To Encourage You

1 Peter 1:15-16 “As he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy.’” 

Throughout the Bible, Christians are often admonished to “be” what they already “are.”  I like to think of this in terms of fatherhood, because it’s something I’m so familiar with.  There are many people in this world who are fathers.  All this means is that they are the male parent of a child.  But fatherhood comes in many forms. For example, some fathers have never seen their children.  They were involved in an intimate relationship with a woman but then just walked away. Other fathers live at home with their children, but they are very distant and spend little time with them. As a result, they know very little about them.  Then there are fathers who are violent. Perhaps they are known to come home drunk from time to time and horribly abuse their children.  And some have even committed filicide, a word that means the murder of one’s own child.  These men ARE all fathers, but none of them really ACT like fathers, at least as a father should ideally BE.  Thus, it’s one thing for a man to father a child. It’s another thing for a man to BE a father to that child, i.e., to love them, provide for them, and train them up in the way they should go.  And although such a man may fall short of all that he should be, it is still the desire of a real father’s heart to come as close to that ideal as possible.  

It is this same idea that can be applied to the passage above from 1 Peter.  Here we are told that God is holy.  It means that He is “set apart” from His creation in that there is no sin in Him.  When the Bible calls believers to live a holy life, it means that they are to be “set apart” to God.  All their possessions, thoughts, actions, and words are to be consecrated to Him.  Positionally, all true believers in Jesus Christ ARE holy because by placing their faith in Him, they have been declared by God to be cleansed from sin and consecrated to Him.  It’s all wonderfully summarized in 2 Corinthians 5:21, which tells all believers that “For our sake he (i.e., God the Father) made him (i.e., God the Son) to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”  This means that when God looks at us, He sees Christ’s righteousness rather than our sin. It’s one of the most awesome things that anyone can ever try to wrap their head around. It is because of this great transformation that the believer’s body is now set apart to God as a temple in which He dwells, for “do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). And so this passage goes on to say that because our bodies actually ARE such a temple, “So glorify God in your body.”  It’s that same idea of being called to BE what we already ARE.  

Again, back to the passage from 1 Peter 1 above.  It’s telling us that our holy God, when He called us to salvation, had in it the purpose that we would be sanctified unto Him, set apart, holy – just as everything else about Him is holy.  Since this is true, we are then to “BE holy in all (our) conduct.”  

Throughout the Bible we have various admonitions as to what this looks like. For example, in 1 Thessalonians 4:3 we are told “For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality.” So, if you call yourself a Christian and yet are living in sexual immorality, you are like that man who might call himself a father, yet his lifestyle doesn’t demonstrate that he is actually BEING a father.  We see the same idea taught in Titus 2:11-14, which says, “ For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people,  training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ,  who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.”  

It’s a new life that God has given us, so it’s a new life that we should actually live.  To lose sight of this is a real tragedy, more so even than the tragedy of a father who is a father in name only, giving little evidence that he actually knows what a real father is.