Christ’s Holiness
You can’t observe Jesus for very long without realising that He was a holy man.
- Early in His ministry He encountered a demon-possessed man, and the demon begins to cry out to Jesus and saying: “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” (Luke 4:34)
- Early in the book of Acts, we see Jesus referred to as “God’s holy servant”.
God's Holiness: Love and Purity in Perfection
The word “holy” means separated or set apart. God is holy. If there’s one word that is used in the Bible to describe God more than any other – it’s the word holy.
I want to suggest two ways in which God is holy:
- He is completely filled with love
- He is completely free from sin
He is totally set apart from the world because of His complete love and His complete purity. We see this in Jesus, don’t we? Complete love, and complete purity.
Oh, never stop praising God for His holiness, friends! Find Scriptures and songs that proclaim His holiness, and just lean into them in worship because He is so complete in His perfection!
In fact Andrew Murray wrote a classic book called Holy in Christ, and in it he writes this: “This Holiness of God, though it is often mentioned as one of the Divine attributes, can hardly be counted such, on a level with the others. The other attributes all refer to some special aspect or characteristic of the Divine Nature; Holiness appears to express what is the very essence or perfection of the Divine Being Himself… In the word Holy we have the nearest possible approach to a summary of all the Divine perfections.”
Praising God's Holiness and Striving to Imitate Christ
God is holy, holy, holy, and so worthy of our praise.
I’m sure you’re thinking at this point - God is holy, but we can’t be holy. What business do we have trying to be holy? We’ll never get it right, right?
Well, of course we will never be perfect in the sense that God is. But if we are to be imitators of Christ, then above all, we must be holy. We will learn how we can do this, in the days to come.
But today, let the theme of your day be this: God is holy, holy, holy… and so I will lift Him up and praise Him in all I do.
