Scripture – Leviticus 20:26
“You are to be holy to me because I, the Lord, am holy, and I have set you apart from the nations to be my own.”
When God calls us into His family as an heir, He invites us to come as we are!
Our human nature loves to classify sin and worthiness based on our own subjective moral hierarchies. In doing this, we make our own presuppositions and judgments against others while casting a blind eye to our own transgressions. For some reason, we always feel as if we are less sinful and more worthy of grace than others.
Contrary to this, God calls us into His kingdom not by the classification of our sins but by acknowledging that we are all the same. We were all born sinners and in us dwelleth no good thing. While we may reveal our sinfulness differently, we were all born of the same pedigree of sin. That is why God can tell us to come as we are. While we are here nit-picking at each other’s faults, God in His infinite wisdom is calling and choosing the broken-hearted and faulty sinners that He can equip, qualify, utilize, and transform into the likeness and image of Himself.
Note well that while God calls us to come as we are, He does not use us as we are. There must be transformation! For transformation to take place, there must be submission to the will of God, sacrifice of our flesh and obedience to His Word. Above all, God is seeking for us to be transformed into holiness because that is the embodiment of who He is.
Unfortunately, we have grown accustomed to living in an unholy fashion and we have even normalized it. If our motive in coming to God is centred only around God’s ability to shower us with every blessing we desire, then I am afraid we have turned off on the wrong exit. God desires to set us apart from the world so that He can mould us into His incomprehensible holiness. Sometimes, God sets us apart from toxic relationships or contaminated careers to get us to a place of absolute dependence on Him. When we lift up our eyes to the hills, He can do His transformative work because He knows we would not be able to achieve holiness stuck in that relationship or career. When we become more like Him, He is then able to use us as chief witnesses to alight the nations just as He is the light unto the world.
We cannot fancy God as we would have Him but come to know and exalt Him as God all by Himself. We cannot conceptualize God as “good” in the limited fashion in which we characterize the goodness of man. The heart posture of goodness in man is like a broken cistern. It is self-centred, manipulated, idol-prone, blemished and hinged upon a variety of limited cultural interpretations. Holiness is not a piece of God; it is who He is. God alone is holy because God alone is sinless.
The question that really befalls us is whether we love our sinful nature (darkness) more than we love God (light). Many of us love and idolize bits and pieces of our contamination and we go to God half-heartedly hoping that He would give us a pass to heaven if we scored over 50% on the test of righteousness. We make up an abundance of half-truths to justify the shadows of our darkness instead of handing over our filthy vessels wholeheartedly to God to do His redemptive work. God wants to cleanse us for He knows that a sinner cannot cleanse himself. He is willing to renew us daily if only we would humble ourselves in daily supplication to Him.
God wants all of us not the bits and pieces we don’t mind giving up. He is looking for sinners and misfits who are willing to reject their inheritance of death for a new inheritance of life in Christ. God is seeking light bearers who will exclusively worship Him not from their flesh, but in Spirit and in Truth.
Passage by A.W. Tozer:
“Holy is the way God is. To be holy He does not conform to a standard. He is that standard. He is absolutely holy with an infinite, incomprehensible fullness of purity that is incapable of being other than it is. Because He is holy, His attributes are holy; that is, whatever we think of as belonging to God must be thought of as holy. God is holy and He has made holiness the moral condition necessary to the health of His universe. Sin’s temporary presence in the world only accents this. Whatever is holy is healthy; evil is a moral sickness that must end ultimately in death.”
