A contemporary holiness testimony

I have had the most remarkable week!

After fifteen years of searching for holiness I think I have finally discovered the truth that 'set's us free'. Any regular reader of my blog will appreciate how intense this battle has been and how vacillating my own moral performance has been during this time. My dithering and indecisive pilgrimage has seen me swing between the extremes of puritanical asceticism to liberal moral abandonment.

Last week somehow – I'm still not quite sure how it happened everything seemed to fall into place.

The stumbling block for me has always been the 'doubtful things' – identifying, exposing and rejecting the sinful things in my life has always been relatively straightforward – but when it comes to the doubtful things it has always been more complicated. Of course the problem is that a refusal to surrender what is 'doubtful' will always leave us quite incapable of surrendering what is sinful. Achan's sin – hiding those things which ought to be devoted to God among our own possessions – is, I am quite certain the curse of the contemporary church. It is our inability to settle the holiness question that holds us in our current state of fear, confusion and impotency. In short, our own version of Achan's sin leaves us 'obligated to defeat'.

Last Friday I finally got to the point where I was willing to surrender all. God's grace had put me in a position where I was willing to make a consecration that was "both entire and real" as the old doctrine book says.

" To be entire it must include the body, with all its members and powers; the mind, with all its faculties; the heart, with all its capacities; also goods, money, family, influence, reputation, time, ability, life, indeed everything. To be real it must be not in imagination or sentiment merely, but everything must henceforth actually be used as belonging to God and not to ourselves." (SA Doctrine Book 1923)

Having got to a point where I was willing to make such an absolute surrender I had a moment that within the context of my own personal struggle was Abrahamic in its immensity. With my arm raised, ceremonial dagger poised over coffee, football, crosswords, TV and the myriad of other distractions that make up my own collection of doubtful things – God held my hand! I felt; genuinely felt that in the face of my sincere willingness to surrender all God actually gave me some of it back. God didn't want me to surrender half of the things on my list but what he did want to know was whether I was willing to give them up.

At the end of the day as Samuel taught "to obey is better than sacrifice'. When it comes to holiness the one – possibly the only – condition that God sets before us is our genuine acknowledgement that he is first in our life. Keith Green puts it succinctly in his classic song:

To obey is better than sacrifice,
I don't need your money, I want your life.
And I hear you say that I'm coming back soon,
But you act like I'll never return.
To obey is better than sacrifice.
I want more than Sunday and Wednesday nights,
Cause if you can't come to me every day,
Then don't bother coming at all.
 
Holiness is about giving God our lives, placing him first, and having a relationship with him. It's not about what we do or even about what he does – it is about us dying and him living in our place. I'm not a huge fan of 'The Message' as an Englishman some bits of it are too American for me but there are some passages that are really quite brilliant. One such passage is Peterson's paraphrase of Romans 12:1-3

"So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you."

If the proof of the pudding really is in the tasting then God with infinite patience has finally enabled me to experience holiness. This week has been the most positive, peaceful, effective week I have had since the early days of my conversion. The phrase used to describe a section in the old song book keeps on coming back to me ''holiness enjoyed' and yes, I have watched TV, drunk the occasional cup of coffee and completed the Telegraph cryptic crossword!

This week I have enjoyed a ''career of uninterrupted victory over sin', I have enjoyed 'maintaining contact with the life giver', I have enjoyed 'the peace of God' and I have found beauty in the simplest of things, this week I have enjoyed singing the following words with the confidence that only grace can give:

"Heaven above is softer blue,
Earth around is sweeter green;
Something lives in every hue,
Christless eyes have never seen;
Birds with gladder songs o'erflow,
Flowers with deeper beauties shine,
Since I know, as now I know,
I am his and he is mine."

The impact of this new life has been evident not only in my own heart and actions but evident in the life of my family. An atmosphere of domestic organisation and calm seems to have descended over our home.

After so many years of struggle and confusion I think that this is actually holiness – and the most amazing thing is that I didn't actually discover it at all – it was (like salvation) the free gift of God, he gave it to me last Friday, no angel voices, no tongues of fire, no trumpet blast - not even a 'still small voice' - he just dropped it into my heart almost unnoticed.

"Thank you Lord for saving my soul,
Thank you Lord for making me whole,
Thank you Lord for giving to me
Thy great Salvation so rich and free."

 
Much grace and peace, Andrew.