Today we are looking at our riches in Christ and some of the great blessings and privileges and treasures that the Lord has given us. We looked at a number of them throughout the last several weeks and we are looking at a couple more this week. Today we are looking at the fact that we are holy.
Do you ever think of yourself as holy? I doubt that most of us do because our definition of holiness is that of perfection. We know we have a holy God who is absolutely blameless, absolutely perfect, absolutely without sin, and so when we compare ourselves in any sense to the holiness of God, we know we fall short. As a matter of fact, that is our problem here. We know ourselves all too well and as we look into our own hearts, lives, actions and attitudes we always see blemishes. We see the evidence of sinful pollution. We know we are not holy in that sense, yet the Lord calls us to be holy because He is holy. That is an aspiration that we have as we want to move toward holiness in our lives. Even as we know we are not there yet, and we will never be in this lifetime. As a matter of fact, if we think we have become holy in our practice, we can be pretty much assured immediately that we are not holy at all and we are prideful and arrogant. So, we are dealing with a tough issue.
Yet, when we go to the New Testament Scriptures, it tells us that we are in fact holy. What does that mean? Hebrews 3:1 is just representative of numerous Scriptures, and it says, “Therefore, holy brethren, partakers of a heavenly calling, consider Jesus the Apostle and High Priest of our confession.” He calls us “holy brethren,” brethren being generic for believers. Those in the family of God. So, we are holy, and we are holy because we are “partakers of a heavenly calling.” Therefore, he is describing all Christians and not just those that seem to be so saintly that they don’t sin, because we know they do, but all Christians. He says all that have partaken of a heavenly calling are holy . . .
