Holiness For the Glory of God

Written by Harold Thornbro

I want to tackle a subject that I believe has a great impact on the way we live our lives as a Christian and that is our understanding of what it is to walk in holiness.This may seem like an open and shut case for to walk in holiness must mean to not sin, and while that is true it is also somewhat deeper than that. Some denominations focus on the freedoms we have in Christ while others border or even cross the border on legalism in their view of holiness. I do believe we can take either of these views to the extreme and go against the biblical intent of these teachings. So when the Bible speaks of holy living that looks like a life of sacrifice and then speaks of our christian liberties is this a paradox or a syllogism? Obviously i don’t believe it is a paradox because it is my conviction and in fact it’s the claim of the Bible itself that it does not contradict itself, but a syllogism is a deductive reasoning in which a conclusion is derived from two premises, so if we take the premises of Christian freedoms and the apparent restrictions of holy living then what is our deduction? The deduction is “do all for the glory of God.”

I first want to discuss the teaching of holiness, the question would arise; is there a way in which “apparent” holy living wouldn’t bring glory to God? The answer is yes, in more than one way. When a person starts to believe that his holiness bears some impact on his salvation or the maintaining of his salvation, this would take away from the glory of God and make less of Christ’s work on the cross. Another way in which this takes away from God’s rightful glory is when one lives holy for the purpose of putting the focus on themselves, in other words they want people to talk about how holy they are and not how holy God is. So what is the right way to live holy? This is not just about action but also about motive. What is our motive for living holy? The first thing we should keep in mind is that we don’t walk in holiness so we can be saved but we live holy because we are saved. So what does it mean to be holy? For mankind to be holy means to do the very best we can, to live according to what God has revealed to us. Another question that may arise is if we are saved than what is our motivation for holy living? Our number one motivation should be that we are commanded to be holy. Secondly we should do so because it pleases God and after what He has done for us we should want to please God. A third reason we should do so is because if done with right motives it brings glory to God, it causes the world to notice something different about the Christian and ask questions that can lead to salvation which also brings glory to our Lord. This is all said to say this - we are called to be holy and we should strive for holiness everyday, but how does this balance with the freedoms we have in Christ? That is what we will discuss next.

So what about freedom in Christ? I think it’s fairly obvious that this could be taken to an extreme that would not only not bring glory to God but bring shame. So where are the boundries? Well, again it comes down to the glory of God. We are most definitely bound by scripture at the very least, what i mean by this is that if the scripture says not to do something then we shouldn’t do it, if we do, it is sin and sin is always outside the boundries of our freedoms. We also find in scripture that we are bound in our freedoms by our conscience, if we go against this God given warning system than we are sinning. But does it go further than that? I believe it does. We see in a few places in scripture where we are told to give up our freedoms for the purpose of unity within the body of Christ. For example the Apostle Paul said that is was well within his freedom to eat meat dedicated to idols, after all idols are nothing, but if it causes an issue with a weaker brother than he would give up eating meat for good. Also we see that in Acts 15 the gentile believers were told to not eat meat dedicated to idols for the purpose of unity with the Jewish believers who would have trouble with it. The unity of the body brings glory to God and it is worthy of this sacrifice of freedom. In other places in scripture we see freedoms being sacrificed for the sake of evangelism. All of this is for the Glory of God.

The conclusion to this for me and I hope for you as well is prayer - “Heavenly Father, help me to serve You in holiness with the right motives while enjoying the freedoms you have given me. Please grant me the wisdom and the discernment to know the limits and see when it is necessary to make sacrifices of freedoms. In the name of My Lord Jesus the Christ I pray!”