How God’s Holiness is the Direct Basis for all we are to Be and Do
Subtitle: Right Living – how to be good
Let the Spirit of God, give every reader supernatural understanding.
God is Holy. God has Integrity in all things, including integrity towards Himself. God loves Himself. God honors Himself. God respect Himself and His Word is His bond. God does not compromise or degrade Himself. God does not make excuses, but always fulfills on everything He has ever said. God has perfect standards for His relationships. To be in relationship, Holiness with Unholiness would be to taint and contaminate. God will never disrespect Himself — His heart and His values — like that!
“Be ye therefore perfect (whole and complete), even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” — Matthew 5:48
And in Corinthians it is written:
Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were entreating through us (appealing to lost humanity); we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 21 He [Father God] made Him who knew no sin [Jesus Christ, who had no personal experience with sin for he never fell short of the loving obedience God requires for relationship with Himself] to be sin on our behalf [sin is death and at the Crucifixion Jesus died for humanity and as humanity, the Just for the unjust], that we might become the righteousness of God in Him [in Christ}– 2 Corinthians 5:20–21
We are not righteous in ourselves, in our religious efforts, or in our moral strivings and good intentions. We are only righteous IN Jesus. Father God places us IN Jesus. Jesus encapsulates us and we live and move and have our being IN himself. This is how His righteousness covers us. This is how we can qualify for connection to a Holy God and experience/receive His Grace — His family, His life eternal.
God has made the way for forgiveness and reconciliation to Himself THROUGH His Son, Jesus (both the Son of God and Son of Man — fully human AND fully God), so that as a human, Jesus could die for us and as us. With this forgiveness and payment for sin (propitiation) now accomplished at the cross, descent and resurrection (“it is finished”) the appeal of God is to RECEIVE it, to BELIEVE it — to be reconciled to God. Come forward in faith and have Father God place you IN Christ Jesus.
We could not be the righteousness, holiness, undegraded, and uncompromised person that meets God’s standards to connect to and have a relationship with. So God had to give us Himself, in the form of the very blood of His Son (Jesus of Nazareth) to put His own righteousness in us and on us. Father God clothes us with His Son, Jesus, SO THAT he can look on us, not according to what our performance and heart and behavior deserves, but according to what His own Son deserves. Jesus is righteous and His righteousness is bestowed on us, not through religion, human intentions and efforts, but through believing and receiving the righteousness, the life and lifeblood of Jesus. Faith is what lets us access the already accomplished forgiveness and restoration/reconciliation to sonship in the househosehold of a Holy and Loving Father.
We are righteous because Jesus is righteous. We belong a Father God’s side, because Jesus belongs at Father God’s side. We are welcomed and given life, blessings, authority and power, because Jesus has received all authority over every form of evil. We are intended to be forced for true goodness and pure and gradious love, heroic love… because Jesus went before us to open the way through His own heroic love both FOR Father God and TO us. God wanted US to come into His beloved family and, having given us belonging and sonship makes His appeal to us to other humans on Earth, )
God is saying through Jesus, and as we are now IN Jesus, is saying through us: “COME ON IN. BELIEVE IN JESUS. WHO HE IS. WHAT HE ACCOMPLISHED FOR YOU AND AS YOU. BECOME RECONCILED TO FATHER GOD. RECEIVE THE FAMILY. RECEIVE THE KINGDOM. RECEIVE JESUS AS HE IS. TO RECEIVE JESUS IS TO RECEIVE THE FATHER.”
Those who go to heaven are not morally superior or inferior to those who end up in Hell. Rather they are the ones who believe and receive the righteousness bestowed on them. The way is open to reconciliation, but it is not autonomic. It is accomplished for all, but only bestowed on those who believe. Believe that Jesus is and did all that Holy Father requires to enter into a grace-relationship with Himself. As the famous verse states:
Ephesians 2:
As for you [those being written to — the community of believers in Ephesus], you used to be dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath.But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us ALIVE WITH CHRIST even when we were dead in transgressions — it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up WITH CHRIST and seated us WITH CHRIST in the heavenly realms IN Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages He might show the incomparable riches of His grace, expressed in His kindness to us IN Christ Jesus. FOR IT IS BY GRACE YOU HAVE BEEN SAVED, through faith — and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s masterpiece, created anew IN Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
Be JOINED to Christ. Be placed INTO Christ. Be seated WITH Christ. And with that as our reality, our identity, we now express goodness and do that which is good, not from moral effort… but from the divine love and divine grace that we are in and that is in us… because we are IN Christ Jesus. Goodness is therefore, not a moral code or a philosophical ideal, but actually Jesus Himself expressing Himself as our new identity out through us into this world.
In this way, as “abide in Christ” and Father God loves and welcomes us EXACTLY like he loves and welcome His Son Jesus. We have the opportunity for UNHINDERED and UNLIMITED INTIMACY with God — the source of all life, power, and goodness. In this way, we now have a relationship with (we are connected to) perfect and utter Holiness. Anything less is to be dead and hopelessly lost.
The flesh LOVES to rationalize, make excuses, cut corners, compromise and worships instant gratification. As long as we are in these fallen bodies, we are simply going to have those urges to pursue pleasure in unwise ways. Short-sighted ways. Ways that degrade us (body, soul, spirit). Apart from the Spirit of Holiness dwelling inside us, we will be addicted to some or many things (substitutes for God and His LIFE wholeness), we will self-abuse, and self-destruct.
But with God inside us (Jesus sends the Holy Spirit from Father God to us — the spirit of Love, power, Patience, Self-control, goodness, meekness, wisdom, understanding, truth) our faith-relationship with Jesus produces all these virtues out through us. Without Jesus, we can have NONE of those qualities within us and no amount or moral/religious strivings will transform a dead heart into a God-connected heart.
Religion will PRETEND it can be good. Religion is full of pretty lies but lacks any power to transform or save us. You don’t need religion; you need spiritual LIFE so you can have spiritual POWER to overcome: the world systems, your own flesh, and team satan. You need to believe so that you can be placed IN Christ Jesus.
ONLY God Himself is Good, is Holy through and through. You either have God inside you or you have nothing and are dead, left to your contradictory, hypocritical and pathetic justifications, rationalizations, excuses as you lie to yourself about your deadness, falling inevitably into greater cynicism, resignation and self-hatred compensations such as denial, abusiveness and delusion/escapism.
God is the life. God is the power. God is the goodness. God is the integrity. God is the only love worth loving with. God — His Holiness — is this the REFERENCE POINT for every decision and action.
This has everything to do with WHO Jesus is and WHAT Jesus die for us and as us. Let us be in REALITY, to how the flesh will rationalize and justify any gratification, and to who Jesus truly is. How the Love of God expressed itself to us, dead and fallen, and MADE THE WAY to connect to God, through God’s own life / goodness inside us. We love because God first loved us. We live only because God sent Jesus to put His life into us.
We are not here to let the flesh rule over us. Most of use are simply SO USED TO losing out to the flesh, caving in to various addictions, and not using spiritual authority, that resignation and the religion of sin-management have left us INEFFECTIVE.
But this is not God’s will — not what He died to offer us. We are not to exist as defeated, but to live as overcomers.
Let us exercise FAITH and TAKE UP the life, the power, the goodness, the internal Holiness that we never earned yet was BESTOWED upon us when we say a wholehearted YES to Jesus to transfer us OUT of Satan’s Hell Kingdom of selfish cruelty, and into God’s Kingdom of integrity, blessing and life, through a trust-based relationship with heaven’s King — Jesus of Nazareth.
Leviticus 11:44
“For I am the LORD your God; consecrate yourselves, therefore, and be holy, because I am holy. You must not defile yourselves by any creature that crawls along the ground.”Leviticus 11:45
For I am the LORD, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt so that I would be your God; therefore be holy, because I am holy.Leviticus 19:2
“Speak to the whole congregation of Israel and tell them: Be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy.”Leviticus 20:7
“Consecrate yourselves, therefore, and be holy, because I am the LORD your God.”Isaiah 35:8
“And there will be a highway called the Way of Holiness. The unclean will not travel it — only those who walk in the Way — and fools will not stray onto it.”1 Peter 1:15–17 “But just as He who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do, or it is written: ‘Be holy, because I am holy.’ Since you call on a Father (God) who judges each one’s work impartially, conduct yourselves in reverent fear during your stay as foreigners (on this Earth).”
We are called into RIGHT RELATIONSHIP with Father God through the example, the life, the obedience, the death, resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
We are called into RIGHT RELATIONSHIP with ourselves — living from our true identity in Christ Jesus. More than our shifting thoughts and feelings, our identity is built upon the Rock of who Jesus is and what He has done for us and as us. This new identity, this transformed spirit, is explained throughout the New Testament.
We are called into RIGHT RELATIONSHIP with other humans — integrity, honesty, and sincere love (no guile, scheming, trickery, or selfishness). We seek to bless and to give to others. We have no need to extract/take from them (attention, love, finances, security, etc.) for we find and exist in a relationship with God whereby God is our life-source. We desire love back from others, of course, but we are not in a needy state of being (and thus become codependent and/or abusive and/or manipulative)
We are called to be life God, to align with God. To be Holy BECAUSE God is Holy. To do as God does. To be as God is. To love as God loves. To judge as God judges. To let the LIFE of God in and through us make us extensions of God’s Heart and God’s kingdom.
Let’s make an important distinction here between morality and righteousness. Morality is the value system a culture, an institution or a relation has. It is based on the shifting worldviews, shifting norms, shifting values, and pet virtues of the day. Striving to be moral is what religion is all about — getting your behavior conditioning into conforming to the standards of mere men, as they define goodness in their own eyes.
Righteousness, in contrast, is based on the character of God. It does not shift. It is based in who you ARE, and you do what is good/right because that is who you are — a self-expression of your being and values…. and NOT a legalistic system of rules to conform to so as to measure up to someone’s or some institution’s moral standards.
Morality references the system of men, the standards of society and the life and how they imagine goodness looking like through their understanding and perspective. Righteousness references the holy character of God, the actual source of all true goodness. Morality cares when people around you think whereas righteousness is concerned solely with aligning with the PERSON of God Himself.
Religion will thus turn every call to “be good” into guilt trips that controlling institutions use to control you and extract money from you. They will give you endless hoops to jump through. That is exhausting and vain. BUT JESUS HAS ALREADY DONE (finished) THE WORK. Religion can never introduce you personally to God.
But with the life-power of God in you, through faith in His grace, you don’t try to be moral or religious; instead you exude goodness in tangible ways for your innermost desires are to be Holy because God is Holy. He is your magnificent obsession. His heart and His ways are core, are precious, are integral to all you are and do.
Let us hear and do accordingly. All glory to God.
