Invocation
Lord of all creation,
we pause before you today,
laying our hectic lives on the altar before you. Summer's warmth and rest are almost gone,
and our minds are turning to the time ahead: students and educators are thinking about school; farmers are thinking about crops and fall harvests; business people are thinking about profit margins and quarterly reports;
politicians are thinking about elections;
retailers are thinking about the holidays.
As we bow our heads before you,
help us put aside today's worries
and tomorrow's fears,
that we may worship and revel
in your presence today. Amen.
Holiness Opens Doors
“I am God Almighty; walk before me and be blameless. I will confirm my covenant between me and you.” GENESIS 17:1–2
Quite simply, our deep gratitude to Jesus Christ is manifested neither in being chaste, honest, sober and respectable, nor in church-going, Bible-toting and Psalm-singing, but in our deep and delicate respect for one another. —THE RAGAMUFFIN GOSPEL, BRENNAN MANNING[*]
Think - the door is always open, never closed, to the choices we may make. Success is making life choices that please God. For people in this community of faith, the challenge for us is not so much a personal relationship with Christ a. k. a. being born again, saved. This decision was made years ago. For most people in this community of faith the challenge is holiness. By holiness I mean, the challenge is to live Christlike. The challenge to develop a Christlike character. It is to live a life prompted and motivated by the Holy Spirit.
First Things
I would like to set the ground work for talking about holiness. As Anne Graham Lotz writes, “God has no back-room, smoke-and-mirrors, clandestine relationships.”[†] We know God supremely in Jesus Christ. The beginning of holiness starts with a relationship with Jesus. “…if there is any doubt whatsoever that you are in a covenant relationship with God, make sure. Right now. Confess your sins. Ask for forgiveness and for cleansing. Accept Jesus’ gift of salvation.”[‡]Sometimes, we think that beginning a covenant relationship with God is the end game of being religious. If we think this way, our thinking is short-sighted.
The Goal of Holiness
I love the writings of Eli Stanley Jones. He was widely recognized as one of the greatest missionaries of the twentieth century. E. Stanley Jones influenced world changers like President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Gandhi, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962 and received the Gandhi Peace Award in 1963. He gave us the term, “Christlike,” in his book, “The Christ of the Indian Road.”
Dr. Jones laid out the motive and end of holy living. The goal of Christian mission is “to produce Christlike character.” There is nothing higher for God or for people then to be Christlike.
Jones writes, “I know nothing higher for God. If God in character is like Jesus, He is a good God and trustable. The present-day doubt is not concerning Christ, but concerning God. [People] wonder if there can be a good God back of things when they see earthquakes wipe out the innocent and the guilty alike ad innocent little children suffer under nameless diseases that they did not bring on themselves. But the distracted doubting mind turns with relief toward Jesus and says, “If God is like that, [God] is all right.””
“…I know nothing higher for people than to be Christlike. The highest adjective descriptive of character in any language is the adjective “Christlike.” No higher compliment can be paid to human nature then to be called Christlike. … This is what we are trying to produce. We think it is worthwhile to produce Christlike character. Do you know anything finer and better? Do you know of any nobler goal? Is there any pattern which you have conceived that surpasses this in being just what life ought to be? If so, show us, and we will, before God, we will leave this and seek the other.”[§]
Is it possible to be Christlike?
For the answer to this question, I turn to John Wesley. Wesley uses terms like “justification”, “perfection” and “sanctification” to describe being Christlike or holy. Summarizing, there is such a thing as perfection; for it is again and again mentioned in Scripture. It is not so early as justification; for a justified person is to “go on unto perfection” (He 6:1). It is not so late as death; for St. Paul speaks of living ones that were perfect (Ph 3:15). It is not absolute. Absolute perfection belongs not to people, nor to angels, but to God alone. It does not make a person infallible: none is infallible while in this body. It is salvation from sin. It is perfect love (1 John 4:18). It is improvable. It is capable of being lost. It is a gradual work.
What is it like?
Christlike character looks like the highest ideals and aspirations of humanity. Christlike character give people a free, full life and gives them God. Christlike character has a heart that has learned to love Christ most irresistibly when a person thinks of Christ as hungry, thirsty, sick, in prison, naked, a stranger in the throbbing needs of our brothers and sisters. “We take them Christ—we go to Christ. Christ is the motive and the end.”[**]
What does it look like?
As we are using Daniel as our model and example, the answer is, “Christlike character looks like Daniel.” What we have learn these past few weeks is that Daniel was a man of faith in God. Evan Gregory said that, “I trust God has a plan for my life…” Daniel was a man of private worship. Pastor Wes taught you about private worship as a choice that one person makes which pleases God. Daniel was a man with an attitude of thankfulness. Daniel had grit, “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” Daniel and his friends had courage to simply stand.
We can add to these things that the Spirit of God was visible through him. Daniel 5:14, “I have heard of you that the spirit of the gods is in you. And that light and understanding and excellent wisdom are found in you.” We can add to these things that Daniel lived blamelessly. Daniel, 6:21,22, “Then Daniel said to the king, O king, live forever! My God sent his angel and shut the lions’ mouths, and they have not harmed me, because I was found blameless before him; and also before you, O king, I have done no harm.” We can add that Daniel turned his face to the Lord. Daniel 9:3, 4a, “Then I turned my face to the Lord God, seeking him by prayer and praise for mercy with fasting and sackcloth and ashes. I prayed to the Lord my God and made confession,…” You may be thinking, “Pastor, living up to the standard of a Biblical character may be unrealistic.”
What does it really look like?
It looks like Shannan Martin. Shannan writes a blog and writes books and is active on Instagram. She lives on the near north side of Goshen. She lives in a small house, maybe even too small for the number of kids and friends that are constant companions. She attends a church in Goshen that our Bishop almost closed down a few years ago because it struggled so badly to maintain a congregation next to the highway and to the railroad tracks. If there is anyone whom I have read or heard about in the last several years that knows something about holiness, something about having a Christlike character it is Shannan. I think that she would deny what I just said. Hear for yourself:
God rescued me from the life I always wanted. He plucked my family up from our dream farmhouse, stripped us of our financial stability and personal esteem, and shattered our obsessions with security, safety, and common sense. Without warning he yanked the rungs from the ladder we were busy climbing, and we fell. Down at his feet, unburdened of the things we’d held so tightly in our desperate quest for freedom, we found the life we were made for. The answer wasn’t in our shipshape self-sufficiency or see-what-I-can-do efforts. It wasn’t in the muscle and drive it takes to get ourselves to the top. Rather, it was in the weightless free fall to the bottom, where he handed us his very best gifts—an income on life support, a zip code on the wrong side of the tracks, a new son with a criminal record, and friends hungry for food, Jesus, and nicotine. We had no choice but to trust God to help us stick the landing. The freedom was in the falling.[††]
Living holy, living with Christlike character, means that you and I are responding to an invitation. Shannan writes,
“He invites us also into his curious existence and offers to lighten our load so we can finally touch freedom. We’ll know it when we see it. Our hearts were created to track it down. He points us toward home, and though we may know little else, we know it’s where we belong.”[‡‡]
Responding to an invitation of God to live with Christlike character may feel like being invited to jump off a cliff.
“Get a good look at the cliff in front of you, the one you find yourself inching away from, the one you try to deny. Step close enough to peek over the edge and see just how far the fall might be. With any measure of luck, you might begin to see the beauty of the fall.”[§§]
Responding to an invitation of God to live with Christlike character may be cooperating with God in God’s plan for your life.
“We get to collaborate with greatness. We’re offered the freedom of seeing the way God is impossibly smitten with us. But first, we’ve got to be willing to fall. We identify with the beggar and find more of him. We discover our kinship with the criminal, the forgotten, the piercingly ordinary, and he is there.”[***]
Cooperating with God in God’s plan for our lives does not mean that we will be perfect by the world’s standard of “perfect.”
“The pulse of our humanity means we’ll never get it right, and we weren’t meant to. God’s love for us is a wheel that keeps turning, a cycle of capture and release. He gives and takes; we receive and pass it on.”[†††]
Cooperating with God in God’s plan for our lives does mean we will get more than we ever think we gave up.
“We are so much better together here, in this long-strung tension between what we think we deserve and the wild grace we’ve been given. This is who God is. This is how he loves us.”[‡‡‡]
Holiness, living with a Christlike character, is about what we do and don’t do as it is about living as one who experiences the unconditional love of God. The degree to which we allow our self to experience this love, is the degree to which we become like Christ.
Holiness
Holiness, holiness is what I long for
Holiness is what I need
Holiness, holiness is what You
want from me
So, take my heart and form it
Take my mind and transform it
Take my will and conform it
To Yours, to Yours, oh, Lord. Amen.
[*]Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up and Burnt Out (Colorado Springs: Multnomah Books, 2015), 109.
[†]Lotz, Anne Graham. The Daniel Key (p. 151). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.
[‡]Lotz, Anne Graham. The Daniel Key (p. 157). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.
[§]E. Stanley Jones, “The Christ of the Indian Road,” p. 161/162.
[**]Ibid.
[††]Martin, Shannan. Falling Free (p. xxi). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.
[‡‡]Martin, Shannan. Falling Free (p. xiv). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.
[§§]Martin, Shannan. Falling Free (p. 210). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.
[***]Ibid.
[†††]Ibid.
[‡‡‡]Ibid.
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