For Lord’s Day, July 6, 2014

Dear Saints,

Last week, Christ reminded us in Exodus 22:31 to be holy unto the LORD, and our motivation is that Jesus has presented us as holiness unto the LORD in Himself as the true High Priest typified in Exodus 28:36 and 39:30.  Here are some helpful ways to, by God’s grace, grow in holiness by being conformed more to the image of Jesus Christ (Rom. 8:29) through the Holy Spirit within you.

In his book, God’s Way of Holiness, Horatius Bonar writes: “… likeness to God is produced by beholding his glory” (2 Cor. 3:18), and notes that it involves three main things:

1. Abide in Me: The Life. Jesus is the life, He gives abundant life, and a holy life comes by abiding in him or we can do nothing (John 15). “Only intimacy with God can keep us from intimacy with the world.” Thus, God, as a loving Father, chastens us for our profit to be partaking of His holiness. (Heb. 12:10)
2. Learn of Me: The Scholarship. Remember what Dr. George Scipione highlighted in a recent Sabbath class: the student is like his master. Jesus says, The disciple is not above his master: but every one that is perfect shall be as [like] his master (Luke 6:40). Study Jesus to be like Him.  “Exposing our souls constantly to this light, we become more thoroughly ‘children of the light’.”  This we do as Jesus prays we would in John 17:17: “Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.”
3. Follow Me: The Walk. A walk in which “we are visible on all sides”. Jesus says in John 12:26 on the way to the cross, “follow me”. He also says, “follow me”, in John 21:22, on his way from the cross. “To the cross, then, and to the crown alike, we are to follow him.”

Do not forget that holiness and godliness are Spirit-enabled habits of discipline.  In his book, The Pursuit of Holiness, Jerry Bridges cites a well known verse worthy of our meditation and application:

Sow a thought, reap an act; [See 2 Cor. 5:10]
Sow an act, reap a habit; [See 1 Cor. 9:27]
Sow a habit, reap a character. [See Prov. 23:7]

Keep sowing seeds of Christ’s character within you by acting and thinking more like Him, beloved. Let me encourage you to keep your hand to the plow of holy habits with these words of the Apostle Paul:  And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not. (Galatians 6:9 )

Semper Reformanda,

Pastor Grant