“But now you must be holy in everything you do, just as God who chose you is holy. For the Scriptures say, “You must be holy because I am holy.””
1 Peter 1:15-16 NLT
This is a big ask. To be holy is, surely, totally beyond us humans beings. Only God is truly holy. Only He is totally without even a trace or hint of sin, and is absolutely, not relatively, holy. And yet Peter quotes the verse Leviticus 11:44a, “For I am the Lord your God. You must consecrate yourselves and be holy, because I am holy. … ”. About God and His holiness we read scriptures such as 1 Samuel 2:2, “No one is holy like the Lord! There is no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God”. Everything about God comes from a perspective of holiness. So His love, grace, mercy, anger and so on are all holy. How can we become holy, as Peter demands in our verses today?
One thing we pilgrims need to appreciate about holiness is that it involves being set apart from the worldly ways and customs around us. So the sinful practices of those in our families, communities, workplaces, schools and everywhere around us where we have contact are not for us. We keep ourselves apart in an example of how God keeps Himself away from sin. It’s a very tall order, because as sinful human beings ourselves, the pleasures of sin constantly tempt us away from God’s ways. So we will find our thoughts drifting into dark alleyways, drawing us away from how we should be thinking. Temptation is always with us. But as someone once said, although we can’t stop birds flying over our heads, we can stop them nesting in our hair.
Is God, therefore, asking us pilgrims to be perfect? I don’t think He is but He is asking us to be set apart as one of His children. And we can only do that by having a right relationship with Him. A relationship that starts at the Cross, where we repent of our sins and believe in Jesus. Through our relationship with our loving Heavenly Father we keep short accounts. We confess our sins. We talk with Him. We listen to what He has to say to us. We are obedient to His commands. We read His Word, the Bible, to find out what God’s ways are all about. And it all boils down to aligning our lives to God’s standards, not the world’s. We will never be totally holy until we join God in His Heavenly home, but in the meantime, we can, with the help of the Holy Spirit nudging us along the way, make a good start. So we realign our gaze away from the worldliness around us and look up into Heavenly places. That’s where we belong.
Father God. Only You are holy. And one day we will wear holiness like a garment, as we praise and worship You. Amen.