How to Become Holier – it’s probably not what you think — Ami Loper

I have a rather large potted plant in my kitchen. It sits by my sink, soaking in the rays of sunlight from the window and getting an occasional sip while I’m washing up the kitchen. Because the plant has had its trunk braided, there is a lot of soil to be seen at its base and, for whatever reason, on a whim, I decided to take some sparking, bright white rocks I had and place them around the base of the trunk. It was pretty and brightened the look.

But, much to my surprise, within a couple of months, those brilliantly white rocks began to change color. No longer brilliant or white, they had become a dull, pale brown. My rocks had acclimated to their surroundings and had taken on the hue of the soil.

Did you know that the Word of God tells us that we are to be holy (1 Peter 1:15-16)? In fact, He calls us to be perfect (Matthew 5:48). These verses aren’t talked about a lot and we hear more about how God doesn’t care about holiness as long as He has our hearts. And though it is true that God accepts us when we are at our worst, loves us regardless of the progress we do or don’t make and is patient with our weaknesses and imperfections, His ultimate goal for each of us is loftier than we may have foreseen. He wants us to be holy.

Happily, becoming holy does not mean what so many of us think it means. It does not mean striving in our own strength to become something we are not.

Our God is Holiness at its purest. Whereas the false gods of man’s making were anything but holy, displaying the avarice and faults of humans in god-sized form, Yahweh is not of man’s imagination so does not embody man’s weaknesses.

God is holy. He is Lord and King. He is separate and altogether unique in perfection. Yet He chooses to draw us in, and as He does, He pulls us into His holiness. In this act of pulling us in, He at once redeems us, makes us His and envelopes us in his cloak of holiness. He makes what is His like Him. Through this connection, this contact, He makes us holy by decree, but He also infects our hearts with a will to make His will all important, to become, to keep holy that which He has made holy.

As God declared that He made the Shabbat holy and then commanded us to keep it holy, He has declared and made us holy and now commands that we keep ourselves holy.

How? We rest. In surrender to His will and His ways, we rest.

Yes, you read that correctly. Being holy doesn’t come through striving in our own strength, it comes when we rest in what He has already done for us and in the knowledge that His Spirit now works in us to keep us holy. 

As my rocks around my plant changed and became like what they had become immersed in, so, as we allow ourselves to be immersed in our Holy Father and allow His Spirit to work in us to will and to work according to His good pleasure, we will find ourselves becoming more and more like that in which we are immersed.

I wish there was an illustration in nature in which one object was improved by its proximity to another, instead of my illustration of white rocks becoming brown. But that’s not really nature’s way. Only in God, only in proximity to Perfection Himself, can something find itself improving. That’s the miracle of God’s redemption: left to ourselves, we experience entropy and deterioration; surrendered to God, we go from glory to glory.

God’s work “is finished.” The Shabbat has come and we enter into His rest. And it is in this place of trusting rest that we find ourselves most like God, most able to allow His Spirit to teach us how to live and most able to live as He has called us to.

“He chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.” Ephesians 1:4

For more on “If God is your Teacher, What Kind of Pupil are You?” click HERE!