HOLINESS-LACKING
Think about
people who find themselves in religious ruts.
They discover a number of things about themselves. They will find that they are getting older
but not getting any holier. Time is
their enemy, not their friend. The time
they trusted and looked to is betraying them, for they often said to themselves, "The passing of time will help me. I know some good old saints, so as I get
older I'll get holier and better. Time will help me, purify me and revive
me." They said that the year before
last, but they were not helped any last year.
Time betrayed them. They were not
any better last year than they had been the year before.
A.W. Tozer
Rut, Rot or Revival, Christianity Today, v.
38, n. 3.
People do not
drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate
toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the
Lord. We drift toward compromise and
call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift
toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost
self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude
ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness
and convince ourselves we have been liberated.
Reflections, Christianity Today, 7-31-00.
Isn’t
it amazing how people are more scared of holiness than they are of sin?
Alan Redpath
The standard
of practical holy living has been so low among Christians that very often the
person who tries to practice spiritual disciplines in everyday life is looked
upon with disapproval by a large portion of the Church. And for the most part,
the followers of Jesus Christ are satisfied with a life so conformed to the
world, and so like it in almost every respect, that to a casual observer, there
is no difference between the Christian and the pagan.
Hannah Whitall
Smith
The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life. Christianity Today, v. 32, n. 11.
If you here
stop and ask yourselves why you are not as pious as the early Christians were,
your own heart will tell you that it is neither through ignorance nor through
inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.
William Law
What a
strange kind of salvation do they desire that care not for holiness… They would
be saved by Christ and yet be out of Christ in a fleshly state… They would have
their sins forgiven, not that they may walk with God in love, in time to come,
but that they may practice their enmity against Him without any fear of
punishment.
Walter Marshall
Quoted by A.W. Pink, The Doctrine of
Sanctification, Bible Truth Depot, 1955, p. 29.
Because
God is so concerned for the holiness of His people, they should be equally
concerned. The church cannot preach and teach a message it does not live and
have any integrity before God, or even before the world. Yet in many churches
where there is no tolerance for sin in principle there is much tolerance for it
in practice. And when preaching becomes separated from living, it becomes
separated both from integrity and from spiritual and moral effectiveness. It
promotes hypocrisy instead of holiness. Divorcing biblical teaching from daily
living is compromise of the worst sort. It corrupts the church, grieves the
Lord, and dishonors His Word and His name.
John
MacArthur
Matthew 16-23, Moody, 1988, p. 123-124.