What about holiness?

It’s interesting that while many think the world is becoming increasingly ‘secular’ there are some that believe the world is going quite the opposite direction.  And I must admit that there is some evidence to believe they are right.  I don’t mean of course that the world is becoming more ‘Christian’, but that people are increasingly searching for something beyond this world – a greater reason for living.  What else explains the growing movement in Islam, the dramatic increase in all things physic and the popularity of books like ‘The God Delusion’?

Then why is the church suffering lower and lower attendance?  A book I’m reading by Erwin McManus says that people are rejecting Christ not because of a lack of spirituality, but BECAUSE of the church!  He says, “Once we were called Christians by an unbelieving world, and now we call ourselves Christians and the world calls us hypocrites. Is it possible that it wasn’t the nation that was becoming dangerously secular but the church?  We were neither relevant nor transcendent. We have become, in the worst of ways, religious.  We are the founders of the secular nation.”

The idea I read in his writing is that we are not relevant or transcendent, and therefore not drawing others to Christ because He is not visible in our lives.  We have turned church from an apostolic ethos into a shopping center for ourselves (with the ‘what’s in it for me’ attitude), and traded the opportunity to reach a broken world for Christ into an fortress for our own protection by becoming less and less vulnerable (an effort to look more godly on the outside without first becoming more holy on the inside).

When I reflect on that concept I realize that the core issue is the lack of true holiness in the lives of individual Christians.  But we don’t hear much about holiness anymore do we?*  We hear, and we want to hear, about more ‘practical’ things.  We hear and we want to hear more about heaven, about escape from this world.  But what we are missing is the all-important melding of those two concepts.  We are missing ‘practical holiness’. 

*I had the privilege of preaching about what holiness is the other day at Burlington Alliance Church.  You can download that message here;

< http://www.burlingtonalliance.com/index.cfm?i=4936&mid=18&showid=37708>. 

I’ll be speaking about practical holiness on Nov 21^st, but I’ll plan on posting at least a couple more blogs about it before then.