Holiness out of Relationship Not Rules

“Holiness” is just a Christian-ese word that means obeying God. So please don't flip out at my use of it. It doesn't need to be some big hairy deal; it just means living in a way that pleases God.

When we're in love with someone, that's easy. When we're all gaa-gaa over our boyfriend or girlfriend, if they don't like our favorite TV show, it's no problem to skip it. We'd much rather hang out with them. Or we'll quit burping in public, or whatever bothers them. It's easy. They don't force us to – we want to please them because we're in love.

God made the natural world a shadow of the spiritual world as an object lesson for us. So what's true in the natural is true in the spiritual. Often, when crying out to Jesus for that revelation of His presence in a personal way that we talked about on Wednesday, something in our life will come up in our heart that we know needs to go.

Now the Enemy is always quick to dump guilt on God's conviction and lie to us: “See God can't love you with that in your life, look at how you are.” Ignore that bugger and tell him to go pound sand. In the name of Jesus.

No, that prompting in our heart is Jesus pleading with us: “I want to come close to you, but I can't with this in your life. Give it to me.” He knows that thing is not “how you are”; no, it's only what you do. He knows who you really are, you awesome person you, and I mean that in truth not sarcasm. And He wants to remove everything that is holding you back from becoming the real you.

So at that point, we have a choice to make. We can keep our thing and keep Him at arms length and never really be satisfied in life, or we can give Him that thing, renounce it from our life, and let Him come satisfyingly close. If you want to let it go but have trouble letting Him take it out of your life, get help from a Pastor. They are really good at helping people walk through the process of letting Jesus work something out of your life.