The Christian’s Desire for Holiness

A Christian is someone who is different, categorically, inwardly and spiritually, from someone who is not a Christian. Christianity is not like many other things. When you go to college, you get a degree, and it hangs on your wall, but you are the same person; only now you have developed a skill and a credential. It is a good thing, but it is still the same you, and we like to see that. We hate it when somebody gets a promotion and acts differently. But let me tell you, when you come to Jesus Christ, you are not the same old person, for something has changed you. You have a change of status. But there has to be a corresponding reality in your life because there is a new power at work within you to that. It works progressively. We spend the whole of our lives working on it, but this is the reality: that the Christian is different from one who is not a Christian.

We are separated, not from people, but from sin, not from the world itself, but certainly from the principle of worldliness. If you do not want to be different, you cannot be a Christian. Martyn Lloyd Jones says this: You cannot be a saint and a Christian without being separated in some radical sense from the world. You do not belong to it any longer. You are in it, to be sure, but you are no longer of it. There is a separation that has taken place in your mind, in your outlook, in your heart, in your conversation, in your behavior. You are a new creature, a different person. The Christian is not a worldly person. He is not governed by the world and its mind and its outlook. That description should increasingly characterize our lives.

Let me ask you: Do you find evidence of that? Do you find that you no longer think and respond in the way that you used to but you have new and godly pleasures and interests and pursuits that mark you out as different from the world, different from the person you were before you came to Christ? Are you becoming more holy? Many Christians at this point will say, I’m so discouraged because I do see that the world has a hold on me and I am pulled by sin, I have sinful desires. And some people will wrongly come to the conclusion: Therefore I cannot be a saint; I am not holy. But you see, even to possess a burden over that is a mark of holiness in your life. The average non-Christian is not walking around under the conviction of the sinfulness of sin. The desire for change is like the Christian who comes in weakness before the Lord and says, Oh, Lord, would you give me grace? I really want to be holy! You see, that is a Christian. That is what it means to be holy. It is the process of God’s grace working out in our lives what he has definitively accomplished when he brought you to himself in Christ. That is what it means to be a Christian: We are the holy ones; we are saints!¹

Dr Richard D. Phillips