Genesis takes a hard rap these days, as does much of the Old Testament. Much of it is perceived as mythology and a great deal is considered retelling of older tales. Few in this post-truth world consider Genesis as inspired by God. I do.

Genesis tells us that God created humans in His own image (Genesis 1:26-28). It tells us that we were given dominion over all animals, that we were to have dominion over the world. God created us to be His imagers. In other words, God created man so that we could represent Him, rule for Him, rule with Him, and model His behavior. We were not to be Gods; we were to be like God.

From the fall of mankind to the birth of Christ one rarely sees a human who is like God, for  until Jesus was born, no one had been perfect. That is not to say that no one modeled a bit of His behavior or acted somewhat like God. Abraham was found worthy of fathering God’s children, but was hardly God-like. Isaiah spoke to and for God. Elijah and Elisha performed miraculous deeds through the power of God. David sought the heart of God. Moses, though, may be the only man short of Christ who best imaged God, but even he fell far short of God’s glory.

When Moses stretched out his hands, God moved, and when his hands rested, so did God. Moses was so like God they some readers – unfamiliar with the Bible or unfamiliar with theology – may be left wondering if God worked through Moses or if Mode worked through God.

Now, the term imager may be unfamiliar to many of you. I don’t know who coined the term but Dr. Michael Heiser does a great job explaining it in his book, The Unseen Realm. An imager of God is one who carries out the mission of “divine image-bearing.”

This commission, he continues, is given to men and women. It is what makes us unique from other created beings. There is something about us that makes us like God. It is not an incremental likeness; it was bestowed upon us at creation.

When Man fell in the Garden of Eden, he lost much of what it meant to carry the image of God. He lost all that was good and pure and holy. He lost life eternal. We lost the place of glory of ruling with Him.

Once we accept Jesus as our Savior part of what was lost is restored, in that God lives within our heart and works through us.

Here is an old hymn that many of you may remember.

Oh! to be like Thee, blessed Redeemer,

This is my constant longing and prayer;

Gladly I’ll forfeit all of earth’s treasures,

Jesus, Thy perfect likeness to wear.

Oh! to be like Thee, oh! to be like Thee,

Blessed Redeemer, pure as Thou art;

Come in Thy sweetness, come in Thy fullness;

Stamp Thine own image deep on my heart. – Thomas O. Chisholm, 1897.

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Holiness is, perhaps, the most misunderstood concept in Christianity. Anyone who has striven to follow the life of Christ can likely tell you that it is impossible to do. No one can match His love, His grace, or His compassion. For no one but Jesus is perfect. Once the believer is filled with and empowered by the Holy Spirit, though, he or she is filled to the brim with the love of Christ, and desires nothing more than to please God and follow in Christ’s steps. The love of sin is gone. In its place is a love and passion for others. That is Christian Holiness. This is Christian Holiness Daily.

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Beverly Sinclair was a spinster heiress who lived in a mansion of enormous size during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She is the main character in a short story I wrote a few years ago. She was considered eccentric by folks who knew her, a spooky old witch by children, and foolish by most. Foolish because she – who never married and had no close family – lived with her three cats alone in a 42-room palatial home.

What made her eccentric was that the home wasn’t always so big. When she inherited her fortune from her father, the home was a impressive Victorian-style home with five bedrooms, a parlor, kitchen, dining room, basement, and three bathrooms. Over the years, she added two more wings to the home, including a gymnasium, indoor pool, sunroom, library, two additional kitchens, three formal dining rooms, two more parlors, ten more bedrooms and eleven bathrooms. She would build something one year and tear it down the next. She was never happy with the work, and always improving on it.

It was said that old lady Sinclair, as she was known, kept the same general contractor employed her entire life and that she would never hire anyone else to do the work. She hired him first in 1889 and he was still working on the place when she died in 1943.

Long after she died a girl from the local historical society discovered in her journals that Sinclair had been in love with the contractor but had never told him because she was married. He was the reason she had never married. Hiring him to renovate the home was the only way she could see him. Renovations continued until the day she died.

I did not write the story as an analogy of the Christian life, but when I read Colossians 2:6 and thought of the word built this story came to mind. Our walk with Christ is much the same as this story. When Christ saves us he goes to work on us, tearing out the old and building the new, adding a room here and testing down a room there. He loves us too much to allow us to live a dark, putrid life and we love Him enough to let Him enough to keep working.

Colossians 2:6 reads this way:

Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith

The word built in that verse is passive, we do not go build ourselves. Christ builds us and perfects us and does not stop working on us until death. Why? He is building and perfecting His body, His home, die He dwells in us, according to Acts 17:24. We are the temple not built by human hands. What then are we to do in this whole process? Allow Him to continue to work in us. Do not quench the Spirit of God (1 Thessalonians 5:19, Ephesians 6:30).

Besides, how can we, mere humans, expect to improve on what God builds?
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Holiness is, perhaps, the most misunderstood concept in Christianity. Anyone who has striven to follow the life of Christ can likely tell you that it is impossible to do. No one can match His love, His grace, or His compassion. For no one but Jesus is perfect. Once the believer is filled with and empowered by the Holy Spirit, though, he or she is filled to the brim with the love of Christ, and desires nothing more than to please God and follow in Christ’s steps. The love of sin is gone. In its place is a love and passion for others. That is Christian Holiness. This is Christian Holiness Daily.

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Eritrea is called the North Korea of Africa. Cut out of the north end of Ethiopia, it is squeezed between Sudan and Djibouti on the Red Sea. It began its struggle to break away from Ethiopia in the 1960s and spent most of the next 50 years at war with that nation. The tiny nation has seen so much war that, for two years, it was responsible for the majority of refugees entering Europe. Even though the country has known peace in the past few years, its government – like that of North Korea – is so repressive, over 3% of its population has fled country.

Like most authoritarian nations, the elite grow obscenely wealthy, the masses starve, and the a dictator wrestles for control of freedoms, including freedom of religion. In Eritrea, about half the people are Islamic and the other half are Christian, but only three Christian churches are recognized: The Catholic Church, the Orthodox (Coptic) Church, and the Lutherans. All others are illegal.

Other churches may register with the government, but registration is such a complicated, lengthy, and invasive processes that the independent church registration has ground to a halt.

Many churches, then, meet in secret, illegally.

The Voice of the Martyrs just released the story of a worship leader in Eritrea – Helen Bethany – who was arrested for her participation in an outlawed church. She was imprisoned for 10 months, kept locked in a shipping container with a severely mentally handicapped woman. The woman physically abused her.

In spite of her imprisonment in such harsh conditions, Helen sang and prayed throughout the ordeal, even when guards beat her for it. She explains why she sang in this quote from The Voice of the Martyrs News, August 14, 2018:

When I was in prison just worshiping, [it] just kind of gave me strength. Also when you sing, it’s a heavy stone on the head of Satan, because he put you in these kind of things and when you start worshiping he is shocked. People don’t understand when something happen they close their door and cry … so he comes with other kind of [trials] or you repeat the same exam.

But when you start worshiping God … it is totally no space for Satan to attack you again and again.

What does following Jesus cost you? Your very life. Jesus tells us to consider the cost before we commit to Him, for we must give Him that which we love most: everything that we are, everything that we do, and everything that we ever hope to be. The cost is the commitment of our entire life. Our life is His to use as He pleases or to take as He wishes, for only He sees it from the unique perspective of the all-knowing creator of life. It is His breath in these lungs that I so foolishly consider my own. Who am I to argue with the very essence of life? All that I am is His.

My Tribute – by Andre’ Crouch

How can I say thanks for the things

You have done for me?

Things so undeserved yet You gave

To prove Your love for me

The voices of a million angels

Could not express my gratitude

All that I am, and ever hope to be

I owe it all to Thee

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Holiness is, perhaps, the most misunderstood concept in Christianity. Anyone who has striven to follow the life of Christ can likely tell you that it is impossible to do. No one can match His love, His grace, or His compassion. For no one but Jesus is perfect. Once the believer is filled with and empowered by the Holy Spirit, though, he or she is filled to the brim with the love of Christ, and desires nothing more than to please God and follow in Christ’s steps. The love of sin is gone. In its place is a love and passion for others. That is Christian Holiness. This is Christian Holiness Daily.

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Look at this verse:

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. – Luke 14:27

What are we to make of that? Those are pretty strong words? What of the ABCs of salvation? Accept Christ into your heart. Believe in the name of Jesus. Confess your sins. Where is Hate your family in the ABCs?

Now, before we go further I want to state up front – as I have in previous episodes that I am not advocating salvation by works. You and I can do nothing to make our sinful souls and mortal bodies worthy of heaven. Only by relying on the virgin birth, sinless life, sacrificial death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ may we find eternal life. I am simply telling you the old 20th century teaching of “Freely Given, Freely Received” is wrong. There is a cost to you and I if we wish to follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ.

What is that cost? That’s not for me to say. It is different for each and every believer. Yet, Jesus tells us to plan for it. In the next breath, immediately telling us we need to hate our family to be worthy of following Him, he tells us to count the cost.

For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him… Luke 14:28-29.

He uses another analogy as well:

…what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand?

So, let me lay out what serve learned so far. There is a cost to salvation, a great cost it would seem, a tremendous cost. But we don’t know what it is up front because it may be different for every believer. Yet, Jesus warns His followers to be prepared to pay for it. To count the costs before following Him. What are we missing?

Maybe, we may hope, there is a difference between simply finding salvation and following Christ? In other words, I just want to be counted in for the part of the plan where I go to heaven, but I don’t want to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, not if it means such a high price to pay. I’m sorry… I don’t see that option in the Bible.

Jesus told the lame man whom he found in the Temple, “Go and sin no more.” He told the woman caught in adultery, “Go and sin no more.” He told the rich man, “sell everything you own and give it to the poor.” He told the scribe, essentially, “Give up your cushy bed in your luxurious home.” What is he telling you?

What does it cost you to follow Christ? He tells us the answer in Luke. 14:27 reads:

Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.

What does the cross represent? It represents death. The cost of flirting Christ is your life. Don’t believe it? Jump down to the end of that chapter and read verse 33:

So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.

What price are you willing to pay, and why would we? We’ll look at those questions yet this week on Christian Holiness Daily.

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Holiness is, perhaps, the most misunderstood concept in Christianity. Anyone who has striven to follow the life of Christ can likely tell you that it is impossible to do. No one can match His love, His grace, or His compassion. For no one but Jesus is perfect. Once the believer is filled with and empowered by the Holy Spirit, though, he or she is filled to the brim with the love of Christ, and desires nothing more than to please God and follow in Christ’s steps. The love of sin is gone. In its place is a love and passion for others. That is Christian Holiness. This is Christian Holiness Daily.

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Levitical law separated the leper from the rest of society; lepers lived at a distance, never again to touch their loved ones, or to speak with them intimately. Never again could they hug their children or kiss their spouse.

Leprosy is highly contagious, and is spread by skin contact and through water droplets, like a cough or sneeze or a runny nose. Leprosy attacks the central nervous system, but its symptoms appear as tumors and disfigurement of the flesh and bone. Fingers twist in unnatural ways; hands become claws, and arms and legs become useless over time. The life of a leper is a painful and sad.

Lepers suffered so greatly that people in the time of Jesus naturally assumed that the afflicted must be paying for some terrible sin. And, why wouldn’t they think that? Two thousand years later, many of us still believe that way, to some extent.

It was near the end of His ministry when Jesus, passing through an unnamed village between Samaria and Jerusalem, was called on by ten such lepers. In keeping with the Law, they called from a distance.  “Master, have mercy on us!”

His answer may seem strange to us, but that is only because we don’t live under the Law. “Go, and show yourselves to the priests.” Before a leper could rejoin society, he or she must have been certified to be free of the disease by a priest.

The Bible doesn’t say for sure, but I imagine an expression or two of doubt on the faces of the lepers, and perhaps a few questions among them. Still, they obeyed Him.

And he said unto him, Arise, go thy way: thy faith hath made thee whole.

– Luke 17:19

The healing must have been slow and progressive, rather than instantaneous. Before the lepers arrived at the Temple or synagogue, they found themselves healed. One of them – just one – was so grateful that he turned back to thank Jesus before he had made it to see the priest.

So grateful was he that he fell at the Master’s feet and worshiped Him.

“Didn’t I heal 10 people?” said Jesus. Of course, He knew the answer. “Where are the other 9? Only one has found it in his heart to return and praise God, and He is a Samaritan.” Christ once again reminded His followers that their prejudice against their neighbors is simply wrong.

“Get up, He tells the Samaritan. “Arise and go your way. Your faith has made you whole.”

The leper’s mission had changed. Before turning around to express his gratitude to Jesus, his mission had been to go see the priests. Now, healed and made whole, he received new inductions from Christ… to go his own way.

“You are made whole.”

And, here’s my point. Those who experience a real encounter with Christ are made whole, spiritually whole; theirs lives are renewed and made complete and they simply cannot continue to go on living like they once had. They are compelled to follow Jesus. Their missions change. Christ directs them in a different direction. They receive a change of plans. Theirs hearts have changed. Their entire lives change.

Have you been made whole? If not, you only need ask. Fall at His feet and praise Jesus. Ask Him to change Your heart. Your life will change. Forever.

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Holiness is, perhaps, the most misunderstood concept in Christianity. Anyone who has striven to follow the life of Christ can likely tell you that it is impossible to do. No one can match His love, His grace, or His compassion. For no one but Jesus is perfect. Once the believer is filled with and empowered by the Holy Spirit, though, he or she is filled to the brim with the love of Christ, and desires nothing more than to please God and follow in Christ’s steps. The love of sin is gone. In its place is a love and passion for others. That is Christian Holiness. This is Christian Holiness Daily.

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Grant never sought command over the armed forces Union. He sought only a role commensurate with his West Point training and experience. He was certainly not pro-slavery, but had never taken a stand against it prior to the war. He had – in fact – worked his Missouri farm using slaves that were given to him by his father-in-law. Early in the war, though, he was compelled to take a radical stand. Long before Lincoln freed the slaves, General Grant declared that the nation could remain united only if all men were free. He sought only to lead his troops, but because of his dogged determination and brilliant mind, he soon led the North into new hope and onward toward victory.

Even before Grant defeated Lee, he became a hero. The press followed him everywhere. His likeness appeared on front pages from Washington to Maine. Both Democrats and Republicans talked of nominating him for President in 1864. Congress reinstituted the rank of Lieutenant General to honor him, a rank that was retired after George Washington died. Abraham Lincoln, who had ascertained that Grant abhorred the idea of running for president, concurred with Congress and made Grant General of the Army of the United States. If Grant did not seek greatness, it was certainly thrust upon him.

Though his life is largely forgotten by generations of Americans who can barely describe the Civil War or identify Lincoln, and though his life has been misrepresented in the media, I have to wonder what made him great. Why was Grant a hero and hailed as our country’s savior before he had even set upon the task of vanquishing the Confederate Army in the East?

While one can hardly reduce his appeal to one aspect, the man did possess one quality that stands out in every biography, good or bad, old or new. Even those histories that wrongly portray him as a drunkard mention this one quality as a key to his success. He never gave up.

In the Battle of the Wilderness, in early 1864, Grant – for the first time – faces off in battle against Robert E. Lee. Lee, as brilliant and cunning and determined as Grant, has the advantage of fighting at home. He knows the country, and the terrain. The people of Virginia are Lee’s family and neighbors. They support him. Grant is the invader, far from home, unfamiliar with the country, and faces odds that seem insurmountable. Lesser men than Grant would have fallen back. In fact, other Generals had encountered Lee had previously won victories in the same part of Virginia. Many Union Generals were wary of Lee; all of them respected him. Grant, though, was determined. It was his determination that at him apart from all others and accounted for much of his mass appeal.

Sure, other Union generals were determined, but Grant never faltered, even when the cards were stacked against him. One incident in the Wilderness Campaign illustrates that point. Grants armies were facing off against Lee’s in what is better described as a jungle than a wilderness. Old growth trees, impenetrable undergrowth, unfamiliarity with the lay of the land, fog and smoke were as much an ememy to Union troops as the Confederate soldiers. After initial setbacks, Grant regrouped and began again.

Grant had purposefully been silent, telling Lincoln little about the progress of the battle. One day, though, he discovered a reporter had decided to sneak through the lines to Washington to file a story. Grant called him aside and, in a hushed tone, said, “If you see the President, tell him for me, that whatever happens, there will be no turning back.”

That determined attitude, the short that resolves “No Turning Back,” is one thing missing in the lives of many Christians today. Determination… Discipline… And Faith are all a part of the walk with Christ. If we truly seek the heart and mind of Christ, we must first repent of our sins, trust in Jesus, allow His Spirit to live through us, allow Him to discipline us, and finally determine to follow Him. No turning back.

Paul puts it this way in 1 Corinthians 15:58 (ESV)

Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

An old hymn is worth recalling:

I have decided to follow Jesus;

I have decided to follow Jesus;

I have decided to follow Jesus;

No turning back, no turning back.

Tho’ none go with me, still I will follow,

Tho’ none go with me still I will follow,

Tho’ none go with me, still I will follow;

No turning back, no turning back.

My cross I’ll carry, till I see Jesus;

My cross I’ll carry till I see Jesus,

My cross I’ll carry till I see Jesus;

No turning back, no turning back.

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Holiness is, perhaps, the most misunderstood concept in Christianity. Anyone who has striven to follow the life of Christ can likely tell you that it is impossible to do. No one can match His love, His grace, or His compassion. For no one but Jesus is perfect. Once the believer is filled with and empowered by the Holy Spirit, though, he or she is filled to the brim with the love of Christ, and desires nothing more than to please God and follow in Christ’s steps. The love of sin is gone. In its place is a love and passion for others. That is Christian Holiness. This is Christian Holiness Daily.

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