Christian Holiness Journal | Page 20 | a record of struggle and victory to know the mind of Christ

Caution Christian Under Construction

August 23, 2018 by ChristianHolinessDaily

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.

Roots, Deep and Wide

August 22, 2018 by ChristianHolinessDaily

When my children were young I would often find extra work to supplement the income of my full-time job. One weekend, I agreed to clean leaves out of a yard, which led to a job the next weekend at the same location. I would be taking down a tree.

I had never cut down a tree by myself but I managed it pretty well. A few days later, the same people asked me to remove the tree stump. How hard could that be? I agreed.

I spent the next two or three weekends digging and cutting and chopping, until, at last, I was ready to tie the stump to a rope and pull it from the ground with my little Ford Courier pickup.

That did not go well. I tugged and pulled, smoking my tires, and straining my clutch, until something gave. It wasn’t the stump that I felt give. It was the rope snapping, the end of which whipped across the truck and shattered the back sliding window.

I never got that stump removed. Instead I cut it off at ground level. A few years later, shoots of green sporting fourth from that stump and began to grow. What the homeowners had thought dead was rooted so deep and so wide that it could not be removed, and it could not be killed.

Those who trust in God for their salvation are given a measure of faith that leads to discipline, compelling us to walk hand-in-hand with our Lord. Consequently, we are rooted in His love, built-up in His grace, and established in the faith. Once we understand that, we cannot help but give Him all thanks and all praise.

“Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.” – Colossians 2:6-7 ESV

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For I Am Meek and Lowly – by Phineas Bresee

August 19, 2018 by ChristianHolinessDaily

Welcome to Christian Holiness Sunday, where we post messages from old-time holiness preachers and writers. Today’s abridged message is from Phineas Bresee, and it called

Blessed are the Meek.

Meek – We are to find the term by its application to character. We find there is no one thing that is so exalted and so insisted upon, or so held up as the crowning glory of Christian life as meekness. Perhaps it is because it is not simply one thing but a blending of many things.

Jesus Christ applies it to Himself as making up much of His character, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart.” Paul in writing to the Corinthians said, “Now, I Paul myself beseech you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ,” and in writing to Titus, He makes a very touching appeal to the church. There were many things they should not do, and many things they should do, in the trying condition in which they were placed, the sum of which was that they should show of all meekness and to all men.

One of the elements of meekness is humility. Humility is essentially a Christian virtue. It is not simply an absence of pride and arrogance, but an adjustment of our feelings toward others which comes from having been made a partaker of the Spirit of Him a who regards every human being as of infinite value.

Humility is not an underestimate of self. No one who properly values others can fail to feel and be thankful for his own relation to God, and for God’s thoughts of him. He realizes his own infinite value in the site of God, that he is one of this great family, all of whom he knows are anxious to serve Jesus.

Gentleness is also an element of meekness. That sweetness of spirit, of touch, that reverence for established usages, a readiness for every good work, speaking the evil of no man.

Meekness is the ability to bear and to endure. That great passive quality by which a man pursues his way regardless of difficulties. It receives the opposition of the enemies without becoming their enemy. It receives the blows of this world without resentment. This does not mean that a meek person is never to contend against the wrong, nor that he is never to resist personal violence. It means that back of all is faith in God, and love to all men.

Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the earth. The earth here means “land” and as reference to the promised land. What the land was to Israel, what it prefigured to the Church of God, is the meaning of this promise. The histories of the Old Testament or full are spiritual lessons for the New. In all of them there is a meaning far deeper into other than what appears on the surface. God has intended that it should be so. He has intended that that these histories should be types of human life and that through them He should be able to pour the light of His love.

Have you ever looked with earnest longing into the Word of God to see if there was a better way? Have you heard the clear statement of God’s Word in reference to the hear being mad holy and even commanded to be holy? Have you heard, “For if the blood of bulls and goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” Do you wait in the attitude of desire and expectancy? Can you say, with Charles Wesley:

Lord, I believe a rest remains

To all Thy people known,

A rest where pure enjoyment reigns,

And Thou are loved alone.”

Does the hope looking up in you as you wait sing out with these words:

Oh glorious hope of perfect love!

It lifts me up to things above,

It bears on eagles’ wings;

It gives my ravished soul a taste,

And makes me for some moments feast

With Jesus’ priests and kings.

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