Holy3
Holistic Holiness for
Humanity, Part 3
Reaching for Clarity
in What Fully Surrendered Humanity Looks Like
By David
Drury
This is the third and final
part of this effort to describe how we might rethink and reimagine
holiness in the future (click here
for part one).
The third dimension: a family fully surrendered to
Christ
I envision this third
dimension of holistic holiness as being with humanity. While the Christian community that is the
church is an important component of “doing life together” the family is perhaps
the most important community in all of humanity. We emerge from family, we are formed by
family, we start families, we live with them, and we grow old with them. My definition of a family is a bit broader
than just wife plus husband plus kids as well.
A grandmother raising her grandkids under the same roof where her sister
lives is a family. Four single college
buddies who live together in an old house for 10 years become a family for that
season. A couple with
no children are still family to one another. Family is my shorthand word for those you live with. That can include a whole bunch of relatives
or perhaps just your roommate and the friends that always come over to eat
dinner.
So, with that broad view of
family I want to challenge us as becoming holy
with them. These human
beings whom we rub shoulders with most are perhaps the greatest test of
our holistic holiness. They know how
well we clean up after dinner, and even how well we clean ourselves up! They know the person behind the curtain of
work, school & church. There are no
public personas when you share a bathroom with someone. What would it be like if our families became
more holy?
We will know we are
succeeding in becoming holistically holy as families when we fully surrender
our past family sins. When we break the
patterns and bondage of family sin and become, by confession and action, the
turnaround generation. When it comes to
forgiveness and reconciliation—it must start at home or rings hollow
elsewhere. If we are likewise
surrendering and obeying God in the present, as we make decisions as a family
together, rather than imposing our will on others we instead become more
holistic as a family unit—we have a togetherness of direction as a family. This unity as spouses, friends, relatives,
children, parents, siblings: it is perhaps the deepest longing we have as
humans. If we are unified in this
respect we’ll know we’re succeeding. And
then we must complete the good work that God has begun in us by surrendering
our future desires as a family to God.
We so often try to live our lives through other members of our family—we
desire things for them that we cannot or have not achieved for ourselves. So by surrendering the future of the entire
family unit and each individual in it we begin to treat each other with a
holistic holiness and without unspoken demands or too-harsh expectations. We become more holy together.
We will know we are failing
at becoming holy as families when we have a continual weakness in our spiritual
lives. When we feel sapped of strength
and energy spiritually as individuals and as churches, it is often because we
do not have the strength that comes from a family that is living holy for
God. What happens at home never stays at
home… it comes with us to our congregation, and into our workplaces, and begins
to erode or fortify our culture in the end, depending on it’s
weakness or strength. Many have written
about the breakdown of the family socially—but few are suggesting a renewal of
holy living in the home. Many have tried
to make us more well-adjusted and offered tips to help us cope. But few have attempted to create a more
spiritual home environment. Few are
looking to scripture and asking, “how would I apply this
teaching to the way I treat those I’m going to have dinner with tonight?”
The fourth dimension: a life fully surrendered to
Christ
I envision this final
dimension of holistic holiness of being as humanity. We must be attuned to our own inward drive to
become more than we are—to be that person we have tattooed on the inside of our
hearts. We are drawn by this inner light
to be what we are not yet. We know we
cannot be this on our own—it must involve some outward source of power &
purity. But we have the inner light
still. The flame flickers even if
windblown—perhaps even more desired when agitated by the winds of life. When we reach the moments of realization that
we cannot do it on our own and the knowledge comes to us that Jesus Christ has
this perfect purity, this potent power that we desire, we can surrender
ourselves to it. That is a beautiful
thing.
We know we are succeeding at
becoming holistically holy as individual humans when we are not subdivided like
pie-charts that have simply grown legs.
We have that keenly holistic sense that our whole lives are about something—something outside of
ourselves. Someone, in fact, outside of ourselves becomes our purpose; first
Christ, then those he gives us to influence for him. It may begin with that all important
confession of the past. Our sins are
what often pointed us to his power and purity in the first place—as they
withheld the benefits of both in our own lives.
So in becoming more fully frail as human beings we begin to tap into his
power and purity. Our authenticity opens
up the possibility of Jesus giving us what we do not have. But there is also the
surrender of the present—the will.
This is no small thing. We often
feel torn between two wrestlers. Paul
named them the Old Human and the New Human.
A holistically holy human is at war with the Old Humanity in their bones
and entrusting all decision making power to the New Humanity in their
Soul. And then it’s about our
desires. These are as mundane as petty
temptations and as grand as your purpose in Creation for a lifetime. Giving ourselves over to Christ in what we
desire for the future opens up all new possibilities for what he may want to do
through us.
We are very well aware of
what comes from failure in this dimension, and it is hypocrisy. When people are asked what their problem is
with Christians, they nearly always cite this as their primary turn-off. It’s the saying of one thing and the doing of
another. The risk of not pursuing and
attaining holistic holiness—where one’s life is fully surrendered to God—is
that our perpetual failings catch up to us.
Yes—the faith of the world does not rest on our sinlessness…
the power and the purity are Christ’s, not ours, but the tendency among
Christians today is to do one of two things: either say one thing and do
another, and so become hypocrites, or to neither say how we should live or try
to live like Christ, and so become heathens ourselves. A third way is there, however, the way Jesus
called us to from the beginning, and pursing that complete, holy, holistic way
of doing life as humans is the only choice that roots out the inner Pharisee we
carry around with us.
A Note on the Order
Perhaps you think I went out
of order here. Why didn’t I start with
this last dimension first? Nearly
everything I’ve read on the subject views personal piety as the wellspring—the
source—of changed families and churches and in the end, hopefully if faintly,
of culture. That is the dominant way
holiness is viewed. It is hard for most
people to think of holiness apart from an individual holiness. I disagree.
It doesn’t seem to work.
We may need to think in the
complete opposite order to even reach a place where personal piety is
possible. If we start with culture, and agree
to be agents of authentic and positive change in it, that lends a more forceful
reason to becoming a church that is in the world but not of it. And if our Christian communities come
together with a sense of common identity as a holy people set apart then that
gives over to becoming more holy as families.
And if our families then become more holy then all individual ships rise
and personal piety becomes a part of a larger stream of a people set apart. Is it any wonder that nearly all commands
towards holiness and being set apart are given in the plural in scripture? It is for this reason. God is not looking for you to be the UberHoly Human that is just so pure and powerful that you
change your family in a flash, then your church, and the culture is thus
likewise transformed through you. That
sounds like the makings of a cult—not a people set apart.
Perhaps we need to start at
the level of culture-transformation, remember all of those commands for what it
looks like for us to be holy—all of us—when the justice, the mercy, the unity,
the love, the compassion, the truth, the worship are all there and changing
society with all they have to offer.
When we remember those things it may help us to be a true movement in
culture, a force for God’s end game for the planet.
Then holiness will spread
across the land, one that effects the whole of humanity—a holistic holiness.
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