I am the Lord Your God
By Enyo Agada
When thinking about the idea of becoming holy, it can be easy to focus solely on the changes that we need to make in our behaviours so that we can become holy. But we see in this scripture that the starting point- and our frame of reference for our holiness- is found in our belonging to the Lord.
““I am the LORD your God; consecrate yourselves and be holy, because I am holy. Do not make yourselves unclean by any creature that moves along the ground. I am the LORD, who brought you up out of Egypt to be your God; therefore be holy, because I am holy.” ”
It is a simple yet powerful phrase: I am the Lord YOUR God, therefore be Holy because I am Holy.
Our covenant with God, which identifies us as His sons and daughters, is what marks us. Therefore, the desire to be like the one we belong to should be what drives us to want to walk and live as He does.
The process of sanctification (a lifelong process of becoming holy and like Jesus) is not merely about behavioural modification. We see in the wider context of Leviticus 11 a long and impossible list of requirements that the Israelites had to uphold so that they could be clean and consecrated before the Lord. However, we know from the biblical narrative, that no matter how hard they tried, no matter how often they made sacrifices and pilgrimages to Jerusalem- as Hebrews 10:4 highlights, ”it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.”
What set the Israelites apart was their covenant with the Lord. However, the law was not sufficient to keep them fully consecrated.
They needed something more. They needed someone greater.
“For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering.” -Romans 8:3
For those of us who have found belonging through a new covenant of faith and have been justified through Christ's blood and once and for all sacrifice, what then does it mean to walk the narrow way of sanctification?
Last month, we explored in Ps 24:3-4, that the only one with clean hands and a pure heart, is the Lord. And so as we meditate on what it means for us to become Holy as He is Holy, we must look to Jesus- the author and perfecter of our faith. Our holiness is no longer about external things, like the clothes we wear or the food we eat, but rather about what is in our hearts. Sanctification is the process of being conformed into the image of Christ. As we look to His image and begin to see His character and nature reflected in our hearts, we become what we behold. And then out of the abundance of the heart flows actions and words that are pleasing to the Lord.
For the Israelites, their covenant demanded that they live according to the law and so must be circumcised and stay away from unclean things, whether people, foods, materials or animals. For Christians, we are under a new covenant- one marked by grace and mercy, but that also requires a new kind of holiness.
We have now been made one with Christ, God’s holy temple- the place where His Holy Spirit dwells.
So yes, how we live matters. The words we say, the way we love both our neighbours and our enemies, how quickly we are willing to forgive and choose to pursue peace; all of these things point to our belonging to a Holy God. But God also sees what is in the heart, He measures us not by external things but by what is hidden beneath the surface.
So whilst we spend time this month reflecting on what it means to be holy as He is holy and to consecrate ourselves, let us make sure to also allow the Lord to search our hearts and reveal the areas that we have not yet yielded over to Him. And then as dearly beloved children of God, let us boldly approach the throne of Grace, knowing that we serve a God who is in the business of making all things new.
