Perfect Purity

We live in a world in which purity is overlooked by the vast majority of the culture in favor of pleasure seeking and relativism.  God asks for more.  He asks us to be holy as He is holy (1 Pet. 1:16).  Obviously, for us to overcome the gap of holiness set before us, two things are in order: (1) we must understand what holiness is, and (2) we have to come up with a game-plan for holiness.

For starters, holiness has two basic definitions, to be pure and to be set apart.  Although God asks for us to take on holiness in both measures, the former of the two is to be the focus of this discourse. Purity, to be pure, requires acknowledging what purity is as well as understanding that which taints purity, making it impure.

God is pure.  Scripture speaks most aptly about the purity of His Word (Psa. 12:6; 119:140; Pro. 30:5).  Purity thus is a direct reflection of His Word in us.  When we are in His Word, His Word acts to purify us.  Additionally, purity speaks to perfection.  For something to be pure it has no extraneous or unnecessary pieces; it is perfect, complete.  This should convict us to assess: are there parts of us that we could deem extra?

Furthermore, purity is unsoiled, undefiled, and ultimately clean.  To be pure then necessitates a state of perfect cleanliness of soul.  When we speak of holiness, this is what we are discussing: the state of a person's soul.  Purity is to be, then, utterly pure and without sin.  To be sure, that's no small order.

Think of a glass of water with sediment floating inside.  This is akin to the state of a unrepentant  soul.  We are so full of the depravation of sin that we, our very beings, have become tainted and defiled.  Only when we are poured out and sieved to remove the unclean sediment of sin can we become "holy as He is holy."  Confession and belief in Jesus by way of repentance and humility accomplishes this purging.

Peter, John, and Peter all speak about the necessity for humans to pursue holiness (Rom. 12:1-2; 2 Cor. 7:1; 1 Thess. 4:7; 1 Pet. 2:11; 1 John 3:3).  For fear of getting too theologically dense, it is sufficient to say that striving for holiness is a big deal for believers.  It can be summed up in a single term: sanctification.

It is true that God guides and administers the sancitification process; however, this does not negate the man's responsibility.  To be holy is not a passive ordeal but an intensely active endeavor.  In order for us to be holy, we need to pursue holiness.  The writer of Hebrews also speaks to this effect, that we have responsibility to put forth effort in holiness (Heb. 12:14).

Because of the vast and singular requirements of holiness, we, believers, should heed the call to holiness and "take every thought captive to Christ (2 Cor. 10:4-5)."  To be made new and pure in holiness is what repentance and sanctification is all about.  Let us then press forward to live more like Christ, perfect and blameless, undefiled by the world and pure in His Word by the power of the Holy Spirit urging us to greater holiness in Him!