Humility and Holiness

I was reading my evening Spurgeon a week or so ago and it came upon the subject of humility as it relates to holiness. This made me think of two things, a Biblical reference and a personal memory: the Biblical reference(s) was/were the many examples of the Pharisees and their striving for "holiness" and perfection before God while in their very boasting betraying the notion that they had actually attained it, showing why their works were filthy rags.

The personal memory was from college. As background, I attended a private Christian college which had a very heavy Wesleyan (and thus holiness) influence in the Methodist tradition. We had chapel three times a week and often there would be a time to approach the altar and pray; I had a friend (one of my groomsman, actually) who would constantly go to the altar to pray. In my ignorance and sin, I asked myself, what's so wrong with him that he needs to go up there all the time? Is it a show or is he doing it because he thinks he's better, etc? However, in the knowledge I have now, I know better.

Holiness often is not so much about our attainment of perfection that it is about Christ increasing in our lives (see the transformation Paul talks about in Romans 12, for one example); our increase in holiness should have a direct correlation with the increase in our humility. That is to say: the more self-aware we are of our own sin (made possible of course by the Holy Spirit) and our need for Christ, the more refining that takes place and the more that Christ increases.

Show me a Christian increasing in godly humility and I will show you the same man increasing in holiness; show me a man who seemingly increases in holiness without humility and I will show you a man headed for a prideful fall.

A humble man becomes more and more aware of his unworthiness before Christ, while a man who vainly works and strives for his holiness begins to rely on his own works and feels God owes him.

Holiness should mean less of me and more of Him; our desires are changed at our regeneration. We are enabled at that point to make distinctions and decisions we were not able, dead in our sin, to make before. In the process of our sanctification, in our growth in holiness, God through the Holy Spirit knocks down obstacles that keep us from being wholly his (make no mistake--when justified, we ARE His, bought and paid for). He changes who we are, down to our core, and makes us the salt that we were intended to be, so that we may be even more gripped by grace than when He first called us.

So, my friend was not better than I was; in fact, he was proclaiming as Paul stated that he was the chief of sinners, being more aware of how unworthy before God he was and throwing himself on the mercy and grace of Christ. May we all be so fortunate to progress steadily in humility and holiness before the Lord!