Some thoughts on Holiness

Many passages in the Bible admonish us not to sin. Peter no less than all the others in his letter to the churches of Asia Minor, known to us as 1 Peter. The trouble for us is that we keep on sinning. These admonishments become a little discomforting to us after repeated exposure. What are we to do?

I'm in a Facebook group that tries to help people out with this sort of thing. Well, to be precise, it tries to help people out with porn addiction. A recent post featured the provocative question, "What's your plan to stop sinning?"

Peter says, Prepare. Be ready. Get serious. Keep expecting Jesus. Pray. Love one another.

I'm reading The Screwtape Letters right now and there's plenty of content there to get you thinking about this question too. 

I don't know that there's a comprehensive, detailed, step-by-step, sure-thing answer to the question, but maybe it involves loving the brethren and meeting together, confession and repentance, and setting our minds habitually on heavenly things. I have to admit when I am not "setting my mind" in this way, as a matter of daily discipline, I seem to drift gradually back to older habits of thought that are in no way holy.

And all this is in keeping with what Richard Foster taught in his classic work, Streams of Living Water. Here's an excerpt:

Virtue is good habits we can rely upon to make our life work. Conversely, vice is bad habits we can rely upon to make our life not work, to make it dysfunctional, as we say. So a holy life simply is a life that works. 

And again:

Holiness is world-affirming. The holy life is found smack in the middle of everyday life. We discover it while being freely and joyfully in the world without ever being of the world. Holiness sees the sacred in all things. It is integrative, synoptic, incarnational.  

Food for thought, no?