If You Want To Be Holy, Stop Trying and Just Trust

I watch the rain falling softly from sky, brimming full in the morning dusky light.

 

I sit with Bible open, eating soul food, comtemplating mysteries. 

My eyes brim full, heart too, as words pour from my lips to heaven and I know that this indeed is the fullest life.  Life in His Spirit.

And these are the words that I read as my heart overflows like so much rain from heaven, “If you love me you will obey what I command.  And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever – the Spirit of Truth.  The world cannot accept Him because it neither sees Him nor knows Him.  But you know Him, for He lives with you and will be in you.  I will not leave you as orphans.”  John 14:15-18

He says this three times.  If you love me you will obey my commands. 

For so long I thought that this was something for me to do to prove my love for Him.  That if I really loved him I would make sure that I always obeyed his commands.  I thought this meant I needed to go out and try really hard to be really obedient and follow all the rules and be really good. 

And I failed.

Over and over again.

I knew that my salvation was dependent completely upon trust in Jesus and His work on the cross but somehow I believed that my sanctification was dependent on me.  My works, my trying hard to do the works of God, my obedience to rules by my effort.

And no matter how hard I tried, I just failed more and more.

In fact the more I tried and greater I failed.

Until I had become so despairing of my own efforts, so empty, so desperate of ever being able to change myself that I finally got it.

We only ever become holy, or sanctified because of our trust in Jesus.

It is only when we let go, stop trying hard to be good, and instead admit that we never will be good enough on our own, that we can receive the grace of God to really change. 

We don’t have to try harder, we just have to trust Him.

Just as we look solely to Jesus and His work on the cross for our salvation, we look to Jesus and His work on the cross to make us holy, to change us into His likeness.  It is the work of His Spirit, not of our works, our effort, our trying.  Sanctification is an act of faith in Christ. 

In John 14 Jesus is saying that if we love him, the natural outflow of that love is obedience.  Obedience is the fruit of our love.  It is what we want to do.  It is what we will do. 

He is not telling us to work up obedience, he is telling us that we can look at our lives and see if we really do love him by the fact that we will obey him. 

And if we look at our lives and see that we don’t obey and we don’t love Him then the answer is one thing,

repent and surrender our lives to Him again in faith believing that His grace is sufficient for us.

Sufficient for our salvation, sufficient for our sanctification.

His grace alone is what changes us.

God is the one who does the sanctifying.  If we did some of it, then we would get some of the glory and God will not share his glory with anyone.  He does all the work from first to last. 

As we give him our life to live in, to work through, He will do His job of changing us.

Our job is just to surrender control to Him and trust Him to do in us His work.

Not that we ever get it exactly perfect on this side of heaven, but it is our constant dependence on Him that he wants.  Our constant reliance on His grace by faith and not our works is what makes us more like Him. 

But the more that we trust the Holy Spirit to do in us what we know we cannot do, then He does, and our lives begin to look more and more like the character of Jesus.

Just the like the clouds in this morning sky don’t produce rain by trying harder to do so, they rain down water when they become so full of water droplets that they cannot hold any more water, and it just over flows, pours down, naturally. 

Our lives, when they are full of God’s Spirit, will pour His life and character right out of us.  We don’t have to struggle or strain to do it, we just have to open wide and receive His life, trust His life in us to pour out through us.  And then He gets the glory for the work he has done in us.

And His Life will pour out of us, like morning rain softly falling.

 

 

May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through.  May your whole spirit, soul, and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus.  The one who calls you is faithful and he will do it. 1 Thessalonians 5:23-24