Quotes about Holiness

Holiness is doing God's will with a smile.

Who may ascend the hill of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart" (Ps. 24:3—4). We need to be pure before God by turning from our sinful ways, receiving forgiveness through Christ, and walking in the Spirit. (See Romans 8:3—4.)

you are integrated, then what you say, what you believe, what you do, and how you respond are the same. If you tell God you believe Him, but then act in the opposite way when you are on your job, taking care of your children, or with your friends, then you are not integrated, pure, holy. You are double-minded. "That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord" (James 1:7).

Holiness isn't some mystical, nebulous, weird, smoky, cloudy presence. It's very practical and real. Holiness means "one"—not the number one, but one in the sense of "complete." Holiness denotes the concept of being integrated. Integrated comes from the same word as integrity. God has integrity because what He says, what He does, and who He is are the same. That's exactly what holiness

Yet James said that if we doubt, we are being double-minded. That means that we don't have integrity—we're not holy. Since God is holy, we also have to be holy if we want to receive answers to our prayers.

You are called to be truly human, but it is nothing short of the life of God within you that enables you to be so, to be remade in God's image. As C.S. Lewis said in a famous lecture, next to the sacrament itself your Christian neighbor is the holiest object ever presented to your sight, because in him or her the living Christ is truly present.

What Paul understands by holiness or sanctification (is) the learning in the present of the habits which anticipate the ultimate future.

Because the early Christians believed that resurrection had begun with Jesus and would be completed in the great final resurrection on the last day, they believed that God had called them to work with him, in the power of the Spirit, to implement the achievement of Jesus and thereby to anticipate the final resurrection, in personal and political life, in mission and holiness.

The church is not simply a religious body looking for a safe place to do its own thing within a wider political or social world. The church is neither more nor less than people who bear witness, by their very existence and in particular their holiness and their unity (Colossians 3), that Jesus is the world's true lord, ridiculous or even scandalous though this may seem.

Christian holiness consists not of trying as hard as we can to be good but of learning to live in the new world created by Easter, the new world we publicly entered in our baptism. There are many parts of the world we can't do anything about except pray. But there is one part of the world, one part of physical reality, that we can do something about, and that is the creature each of us call "myself.

Someone who truly understands who he or she is in Christ is further along the road to genuine holiness than someone who, in confusion, anxiously imagines that the new life is the result, rather than the starting-point, of the daily battle with temptation.

It is time, and long past time, to reread the gospels as what we can only call political theology—not because they are not after all about God and spirituality and new birth and holiness and all the rest, but precisely because they are.