Holiness

Sunday we looked at real holiness verses pretend holiness. Real holiness is a holiness that breaks Satan’s hold on life. You can download the message at egm's website. I didn’t have time to give a lot of insight into the ways we can pursue that real holiness so here’s a bit more:

Real holiness honors authority (see Hebrews 13.17): Satan is forever attempting to take authority that is not his and refuses to follow the authority of God. We break Satan’s hold when we honor godly authority that God has put in place. To understand how such honoring can take some deep and good thought since we are told in Romans 13 to honor those who rule and at the same time we see in Revelation that certain governments are seen as evil. So also in the church, we honor and follow godly authority, but we need to know when those in leadership have left God’s path. Our trouble in both of these areas, however, is that we have been so trained to both question authority and be sure that we are right that we are often too quick to assume those who rule are wrong and we are right.
Real holiness builds up the church. Revelation 12 shows Satan attempting to destroy the church. We break Satan’s hold when we do all we can to build up the church. Here we find that again our individualism can be a hinderance since we often look at the church as something that is there to serve me and to meet my needs rather than the bride of Christ which I am a part of and which I am to use my gifts in to make her a radiant bride.
Real holiness brings health and healing as Jesus did when he healed the woman on the Sabbath.
Real holiness is about breaking through lies and telling the truth (Satan is the father of lies). Here telling the truth involves telling doctrinal truth (Ephesians 4), telling the truth to fellow believers when they get off track in their walk with Christ (Ephesians 4), but also telling the truth about our own failings that are keeping us from a faithful walk with Christ (James 5).
Real holiness is about worshipping God and him alone. We break Satan’s hold when we worship God and reject all others. Satan is forever trying to get us to worship something other than God (he even tries to get Jesus to worship him).