All in Holiness
My grandmother’s worn Bible beside her overstuffed chair held the foundational truths that provided the inner strength Paul prayed for the Ephesian believers. I pray that God will also strengthen me with His power through His Holy Spirit in my inner being. And, because of that, I pray my own grandchildren will carry with them a similar image of a Granny with God’s inner strength.
Have you tried to take a toy from a toddler, and she doesn’t want to give it up? It may be naptime or perhaps you need to leave from playing with a friend, but no matter what you try, you cannot pry those little fingers off of that toy without many tears and protests.
Once we take our first steps, we usually don’t think much about how we walk, unless we are hurt. We just get up and go. But what about our spiritual walk? It benefits us to take an assessment periodically.
I have always been amazed at the transformation of the caterpillar to the beautiful butterfly!
One minute, it is crawling as a plain worm… to later fluttering in the air as a colorful butterfly. The same little creature has two very distinctly different bodies that do very different things.
And so, with our eyes fixed on Jesus we have entered that race marked out for us (12:1-2). Make every effort is not lost on me. To race is to do just that—to expend all the energy you have till you reach the finish line. The Greek underscores your effort with godly fear—with the reverence of a minister or deacon (Strongs).
In Malachi’s day reverence for the Lord had hit rock bottom once again. God knew there was only one way to make His message plain and clear. He had to shift the focus of His people off themselves and the world, back on Him.
It seems fear of the Lord has me in its grip for 2024. Let’s spend the week seeing what the book of Malachi has to say about a fearful attitude. How in the world do we live in the fear of the Lord?
The most miserable people at a lake are those who are half in the water and half out. You’ve been there, right? You’ve slowly inched into the water, dreading the moment the water hits your tummy!
Do you find yourself having self-control in some areas of your life, but others not so much? I know I do. Sometimes I feel like I am on a roller coaster. I go up and up feeling like I have made so much progress and then, bam, down I go at a much faster pace than I went up.
It all began in the garden, didn’t it? It certainly would have been God’s desire that we be holy as He is. After all He created man in his own image (Genesis 1:27), and holiness is the essence of His being. Makes me wonder how different things could have been.
In my search for the fear of the LORD this year I am certainly in need of both wisdom and understanding. See how key knowledge of the Holy One is. I need to know God, not just know about God. The Hebrew for knowledge, yada, is experiential knowledge, not merely head knowledge.
Names in biblical times were important. “I AM WHO I AM” proclaims the “eternity and self-existence of God”*. Plain and simple, that is who He is. The name by which He is to be known forever is ‘The LORD’, translated Yahweh. The Israelites considered Yahweh too holy to speak or write out in full.** At least they started out with reverence and awe.
The Old Testament patriarchs and prophets were no strangers to godly fear. Take Isaiah’s cry for example: “Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty” (Isaiah 6:5).
Really—Fear? Who in the world would choose “fear” as their word for the year? But that is the word that dawned on me as my girlfriends and I began a journey through Kathy Howard’s Before His Throne* Bible study in January.
Flower children, hippies, and the unmistakable aroma of incense filled the streets and shops along “The Drag,” the street beside the university where I studied during the early 70’s.
One of my seminary professors once described holiness simply as “other,” meaning that if you took the sum total of all your past experiences and drew a circle around them… Holiness would be in an entirely separate circle.
From his position on the ramparts (2:1) Habakkuk receives the revelation from the LORD. Yes, Judah will pay for her sins at the hand of Babylon. In turn, woe upon woe will be piled upon Babylon (2:6-19). “The LORD is in his holy temple” (2:20) indeed!
My granddaughter introduced me to I Love You to the Moon and Back;* a children’s book so popular that the title has become a common phrase in the American culture!
