“When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to him and said, ‘I am God Almighty; walk before me faithfully and be blameless.’” (Genesis 1:17)
Contrary to popular opinion, holiness is not an optional add-on for super Christians; it is the minimum standard for every believer. At the beginning of the story of salvation, Abraham was called God’s friend (Isaiah 41:8, James 2:23), and as God’s friend he was told to, “walk before me faithfully and be blameless.” We, Abraham’s heirs (Galatians 3:29), have the same calling. But what sounds like an impossibly heavy burden, “be blameless,” is, for us, not a burden at all, but an invitation.
The first thing we need to understand is that obedience to God’s commands is not a requirement for our salvation, it’s the result of our salvation. Which means that it, too, is given by God’s grace. The obedience that God requires of me is not something that I do out of my own righteousness, but rather something that the Holy Spirit does in me and through me.
But it’s not optional. If I say that I won’t obey Christ’s commands, I am implicitly denying that he has the right to command me. To say that is to say that I don’t really believe he is Lord. It’s a straight out refusal to believe the gospel and be saved. If, on the other hand, I say that I can’t obey, I have forgotten that God’s own Spirit is living in me.
God’s word tells us:
“You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ. But if Christ is in you, then even though your body is subject to death because of sin, the Spirit gives life because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.” (Romans 8:9-11)
You say it would take a miracle for you to live righteously? Me too! But God himself is living his life in my body. That’s a miracle already. At the same time, it’s also what I was born to do. I was created to be God’s temple (1 Corinthians 6:19). And so were you.
But, when I fail to live up to who I am, as I sometimes do, I am nevertheless not condemned because there is no condemnation for us in Christ (Romans 8:1). Rather, I’m encouraged, and powerfully so, to believe that I really can, with practice and time, achieve the heights to which God is calling me. I’m encouraged by God’s word not to give up, even when it seems like all I do is fail, over and over and over again. And in the light of the Scriptures, there is assurance that God’s call to “walk before me faithfully and be blameless” really is not a burden, but an invitation.