D.A. Carson Writes:People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.
holiness
What is love?
“And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.’”And he said to him, “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.” And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.”
(Mark 10:17–22 ESV, emp mine)
When the rich man comes to Jesus, Jesus loves him. But look at that love. We might expect Jesus to love him by saying, “You’re money is an issue, come follow me and we’ll deal with that.” Or, we might expect Jesus to say, “You’re all sinners, so don’t get too worked up over this law stuff.” From much of what we hear taught today, the only way to love the unrepentant sinner is to not confront their sin. Yet, Jesus does the exact opposite.
It is loving for Jesus to confront this man’s sin. He draws a clear line in the sand: the man must leave his beloved wealth in order to follow Christ. Anything less is absolutely unacceptable. How is this love? Because it doesn’t give the man a false sense of security, or a false sense of salvation. Jesus knows the standard is real repentance, and knows it would be doing this man a disservice to pretend something less was acceptable. Lowering the bar might even cost this man salvation.
We tend to lower the bar in our own lives. We rationalize and excuse our own sin. We also lower the bar for others. Professing Christians are allowed to continue in unrepentant sin without anyone loving them enough to tell them they’ve sinned. Rebellious Christians are allowed to continue on indefinitely, because the church doesn’t love them enough to say, “Enough is enough.”
Don’t lower the bar. Love yourself and others by passionately pursuing personal holiness.
Brandon Markette 