Holiness Is Not Optional: The Call to a Set-Apart Life

There is a word the modern church has grown quiet about, and its silence is costing us dearly. The word is holiness. It used to be central to how Christians talked about the Christian life. It was expected. It was taught. It was pursued. It was understood as the natural response of a redeemed heart to the God who had redeemed it. Somewhere along the way, holiness became optional, a subject reserved for the especially serious, a topic that made ordinary Christians uncomfortable. That drift has to be reversed. The New Testament does not treat holiness as advanced discipleship. It treats it as the basic call of every believer, and it commands it with a seriousness we cannot afford to ignore.

Peter says it plainly. “As he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy’” (1 Peter 1:15–16). Notice the reach of that command. Not holy in some areas. Not holy when it is convenient. Holy in all your conduct. Peter is quoting Leviticus, reminding us that the standard has not changed. The God who called Israel to be set apart from the nations has called the church to the same thing. The details differ. The principle is identical. God’s people are to look different from the world around them, because they belong to a God who is different from the gods of the world.

The writer of Hebrews goes further. “Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14). Read that carefully, because it will not let us treat holiness as an add-on. It is described as something without which no one will see the Lord. This is not a threat that our salvation depends on our performance. It is a statement of what regeneration actually produces. A Christian is someone the Spirit of God is making holy. If there is no pursuit of holiness in a life, there is reason to question whether the Spirit is in that life at all. The tree is known by its fruit, and the fruit of a genuinely converted person is a growing conformity to Christ.

We need to be honest about how far this cuts against the assumptions of our age. Our culture teaches us that authenticity means expressing whatever we feel, that fulfillment means pursuing whatever we want, that morality is a matter of personal preference, and that any external standard is oppressive. Christianity teaches something entirely different. It teaches that we were made by God, for God, and that our deepest joy is found in becoming what He designed us to be, not what our fallen desires drive us toward. The Christian pursuit of holiness is not a rejection of joy. It is the pursuit of the only joy that lasts. It is the recognition that our Maker knows us better than we know ourselves, and that His commands are not arbitrary restrictions but the very shape of human flourishing.

Paul is emphatic. “For this is the will of God, your sanctification” (1 Thessalonians 4:3). If you have ever wondered what God’s will for your life is, Paul answered it in one sentence. It is your sanctification. It is your growth in holiness. It is your progressive transformation into the image of Christ. Every other question about God’s will for your life takes its place under this one. God’s will is that you become holy, and He is committed to that work in you, and He will not stop until it is complete (Philippians 1:6).

The pursuit of holiness is not natural to us. That is why Scripture calls it a fight. “Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil” (Ephesians 6:11). “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (Colossians 3:5). Notice the language. Put on. Put to death. This is combat vocabulary, not therapeutic vocabulary. The Christian life is not a leisurely stroll toward heaven. It is a war for our souls against the world, the flesh, and the devil, and we will lose that war if we treat holiness as a hobby rather than a mandate.

Paul describes his own experience of this fight in Romans 7. “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing” (Romans 7:19). Every honest Christian knows that struggle. Sin still whispers. The flesh still wars against the Spirit. There are days we feel like we are gaining ground and days we feel like we are losing it. That is not evidence that we are not Christians. That is evidence that we are Christians in an unfinished state, on a road we have not yet reached the end of. The fight itself is a sign of life. The person who is truly dead in their sins does not fight; they drift. The person who has been raised with Christ struggles, because there is now something in them that hates the sin they used to love.

But we do not fight alone, and this is the good news that keeps the pursuit of holiness from becoming a burden that crushes us. “It is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13). The Spirit who dwells in every believer is actively producing holiness in us. He is convicting, guiding, empowering, sanctifying. He is not a passive presence. He is the agent of our transformation, and He will not fail. “And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6). The pursuit of holiness is not us climbing toward God by our own strength. It is us cooperating with the Spirit who is already at work in us, using the ordinary means God has given, and trusting that He is doing what He has promised to do.

Those means are not mysterious. They are the reading of Scripture, prayer, the fellowship of the church, the preaching of the Word, the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, confession of sin, and obedience to what God has revealed. There is no secret path to holiness. There is only the well-trodden road that saints have walked for two thousand years, and it works because God has appointed it to work. When Christians drift from holiness, it is almost always because they have first drifted from these means. When Christians grow in holiness, it is almost always because they have returned to them with fresh seriousness.

Holiness is not perfection in this life. No Christian will reach that until we see Christ face to face and are made like Him (1 John 3:2). But holiness is a direction, a trajectory, a growing hatred of what God hates and love of what God loves. It shows up in what we watch, what we say, how we spend our money, how we treat our spouses, how we handle our anger, what we do when no one is looking. It touches everything, because there is no part of a Christian’s life that is exempt from the lordship of Christ. He does not just want our Sundays. He does not just want our religious moments. He wants all of us, and He is worthy of all of us.

The world will not encourage this pursuit. The world will call it legalism, self-righteousness, prudishness, or worse. Let it. The Christian is not called to please the world. The Christian is called to please the Lord. “For if I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ” (Galatians 1:10). We would rather be misunderstood by our neighbors and approved by our God than the reverse. Our approval will not come from the culture. It will come at the throne of Christ on the day we see Him, and on that day, nothing will matter except whether we lived for Him or for ourselves.

There is a great weight in this and also a great freedom. The weight is that God takes our conduct seriously and calls us to a standard we cannot reach on our own. The freedom is that He has given us everything we need to grow into that standard, that His Spirit is actively at work in us, and that the finished work of Christ has already secured our acceptance so that we pursue holiness from a place of security rather than fear. We do not become His children by being holy. We become holy because we are already His children, and we are growing into what He has already declared us to be.

“Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure” (1 John 3:2–3). Let that be the pattern of our lives. We are His now. We will be like Him then. And in the meantime, we pursue holiness, not to earn what we already have, but to become what we already are. The world does not need more Christians who look like the world. It needs Christians who look like Christ. That is the call. That is the work. That is the life we have been given.

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