What Does It Mean To "Be Holy"?

 Click Here to Read or Listen to the One Year Bible Lessons

A Call to Holy Living

13 So prepare your minds for action and exercise self-control. Put all your hope in the gracious salvation that will come to you when Jesus Christ is revealed to the world. 14 So you must live as God’s obedient children. Don’t slip back into your old ways of living to satisfy your own desires. You didn’t know any better then. 15 But now you must be holy in everything you do, just as God who chose you is holy. 16 For the Scriptures say, “You must be holy because I am holy.”

As Peter continues to admonish the believers in Asia who are undergoing persecution, he also wants them to exhibit good character as a result of the grace they have been given in Christ. Grace is opposed to earning not effort. Since they did not know when Jesus would come back, in the meantime they needed to live out their lives as newborn children of God. They could not go back to their old ways and conform to their former desires because to do so would cheapen the grace they were given and devalue the price Jesus paid for them on the cross.

It is in this context that Peter calls them to "holy living". They were to be holy because God set them apart to be holy just like He is. We often have many wrong misconceptions about holiness. The two best ways to understand it is that to "be holy" means to be "set apart". To be holy means you have been set apart for "special use" in God's kingdom here on earth. It doesn't mean that you will never sin again. It doesn't mean that you will ever be completely morally pure. 

In fact, Peter tells them to put their hope in the gracious salvation that will come to them when Jesus Christ returns and is revealed to the world. Note grace has a past, present, and future sense. 

"Grace isn’t just for the past, when we first gave our lives to Jesus. It isn’t only for the present, where we live each moment standing in His grace (Romans 5:2). It is also for the future, when grace will be brought to us. God has only just begun to show us the riches of His grace." - Guzik

Even though our future hope is in Jesus' return when Paul says, "We will be delivered from this body of death" (Romans 7:24), he calls them to action NOW. The action starts in the mind and results in the exercise of self control. Later he will say the action is how they treat each other with love and impartiality. They (and we) must choose not to return to our old ways of living to satisfy our old desires. 

Peter is not calling us to clean up our act, he is calling us to live as the "set apart" children of God we were called to be. Our motivation is in response to the great love God had for us when he sent His Son to be our Savior. Therefore, as we seek to live a life of obedience and self control it is all done for Jesus and in His power.

Where do you need to remember that you are set apart? What areas of your life is it easy for you to slip into old behaviors that are not of God. Remember it is for freedom that Christ set you free so don't return to the bondage of your old nature! Galatians 5:1

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