A Revelation of Holiness
I came to God, to ask Him to teach me, and show me any error in my heart or mind, about holiness. What He taught me was totally unexpected, and really hit a deep place in my heart. It began with God touching me, and my angry reaction. I dont always react like that, but I have noticed it happen quite a lot, and have never known why. So, anyway, I stayed put purely through determination, and began to ask God what on earth is the problem, and what’s it got to do with holiness? We made painfully slow progress, like two friends trying to make up after a terrible argument: ’I'm angry with you.’ ‘I know you are, but why?’ ‘Cos your horrid’. That sort of thing. So, here comes the lesson that God taught me about holiness. It started in Genesis 4:6-7, ‘Why are you so angry? the Lord asked Cain. Why do you look so dejected? You will be accepted if you do what is right.’ Now, I’ll have to explain a little bit of the background here. You see, my relationship with God was wonderful, intimate and deep, until a point came when everything in my life went wrong. I went through a valley, and it was a dark valley that seemed to go on forever. In the first 3 or 4 months of this period, God suddenly withdrew from me, and I could not understand. Why would God leave me when things got bad? That was the worst part of the whole thing, and was the cause of my anger towards Him. I was pondering all this when I took a drink of water that I had brought with me from home. It tasted completely foul. I didn’t realise Evian could go off, but it can. It was rancid, disgusting, and left the most foul after-taste in my mouth, which no amount of chocolate could overcome. I was sat there on the floor with this grimace on my face wanting to spit my tongue out, when God began to speak to me about my false view of holiness. When I got saved, I came to God on the basis of the sacrifice Jesus Christ made for me. I came to Him broken, humble and eternally grateful. However, when things got bad and I began to go through some incredibly hard and painful times, I began to bring to God my own sacrifice of pain and suffering, instead of the sacrifice of Jesus. I imagine the thoughts of my heart went something like this, ‘Oh Lord, look at how I’m suffering for you. If I didn’t love you so much I would never endure this. I’m in such pain and its all for you.’ Now, my water looked pure, fresh and clear, but it tasted like sick, and once i’d drank from it I wanted to put it as far away from me as possible. My own sacrifice of suffering for God is exactly the same. It looks pious, and holy, but when God drinks of it He finds that it tastes foul, and so puts it as far away from Him as possible. This was Cain’s problem too. He came to God with his own sacrifice (look how hard I’ve worked for you. See how I’ve been slaving away in the fields, and its all for you) instead of the sacrifice provided for him by God. So, God told me to go and pour my foul water down the sink, and to repent for thinking that my sufferings were anything at all. Only the sufferings of Jesus Christ are worthy before God and can bring me into the place of holiness, the Presence of God.