30 Days of Thankfulness ~ Day 7 ~ Holiness

"And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and within, and day and night they never cease to say, "Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!""

‭‭Revelation‬ ‭4:8‬ ‭ESV‬‬

Day and night...

They never cease...

Holy, Holy, Holy...

"He is the All-Holy, the Holy One; He is holiness itself, beyond the power of thought to grasp or word to express, beyond the power of all praise." Tozer, in all his wisdom and understanding of God readily admits that it is beyond human comprehension to understand God's holiness. Not just because it is an intellectual struggle but because to try to understand God's holiness, means we must admit all the more our vileness. Yet, God, this all-holy, endlessly holy God, would choose to look upon His creation, that willfully rejected Him, and call them to "be holy as I am holy." Then, because He knew we couldn't become holy on our own, not by sheer willpower and grit, He sent His son to bear the wrath a holy God demands of something vile, so that when He looks upon us he can see the price paid for us. 

Still, coming to this holy God doesn't free us from all the pain and struggle of the journey to holiness. Things must be removed. In order to be refined to our purest form, we must go through the fire. It is what Isaiah calls the "devouring fire" (Isaiah 33:14). The same Isaiah who said "woe is me I am a man of unclean lips" and had his lips burned with the hot coal from heaven. In his book The Attributes of God, Tozer says, "What is this devouring fire? It is not hell, but the presence of God. Who among us shall dwell in the fiery burnings? Do you not know that fire can dwell with fire? You can put the iron into the fire and the iron can learn to live with the fire by absorbing the fire and beginning to glow in incandescent brightness in the fire."

He is calling me into that devouring fire so that He might make me holy as He is holy. So that He may cause the fire He put in my heart to grow and glow and attract others to His holiness the more I become like Him. I know I will never be as holy as He is - He alone is Holy. But because of the work of His Son, someday I will stand before Him, holy, unstained by sin. For now, my calling is to daily run to that devouring fire, and allow the Lord to continue that refining process until the day He calls me to His eternal presence. 

What is the thing God desires to refine in you to make you holy as He is holy? Thank Him today that His refining work is never done in you and that He has made a way to make you holy!