All Hallow’s Eve?
Two holidays a year take their name from the day that follows them. Christmas Eve? Just the day before Christmas. Halloween? All Hallows’ Eve—The day before All Saints Day. Isn’t it funny that we celebrate All Hallows’ Eve but no All Hallow’s Day? I’m not sure how that happened, but culture has pretty much forgotten about All Saints’ Day. The word “hallow” is otherwise out of our vocabulary. Yes, we say in the Lord’s prayer, Hallowed be Thy name, but what does it mean that a thing is hallowed?
Hallowed means holy, sacred. To “hallow” something is to make it holy, but can we really do that? Can we make something holy? I’ll argue that only God can do that, but what we can do is acknowledge something sacred as holy—to acknowledge those things which merit our reverence. We don’t make it holy ourselves, but in acknowledging what God has made holy, we sanctify it, figuratively.
This is from verse 15 of our text: “In your hearts, sanctify Christ as Lord.” Here, to sanctify does not mean to supply Christ with holiness, but to acknowledge His inherent holiness with our whole being.
Today is Dedication Sunday, the day we put forward our pledges and plans for 2020. At heart, it is all about our acknowledgment of the Lordship of Christ. It is a real-world expression of our commitment to Christ and His kingdom. Today, we should be mindful that we are being sanctified by the Holy Spirit of God, and growing into the image of Christ with every year. This is what we call spiritual formation. It is what we call Discipleship, and we are a disciple-making church.
All discipleship is a matter of constant growth. We are ever-growing as Christians. Christian formation is always in motion. As we seek to be deeply-committed Christians, we move from self-preservation—which is the world of natural man—survival, self-reliance, storing up treasures here and now in this world—toward self-sacrifice.
INTEGRITY’S “NO!”
Our instinct to self-preserve is not just individual, but collective. Families, communities, and nations alike seek to preserve themselves in this world. One downside of this—as regards our discipleship—is that “the need to get along” can become a source of compromise. In trying to be nice people that coexist peaceably with others, we can devalue items of conscience. Is it more important to avoid confrontation and risk stirring up waves than to share the good news of Jesus? On paper, we’d all say NO! In practice, I think we often “shelve” our faith to otherwise keep the peace (which is a false peace, usually).
Because we are social creatures, we also run the risk of avoiding what is truly important so that we can safely relish the warmth of the herd. We want to get along and fit in, so controversial items—even the eternally significant ones—are hidden away so our comfortable place in society is not disrupted.
There is no way for a follower of Christ to determine her priorities without risking disruption. When we “sanctify Christ in our hearts” we essentially proclaim that Jesus alone is Lord. We have one Lord only, and our service to Christ cannot be compromised by any lesser good in this world. When we acknowledge that Jesus is Lord, He becomes our light, and that light shines on everything in our world, throwing all things into relief, revealing what is valuable, chasing what is dirty or dark deeper into the shadows, and lighting the path that is growing into Christ. For the Christian, this is conscience.
To live, think, act, and speak with integrity, we must learn to offer a thunderous no to every audience in our world: family, friends, community, and nation. That NO! is our departure from the warmth of the herd and conformity. To serve no one and nothing other than our One Lord is the starting point of integrity.
goodness a gift
I’ve always loved Martin Luther for this revelation. Imagine the backbone required of him to stand up and against the entire CHURCH—all whom he loved and admired—with his thunderous NO! Luther’s integrity came from Scripture and his awakening to the righteousness of God which is not the same as the righteousness of the Church. The righteousness of God, Luther realized, is a righteousness given to us by God. The gospel is indeed good news in that God provides the righteousness needed for salvation. This means we do not accomplish it by our own struggle. Just as we can hallow nothing, but acknowledge what God hallows, so we must accept that we cannot make ourselves holy, but must accept the gift of righteousness given us in Christ. This is a world-changer
John Calvin, THE theologian of the Reformation, followed Luther’s commitment to conscience—to serving God alone—and it gave him the bold stance to change the world. From Calvin:
Integrity is the best of all protectors...we cannot be more secure than when fortified by a good conscience.
As we said a few weeks ago, those who are in Christ are no longer playing by the world’s rules. Our bodies have become temples, dwelling places for the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit dwells in us as our conscience, as encourager, convict-er, convincer, confessor, counselor, and comforter.
The Holy Spirit
Conscience is not just the mishmash of impressions and feelings put into us by our parents, family, and childhood influences. All of those things make up the natural conscience—shared by nature and all people to some degree or other—but the one who becomes a Christian also becomes a temple of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit dwells within us, and that means God is in us.
Paul says “The Law is written on our hearts”
Our natural conscience is undergoing constant revision and reform as God’s Spirit leads and directs us. When we hear His Word, it confirms what His light reveals, and these things are never contradictory, but always aligned. Yes, we have to puzzle it out and struggle through our understanding, but we are always growing, always being led deeper into that Light.
The churchy word for this is Sanctification. We are being sanctified. This is important because the term is essentially passive. Sanctification is not something we do for ourselves; it is something the Lord does for us.
A lot of people think we do it ourselves by building ourselves us up, praying harder or longer, trying harder to be better Christians—and I think all of these are excellent, admirable practices, so know that I am for those activities—but none of these put us in better standing with God. It is God who sanctifies us; we do not and cannot sanctify ourselves.
It is not so much a matter of effort as it is letting go, which is part of the good news of the gospel.
If we think of piety as gutting up and working ourselves into higher holiness, we waste our time, for this is vanity (in my opinion, a rather toxic kind of Christian vanity—the same we see in Pharisees).
Better that we should think of ourselves as simply turning over our controls—again and again—to the Spirit who dwells within us. It is not like working out at the gym or body-building for the soul (which we all ought to be doing nonetheless), but more like relaxing, more like letting go.
we are like hoses
Think of yourself as garden hose. The purpose of a hose is to transfer water from its source someplace deep behind all the pipes out onto the agapanthus. If you think that you are the source of the water—that all that water comes from your good intentions and pious efforts, then the agapanthus is going to die. The source of all that water is not you or me but the Holy Spirit of God, then our role is like the nozzle on the hose. We simply open ourselves up so the living water can come through us.
Our “work” is more allowing God to work than any effort of our own. As Paul says elsewhere, “He must become more and I less”
Isn’t this what we want? Isn’t this exactly what we pray for when we are well-connected with God? “Lord, let me be useful! Lord, we surrender to you and give ourselves to you—become more in us and help me get myself out of the way!”
In all we do, the Light of God shines. This means we let his light fall on everything in our lives and we judge it accordingly. It is God’s light that shows the Christian what is important and what is not, what is true and what isn’t, and what sins in the shadows need to be chased away.
That is conscience and the Christian happily submits to the process of her ongoing reform and transformation. That light is the source of our growth as well. The good stuff gets taller and stronger while the nasty or irrelevant stuff withers away. Happily withers away, I should add, for the withering away of sin and darkness is the answer to our prayers.
In your life and mine, the Holy Spirit becomes our conscience. We invite that Holy Spirit into us in every way we can—we long for the Holy Spirit to possess us and take us over as completely as possible.
The semi-Christian—anyone who wants to follow Jesus, but doesn’t want to surrender all but rather preserve oneself and keep oneself intact—is no Christian at all. The person ready for faith is the one ready to be completely taken over by the Holy Spirit!
Even talking about this scares some people—including semi-Christians—to near death. And it should.
SPIRIT POSSESSION
Halloween-time: We talk of spooks, spirits, and goblins. The whole idea of demonic possession is still Hollywood-marketable; it is a genuinely terrifying idea to think that an alien being—some spiritual denizen of hell with ill-intentions—could enter a person’s soul and take control, replacing dear old you or me with a wicked agency beyond personal control. It is terrifying to imagine a devil coming in and overwhelming you. But this is the exact same language we use for the Holy Spirit of God, and the Christian is one who invites it, calls for it, and daily begs for its power to increase!
“Lord, overwhelm us, take us over, dwell within us so completely that we would do your will instead of our own!” Yes, brothers and sisters, this is how it works.
The difference is that with the horror story, the self is lost—absorbed and consumed—by the demon while the person desperately attempts to preserve himself. With the Holy Spirit, you and are desperate to give ourselves away—to have the Holy Spirit become more and more—but the miracle is that Holy Spirit will not absorb or consume us—rather He gives us back to ourselves in newness and in greater measure—greater authenticity—than we could ever know otherwise. The more we attempt to give ourselves away to God, the more we find ourselves fulfilled and overflowing.
Back to the garden hose: the secular life is an empty hose desperate for water that is constantly anxious to be made full. The Christian life is a full hose that is ever seeking to become empty but can’t because the source keeps the water flowing.
The fallen life is an empty vessel, dying of thirst, seeking even a drop of water. The Christian life is one that becomes an overflowing fountain—one that can never be emptied because it is so well connected to the source.
So it is all about connection and surrender. There is no half-commitment that will work; it is an either/or proposition. Either you empty yourself for the Holy Spirit to fill you and flow through you, or you will simply choose to be empty—empty, dry, and dark.
holy emptiness
It is really simple: only one thing is required to follow Jesus: everything. Simple. That thought is either terrifying beyond description or it is your good news—what you’ve been praying for all along.
The words “believe” and “trust” are attempts to capture this essential calling. Do you really want to follow Jesus? Relax. Seek to become as empty as possible and call his Spirit into your life, down to the roots of your soul. Abandon everything in this life: let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also. Do year His call? Is this invitation your good news or your terror?
As his light shines on all things, we learn our way forward. May we all come to the holy practice of seeking emptiness, of abandoning sin and all the irrelevant things. May we call his Holy Spirit into us that his word would become our conscience, our integrity, our life, and our light.
And finally, for all who walk in darkness, or any who may feel that they have been semi-Christians: for all who are ready—welcome aboard—this is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. †