Hi, from the Salvation Army, you're listening to Words of Life. May we live a life that reflects who you are to the world around us. In Jesus' name, Amen. Well, we're back together again. Bill and Diane Ury and Ken Leich and I'm Vern Jewett are talking about holiness and God's desire that we live in, that close relationship with Him.
And we have a second question. We spoke about what is entire sanctification and we only have time to just get started before our session ends. But we want to look at a biblical term and a classic term, Christian perfection. Now, the word perfect scares a lot of people away, and I understand why none of us feel like we can be perfect, especially when we think about our relationship with God. But Christian perfection speaks of not the English definition, perfect, today, which means no flaw or defect.
It speaks of a relationship that is whole and a flourishing, open relationship with God. Have you encountered the same kind of problem with the word perfect? Yeah, just a couple days ago, I had somebody come up to me, and you can tell when they're mad when they're coming up toward you after you speak, and she was very upset. She said, I think I heard you say to the person behind me that they can be perfect like heavenly perfection.
She was very upset. I said, well, if I said that, I'm totally wrong. But I said, I hope I can clarify just a bit that this word is, as you said, Vern, a biblical term. I mean, I think the first thing I can think of is the Lord saying to Abraham in Genesis 15, walk before me, 17, and be perfect. There's a Hebrew concept. Walk with me in a way that you're intended to walk.
I want all of you in all of me, that kind of relationship. And then, of course, Jesus, Matthew 548, he uses the word, be perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect. So we, as biblical Christians, have no way around that kind of strong reality, Old and New Testament. Discussing it in a day where the word can be so easily misunderstood can end up being an excuse for not living the life the Lord wants to offer to us.
And so I love the way you qualified it. It's Christian perfection, biblical perfection, not American language perfection or philosophical perfection. It's a positive movement of the Trinitarian God filling us with his very self, and he's restoring us to who we were always meant to be.
Yeah, you have to begin with the beginning. That's right. When God said, oh, this is very good, what he actually was saying was this is exactly what I intended. And what it meant for humankind was that we live in an intimate, completely dependent, loving relationship with God himself. Face to face, breathing in his life, his spirit continuously. That's what he intends.
And he called that very good. And it's the idea of perfect. So when we think of perfect, when we see that, we must always, at least I do, I always think of that in my mind as a perfect, intimate relationship with God where he wants to look at me face to face, eye to eye, and breathe his life into me all the time.
I can't live a single moment without him, not an hour. That's what perfection is to me. Absolutely. It's dependence. Makes you complete.
Yes. And that's God's intention. I think entire sanctification is requisite if there's going to be a Christian perfection.
I think that's, again, we talked about the Lord's giving his grace. Of course, that's the 99.9% of this whole relationship. But the 0.1% of my responsiveness is to say, Lord, if there's any unlove in me, fill me with your love. If there's perverted love, idolatrous love, I need you to cleanse that. And that's the hard part.
So we can excuse ourselves saying we'll never be perfect. The Lord says, no, I want you to be. So that means I want your whole heart. I want everything that you are. To make you whole, I must, because I'm a person, the Lord is three persons, it's a personal relationship. If he's going to sanctify me and then perfect my heart with love, I must say, Lord, I relinquish any grasping, any tendency toward power plays.
My old ways of doing things, I give them all to you. And I think that's where most people buck up and say, I don't want to be entirely anything because I can't be. I don't want to be perfect because I can't be. But they really know the Lord's not asking them for performance.
He's asking for all of themselves. And that's the battlefield. We can say perfect in motive. And again, we can't reiterate enough, consistent with who we were intended to be all along.
Perfect in love. It's a wholeness. And we were talking beforehand about the enemy of wholeheartedness is double-mindedness. And so it's being who God wants us to be. And I love the thought, Diane, and I think it's an important one, that we are not fully human unless we are flourishing and whole in him. And that's what perfection is. And the term sometimes is misunderstood, absolute perfection.
We don't believe in absolute perfection. It's a Christian perfection which speaks of the living relationship with God that is the heart of what we do. And Vern, you said wholeness, and you also mentioned before we started this Week 2 podcast the idea of shalom and the meaning of that in the Hebrew. And that's the wholeness of God making us who we ought to be. I was going to read a verse.
I'm reading from the New Living Translation, and this is Ephesians 4.13. It says, it's talking about how we are to be equipped and continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge. And that word knowledge means intimate belonging and union. It's not information.
It's that kind of knowledge. Knowledge of God's Son that we will be perfect. Some translations say mature, I scratch out mature and put perfect here because that's the word in the Lord.
Measuring up to the full, the fullness of the measure of Jesus. That's perfection. We are empty. We're dust, right? And perfection is being filled with Jesus.
That's what it is. And that's why perfection means complete whole, like shalom. It means I am an empty, I'm created to be made complete when God is in my life. That is the only way we're complete. And I love, I'm going to read a quote from John Wesley.
I love what he says. He says, what is Christian perfection? He's praying. This is a prayer. He says, for what is the most perfect creature in heaven or earth in your presence, but a void?
An empty place. I can be a void. I can be totally desperate and helpless.
I cannot do my life. And Wesley says, that's perfect. And then the rest of the quote, capable of being filled with you by you.
And I just think what a beautiful, restful definition of perfection. I'm a void. I'm empty. I'm this clay piece of dust just waiting to be filled with you. God looks at us when we acknowledge that we cannot do our life without him. He says, oh, that's perfect.
I'm going to come and fill you. That certainly clarifies any misunderstanding you might have with a modern day understanding of what perfect means. And looking unto Jesus.
Thank you. Because Christ's likeness is certainly a description of what it means to be holy. And I think of the Hebrews author saying, we look unto Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith. He is our example. He's filling us. That's how he perfects us.
He fills us with himself. This theme has gone through all the Bible, of course, and all of church history. It's interesting how many Christians, East and West, Catholic, Protestant, we've all dealt with this thing. I'm glad to be a part of a tradition that says, no, this word is applicable to real life. It's not just for heaven.
It's real life on earth for a person. You can know that your heart is perfected by the Holy Spirit. Again, I'm going back to my... And the words are hard for us to deal with. This gal I mentioned earlier who was upset with me, she said, I know myself. I know myself too well. And what she was saying was, I've got two natures in me. I've got a sinful nature and I've got this Christ nature and they're always fighting.
And I wanted to say, wait, wait, wait. Now that's a view of reality that is taught probably in most of the West. And I said, there's another way of looking at that. You don't have to fight your nature fighting this perfecting nature of Jesus in your life every day. You can be perfectly his. You can love him because of what he's doing in your life.
He's doing it, but you're responding. And I could tell it just hit a wall. There's a huge wall with these words, to be sanctified, holy, to be perfected in love. There's something in us where we say, no, that just can't happen. And I just want to say, biblically, I think it's everywhere. No, this is not an impossible thing. This is a real reality that is normal Christian existence.
It's not for esoteric people or weird people. It's for every believer. You can have a perfect love flowing through your being. Absolutely.
I often challenge people by saying, I believe a perfect heart makes a perfect Christian. Exactly. It's a matter of heart and will. Amen. Yeah.
Yielded to him. And purity of intention. Right.
Is the, quote, performance flawless? No. But can the desire of our hearts be pure and clean? Absolutely. Our desire to do everything that God would want us to please God more than anything in the world is a part of Christian perfection.
Yeah. Amen. Well, interestingly, the May Holiness podcast that we do here in the Salvation Army in the Southern Territory, the topic was embracing Christian perfection. So, we invite you to go to your favorite podcast site and listen to that. And we also want to ask Diane to share, because Bill is humble. And I'm not. We want Diane to share about him. Not about him.
I'm not. His long-going, longstanding podcast on holiness. Yeah. Bill has been doing, it started before podcasts were invented, so he's been doing a program for 28 years every single week. And it's called The Hour of Holiness.
And just every week, it's like, not an hour, it's like 23 minutes. And he usually preaches through scripture. And I love how you can hear his Bible pages turning. And, but it's always about holiness and 28 years worth of different themes. And just to dive into all. 823 podcasts.
I saw that one. Yeah, all the different ways to live in holiness biblically, theologically, it's an incredible resource. My students just laugh and say, it's not an hour, it's an hour of half holiness or a half hour of holiness.
Say the truth. It's not an hour of holiness, but it's been a great privilege to do that. Thanks. Thank you. And having shared with you those wonderful resources, we invite you to come and join us. This is the end of our second week's discussion about holiness. God bless you.
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