Content

• Steps
• Method 1 of 2: Understanding God's Holiness
• Method 2 of 2: Strive for Holiness in Your Life

Instead of striving for fame, fortune, or material happiness, the Christian should strive for holiness. Holiness comes from God as such, you must first understand God's holiness before you can bring that holiness into your own life. Even after you realize that you have achieved holiness, you understand that the pursuit of holiness still needs to be in your own life for self-discipline and dedication.

Steps

Method 1 of 2: Understanding God's Holiness

1. 1 See God as absolute perfection. God is absolutely perfect: perfect in love, perfect in mercy, perfect in anger, perfect in justice, and so on. This perfection is directly related to the holiness of God.
   • God without temptation and sin. As stated by James 1:13, "God cannot be tempted by evil and He Himself does not tempt anyone."
   • The things that God does and his desires do not always make sense from a human point of view, but a believer means he believes that all God's actions, commands and desires are beautiful, even if you cannot understand them.
2. 2 Think of holiness as the character of God. God is holy, but in another sense, God himself defines holiness. There is nothing or no one more holy than God, and holiness itself is fully embodied in Him.
   • God is different from any other and God's holiness is the root of this “otherness”.
   • People can never be as completely holy as God, but people should strive to imitate God's holiness, since people were created in the image and likeness of God.
3. 3 Think about God's commandments, about holiness. Striving for holiness in your own life is what God has commanded us to do as believers. The task may seem overwhelming, but you must rest easy knowing that God will never ask or demand to do something that you cannot do. Thus, holiness is within your reach.
   • In Leviticus 11:44, the God of states, "For I am the Lord your God: therefore you must sanctify yourself, and be holy, for I am holy."
   • Later, in 1 Peter 1:16, God repeats, "Be holy, for I am holy."
   • Once you understand the place God occupies in your life, you can train yourself not to believe in God and not give up in the hope of Heaven. That kind of hope is like an anchor, and that anchor can keep you grounded in God's truth and in your pursuit of holiness.

Method 2 of 2: Strive for Holiness in Your Life

1. 1 Belong to God and the hunger for holiness. True holiness will come only once, you completely surrender your life to God. In doing so, you will learn how you hunger for holiness in the past and how you are hungry and thirst for holiness now.
   • In order to belong to God, you must be "born again." In other words, you must accept Christ and let the Holy Spirit work on your life.
   • Before you really feel a "thirst" for holiness, you need to come to an understanding of why it is important for you to do what God wants you to do. God does not require anything from you just to test you. Instead, God wants to improve your eternal well-being for you and issues commands based on it.
   • While humanity naturally longs for holiness, the world exposes so many distractions that the desire to become a saint is often deceiving. However, the distractions of the world will never offer the spiritual food the soul needs.
2. 2 Prepare your mind and heart. Although it is possible to achieve holiness, it is not easy to achieve. You must devote your mind and your heart to the practice if you have hope of completing a task.
   • In 1 Peter 1: 13-14, the believer is instructed to “gird the loins of your mind.” More literally, it means, “prepare your mind for action.”
   • Set your mind to action - make a clear, definite effort to give up sinfulness and follow God to holiness.
   • There will be many outside influences trying to mislead you. If you do not direct your mind to a clear, definite goal, you will most likely slip onto a different path, so you have to descend in order to reach the desired path.
3. 3 Avoid moralism. Many people often get the wrong idea of ​​holiness and think that it can be achieved by simply following a strict set of rules. Rules and rituals have their place, but when you start to care more about seeking holiness than being holy, you enter the realm of moralism.
   • For example, if you are praying in public to be watched by other people, your attitude towards prayer is not as good as it could be.You can pray in public places if the situation calls for it, but during this time, your prayers should be for the sake of fellowship with God.
   • There is nothing wrong with being seen as a spiritual or religious person, but it should come naturally. You must give up the desire to appear holy to other people. If people still develop this view of you after the fact, then there is nothing wrong with that, but there is no guarantee that those around you will accept your desire for holiness normally.
4. 4 Set yourself apart from everyone else. As already noted, the Law of God is indeed the part in which it is written about holiness. God commands his believers to separate themselves from the sinfulness of the world. This does not mean that you need to close yourself off from the secular world, but it does not mean that God's law, even with secularism, criticizes you for it.
   • In Leviticus 20:26, God explains, "And be holy to Me, for I am the Lord, holy, and I separated you from other people that you were Mine."
   • In essence, being "torn apart" with other people means moving away from the mundane and from other people. You must shield yourself from influences that do not come from God.
   • Understand that you do not need to close yourself up in a monastery or a monastery to shield yourself from the mundane. You really exist in the world, and if God did not want you to be here, He would not send you here.
5. 5 Practice self-control. You can never escape temptation, even if you involve holiness in your life. When faced with temptation, you will have to control harmful desires in order to maintain a degree of holiness.
   • Temptation doesn't always come in material form. It's relatively easy for many people to resist the temptation to steal something from the store or hurt someone who makes you angry. It is much more difficult to resist the basic temptations of greed and hatred.
   • To truly practice self-control, you need to do more than just stop obvious sins. You must protect yourself from weaknesses of character that can distract you from God. These flaws include things like pride, envy, greed, hatred, laziness, gluttony, and lust.
6. 6 Do not tolerate sin. For the most part, it is intolerance of sin in one's own life. Being intolerant of sin is its rejection in the surrounding world. Regardless of how you can love someone when a person sins, you do not have to justify their sin or accept the sin itself.
   • Words such as “intolerance” and “condemnation” are often scattered about carelessly and used as criticism, but the concepts themselves are not evil. After all, few would argue that it is a bad thing to be intolerant of hate or judge what is dangerous and what is safe. The mistake lies not in intolerance itself, but in how it is practiced.
   • Be intolerant of sin, but do not use that intolerance as an excuse to hate others. God is all that is good, and love is good above all.
   • At the same time, you must not let the love and sympathy you have for others blind you with sinfulness. You cannot judge or rule the hearts of others, but you must not accept the sins of others as "rights", because by doing so, you will damage the purity of your heart.
7. 7 Die to yourself, but love who you are. To kill your self-determination is to surrender any desire that is not from God. That being said, God created you to be who you are, so you don't have to despise your existence. If anything, you must love yourself in the same way that God loves you, before you can approach the level of God's holiness.
   • God created you in His image, which means that you are as beautiful as He is. Your beauty includes all your strengths and weaknesses, past mistakes.
   • Even if you are beautiful like Him, you also need to acknowledge your strengths and weaknesses for what they are.When you seek the means to perfect your holiness, you seek them through the vices of God.
8. 8 Consider working catalysts in your daily life. Certain spiritual practices can serve as catalysts that help move you towards holiness, towards a richer existence. You don't always have to practice these catalysts, you have to be holy, but they can guide you towards holiness if used.
   • For example, in order to strive for holiness in the image, you test all food and meals that you could taste during one day of fasting, or even half a day.
   • In some cases, holiness in a specific area of ​​your life cannot be achieved without the practice of a catalyst, although the catalyst itself is not holiness. For example, you must love and present yourself in such a way that you and your spouse have a holy marriage, and you must love your enemies in order to have a holy relationship in general.
9. 9 Pray for holiness. Being holy is a difficult task, it cannot be realized in the absence of God. Prayer is a powerful resource - one of the most powerful tools available to the believer, in fact - prayer will help you stay the same, even more holy.
   • You don't need to pray for holiness for a long time, you don't need to be extravagant and eloquent. Something simple is wonderful as long as prayer comes from the heart.
   • For example, your prayer might be as simple as, "God, let me thirst for holiness more than I thirst for the worldly, and make me holy in every aspect of my character and actions."