December 15 Daily Devotional

The beauty of holiness

Why should [righteousness] be the greatest desire of every one of us? I answer the question in this way. All who lack this righteousness of God remain under the wrath of God and are facing perdition.... That is the teaching of the Bible.... It is only this righteousness that can fit us to be right with God and to go to heaven and to be with Him and to spend eternity in His holy presence.... How amazing it is that this is not the supreme desire in the life of everybody! It is the only way to blessing in this life and to blessing in eternity. Let me put to you [also] the argument of the utter hatefulness of sin, this thing that is so dishonouring to God.... If only we saw the things of which we are guilty so continually in the sight of God, and in the sight of utter holiness, we should hate them even as God Himself does....

But I put it in a positive form. If only we knew something of the glory and the wonder of this new life of righteousness, we should desire nothing else. Therefore let us look at the Lord Jesus Christ. That is how life should be lived, that is what we should be like.... Look at the lives of His followers. Wouldn’t you really like to live like those men, wouldn’t you like to die like them? Is there any other life that is in any way comparable to it—holy, clean, pure, with the fruit of the Spirit manifesting itself [Galatians 5:22, 23]. What a life, what a character. That , is a man worthy of the name of man; that is life as it should be. And if we see these things truly, we shall desire nothing less; we shall become like the Apostle Paul and we shall say, ‘That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death; if by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead’. Is that your desire? Very well, ‘Ask, and it shall be given you

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, i, pp. 93–4