The Hole in Our Holiness

We have no shortage of excellent books on the subject of holiness. J.C. Ryle’s Holiness has stood the test of time while R.C. Sproul’s The Holiness of God and Jerry Bridges’ The Pursuit of Holiness represent two modern classics. We might well ask whether we really need more books on the subject. Kevin DeYoung’s The Hole in Our Holiness answers with a resounding “Yes!”

DeYoung believes there is a hole in our holiness, a gap between gospel passion and the pursuit of holiness. The hole is simply this: that we don’t really care much about holiness. “Passionate exhortation to pursue gospel-driven holiness is barely heard in most of our churches. … I’m talking about the failure of Christians, especially younger generations and especially those most disdainful of ‘religion’ and ‘legalism,’ to take seriously one of the great aims of our redemption and one of the required evidences for eternal life—our holiness.”

I have thought about this often over the years and am inclined to agree with DeYoung’s assessment. All the way back in the nineteenth century J.C. Ryle was teaching that holiness “is one grand end and purpose for which Christ came into the world.” But then, as DeYoung says,

My fear is that as we rightly celebrate, and in some quarters rediscover, all that Christ has saved us from, we are giving little thought and making little effort concerning all that Christ has saved us to. Shouldn’t those most passionate about the gospel and God’s glory also be those most dedicated to the pursuit of godliness? I worry that there is an enthusiasm gap and no one seems to mind.

We would do well to ask the reason for this gap, and here DeYoung proposes several answers: In the past Christians equated holiness with abstaining from a few taboo practices such as drinking and dancing; our churches have many unregenerate persons in them who are necessarily uninterested in holiness; we emphasize a culture of cool that pushes the boundaries with language, entertainment, alcohol, fashion, and whatever else is deemed cool; labeling something as unholy or ungodly feels judgmental; we fear legalism and are frightened by words like diligence, effort and duty; we face the reality that pursuing holiness is hard work; and finally, many Christians have tried and just plain given up.

Through nine short chapters, DeYoung goes on to show what the Bible says about holiness, to answer some of the contemporary objections to it, and to offer challenges in a few of the areas where we may be accepting and even celebrating unholiness. The chapter titled “Saints and Sexual Immorality” is especially to the point as he challenges us to see that maybe, just maybe, we’ve allowed the world to squeeze us into its mold in the area of sexuality. This is true not only in our sexual ethics and behavior, but also in the things that entertain us and the things we laugh and joke about.

One of the book’s strengths is in its constant encouragement that we actually can be holy. What God calls us to he also empowers us to attain. Yet too many of us have tried holiness and have found it too difficult, too insurmountable a calling. DeYoung says rightly that “There are a hundred good things you may be called to pursue as a Christian. All I’m saying is that, according to the Bible, holiness, for every single Christian, should be right at the top of that list.” I couldn’t agree more.

While Ryle, Sproul and Bridges have written books that are almost timeless, DeYoung’s humor and references to culture keep it bound in the here and now. But this is exactly what makes it such a great complement to those other works. It does not replace them, but stands beside them.

If holiness really is meant to be at the top of the Christian’s list of priorities, then we do well to equip ourselves by regularly reading about the subject. The Hole in Our Holiness will challenge, equip and encourage you to put sin to death and to be relentless in your pursuit of holiness. I don’t think I can pay the book a higher compliment than that.

Are You Chasing Happiness or Holiness?

Such a question actually reveals a common mistake of pitting holiness and happiness against each other. “God is more interested in you being holy than happy,” so the line goes.

One of my favorite theologians falls prey to this subtle dichotomy in a book to be released next year. Overall it’s a great book (with plenty of strengths to commend later), but here I want to make a friendly amendment to these few paragraphs from it:

In this psychological world, the God of love is a God of love precisely and only because he offers us inward balm. Empty, distracted, meandering, and dissatisfied, we come to him for help. Fill us, we ask, with a sense of completeness! Fill our emptiness! Give us a sense of direction amid the mass of competing ways and voices in the modern world! Fill the aching emptiness within!

This is how many in the church today, especially in the evangelical church, are thinking. It is how they are praying. They are yearning for something more real within themselves than what they currently have. This is true of adults and of teenagers as well. Yes, we say earnestly, hopefully, maybe even a little wistfully, be to us the God of love!

Those who live in this psychological world think differently from those who inhabit a moral world. In a psychological world, we want therapy; in a moral world, a world of right and wrong and good and evil, we want redemption. In a psychological world, we want to be happy. In a moral world, we want to be holy. In the one, we want to feel good but in the other we want to be good. …

God stands before us not as our Therapist or our Concierge. He stands before us as the God of utter purity to whom we are morally accountable. He is objective to us and not lost within the misty senses of our internal world. His Word comes to us from outside of our self because it is the Word of his truth. It summons us to stand before the God of the universe, to hear his command that we must love him and love our neighbors as ourselves. He is not before us to be used by us. He is not there begging to enter our internal world and satisfy our therapeutic needs. We are before him to hear his commandment. And his commandment is that we should be holy, which is a much greater thing than being happy. …

It is true that there are psychological benefits to following Christ, and happiness may be its by-product. These, though, are not fundamentally what Christian faith is about. It is about the God who is other than ourselves, who is the infinite and gracious God.

Now it’s certainly appropriate to push back on culturally defined “happiness” (like consumer-centered materialism, sexual liberation, and self-centeredness in all forms). And it’s certainly right to push back on the idea that holiness is non-essential in the Christian life. And it’s certainly right to attack the idea of God as nothing more than a Santa Claus for our felt needs. God self-exists outside of us. He is the wholly pure Creator to whom all creatures will give an account.

But by distancing holiness from happiness we create a false dichotomy.

When in doubt, glance at the Redwoods of the church, the Puritans. Two in particular can help us respond to the modern attempt to separate happiness from holiness so cleanly. For example, Thomas Brooks (1608–1680) authored a 450-page book under the apt title: The Crown and Glory of Christianity: Or, Holiness, The Only Way To Happiness (1662). It’s a massive defense of the interconnectedness of human happiness and holiness that runs on and on, point after subpoint, to make the case irrefutably clear from Scripture.

“Holiness differs nothing from happiness but in name,” Brooks boldly writes near the opening of the book. “Holiness is happiness in the bud, and happiness is holiness at the full. Happiness is nothing but the quintessence of holiness.” Near the end of the book, he reiterates the point, “An absolute fullness of holiness will make an absolute fullness of happiness. When our holiness is perfect, our happiness shall be perfect; and if this were attainable on earth, there would be but little reason for men to long to be in heaven.”

Or we can cite the formidable Matthew Henry (1662–1714), a celebrated Bible scholar who saw the same thing. “Those only are happy, truly happy, that are holy, truly holy,” he wrote on Psalm 1:1–3, going so far as to write “goodness and holiness are not only the way to happiness but happiness itself.”

These Puritans knew it well. The soul’s true happiness is no incidental byproduct of holiness. True happiness is true holiness.

More recently, John Piper dialed in the point with an even finer adjustment in an Ask Pastor John podcast (episode thirteen): “Happiness is part of holiness,” he said. “If you tried to describe for me what it means to be a holy person, leaving out happiness in God, you can’t do it. There is no such thing as holiness minus happiness in God. Happiness in God is — I will risk it — the essence of holiness.”

But do the Scriptures support such claims about how inextricably intertwined holiness is with happiness?

The Psalms are incredibly helpful here. The Psalmists often address those who are “blessed” — and by “blessed,” they mean those who are “truly happy.” So who are the blessed, the truly happy?

The truly happy are those who are, in some measure, truly holy, and it’s a theme that carries right through the Psalms in places like Psalms 1:1–2, 19:8, 32:8–11, 34:8–14, 40:4, 106:3, 112:1, 119:1–2, 22–4, 69–70, 143–4, 128:1–6.

But not only are holiness and happiness (or blessedness) joined in the Psalms; they get linked together in the Proverbs, and very tightly by Jesus in his Beatitudes (Matthew 5:2–12).

And preceding any possibility of finding true happy-holiness is the profound reality that our sins must be permanently and forever removed before a holy God. The beautiful reality of justification in Christ, by faith alone, bridges the happy-holiness of the Psalmist and our forgiveness in Christ, by faith alone (Psalm 32:1–2, Romans 4:7–8).

However incompletely, Christians taste this true happy-holiness as we live out our union in Christ. In him we find the inseparable organic connection between our obedience and our joy, between our pursuit of true holiness and our experience of true happiness (John 15:1–17).

So, at the core of our being, we don’t want to be happy or holy. We want to be happy-holy, like God. God is the fountain of joy and delight; he is a happy God, satisfied in his eternal self-delight, and this happiness is part of his glory (1 Timothy 1:11). And our glorious God is, at the same time, an awesome blaze of unpolluted holiness, revolted by all of man’s depravities (1 Timothy 1:8–10).

What, therefore, God has joined together, let no theologian separate.

In reality, our quest for happiness is driven by a primal urge, an urge as ancient as the first man and woman, an urge that predates postmodernism, modernism, the enlightenment, and Freud.

Like every generation before, we face the same ancient choice, and it’s not a choice between happiness and holiness, but between two different quests for happiness (one evil, one holy).

Quest #1 is a pursuit of the happiness promised by the false securities and comforts and idols of our world, but turns out to be false lies that grieve.

Quest #2 is a true happiness found in God, a genuine delight in him, an eternal and unending treasuring of his glory and holiness above all else.

So there’s the key. The battle for this true holy-happiness is a daily spiritual battle for the faith to choose the right happiness.

To return to that same podcast episode, Piper well summarized the daily faith-battle of the happy-holiness: “When we say God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him, we are saying the essential warfare of holiness, or sanctification, is the warfare to be satisfied in God.”

There’s a weight of truth in that statement worth deep reflection.

My Joy and God’s Holiness: Friends or Foes?

Happiness and holiness are inseparable. True holiness is unattainable without true happiness. Happiness is part of holiness — even the essence of holiness.

But there’s an even deeper connection between our happiness and holiness, and it’s rooted in God’s holy character.

Many times, a sermon on the holiness of God will start with Isaiah 6:1–5, with a dramatic recounting of Isaiah, the priest, entering the temple in the presence of God’s flowing holiness. Angels cover their faces as Isaiah falls on his face and the temple shakes and tremors in the presence of the almighty, holy God.

The account is frightening, and the sermon is appropriately solemn and serious. It often ends with a grave prayer and silence. Such a sermon is vital for the health of the Church, and we need more of them.

But it also compels a follow-up sermon.

The awesome holiness of God that put Isaiah on his face becomes the holiness of God that puts the people of God on their feet — with hands raised in joyful praise.

This is an important connection to see as Isaiah unfolds, and Isaiah 12:6 is one good example: “Shout, and sing for joy, O inhabitant of Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.”

The majestic holiness of God evokes in God’s people a holy fear, yes. But it also evokes joy and happy confidence in God to overcome the greatest challenges of this world, a theme that echoes throughout the rest of the book (Isaiah 29:19, 41:14–16, 56:7).

The holiness of God generates happiness in God’s people, and this point echoes beyond Isaiah and throughout the Old Testament. Psalm 96 is entirely devoted to making this point, as are passages like 1 Chronicles 16:25–33, 1 Samuel 2:1–2, Nehemiah 8:10, Psalms 30:4–5, 33:21, 43:3–4, 46:4, 48:1–2, 65:4, 68:1–6, 71:22–23, 89:15–18, 97:12.

Here are a couple of brief examples:

“Rejoice in the Lord, O you righteous, and give thanks to his holy name!” (Psalm 97:12)

“Our soul waits for the Lord; he is our help and our shield. For our heart is glad in him, because we trust in his holy name.” (Psalm 33:20–21)

God’s holiness is his awesome strength and his unique beauty, his unwavering dependability and his reigning power. Only a holy God like this can ensure the safety of his people. Only a holy God can promise that all things will be put in order. Only a holy God can assure us every evil and sadness will be defeated in the end.

And so the people of God are glad and filled with exceeding joy, in the Holy One.

Succinctly put, here’s the point. The vision of God’s majestic holiness in Isaiah 6 provides the foundation for the happiness of believers in Isaiah 12:6 and elsewhere. The tremors of God’s holiness shake us to the core to unsettle everything false and fake and trivial in our lives in order for us to find genuine gladness in God’s Holy Name.

We do live in holy fear, but we don’t live facedown in the temple. We fear God in a way that leads us to raise our hands in joyful praise and glad confidence.

And yet just when we think we have a grasp of God’s holiness in the Old Testament, something stunning happens on the opening pages of the New Testament.

The Holy One emerges from the temple, implants in a virgin’s womb, and surfaces one dark night in history as an infant.

A child, called “holy,” the Son of God, is born in a dirty Bethlehem barn (Luke 1:35).

Immanuel — Holy God with us — an infant, a child, and later a man, of infinite holiness — has tabernacled among us (John 1:14).

The “Holy One of God” draws close, and brings with himself joy to the world.