Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“Do not be conformed to the desires that you formerly had in ignorance. Instead, as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct.”
NL Daily Devotion for Thursday, July 14, 2022
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
To be holy means to be set apart. God is holy because God’s ways are not our ways. God calls us to be holy—to set ourselves apart from the trappings of society—as God is holy. Some folks have taken that literally, becoming hermits or entering a holy order, but I don’t think that’s for everyone.
I think the primary ingredient of becoming holy in our modern context is honesty. It would be easy to think of the hermit or monk or nun and decide “well I could never do that,” and just side step the whole notion of holiness. But if we look honestly at our lives as we are living them on a day to day basis, we are bound to see plenty of ways in which we are caught up in unhealthy and destructive patterns dictated by our society, which cause us to simply go with the flow rather than stop and question it. We are indoctrinated from an early age to believe that wealth is the ultimate goal and is to be attained at all costs, to value material possessions and thinness, and so forth.
Being holy doesn’t mean being a hermit, but it does mean setting ourselves apart from the falsehoods our society teaches us—the “desires you formerly had in ignorance.” That way we’re far more able to hear what God is calling us to do, and to take joy in doing it.
What worldly ideas and attitudes present a barrier to holiness?