Holiness sounds scary. It need not be, but to the average American it is.

Our tendency is to say that holiness is something for the cloistered halls of a monastery. It needs organ music, long prayers and religious-sounding chants. It hardly seems appropriate for those in the real world of the 21st century.

Author John White seems to agree with that as he writes in The Fight the images that came to his mind when he thought about holiness: thinness, hollow-eyed gauntness, beards, sandals, long robes, stone cells, no jokes, frequently cold baths, fasting, hours of prayer, wild rocky deserts, getting up at 4 a.m., clean fingernails, stained glass, self-humiliation.

Is that the mental picture you have when you think of holiness? Most do. It’s almost as though holiness is the private preserve of an austere group of monks, missionaries, mystics and martyrs.  But nothing could be further from the truth.

I couldn’t be in greater agreement with Chuck Colson’s statement in Loving God: “Holiness is the everyday business of every Christian. It evidences itself in the decisions we make and things we do, hour by hour, day by day.”

Are we holy?

Olin