For four years I was an Assemblies of God minister and a monk with the Brothers and Sisters of Charity at the Little Portion Hermitage. This is an excerpt from an unpublished book I’ve written called Talking Off My Comfortable Clothes, from the chapter on Holiness.
As I was sitting in a Starbucks going over this chapter, I kept thinking, “What is it I want to say to my readers?” Here are my final thoughts on Holiness.
- Be real with who you are. Accept and embrace your gifts and talents as well as your sins and limitations.
- Beware of succumbing to someone’s personal (or organizational) standards for holiness, especially if they have no Scriptural basis.
- Find people in your life that will hold you accountable for living a holy life — a life sacred to God and separate from the standards of the world — but who will also encourage you and your dreams at the same time.
- Run from every naysayer who will try to make your life conform to his or her mediocre box of fears.
- Holiness is not a matter of eating, drinking or dressing. It is living the character of Christ.
- Memorize this quote from Albert Einstein: “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
Up until recently, I never had a need or an opportunity to apply these verses to my life. However, since I have been an unemployed minister for a while, I am starting to read Scripture differently, because I am starting to doubt my own resources.
I was sitting in church the other day when the pastor read this verse from John. Naturally, I respected his sermon by immediately tuning him out and writing my own notes. As most of you know, there are usually two sermons we hear on Sunday—the one the pastor preaches, and the one we preach to ourselves on the way home. For my own rude reasons, I didn’t even wait to get into the car before I was preaching to myself.
I like the word “meditation.” Although some Christians are truly scared to meditate – thinking it is something done by cultic Eastern religions while forgetting that Judaism and Christianity ARE Eastern religions! – Scripture is full of injunctions to meditate upon the Word and Law of God.
I saw a former member of my church yesterday. It has been about a year since she and her husband moved to another state to pursue their careers, and the church really missed them and their family.
If you’ve been involved in Christianity for more that two weeks, you’ve probably sat around the dinner table with other Christians and prayed before you ate. This is a good practice, for reminds us that God is the source of all the good things in our life. However, I think our practice of praying before a meal can become nothing more than a religious habit, especially when we are in the presence of other Christians. To be honest, the only time I ever pray over a meal is when I’m with someone else. Otherwise, I just jump right in and eat.
I must admit that when I read this sentence, the first thing that comes to mind when I think about possessions is my “stuff.” And I’d be correct. Jesus said this in reply to two brothers who were having a not-so-friendly family argument over an inheritance. He then went on to tell a parable about a rich man who built bigger barns to hold his crop, only to die and leave everything he had hoarded to someone else.
Thinking Out Loud 