You cannot fully love God if you do not learn truly to love holiness.

Those who truly want to know God discover that learning to love holiness is all important, because God is holy. Holiness defines him. Everything about God is pure, clean, pursuing good and opposed to evil.

Learning to love holiness depends on two actions. If you focus on only one, you will fail. Do both, and each contributes to the other in mutual strengthening. Like someone getting dressed for a big event, you must both put off dirty clothes and put on clean clothes.

Ephesians 4:22–24 says: “You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.”

So becoming holy always requires both positive and negative, putting on and putting off, what to do and what not to do.

Putting off

To grow in holiness we need to stop doing things that pollute and corrupt our souls.

If we are honest with ourselves, we know what those things are. But because we want to do them, we often deceive ourselves so that we can go on doing them. The Scripture above talks about “deceitful desires.” If we like going to worldly parties, we tell ourselves that Jesus went to parties. If we like watching worldly shows and movies or listening to worldly music, we tell ourselves that what we watch and hear does not affect what we do. If we love money and possessions, we tell ourselves we need what we are greedily pursuing.

But our growth in holiness will go nowhere as long as we continue in such things. We must put off what defiles our mind, spirit, and body. We must ask God to help us be completely honest as we consider our conduct. And we must then ask ourselves if there is anything in our lives that is not holy, anything that influences us to be unholy and worldly rather than pure and godly. Once you settle in your mind to be completely honest and to renounce whatever God shows you is unholy, your conscience will be a reliable guide.

Putting on

But putting off worldly things is not enough. Our soul abhors a vacuum. We need to replace bad desires with good desires, bad “food” with good “food.”

To grow in holiness we need to do the things that will increase our love for holiness, God, and the things of God. The things of God are an acquired taste that increases when we feed that appetite. When we learn to love them, we will find that they are far more satisfying than our former worldly pleasures.

So holiness comes from reading and meditating on the Word of God, from worship and prayer, from full involvement in church life and fellowship with true believers, from serving and helping others.

Dabbling in relating to God and in the things of God—reading the Bible now and then, praying here and there, going to church once or twice a month—does not satisfy and does not lead to growth in holiness. That only leads to guilt and a feeling of being torn between God and the world.

So we must go all in. When we devote ourselves to the godly life, and to loving Jesus Christ, and relying completely on his gospel for acceptance with God, we will learn to love holiness. And we will come to know God and his ways better and better.

Our ways versus God’s ways

Our ways: Dress in both dirty and clean clothes.

God’s ways: Dress only in clean clothes.