Now may the God of peace make you holy in every way, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless until our Lord Jesus Christ comes again. — 1 Thessalonians 5:23 NLT
I absolutely love this verse; I love the hope of my entire being made pure by the Spirit of God.
I realize that holiness is a word with a lot of baggage for many people, but we can get past all that if we look at the gorgeous life and character of Jesus — He was simply good through and through. His character is so alluring, so winsome, and whenever you see Him relating to people you are watching true holiness in action. Women who everyone had used and abused came to Jesus, threw themselves at His feet, and He was only loving toward them. Sometimes the crowds loved Him, other times they shouted for His head, but He didn’t let it faze Him. Jesus’ goodness in the Gospels is captivating.
When His own time of severe testing came, that goodness was His shield. Just before the secret police came for Him, before the grisly scenes that follow, Jesus told His disciples,
I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming, and he has nothing in Me. — John 14:30 NKJV
The enemy tried every angle he could find on Jesus — seduction, rejection, threat, the fear of not having enough, even torture. Nothing worked, because Satan had nothing “in” Jesus to use as his hook. Imagine the sheer relief of it.
It probably feels like obtaining even a fraction of that goodness is beyond you, but the promise of the Christian faith is that God will reproduce Jesus’ goodness in you:
I feel as if I’m going through labor pains for you again, and they will continue until Christ is fully developed in your lives. — Galatians 4:19 NLT
The goal of God’s work in us is Jesus taking up residence in every part of us. Nothing left out. No little pockets of resistance. (And did you notice? Paul, with the Holy Spirit through him, is “mothering” these dear followers of Christ toward the beautiful goal. He is “in labor” with them, for them!)
In our own times of severe testing, we want to be made “holy in every way,” our entire “spirit and soul and body... kept blameless” (1 Thessalonians 5:23 NLT). Let me be quick to add, I think much of the testing and the Falling Away takes place very subtly in the heart. It’s the small turns from God toward our other comforters, the quiet feelings of being disappointed with Him, the early stages of Desolation — this is how most of the testing plays out. But it has momentum like an avalanche.
C. S. Lewis’s personal secretary was a man named Walter Hooper. He described the Oxford professor and creator of Narnia as “the most thoroughly converted man I ever met.”1 What a wonderful thing to be said about you. Lewis was a man whose entire being — heart, soul, mind, and strength — had become almost thoroughly inhabited by Jesus Christ. His fragmented self was nearly fully reintegrated in Christ. (Nearly, because none of us are utterly whole until Christ returns. But my goodness — nearly is fabulous.) Many people fell in love with the presence of Dallas Willard for the same reason.
Let me pause on that thought for a moment, because while this is known to the saints, the Comfort Culture framed within us other goals. Does your heart tell you that it agrees with this — that the goal of your life is to become the most converted person your friends and family know?
Or does your heart prefer the goal to be something else? Perhaps, “I just want things to be good again, and let somebody else live through the end of the age”? Ouch. That hits close to home.
The battle taking place over the human heart can be described as Satan using every form of seduction and threat to take our hearts captive and our loving Jesus doing everything He can to form single-heartedness in us. This often plays out in thousands of small, daily choices. Which is kind, really; we want to develop single-heartedness before the severe testing comes.
Theodore Roosevelt had a lifetime of stories to prepare him for his last great adventure and ordeal — descending an unnavigated tributary of the Amazon in primitive canoes. And he needed preparation, because he nearly died on that trip. But this is the fellow who rode eighteen hours on horseback across the Dakota Badlands without water because the spring from which they’d planned to get water had dried up.
I love another story about a hunting trip during which Roosevelt and his guide repeatedly got their wagon stuck in mud as they tried to travel into the mountains.
The second plunge of the horses brought them up to their bellies in the morass, where they stuck. It was freezing cold, with the bitter wind blowing, and the bog holes were skimmed with ice; so that we passed a thoroughly wretched two hours while freeing the horses and unloading the wagon... My companion preserving an absolutely unruffled temper throughout... whistling the “Arkansas Traveller.” At one period, when we were up to our waists in the icy mud, it began to sleet and hail, and I muttered that I would “rather it didn’t storm”; whereat he stopped whistling for a moment to make the laconic rejoinder, “We’re not having our rathers this trip.”2
A whole lot of that gets you ready for just about anything.
Maybe this helps you reinterpret the story of your own life. Maybe all those former hardships were developing resilience in you!
