When Holiness Leads to Love

The one who accuses day and night is relentless, and the barrage is constant.

One of the primary lies permeating culture—and even the Church today—is that wholehearted obedience to God’s commands limits our joy and happiness, holds us in bondage, and will cause us to lose out in life.

This lie leads to the belief that hungering for righteousness is the path to legalism, and that the grace of God makes walking in righteousness unnecessary.

God’s commands only feel burdensome when we follow them to earn love, or when we’re trying to follow them in our own strength, apart from relationship with Him.

The truth is that the call to live in holiness and walk in righteousness is actually possible to achieve.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.” (Matthew 5:6)

Through the power of the Holy Spirit and the Word of God, we can deny the lies of the enemy and the sway of the culture in order to consistently walk in holiness.

The Word demonstrates that it’s to the believer’s benefit to walk in obedience and pursue God wholeheartedly through the power of His grace. To do this, we must renew our minds according to the Word (Romans 12:2). The Word has the power to transform our thoughts, leading us to the revelation of truth, the man Jesus Christ.

As we think and live rightly, we are able to experience God’s joy now and in the life to come.

God’s Word, if we obey it, will keep us in true love.

We come to understand that God’s law, which teaches us how to walk in righteousness, originates from a place of love and is designed to bring us into the love shared within the Trinity.

Our obedient response to God’s commands is an expression of our love back to Him.

“He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me.” (John 14:21)

When we respond to the free love of God, purchased by Jesus’ life, we walk in obedience more readily. This is the path that results in love, joy, happiness, and freedom—character traits of God that we were created to readily enjoy. We weren’t made to imitate the sinful world around us, because we were created to be filled with true pleasure from another world (John 17:14–15).

We were set free in order to enjoy God, to worship Him, and to enter into the joy of the One who made us.

So when we read Scripture passages that remind us to “be holy, for I am holy,” we can rest assured that our all-knowing God knew exactly what His followers would face in the generations to come, and how the strength of His Holy Spirit within us would make it possible to live out His commands.

The hunger and thirst to pursue God is in our best interest. God’s commands are liberating and always bring freedom to lives in bondage. When we grow in knowledge of the Word, our experience of love increases. Even when we meditate on the simple verses from childhood that we can easily quote from memory, we receive revelation that keeps us walking in freedom.

As sons and daughters of the King, this is our inheritance.