Living a holy life should never be defined as “living without sin”. In fact sin has got nothing to do with holiness at all! We have been programmed to think that it does but that programming needs to be undone. The religious world has made holiness mean “not sinning”, and they have made that the most important issue for the church today. The religious spirit across the world is trying to put pressure on leaders to preach more on holiness and not sinning and it seems so virtuous, yet it is a demonic deception. Sadly many are blindly falling prey to it.
There are some things concerning this issue in the body of Christ that really need to be broken down. Namely the lie that says, “If you sin then you are unholy and if you don’t sin then you are holy.” That right there is the Ten Commandments! What is the first thing you think of when you hear the words “be holy”? You think “stop sinning” right? If that is the first thing we think of when someone says to “be holy”, then it means our minds have been programmed by the law to define what holiness is. Holiness has got nothing to do with sinning or not sinning. If that is what we think, then we think that we are the cause of our holiness. There is only one person who is the cause of our holiness and his name is Jesus Christ. And if you are in him, then you are holy. You don’t have to try and be holy or get holy, you are holy!
“We have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”
– Hebrews 10:10 (NIV)
It is amazing that this is in the Bible! You have been made holy once and for all. God was holy long before sin ever existed. In fact God’s holiness could not be referenced to sin at all. Sin wasn’t around. If we limit the holiness of God to the mere absence of sin then we are limiting his awesome holiness. God’s holiness is far greater than just the absence of sin. What is holiness then? Holiness is who God is. God is holy. Here‟s the thing: if you are in him then you are holy!
Separation from God is unholiness!
We were all born into the sin of first Adam and because of that we were made sinners (Romans 5:19). Now it was the sin of Adam and our state of sin that separated us from God. It wasn’t our sin that was unholy, it was our separation from God that was unholy. A state of separation from God is a state of unholiness. Then Jesus came and offered the once-for-all sacrifice that permanently removes all of our sins and makes us blameless before the Father. He made us righteous and blameless and because of that we were able to come into God. And it is the coming into God that makes us holy! People confuse holiness and blamelessness. We mustn’t confuse the two. Blamelessness is the removing of our sins. Holiness is the coming into God.
“He chose us in Him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight.”
– Ephesians 1:4 (NIV)
God made us blameless by making us righteous, and he made us holy by bringing us into himself.
Holiness is not about what you do!
Holiness is not about what you do, it is about where you are. Where you are will affect what you do. So the question is, “Where are you?” If you want to understand what holiness is then you need to understand where you are. Well, the Bible tells us exactly where we are in the book of Ephesians.
“God raised us up with Christ (That is being born again) and seated us with Him in heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.”
– Ephesians 2:6 (NIV)
That’s where you are! You are seated in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus. That is your heavenly position. What else is true about your heavenly position?
– You’ve been blessed in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing.
“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing that is in Christ Jesus.”
– Ephesians 1:3 (NIV)
God cannot bless you with anymore in the heavenly realm for he has already fully blessed you in Christ Jesus.
– You have been given fullness in Christ.
“In Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form and you have been given fullness in Christ.”
– Colossians 2:9,10 (NIV)
Some translations say, “You have been made complete in Christ.” That means you can’t receive anymore fullness in your heavenly position in Christ. It’s easy to read over that and miss it or just simply not believe it. Do you believe it? You need to believe that. You need to see where you are. I’m not talking about your flesh or your soul but your spirit that has been made alive with Christ and seated with Christ in the heavenly realms in fullness. Think of what the fullness of Christ means. That means you don’t have to try and achieve anymore righteousness or achieve anymore perfection because you already have his perfect righ-teousness. That means 100% righteousness and 100% perfection. You’ve got Christ’s 100% obedience, love, faith and authority, health, riches, victory, passion etc. That is your heavenly position in Christ.
What exactly is holy living?
Living holy is not about living without sin. Living holy is about liv-ing from your eternal heavenly position in Christ Jesus! That‟s true holy living. The Greek word for “holiness” is the same word for “sanctification” and it means two things: Firstly it means separation or separated or separate; secondly it refers to the life that flows out of someone who has been so separated. So to become holy is to be separated from your old life of sin in Adam and to be brought into your heavenly position in Christ. Holy living is the life that flows out of that place.
Does that happen automatically?
No it doesn’t. It has the potential to flow out of that place but if you don’t see that place and have a revelation about that place, then you will live your life from this natural earthly place. What I call your “current earthly condition”. But we’re not called to live from our current earthly condition. We’re called to live in our current earthly condition from our eternal heavenly position.
Let’s drive it home!
To live holy is to live from your eternal heavenly position. To live unholy is to live from your current earthly condition. It has got nothing to do with sinning. It has got to do with position. It has got to do with where you are living from. Sin is not unholiness, it’s the byproduct of unholiness. Or rather it is the byproduct of not living from our eternal heavenly position. If you were to live 100% from your eternal heavenly position you would never sin while in your current condition.
The religious world makes holiness all about siining
They make holiness about what you have got to do and what you have got to change. Holiness has become a standard that can be measured by the amount of sin you do or don’t do. It is all about behavior modification. Forget about behavior modification. Forget about trying to change and just see your heavenly position. The more you see your heavenly position the more that position will flow through your current condition.
What is the most important issue?
The religious world makes holiness the most important issue. I believe holiness is the most important issue but not the way the religious world has defined it as living without sin. “God wants you living holy” they say, and “God wants you living without sin!” Actually God’s priority is not to get you to sin less. God’s priority is that you live holy according to the biblical definition of living from your position in him.
We have got to separate the concept of sin from holiness and see heaven. When you define holiness as living without sin, people automatically think that if they stop sinning then they are holy. That gets their focus on themselves, on their flesh and on their human efforts. It makes them think that not sinning is the cause of their holiness. When we realize that holiness is simply living from that place where you are seated in Jesus and his fullness, it will get your eyes off yourself and onto him, who he is in you and who you are in him. The more you see that, the more it will flow through you here on earth. The more you see your position, the more you will live from that position, and the more you live from that position the more you will actually overcome sin. More importantly, it will cause you to see heaven come to earth through your life and more and more you will do the works Jesus did, and greater. God did not leave us on earth to see how much sin we could overcome. He left us on earth to see how much of heaven he could bring to earth through us! The religious world says, “Produce fruit!” Grace and truth says, “Get rooted and grounded in the love of Christ and you will see the fullness of Christ that is in your heavenly position manifesting through your earthly condition.”
“That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love… might be filled with all the fullness of God.”
– Ephesians 3:17–19
The more you see by faith your heavenly position, the more your current condition gets rooted in the heavenly realms and the fruit of being rooted up there will show down here. You don’t even have to try to make it manifest. You won’t be able to stop it from manifesting.
Religion pulls on the leaves and branches of a tree to make it grow. Forget trying to do that. Just make sure the roots are grounded in the right place and feed them and the tree will grow and produce fruit. Get rooted and grounded by revelation in your position in Christ and the fruit of heaven will show up in you on earth!
If you don’t see that holiness is about living from your position and who you really are, then when you read scriptures about holiness, you will assume that all they are talking about is you not sinning. When in actual fact, they are trying to say that you must live by faith out of your position in Christ and not get caught up in activity aimed at achieving a position in Christ.
Bill Johnson says that our destiny is to go to heaven but our assignment is to bring heaven to earth. My version of that is that we have already achieved our destiny because we are already seated in heavenly places and now the life we live, we live from heaven to earth, bringing heaven with us.
You could say the more you live from the heavens, the more the heavens will show up in your life. It is not bad to live from the heavens. Don’t mock people who are always in the heavens and living from the heavens. You need to live more from the heavens. You need to be more “holy”. That is the actual appropriate way to say that. When you hear that you don’t think, “Me, myself, what I must do, my sin.” You think, “Him and what he has done and how awesome he is.” As a consequence of that, faith erupts in your heart to lay hold of the things that are yours in Jesus Christ.
A final thought
The more you find out about your position in heaven, the more you find out about your potential on earth. You have the potential for total victory over sin. You have the potential to walk in divine health. You have the potential to walk with God in the glory realm twenty-four hours a day, the potential for great wealth and to finance nations, to con-tinuously hear the voice of God, to raise the dead, to do the works Jesus did and all that God has planned for you to do. I don’t preach on faith. I preach those things that produce faith. Simi-larly, when it comes to sanctification, I don‟t preach sanctification. I preach those things that cause sanctification, namely your position in Christ. We don‟t need to preach obedience to the church, but rather the things that empower obedience! The church preaches too much about who we aren’t. In other words they keep telling us we’re sinners, filthy, disgusting, incomplete, not deserving of God‟s blessings, unworthy, guilty, fallen short of God, displeasing to God, powerless, poor, sick and open to the devil. No wonder the church ends up living in these things. The church needs to hear who we really are. Sons of God, 100% the righteous of God in Christ Jesus, perfect, complete, seated in the heavenly places, blessed with every blessing, holy, pleasing to the Father, accepted in the Beloved, more than conquerors, unable to be separated from God‟s love etc! That is our true identity. To agree with that is holy thinking!
