Holiness and the Work Set before Us
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Therefore, with minds that are alert and fully sober, set your hope on the grace to be brought to you when Jesus Christ is revealed at his coming. As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: “Be holy, because I am holy.” (1 Peter 1:13-16)
One of the most striking truths of Scripture, and of the Christian tradition as a whole, is that holiness is possible. Another significant truth is that holiness never exists in abstraction. It is always grounded, always concrete, and always worked out in the particularities of our stories, relationships, habits, and desires. Holiness is the shape of God’s life taking form in the ordinary fabric of human life. It manifests in love rightly ordered toward God that overflows in love of neighbor as it heals, reorients, and transforms us more and more into the image of Jesus Christ. It is the restoration of what sin has disordered, the renewal of our deepest affections, and the training of our hearts to desire what God desires and to see as God sees.
If holiness is understood as rightly ordered love, then holiness must always also be considered against the reality of our disordered loves, i.e., sin. Theologians like St. Augustine of Hippo have long described sin as a rebellion within the heart. It is not simply a failure of behavior but a distortion of the heart. Sin is our turn inward, our reliance on our own strength. We seek wisdom, security, and identity in our own capacities and accomplishments. We bend the gifts of God toward ourselves. This inward bent is why holiness cannot be reduced to mere moral improvement or external piety but must be seen as God’s work of healing the heart and reordering love so profoundly that our lives begin to reflect Christ’s life and love.
The miracle of grace is that God does not leave us in this inward turn. He meets us in our self-reliance, our striving, our misdirected loves and begins the patient work of drawing us outward again. What sin distorts, grace restores. What self-love isolates, divine love reconciles. Holiness is this slow, gracious work of God drawing us out of ourselves and into communion with Him, communion with others, and communion with the world He loves. It is God’s own life growing in us, reshaping our desires, reorienting our choices, and forming in us a disposition of humility, gentleness, discipline, mercy, and joyful obedience. It is the life of God restoring in us what we cannot restore on our own. As Augustine confessed, “My sin was this, that I looked for pleasure, beauty, and truth not in Him but in myself.” And yet, in the very place where our love turns inward, God meets us with His own. He does not shame our brokenness but heals it and gives us Himself. In Christ, divine love enters the very space of our disorder and begins to reorder it. Holiness, then, is God’s persistent redirecting of our gaze upward and outward, toward Himself and toward our neighbor, so that we may learn to love rightly.
In the midst of the church’s life today, the call to holiness lands with particular weight. We are living in a time when scandals, abuses of power, and failures of integrity have wounded the body of Christ and shaken the trust of many. Headlines reveal again and again what happens when charisma is elevated over character, when giftedness is mistaken for godliness, and when leaders imagine themselves exempt from the ordinary demands of discipleship. The result is always the same: communities are harmed, witness is compromised, and the name of Christ is obscured.
In such a climate, holiness is not optional. It is essential. The integrity of Christian leadership rests not on skill, strategy, or success but on the inward work of God forming us into people whose lives bear the marks of Christ’s character. Holiness is not perfectionism, nor is it a form of religious performance; it is the shape of Christ’s life taking root within us so deeply that we become people who can be trusted, people who love rightly, lead humbly, repent quickly, and serve faithfully. Without holiness, leadership becomes dangerous. With holiness, leadership becomes a conduit of grace.
This is why, for anyone entrusted with influence in Christ’s church, the call to holiness cannot remain theoretical. It must be pursued, nourished, and guarded. It must be woven into the very fabric of our lives and leadership.
As Christians, the truth that holiness is God’s gracious work rather than something we can achieve on our own touches the center of our calling. Our work is weighty and necessary, but it also tempts us toward subtle forms of self-sufficiency, believing that formation, both ours and others’, rests chiefly on our strategic clarity, institutional solutions, or constant innovation. Yet holiness is received, not engineered. It is practiced, not produced. It unfolds within the ordinary rhythms of returning to Christ, naming our need, and opening ourselves to the grace that makes new life possible. At least three implications naturally follow.
First, holiness requires honest confession. Before holiness can take root, there must be truth-telling about who we are, about the ways we have fallen short, and about our deep need for mercy. Confession, therefore, is not venting frustrations and complaining about institutional shortcomings. Rather, confession is the acknowledgment of our own need for grace. The life of holiness always begins with surrender, the willingness to release what must die so that Christ’s life may rise within us. We have an even greater responsibility as leaders to take seriously the fact that sin must be crucified in us so that holy love can take its place. As leaders, we must model this kind of humility and constant need for God’s grace.
Second, holiness is sustained through participation. Holiness matures as we live in constant dependence on God’s grace and as we abide in His presence, walk with His people, and allow His Spirit to shape our life together. We are not sanctified by our productivity or by the accumulation of good works, but by continually returning to Christ, opening ourselves again and again to participate in the transforming work of the Holy Spirit. This is why God has given us the means of grace.
Through the means of grace, God draws us into the life of His Son and makes His holiness tangible in the rhythms of our ordinary lives. Prayer that reorients the heart, Scripture renews the mind, worship lifts our vision, and community trains us in love. Our participation in these means allows us to receive grace and to share in the very life of God. Of course, holiness grows in the quiet disciplines no one sees and few applaud, but it also grows in our mutual participation and care for one another as we learn to receive grace together. In this kind of community, competition gives way to collaboration, rivalry yields to encouragement, and holiness becomes a shared vocation shaped by the presence of Christ working in and among His people. The question we must face, then, is whether we truly live this way, embodying the grace we profess, or we merely speak of it while clinging to the habits of self-reliance and the temptation to build ourselves up at the expense of others.
Third, holiness is always communal. As good Wesleyans, we know that holiness is necessarily social. It cannot be cultivated in isolation but takes shape as believers watch over one another, encourage one another, and even gently correct one another when our loves drift out of order. That kind of life together is rarely easy. It means allowing ourselves to be known, inconvenienced, and sometimes even challenged by others. In essence, to be holy we have to allow people the chance to frustrate and annoy us and love them rightly anyway. Real holiness grows in the messy, beautiful work of life shared with others. Grace deepens as we learn patience, humility, and forgiveness in community. The presence of others becomes both a mirror and a means of grace, revealing our rough edges and giving us the chance to practice love in real time. Yet even within the body of Christ, it can be easy to let comparison, insecurity, or quiet competition creep in and fracture our fellowship. Genuine holiness resists those impulses. It calls us instead to bear one another’s burdens, to celebrate each other’s joys without rivalry, to lament with those who are hurting, and to guard one another’s hearts against the pressures that life together inevitably brings.
When we think about the work set before us, whether in our churches, classrooms, families, or communities, we must remember that our work is not separate from the life of holiness but an expression of it. The task we share is to embody the holy love of God in the way we labor together. When a community begins to allow holiness to take root not just in individual hearts but in the shared rhythms of life together, it reshapes everything. The way we serve, lead, and labor alongside one another becomes an extension of that holy fellowship. This shared life marked by patience, grace, forgiveness, and mutual care provides the very ground on which Christian community is built.
Holiness is God’s reminder that the work before us is not ours to make succeed. It is His work, and He alone makes us holy so that the lives we live showcase His life and love at work within us. So today, receive this simple invitation: Let something in you die. Let grace rise in its place. Let love reorder what the various pressures you face have disordered. And allow God to form in you a heart capable of leading from the abundance of life in Christ, which we share together bound together by the Holy Spirit side by side as a holy community. And may the God who calls us to holiness complete His work in us, so that all we do bears the mark of His transforming grace.
Jonathan A. Powers is the Interim Dean of the E. Stanley Jones School of Mission and Ministry and Associate Professor of Worship at Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, KY.