Being Made Holy

Hebrews 10:10, 13-14
And by that will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. Since that time he waits for his enemies to be made his footstool, because by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.


Well, for those of you who don’t already know, my husband and I are expecting Baby #2, a little boy, in just a matter of weeks. We are both thrilled and excited, and I am definitely getting large, and feeling all the pains and discomforts of pregnancy, as well as the poking and turning of a little one inside. It never ceases to amaze me how I am allowed to be such an intimate part of a miracle that God is, at this very moment, performing. Inside of me, He is knitting together a child – a person that will be complete, and altogether separate. The thing that really strikes me tonight is that I really don’t have to do anything. Oh, I know I need to eat right, get plenty of rest, take care of myself, but in the actual forming of the child, my body just does what it needs to do – God just does what He needs to do. I am simply trying give Him plenty to work with in caring for myself. Otherwise, it’s all Him. And the really remarkable thing is that even if I wasn’t taking care of myself all that well, He could still complete the work perfectly within me – because it’s all Him.

Then it hits me – just as it is with the child inside of me, so it is with those of us in Christ. We think we have to really strive to become better people, more like Christ. We tend to think that it all has to do with following the rules, and doing all the right things, as though it is up to us to become holy. But that is not the case. We have to take care of ourselves spiritually – reading the Bible, praying, obedience, fasting, all the spiritual disciplines – but it is not in doing those things that we become holy. They just prepare the soil, so to speak, for God to come along and do all the work – it’s all Him. Just as I don’t have to think about making a baby, and what comes next in the process, so it is with spiritual growth. God does the growing, He is knitting us together spiritually, and He knows exactly what comes next. He brings hardship at just the right times, and He brings us joy as well. He provides us with exactly what we need, at exactly the right times, so that we will grow into the people He designed us to be. Just as the verse above says, we are "being made holy." We are not working to become holy – this implies that we are being worked upon.

So, let’s give God the best to work with – preparing ourselves, and staying healthy, spiritually, as best we can. Then, we can rest in the fact that He is in the process of making us holy. He is changing us, knitting us back together, into the perfect likeness of Christ. It is a job for God, not us – praise His mighty name!