discernment, part the fifth

Holy Spirit, dwell with me: I myself would holy be,
break from sin and choose the good, cherish what my Savior would,
and whatever I can be, give to him who gave me thee.

I just realized that I never explained what I'm doing with these posts. I'm almost halfway through a two week class on discernment, and I'm using the five verses of this hymn to center some of my reflections about the process. Since I'm working with it anyway, I thought I'd post a verse each day.

This verse is the most challenging of all five, for me. I grew in the self-dubbed Holiness Movement, which is about holiness in the same way that the self-dubbed Peace Churches are about peace... that's a post for a different day, though. Holiness, being set apart for the uses of God, was a common sermon and Sunday School topic. Holiness, becoming a whole worshipper before God, is a running theme in the hymns I hum to myself while sitting in silent worship.

Holiness, of course, was the ultimate goal of the believer in a holiness church. Again, similar to how peace is the standardized goal of peace church.

Holiness has only ever been my ultimate goal in a spotty sense, an admission which sometimes makes me feel like I'm dangling like a spider over the fires of hell.* It seems sometimes that other folks wish to be holy and just have trouble working out the details, whereas I struggle with wanting to be holy in the first place. Ezekiel was pretty holy, and look where that got him: laying on his side for 40 days at a stretch, bearing the iniquities of Israel. Plus, God knocked off his wife.

It didn't seem to work very well for him, is my point.

Hopefully the process of maturity can be mapped as a growing desire to want to be holy, even though that seems a step removed from sctually becoming holy.

* Jonathan Edwards sermon here. I don't often quote from it, since it's not representative of his work and is customarially used to bash him anyway, but this really is the image in my mind.