The dividing barrier of sin has been torn down by the cross, and as a result, the children of God are welcome into His presence. And as such, we should come—even boldly—into that presence. This is what the Bible tells us to do.

What do we mean when we say God is “holy?” We are familiar with the word – we use it as an exclamation in phrases like, “Holy cow!” or “Holy moly!” or worse. So we use it frequently enough. We are familiar with the word; perhaps even too familiar. Perhaps we have become far too comfortable with a God who is holy.
The basic meaning of holy is one of separateness. Sacredness. Something that is not common or like other things. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever found yourself in a place where you clearly do not belong. Maybe it’s a fancy restaurant where you’re the only one wearing t-shirt and flip flops. Or maybe it’s in the middle of a very serious conversation you walked in on your parents having. Whatever the case, you get this sense all of a sudden that you are in a place that is too serious for you. And it’s uncomfortable.
The holiness of God reminds us just how separate and sacred God is. He is not meant to be treated trivially, and those who do so do so at their own risk. This is part of what the prophet Isaiah discovered.
If you take a look at Isaiah 6, for example, you find that beginning to understand holiness is the beginning of learning about God. “Holy” is the cry that even now is ringing in the heavens to describe God. That’s what Isaiah encountered as he was taken up in a vision and saw the Lord:
“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne, and His robe filled the temple. Seraphim were standing above Him; each one has six wings: with two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another:
‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts; His glory fills the whole earth.’Isaiah 6:1-3
By calling God “holy” three times, the seraphim were pointing to the absolutely essential and foundational nature of God’s holiness. They didn’t chant “loving, loving, loving” or even “glorious, glorious, glorious.” They opted for holy, and therefore we must recognize that to understand a bit of who God is we must start here with this characteristic.
Read More
Related Posts:

Yahaya Sharif-Aminu is a singer-songwriter in his early 20s. He’s a Sufi Muslim, making him a religious minority in northern Nigeria’s mostly Sunni population. He shared some of his songs in a WhatsApp group in 2020. Some of the members in the WhatsApp group, however, accused Yahaya of committing “blasphemy” against the “prophet” Muhammad. Soon a mob surrounded his family’s home and burned it down. Police officers subsequently arrested Yahaya and he was convicted under Sharia court—without legal counsel—to death by hanging. 

The deadliest country in the world for Christians isn’t Afghanistan or North Korea, it’s Nigeria.
Last year, 5,621 Christians were killed worldwide because of their faith—90% of them were northern Nigerians.
Mission organizations are reporting that Christian persecution is at its highest in 30 years. And that’s primarily because of what’s been happening in northern Nigeria over the last 24 years.
Approximately half of Nigeria’s population are professing Christians, and most of them live in the south. However the other half are Muslims, and most of them live in the north.
Northern Nigeria is where Boko Haram, an Islamic terrorist group, have kidnapped thousands of young girls and killed tens of thousands of people over the last decade. But Boko Haram is enabled by northern Nigeria’s Sharia laws. There’s a direct relationship between terrorism and Sharia law in Nigeria.
Boko Haram was founded in northern Nigeria in 2002, shortly after 12 northern states reintroduced Sharia law between 1999 and 2001—despite Nigerians’ constitutional right to religious freedom. Since then, at least 50,000 Christians in northern Nigeria have been murdered.
And it’s actually getting worse. Last year was the deadliest year for Christians in Nigeria. Sharia blasphemy laws, terrorist attacks, and mob violence killed at least 5,000 Christians last year.
One of these Christians was Deborah Samuel. She was a student at a university in Sokoto State, northern Nigeria. She was killed at her school because she praised Jesus for her academic success.
On May 12, 2022, a classmate asked Deborah in a WhatsApp group for their class how she passed a recent exam. She answered, “Jesus.” According to some of her classmates, that answer is a crime worthy of death.
Some of her classmates replied with Islamic statements and demanded that she should retract her words about Jesus. But she refused. Instead, she defended her Christian beliefs.
Immediately the Muslim students said she was guilty of blasphemy under Sokoto State’s Sharia law, which is punishable by death. So they called on others in the community to execute mob justice.
School security tried to protect Deborah, but they were overpowered by the mob. Police officers were called, but they were supposedly intimidated by the large crowd. The mob threatened to kill anyone who tried to help her, so the rest of the Christian students fled the scene and returned home for their own safety.
Deborah, however, didn’t get the opportunity to return home to her parents.
Read More
Related Posts:

We are inundated with the world’s images and narratives, and the Gospel comes with a counter narrative and images that are powerful enough to drive out and replace the world’s images. As ministers of the Word, we need to speak to the imagination of those God sets before us.

In reading through the Gospel of John as part of my personal study time, I found that the story of the woman at the well showed me more about preaching than I had ever seen in it before (John 4:7-30).
Specifically, I was struck by how Jesus spoke to the woman’s imagination and how this interaction helps me as a preacher to better understand my calling to preach to the imagination effectively.
Calling People to Imagine
In ancient Palestine the task of drawing water from a well did not require a good deal of imagination. You would go to the well almost daily, drop the bucket or skin into the well, and draw it back up. But in John 4, the moment Jesus speaks to the woman her imagination is stirred. He asks for a drink and the woman responds with a question that starts with “How is it…” (John 4:9) These words show how her imagination is at work.
In her experience, Jewish men didn’t speak to Samaritan women, and so Jesus’ words force her to imagine a world where Jewish men do speak to Samaritan women. In simply asking for a drink Jesus demands that the woman imagine the world (even if only a little) to be other than she has known it to be. She knows Jewish men don’t speak to Samaritan women, yet here is a Jewish man speaking to a Samaritan woman!
Jesus then kicks things up a notch and introduces images and ideas that will force the woman to push her imagination even further. He says, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (4:10).
When Jesus opens with “If you knew”, he is inviting the woman to second guess her reality. She was shocked enough by a Jewish man asking her for a drink, but now she has to imagine that this man is something more, or at least different than any other man. Jesus also speaks of the “gift of God” and “living water”, all words that she would have been familiar with but when brought together by Jesus in the order and context of the situation, she is forced to wonder what he means. This “wondering” or thinking requires imagination. 
When Jesus adds that all who drink his water will find “a spring of water welling up to eternal life”, she is again being asked to imagine water and life in a very different way.
Put plainly, this woman is being called to imagine a world that doesn’t exist as far as she knows it, and yet a world that she now desperately wishes were real. This is a world where Jews and Samaritans relate to one another; where men are not just men; where water is more than water; and where thirst can be quenched and water can bring eternal life.
There is a lot more that can (and should) be said about all the ways that the imagination is spurred in this interaction, but it is enough here to say that Jesus has so engaged the woman’s imagination that she is prepared to accept that this world that he has presented to her is real.
Read More
Related Posts: