'Don't
Do It Again
by Captain Andrew Bale
A book excerpt, chapter 1, from the forthcoming book on
holiness called ‘Don’t do it again’ by Captain Andrew Bale,
(hopefully) to be published soon by The United Kingdom
Territory, watch this space!
When I was a little boy I wanted lots of things; I wanted to
be a professional footballer, I wanted to play the guitar, I
wanted to get married and have a family, I wanted to live in a
nice house… Yet never far away, alongside all of these
desires, was the desire to be good. I can clearly remember how
as a child on many occasions when - having once more failed to
be good - I would cry myself to sleep, continually repeating
the simple prayer, ‘Dear God, help me to be good.’ I can also
remember the moment when as a teenager I first heard the words
of Samuel Horatio Hodges and the intense empathy I felt with
him:
‘Tell me what to do to be pure in the
sight of the all-seeing eyes;
Tell me, is there no thorough cure, no escape from the sins I
despise?
Tell me, can I never be free from this terrible bondage
within?
Is there no deliverance for me from the
thraldom of indwelling sin?’[1]
Goodness doesn't seem to come naturally to most of us –
certainly not to me! We try to be good but we are distracted
by the ‘sights that dazzle’ and ‘the tempting sounds’. We want
to be holy, we want to be good, and we want to be effective,
but their is an enormous gulf between how we want to live and
how we actually live. Merely wanting to be better, though a
step in the right direction is not enough:
‘If
wanting could make us better, we would be better… If desire of
itself could transform us into men after God’s own heart, we
would have been that long ago.”[2]
The purpose of this book is to try and answer in a very
positive way the questions set by Samuel Hodges in his hymn
outlined above; questions which have undoubtedly at some time
or other been on the lips of all Christians. My aim is to show
that holiness, far from being an elite form of Christianity
available to only a few, is actually the strengthening
hand of God offered to all who occasionally feel unsteady and
weak. I hope that the following pages will convince the reader
in a practical and easy to understand way that there is indeed
an escape from ‘the sins (we) despise’.
I’m not writing this
book in some distant academic haven far removed from the heat
of spiritual warfare; I’m sending out a despatch from the
frontline. What I hope to share isn’t just based on
theoretical knowledge but is backed up by experience.
The stumbling blocks I identify are only known to me
because they caused me to fall, the familiarity I have with
the tactics of the enemy are mine only because of the many
defeats I have suffered at their hands.
If we, as Christians, are constantly plagued by secret sin,
caught in a never-ending cycle of wrong-doing, confession and
forgiveness, then we are only enjoying a part of the salvation
that God wants to give us. In years gone by, Christians talked
and sang about an experience they called ‘full salvation’.
Although our challenge
is to define holiness in a post-modern world we may actually
find that old fashioned phrase helpful. Salvation introduces
us to the love of God, but like some divine appetiser it
leaves us hungry for more. Once we have tasted that love, once
we have experienced God’s grace we will never be satisfied
with a life that constantly moves between good and bad.
Forgiveness always leaves the believer with a yearning to do
better, and nothing whets the appetite of a Christian quite
like the prospect of a victorious life:
“The forgiven soul cannot be content to
remain forgiven only. When theologians declare that ‘a
justification which does not issue in sanctification is no
justification at all’, they are but stating in their own idiom
what simpler believers instinctively realise. For the
ideal of Christian holiness has a most disconcerting
power.”
[3]
When Jesus, in the very early days of his ministry, set out
the mandate given to him by his Father this is how Luke
reported what he said:
‘He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the
Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. And
he stood up to read. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was
handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is
written:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim
freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's
favour.”
Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant
and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were
fastened on him, and he began by saying to them, “Today this
scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”’ (Luke 4:16-20)
Many years later, one of Christ’s disciple, wrote to the young
Church saying:
‘Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. He who does
what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous. He who
does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has
been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God
appeared was to destroy the devil's work. No one who is born
of God will continue to sin, because God's seed remains in
him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God.
This is how we know who the children of God are and who the
children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is
right is not a child of God; nor is anyone who does not love
his brother’. (1 John 3:7-10)
It would have been impossible for Luke or John to be clearer.
Jesus doesn’t offer the prisoner bail or parole but freedom;
he doesn’t offer the blind person a guide dog and a white
stick he offers them sight! John tells his readers that they
can have lives completely free from habitual sin. There is no
other way to interpret these passages. ‘The son of God
appeared... to destroy the devil's work’ says John ‘no one who
is born of God will continue to sin...’ (John 1 3:8-9) John
does not mince his words, he calls it like it is, if you keep
on doing the things that you know you're not supposed to do
then you have not been
fully ‘born of God’. John passionately believes in the
possibility of victory over sin but he does recognise that for
most of us this is going to be a struggle, for in the same
letter he also writes:
‘My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not
sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the
Father in our defence-Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is
the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but
also for the sins of the whole world. We know that we have
come to know him if we obey his commands. The man who says, ‘I
know him,’ but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the
truth is not in him. But if anyone obeys his word, God's love
is truly made complete in him. This is how we know we are in
him: whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did.’ (1
John 2: 1-6)
Yet John’s overriding message remains clear:
‘I write this to you so that you will not sin... we know that
we have come to know him if we obey his commands... whoever
claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did.’
The idea that Christianity holds the key to victory over
temptation is well established throughout the New Testament.
When Jesus promised the Holy Spirit to the disciples
the emphasis was on the role of the Spirit as teacher but
Jesus also speaks about the importance of obedience. In fact
Jesus describes obedience as the evidence of love. Look at the
following verses from John 14:23-26
“Jesus replied, ‘If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching.
My father will love him, and we will come to him and make our
home with him. He who does not love me will not obey my
teaching. These words you hear are not my own; they belong to
the Father who sent me. All this I have spoken while still
with you. But the Counsellor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father
will send in my name, will teach you all things and will
remind you of everything I have said to you.”
Christ’s main purpose in sending the Holy Spirit was to enable
the disciples to carry on with the establishment of his
kingdom when they no longer had his physical presence to guide
and encourage them. Such a task, as the young church would
quickly realise, could not be fulfilled by men and women who
were constantly ‘tossed with temptation then haunted by
fears.’
When contemporary consider the role of the Holy Spirit the
emphasis is often placed upon what he can do for us rather
than what he can do through us. All too often we are tempted
to see the Holy Spirit as a blessing factory designed to
deliver fresh tingles down the spine every time we attend
church. The connection between the ministry of the Holy Spirit
and the power to obey is all too often missed. Of course, it
goes without saying that the Holy Spirit is about blessing,
but his main function is to educate and empower believers.
Whilst some of the most intensely passionate moments of the
Christian life will be spent relaxing in the embrace of the
‘Comforter’ the purpose of such intimacy goes well beyond our own
happiness. Love remains the most powerful motive that God has
at his disposal and it is not given to us so that we might
simply indulge ourselves in isolation from the lost. Christ's
love is always given to us to encourage obedience.
When our ability to obey is limited by the ball-and-chain of
habitual secret sin we are not enjoying the complete salvation
that God longs to give us. When we take the salvation that
Christ offers us to its fullest possible extent - that’s
holiness. Sometimes the most difficult concepts are best
expressed in the simplest of ways:
‘He died that we might be forgiven,
He died to make us good,
That we might go at last to Heaven,
Saved by his precious blood.’[4]
A Christianity which willingly forgives but doesn’t have the
power ‘to make us good’ leaves us sitting targets for the
enemy; a Christianity which declares we will continue to sin
until the day we die presents death rather than Jesus as our
ultimate saviour. However, the good news is that Christ not
only forgives us, he also promises to deliver us. The verses
of Scripture we have already quoted make it quite clear that
Jesus can, if we cooperate with him fully, consistently and
completely save us from sin and not just from the consequences
of sin.
In the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:8), Jesus promises that
‘the pure in heart will see God’.
In Hebrews 12:14 this idea is picked up again in the
statement ‘without holiness no one will see the Lord’. Who is
it that sees God? The pure in heart, those who live a life of
holiness, they are the ones who ‘see the Lord’.
The link between holiness and obedience stands like a
theological chicken and egg. Which comes first? Does obedience
lead to holiness or is obedience the consequence of having a
pure heart? Obedience and holiness are dependent upon each
other and they are both born out of love. This is a concept we
will return to many times as we explore what holiness is, what
it does, how it is achieved and how it is sustained. The whole
purpose of Christianity is to enable our lives to draw
people's attention to God and increase his glory. My life, the
way I act and react, must be righteous if I am
to
allow Christ to
achieve this end.
‘Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good
deeds and praise your Father in heaven.’ (Matthew 5:16)
Colin Fairclough perfectly summarises the way in which
holiness reveals Christ to others through our lives with the
following words:
Gracious lord, thy grace apply,
Both to save and sanctify;
All my life wilt thou control,
Calmly ordering the whole,
That the world may ever see
Christ, and only Christ, in me.’[5]
For most Christians the idea of presenting Christ so clearly
in our lives remains a distant and unfulfilled ideal. Whilst
many Christians accept that holiness sits at the very heart of
the gospel and is in itself the peak of God's hopes for
humanity, far too many of us still see it as an elite form of
Christianity, an optional extra for advanced believers.
Ask a group of Christians to give you a definition of
salvation and most will show you in their answer a solid
understanding of redemption, yet ask the same group to define
holiness and you will probably get a different answer from
everyone you ask. This hasn't always been the case; indeed in
the 200 years prior to the turn of the 20th century, holiness
had many champions who practically promoted and preached its
benefits. Once we go beyond the 1950s a clear consensus
as to what holiness is starts to slip from the Church’s
grasp, by the 1960s the definition of holiness has become
veiled in a fog of liberalism and compromise — today in many
quarters holiness has become almost forgotten altogether.
When I was growing up as a young Salvationist in the late
1960s and early 1970s the Sunday morning meeting was still
called the ‘holiness meeting’. If you had asked me as a child
how the holiness meeting differed from the salvation meeting I
would have simply replied that we don't clap when we sing in
the holiness meeting, the songs are generally quieter and more
reflective and the band only plays for the opening tune. I
can't say that holiness was never taught in these meetings,
indeed when I look back at some of the Corps Officers whose
ministry I sat under it almost certainly was, but what I can
say is that as a child and as a teenager
I
never heard it –
maybe I just wasn’t listening or perhaps it wasn’t presented
in a way that held my attention.
However fashionable or unfashionable,
popular or unpopular it might be, holiness remains an
obligatory experience for all disciples. To have to describe
holiness as an obligatory experience for Christians seems
utterly absurd - what Christian in their right mind would not
want to have the power to overcome temptation?
What Christian in their right mind would refuse a life
set free from the burden of habitual sin? Holiness has always
been the subject of passionate debate within the Church; there
have always been Christians who have argued fiercely against
the possibility of a life without sin. The problem that such
Christians have with holiness is that they confuse a life in
which we don’t sin with a life in which we are not tempted.
Temptation is not sin, giving into temptation is sin and
‘holiness is not an end of war with outward sin but a
career of
uninterrupted victory over it[6].’
This is a book all about that ‘uninterrupted victory’, all
about holiness – what it is, what it isn’t, how it works, what
it does, what it costs, how it is maintained and why it is
essential.
Once again the Holy Spirit seems to be bringing holiness to
the attention of Christians; the future of the Church will be
determined by our response to this call. When Christians
experience holiness collectively, then Christ becomes visible
in everything they do. In a ‘holy’ Church, society will see
Christ fighting against social injustice, feeding the hungry,
clothing the naked, visiting the sick, setting the enslaved
free and performing all kinds of miracles. In a Church like
this, Christ will be seen at the local council meeting
opposing harmful developments and defending the cause of the
vulnerable. He will be seen standing up against politicians
and projects that seek to take advantage of the weak. In a
holy Church, Christ will be seen freely associating with
sinners and outcasts, living with, and loving, those on the
very edge of society. In a Church like this, Christ will be
seen whip in hand cleansing the temple and re-establishing the
fundamental principles of righteousness. In a holy Church,
Christ will be seen in the way members of the congregation
interact with each other, the world will notice the love they
have for each other and this will mark them out as Christ's
disciples. In a Church like this, Christ will be seen in the
family life of those who gather for worship, in the way
parents address their children and in the way children respond
to, and respect, their parents. In a Church like this, the
lifestyle and values of Christ will clearly and always be
reflected in the lifestyle and values of those who attend.
Holiness can do all of this because it fills the individual
believer with a perfect love for God, a perfect love for their
neighbour and gives them that all-important ability to ‘stop
doing wrong and learn to do right’.
Writing in the preface of a book called ‘Holiness Readings’ (a
series of articles originally published in The War Cry in 1880
to 1882), William Booth says:
‘But, ah! I know what will prevent anyone
from getting a blessing from the reading of this book. It is
the unwillingness to leave all - to sacrifice all - to endure
all. Do not hope to get any good out of this or any other book
until you have come to that point to which, alas! so few come
before they reach their deathbed - that point of willingness
to leave all and follow him who left all to seek for you, and
to set you entirely free from sin, and fear, and spiritual
weakness, that you might be a worthy labourer together with
him - a willing sharer of his sufferings and so made fit to be
a joint heir of his crown.[7]’
Are we willing to sacrifice everything and to fully cooperate
with God in a reckless daredevil attempt to find full
salvation? Then let's look again at what the Bible has to say
about sin, about victory over sin and about holiness because
‘those who seek shall find’.
[1]
Hodges, Samuel, The Song Book of The Salvation Army,
London: Campfield Press, 1986, Song 459
[2]
Coutts F.L. The
Call to Holiness,
London: SP&S 1964, 2
[3]
Coutts F.L. The Call to Holiness, SP&S London 1964, 3
[4]
Alexander, C.F. The
Song Book of The Salvation Army, London: SP&S,
1986, Song 133
[5]
Fairclough, C.
The Song Book of The Salvation Army, London:
Campfield Press, 1986, Song 479
[6]
Orders & Regulations for Field Officers,
London: the Salvation Army Publishing Department,
1908, 137
[7]
Holiness
Readings, Ohio: Schmul Publishers, 1984, Preface
iii
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