Jay Reynardus came to faith as an adult, and like anyone new to a book that long, he needed somewhere to start. He picked 1 Peter. It was short, and Peter seemed important. He knew that much.
He got as far as chapter one, where Peter quotes Leviticus: be holy, for I am holy.
He stopped. Be holy? That was a thing? He had spent his life hearing be happy, be prosperous, be good, don't be bad. Holy was new. And whatever it turned out to mean, he was fairly sure he was not it.
So he did the obvious thing. He made a list. Go to church. Feed the poor. Stop the Friday nights, the parties that ran until four in the morning. Do these things, avoid those things, and holiness would presumably show up.
It did not work. He could not keep the list — and it was his own list, which he had written himself, to a standard he had set himself. He calls it the religion of Jay. He could not even keep up with the religion of Jay.
Spoons cannot perform
What finally cracked it open for him was an odd little detail in Exodus. When the tabernacle is set up, its equipment is consecrated — the tongs, the spoons, the lampstands. Scripture calls them holy.
And they do not do anything. They just sit there.
So holiness cannot mainly be about performance, because a spoon cannot perform. Holiness is a state of being. It is about belonging to God and being set apart for him, and it is something you are long before it is anything you do.
Which is the whole argument of this passage.
Why the list will never work
Somebody in Colossae was handing out rules — what to eat, what to drink, which festivals to keep, which days mattered — and passing judgment on the people who did not comply. Paul's response is that God has already passed judgment on these people, and the verdict was righteous. So how dare anyone reopen the case.
Then he gives them an image. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. The word behind "substance" is the ordinary Greek word for a body. Picture someone standing in the light, throwing a shadow across the ground. The festivals, the food laws, the temple, the sacrifices — all of it is the shadow. Jesus is the body casting it. So why spend your life chasing a shadow when the substance is standing right there?
Then five reasons that self-made religion cannot deliver, straight out of the text. It belongs to the world, and the world is passing away. The things it fusses over perish as they are used. It runs on human precepts and traditions — which means somebody made it up. It has the appearance of wisdom, and if a thing only looks like wisdom, it is foolishness. And it is self-made. Not God-made. Yours.
Paul's verdict on all five: they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh. Translated plainly, it does not work. You will wear yourself out keeping rules and end up exactly where you started.
The deeper danger is what it does to the relationship. A list turns God into a transaction — I do A, B and C, and you owe me. "If you have been around for more than five minutes," Jay said, "you have negotiated with God. Does it work? Never. Because he's God and you ain't him."
The answer is not a what
So if the list is out, what do you do instead?
Nothing, if you are asking for another item. The answer to this question is not a what. It is a who.
Union with Christ is the foundation. Communion with Christ is the means. Holiness is the result — not the goal you march toward, but what grows out of proximity to him.
There is a painting in Jay's bedroom that he and his children made for his wife when they were small. The youngest could not manage a handprint, so they put her feet in the paint and pressed those onto the canvas instead. Across the bottom is Psalm 1, because he wanted it to be the foundation of the family: he is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season, and its leaf does not wither.
The picture is a tree standing beside clean water, drinking deeply, flowering because of what it is next to. Now imagine that tree getting up, walking into the desert, and planting itself there. It shrivels. Not because it stopped trying, but because it left the water.
Jesus says the same thing with a vine. The branch does not manufacture fruit. The branch holds fruit that the vine grows. Its one job is to stay attached.
More Jesus
Which means trying harder is not the answer, and Jay was blunt that most people in the room had already tested that. Trying harder will fail you, because you are a mess and so is he. He reads a lot of biographies of mature men of God, and the pattern is always the same: the closer they get to God, the more of their own failure they see.
That is not bad news. Jesus is greater than all of it. He carries all of it.
There is a nineteenth-century Scottish preacher, Thomas Chalmers, who wrote a sermon called The Explosive Power of a New Affection, and Jay says it has been the key of his life. The way you break the thing that has you chained is not by gritting your teeth against it. It is by loving something else more.
So if you are losing to the same sin over and over, the problem is not that you have not resisted hard enough. It is that you have not yet seen anything big enough to outweigh it. Go find a love worthy of a son or daughter of God, and cling to that.
Do you want to be holy? You need one thing. More Jesus.
