Universal Call to Holiness
The call to holiness is a call to an authentic spirituality which attempts to clearly understand what you believe about God, Christ and yourself. What all of this comes down to is that spirituality cannot be separated from religion, although many would like to try. One of the modern phrases that is heard over and over again is: I’m not a religious person but I’m a spiritual person. The life of a Christian cannot be separated from the foundational doctrines of Christianity. Christian doctrines are meant to help us understand what we believe so that we can have a healthy and robust relationship with God. True holiness requires a relationship with God. In fact, holiness is the result of a true relationship with God. The reality of three Persons in one God, the unity of God and man in Jesus Christ, and the unity that exists between Christ and His Church are the foundation that makes it possible for us to change and grow closer to God. When we try to pull apart religion and spirituality, we fall into the tender trap of sentimentality, in which we never have to do anything inconvenient. This will neither save us nor help us grow morally, but will trap us in the netherworld of emotion and sweet feelings, where we worship our own ideas and congratulate ourselves on our maturity.
Genuine, godly spirituality will bring us to a deeper understanding of God, our rela-tionship with him and ourselves. We will see things that we should have seen be-fore, understand ideas that we thought we knew but had only skated across the surface of. There is a great risk in this, because as we learn to encounter God as He is, some of our pet assumptions about both God and the world will be challenged. We will have to lay some childish things aside. Our movement will be in directions we had not consid-ered before, but always toward that which is sound and true. We will have to change and grow.
We must always remember that the purpose of this earthly existence is to respond to God’s call to holiness – God’s call for us to grow in our likeness of Jesus Christ, God’s revelation to humankind about the meaning and purpose of human life.