What does it mean to live a holy life? Living a holy life should be the goal of any Christian, but how do we know if we are doing this? Certainly we will never live a perfectly holy life, but we can never even attempt to live it if we don’t know what it looks like. During the course of my studies this semester I came across what I consider to be the two aspects of a perfectly holy life: (1) sinlessness and (2) obedience to God.

Sinlessness. This means, as you might expect, a life without sin. Anytime you do something that God has declared wrong or commanded not be done, like lust, lie, or covet for example you have committed a sin. Even the greatest most perfect Christian on the planet sins multiple times per day; it is so embedded in our nature that we will cannot but help but commit it.

Obedience. This means doing the things that God has commanded to be done, like loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and your neighbor as yourself. This also includes things that God may have commanded you personally to do, such as taking a certain job or preparing to enter a certain vocation.

While in theory these two aspects can be separated out into neat definitions this isn’t so easy to do in reality. In reality these two aspects are so intertwined that they are inseparable. The more you sin the greater its influence becomes over your thoughts and actions. The less you sin the less its influence becomes. However it is not enough to simply not sin. Something must take the place of sin’s influence otherwise all you are doing is striving for a moral purity which you will soon cease striving for as you will quickly realize that moral purity by itself is quite pointless.

The counter to the influence of sin is the influence of the Holy Spirit. This is where obedience comes in. When we are obedient to the commands of God we become more sanctified (that is, more like Christ) than we were previously. To be sure, obedience is not simply mere external actions, but is internal as well. Jesus condemned the Pharisees for their disobedience, which ironically stemmed for their striving to be obedient, because even though outwardly they were doing everything that God required they were doing it for the praise of men and not the praise of God.

So, in short, living a holy life involves not only sinning less, but also being obedient to God’s commands. As Christians we are called to live a holy life (Leviticus 11.44; 1 Thessalonians 4.7). The Hebrew word for “holiness” means “to cut off” or “mark off.” We are called to live a life that is marked off for God. We cannot be ministers for a holy God if we ourselves are not pursuing holiness. If we are content as we are we will never minister God, but only ourselves. If we want to minister God we must mark ourselves off for him so that we will become more like him and it will become evident to others that we are serving him and not ourselves.

Holiness does not merely involve a life free from sin. It also involves a life lived in obedience to God. We can see this most clearly in the life of Christ. Not only did Jesus not sin, but he was also obedient to the Father’s will, even to dying on a cross.

In closing I will note that pursuing a holy life doesn’t mean that everyone will like you. Hopefully your Christian brethren will appreciate you, but I think that those outside the Christian faith will most likely despise you. God’s holiness reveals just how depraved and sinful we are (see Isaiah 6) and that causes one of two responses in people: (1) they recognize and lament their sinful state, or (2) they despise God. If God’s holiness is seen in a sinful human person (though certainly to a far lesser extent than in God himself) I think we can expect the same. After all, Jesus perfectly revealed (ministered) the Father to Israel and they did not accept his testimony, but instead ascribed his power to Satan and crucified him.