According to JC Ryle in his book, Holiness: Its Nature, Hindrances, Difficulties, and Roots: “A holy man will follow after faithfulness in all his duties and relations in life.”
Some key points:
- It’s more than just staying out of trouble or doing the assigned task. Ryle says anyone can do that, including “others who take no thought for their souls.”
- The challenge, for Ryle, is “Holy persons should aim at doing everything well, and should be ashamed of allowing themselves to do anything ill if they can help it.”
- Ryle’s examples include being “good husbands, good wives, good parents and good children, good masters and good servants, good neighbours, good friends, good subjects, good in private and good in public, good in the place of business and good by their firesides.”
- Ultimately, Ryle concludes, “Holiness is worth little indeed, if it does not bear this kind of fruit.”
That’s a tall order, and it involves, instead, greater vision, effort, and endurance.
- It involves greater vision because the holy person needs to strive for excellence in all things.
- It involves greater effort because great achievements come at a great cost.
- Operating at such a high level requires great endurance, and that’s where faithfulness comes in.
Faithfulness, therefore, can be seen as having a sense of unfinished business that should drive Christians beyond ordinary living. Ryle points to Jesus’s questions in Matthew 5:47, the final in a set of rhetorical questions that conclude his exhortation to do more than return an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Instead, Jesus charged his disciples to turn the other cheek, give one’s coat in addition to one’s cloak, and go the extra mile. Those final questions, “What more are you doing than others? Do not the Gentiles do the same?” are a challenge to live above the ordinary every day.
How can we find the great endurance to stay that course day in and day out? It’s no coincidence that faith is not only belief but also perseverance, that is, keeping faith, or as Ryle expresses it, faithfulness. That distinction corresponds to Ryle’s distinction earlier in Holiness between justification and sanctification.
- Justification is the initial act where God immediately sees the individual as righteous and sanctification is the lifelong process of growing toward God’s vision every day.
- In other words, justification is how God immediately sees His followers, but sanctification is how God shapes His followers over the course of their lives.
John Piper said that distinction is the root of the endurance needed to consistently do everything well without flagging. In studying the lives of John Newton, Charles Simeon, and William Wilberforce, Piper discovered this secret to endurance:
- Justification, God’s grace act of covering our sins with Christ’s sacrifice, was not sanctification, the lifelong process of holy living.
- Too many people, Piper said, believe once justified means fully sanctified and don’t take on the hard task of spiritual growth.
- That means they’re surprised and discouraged when they discover holy living is hard.
Newton, Simeon, and Wilberforce didn’t lose sight of that, so justification became the basis of hope that got them through the hard times that inevitably come when trying to do the right thing.
- They looked back on God’s act of justification in order to look forward to the great tasks ahead.
- They were encouraged that God’s act of justification meant they would never lose that relationship with God and, resting in that knowledge, attempted great things for God day in and day out.
How can we make that endurance our own as we fight the Sunday night blues thinking of the week ahead? In his great hymn, Amazing Grace, John Newton tells us how.
- We first understand just how great God’s grace was to bring us to Himself. Newton, a former slaver, understood his condition before God, calling himself a wretch and equating his transformation to going from lost to found, from blindness to seeing.
- After his conversion, Newton accepted the path of growth in holiness as grace taught his heart to fear.
- Knowing that grace his fears relieved, Newton accepted that life was full of dangers, toils, and snares, but anchored himself in God’s grace that brought him safe thus far and would lead him home.
This formula for endurance is what allowed Newton to counsel Wilberforce during a time of self-doubt to stay in politics, advice that led to a change in British law regarding slavery. It’s a formula that can motivate us to stay the course. To steal Douglas MacArthur’s words from a different speech, anchoring in God’s grace will “build courage when courage seems to fail…regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith…[and] create hope when hope becomes forlorn.”