Purpose Awakening by Touré Roberts

Author:Touré Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: FaithWords
Published: 2014-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

Who Really Wants to Be Holy Anyway?

I’ve got a question for you, and I want you to be honest. What does the word holy mean to you? Take a second and think about it. I had an idea of what most people thought, but wanted to see if my suspicions were true. I decided to conduct my own scientific and “very official survey” on the subject, so I went to the go-to source for current information and popular opinion. You guessed it—­Twitter. Almost immediately after sending out the tweet about the word holy, I started getting some interesting replies, most of which confirmed what I felt the general consensus would be. Some of the replies I received included: untouchable, unreachable, judgmental, overly honest, purity, square, swagless, righteous, overly religious, reverence, apart from the rest, above and beyond, higher, without sin, sacrifice, high and mighty.

My suspicions were true. The majority of people associated the word holy either with a negative connotation or in a way that suggested that only the “pure” are worthy of approaching or attaining it. But there’s a problem here—none of these definitions or attributes given to the word holy are accurate. Holy literally means “to be whole.” It doesn’t even mean sacred like many people think. That’s a connotation that was given to it, but the root of the word means whole. Holy means to be perfectly complete and spiritually whole.

So the question becomes, how did the term holy come to be seen as untouchable, overly religious, unreachable, and judgmental? The answer is simple. It has to do with some people’s interpretation of God and how they have presented Him to others. According to some people’s commentary about Him, He is unapproachable, condemning, standoffish, selective, and just one bad report away from sending all of us to hell. What further complicates things is when people call themselves holy, but then appear self-righteous, overly critical, holier than thou, and, at times, flat-out obnoxious. When you have a society that has been conditioned to think this way about God for centuries, and people who take ownership of the term and project a loveless image, there is no question why the term holy has become so controversial.

So in a sense, this key attribute of God has been hijacked from Him, and as a result, the very thing designed to draw people to Him has now become the thing that pushes people away. This has to be something that grieves God deeply. I say it all of the time and here it is again—God’s got the worst PR ever. I don’t say that to be critical. I’m just acknowledging the shortcomings we all have and our tendency to project onto God characteristics that are far from who He truly is. He is holy, meaning He is whole in every way and wants nothing more than to have His children be spiritually whole as well.

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