The Wild Call of Holiness
“For our God is a consuming fire.” —Hebrews 12:29
Holiness is not a safe or polished goodness, but a wild, consuming fire that breaks, remakes, and transforms us into the likeness of God. —D.
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The world prizes goodness. It speaks of decent men, of clean reputations, of lives lived without offense. But goodness, as the world understands it, is too neat, too small. A man can be goodand never be changed, never be broken open by God’s hand, never feel the fire of the Spirit working in his marrow. Christ did not come to make men good. He came to make them holy, and holiness is something wilder, something that leaves no part of a man untouched.
Holiness is not about virtue polished to a high sheen, not about fitting in, not about the careful measuring of sin and righteousness. It is a tearing away. It is God’s fire moving through the soul, burning away the self that clings to its own idea of goodness. It is a breaking, a remaking, the same kind of undoing that turned fishermen into apostles, that took Saul the persecutor and shattered him into Paul the saint. A man who seeks only to be good will shield himself from this breaking, will try to keep himself intact. But the call of Christ is not to remain whole as we are, but to be split apart and remade in Him.
The world will tell us to conform, to soften, to make peace with its definitions of virtue. But the call to holiness does not conform. It does not fit into the categories of good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable. It is unpredictable, relentless. It demands surrender—not to a moral code, but to the hands of the living God, carving His image into our bones.
This is the fire that refines, the death and rebirth that Christ spoke of. It is not a safe path. It is not for those who wish only to be admired, to be respectable, to be known as good men. It is for those who would be changed beyond recognition, for those who would be consumed by God’s Spirit, for those who walk into the wildness of grace and come out—shaken, burned clean, made new.