Marriage is like...

19 days from today, I’m getting married. I’m very excited, and naturally, a lot of my thought over the past few days/weeks/months has been about marriage and how marriage relates to everything else I’m doing in my life.

The infusion of “Holly” into my bachelor-pad has been an interesting transformation. I’ll be honest, the place looks better, and it probably smells better too. She’s added some of her own touches to the apartment over the past few weeks as she prepares to completely move in and make it her place too.

We have a lot more stuff now, than we did, most of that is the result of three bridal showers in a two week span. The sheer amount of gifts that we received from our biological families, church family, adopted families and friends has been absolutely overwhelming.

Enough about that, though. I was thinking about marriage and sanctification. Yes, I’m such a Nazarene that even when I’m thinking about marriage, I’m thinking about entire sanctification and holiness. It really is in my blood, I think.

A few weeks ago, at our weekly prayer breakfast on Tuesday morning, Pastor Izzy and I were talking to a guy in the group about holiness. He had some misinformed thoughts on the doctrine of Entire Sanctification, and Izzy and I were working with him to help him better understand the doctrine.

So, how do they match-up? What are the similarities?

Well, I’ve given it a lot of thought and here’s the big one.

Every morning, when I wake up, I have to make a choice. I choose every day to love my fiancé. In the same manner, I choose every day to love God.

I think holiness is all about loving God. Just like marriage is all about loving your spouse. When I say “love” here, I’m not referring to an emotional response; I’m talking about a choice, every day.

Every day, we need to make a choice to love God more than we love everything else. Just as when you made that commitment to your spouse, you committed to love her only and nobody else.

So, in being holy, I love God more than I love everyone else. I’m going to say Yes to God, and No to everyone else.

In 19 days, I’m making an eternal commitment to Holly. I’m not only saying Yes to her. I’m saying No to every other female that ever comes my way. Although, in my defense, it’s not like females have ever been beating down the door for me.
Holiness is exactly like Marriage.

Every day, you have a choice to make.

Every single day.

What’s your choice today?

So Help Me God

I’ve been talking a lot lately with one of my friends about entire sanctification. We’re both on the side of ordination where we have to articulate sanctification in a certain way, and so we’ve been talking about the way we see entire sanctification and the way the Church of the Nazarene sees it.

We were talking about this yesterday and were talking a bit about our experiences trying to explain and understand the doctrine of entire sanctification. Someone had once criticized my friend for his theology of sanctification.

I’ve been thinking about this since then. My friend was somewhat chastised by a pastor for implying that sanctification was a daily thing. “You mean I need to pray to God to ‘re-sanctify’ every day?” (Loose paraphrase)

I would argue that comment with a great big YES! Maybe I don’t need to be entirely sanctified every day, but I definitely think that we need to pray to God to keep us sanctified every single day.

Jesus implored us to do nothing less than do this each day. “And He was saying to them all, ‘If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me.’” (Luke 9:23).

Daily.

Every. Single. Day.

We will continue to debate and wrestle with the theology and concept of entire sanctification, and that’s okay. But I do not think that we get to debate on whether or not entire sanctification is a daily process. If I’m not denying myself and picking up my cross every day, then I’m doing it wrong.

My prayer this morning was that God would help me to deny myself today. My prayer was for God to help me bear the weight of the cross today. So, help me God, to put my faith in you.