1| The Pursuit of Holiness

The leadership quality that caused one of the world’s greatest movements

This is the introduction to the Boxed Wine & Bad Ideas series on how a church movement died and how we can get it back.

Domesticating God

“One of the stubbornly enduring habits of the human race is to insist on domesticating God. We are determined to tame him. We figure out ways to harness God to our projects. We try to reduce God to a size that conveniently fits our plans and ambitions and tastes.” - Eugene Peterson

Pride is shoving God into a box that we think we can manage. Holiness is letting Him break it.

CS Lewis called God “the great iconoclast” because it seems to be in His job description to continually break down the idol we’ve made him out to be. Through books, our own experiences, and other people’s experiences, it’s reasonable for us to come to those ultimate conclusions about who God is and how He operates. Yet one thousand lifetimes would only be sufficient to conclude that one thousand more wouldn’t be enough.

“As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” — Isaiah 55:9

A few hundred years ago, some men, most of whom people have never heard of, each had a realization of their own futility in contrast with God’s sovereignty. This led to a radical abandonment from their own ways to God’s ways, and in turn caused one of the greatest movements that the world has ever seen.

In this collection of stories, we will track from Jan Hus in the 14th-15th centuries to Martin Luther in the 16th and how those men contributed to Count Nikolaus Von Zinzendorf and his Moravians who shaped the world and caused the early Methodist movement. We will spend most of our time in the Methodist movement from the 1700’s with John Wesley and a few others.

Let me be clear before we move forward: we are not making claims that any of the “great figures” that we’re writing about are worth imitating. They did great things, but they also did not-so-great things. Luther became an ornery anti-semite in his later years and his writings were used by Hitler. Wesley had a terrible marriage and had a pen-pal or two that I’m pretty sure counts as cheating by Sermon on the Mount standards. People are people. They are a mixed bag. Just because Wesley led a movement doesn’t mean that his whole life and habits are to be emulated. And we might not agree with how Wesley conducted himself at times but that doesn’t negate the disgusting evils, like slavery, that were fought against because of the movement he led.

Just because Martin Luther seemed to lose his mind in the later years of his life doesn’t remove his early fidelity to God that allowed him to fight against the vileness of the Catholic Church at the time or that he united the German people with a common language around Scripture.

Our aim is not to bash these men or to elevate them as demigods that we should aspire to become. There’s one standard. There’s one teacher. There’s one source — and from the Apostles to Wesley and all in between, all have fallen short. These men screwed stuff up just like us, but they gave it their all in the allotted time they had here on this earth. There are lessons to be learned from a life lived all-in.

”I have one passion–it is He, it is He alone.” — Zinzendorf

In this book we are going to talk about a movement that shaped continents. We’ll dig through the financial management that killed it, we’ll look into the structure that allowed it to flourish like a vine on the trellis, we’ll slow down with journal entries from the workers themselves, and we’ll begin to discuss current off-the-wall strategies that “everyday” people are using to reach people and start churches today.

Movement is exciting. Movement is sexy. It’s impactful. It’s world-changing.

Yet a common theme you’ll see through every leader in this series is that when they were at their best, their focus was fully on Jesus. On His nature. On His kingdom. On His righteousness — first. It’s when they looked at the wind and the waves and their own ego and the opinions of other people around them that they fell short.

Be holy, for I am holy.

“Therefore, prepare your minds for action; be self-controlled; set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed. As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: “Be holy, because I am holy.” — 1 Peter 1:13–16

“Be holy…” Our divine command.

“… for I am Holy.” Our divine motivation.

I used to think when Jesus said, “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”, in the Sermon on the Mount, he was being sarcastic. Now I realize it’s an invitation. Not as an ideal to pursue, but a person. He had just finished talking about never being angry or looking lustfully at a woman. He even said that when you get smacked in the face to just act cool and ask them if they’d like to use their other hand, too.

We can culturally analyze all these statements and their pragmatism until we’re exhausted, but in the end our Leader is constantly teaching us to seek a change of the heart that only He can produce in us. (2 Corinthians 5:21)

Holiness is not the absence of drinking and cussing, rather it’s the sanctity of our disposition that precedes the power that Jesus promised we’d experience. In other words, it’s the purity of heart behind the matter that matters. Only Jesus can fix that part. We can work to shape our character, but our heredity, the depth of our nature, is fully in His hands whether we accept it or not. His heart that we now have access to is the vine from which fruit that will last is produced. (John 15)

So let’s say you want to read this because it’s about a movement. And let’s say that your plan is to find the key practices and replicate them so you can start a movement too. If that’s true, yet there is a log is securely in your eye (i.e. living in sin and that sin blinding you) your “good” actions are of no help to the Kingdom. Especially if what you do grows and “works.” Time will promote or expose us all, and inevitably the truth of our innermost lives will show.

If we pursue a movement, we might just get it, but the movement, like it’s people will only be ankle deep. Yet if we pursue the fullness of the person of Jesus Christ, we may or may not see a movement, but we will undoubtedly find the depth of the fullness of life that he promised. Then we actually have real a shot at leading others out of the shallows.

Discipleship is the replication of a life lived. Jesus said “follow me” so that his friends could tag along with him everywhere but the bathroom with the goal of becoming like him. Not just following what he taught. His thinking. His habits. His “secret” life that others never saw. Who Jesus is, is what is to be replicated and that replication is what makes up a real and lasting movement of God. If people followed us the way Jesus invited the disciples to follow Him, how would they turn out?

So if holiness, i.e. becoming like Jesus, is not our pursuit, then why in the world would God want more of us anyway?

In John Wesley’s sermon called “The Circumcision of the Heart,” he said this:

“At the same time we are convinced, that we are not sufficient of ourselves to help ourselves; that, without the Spirit of God, we can do nothing but add sin to sin; that it is He alone who worketh in us by His almighty power, either to will or do that which is good; it being as impossible for us even to think a good thought, without the supernatural assistance of His Spirit, as to create ourselves, or to renew our whole souls in righteousness and true holiness.”

The foundation of all that went right in this movement we will examine together was built on the Cornerstone through men who assumed they couldn’t domesticate God and who fought with everything in them to be like the one they preached about. All that went wrong in this movement was built on the backs of those that thought they had God and what He wanted all figured out.

So, without further delay:

A few hundred years ago, the small “missional” church and the “traditional” church worked in tandem to create one of the greatest movements that recorded history has ever seen.

Fresh, flowing wine.

And then we boxed it up and sucked the life out of it.