BVOV Magazine 2013 - present

Clearly, as far as God is concerned, holiness is an important issue. He isn’t OK with us just floating through life doing the same kinds of things unbelievers do. He doesn’t want us running around acting just any old way, as if our lives are our own. Our lives aren’t our own. We belong to our heavenly Father who is the God of this universe. He has redeemed us for Himself with the precious blood of Jesus. He has claimed us as His sons and daughters. We’re part of His family and He wants us to act like it. He wants us to be holy just like He is. Why is that so important to Him? Because He loves to fellowship with us. I got a revelation of this a few years ago when Billye Brim and I were doing some television broadcasts together. We were talking about holiness and she explained that in Hebrew the word translated holy means “to set apart, to take something out and put it in a different place.” As I thought about that, I realized the reason God cares so much about our holiness is because He wants us to be with Him. He wants us to be set apart in the place where He is so we can be together. So He can manifest Himself in our lives and we can walk with Him and talk with Him and hear His voice. That’s what God has always wanted to do with His family. It’s what He wanted in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve. In the beginning, when He created them in His image, they had no sin in them so there was nothing to separate them from Him. He could come down to fellowship with them in the cool of the day and they could talk with Him face to face. They could be comfortable with Him and enjoy His presence. Just think about what fun they must have had together! All their conversations would have been happy ones because they had no problems to discuss. They didn’t have to talk to God about not having enough money to buy food, or about their crops drying up because of a drought. They didn’t have to ask Him for something they needed and didn’t have. Because the Garden of Eden was perfect they could just fellowship with God and enjoy His goodness. They could have continued that fellowship without interruption forever. All they had to do was keep the one command God had given them about not eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. “If you eat its fruit,” He’d warned Adam, “you are sure to die” (Genesis 2:17, "New Living Translation"). God didn’t say that because He was a mean dictator. He didn’t say it to deprive them of something fun. He said it so they could stay connected with Him, be BLESSED and continue to live in light and life in the Garden. But the devil came along and lied to them. He told Eve God didn’t have their best interest at heart, that He was withholding something good from them. She believed the lie and she and Adam disobeyed God. The instant they did, they died spiritually just like God had said they would. What’s more, they lost their covering of light. Until they sinned they’d been clothed in God’s radiant glory. But when that glory departed they realized they were naked. They thought, What happened to my covering here? Think about how alarming that must have been for Adam and Eve. Suddenly they’re looking around and realizing that birds have feathers to protect them, cows have hide and fish have scales but they—the highest beings in God’s creation—were completely exposed and unprotected. Why? Because they’d lost their garments of light. No longer holy, they’d sinned and fallen “short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). No Matter What the Devil Says, Sin Is Not Cool Of course, you know as well as I do that wasn’t the end of the story. Even after Adam and Eve sinned and separated themselves from God, even after they threw away His BLESSING and opened the door for the curse to come on the earth and on all mankind, God didn’t give up on His dream of having a family. He didn’t just shrug His shoulders and let the whole human race be carried away captive forever into the slavery of sin. BVOV : 29

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