Excerpt from The Hole in Our Holiness

Thistlebend Quiet eMoment

by Laurie Aker

Hello Again from My Reading Retreat

Today’s book is:

The Hole in Our Holiness

by Kevin DeYoung

Excerpt from Chapter One.

I absolutely, positively, LOVE, LOVE,

LOVE this book. I think it is one of

the most important books written in the past decade.

Kevin has spoken the truth in love to the church

with much grace, wisdom, and humor.

“I’ve never understood the attraction of camping.

Although I have plenty of friends and relatives who are avid campers, it’s

always seemed strange to me that someone would work hard

all year so they can go live outside for a week.

I get the togetherness stuff, but why do it in tents with

community toilet? As an adventure, I sort of understand camping.

You strap a pack on your back and go hike God’s creation. Cool. But

packing up the van like Noah’s ark and driving to a mosquito

infested campground where you reconstitute an inconvenient

version of you kitchen and you bedroom just doesn’t make sense. Who

decided that vacation should be like normal life, only harder?

Every year our church advertises “family camp.”

Every year my wife wants to go, and every year we surprising

end up in some other state during our churches allotted week.

As best I can tell, the appeal of family camp, is that the kids,

unbothered by parental involvement, run around free and dirty

sun up to sun down-a sort of Lord of the Flies for little

Michiganders. But as appealing as it sounds to have absentee

offspring and downtime with my friends, there must be a cleaner,

less humid way to export the children for a week (isn’t

that what VBS is for?). And even if the kids have a great time,

the weather holds up, no one needs stitches, and the seventeenth hot dog

tastes as good as the first, it will still be difficult to get all the

sand out of my books.

I know there are a lot of die hard campers in the world.

I don’t fault you for your hobby. It’s just not my thing. I didn’t grow

up camping. My family wasn’t what you’d call ‘outdoorsy.’

We weren’t against the outdoors or anything. We often saw it through

our windows and walked through it on our way to stores.

But we never once went camping. We don’t own a tent, an RV,

or Fifth Wheel. No one hunted. No one fished. Even our

grill was inside (seriously, a Jenn-Air; look it up).

I’ve been largely ignorant of camping my whole life.

And I’m ok with that. It’s one more thing I don’t need to worry

about in life. Camping may be great for other people, but I’m

content to never talk about it, never think about it, and never do it.

Knock yourself out with the cooler and collapsible chairs,

but camping is not required of me and I’m fine without it.

Is it possible you look at personal holiness like I look at camping?

It’s fine for other people. You sort of respect those who make

their lives harder than they have to be. But it’s not really

your thing. You didn’t grow up with a concern for holiness.

It wasn’t something you talked about. It wasn’t what your family

prayed about or your church emphasized. So, to this day,

it’s not your passion. The pursuit of holiness feels like one

more thing to worry about in your already impossible life.

Sure, it would be great to be a better person, and you do hope

to avoid the really big sins. But you figure, since we’re saved

by grace, holiness is not required of you, and frankly, your

life seems fine without it. The hole in our holiness is

that we don’t really care much about it. Passionate

exhortation to pursue gospel-driven holiness is barely

heard in most of our churches. It’s not that we don’t

talk about sin or encourage decent behavior. Too many

sermons are basically self-help seminars on becoming

a better you. That’s moralism, and it’s not helpful. Any

gospel which says only what you must do and never

announces what Christ has done is no gospel at all. So I’m

not talking about getting beat up every Sunday for

watching SportsCenter and driving an SUV. I’m talking

about the failure of Christians, especially younger generations

and especially those most disdainful of ‘religion’ and

‘legalism,’ to take seriously one of the great

aims of our redemption and one of the required evidences

for eternal life-our holiness. J. C. Ryle, a nineteenth-century

Bishop of Liverpool, was right: ‘We must be

holy, because this is one grand end and purpose for

which Christ came into the world. . . . Jesus is a complete