Psalm 96:9

Sisters and brothers in Christ,

Our first Bible passage for this evening is from Psalm 96:9: “O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness” (KJV).

We don’t often think of holiness as beautiful. Preachers sometimes threaten their listeners with God’s holiness, while people who claim to be holy can strike us as self-righteous. To say that someone has a “holier-than-thou” attitude is not a compliment. But here, the palmist speaks of the beauty of holiness.

Peter, too, writes of the beauty of holiness: “Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear— but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious.” (1 Pet. 3:3-4). “A gentle and quiet spirit” is an “imperishable beauty”: it grows rather than fading with age, and will be perfected in heaven.

 It would be a mistake to think of such an internal spiritual beauty as exclusively female. God calls on us all to worship him in the beauty of holiness. The Spirit’s work is to cultivate this beauty in us: “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Gal. 5:22-23). There are few trees more beautiful to look at than fruit trees in blossom, and few foods more beautiful to eat than fresh fruit. It’s no accident that Paul used the analogy of a fruit tree. The Holy Spirit is committed to growing in each of us, over a lifetime, the beauty of holiness.

But, you might say, I still fall very short of that kind of holiness. So do I. We don’t measure up well against the dazzling beauty of God’s holiness. It’s comforting, therefore, to know that Paul has already told his readers, “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” By “baptized” here he means the work of the Spirit by which we are “born again” into new life in Christ (cf. John 3:5-6; 1 Cor. 12:13). By “put on Christ,” he means that we have been clothed with the righteousness of Christ (cf. 2 Cor. 5:21).

God gave us new life in Christ and is now cultivating in us the beautiful fruit of holiness. While he carries out that slow and patient work, he already views us as clothed in Christ’s own beautiful holiness. Which is why the holy God can say to each one of us, in the words of the Song of Solomon, “You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is now flaw in you” (Song of Solomon, 4:7).

In Christ, God’s holiness is not a threat, but a cosmic thing of beauty. He loves us, he accounts us already holy and without flaw in Christ, he is slowly cultivating in us an actual lived holiness, and we can hardly imagine how beautiful we will be when we meet God in glory, except to trust that “we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 Jn. 3:2). Our call, in the meantime, is to worship him in the beauty of his holiness and, astonishingly, in the beauty of our own holiness in Christ.

Your brother in Christ,

Max