Holiness and Mental Health

I define holiness as being like God. As human beings, this often feels an impossible standard. How can I, limited as I am, measure up to the Creator of the universe? Despite our misgivings, God clearly tells us to be holy as He is holy. If He is commanding us to do it, it must be possible. God’s statement leads us to the question: how may I achieve holiness? I think this is fundamentally the wrong question.

As a psychologist, I am approached daily with the question: how can I achieve emotional healthiness? From my years of experience, I know that the clear answer to this question is: you can’t. Mental health is not something to be achieved, it is a system we must practice. If you don’t engage in the process of becoming emotionally healthy, you will never achieve mental health. If you don’t continue the practices that lead you to emotional healthiness, you will never maintain mental health. Mental health is a process, not a goal. I think the same rings true for holiness.

Holiness is not something for us to achieve, it is a process for us to maintain. Any of us can be holy for a moment, but maintaining holiness through our entire life is a real challenge. Rather than asking how we achieve holiness, I believe the correct question is: what practices do I need to engage in to practice and maintain a holy life?

Sometimes, in the church, we use “holiness” and “good deeds” interchangeably. We teach that holiness is behaving as God would have us behave, so follow these rules and you will live a holy life. This aligns well with Old Testament theology of following the law as the path to holiness. The Pharisees were excellent at following the law, and yet Jesus called them hypocrites who fulfilled the letter of the law but failed to achieve the spirit of the law. Jesus quotes Isaiah in Matthew 15:8 when he says, “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.” Jesus makes it clear that simply following the law isn’t good enough; to be holy our hearts must be aligned with God. Good works without correct intention is not good enough.

There are some in the world of philosophy who argue that our intentions can never be pure. When we do good deeds, we receive some sort of psychological benefit such as feeling good about ourselves or external praise, and therefore our intentions can never come from anywhere other than selfish ambition. While I disagree with this conclusion, I do understand the sentiment. It is hard for us to judge our own intentions. If we do a good thing for some reward, that is not holiness. If we do a good thing because we are following a rule, that is also not holiness. In my mind, this is the biggest challenge of holiness. How can we ensure our intentions are pure?

God is perfectly good. His standard of holiness is perfectly good. As a human, I am made in the image of God, but I am not God. My standard cannot be infinitely good. Any intention originating from me will never be good enough. It is easy to conclude from this argument that holiness is impossible. Instead, we should conclude that any intention originating from me is not good enough. To be holy, to do a good action with good intentions, our intentions must come from God. When our intentions come from God, our intentions become perfectly good because God is perfectly good.

When intentions come from me, they might be good (originating in the image of God), but they will never be perfectly good like God’s intentions. To me, the key to holiness is aligning our intentions with God’s intentions so that our intentions and actions become aligned with His perfect goodness. We cannot be holy if we are not unified with the source of all holiness.

Now that we have established our goal, we need to determine a set of practices that will allow us to be unified with God. Paul tells us, “Now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness” (Romans 6:22). Paul lays out a simple two-step process: (a) become free of sin, (b) become slaves of God.

Becoming free from sin seems deceptively easy; all we need to do is ask for forgiveness. 1 John 1:9 tells us, “If we confess our sins, [God] is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” Some of us think this means that when we do something wrong, we ask God for forgiveness and don’t have to face the consequences. That is not what this verse says. It tells us that we will be forgiven and purified from all unrighteousness. Very often being purified requires us to face the consequences of our actions so we can learn from our mistakes. The forgiveness that God gives us is not free. Jesus paid the ultimate price for our sins. We discount the amazing sacrifice Jesus made for us when we continue to sin and choose to not be purified from all unrighteousness.

To be holy, we must first admit that we are powerless to forgive ourselves. We are entirely dependent upon God’s grace and Jesus’ sacrifice. When we fail to accept God’s forgiveness, that is when we feel shame. Guilt is feeling bad for something I have done wrong; shame is telling me there is something wrong with me. Shame is there to remind us we are human and to tell us that we are not unified with God.

In Genesis, when Adam and Eve sinned, the first thing they did was hide because they felt ashamed. Shame drives us to hide. When we feel there is something wrong with us, we want to hide our deficiencies. This means that the people who present the best are often the ones hiding the deepest shame. People think of narcissists as supremely confident people. The reality is that they feel deep shame and wear the mask that everything is perfect as a coping mechanism to hide their shame. Arrogance is one of the signs of shame and disunity with God.

To overcome shame, we need to reveal our deficiencies. We need to confess our sins. Without confessing and accepting God’s forgiveness, we can never be holy. Confessing to God is an excellent first step, but as a counselor, I know the incredible power of confessing to another person. Many of us are afraid to reveal our true selves to others. We are afraid of abandonment and rejection; this is another key indicator of shame. There is power in confessing to another person, recognizing that our shame does not define us, and being received with unconditional positive regard. For those of you with few people you trust, I recommend seeking out a counselor. Share your shame with them and feel the liberation that comes with confession.

After we have confessed and worked through our shame, we then need to become slaves to God. Unity with God is not a goal to be achieved, it is a process with which we must engage. Think for a minute about becoming unified with another person. As a counselor, I have worked with people through meeting, dating, getting engaged, and becoming married. That process is not one that typically happens overnight. Building a relationship with God is much the same. We need to get to know God first if we are to be unified with Him.

The first step is incredibly easy. There is a Sunday school chorus that lays out the key steps: read your Bible, pray every day, and you’ll grow. I recognize that pretty much every Christian knows this. As a psychologist, the more interesting question is: if we know it, why don’t we do it?

I have had many hundreds of people come to me with this exact problem. I know what I should be doing, but I don’t do it. In my experience, the simple reason is priorities. Your priorities get your time. If you prioritize work over your children, you will spend more time at work and less time with your children. If you prioritize your children over your work, when work does need to take priority, they will forgive you because they know it’s the exception rather than the rule. My point is that priorities are often fluid and will change throughout the day. In my work with Salvation Army officers, I know they are constantly pulled in many different directions with several tasks demanding attention at any one time. Successful officers can prioritize tasks and get things done. Unsuccessful officers often spend their time doing things that should not be a priority and fail to accomplish much. If you struggle to get things done, begin by questioning your priorities.

Most Christians I speak with tell me that God is their main priority, yet few of them spend consistent time with God. This tells me their stated priorities are not aligned with their actual priorities. Spending time with God every day should be a priority, and it is up to you to structure your time to make it a priority. That said, I think that daily devotions are a part of holiness, but not all there is to holiness.

I am friends with a pastor who I know spent a minimum of two hours every day reading God’s Word and praying. This same pastor convinced himself it was God’s will that he no longer be with his wife which led him to have an affair. To me, this is an obvious example that spending time in devotions is not the same as holiness. The God I am familiar with in the Bible is unlikely to endorse extramarital affairs. If you are doing devotions and are not unified with God, you are still not holy. For this pastor, I know that he had unresolved abandonment and shame that led to his affair. He failed at the first step of holiness, and even following through on the rest failed to help him unify with God.

There is much more that could be said about holiness. Samuel Logan Brengle and William Booth wrote many words on the topic. If you would like to progress further beyond what I have written, I fully endorse their many books on the subject. I want to leave you with a few action steps you can take to start on the path to holiness:

1. Make a list of your insecurities and shame. Turn each of these items over to God and claim the forgiveness He is offering.
2. Write down people you resent, times you were hurt, betrayed, or abandoned. Think through how these periods of pain and shame have shifted your perception of yourself. Extend God’s forgiveness to others by praying for those who have hurt you, not because they deserve it but because God has forgiven you.
3. Make a list of your priorities. Observe yourself throughout your day and see how these priorities play out. When you find that your priorities are not aligned with how your time is spent, add structure to make your time align more with your priorities.