God has become so casual (so human, so buddy-buddy) in the thinking of many today, that they do not understand the whole perspective of His utter holiness. The Scripture says our God is a consuming fire, and He has a holy indignation against sin. It is possible to flippantly rush into His presence, with lives unattended to by repentance and confession of sin so that we are vulnerable to His holy reaction. Remember, John leaned on the bosom of Jesus in the Upper Room, but he fell at His feet as he beheld Him as Sovereign in Revelation 1:17: “And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead.” (How do we come before God?) At the burning bush Moses was told he was on holy ground. (Why? What made it holy?) Because he was in the presence of God.The language of Israel’s worship makes it clear that the Israelite thought of God as being locally present. And we know that He is present with this church when we come together to worship Him. Matthew 18:20: Jesus said, “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” The quality of anyone’s worship depends upon and is conditioned by the object of his worship, and an underlying cause of much shallow worship is failure to recognize the holiness of God. Most Bible commentators rank love as the primary attribute of God. Many churches have distorted the love of God to make Him appear indulgent of sin and indifferent toward justice. Someone said, “An understanding of God as He truly is, the sovereign Lord of heaven and earth, inflexible in His holiness, righteous in all His ways, unwilling to countenance sin, even in His own children, but gracious beyond all human capacity because of the eternal sacrifice of His Son, would be reflected in the worship of His name and thus would certainly bring glory to His person.” The key to understanding biblical worship is an appreciation of the attributes of God – especially His holiness. We must comprehend the exalted character of God (with holiness as the primary attribute) in order to understand our need as worshippers. In Isaiah 6:5 Isaiah saw the Lord and realized his contrasting condition. “Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.” Until we understand ourselves as weak and needy and God as “lofty and exalted,” we will be unable to grasp the significance of God’s holiness and thus give Him “acceptable” worship. The average person, even among believers, often thinks, “I did this. I got this degree. I got this job” when in reality, without God’s working our lives we would not have those things. Hebrews 12:28-29: “ . . . let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear: 29 For our God is a consuming fire.” One man said this about holiness: “ There is a simple yet profound word which occurs 900 times in the Bible. You see it first in Genesis . . . You see it in the closing chapter of Revelation where we are told about God’s creation of a new heaven and a new earth. But except for a few grand old hymns of the faith, you do not see this word much today. The word is holy.” (When was the last time you heard a message, or read a devotional or a lesson on holiness?) I fear that when we consider the thought of holiness, of consecration, or of dedication to God, we are tempted to compare ourselves to someone we less mature, less consecrated, or less holy than ourselves. We find it easier to measure ourselves and our service to God using an imperfect standard – one another rather than God or the Lord Jesus. Someone said this: “God’s holiness is not simply the best we know infinitely bettered . . . Holy is the way God is. To be holy He does not conform to a standard. He is that standard . . . ” Now, why did God say to Israel in Leviticus 20:26 and to us through Peter in I Peter 1:15, “Be ye holy?” It is because He is holy! And because He is holy, His attributes are holy. That is, whatever we think of as belonging to God must be thought of as holy. But what do you think of when you consider the holiness of God?

I. THE HOLINESS OF GOD -- (“for I the Lord am holy.”)

II. THE HOLINESS OF GOD’S -- (“Be ye holy . . . ”)