I seem to be encountering God’s holiness a lot more than His love at the moment. Does that make me a bad Christian? Or does that just make me a bad charismatic?

Have we lost our sense of the holy?

At the risk of upsetting the apple cart, I think it is healthy at times to ask: have we become too familiar with God? Here perhaps we need to realign our worship and our teaching. The Hebrew concept of ‘holiness’ means ‘set apart’ or separated for a particular purpose. The lyrics of our worship songs often cry out for a response to this conception of God, and yet our teaching vocabulary (and subsequent prayer ministry) often only emphasizes God’s intimate love.  

Our Father is in heaven

Any honest Christian will admit that God can seem distant. What our teaching sometimes does not reflect is the fact that, in one very real sense, He is distant. The prayer that Jesus gave to us begins: ‘Our Father in heaven’ (Matthew 6:9). That statement contains a profound difficulty. God is our Father, our Abba, our Daddy. And yet in one sense, God is an absentee Father. Protest if you will, but Jesus tells the truth. We cannot see or hear or touch our Father as we could a human being. This has always been a source of profound disappointment in my life; I long to see God with my human eyes and touch him with my human hands. But He is ‘in heaven’. Am I the only person who finds this rather devastating?

Close yet holy

Of course in another very real sense God is omnipresent - as the Psalmist cries: ‘Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?’ (Psalm 139:7). I have had some profound moments of intimacy with God where I am as sure as I can be of anything that God is here. However, in my messy, impulsive, impoverished spirituality - my overriding day-to-day experience continues to be a vague, uneasy sense of lack, punctuated by flutterings of desperate hope.

Perhaps we can make sense of all this with the realisation that the gulf between our sinfulness and God’s holiness is far wider than we imagine. Jesus has bridged that gulf – but see the lengths to which our Lord had to go! 

Responding with fear and trembling

When people encountered God in the biblical narratives they reacted in all kinds of extreme ways. Many simply died on the spot. Others fell down as if dead. Others were so overwhelmed by their own sinfulness that they wanted to die (See for example Isaiah 6 and Revelation 1). Where is that kind of reaction to God’s awesome holiness today? I don’t really see it. It is my conviction that we do a disservice to our corporate worship if, in our eagerness to claim our access to the Holy of Holies, we neglect to pass through the outer courts with some degree of fear and trembling.  

Knowing God as a holy God

In the charismatic movement, we so often emphasise the need for a personal encounter with God’s love. This is a crucial and vital teaching, especially to the broken-hearted. But in making this vital emphasis, have we obscured half of God’s character? I humbly make a case for a fuller exploration of God’s holiness in our churches today. If we do this, then we might further understand God’s apparent distance from us at times; we might know God’s real character more fully, and so be transformed in holiness ourselves.

Then perhaps, by His grace, we will be able to stand in the very fire of God and not be consumed - between the flames of His love and the flames of His holiness, speechless in the light of His glory.