Saturday Read: All Saints and Artificial Holiness

On this day, the church historically remembers the saints - not the sanitized, stained-glass versions, but the messy, broken, redeemed people who followed Jesus through doubt, failure, and suffering. Peter denied Christ three times. Thomas demanded proof. Paul persecuted believers. David committed adultery and murder. Yet Scripture calls them saints not because they achieved moral perfection, but because they were set apart by God's grace.

Modern Christianity has created two dangerous extremes regarding holiness. Some treat it as impossible, shrugging off sin with "nobody's perfect" while making no real effort toward transformation. Others present holiness as a performance metric, creating impossible standards that crush believers under guilt and shame. Both miss Paul's revolutionary statement: "It is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure" (Philippians 2:13).

The early church fathers understood holiness as gradual conformity to Christ's image - a lifelong process powered by the Spirit, not achieved through willpower. Augustine wrote of his own moral struggles with devastating honesty, never pretending to have arrived while constantly pursuing transformation. The desert fathers fled to the wilderness not because they were holy, but because they weren't - they needed isolation to battle the demons of pride, lust, and anger that plagued them.

True holiness isn't about appearing perfect or achieving sinless status before death. It's about "being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another" (2 Corinthians 3:18). It's progressive sanctification - messy, inconsistent, two-steps-forward-one-step-back growth that depends entirely on God's patient work in our resistant hearts.

Today, as we remember the saints who've gone before us, we're reminded that holiness isn't reserved for spiritual celebrities or moral athletes. It's the calling of every ordinary believer who, by grace, pursues Christ's likeness despite repeated failures. The question isn't whether you're perfect, but whether you're progressing. Are you more like Christ today than you were last year? Are you addressing sin patterns or excusing them? True holiness begins with honest acknowledgment of our need for grace, not pretense of having already obtained it.