For years I have heard pastors and theologians define “holy” as a word meaning “set apart for service to God”. In the New Testament – although many today shy away from this term – the same word in the noun form is “saints” and gets applied to believers.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
The Apostle Paul was always writing his letters to “saints”, like those in Ephesus: “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, To the saints who are in Ephesus, and are faithful in Christ Jesus.” (1:1)<\/p>\n\n\n
I guess we shy away from calling ourselves saints because we don’t want to set too high of standards for ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n
But it seems to me now that speaking of a people “set apart for service to God” is simply acknowledging that God has now actively re-established what He intended from the start when He first created humans in His image.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
And if we resist the label of “saints”, then we might not be ready to live up to what God is calling us to in Christ – being renewed in His image.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For years I have heard pastors and theologians define “holy” as a word meaning “set apart for service to God”. In the New Testament – although many today shy away from this term – the same word in the noun form is “saints” and gets applied to believers.\u00a0 The Apostle Paul was always writing his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,51,86],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-eden","category-image-of-god","category-saints"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4836"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4837,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4836\/revisions\/4837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}