06.06 | Holiness is Wholeness
1 Thessalonians 4:1-5:11
‘For God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness.’
1 Thessalonians 4:7
Whether or not you’ve read much by Sigmund Freud, you’ll have been impacted by his thought. There’s few people who did more in the 20th Century to shape the ideologies of the global West.
Freud had an idea, that humankind was locked in a struggle between their human desires, and the norms of society.1
On the one hand, Freud argued, our bodies want things—like food and security and sex. With sex offering the most intense experience of pleasure he could think of, he (notoriously) focused much of his writing here. Mental wellbeing, for Freud, came from maximum fulfilment of bodily desires.
However, civilisation pushed back. Freud recognised that you can’t have a civilisation where everybody runs around fulfilling every desire that they have. It would be chaos. Civilisational order requires some rules and limitations. But Freud argued that these societal norms (including the the nuclear family, and religion) were excessive and damaging, and that this repression of our natural human desires led to a great variety of mental health problems. In particular, Christianity’s call for ‘holiness’ was a particular source of this destructive repression.
It’s not difficult to see how strongly Freud’s ideas now shape our cultural worldview.
Express yourself. Follow your heart. You do you. Do as you feel.
The Sexual Revolution onwards has been a massive social experiment in the ideas of Freud. If Freud was correct, it should have led to a liberated humankind, casting off the religious shackles of medieval man, unleashing our repressed desires, and leading to a huge boost to our mental wellbeing.
It’s not difficult to see that the experiment has been a catastrophe. We’re not happier. Our mental health is not better. Quite the opposite.
And yet Freud’s error wasn’t so much in that he was all wrong. It was more that he was only half right.
He was half right, in that religion that tries really hard to keep the rules, to avoid punishment and anger and exclusion, leads to misery and control. I suspect this was much of what Freud had experienced of church.2 And yet Jesus Himself pointed this out. The Pharisees were the 1st Century exemplar of this religious way. Religion understands holiness as rules. Trying harder. Repressing desires. Control. Keep the rules, and you get to be called holy.
But the truth of the Scriptures is vastly different.
Because holiness is not actually about rules; it is about health. It is not about limitation, but liberation. It is not about the repression of desires, but the renewal of them. Holiness, in the Bible, is the process of becoming like God. It is the return to the full and whole person that you were created to be. It is the realignment of our every desire, until our weak desires become whole in the greater desires—where our jealousy becomes generosity and our fear becomes courage and our lust becomes love. Holiness does not restrict desires; it is the expansion of them from the small and grabby into the great and generous and joyful longings of heaven itself. To be holy is to be whole. It is the most liberated and alive and joyful and free that a person can be.
Paul’s words today, if read through the perspective of our culture, may hit us as a repressive list of moral requirements. Freud wouldn’t have liked it.
But Paul knew the greater way. He knew that the Cross of Jesus was not just mercy for our errors, but power for our transformation. He knew that the invitation of God to the holy life is not the sulky and mean rulebook of a miserly God;3 rather, it is the beautifying work of the God of the greatest love. He knew that holiness was the invitation to begin walking now—amidst our all stumbling and mistakes and with the oceanic grace of God that covers it all—in the ways and desires and freedom of eternity. To be children of the morning, though we walk through the night.
Further up, and further in, my friends. We do not walk the way of repression and misery, but the truer way of flourishing and goodness and life. The upward call is unto your greatest good. And the destination is your life made whole.
Reflect:
How does today’s passage challenge you?
Don’t stop at the rulebook. Look higher. Ask the Spirit to reveal to you the vision of purity and fidelity and honour and love that He has for your life on the other side.
And then, Child of the Day, in love, and the power of His Spirit, step forward. This is your way.
Pray:
Father,
I see that you don’t critique my desires
For being too strong—
Although they can feel strong to me.
I see that you actually call me
To desires that are greater:
To replace the small and selfish and covetous and warped
With the great and visionary and adventurous and kind.
And so, Father,
I give you this heart again today.
Take from me my every wounded desire,
And renew in me
The greater passions of Jesus.
Make my heart to look like your heart,
And my desires like your desires,
That my way in this day,
May looking increasingly like it will
When I reach true wholeness
In the sunrise of your eternity.
In Jesus’ Name,
Amen
Old Testament:
For those also reading the Old Testament this year, your additional readings are here:
2 Kings 4:28-6:23 | Psalm 72:15-20
Freud describes this in his 1930 book, Civilisation and its Discontents
Freud, a secular Jew and an atheist, had understandable reasons for his disaffection with the church. Living in Nazi Germany, he’d grown up with significant antisemitism, and would have been aware of the compromised institutional church’s support for the Nazi regime.
This misunderstanding of God’s character—that He gives us instructions for our limitation rather than limitation is as old as Eden: see Genesis 3:4-5.