“‘If one of you is carrying some meat from a holy sacrifice in his robes and his robe happens to brush against some bread or stew, wine or olive oil, or any other kind of food, will it also become holy?’” The priests replied, “No.” Then Haggai asked, “If someone becomes ceremonially unclean by touching a dead person and then touches any of these foods, will the food be defiled?” And the priests answered, “Yes.” Then Haggai responded, “That is how it is with this people and this nation, says the Lord. Everything they do and everything they offer is defiled by their sin.”
Haggai 2:12-14 NLT
It is important for believers to be righteous in practice. That is to say, that it is important that they seek to enable God’s process of sanctification on their lives. But many confuse this process for salvation. They believe that if they are saved, they are clean. In truth, they are not clean from sin, so much as relieved from the consequences of sin. They are still living with the effect of sin in their lives. Sometimes they are still living with the practices. The process of sanctification is what happens after salvation. It is systematically disassembling behaviors and artifacts of your previous life of sin. It makes you holy in a tangible sense rather than the legal sense in which salvation brings holiness. God doesn’t save us without a sanctification process in mind. We cannot continue to harbor sins in our hearts and lifestyles and believe that our salvation covers them. This behavior is the rejection of salvation and ultimately leads to death again. We cannot continue to harbor, even seemingly insignificant aspects of sinfulness in our lives. They will infect the whole of it. We must strive to be holy until our holiness is made complete. We must lean beyond our salvation into the sanctification process.
JOSH McGARY. COM 