Strive For Holiness

Strive For HolinessHebrews 12:14 “Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.”Striving for holiness is something I have been hearing a lot about over the last few years. It is an interesting phrase that I don’t think many people think about. If you were to ask people if they were striving for holiness, I am not sure they would say yes. I don’t think this is because we don’t want holiness. I think it is because we just never really thought about it before. Another reason might be that we have thought about it, and yet we discounted ourselves because we could never be holy. Who are we to think we could be holy? I remember going to a talk once by Jon Leonetti. He is excellent, by the way. You can find short videos on YouTube where he talks about all things Catholic. You can tell just by listening to him how much he loves his Faith. In his talk, he asked the audience how many people sitting there wanted to go to heaven. We all raised our hands. Then he asked how many of us wanted to be saints. I think there might have been 3 of us that raised our hands out of a couple hundred people in the room. He then said, “You know only saints are in heaven, right?” It’s true. Nothing unclean gets into heaven. This is why we go to purgatory. However, wouldn’t it be better if we started working towards holiness before we died? Wouldn’t it be better not to have to spend as much time getting it right after we die?This verse tells us that we are ALL called to strive for peace and holiness. It says without this, we will not see the Lord. I don’t know about you, but I want to see the Lord. I want to do whatever I have to do to be able to not only see the Lord but to spend eternity with Him. Holiness is not something we will be perfect at, and I don’t think God expects perfection from us. It doesn’t say in this verse that we must master peace and holiness. It says we should strive for it. So, how do we strive for it?Let's start with what holiness even means. From what I can gather, holiness means being set apart. Being holy means, we are set apart from the things of this world. It means we are set apart from sin too. One way we could strive for holiness is to ask God for the grace to follow Him in His ways. We can ask the Lord to put on our hearts the various ways we are falling short of holiness and then give us the grace and the strength to change those things. We can take all those things that the Lord put on our hearts to confession, and we can confess our sins and try to sin less next time. Going to confession can help us sin less because it brings our attention to our sins. The more you examine your conscience, the more you will begin to think about it even when you aren’t meaning to. Also, the more aware you will be of what is right and what is wrong. The more you start to look at the Examination of Conscience, the more the Holy Spirit begins to point out things. First, He will point out the big ways we are breaking our relationship with the Lord. However, as we continue to grow closer to Him, we will start to notice even the small ways we offend the Lord. It is gradual and gentle. The Lord is not going to put all the things in your heart at once. He meets us where we are and walks us in slowly.Another important factor of being holy is having a personal, intimate relationship with our Lord, Jesus, and /or the Holy Spirit. They are three people in one, so it doesn’t matter which you have an intimate relationship with. A lot of people feel more comfortable talking to Jesus as we can relate to Him. He was human. He walked the earth. We have stories about those He hung around. He has a mom and a dad like we do. Others love to talk with the Holy Spirit living inside of us. Some like to talk to God the Father. Any of these are good. Whatever feels the most comfortable for you. You might start talking with one and then as yo