“Be holy, because I am holy” (I Peter 1:16)

I know that my spiritual life needs work, so what should I do? God calls me to be holy; therefore, I must obey God and be holy. And how do I achieve holiness? Holiness requires an absence of sin. My goal is now to eradicate sin from my life. The problem, however, is that I fail to eradicate sin from my life. This is discouraging because no matter what I do or how hard I try, I continue to sin. My discouragement and sense of failure leads to a deterioration of my standards. “Since I can’t keep from sinning, is it really all that bad if I sin a little more?” The selfish desires within me don’t want to give up the sin, but my conscience says I should. So when I’m feeling spiritual, I convince myself that the sin is truly unholy and my conscience is right. After doing this I am committed to doing away with the sin. But when I stumble and commit the sin again, it becomes increasingly harder to keep convincing myself that I must stop sinning. How am I to improve my spiritual life when I can’t seem to make good progress towards becoming holy. When I focus on trying to stop sinning, I only encounter failure. I look again at God’s command: “Be holy, because I am holy.” Ah! God wants me to be like Him. And since God came to earth as a man, I have a good model to follow. The answer then is to fall in love with Jesus. Only then, by following the Holy One, am I truly on the road to holiness.