One morning this past week my placid time of cogitating was disturbed by exclamations of disgust coming from the kitchen. “Ooh, gross.” Then a few seconds later, “Yuck, did you check the bottom of the bag?” At first, I had no idea what my wife, Linda, was talking about. Then I remembered, I had left food for her on the kitchen counter to pack her lunch for work, including a bag of what seemed to be delicious green grapes. I had just bought them earlier that morning at the grocery store.

“They looked pretty good to me at the store. That’s why I picked them up. What’s wrong with them?” Linda brought them into me for my inspection, having removed the layer that had been spilling out of the top of the bag. What I saw looked like we had a head start if we wanted to make some wine: crushed and bruised grapes that were not fit for consumption. Some sneaky stock person at the grocery store had piled fresh good-looking grapes on top of the ones that were past their prime, and I fell for it. “You have to check all the way to the bottom of the bag,” she said as she ran out the door for work. “Thanks for the tip,” I replied (after she was far enough away to not hear me).

It was at that moment that it felt like God’s voice saying, “That’s what I’ve been telling you, Derek, about holiness. It goes all the way down to the bottom of the bag.” You may or may not be familiar with the idea of holiness. We certainly talk about a lot of things being holy. According to common usage, cows are especially holy. So is Toledo. And there are certain substances that are unmentionable in a religious column that are purported to be holy.

In the biblical usage, however, holiness is an apt description of God’s character and God’s faithful people. “Holy” is what describes God and everything that belongs to God or pertains to God. In the Old Testament, certain spaces were deemed to be holy, like the temple that Solomon built in Jerusalem. Certain objects used for specific purposes could be holy, like forks and bowls used in preparing sacrificial animals. These examples reinforce the connotation of separateness when it comes to defining what it means to be holy. In this usage, the Israelites were like all of the pagan cultures surrounding them. Holiness was the word used to describe the things of the gods. But here is where the usage of the word was different for the Israelites: holiness was primarily a word used to describe God’s character – God’s ethics. The things of God are holy because God himself is holy, and God acts in ways that are holy. He is purely good all the time. What is more, he expects those who belong to him to act in ways that are consistent with holiness.

In Leviticus 20:26, God commands, “You shall be holy to me, for I the Lord am holy and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine.” You can see again the idea of separateness, but it is a separateness based on the fact that we are in a relationship to a holy God. In the New Testament, Peter puts it like this: “As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance, but just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do.” So as God’s people, Christians are not to act like everyone around them. Becoming a Christian ought to change you, now in this life. It is not simply that you are forgiven for your sins (though there is that). It is also that you are transformed and freed from the deeply engrained patterns of sin. Your character is changed from that which belongs to the world to that which belongs to God.

The Pharisees in Jesus’ day were trying to become holy, but they were going about it all in the wrong way. Their focus was squarely on the outward behaviors of a person, trying to force a total behavioral makeover through rigorous application of rules. Religion became legalistic, an outward conformity to what was defined as godly at that time. The problem was that it left the heart unchanged. Jesus was a fierce critic of such an approach to “holiness.” In the Gospel of Matthew, he likened the Pharisees to dirty dishes: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisees! First, clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.” (23:25-26)

The hypocrisy of the Pharisees rendered them unusable for God’s purposes, the very thing they desired above all other things. To use my earlier analogy, they had put a layer of good-looking grapes at the top of the bag where everyone could see, but down below at the heart level, they were rotten and unfit. God sees not only the top of the bag but right down to the bottom.

The particular challenge for Christians is that it is always tempting to look pretty clean on the outside where everyone can see but have a bunch of rotten filth on the inside. We can rationalize things that we know are sins and are not God’s will for our lives. We can live double lives, appearing one way, but being the opposite. The only way out of this hypocritical trap is to come clean before God, to confess the sin that he already knows about and then cooperate with him through the power of his Spirit to develop an interior holiness, a set-apart character, good all the way down to the bottom of the bag.

Derek Russell is pastor of the Hillsboro Global Methodist Church. He loves Jesus, family, dogs and football.