No Holiness but Missional Holiness
- Matt O'Reilly
- May 19
- 3 min read
The following is an excerpt from Free to Be Holy: A Biblical Theology of Sanctification. Seedbed is offering a live mini-course designed around the book with Dr. Matt O'Reilly on May 22, 2025. Click here for info and registration.
Before we consider how God intends to make his people holy, a major connection needs to be made, namely, the connection between holiness and mission. The connection comes in Ezekiel 36:23 when God speaks through Ezekiel and says, “the nations shall know that I am the Lord, says the Lord God, when through you I display my holiness before their eyes.” This sheds significant light on God’s purpose for his people. First, God wants the nations to know him. This echoes what we learned in Exodus 19 about the priestly vocation of the Hebrew people. Second, the way that the nations will come to know God is through the holiness of God’s people. This clarifies the problem we’ve been exploring. If God is holy and if his people are to represent him well, then God’s people must be holy too. When God’s people embody his character as they represent him to the nations, the nations will come to know the character of God. The nations will see God’s perfect love, consistent truth, and unwavering righteousness. This doesn’t happen apart from the representative vocation of God’s people. God, in his wisdom, has determined to make himself known through the character of human representatives. That means the mission of the people of God depends on the holiness of the people of God. If we become holy, the people we encounter will discover the beauty of the holiness of God. If we don’t, they won’t.
It should now be clear that our mission as God’s people extends far beyond the initial experience of conversion. Unfortunately, that initial step is often the main and sometimes the only focus of our ministries. Of course, we want to see people convert to Jesus. That’s crucially important. I certainly want to see people experience the life-giving love of Jesus. I want them to experience the forgiveness of sins.
I want to see people be reconciled to God. But that initial experience of reconciliation isn’t the goal of our mission. Instead, it’s a necessary first step. The goal of our mission is thoroughgoing transformation of the heart. We want people to experience forgiveness and to subsequently be
made holy. That’s what Ezekiel is describing. It starts with each of us and extends to our neighbors and the nations. God wants to make us holy. And when he does, all the families of the earth will be blessed as they come to know the Holy One.
Dr. Matt O’Reilly (Ph.D., Gloucestershire) is Lead Pastor of Christ Church in Birmingham, Alabama, Director of Research at Wesley Biblical Seminary, and a fellow of the Center for Pastor Theologians. A two-time recipient of the John Stott Award for Pastoral Engagement, he is the author of multiple books including Free to Be Holy: A Biblical Theology of Sanctification, Paul and the Resurrected Body: Social Identity and Ethical Practice, The Letters to the Thessalonians, and Bless the Nations: A Devotional for Short-Term Missions. Follow @mporeilly on X and @mattoreillyauthor on Instagram.
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