Holiness is not an option. We are called to live holy lives, and that means it is a divine requirement. Anything else is disobedience. That is why the Word is so strong on this subject: “Make every effort to live in peace with all men and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord.”
Holiness
Matthew Henry
Wherever the fear of God rules in the heart, it will appear both in works of charity and piety, and neither will excuse us from the other.
D.A. Carson
People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.
John M. Frame
A biblically balanced view of worship must take into account both God’s transcendence and his immanence, his exaltation and his nearness, his majestic holiness and his unmeasurable love. This balance is not always easy to maintain. Churches that focus on divine transcendence are in danger of making God appear distant, aloof, unfriendly, unloving, devoid of grace. Churches that focus on God’s immanence sometimes lose sight of his majesty and purity, his hatred of sin, and the consequent seriousness of any divine-human encounter. To maintain this balance, we must go back again and again to the Scriptures themselves so that we may please God in worship rather than merely acting on our own intuitions.
Frederick Brotherton ( F. B. ) Meyer
Holiness is the beauty of the Lord God of hosts. Thou canst not separate the one from the other. To have it, thou must have Him. Nor will it be hard to obtain either; for He longs to enter into thy being. Thy longing is the faint response of thy heart to His call.
James Hudson Taylor
We are not only to renounce evil, but to manifest the truth.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
If you think you can walk in holiness without keeping up perpetual fellowship with Christ, you have made a great mistake. If you would be holy, you must live close to Jesus.
A. B. Simpson
Each of us has a splendid site for a heavenly temple. It looks out upon eternity and commands a view of all that is glorious in the possibilities of existence. The house that is built upon it now, however, is a worthless wreck, it is past improving. Our patching and repairing is worse than waste. What God wants of us is simply that we give him the possibilities of our lives and let him build upon them a temple of holiness which he will make his own abode and which he will let us dwell in with him as his happy guests in the house of the Lord forever.
Edward McKendree (E. M.) Bounds
The ministry of prayer, if it be anything worthy of the name, is a ministry of ardor, a ministry of unwearied and intense longing after God and after his holiness.
Oswald Chambers
When someone thinks that to develop a holy life he must always be alone with God, he is no longer of any use to others.