ast as long as life
itself.

II. The Christian life is to be not merely a continual getting rid of
evil, but a continual becoming good.

Paul here draws a distinction between cleansing ourselves from
filthiness and perfecting holiness, and these two, though closely
connected and capable of being regarded as being but the positive and
negative sides of one process, are in reality different, though in
practice the former is never achieved without the latter, nor the latter
accomplished without the former. Holiness is more than purity; it is
consecration. That is holy which is devoted to God, and a saint is one
whose daily effort is to devote his whole self, in all his faculties and
nature, thoughts, heart, and will, more and more, to God, and to
receive into himself more and more of God.

The purifying which Paul has been enjoining will only be successful in
the measure of our consecration, and the consecration will only be
genuine in the measure of our purifying. Herein lies the broad and
blessed distinction between the world's morality and Christian ethics.
The former fails just because it lacks the attitude towards a Person who
is the very foundation of Christian morality, and changes a hard and
impossible law into love. There is no more futile waste of breath than
that of teachers of morality who have no message but Be good! Be good!
and no motive by which to urge it but the pleasures of virtue and the
disadvantages of vice, but when the vagueness of the abstract thought of
goodness solidifies into a living Person and that Person makes his
appeal first to our hearts and bids us love him, and then opens before
us the unstained light of his own character and beseeches us to be like
him, the repellent becomes attractive: the impossible becomes possible,
and 'if ye love Me keep My commandments' becomes a constraining power
and a victorious impulse in our lives.

III. The Christian life of purifying and consecration is to be animated
by hope and fear.

The Apostle seems to connect hope more immediately with the cleansing,
and holiness with the fear of God, but probably both hope and fear are
in his mind as the double foundation on which both purity and
consecration are to rest, or the double emotion which is to produce them
both. These promises refer directly to the immediately preceding words,
'I will be a Father unto you and ye shall be My sons and daughters,' in
which all the blessings which God can give or men ca