DAY 2 | Consecrated hearts

1 Peter 1:16

Have you ever seen someone who is so much better at something than everyone else around them?

It could be an athlete, an artist, a musician, anything. You don’t need an explanation. You can just tell.

When I was living in Washington, I once went to a high school basketball tournament with a friend. There was a kid playing named Zach LaVine, now a 12-year NBA veteran, and he was far and away better than everyone else on the court. From the first few minutes, it was obvious. He wasn’t just skilled. He was set apart.

That idea gets us close to what the Bible means when it talks about holiness.

Scripture speaks of God’s holiness over 600 times. At its core, holiness describes God’s otherness. He is in a category all His own. As one pastor put it, “God’s holiness means that He is different from us.” And yet, astonishingly, this holy and morally perfect God calls His people to be like Him.

One of the defining marks of Christians, and therefore the Church, is that we are meant to be noticeably different from the world around us. Not in a posture of superiority. Not as a performance of morality. But as people whose lives quietly confront the values of our environment through the way we think, speak, and live.

And that kind of difference doesn’t start with behavior. It starts with the heart.

Holiness is not something we put on. It’s something God forms in us. We become people who carry the holy presence of God into ordinary places. And when holiness takes root in the heart, the world doesn’t need to be told we are different because it’s evident. So today, let our prayer be this: that we would be holy as He is holy, and that the consecration of our hearts would be the place where that work begins.

Invite the Lord to set us apart as individuals and as a church before we ask Him to build anything through us.