August 5, 2026

Today the church is asking what holiness actually costs — and whether we've made it too easy. Ligonier Ministries runs a piece this week insisting that God's holiness isn't one attribute among many. It's what he is. That framing has consequences. If holiness is God's very nature, then our drift from it isn't a personality quirk — it's a rupture. Tim Challies picks up the practical edge of this: sin runs downstream, and holiness means swimming against the current, hard and without rest. The Aquila Report adds another angle — that what keeps us from holiness isn't usually defiance, it's shame. We hide. We stay behind the fig leaves. The gospel, on that reading, is God calling us out of hiding, not punishing us for needing to hide in the first place. These three pieces don't quite agree on where the problem sits — the nature of God, the will of the sinner, or the fear underneath both — but together they're asking the same question: what does it actually take to become holy, and are we willing?

O. Alan Noble is doing something adjacent but sharper. His piece on sexuality and creational design argues the church has ceded the conversation on sex precisely because it stopped making a positive case — stopped showing why God's design is beautiful, not just correct. Hosanna Wong's story in Relevant Magazine puts a face on that gap: she spent years preaching identity while hiding her own, knowing who God says she is without living like it. That gap between knowledge and formation — we were watching it earlier this week in the conversation about desire and the limits of the mind. Christianity Today is also asking whether the church has confused radicalism with faithfulness, reviewing a book that questions whether full-time ministry is holier than being a good neighbor. The answer isn't obvious. Neither is the question of what a fully formed, non-hiding, upstream-swimming Christian actually looks like in ordinary life. That's what today's conversation is circling.