High Calling Magazine
The official publication of The Francis Asbury Society

My Quest for Holiness

BY REV. PAUL BLAIR

When I was growing up in the coal mining country of Eastern Kentucky, my family attended church every Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday night.  It was a small church with around two hundred members. I remember that when I was in the fifth grade, we had a long revival meeting – long for a kid my age because we had to go to church every night for two weeks which seemed like an eternity for me.  Night after night the evangelist would speak. I don’t recall any specific message, but I remember that one evening it seemed particularly moving to me. About twenty young people – both elementary and high school ages – went forward to pray as the evangelist gave his invitation at the close of the service.  I was scared, and I was especially afraid of what people would think if I went forward.  But I had come under conviction by the Holy Spirit for the bad things I had said, done, and thought, and I really felt guilty about them.

I knew that I had never asked Jesus into my life but that I wanted to seek Him.  However, I was scared, too.  So I prayed, “If you are really there, Lord, let a really older and pretty girl go forward first; and I’ll follow her.” I did not want to go forward and be alone and have everyone looking at me. Just then, the beautiful captain of the girls' high school cheerleading team stepped out of her pew, and an older group of teenage boys followed her.  It was as if God had said, “OK; it’s your turn now.  Are you going to allow me to begin to work in your life?”  So, because my prayer had been answered, I stepped forward. The first step was awfully hard, but I followed the voice in my heart that said, “Follow me; I love you; and I know what’s best.” 

I remember the evangelist's seating us all in the front pews after the service and talking to us about a life with Christ.

That night when we went home, my mother, my older brother, and I had prayer on our knees around one of our beds and read the Bible together.  We had always had prayer before meals and a short devotion in the morning with breakfast, but this was something much more meaningful.

Things were OK for awhile. I realized I was changed, I felt forgiven and at peace. I had a sense of being somewhat clean inside, and I knew that I was a real Christian.  But there was no follow-up, no youth Bible study, no prayer time, no discipleship, no real help from people in the church for a beginning Christian. I felt alone and began to drift.  As I became older, I drifted even more. I’m not blaming those circumstances on the little church I attended, because ultimately I began saying no to the Holy Spirit who was in me.  I slowly began choosing my own way again.  This led, as one can imagine, to all sorts of wrong-doing through my  high school and college years.  During those years of my life, I pretty much turned my back on God and that earlier conversion experience.  However, I continued to go to church regularly, to read my Bible, and to pray.  But all my prayers were self-absorbed.  My behavior was not Christlike, and I knew it only too well.  But I kept telling myself that I wasn’t as bad as some people that I knew.  That was my excuse.  This sad state of affairs continued for months after my graduation from college.

Then something happened.  I had come home after college to help my parents on their farm for awhile.  However, my lifestyle seemed to irritate my mother.  She, also, was burdened for my soul (something I now have experienced as a parent), and she told me that she thought I was under conviction.  She told me that she thought God was trying to work in my life and that I was refusing to let him.  She was also expressing the idea that my life was not pleasing to Christ and that I was trying to ignore that reality and its consequences.  She was right, but I would not admit that to her or to anyone else.  I did start reading my Bible seriously, and all the mess of my life became increasingly painful because it shouted loudly about my own poor choices and consequences.  Things began to fall apart. I had a loss of direction, experienced a broken heart over a particular young woman, and I began to take a sober look at the problems that I was causing myself and others. This all came to head a few days later while I was baling hay with a group of men. There was a deep gnawing in my soul over the accumulation of conviction for all that I was and wasn’t   I was beginning to see all that I had done and the problems I was causing from all that was wrong in my life. And so, in the middle of a hot August day, under total conviction from the Holy Spirit, I got off the hay wagon, told the men that I wasn’t feeling well, and drove over into another field to be alone with God.  There I got down on my knees and prayed, holding nothing back.  Yes, I had a real conversation with God. I admitted that I was sorry for all the wrong things that I was aware of and asked for His forgiveness and His absolute assurance that I was forgiven.  Literally, in a moment, He was there, and I had real peace. I knew I was accepted and forgiven.  How good that felt that day.   

I later learned that this is what the church calls becoming a Christian and that there are many words to express this experience. Some people may call it rededicating one’s life to Christ. I knew I was in a real relationship with a real person named Jesus.  However, in the midst of this praying in a cow pasture, I suddenly realized that God was asking me to do something more that I did not want to do – become a preacher. Go into the ministry? What a scary thought for me; however, this was a strong impression that I did not welcome at first. I worried because it seemed to me that most of the ministers I had known didn’t have any fun.  They wore dark suits, and they just didn’t seem to be happy.  However, I knew that I must say yes immediately or turn my back on my Lord.

I knew this had to be settled right away, so I got into my truck that very moment and drove to Wilmore which was thirty minutes away from the farm to the place that looked like a church to me. It was actually the chapel at Asbury Seminary. So on that hot August day in the afternoon, having come straight from working in the hay. I must have been a sight going in that chapel that day, with streaked tears, dust, and sweat on my face.  But I knew that God didn’t mind. I went into that chapel and had another good long talk with God about me and preachers, and I decided to trust Him on this idea, even though I was unsure about what would happen.

I had already looked at two medical schools where I had had my sights set, but He had other ideas.  I went into the administration building with all the confidence of knowing that I was called by God to go into the ministry. With my usual bluntness, I promptly told the lady that God had called me to be a preacher. She looked at me strangely and pushed some papers at me saying, “Send them in.” So I did, and I was accepted to start Seminary in January of 1976.  I moved to Wilmore in December of 1975 and took a job cleaning and working as a janitor to help pay for tuition.  Then I started classes at Asbury Theological Seminary.  That was a wonderful experience! I found that it wasn’t just the classes that were important, it was also getting to know the teachers in a personal way.  It was having great people to guide and lead me. This was new for me, and I began to thrive in this environment. I also began to hear another message that I didn’t understand, words that I didn’t understand.  I began to hear words like Spirit-filled, holiness, sanctification, absolute surrender, wholly devoted.  I had never heard these words in my background, these terms, this kind of vocabulary before. I didn’t know what they meant. I began to hear people preach and testify and talk about them, but I still didn’t know. A year or so went by, and I began to see that while I was learning much, there was a depth of relationship with Christ that some talked about and were experiencing but that I wasn’t. I was saved and knew that I was going to heaven but this was something more, something deeper and better, and I didn’t understand it – but I wanted it.  I wanted that deeper relationship with Christ.

So I thought the right answer was just to do more, work harder, pray more, preach more, study the Bible more, just do more.  That began to wear me out. Finally, a friend and I began to pray together.  In the summer of 1978 we prayed every morning at five o'clock, then read the Bible from six until seven o'clock, then we went about our jobs. Then a very close teacher friend began to help us by sharing with us that we shouldn’t be seeking an experience from God but that we should be seeking God Himself.  During this time, I also found a young woman that would become my life partner, and we were married. Mary was a preacher’s daughter and became my wife, my friend, and my spiritual accountability partner.  While we were living in our little apartment in Nicholasville, I was preaching across the central Kentucky area. While I was in school, I would usually take evening meetings to help pay our bills. But that also gave me great experience in preaching, and in helping me to know myself and my Lord better.

I’ll never forget one night about one o'clock in the morning when I couldn’t fall asleep and was thinking through my mind about the messages that I would be preaching at a church the coming week.  I wanted to peach some messages on the pure heart, sanctification, what it means to be sold out to God, and to be spirit-filled and wholly His.

I thought, “Well, I’ve given my life to God to be a preacher; what else does He want?”  But then I began to see jealousy and envy, meanness, things still inside me that weren’t pleasing to Him. There was still a tug of war in my heart about who was really going to be the boss in my life, who was really going to run things – me or Jesus.  And it was just as if I had a conversation in which He said, “Paul, don’t you trust me to take care of all this?”  I said, “What if I mess up?  This is Seminary, and I feel as if I’m Daniel in the lions' den.”  He said, “You just need to trust me. I said, “Ok Lord, I am going to trust you even though I’m scared to death.” He answered, “I can fill you with my spirit and make you all mine,” and I said, “OK.” No rockets went off, no stars; but I knew that all of me now belonged to all of Him and that He had everything of me. I knew this from the top of my head to the bottom of my toes; this was everything. I heard another voice, as if the devil was there, too, “Just wake your wife up and talk to her about this; let’s just see what she thinks of this.” So I woke Mary and told her about my conversation with God; and she immediately said, “I need to do this, too.”  Thank God for a Christian wife.  We got out of bed and knelt by our couch in that little apartment and gave everything to the Lord. We each had a deep peace at the very core of our being and knew that there was nothing left of us to give or to take but that it all belonged to Him and that we were there together for the duration.  By this time, it was two o'clock in the morning, and I called our friends, got them out of bed, and went to their home.  I told them of our experience. It was so funny because everyone had on pajamas and robes and we had a real prayer meeting in their apartment.

I didn’t say anything to my Seminary classmates about that experience because I was afraid that everyone would be looking at me, watching me. I felt like that young boy in that little church again, wondering what everyone would be thinking about me.  However, I knew that what had taken place had really happened.  One of the first things I did after that experience was to go to some professors at the Seminary and apologize for talking about them behind their backs.  It’s interesting the friendships that formed with people I had not liked or didn’t agree with before. About two days after this experience, I was sitting in the cafeteria working on my homework (I was always behind in my homework – never getting it done on time). Some of the students were having an open forum and sharing their summer experiences.  Some had been on mission trips, others in evangelistic meetings, etc. There were more than one hundred students in the cafeteria, and I wasn’t paying any attention to anything being said, just working feverishly on my Bible lesson. Then, suddenly, I began weeping. I was at a table with friends who began looking at me as if I had lost my mind. There was a young man telling about what he had been doing that summer. I tried to focus and could not. God spoke to me and said, “Tell them what has just occurred in your life.” I said, “God, I can’t do this in front of this group of people. I’ll mess up, I’ll do something stupid. I don’t want to tell them that I’m the Spirit-filled person in this room. God said, “Don’t you believe what I just did in your heart?” So I‘m carrying on this conversation, arguing with God, but it’s evident that God is speaking to me. He said, “Take the microphone and tell these people what I’ve done in your heart—now.” It was very clear; it was right from heaven. But I was scared to death. I grabbed the table and the whole table started shaking and everyone was looking at me. “Take the microphone and tell them.” So I did.  I just told the story of what God had done and people starting weeping and getting on their knees. It was evident that God had come. It went on for about forty minutes and swept through the campus that day. God was moving in many people’s lives. I still run into some that talk to me about that day and of how their lives were changed.

But if I stopped right here, it wouldn’t be the whole truth. As wonderful as that was, there was still a whole lot of work that God needed to do in me.  I really believe now that when God gets all of a person, it is similar to when a young person's going through puberty. That’s just the start, just the beginning of maturity and the beginning of what He can do. But we have to let Jesus become the most determinative factor in our life. God wants to bring us to the place where He can do surgery on us, where He can cut away the bad, ugly parts and leave us clean and wholly devoted to Him, as I have discovered through years in the pastorate, in service as a missionary overseas, and as an evangelist,   there are areas in my life that cause problems for me and for those that I love. Many times the “package” of our lives causes a problem even when we are good, sold out Christian men and women. It’s the package of our lives that causes problems interpersonally and people sometimes won’t follow Jesus because of the problems with our own package. You might ask, “What is he talking about?” Well, I found out there were places in my life that were not pleasing to the Lord, even though I loved Him with all my heart. Even though I was a Christian, my “package”, my daily walk and witness, were not what they should be and people close to me knew that and could tell that about me. I was still not the light in the world that He wanted me to be. Jesus talked about this in the Sermon on the Mount when He talked about getting the log out of our own eye before getting the speck out of our brother’s eye.  Many times our problems are not problems of knowledge, but problems with our relationships with others, the way we treat one another. 

We are sometimes arrogant, prideful, angry, self righteous, bitter, jealous,  greedy, envious, and sometimes just downright mean and manipulative, and we hide all of this under the fig leaves of religion. 

Some people are unaware of being this way, but some of us are aware and we just don’t do the homework that God calls for to get our lives cleaned up. What do I mean by homework? Here is an example. One evening I set my three children down at the table, and I put an extra chair by them. "If Jesus were sitting in this chair, what do you think Jesus would like to change about Daddy?" I’ll never forget what came out of that conversation. My children made me painfully aware that I was in denial about my own life and had a lot of changing and growing to do.

Here’s another illustration, one that’s painful for me to admit, but it may help someone else who needs to hear this story. My wife is a gracious, loving woman with a strong spiritual background.  When she was growing up she’d write letters to Jesus and she kept them. She had books and books of her letters to Jesus that she had written. She continued this practice through our married life, journaling her prayers to the Lord.  One morning she had gone shopping,  and I knew she’d be gone a long time. I had been wondering what she was saying to Jesus about me.  I glanced at her prayer books and I began to think, “I wonder what this person that I love is saying to Jesus about her husband.” I thought, “I’ll go and look in that book that she writes in every day and see what she’s saying.” So I did. I’m ashamed to admit that because I betrayed her trust when I read her private thoughts on those pages, words meant just for her and her Lord.  I read just enough to find out that she had quite a few things to say to Jesus about me. Some of them I didn’t like. As a matter of fact, I counted nineteen negative things that she had to say to Jesus about me, but what made it worse was that she was right.

As my anger burned at her at first for the things she had written, the Holy Spirit said to me, “You just violated your wife’s trust by opening this book.” I got very mad, I threw the book against the wall. I even cursed I was so angry. Then as I thought about each thing individually that she had written, I just became sadder and sadder as I realized that the person I loved most in the whole world could see these things about me, and I had not been paying attention to her and she was right about the areas of my life that I needed to change.  She was afraid to confront me with them and felt that her only recourse was to take them to the Lord. The Lord gives us our spouse to protect us and help us grow, but like a fool, I would not listen. Jesus softly reminded me, “He that has ears to hear, let him hear.”  God was now getting my attention.  Mary has long since forgiven me for that betrayal of her privacy, but it was actually one of the best things to happen to me. I saw clearly the kind of husband, the kind of man I was and God was able to help me change those things that Mary had been praying about.  It showed me that a person that loves God with all his heart can be working with a tremendous amount of unawareness of how he is really operating interpersonally with those he is in contact with the most, colleagues, friends, and family.

I realize that sometimes our life is like sitting on the edge of the Doctor’s  examination table when he hits us under the kneecap with that rubber hammer and the leg jerks involuntarily. That’s a healthy reaction to a stimulus, but many times what is going on in our interpersonal relationships is unhealthy and dysfunctional and we’re unaware of it.  But we’re so familiar with reacting that we’re not even aware that what we’re doing is self-centered, self-protective, self-defensive, self-assertive, and proud, because that’s part of our package. God has to dismantle that. It’s like ripping the wiring and plumbing out of an old house and putting in new wiring and plumbing. God has to do that with us and he can’t do that with us until we are ready. That’s part of our homework when we completely follow Him.

This is the log in our eye of which we are unaware if we keep having the same chronic problems interpersonally. We need to get down to business with Jesus and let Him show us the way to a healthy spiritual life dealing thoroughly and definitively with the problems in our lives. It’s like some of us just want to cross the Jordon river and live in the promised land but never possess all the land that God has for us. The children of Israel lost the promised land and became captives again because they did not “deal with the problems God told them to deal with” and take all the land God wanted them to take.  To claim our promised land we must let Jesus come in and take control and totally remodel our “package”.  He sets about the task of reworking our personalities, hearts, and souls.  This is the homework of the log in the eye.  Either we deal with these problems with help and the Lord or they capture us and destroy our inner lives.  Then we live in denial and as a fraud or as a spiritual farce.

Just as the children of Israel became captive again, we, too, will become captive. We must deal with the junk in our lives that everyone else knows and sees about us.  Many times we just want to do the things that we do very well because we perform well and are skilled at them.  But God wants us to deal with the stuff in our lives and get it cleaned out.  That’s our homework and sometimes we want to ignore it and deny it and not deal with it. As a result of that, we wound others interpersonally because we don’t deal with our own dysfunctions and baggage. This is part of our spiritual homework that as mature Christians we must deal with. In fact, I would say that there is no spiritual maturity without emotional honesty and maturity.  And unless this is dealt with honestly, humbly, truthfully, then we lose our intimacy with Christ.

Peter, the leader of the early church, the spokesman at Pentecost, had to grow, also. God had to deal with the stuff in Peter’s life that was hindering the progress of the gospel.  Usually, the progress of the gospel in the world is determined by the continuing progress of the gospel in my own heart.  Peter’s prejudice had to be challenged and removed, old patterns and habits die hard. He had to be confronted by Paul at Antioch for his hypocrisy with the Christian Pharisees in the new church. His disdain for the Romans and other non-jews had to go.  His biblical understanding of clean and unclean had to be changed. He had a wrong interpretation of the ceremonial laws and rituals. These were symbols pointing to the deeper reality of God constructing his temple in our own hearts.  It was important that God continued to work on Peter after Pentecost because there was a lot more work to be done in Peter’s life and so much of the progress of the gospel depended on what took place in Peter’s heart. Actually, God had to enlarge Peter’s heart and vision.  However, without Peter's experiencing Pentecost God could not have dealt with these other areas. God had all of Peter and that was a settled issue so these other logs in the eyes could be dealt with head on by the Holy Spirit.  There is a lesson for all of us today.

Every Christian has a journey on his or her path to spiritual maturity. I’ve shared with you my very personal journey in hopes that it may touch and inspire someone reading this.  I encourage you to examine your own life, “An unexamined life is not worth living”, have someone you can be accountable to that will “get real” with you about some of the baggage that you may need to clean out. Spend time with those who have experienced being totally surrendered to God.  Spend time in His word, spend time in prayer, and spend time soul-searching about changes you may need to make with God and with others helping you, but get honest with yourself. Talk to your family and friends and ask them to be honest with you about things that they may be aware of in your life that you need to change, about ways that you can grow.   Most importantly, let God have total control of your heart, mind, and soul. Experience Him in His fullness and let Him possess all of the areas of your heart – even of those that hurt – and of all the places that you alone are afraid to go, but you must go there with Him.

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