The Secret Of Holy Living 

    Among devotional writers, Paul and David are without peers.  How often we seem to intuitively turn to the Psalms of David or the letters of Paul for our devotional reading.  Both take us into their strictest confidence and bare their deepest heart secrets.  Neither is a theorist.  Their writings spring from a personal relationship with God.  Both use the personal pronouns with amazing dexterity – never with offense, always with heart-warming nearness to the devout reader.  Our texts are examples.

    Hear David, “One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in His temple” (Psa. 27:4).

    Hear Paul, “But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ…Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended:  but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:7, 13-14).  Three things characterize their spiritual lives. 

Singleness of Purpose

    Both were committed to “one thing.”  Having discovered the “unsearchable riches of Christ,” they turned from all other considerations and pursuits.  Having beheld His glory and beauty, from that point on, nothing else really counted. 

Singleness of Pursuit

    Second, their lives were characterized by singleness of pursuit.  Both declared, “One thing I do,” “One thing I seek after.”  Not content to be passive, their souls reached out in hot pursuit of the One to whom they have been attracted.  Every activity must tend toward one goal, and that goal was a Person – the Lord Jesus Christ. 

Singleness of Love

    Third, their lives were characterized by singleness of love.  Both were completely enamored by one Person.  David’s interest in the temple lay in the fact that it was the Lord’s temple.  There he could “behold the beauty of the Lord.”  And so it was with Paul – a constraining love held him to the path of duty.  Without hesitation he declares, “I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord:  for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ” (Phil. 3:8).  A real paraphrase of Paul’s love for Christ could be:  “Jesus only; nothing more; nothing less; nothing else.”

    To love the Savior is to love the things that He loves; it is to do the things that He does; and it is to suffer the things that He suffers.  In a word, it is to be like Him.  “But we all,” says Paul, “with open face beholding as in a glass (mirror) the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3:18).  That, my friends, is the secret of all holy living. 

    – Melvin H. Snyder.  From Pilgrim Holiness Advocate and American Holiness Journal.