God’s Holiness is the Secret Sauce

HOLINESS & TRUST

Jackie Hill Perry wants to help people who have trouble trusting God. In her new book Holier Than Thou, Perry walks readers through various Scripture passages and reveals God’s holiness for what it really is. Showing readers that God’s being “holier than thou” is actually the best news in the world, and it’s the key to trusting him. 

She explains, “For many people, all it means for God to be holy is that he doesn’t sin, which is true in one sense. God’s moral purity is truly an aspect of what it means for God to be holy, but that’s not all that it means. The term “holy” literally means ‘separate’ or to be ‘set apart.’ God is not only holy because He is sinless but also because He is transcendent, meaning, He exists differently than everything that exists. So with that in mind, thinking of God as holy should lead us to not only trust Him because He’s morally pure but also because He is totally different from anything and anyone we will ever meet.”

She helps readers understand by walking them through familiar passages and narratives, like Isaiah 6, for example, where God’s holiness is revealed. Jackie says in the introduction of her book, that nothing in the book is new since her primary source is the scriptures. She’s simply communicating an old truth in a new way.

WHO SHE WAS

Jackie Hill Perry felt a strong attraction to females at a very young age, but it was not until she was 17 that she began to explore her feelings. The gender confusion began around the 1st or 2nd grade when she had the thought she wanted to be a boy, acting as the dominating one in relationships.  

Jackie attended church with her aunt most Sundays for the first nine years of her life. That foundation gave her convictions about who God was during her formative years. However, she was always attracted to women even knowing it was wrong and feeling a temptation to explore it. The first time she was flirted with by another woman was at a high school dance and she said, “It felt natural….it was like this is what I want.” As she began to explore the lifestyle, clubbing, etc., she realized she was having fun on the surface. There was not a deep inner satisfaction and she would even tell the girlfriends that what they were doing was a sin. Jackie lived in a constant state of conviction.

WHO SHE BECAME

Jackie was not going to be found in church where they “didn’t care too well for people like me. Me, being a gay girl.” God being God found a way to reach her. When she was 19 and watching TV one evening, the Lord brought His strong convicting presence and revealed to her that she would “die and go to hell” if she continued in the sins that she loved. Jackie had a conversation with God telling Him that she didn’t want to be straight. She liked girls. She had equated being heterosexual with salvation, but the Lord began to make her aware that He could change her desires, He could give her desires for a man.  She began to consider her actions and thoughts in light of their consequences and to weigh the costs.  

“Sin is the issue plaguing a person, and homosexuality is just an outworking of that nature.” Jackie began to realize that her arrogance, anger, pride, acts of stealing, smoking weed, and stealing was just not worth it.  In those moments she began to see the Lord offering her a choice, life in Him or without Him- death. The Lord loved her so much that He showed her how much greater was His love for her than that of a fellow human being.

"Without a sermon, an altar call, or any emotionally-laden music gesturing me to "come to Jesus"- just sitting in my bed, with the TV on and the sun not yet up-I saw Jesus.  He was better than everything I’d ever known and worthier of having everything that I thought was mine to own, including my affections. They were for Him to have and to be glorified with.”

She broke up with her girlfriend, which was painful as she loved her but knew she was choosing the right thing. Jackie began a journey into understanding womanhood and what it meant to be a woman “in the fullest “and the more time she spent with the Lord the more He showed her how.

Preston entered her life after asking for advice about a poem he was writing.  They talked every week, sharing while she was in LA and he was in Chicago. The fact that he was not afraid of her or intimated as other men had been and that he saw her "as God did, a woman with more baggage than she had the strength to carry…" showed her he was different. A relationship developed and today Jackie Hill Perry is married to Preston and they have three children.