How to Pursue Holiness Without Becoming a Pharisee
⏱ 13 min read
You have probably noticed the pattern in yourself, or in someone you love. The Christian sets out, in good faith, to pursue holiness — to put off the small sins, to take seriously the daily disciplines, to live a life that is more visibly conformed to Christ. Six months in, something has gone subtly wrong. The practices are intact. The reading is happening. The temper is shorter, not longer. The judgement of other believers has become sharper. The joy has thinned. The marriage feels more brittle. The children are more anxious. The pursuit of holiness has produced, against the believer’s intention, the shape of a Pharisee — disciplined, doctrinally precise, increasingly without warmth.
You may be reading this because you have started to suspect that shape in your own life. Or you may be reading because you have watched it in a brother or sister and want the language for what is happening. Either way, the question is the same one Jonathan Edwards spent his life trying to answer: how do you tell the holiness that is real from the holiness that has gone wrong, while it is happening, in time to course-correct?
Edwards’s deepest treatment of the question is Religious Affections — a book he wrote after the Great Awakening, when he had watched a generation of awakened converts settle into shapes of religion that did not always survive close inspection. The book is long and dense and not, on first reading, an obvious self-help. But the diagnostic underneath it is one of the most useful things a Christian can carry. This essay walks two passages slowly. If you want a daily page to walk alongside the reading, Bible Study Workbook for Women is the 140-day companion built for the woman who is doing this kind of slow, examining work in the quiet hours of the week.
The first passage: what the real pursuit feels like
Edwards’s starting point is not a definition of holiness. It is a description of what the pursuit actually feels like from inside the soul that is doing it rightly. That description is the diagnostic — because the soul whose pursuit has gone Pharisaical feels something quite different inside, and the felt difference is the first place the trouble shows.
“I felt an ardency of soul to be what I know not otherwise how to express, emptied and annihilated; to love Him with a holy and pure love; to serve and follow Him; to be perfectly sanctified and made pure with a divine and heavenly purity.”
— Jonathan Edwards, quoted in Essentials of Prayer by E. M. Bounds
Read it twice. Notice the verbs. Emptied. Annihilated. These are not the verbs of a self-improvement project. These are the verbs of a soul whose pursuit of holiness has, at its centre, a wanting not to be the self that it is. The Pharisee’s pursuit, by contrast, has at its centre a wanting to enhance the self — to add holiness to the self as one might add an accomplishment, to be the kind of person whose holiness can be observed and respected, by other people and by oneself.
That distinction is the whole essay in one sentence. The real pursuit of holiness moves the soul out of itself, toward God; the false pursuit moves the soul deeper into itself, with God recruited as the language of the moving. The two pursuits look very similar from the outside for a long time. Both involve reading. Both involve prayer. Both involve moral effort. The difference shows in the felt direction of the soul — and that is what Edwards is naming when he says ardency of soul to be emptied and annihilated. The real pursuit is not after self-enlargement. It is after self-displacement. The Pharisee’s pursuit is the opposite.
You can test this in your own life by sitting honestly with one question: when I imagine becoming the kind of Christian I am trying to become, what part of me lights up? If the part that lights up is the part that wants to be seen as that kind of Christian — by your spouse, by your church, by the woman whose discipleship you envied at study group, by your own internal observer — the pursuit has bent toward the Pharisaical, even if the outward practices are still doctrinally sound. If the part that lights up is the part that wants, almost wordlessly, to be with God and to be unlike yourself in the ways that have kept you from Him — that is the ardency Edwards is naming. That is the pursuit that does not become a Pharisee, because its native direction is not self-aggrandisement but self-emptying.
The reason this matters practically is that the same outward practices serve both pursuits. The same daily reading. The same disciplines. The same morning prayer. What changes the practices into the false kind is not the practices themselves; it is the soul’s underlying direction. Which is why the question am I becoming a Pharisee cannot be answered by inspecting the schedule. It has to be answered, slowly and honestly, by inspecting the direction of the wanting underneath the schedule. (For the small daily page on which that honest inspection can happen without becoming morbid or self-condemning, Christian Journal Prompts for Teen Girls is the weekly companion when the question is being learned young, and the same prompt-pattern adapted for adult life sits underneath much of the slow daily practice this essay points toward.)
The second passage: where the pursuit goes wrong
Edwards’s second move is to name the specific symptom by which a pursuit-of-holiness gone wrong gives itself away. The symptom is not what you would expect. It is not extra strictness, or doctrinal aggression, or the obvious things outsiders notice. It is something subtler — something the Pharisaical believer often cannot see in herself, but which she can be helped to see if the diagnostic is named clearly enough.
“This your practice shows, that you place not your happiness in God, in nearness to him, and communion with him.”
— Jonathan Edwards, Select Sermons
Sit with that sentence for a moment. You place not your happiness in God.
Edwards is naming the diagnostic test. The believer whose holiness-pursuit has gone Pharisaical can be identified by where, in fact, she places her happiness. Not where she says she places it; not where her doctrine claims she places it; where her actual happiness, observable in her actual moods and behaviours, in fact rests. If her happiness rises and falls with her own performance — with whether she had a good prayer-time, whether the discipline was kept, whether the day was Godward — then her happiness is in herself as a religious agent. It is not in God. It is in her own holiness-output. The God-language is real but secondary; the deeper engine is the small daily reading of her own spiritual progress, and the happiness or unhappiness that reading produces.
This is the Pharisaical structure Jesus diagnosed in the original Pharisees. They were not happy in God. They were happy in their own observance — in being the kind of person whose observance was reliable, visible, and superior. Their misery, when their observance was disrupted (by Jesus, by the sinners He welcomed, by the disciples who plucked grain on the Sabbath), was the misery of the self-located soul, not the God-located one. Their happiness was in the religion, not in the God the religion was supposed to be for.
Edwards’s diagnostic test, then, is not check your doctrines or check your disciplines. It is check where your actual happiness rests. The believer whose happiness, in honest examination, is in nearness to God and communion with Him — whose moods rise and fall with whether she has been with Him, regardless of whether the time felt impressive — is on the real road. The believer whose happiness is in her religious self-image, in the felt sense of being-the-kind-of-Christian-who-does-this-well, is on the Pharisaical road, even if the outward shape of the two roads is almost identical for years.
Pause here. Let the body soften. The diagnostic above is hard to receive without the body tensing against it — the chest tightens, the shoulders rise, the inner observer starts defending. Let one slow breath come in and out. The point of the diagnostic is not to condemn you; it is to give you the small clear question by which the slow correction becomes possible. The correction itself is gentle. It begins in the body that is willing to soften before the question rather than brace against it.
The third passage: the door back to the real thing
If the first passage names the felt direction of the real pursuit, and the second names the diagnostic for when the pursuit has gone wrong, the third passage names the door back. This is the part most modern teachings on holiness skip past, because the door back is not what the moralist instinct expects.
“‘The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart; that is, the word of faith which we preach.’ There is no need of doing any great work to come at this rest; the way is plain to it; it is but going to it, it is but sitting down under Christ’s shadow.”
— Jonathan Edwards, Select Sermons
Read that twice. There is no need of doing any great work to come at this rest. This is Edwards refusing the very move the Pharisaical instinct wants to make at the moment of correction. The believer who has noticed her holiness-pursuit has gone wrong will, by reflex, try to correct it with another holiness-pursuit — a harder one, a more interior one, a more rigorous one. That is the Pharisaical move repeating itself one level deeper. Edwards forbids it. The way back is not another great work. It is the sitting down under Christ’s shadow. The way back is the giving-up of the project of being-the-kind-of-Christian, and the simple coming-to-rest in the company of the Christ whose presence is the thing holiness was always for in the first place.
This is gentle, and it is hard, in different proportions for different believers. It is gentle because the door back is not effort. It is rest. It is sitting. It is the simple coming-into-the-shadow of the One whose nearness is the entire point. It is hard because the Pharisaical instinct does not, by its nature, want to sit down. It wants to do — and it will read the call to sit as a temptation to spiritual sloth, or as a soft-pedalling of the seriousness of holiness, or as an evasion of the believer’s responsibility. None of those readings are correct. The sitting is the most serious response to the diagnostic above, because the sitting is the only posture in which the direction of the soul can quietly re-correct toward God. The doing cannot do that; doing more is the disease, not the cure.
What this looks like practically is small. It looks like a five-minute sitting with God in the morning that does not produce an outcome. It looks like reading one verse slowly rather than five verses for the sake of getting through them. It looks like a prayer that says Father, I cannot tell whether my pursuit has been for You or for me; sit me back down under Your shadow today and let the day be what it is. It looks like the willingness to let the holiness-output drop, for a season, while the deeper re-orientation happens. The believer who has lived inside Pharisaical patterns for years will, at first, feel almost lazy when she tries this. The laziness-feeling is the withdrawal from the false engine. It passes. The slower, deeper rest underneath is the soil real holiness grows in. (For the seasonal, framework-shaped version of this slowing-down — when the body wants a defined practice to walk inside — Lent Fasting Ideas Beyond Giving Up Chocolate walks fifteen older practices the church has used for centuries to displace the doing-engine without abandoning the discipline; and Advent Meaning in Christianity walks the slow four weeks of waiting that, by design, refuses the Pharisaical instinct to perform.)
What the daily life of the corrected pursuit looks like
If the diagnostic has landed and the door back is open, the daily life of pursuing holiness without becoming a Pharisee settles into a particular shape. The shape is not glamorous. It is the shape Edwards’s converts, at their best, lived inside for the rest of their lives.
It begins each morning with the sitting. Not with the to-do list. Not with the day’s scripture pre-printed and checked off. With the coming-to-rest under Christ’s shadow — five minutes, ten, however long the morning allows. The sitting precedes the reading. The reading is then done from inside the sitting, not from inside the productivity instinct that opens the day in most modern lives. The reading is slow. One passage. Sometimes one verse. The believer reads as a soul being-with-God, not as a project being-improved.
Through the day, the holiness-pursuit then expresses itself in the small, mostly-invisible choices the day actually offers — the slower word with the difficult colleague, the patient response to the child’s third interruption, the small honesty in the small interaction at the supermarket. These are not the dramatic projects the Pharisaical instinct wants. They are the ordinary expressions of a soul whose centre has been re-located, even by one degree, toward God. (For the small daily structure on which the reading and the sitting and the ordinary expressions can be carried without inventing a new practice every morning, SOAP Bible Study Method — Free Printable Worksheet is the gentle starter scaffolding many believers begin with; the deeper 140-day form of the practice sits in the workbook below.)
At the end of the day, the believer returns. Not to inspect her output. To rest, briefly, in the shadow again. To name, with God, what was hard. To name, with God, what was given. To sleep. Tomorrow she will sit again. That is the pursuit. It does not feel impressive. It is not meant to. The fruit grows quietly, over years, in the soul that has stopped trying to grow it. And the wider doctrinal context for this slow shape — what the inward growing actually is, what the once-for-all standing underneath it is — lives in the two sibling essays that complete this small cluster. What Is Sanctification and How Does It Actually Happen? walks John Owen’s account of the inward Spirit-work that produces the slow conformity; and The Difference Between Justification and Sanctification walks Spurgeon’s trinitarian map of where each work of God belongs in the believer’s life.
A closing word for the believer who has already become a little Pharisaical
If you have read this far and you have started to suspect that the Pharisaical structure has been in you for longer than you want to admit, the move is not despair. It is the same small move Edwards points his hearer toward: the sitting down under Christ’s shadow. The door has not closed. The God who has watched the false pursuit happen has also been waiting, patiently, for the moment the soul becomes honest enough to come back to the rest. That moment is not measured in dramatic confession. It is measured in the next five quiet minutes you take to sit with Him before the day begins, with nothing being produced, with no project being added. The re-orientation begins there. The fruit, over time, follows.
Holiness was never the project the Pharisaical instinct wanted to make it. It was always the slow conformity of a soul that had learned to place its happiness in nearness to God. That is the holiness the New Testament names. The pursuit of it does not become Pharisaical when its centre of gravity stays, daily, in nearness rather than in performance. The simplest test is the gentlest one: today, where is your happiness located?
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A workbook for the slow sitting
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Same Edwards posture — the soul placed daily under Christ’s shadow before any output is attempted, the slow re-location of the heart’s centre toward nearness with God — held across a structured page that holds the rhythm so the daily sitting does not have to be reinvented each morning.
Bible Study Workbook for Women
The Stilling Waves Bible Study Workbook for Women walks the Edwards placed-happiness-in-God practice across 140 days — the daily sitting under Christ’s shadow, the slow re-orientation of the soul’s centre, the small honest naming of where the day’s happiness actually rested. Built for the woman who has tried the doing-engine and wants to walk the slower way.
