There have been lots of discussions surrounding sanctification lately, and they are good discussions to have. Being made holy (sanctification) is a beautiful gift from God, and one to be sought after with care and delight. There are lots of things that can be said about it, and I want to say just a few today.
I want to talk about the incredible power of sanctification by faith in God's promises.
There has been much discussion lately on the sanctifying power of believing God's promises of justification. Justification is a critically important and amazing truth about our being reconciled to God through his legal declaration of us as righteous based on the righteousness of Jesus alone, accounted to us by faith alone. It is because of this that we can stand before the holy God despite our sin. There are lots of uses and applications of this great truth. It gives deep comfort to the troubled conscience, it gives massive rejoicing to the poor in spirit who know they cannot approach God without a mediator, it provides the promised blessing of access to the Father to all the nations, and enables us to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
What has been emphasized lately in neo-calvinist circles has been the powerful sanctifying effects of resting in our justification by faith alone. When we come to rest in Christ for our acceptance with God, it heals all sorts of weird human behaviors that stem from compensating for things like fear, guilt, shame, longing for acceptance, identity, etc. Another way to say this is that our lack of justification before God has led to all sorts of bad things in us at a very fundamental level. So, for example, the more you believe that you are justified in Christ, and accepted with God, the less you will need to compensate for feelings of guilt and shame by deceiving others to appear better than you are, or acting out violently when your guilt and shame are threatened to be exposed by others. For another example, the more we come to rest in God's declaration of us as accepted with him, the less we will live in fear and be slaves to the approval of others. We will feel so safe in Christ that we will not seek security in comfort foods, overworking, body image, etc. And we will feel so approved by God that we will not have to manipulate others to get approval either by belittling others, or by using them to bolster our sense of self-worth. Much that is helpful can be explored in this, and Tim Keller is a great teacher to guide you through it. His book Counterfeit Gods is a good place to start.
And God gives even more grace.
While God's word is full of promises to us about our justification in Christ, which have a dramatic effect on our sanctification, his word is also full of promises to us about our sanctification in Christ. When these promises are believed, they have an incredible, transforming power.
Let me give a few examples.
Ezekiel 36 is a beautiful passage giving predictive promises about the new covenant in Christ. If you are not familiar with this passage, you should make it a priority in your study. Within this great chapter, full of incredible promises of what God will do (has done in our day) is a verse that reads, "I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules."*
If you are a Christian this has happened to you. You have been:
-sprinkled with clean water to cleanse you from all your uncleannesses and idols.
-given a new heart and a new spirit
-had your heart of stone removed and been given a heart of flesh
-been inhabited by the Holy Spirit of God with the result that you walk in God's statutes and are careful to obey his rules.
Do you truly believe these things about yourself? Do you think of it as a mark of humility to refuse to believe these promises? Is refusing to believe God humble? If you are in Christ, these things are true of you. If they are not true of you, you are not in Christ. If you stumble over that, please stop reading this and go read 1 John 3:1-10 carefully. If you are not in Christ, you may freely come to him through faith and repentance.
Another great chapter along these lines is Romans 6. Again, if you are not highly familiar with this chapter, I encourage you to make that a priority in your Bible reading. Paul has been laying out the doctrine of justification, that we are accepted by God apart from our works, and so the objection comes: should we just keep on sinning then? His answer is awesome; how could that be possible in light of the radical change God has effected in you? "How can we who died to sin live any longer in it?" The rest of the chapter unpacks this idea. Here are a few highlights:
"We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin" (6).
"So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus" (11).
"For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace" (14).
"But thanks be to God that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed" (17).
"But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life" (22).
Do you believe these things about yourself? Do you believe that your old self is crucified and dead with Christ? Do you believe you are not a slave to sin? Do you consider yourself dead to sin? Do you believe that sin will not have dominion over you? Do you believe that you have become obedient from the heart?
This is how you fight temptation to sin at the root level, at the level of faith. You remind yourself who you are, and what God has done for you and in you, no matter how you feel or how strong the temptation is. This is what Paul teaches in Colossians 3:9-10. "Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator." How do you not lie? By seeing (by faith) that your old self is gone, and you are a new self in Christ, who is being renewed.
Believe and walk in freedom. It is hard to overstate the importance of faith in the Christian life. We have incredible promises, lets reach out for them in faith and find greater growth in our sanctification. And if you have come to think that sanctification only comes through resting in the justification promises, I encourage you to widen your scope.
*Ezek. 36:25-27
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