Sanctification

On Christmas Day, a lot of kids excitedly opened presents which contained expensive toys. But written on the box were those dread words, “Batteries Not Included”. No matter how elaborate and expensive a toy is, if it’s supposed to work on batteries and the batteries aren’t included, it’s useless. It doesn’t work. It just sits there.

But when God gave us a new life in Jesus Christ, he included the batteries. What I mean is that God didn’t just give us a new life and then expect us to supply the power to make it work. He gave us His Holy Spirit and put into action a process called sanctification. That process is what we want to look at today.

Over the past several weeks, we’ve been looking at what it means to be a Christian. Let’s review what we’ve learned. First, we learned that you become a true Christian by doing two things - repenting of your sin; that is, turning your back on that self-directed lifestyle that leaves God out of the picture, and placing your trust in Jesus Christ; by believing in Him, not just believing some facts about Him.

You can call yourself a Christian, you can go to church, you can wear a cross around your neck, but unless you have taken those two essential steps at some point in your life, the Bible says that you really aren’t a follower of Jesus Christ.

We also learned that the moment you place your faith in Jesus Christ, several important spiritual transactions take place which affect your relationship with God.

First, you are justified. That is, you go from being a guilty sinner in the sight of God to being innocent. You go from having no righteousness in God’s sight to having the righteousness of Christ. You go from being under the wrath of God to being under the grace of God. And you go from being at war with God to having peace with God. All these things happen when you are justified by faith in Jesus Christ.

Second, you are born again. That is, you go from being spiritually dead to being spiritually alive. You go from being a child of the devil to being a child of God. You go from being a slave to sin to being a servant of righteousness. When you become a Christian, you are made alive in Jesus Christ. That’s what the Bible calls spiritual regeneration.

Third, you are adopted into God’s family. This is the action by which God the Father places you as a full-fledged son or daughter in his family. You gain the full rights of sonship. You become an heir of God’s riches, and a co-heir with Jesus Christ. You gain all sorts of privileges - unlimited access to your heavenly father; a close bond of affection with God the Father; and an anticipation of someday receiving your eternal inheritance in glory. These blessings all come as a result of adoption.

Fourth, when you place your trust in Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit comes and takes up residence in your life. Your body becomes the Temple, or dwelling place, of the Holy Spirit. When he comes into your life, the Holy Spirit does several things - he baptizes, or places, you into the Body of Christ, the church. He seals you with a divine mark of ownership on your life. Nobody can tamper with you or remove God’s seal of ownership, which is the Holy Spirit.

And he wants to fill your life. He wants to control you in a way that will cause you to become the person God intended you to be; a person whose outlook, and attitudes, and reactions, and relationships will more and more resemble Jesus Christ’s.

That’s where we left off a couple of weeks ago, and that’s a good place for us to begin today to consider this process called sanctification. The word “sanctify” means “to make holy”. It comes from the same root as the word “saint”. A saint is someone who is holy. So what is sanctification? It is the process of becoming holy.

Now who’s responsible for this process? Well, the Bible tells us that God is. The process of sanctification is just like all the other spiritual transactions that take place in the life of a believer. It is God who justifies us. It is God who regenerates us. It is God who adopts us. It is God who sends His Holy Spirit to come and live within us. Likewise, it is God who sanctifies us.

To the Corinthians, Paul wrote…

1 Corinthians 6:11 But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

To the Thessalonians, he wrote…

1 Thessalonians 5:23 May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through.

To Titus, Paul wrote that…

Titus 2:14 Christ gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.

Peter wrote, at the very beginning of his first epistle…

1 Peter 1:1-2 Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To God’s elect… who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit.

All these Scriptures indicate very clearly that the Christian life is not a do it yourself project. It is not a course in self-improvement. It is not a process by which God gives us the gift of eternal life, and then expects us to try to get our act together. The process of becoming holy is something that God wants to do for us; it’s not something we can do for ourselves.

The Bible tells us that sanctification has two sides, something like the two sides of a coin. One side of sanctification is positional and the other side is progressive. To put it another way, one side is static and the other side is dynamic. Let me explain…

Back in the Old Testament, God often told the children of Israel to set certain things aside for His purposes. For example, he told them to set apart the tribe of Levi to serve as priests for the rest of the nation. He told them to set apart the seventh day of the week, the Sabbath. He told them to make a special tent, called the Tabernacle, which they were to set apart as a place of worship. He told them to set apart certain vessels and utensils to be used in the worship services.

When you set something apart for God’s use, you sanctify it. It doesn’t mean that that object has any special qualities in and of itself. The Levites were just ordinary people, like all the other people of Israel. The Sabbath was just an ordinary day like every other day of the week. But those things were made special - they were sanctified - because they had been reserved for a special purpose.

We do the same today. This sanctuary we’re sitting in is a room that has been set apart for a special purpose. The name “sanctuary” means “holy place”. We don’t use this room for common things. We don’t use it to hold driver’s ed classes, or to have fashion shows, or to hold rummage sales. It’s special. It is a place where we worship God. It is reserved for that purpose. It is a sanctified room.

Take our church communion set, for example. Those plates and trays are special. They are set aside for the remembrance of the Lord’s supper. We don’t use them for anything but that. We don’t bring them out when we have fellowship dinners in the Rambikur Room. We don’t use them to pass out punch and cookies. They’re special, set aside for a particular purpose having to do with the worship of God. Those are sanctified dishes.

(In the book of Daniel, you may remember that King Belshazzar of Babylon was having a wild party. They brought out the goblets of gold and silver that they had stolen from the Temple in Jerusalem and used them to drink from. They profaned those sacred objects. God judged them for it, and that night the Babylonian empire fell. It is a very serious thing to take something that is sanctified and use it for common purposes.

We talk about the holy land, or the holy city, the city of Jerusalem. Those places aren’t holy because of what goes on in them, but they are holy in the sense that they have been set apart in history for God’s use.

That is what we mean when we talk about positional sanctification. It is when you take something ordinary and set it apart for the special use of God.

The Bible says that if you are a Christian, that is what has happened to you. Your status has changed. You are no longer an ordinary person. You have been positionally sanctified, or set apart, for the special use of God.

When Paul wrote to the church at Corinth, he was writing to a church that was having problems. They were fighting and bickering with each other, and acting in a disgraceful way. There were moral problems, and legal problems, and financial problems in that church. It was a mess.

But you know how Paul addressed them? He didn’t start his letter off by saying “Dear Scumbags”, he said “To the church of God in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy.”

Even though those Corinthians were being anything but holy, Paul said that they were holy people. They were holy in that they had been set apart for God’s use. They had been sanctified as the people of God. They had been separated out from all the other people in the city of Corinth to be a special people that God could use for his glory.

In other words, to quote Peter, they were “a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that they may declare the praises of him who called them out of darkness into his wonderful light.” And that’s what made their behavior so disgraceful, so disappointing. They were not living up to the purpose for which God had called them.

Ephesians 1:4 For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.

Ephesians 2:10 For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works

And that gets us to the flip side of the coin.

The Corinthians had been positionally sanctified, but they obviously weren’t holy in their conduct. They needed to be progressively sanctified. Positional sanctification is when you are declared holy by God. Progressive sanctification is when holiness actually becomes part of your character and your conduct.

If you are a Christian, you have been positionally sanctified. That’s a fact. All Christians are equal in that sense, because all Christians have been set apart for God’s use. And, by the way, that’s why the Bible calls all Christians “saints”. Not just the best Christians; all Christians are saints. According to the Bible, a saint is simply someone who has been set apart as one of God’s people.

But not all Christians are equal in terms of their progressive sanctification. Some seem to be further along the road than others. Some Christians are a lot more like Jesus Christ than others. Why is that? Why are some Christians so godly, and such beautiful people, while others act like they must have been baptized in lemon juice?

Well, it has to do with how much you let God control your life. Remember, progressive sanctification is the work of God. But God can only do that work in your life if you let him.

When you are teaching a child how to write, what do you do? At some point in the process, you take his hand in your hand and you show him how to form the letters. His hand is the one holding the pencil, but your hand is doing the steering.

Now what happens if the child resists? He decides that he doesn’t want to co-operate. He wants to do it on his own. That makes the process very difficult doesn’t it? You’re trying to move his hand in one direction and he’s trying to go in another. And the finished product doesn’t look very good.

This is a perfect illustration of what God is trying to do with us in this matter of sanctification. He has his hand on our life. He wants to steer us and guide us in the right direction, but he can only do it if we let him. If we pull away from him, or if we say “Please take your hand off my life, God. I want to do it myself.” what will be the result? The result will be a mess.

But if we yield control to him, if we let him do the steering, our lives will begin to form letters that will spell the name of Jesus Christ.

Now you might be saying, “OK, but eventually, that child learns to write on his own, and he doesn’t need your hand to guide his anymore.” Well, that’s where this illustration breaks down. Because when it comes to living the Christian life, you never reach the point where you no longer need God’s hand on your life.

Why? Because the Christian life is utterly impossible to live under your own power. You simply can’t do it on your own! Doesn’t matter how long you’ve been a Christian, or how mature you are in the faith, you can’t live the Christian life unless you are totally dependent upon God every moment of the day. In fact, the more mature you become as a Christian, the more you’re going to realize that.

It’s a funny thing, but Christian growth is just the opposite of physical growth. When a human baby is born, he is totally dependent on his parents for everything. He needs to be fed, he needs to be burped, he needs to be changed, he needs to be carried everywhere. But then, as he begins to grow, he gradually becomes more independent.

He learns how to eat. Boy, does he learn how to eat! He learns how to dress himself, he learns how to get around on his own and to think for himself. He eventually learns all the skills he needs to live independently. Physical growth is a progression from dependence to independence.

That’s just the opposite of spiritual growth. Spiritual growth is a progression from independence to dependence. When a person becomes a Christian, he is a spiritual baby. He’s a newborn. And in many ways, he’s still independent of God. His behavior shows that.

He’ll be out in his car on the Southern State Parkway and somebody cuts him off. And his immediate reaction is “Step aside God, let me handle this.” He’ll go to the bar with his old buddies on Friday afternoon at happy hour, and he’ll say “You wait out here, God. I’ll be out in a couple of hours.”

His life is independent. He acts and reacts on his own. He doesn’t rely on God for direction, or wisdom, or provision. He thinks he can take care of these things himself. And it’s only as he begins to grow as a Christian that he realizes that he can’t. And so, almost reluctantly at first, he becomes more dependent on God. And the more he grows, the more dependent he becomes.

If you have read the writings of some of the great spiritual giants who have ever lived, you will find in each of them a common thread. In each of them, you find almost a childlike dependence upon God for every little detail of their life.

You see, in the spiritual life, the degree to which you are independent of God is the degree to which you are not sanctified.

Only God can make us holy. Only God can give us the spiritual resources we need to live pure and good lives. So that means that progressive sanctification can only take place in practical terms as we offer ourselves to God for him to live through us.

Romans 12:1 Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.

Galatians 2:20 I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.