Landon Coleman
Immanuel Sermon Audio
Salvation: Sanctification
We'll take a Bible, we're going to look at some verses tonight, we'll do some flipping around, we do have notes in the back, we're going to talk tonight about sanctification. I'll just remind you where we've been. One, because we've done that every week, but two, because you really can't understand sanctification rightly until you understand the ground that we've covered in previous weeks. Our topic is salvation, we took one week to just talk about salvation in general terms, and I'm going to refer back to some of that original lesson later tonight, so we spent the first week talking about salvation. The next two weeks we talked about salvation accomplished, and we talked about propitiation where Jesus in his death on the cross satisfies the Father's wrath, he satisfies it by bearing it, by drinking the cup of the Father's wrath, and he deals with the Father's wrath that should have fallen on us as sinners, and then we talked about redemption, which is the aspect of Jesus dying on the cross where he shed his blood to purchase us, to redeem us, to buy us out of bondage, out of death, out of slavery, out of sin, so that is salvation accomplished as we talked about it. The fourth week we talked about regeneration, that's the unique work of the Holy Spirit, where he brings us out of death and into life, he removes our heart of stone and he gives us a heart of flesh, he changes the direction of our life, and our response to the miracle of regeneration, that's the Spirit's work, our response is what we called conversion, and conversion has two pieces to it, one, turning from sin, that's repentance, and two, turning to Jesus, which is believing or putting our faith in Jesus, so that's regeneration and conversion, and then union, justification, adoption, and reconciliation kind of all go together, and there was a lot of points in those four weeks where it was hard just to talk about one aspect of salvation without bleeding over into those other ideas. So union with Christ is our being united to him, and the clearest biblical picture of that is marriage, we talked about that on a Wednesday night, we talked about that this last Sunday, we're united to him by faith, we talked about justification, which is God's declaration that we are righteous even though we're sinful, and he makes that declaration on the basis of the work of his son Jesus, so he declares that sinners are righteous when we put our faith in Jesus, and then we talked about adoption, also a courtroom idea, also a declaration from a judge or an authority, but this is a declaration that we've been adopted into God's family, not just that we've been declared righteous and we're good in the eyes of the law, but that we're actually accepted into God's family as his son or his daughter. Tonight, well, we also talked about reconciliation, that was last week, reconciliation is just the broad idea that our relationship with God has been restored and repaired. We have been reconciled to him, and he's been reconciled to us, so that brings us to sanctification, and my hunch is that many people, maybe not you, but many people, when they think about sanctification and if you kind of walked them through all these other terms, they would say, ah, sanctification, this is where we do something, this is where I'm responsible, this is where I sort of step in and I take things over and God has done all these things for me and now it's sort of the balls in my court to grow in sanctification, and that's not really what we're going to talk about tonight, it's really not the New Testament emphasis when it comes to sanctification. So we'll try to break sanctification down tonight and then we have two more, resurrection and glorification, and I've started looking at these two and I have found it very hard to talk about them distinctly because they're so tightly connected, but we are going to break it into two weeks and talk about resurrection and glorification. So let's start with the definition, sanctification. We are no longer defiled, or you could say polluted, or you could say corrupted, no longer defiled, sin defiles us, it pollutes us, it corrupts us. So here's a quote to get us rolling. This is from a Dutch theologian named Herman Bavink, a book called The Wonderful Works of God. He says sin is guilt, but it's also pollution. Justification delivers man from his guilt, justification. God declares that we are righteous, not sinners, we're no longer condemned, we're no longer guilty, but we are declared righteous. Sanctification delivers man from his guilt, sanctification delivers him from the pollution of sin. By the former, that's justification, his conscience, consciousness is changed, and by the latter sanctification, his being is changed. By means of the first, it's justification, man comes to stand in a right relationship again, by means of the second sanctification, man becomes good again and able to do good. So that's Bavink from The Wonderful Works of God. I'll just give you a quick plug about this book that I'm quoting from. Sometimes I like to encourage you when it comes to reading and studying. Bavink was a great writer, a great author. He wrote really big books. He wrote books that are so big, they had to chop them into multiple volumes to publish them because the one book would just be massive. This book, The Wonderful Works of God, is kind of like the Cliff Notes version of his systematic theology, and I think it clocks in at like a measly 500, 600 pages or something like that. I think this is the best single volume systematic theology that I've ever read. I've read through multiple systematic theologies. They take different approaches, they break things down different ways. This is my favorite one, not even close. So if you want something to read to study, I'm not saying to you it's the easiest book to work through. I'm not saying to you that this book reads like a Tom Clancy thriller, but I'm telling you it's a really, really good book and Bavink is a really, really helpful writer and I would come in this book to you. So sanctification, one of the things I want to acknowledge before we begin is that there is a massive debate amongst Christians throughout church history and in the present day when it comes to sanctification. So you may end up hearing people use this word and what I'm saying to you is they may or may not be talking about what we're talking about tonight because there is an awful lot of disagreement about what this word actually means. Now sometimes when there's a debate about a thing, it's a binary debate. You understand what I'm saying? Sometimes there's a question at hand and it's either yes or no. It's either I'm for it or I'm again it, okay? It's just binary choice and I'll give you some examples of binary choices that we could debate. First of all, mint chocolate chip ice cream, okay? Some of you are nodding, yeah, you're like, oh that sounds great, let's go have some. It's 90 degrees outside, middle of October and some of you as soon as the picture went up there you started frowning and you started scrunching your face up and that's kind of how it is with mint chocolate chip. You either think when you go to Baskin Robbins and they have the 32 flavors, you either think I love mint chocolate chip or you just pass by it and you say not in a million years what I ordered that ice cream, yes or no kind of thing, okay? Here's another example, cilantro. How many of you like cilantro? How many of you put cilantro in your mouth and you taste dial soap like me, okay? Some people have this genetic thing, you put cilantro in your mouth and it just tastes like a big mouthful of soap and it is terrible. I'm not telling you that I don't prefer it. I'm telling you that when I go to torches and I order queso and I say no cilantro, if they bring it out with cilantro, I will not pick around it or scoop it out. I'll say you got to take that back. I cannot eat that. You just might as well have taken a big thing of dial and squirted it right on the top and start it in. I can't eat it, okay? Yes or no? Here's another example, the Dallas Cowboys, okay? Either you're completely delusional and you're one of these people who keep saying we are going to the Super Bowl and you're just living in a fantasy world or you live in the real world and you say they're terrible. They've been terrible for 30 years, they're going to be terrible for the next 30 years. They're just terrible. They're not any good. They're not going to win, okay? One or the other. One more example, cats, okay? Everybody likes dogs, how could you not like a dog? Cats, either you love cats and some of you are doing this right now, oh I love my kitty, I love cats, and some of you are shaking your heads, resolutely, no, I do not like cats, I don't want cats, okay? These are kind of binary things, yes no, I'm for it, I'm against it, you get the idea. When it comes to the debate about sanctification, it's not that kind of debate, okay? The debate is not do you believe in it or don't you? The debate is what exactly do you believe about it, okay? Lots of people use this word, sanctification, and they do not all mean the same thing, and you just have to be aware of this. Now this isn't on your notes, and I'm not going to leave these up here very long, but I'm going to roll through them, and I'm just going to give you the major positions on sanctification that you'll find in church history and that you'll find today, okay? Number one is what we will call the Catholic or the sacramental position on sanctification. This is the view that says there really is no distinction between justification and sanctification, okay? I look this up on a reliable Catholic resource this week, and I just pulled this straight off the resource. They say, look, they're just, it's the same thing, justification, sanctification, it's just kind of like two parts of the same thing, you don't really know when you move from one to the other, it's kind of all one big ball of the same stuff, and it's the idea that we receive holiness through the sacraments, and there's seven of them in the Roman Catholic church, okay? Through the act of the sacraments, you receive this holiness, and you receive it from what is called the treasury of merit, okay? It's this stockpile of merit and holiness from people like Mary or the saints who had more merit, more holiness than they needed to go to heaven, and so they kicked into this treasury, and the church has the authority to dispense this, and the way that they dispense it is through the sacraments, okay? That's a position on sanctification. Secondly, we would call this the Pelagian or the liberal view of sanctification. This is the idea that we are all flawed people, okay? No one's perfect. We all have our flaws, but this view says we're not that bad, we're not dead in our sins, I know Ephesians 2 says we're dead in our sins, we're not dead in our sins, we're not totally depraved, and the idea of sanctification here is that we are going to improve ourselves morally through the teaching of Jesus, and that's important. Sounds biblical, right? Jesus taught. We want to improve ourselves through Jesus' teaching, but this idea of sanctification really has nothing to do with the person or the work of Jesus, it's just the teaching of Jesus, and as you live it out more and more and more, as you get better at obeying Jesus, you become more sanctified, and what this view is saying is it's all on you. It is a hundred percent on you to improve yourself through moral obedience to the teaching of Jesus, okay? Thirdly, the Wesleyan or the Keswick tradition, Wesleyan is a reference to John Wesley, obviously, and Keswick is a reference to a region town in England where there were some revivals and conferences, and that's just the name that has kind of stuck through the years. The idea here is that sanctification can result in, quote, this is not my term, it's their term, Christian perfection in this life, okay, in this life. And if you're Wesleyan, if you're Methodist, method, you use methods to obtain this Christian perfection, okay? That's why Wesley and his followers got the name Methodists, because they met together as a group and they used methods to pursue this holiness, they thought they could obtain this Christian perfection. If you fall in the Keswick branch of this idea, it's not so much about using methods, it's about letting go and letting God, okay, it's like a completely passive approach. And those sound different, like the Wesleyan, you're using Methodists, the Keswick, you're just laying back and God's going to do it all, but at the root of it is the idea that if you take this approach, you end up with Christian perfection, okay? So just an example of this, I knew a man, I think this was when I was a senior in high school, I knew a man who was a pastor in Amarillo and he told me one time that he was on a nine and a half month stretch of not sinning, nine and a half months. And at the time, I thought, that's really impressive. I can't make it nine and a half minutes, nine and a half seconds, nine and a half months, but this man, I didn't understand at the time, he was speaking to me from a Keswick-type tradition and he was just saying, I've reached this plane of my spiritual life, this level of sanctification where I've just stopped sinning, I don't sin anymore. So that's one view. You see, this is important. Somebody talks about sanctification, you say, I've heard a sanctification, they might be speaking about something completely different. The fourth, Pentecostal Charismatic view of sanctification, sometimes they'll talk about the second blessing of the Holy Spirit. In many of these churches, it's really less about your personal holiness and it's really more about the power of God being put on display in your life. And the power of God might be put on display in your life through speaking in tongues or through uttering prophecies or through performing miracles, these different outward visible manifestations of the Spirit's power. And this gets talked about in the category of sanctification, but many times it really has very little to do with your growth in holiness at all. So we wouldn't fall into any of those categories, at least I wouldn't fall into any of those categories. Our elders wouldn't fall into those groups. We would fall into what would broadly be called a Lutheran or a Reformed view, Reformation, Luther, the Reformation you see where these terms are coming from, Martin Luther and the Reformation. This is the idea that says justification comes first and then sanctification follows. These are not the same thing, they're distinct things. Now sanctification does follow justification. Remember we talked about we're saved by faith alone, but the faith that saves is never alone. Justification does lead to sanctification, but these are distinct things. And justification is a declaration that we're righteous on the basis of the work of Jesus. And sanctification is a second thing that we're going to talk about tonight. This view is realistic about indwelling sin, okay? We're about on Sunday mornings to be in Romans 7, and we're going to have to be really honest about the reality of indwelling sin. Nobody's going to come out of Romans 7 saying I've made it nine and a half months without sinning. It's not going to happen. Okay, so some people say this is like a pessimistic view. I don't think it's pessimistic. I think it's realistic about the reality of indwelling sin. But it's also hopeful, it's hopeful, because we believe in the miracle of regeneration. We believe that while we were dead, God made us alive, and He took out our dead stony heart and He gave us a new heart. Like He fundamentally changed something in us. We believe in union with Christ. We're actually joined to Him. We're united to Him. We have a living, real relationship with Him, and that changes us. And we believe in the presence of the Holy Spirit. We believe that we're the temple of the Holy Spirit, and He is the Holy Spirit. And so it stands to reason that He would help us to grow in holiness. So sorting all that out would take a whole series in and of itself to talk about sanctification. And one more disclaimer I would give you before we jump in is that there's a lot of things relating to sanctification that I would like to talk about tonight, and we're not going to talk about them. So I'm just telling you, we don't have time to say everything we could say about sanctification. That's been true in all of these topics. There's a lot of things we're going to leave unsaid, so we're not going to try to be exhaustive. We're going to try to be biblical, and we're going to try to think rightly about the things that we discuss. So you're aware when you read books and you listen to podcasts and you see social media posts and you go to conferences and all these things that some people who talk about sanctification may or may not be talking about what we're talking about tonight. Question one, why do we need to be sanctified? This should be no surprise to you, God is holy, holy, holy. He's holy, holy, holy. Now I realize that most weeks in this series we've talked about God's holiness in some way, shape, or form, that's not a coincidence. This is a fundamental biblical truth, it is an essential biblical truth if you want to know who God is, and if you want to understand salvation, you have to know who God is. You can't just jump into the mix and say, "How does it all work?" You have to start with an understanding of who God is and you have to understand who we are as sinners. And this fundamental idea that we need to reckon with is that God is holy, holy, holy. Now a quick vocabulary lesson that maybe will help you as you think about sanctification in biblical terms. In the Old Testament there is a word kadosh, or kadosh, and it's the word holy. And then there is a verb kadosh, or kidosh, and that means to sanctify. And then in the New Testament, written in Greek, we find the words hagayos, holy, and hagayadzo, to sanctify. So this is why I'm pointing this out to you. In English, as words have come down to us from Hebrew and Greek, from all sorts of different languages, we talk about holiness and sanctification, and those don't sound like the same words, right? They don't sound like they share any kind of common root. But if you trace it back to the original, and you trace these words back through their linguistic sort of path, how we got them in English, these are the same thing. To sanctify something is to make it holy, and to make a thing holy is to sanctify it. So if you want to understand sanctification, the root idea is holiness. And the fundamental characteristic of God as He reveals Himself in Scripture is His holiness. He is holy, holy, holy. It is the primary characteristic of God that you've got to reckon with if you want to know the truth about who He is. So that's who God is. Secondly, why do we need to be sanctified? Sin has left us defiled and polluted. Defiled and polluted. So let's look at a few scriptures here. We've read Isaiah 6 in Revelation 4 in previous weeks. Look at Psalm 51. The heading on Psalm 51 tells you this is a psalm of David. When Nathan the prophet went to him after he had gone into Bathsheba. So this is in the aftermath of David's sin. The Lord is sent Nathan to rebuke him, and the Lord has brought conviction to David's heart, and this is David's confession to the Lord. Psalm 51, "Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love, according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgression." And the phrase I want you to think about there is blot out. It's like you're at a dinner. You spill ketchup or soy sauce or something on your shirt. You go to the bathroom and you're trying to rub it out. You're trying to blot it out. You're trying to remove that stain. David is saying there's something that has stained me fundamentally, and he can't clean it. So he's asking God to do that. Verse 2, "Wash me. Wash me. My iniquity has made me dirty and cleanse me," he says, from my sin. Sin, iniquity, transgression. Those three words show up an awful lot together in the Old Testament. I was reading personal Bible reading this week in a different place, and I noticed those three words together, sin, iniquity, transgression. Sin you fall in short. Iniquity is a perversion, transgression you've crossed a boundary. And as David thinks about those three descriptors of his moral failure, he's basically saying to God, "I need to be cleaned. I need this stain to be blotted out. I need you to wash me because I'm defiled and I'm polluted." Look at verse 7, "Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean. Wash me, and I shall be wider than snow." Verse 7 is an odd verse. Hissop is a plant. It's like a scraggly looking thing that would grow in Odessa. Like take the dead, scraggly, mesquite bush, and purge me, and then I'll be clean. It was hyssop that the people were to use at the Passover to dip it in the blood of the lamb and to smear it on the door of their house so that death would pass over them. There is a fountain filled with blood, and sinners who are plunged into it, they lose all their stains. We were just saying that, because that's what David's talking about. Take the hyssop, dip it in the blood, smear it on me, and then I'll be clean. Look what he says in verse 10, "Create in me a clean heart." He knows that disdain and pollution and corruption and defilement is not just external. It's not just surface level, but it goes all the way to his heart, and he knows that only God can, can cleanse him, can purge him, can blot him, create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Isaiah 6, we've read that. Isaiah is confronted with God's holiness, and he says, "Woe is me, for I'm a man of what kind of lips, unclean lips, and I live amongst the people of unclean lips, and the uncleanness of our lips springs from the uncleanness of our heart." Flip over to the right, we'll do a little Bible drill and see if you can find Zechariah. Zechariah 3 is one of the last prophets who preached in the story line of the Old Testament. Zechariah 3 is a vision that Zechariah has. Then he showed me Joshua, the high priest, standing before the angel of the Lord. In Satan, it's only the third time Satan's mentioned in the Old Testament by name. Only third time. Once in Job, once in the story of David and the census, and Satan inciting David to take that census, here's the third time. Satan is there, Satan is standing at his right hand, and he's there to accuse him. The Lord said to Satan, the Lord rebuke you, Satan, the Lord has chosen Jerusalem, who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you. Is this not a brand, and he's talking about Joshua, the high priest. Is he not a brand plucked from the fire? Joshua was standing before the angel, and he was clothed with what kind of garments? It's filthy garments, and the angel said to those who were standing before him, removed the filthy garments from him, and to him he said, "Behold, I've taken your iniquity away from you, and I will clothe you with pure vestments," and I said, "Let them put a clean turban on his head," so they put a clean turban on his head, "and clothe them with garments," and the angel of the Lord was standing by. So this is an odd vision, and we're not going to get into the weeds of it, but he sees the high priest, and he's dirty, and Satan is there to point out how dirty he is. How can this man represent the people? Have you seen his iniquity? Have you seen his filth? Have you seen how dirty and gross and defiled and polluted he is to the very core? And in this vision, it's kind of like Isaiah, who sees his uncleanness, and he doesn't fix it. This angel comes, and there's a tongue, and the coal, and it touches his tongue, and his sin is atoned for, and he's made clean, and in this vision, the dirty garments are removed, and he is clothed in clean garments, but Joshua doesn't do that. It's the Lord who does that. So we're defiled, and we're polluted. Let me just give you a few examples for how you can think about this idea of pollution. How many of you watch the Olympics this year? I'm probably not going to say what you think I'm about to say, so don't get too excited if you want a soapbox. I'm talking about the triathlon. Do you remember why the triathlon had to be delayed, and it almost became a biathlon? It's because the river, sin, was dirty, and they tried to clean it up before the Olympics. You know, they did all these things, and they just improved it, but not enough, and they kept testing it, and they kept telling the athletes, "We almost have the E. coli levels down low enough where you can swim in it, but they're just a little bit high. It's dirty, it's polluted." Another example of this, I just looked up the grossest rivers in the world. One of the ones I found is the Ganges River in India. Hindus believe it's a sacred river, a holy river, and they think that bathing in it cleanses them and has spiritual value as part of their idea of sanctification in the Hindu worldview. They bathe in this river, even though upstream, there are over 1,000 industrial facilities that pump sewage directly into the river. It's gross, it's polluted, it's defiled. When Americans think about sin, most Americans think sin, that's what makes us bad. If you don't sin, you're good, if you do sin, you're bad. That fits in the biblical category. The fundamental biblical idea is that sin makes us dead. The wages of sin is death. Adam and Eve don't eat of that tree. On the day that you eat of it, he didn't say you'll be bad. He said, "On the day you eat of it, you will die." Okay, fundamental sin makes us dead. It also makes us bad, and what we're acknowledging tonight is that it also pollutes us, and it defiles us. It makes us unclean. One last thought, why do we need to be sanctified? The Levitical system of the old covenant could not purify God's people and make them holy. It couldn't do it. Very quickly, Hebrews 9. Even the first covenant had regulations for worship and an earthly place of holiness. For a tent was prepared, the first section in which were the lampstand in the table and the bread of the presence is called the holy place. And the second curtain was a second section called the most holy place. Having the golden altar of incense in the ark of the covenant, covered on all sides with gold in which was a golden urn, holding the manna, and Aaron's staff that budded in the tablets of the covenant, above it were the cherubim of glory overshadowing the mercy seat of these things we cannot now speak in detail. These preparations having thus been made, the priest go regularly into the first section performing their ritual duties, but into the second only the high priest goes and he but once a year, and not without taking blood, which he offers for himself, why does he offer it for himself? Because he's defiled, he offers it for himself and for the unintentional sins of the people because they're defiled, by this the holy spirit indicates that the way into the holy places is not yet opened as long as the first section is still standing, it's symbolic for the present age. According to this arrangement, gifts and sacrifices are offered that cannot, cannot, they do not have the ability to perfect the conscience of the worshiper, but they deal only with food and drink in various washings, regulations for the body imposed until the time of Reformation. And if you keep reading down to chapter 10, we'll skip some of the same type of discussion. Hebrews 10, 12 says, "When Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down, the high priest never sat down, his job wasn't done, but Jesus sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet for by a single offering. He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified." Now the whole point of Hebrews 9 and 10 is that that old system couldn't actually deal with our sin problem. It was surface level, it was external, it was a reminder, it was pointing you forward to the sacrifice that would come, but it didn't save anyone. Not one person in the Old Testament, the Old Covenant was saved by the stuff that happened at the tabernacle or the temple. They were saved like Abraham by faith in God's promises and they looked forward to the fulfillment of those promises just like we look backward to the fulfillment of those promises in Jesus. So that system couldn't purify God's people, it couldn't make them holy. So how does God sanctify defiled sinners? Lots of things we could say here. Baving is helpful, he says sanctification is a work of God, but it is intended to be a work in which the believers themselves are also active in the power of God. That's the best succinct description of sanctification that I've found. Sanctification is God's work, it's not your work, it's God's work. God sanctifies people. It is a work that involves you in action. Doesn't mean you're responsible for it, God's the one who sanctifies, but his sanctifying work draws you into involvement and into action. So week one, I told you that as you think about salvation in the broadest sense, it's biblical to say God has saved us, it's biblical to say God is saving us, and it's biblical to say God will save us. There's truth in each of those statements, okay? Substitute sanctification into that schema. It's right to say that God has sanctified us. It's right to say that He is sanctifying us, and it's right to say that He will sanctify us. Let's walk through those quickly. First of all, the Holy Spirit definitively sanctifies believers. He definitively sanctifies believers. So we just read in Hebrews 10, maybe your Bible's still open. Verse 14 says, "By a single offering He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified." You hear the tension in that verse? They are being sanctified, but by this one offering He has perfected them. That's a finished and a completed work. It is definitively done. You see this if you'll flip to 1 Corinthians 6. 1 Corinthians 6 verse 9, "Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, either the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God, and such were some of you. But you were past tense washed, and you were sanctified, past tense, and you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God." Okay, that's Paul talking about sanctification as a past tense work. You have been. You were sanctified. You used to be all these impure, defiled, polluted things, but you were washed and you were sanctified and you were justified. This is a definitive act. So just a couple of comments here. I put the word "definite" here, and I'm meant to put the word "definitive," so you can change that if you want to. This definitive work involves setting believers apart, and this definitive work involves the gift of holiness. So when you were young, maybe you went to grandma's house, and if you were eating dinner, she had plates that you would eat dinner off of, but she also had a china cabinet, and you probably didn't get to eat chicken nuggets off of those. Maybe Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or Easter, but those dishes were set apart for something special. That's part of the idea of sanctification and being set apart as holy, that God sets his people apart. This is a definitive work. It's not an ongoing thing. It's a once-for-all time you were sanctified. He did set you apart. And there's also a parallel here when you think about definitive sanctification. You compare it to justification. In justification, we receive the gift of Christ's righteousness. It's a definitive gift. And in this definitive aspect of sanctification, we receive His holiness as a gift. It's credited to us, or it's counted to us. This is why in the New Testament, rarely are people like you and me called Christians. Most of the time, do you know what we're called? We sang it in a couple of songs earlier if you were paying attention. Saints, which literally means holy ones. Now, we think saints and we're like, "Oh, that's the really good people." That's the really good people. They get the special thing when they die. They get the saint before their name. The biblical category is if you're a Christian, you're a saint. If you've repented of your sin and put your faith in Jesus, you're a holy one. In a definitive sense, you were those things Paul said to the people in Corinth, but you were washed and you were sanctified and you were justified and you were set apart as a distinct, separate holy people. That's a definitive, completed work. Secondly, the Holy Spirit progressively sanctifies believers. This is what we've been reading on Sunday mornings in Romans 6. We'll pass on these verses. We've talked about them recently. This is the slow, steady process where the Holy Spirit who lives in us, convicts us of sin and changes us and makes us more holy and conforms us to the image of Jesus. It is a slow process. You can't microwave it, but it's also a steady process. That means within any week of your life, you probably can't look from a Monday to the next Monday and say, "I have really grown in my sanctification this week." But if you look over seven years, you probably ought to be able to look back and say, "I'm different. I've changed. I'm not perfect. I'm not completely obedient and holy, but I'm different. I've changed." And that's the work of the Holy Spirit in me. Progressive sanctification, this progressive work involves struggling to mortify sin. That's Romans 7. We'll get there on Sunday in just a few weeks. Put sin to death, Paul says. You have to kill it. And this progressive work involves growing in Christ's likeness, and that's Romans 8. That God is at work to save His people, to conform us to the image of His Son, to make us more like Jesus. So that's progressive sanctification. That's probably what most of us think. We think about sanctification. It's this slow, steady process where we're growing, becoming more like Jesus. Thirdly, the Holy Spirit finally sanctifies believers, and we'll call this glorification, and we'll talk about it in a few weeks. Final sanctification happens in our glorification. So how does this change us? Let's just make a few points. First on prayer. Praying that God's will would be done in our lives involves praying for sanctification. Turn to 1 Thessalonians 4. Thessalonians 4. Before we read it, I just want you to think about the Lord's Prayer. Our Father, who is in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Okay, when you pray like Jesus taught his disciples to pray, one of the things you ask for is that God's will would be done. I'm praying that God's will would be done. What does that mean? Well here's at least one part of what it means. First Thessalonians 4 verse 3, this is the will of God, your sanctification. We like to talk about God's will and all the secret little decisions of life. Is it God's will that I buy this house or that house, I go to this school or that school, I take this job or that job, God show me your will. You can pray about those things, you can pray for wisdom in those things, but fundamentally what is God's will for your life? It's your sanctification, it's your growth and holiness, it's your being conformed to the image of Jesus. And if you're going to pray like Jesus taught his disciples to pray, you're going to pray the Lord's Prayer, wrote repetition, or you're going to use it as a framework for how you pray. If you're going to ask that God's will would be done in your life, whether you realize it or not, you're saying, God I want you to sanctify me. That's his will, his will is your sanctification. And it's interesting as Paul writes the Thessalonians, the first specific example of that that he teases out is sexual immorality. Nothing new under the sun is there. God's will is your sanctification. And he talks immediately about sexual immorality, and he says the most counter-cultural thing that any Roman citizen could say or that any American citizen could say, you need to learn how to control your body and not live in the passion of your flesh and follow every desire. But you need to have self-control. You need to say no to some of the desires that live in your heart. That's God's will for you, your sanctification. Secondly, discipleship. The believer is called to repent of sin, to imitate Christ and to rely on God's spirit. Repent of sin, imitate Christ, rely on God's spirit. What does it mean to be a disciple? These things are part of it. Now we're short on time, so I'm going to let you read Philippians. Very helpful. We're going to talk about Romans 7 soon. Hebrews 12 says, "Strive for peace with all men and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord." You have to strive for it. It's not going to come easy. You are called to action. It's the work of the Holy Spirit, but you're called to action. Philippians 2, "Work out your salvation with fear and trembling," because God's working in you to will and to work for his good pleasure. Let me just mention two quick things. You ought to read John 17, 17 in James 1, 22, because in John 17, 17, Jesus prayed for you. And He prayed for your sanctification. He prayed that the Father would work sanctification in your life. He said, "Sanctify them in the truth. Your Word is truth. You cannot grow in sanctification apart from growing in the Word of God. Those two things are connected. That's Jesus praying. Slide them in the truth. Your Word is truth. And James warns us, "Don't you dare just be a hearer of the Word, but you have to be a doer of it. You have to grow in the Word of God and you have to live it out in your life." Evangelism, even as we call sinners to repentance, we must always base our evangelistic appeals on the grace of God and the primacy of faith in Jesus. You read that in Ephesians 2 earlier. It's by grace. You're saved through faith. It's not your own doing. It's a gift of God so that no one could boast. But you were saved to walk in good works that God prepared beforehand for you. Here's all those crazy things we talked about sanctification at the beginning, all those different views, five different views. All the errors confuse sanctification and justification. And they call on lost people to clean themselves up on their own so that God will love them. And we've got to keep these things distinct, saved by grace through faith. Last, for the church, the people of God must rely on the regular means of grace to make progress in personal, in corporate holiness. What are the regular means of grace? Scripture, prayer, worship, fellowship, the ordinances. And here's the warning for us as a church, just quickly as we close, evangelicals in the United States, us, our people. We are the world's worst at looking for a microwave for sanctification. Rather than a slow cooker, we want the 30 seconds, okay? So for some people, it's, well, I had a near-death experience or I read a book about someone who had a near-death experience and that's just changed me completely forever. Everything about me is different. It's an experience they had that fundamentally changes them. For some people, it's why I went to this conference and this person spoke at the conference. It was completely life-changing. For some people, it's a certain podcast or a certain author or a certain practice or some kind of retreat, but evangelicals are always looking for one little simple thing. If I could just do this, people ask me all the time, "What's a good devotion book?" And what they mean is, "What's something I can read every day in like 30 seconds that will make me a super Christian?" Would you give me the 30 second version? I don't have it, but if you'll just commit yourself to the Word of God and the people of God and the worship of God and discipleship and sharing your faith and fellowship with God's people and if you'll just do that over, let's just say you do it, I don't know, once a week, we'll pick Sunday, once a week, and you do it for five, ten years. It'll change you. It'll change you. That's what sanctification is about. John Murray, it's one thing for sin to live in us. It's another for us to live in sin. All of sanctification on our lives is to live out what God has worked in us, to build on this definitive work of the Spirit in sanctification even as we await the final work of the Spirit in sanctification. So let's pray, ask God to do this work in our lives. Father, we're grateful for salvation. We're grateful that from beginning to end, you are the author of our salvation. This is a story you began writing before the foundation of the earth and it's a story that you intend to see to completion in the end. And Father, we find ourselves as believers in this experience of sanctification. We can see where you have definitively sanctified us. We can see in the future where you will one day finally and fully sanctify us and Lord even now you're progressively sanctifying us through the presence of your Spirit, through the power of your Word, through the fellowship of your people. Father, we pray that you would continue this work in us and that by you working in us, we would will and work for your good pleasure. We would work out our salvation that you have worked into our hearts. Lord, we love you. We pray all these things in Jesus' name. Amen.