![]() Thus the disciple either hears, and engages the foe, gaining victories by faith in Christ, or when disobedient, hears the Word and repents with a will to more consistent fidelity. And so the life lived is one lived hearing the Word as commandment, or often as rebuke, but responding to the Word as the normative guide for all things. But the disciple of the Lord does disobey. He must hear the command of God to turn from sin to righteousness and obey. The progress of the believer demands a ministry of God’s Word. Transformation that is clearly discernable would be seen, and it would not be hard to do so. If one could have a bird’s eye view of the history of our lives he would see, that in spite of failures both great and small, there may be discerned a genuine change in the thinking and affections of the true believer in Christ. We grow in grace but in a fallen world, that growth is uneven in its progress. Though it is God’s work, it varies as the renewed man engages his three great enemies, this world and its siren’s song, Satan and his wiles, and the flesh with its strong inclinations. This is not to say that sanctification may be represented on a graph as an ascending line of progress with inevitable percentages of growth, year by year. Now this I say, and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds (Ephesians 4:17). There is no independent righteousness, either personal, or of departed saints, which becomes the substance of our holiness. Without His atoning work there would be no hope of sanctification in this life or glorification in the next. Just as His righteousness is the ground of our justification, so His righteous obedience is the ground of our growth in obedience. ![]() ![]() He has come into the world and lived a life of true separation, a life unique in its pristine character. The pots and pans used in the tabernacle’s priestly work were separated to the purposes of the Lord. The Hebrew word kadosh means “separate.” To be holy is to be separated to the Lord and to His purpose to save a people for His eternal glory. Indeed, Paul calls Christ our sanctification (cf. Thus the sanctification won is now our sanctification but Christ is surely the author and finisher of it. He works righteousness in them, as He has worked righteousness for them, but that work of righteousness in them is His work, even though, by union with Christ, we come to own it. The satisfaction of divine justice, the application of saving grace, and the final state of glory all depend on what the Lord Jesus Christ accomplished by His death on behalf of His people. All of our salvation was won by the death of our Lord on the cross. The sanctification process, like justification, is the work of God, and it is God who must have the glory and honor of it. In the same way, though we are different now, having a renewed will, we can make no claim to merit other than that which comes from Christ. Our hearts fill, and our mouths open with praise to such a God who would in mercy provide what we never could have accomplished. ![]() And, as the Old Testament prophets looked forward to His appearing in hope, so we look back to His salvific work. But Christ appeared and everything is changed. Without the death of our Lord all would have been lost, the eternal purpose of God, the renewal of creation, the renewal of the race now, without the Lord’s intervention, hopelessly careening toward only eternal damnation and nothing more, all lost. And it was God who did what needed to be done to provide a righteousness not our own, a justification which in no way depended on our endeavors. It was God who called us to Christ, with a calling that worked spiritual resurrection in our hearts. We are now in union with our Lord and Savior. Lest anyone should think that sanctification is our contribution to the “working out” of our salvation, the confession grounds it in the gospel events. The gospel events constitute the fountainhead of our sanctification.įor I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified (1 Corinthians 2:2). They who are united to Christ, effectually called, and regenerated, having a new heart and a new spirit created in them through the virtue of Christ’s death and resurrection, are also farther sanctified, really and personally, through the same virtue, by His Word and Spirit dwelling in them the dominion of the whole body of sin is destroyed, and the several lusts thereof are more and more weakened and mortified, and they more and more quickened and strengthened in all saving graces, to the practice of all true holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.
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