Sanctification

Faith and Sanctification

Tony Reinke Sanctification, Thomas Schreiner

For the nourishment of my own soul I’ve recently been listening to Thomas Schreiner’s 2007 sermon series through Galatians. The series is very good (and his new commentary on Galatians is superb).

Not surprising, Schreiner sees in Galatians 3:1–3 a very important passage for properly understanding the Christian life.

Here’s the passage:

O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?

Schreiner expounds its importance of this passage nicely in a 6-minute clip taken from his sermon “Faith From First to Last.” I commend this excerpt for your own meditation.

You can listen here:

Indicatives, Imperatives, and Personal Holiness

Tony Reinke Imperatives + Indicatives, Sanctification

C. F. D. Moule, “’The New Life’ in Colossians 3:1-17,” Review and Expositor 70:4 (1973), page 479 [ht]:

Christian existence is a strangely relaxed kind of strenuousness, precisely because the Christian gospel is what it is. Before ever any demand is made, the gift is offered: the announcement of good news precedes the challenge.

The indicative precedes the imperative as surely as the rope is made fast round a firm piece of rock for the climber’s security before he has to apply himself to the struggle. Moreover (if the parable may be extended one clause further), the climber must attach himself to the rope before starting his effort. So the gospel not only begins with the indicative statement of what God has done, before it goes on to the imperative: even the imperative is first a command to attach oneself (be baptized! become incorporate!), before it becomes a command to struggle.

The striving does come: strenuousness is indispensable for the Christian climber—but only in dependence on all that has first been given by God and then appropriated through the means of grace. And the attachment to Christ, which is what causes the tension and makes us “amphibian,” is also precisely what gives us our confidence and our grounds for hope, as it is also the source of forgiveness and renewed strength when we fail.

Related: Sinclair Ferguson on “Supporting the imperatives to holiness.”

Growth in Holiness

Tony Reinke Sanctification

One very helpful book on the doctrine of progressive sanctification—or how we grow in our display of Christ-likeness—is David Peterson’s Possessed by God: A New Testament Theology of Sanctification and Holiness (IVP, 1995). In a chapter on how we are positionally sanctified in Christ, Peterson makes these two helpful conclusions:

Our essential identity as Christians is formed by Christ and the gospel, not by our own personalities, backgrounds or achievements. Through the death and resurrection of his Son, God has cleansed us from the guilt of sin and liberated us from its consequences and its control. He has set us in a right and faithful relation to himself, together with all who call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Drawing us into an exclusive relationship with himself in this way, he has made us his holy people, destined to serve him and please him for ever. Sanctification is about being possessed by God and expressing that distinctive and exclusive relationship by the way we live.

Although God calls upon us to express the fact that we have been sanctified by the way we live, our standing with him does not depend on the degree to which we live up to his expectations. It depends on his grace alone. Those who are bowed down by the pressure of temptation and an awareness of failure need to be reminded of the definitive, sanctifying work of God in Christ, by which he has established us as his holy people. On this basis, they should be urged to press on in hope and grasp again by faith the benefits of Christ’s sacrifice. Approaching the exalted Lord with boldness, we may always receive mercy and find ‘grace to help in time of need’ (Heb. 4:16). [pp. 47–48]

This is a very carefully expressed way of explaining how our pursuit of personal holiness is rooted in the finished work in Christ. Without ever coming across as though the Christian is passive in the pursuit of sanctification Peterson makes this point well. He writes in his final conclusions:

The popular view that sanctification is a process of moral renewal and change, following justification, is not the emphasis of the New Testament. Rather, sanctification is primarily another way of describing what it means to be converted or brought to God in Christ and kept in that relationship. It would be more accurate to say that renewal and change flow from the regeneration and sanctification that God has already accomplished in our lives.

Sanctification is thus primarily the work of Christ on the cross and of the Holy Spirit through the word of the gospel, bringing us into an exclusive and dedicated relationship with God, as the holy people of the New Covenant. It is a concept with important, ongoing implications for the church, as well as for individual believers. [p. 136]

Peterson is good at showing how personal holiness is rooted in the finished work of Christ. He also does a fine job connecting personal holiness to (a) the New Covenant promises of God, (b) the broader re-creation of the cosmos, and (c) in showing that growth in godliness is a growth in Christ-likeness in his humiliation and why this should caution us in comparing ourselves to others. These are strong iron beams on which our pursuit of holiness rests.

On progressive sanctification this is not a definitive book (for example Galatians 2:20 is never mentioned!). But nevertheless Possessed by God is very good and deserves a careful read.

Holiness

Tony Reinke Herman Bavinck, Sanctification

From Herman Bavinck‘s Reformed Dogmatics (4:248),

To understand the benefit of sanctification correctly, we must proceed from the idea that Christ is our holiness in the same sense in which he is our righteousness. He is a complete and all-sufficient Savior. He does not accomplish his work halfway but saves us really and completely. He does not rest until, after pronouncing his acquittal in our conscience, he has also imparted full holiness and glory to us. By his righteousness, accordingly, he does not just restore us to the state of the just who will go scot-free in the judgment of God, in order then to leave us to ourselves to reform ourselves after God’s image and to merit eternal life. But Christ has accomplished everything. He bore for us the guilt and punishment of sin, placed himself under the law to secure eternal life for us, and then arose from the grave to communicate himself to us in all his fullness for both our righteousness and sanctification (1 Cor. 1:30). The holiness that must completely become ours therefore fully awaits us in Christ.

Good News, Doubled

Tony Reinke Cross of Christ, Cross-centered life, John Piper, Sanctification

Jesus died on the cross to atone for the guilt of our sin before a holy God. This is amazingly good news. But the cross of Christ also liberates us from our enslavement to sin’s power. Peter captures this when he writes, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness” (1 Peter 2:24).

On one hand we rejoice in our legal justification before God. On the other hand we rejoice that we have been liberated from the tyranny of sin, liberated to obey, liberated to pursue godliness, liberated to holiness. This is good news. Or is it?

In a 1994 sermon, John Piper asked:

Does this feel like good news to you? Or does it feel like the good news of the cross is being given with one hand and taken away with the other. Does it feel like good news that the message of the cross on the one hand is a lifting of guilt and on the other hand is a laying on of burden? …

There are many people today who feel the first work of the cross as liberating good news and who feel the second as burdensome bad news. For them, the grace of the cross is one thing: liberation from guilt and shame. And when they hear that the grace of the cross is not just liberation from the guilt of sin, but is also liberation from the power of sin, it doesn’t feel as good. …

Yet, he writes,

the design of the cross to liberate from the enslaving power of sin as well as the guilt of sin does not diminish the good news; it doubles it.

Union and personal holiness

Tony Reinke Sanctification, spurgeon, Union with Christ

In his exceptional commentary on Romans, Douglas Moo cites Puritan Jeremiah Burroughs on the connection between growth in personal holiness and the believer’s union with Christ. Burroughs writes, “from him [Christ] as from a fountain, sanctification flows into the souls of the Saints: their sanctification comes not so much from their struggling, and endeavors, and vows, and resolutions, as it comes flowing to them from their union with him.” Union with Christ is the fountain, the source, of personal holiness and two Pauline texts make this connection clear, Romans 6:1–14 and Colossians 3:1–17. And while a number of books on sanctification and biblical counseling mention this union at some point, it seems to me that too few books on personal holiness have roots sunk deep into this Pauline soil. One fine example of how union can provide a rich framework for personal holiness can be seen in Jerry Bridges’ classic book The Discipline of Grace: God’s Role and Our Role in the Pursuit of Holiness. Just a few of my early Monday morning thoughts, fwiw.