[SANCTIFICATION are about being holy and following God, like he expects.]
As you know, we Christians are entirely saved by God’s grace. We do nothing to earn it, as if that were even possible. Ep 2.8-9
As you may not know—’cause lots of Christians don’t—God’s grace is primarily for those who make the effort to follow him. It may extend to people who make no effort whatsoever, ’cause grace is gracious like that. But the scriptures make every indication we shouldn’t count on that. Those who meet the bridegroom unprepared, yet try to prepare themselves at the last second, will likely find themselves outside the Kingdom. Mt 25.1-13 Never take God for granted.
Making the effort to follow God, by getting rid of the sin in our lives, is called sanctification. When we turned to Jesus, we died to sin. We have to stop living in it, and live new lives. Ro 6.1-4 It doesn’t make any sense to claim we’re followers of Jesus, yet violate every command he gave us. Lk 6.46 Yet there are plenty of so-called “Christians” who do, and are counting on God’s grace to bail them out, despite Jesus’s every warning to stop sinning.
It’s a process.
Most of the trouble is because Christians (especially Protestants) mix up sanctification with salvation. They’re not the same thing.
Salvation, of course, is when God saves us from sin and death. It happens all in an instant: God saves us, adopts us as his children, and seals us with his Holy Spirit. Presto-changeo, we’re saved. When Jesus takes his Kingdom one day, we’ll be resurrected and join him in it. It’s a done deal—and entirely done by God. We didn’t earn it, we don’t deserve it, we can’t achieve it, and it’s a free gift anyway. Accept it, and it’s yours.
Sanctification is what comes after salvation. ’Cause it can’t come before. It’s impossible to be freed from sin without the Holy Spirit, and before salvation, he’s around, but he’s not in us. And we’re not in him. Until we’re bound together, sanctification will not happen. That’s why it makes no sense to try to earn salvation by being good: Without the Spirit, we can’t be good. But with the Spirit, we can be.
Still, it’s not an instantaneous “presto-changeo, we’re sanctified” deal like salvation is. Salvation is a done deal, but sanctification is most certainly not. If it were, there’d be no need for any of the commands in the bible: The Ten Commandments would be redundant, ’cause we’d do ’em automatically. Jesus’s commands would be unnecessary, ’cause we’d instinctively obey him. Copies of Paul’s letters would be a massive waste of paper, ’cause the Law would already be written on our hearts. (Jr 31.33) There’s no need to command a person to do what they already do.
God originally created humans to be good, and do good. Ep 1.31 Well, now that we’re saved from sin and death, we can go back to being good, and doing good, as God originally intended, and always wanted. Ep 2.10 We don’t have to sin.
Problem is, lots of Christians assume that because salvation and sanctification are a package deal, they’re both instant: Once we’re saved, we’re sanctified. Problem is, we don’t stop sinning. And rather than recognize the problem—“Hey, I’m still doing what I don’t want to do!” Ro 7.15-20 —and deal with it—“I need to follow the Spirit, and not my flesh” Ro 8.5-17 —we invent ways to rationalize the sin.
Some Christians claim once God saves us, his forgiveness is so comprehensive, nothing we do from now on will count against us. Others claim once we’re resurrected, we’ll be physically and mentally incapable of sin. Now, let’s be fair: One can make a good case for either of these ideas. But here’s the problem: Those who embrace these ideas, in the meanwhile, act like God’s given us a free pass to sin. So they sin. They barely bother to reform themselves. They commit any and every sin—unless it’s a really egregious, socially unacceptable sin. (Of course, since society is changing all the time, give it a little time and some of your favorite sins will become socially acceptable, so you can commit them publicly.) They figure by the time Jesus returns to take his Kingdom, they’ll be good, and ready to serve in his Kingdom right along with him.
Except they won’t be. Paul said so.
The works of the flesh are obvious in anyone who is the following: Promiscuous. Unclean. Unethical. Idolatrous. Drug-hooked. Hate-filled. Argumentative. Overzealous. Angry. Partisans. Dividers. Heretics. Envious. A stoner. A partier. And other people like these. I warn you of them just like I warned you before: Those who do such things won’t inherit God’s Kingdom.
—Paul, Galatians 5.19-21 KWL
Every Christian agrees God has no desire for these works of the flesh to be in us. Problem is, not every Christian tries to be rid of them. Either they figure God forgave us for them once and for all—so it’s totally okay when we’re like that—or they figure God will eliminate them once and for all when Jesus returns—so it’s totally okay that we’re like that now. And this interpretation totally misses Paul’s point: The reason he warned the Galatians against them is because when Jesus takes his Kingdom, he’d better see us fighting these traits.
Not embracing them, nor ignoring them, and figuring of course we won’t take them with us into the Kingdom because presto-changeo God fixed us. If our attitudes aren’t Kingdom-ready, they never will be, and chances are we’re not going in.
If we’ve truly repented, if God’s truly saved us, we shouldn’t want to sin any longer. Sin should bug us. Maybe not as much as it bugs God, but it should bug us enough to where we want to stop. We should feel some degree of frustration about how hard it is to stop. We should be crying out to God for help, not looking for convenient excuses in the bible so we can ignore our consciences, and pretend everything is just peachy.
The 12 steps.
Because sanctification is a process, perhaps we’d better learn the process. Now, different Christian teachers suggest different steps. Some have seven or eight; some have 15 or 20. I have 12, and the reason I have 12 is because I swiped them from Alcoholics Anonymous. But let’s be fair: AA swiped the idea from Christianity first.
We realize we’re sinners. We’re powerless over sin when we’re separated from God. We can’t manage our lives.
We realize the Holy Spirit can fix us.
We decide to turn our will and lives over to the Spirit’s care.
We make an in-depth, fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
We confess to God, to ourselves, and to another trustworthy Christian, the exact nature of our wrongs.
We submit to the Holy Spirit, and permit him to remove these character flaws.
We humbly ask God to remove them.
We make a list of people we’ve harmed and sinned against, and be willing to make amends to all of them.
We make direct amends to these people—when we can, unless doing so would harm them further.
We continually take inventory of ourselves, and where we’re wrong, confess; we repeat all these steps as necessary.
We pray and meditate and make regular contact with God. We ask to know his will. We ask for the power to carry it out.
We share these steps with others, and practice these steps in every circumstance.
Twelve-step groups (unless they’re Christian, like Celebrate Recovery) tend to replace “God” with “God as we understand him,” or “our higher power,” or something which removes from the steps as much religion as they can reasonably get away with. That’s because their emphasis is on recovery, and not a closer relationship with God. The relationship with God is a byproduct: People wanted to get healthy, joined a 12-step group, picked Jesus as their “higher power,” and as a result met Jesus. Which is awesome. But not everybody picks Jesus. Lots of folks go with a pagan idea of God which doesn’t resemble him much, and only brings them closer to God if he decides to get involved and steer them in his actual direction.
Twelve-step groups likewise focus all their attention on the one flaw which brought ’em to the group in the first place. Alcoholics Anonymous focuses on alcoholism: They try not to drink. With God’s help, they don’t drink. But they don’t necessarily fight the other works of the flesh which God wants us to be rid of—like anger, promiscuity, idolatry, argumentativeness, envy, uncontrolled emotion, divisiveness, heresy, uncleanliness, and so forth. I’ve met plenty of addicts who swapped one addiction for another: They used to be hooked on cocaine, and now are hooked on nicotine and sex. They used to drink, and now they’re knee-deep in politics or work or something else which keeps them too busy to have to deal with reality. God doesn’t want to fix just one character flaw, or let us shrink one flaw and grow another. He wants to kill sin. It’s a much bigger job… but he’s an infinitely big God.
.jpeg)
No comments:
Post a Comment