Truth For Life

Bob Lepine: When you come to saving faith, acknowledging Jesus as both Lord and Savior, you are in that moment fully forgiven, fully saved, and fully justified. But then there’s sanctification, and that’s a lifelong process of growing in holiness, becoming more like Jesus. Today on Truth For Life, Alistair Begg helps us understand how sanctification happens as we continue our study in John chapter 17.

Alistair Begg: When we actually come to faith in Jesus Christ, so somebody has shared the gospel with you, you knew about the Bible, you knew about God, you knew about Jesus, you knew a ton of stuff. You maybe went to religious school, but there came a day when suddenly you heard the voice of Jesus say. And you heard His voice, not audibly, but it was as though He might just as well have tapped you on the shoulder.

Suddenly all the panorama of religious background that you had enjoyed was crystallized in a moment when you actually personally responded to Christ. You admitted that you were sinful, you believed that Jesus died in order to deal with that, and as a result of that the Holy Spirit came to indwell you. You were made new; you were made different.

But as soon as you have entered into that new dimension, you quickly realize that you brought with you your own fallen nature. That part of you that still loves the idea of sin. And as a result of that, there is immediately set up an internal conflict. The conflict that Paul references in Romans 7 where he says, "The good that I want to do I don’t end up doing, and the bad that I don’t want to do I find myself doing." Why is this? Well, it is because of this very thing. That the conflict is between our new nature implanted in us by the Holy Spirit and our fallen nature that we haven’t yet left behind.

So I am sinful and I am rebellious, but I am also God’s adopted child. Now what I want to point out to you is this. The way in which Paul addresses the Corinthians, if you know anything about the Corinthian church, to say it was a tough spot, let’s put it that way. All kinds of shenanigans going on at the communion services. It was beyond comprehension really what was taking place.

Now it is to those people that he begins his letter. Look at it: "Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus and our brother Sosthenes, to the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours." He doesn’t say these people are going to be sanctified; he says these people are sanctified.

Now if you go to the 30th verse of the chapter, he says, "And because of Him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption." So that in Christ all of this is given to us. Sanctification is not imputed to us as justification is, but when we’re regenerated, as soon as the Spirit of God comes to live in our hearts and we are justified before God, that sets immediately in motion the reality of sanctification.

You need to go, if you’re still in 1 Corinthians, to chapter 6 and to verse 11. We are familiar with 9 and 10 where he is speaking about the deeds of the flesh and so on, and then wonderfully he says in verse 11, talking about drunks and revilers and greedy people and all kinds of things. He says, "And such were some of you." You’re not the church of the I don’t know what you are, you’re a bunch of broken people in this church. You were like that, but look, you were washed, past tense. You were sanctified, past tense. You were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

And so it is a twofold thing, isn't it? That in terms of the reality of the work of God, it’s not in question, but the work that His goodness has begun is now being completed. And when the apostles write about this, for example, when Peter writes about it in his first letter, he gives you about twelve verses on the nature of salvation. From verse 3 to verse 9, it’s one long sentence in the Greek. And all he is saying is this is the wonder of salvation, what an amazing thing that God has done this for us.

And then he immediately, having given to us all these indicatives of what is true, he then comes with the imperatives and he says, "So then you should be holy as God is holy." He’s not asking us then to become something that we are not, but to become that which we are as now being conformed to the image of Jesus. Paul does the exact same thing more familiarly, I suppose, in eleven chapters of Romans. Hardly any imperatives in it at all, nearly all indicatives, maybe half a dozen imperatives in eleven chapters, and then he gets to chapter 12 and here come the imperatives: "Therefore, therefore." And he says this is what you’re to be transformed by the renewing, be being transformed by the renewing of your minds.

Well, and succinctly again in 1 Corinthians, but verse 19 and following: "You are not your own; you were bought with a price." That’s the reality. So you can’t walk around saying I can do whatever I want to do. You know, I was chosen in God, therefore I can do what I like. No, the doctrine of election is not God chose me and therefore I’m free to do what I choose. The doctrine of election is that God chose me and therefore I must do what He designed me to do.

And how will that be worked out progressively? Well, I just give you three words. First of all, if you like, mentally or better still perhaps, intellectually. If the work of sanctification is progressive, what about in our minds? Transformed by the renewing of our minds. Think about our minds in the present context. I mean, if you think about your mind, you could go nuts thinking about your mind. When you think about the fact that you can actually speak to somebody, that they make movements with their larynx and their tongue and everything else with breath passing over and you can understand it and you can distinguish. It’s truly amazing.

And think about the use of our minds. Think about our minds in the present context when you think God is wanting me to be renewed in my mind, in my mind. Our minds at this point in the 21st century are bombarded. Not just on a daily basis, but on a minute-by-minute basis. Bombarded by podcasts, by emails, by videos, by music. We have what Neil Postman, not in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death but elsewhere, what Neil Postman referred to as information glut.

Our teenagers and younger than our teenagers are absorbing on a moment-by-moment basis notions, ideas, concepts, mistruths, flat-out lies that challenge the notion of our being conformed to the image of Jesus. Life is like a huge journey to who knows where on a daily basis. Fast-moving sites and sounds experienced with very little center to them or very little meaning to them.

And then you come to church for 25 minutes, somebody says to you, "You know the Bible says that He is at work within us to sanctify us and to make us holy and to transform us in our minds, mentally." The question is how much endeavor do you want to spend, do I want to spend to have my mind secured by the truth of God’s Word? And do I think for a minute that I can allow my mind to be bombarded at multiple levels hour by hour, day by day, and get by with a little scribble of the Bible every so often if it happens to pass my fancy? It won’t happen mentally.

Physically. We just go to a children’s song. "Take my feet and let them be. Take my hands and let them move at the impulse of Your love. Take my lips and let them be filled with messages from Thee." What is that children’s song saying? It’s saying Lord, I want to be sanctified; I want to become like You. "Do you not know," says Paul, "that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?" What I do with me physically is either advancing things in relationship to becoming like Jesus or is making me increasingly a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.

Mentally, physically, and actually totally. You say well, I don’t know if I want to do totally. Well, you don’t have an option folks, none of us do. 1 Thessalonians 5: "Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely." Completely. Do you have any rooms in the house of your life that are shut off to God? Can God walk through the house of your life and mine and we don’t have to hide anything? That’s the question. That’s what He’s saying. Sanctify you completely. Your whole spirit, soul, and body kept blameless at the coming of Jesus.

Well, we need to just say something about how this is then discovered submissively. This last heading is not very good, but it’s just an attempt to try and keep it within the framework. Come up with another one for yourself. But it’s the second half of what Jesus is saying here in the 17th verse. "Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth." Bottom line: by the Holy Spirit, God’s Word is the means by which God works to make us more like Jesus. The psalmist: "The sum of Your word is truth, and every one of Your righteous rules endures forever. Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things and give me life in Your ways." David in 2 Samuel: "And now, O Lord God, You are God and Your words are true."

The fact is that God sent His Son into the world and He gave Him His Word. Remember that? Jesus says the words I speak are not my own; they're the words the Father gave me to speak. Jesus then takes those words and He gives them to His apostles, those for whom He’s praying here immediately. And those apostles are then going out from Jerusalem and out into the world to first of all declare the Word of God by preaching. And then by the administration of the Holy Spirit that is then inscripturated for us so that the world then might hear the Word of God. Hence Wycliffe Bible Translators, hence what we’re doing in order to see the Word of God in the lips and lives of people.

Well, if that’s the extent to which God has done, gone, what about us in terms of the place of the Word of God personally? Personally. The place of daily devotions, the regular reading of the Word. In the awareness of the fact that the Word of God appeals first of all to our minds. You have to think. It actually, as you think, reshapes the way you think. It actually penetrates our consciences. That’s why I began saying show me myself. Well, when it shows me myself, I say well, what’s the answer to myself? Show me my Savior. So we look from ourselves to the one who has saved us and to the work of the Spirit who is sanctifying us. And it stirs us to action.

This is J.C. Ryle. He says, "Believers who neglect the Word of God will not grow in holiness and victory over sin." You can take that to the bank. If your Bible is not an open book to you, if your nourishment in the Word of God is not daily nourishment, then you actually are starving yourself from the very product that has been provided to you in order that you might be completed in this way.

I want to say just finally a word about the place of the Word of God not only privately but corporately. Corporately. When Moses at the end of Deuteronomy is gathering the people together, it says this, and all the people gathered and, no that’s actually Nehemiah. In Nehemiah when they say to Nehemiah, "Bring out the book," it reads, "And all the people gathered and told Ezra to bring out the book. And so Ezra brought the law before the assembly, both men and women, all who could understand."

What I thought I was going to quote to you is Deuteronomy 31 and verse 12. This is the word: "Assemble the people, men, women, and little ones, and the sojourner within your towns, that they may hear and learn to fear the Lord your God, and be careful to do all the words of this law." There is no question about the priority of preaching. Unfortunately, it’s usually just the preacher who says that. So to sit out and listen to the preacher you say, "Well, yeah, I suppose it’s job security or whatever it might be."

But the fact is that the means by which the authority of God, the voice of God through the Word of God to the people of God is experienced in a unique way in this kind of context. It’s not like any other kind of context. You are supposed to be entirely passive. It is in that passivity, in that non-activity that we ask God to speak, that we ask that we might hear the voice of Jesus, that we might look way beyond whoever the preacher is and be encountered by God.

Sinclair Ferguson has helped me as much with this as anybody, and I think as elders we’ve recognized it too when we read the book Devoted to God. Because in that book at one section he explains just why it is important for Christians to place their lives under the preaching of the Word. In other words, to become what he says: "actively passive." To become actively passive. Because it is expounded to us; it is not expounded by us. And he goes on to say, and he is very honest about it, he says my perspective on this is controverted and is actually controversial. And this is what he says about Bible studies and particularly group Bible studies. He says neither of these, valuable as they may be, can substitute for the transforming power of the preached Word of God.

Now if you think about this, go back fifty years in the nation and any church such as ours, it wouldn’t even be a question about whether you have a service in the morning or a service in the evening. You just did. Was that just conformity to a shibboleth or what was it? No, it was an expression of desire. It was an expression of hunger. Consider the difficulty that church leaders have now to establish, for example, an evening service. What’s it about? Well, he says it’s about a loss of appetite. A loss of appetite both for worship and for the Word of God. And then he says, surely no young man in love with a young woman would be content to arrange to meet her for only one hour a week and always at the same time.

The ultimate issue is desire. You see we’ve become an activist generation, we think if we’re not doing something something must be wrong. All the things you can do with the Bible. The big issue is what’s the Bible doing to me? And I have to sit under it. I have to be subjected to it. Not the word of a man, the Word of God. The only role that we have is to be a voice-piece for a little while. You come and you go.

The fact that there is no evening service tonight is both an irony and an exception in light of what I’m saying. And I acknowledge that. But here’s the deal. It is only an exception to some, but it is not an exception to most. When we began in '83, we set out with the conviction about the priority of the preaching of the Bible on the Lord’s Day. We determined that we would do that. The Sunday evening services emerged out of a total vacuum in 1983. Teaching particularly the children as they came, and actually teaching the adults from the children’s material because the adults weren't that theologically adept at that point in any case, at least many of them were not.

Headline in the British press this week: "100 church buildings in Scotland for sale." If you want to buy a church in Scotland, now's your chance. Why is that? Because they gave up on this. The real test of the future of church, I suggest to you, and its effectiveness is not going to be seen in the morning service, but in the evening. Because the evening is always different. And the reason it is is because we’ve shuffled in in the morning, whatever our attitude was. We’ve had the Word of God preached to us. Our hearts have been seasoned. We’ve been lifted up in praise. And now we have another framework out of which to come to the evening service. Why is it that the singing is so different in the evening? Why is that? It’s this. What is God doing with you?

Well, He predestined you to be conformed to the image of His Son. We are being transformed into His image, and one day when we see Him it will all be complete because we’ll be just like Him. Father, I want to pray that You will help us navigate through all these many words that the Spirit of God might do the work of God in our hearts. That correction, rebuke, training in righteousness we may be ready to receive. And so we pray that You will continue to fashion us in such a way that we become increasingly like our elder brother Jesus. And we pray it in His name. Amen.

Bob Lepine: You’re listening to Truth For Life with Alistair Begg. You know, it’s our hope that the teaching you hear on Truth For Life gives you a quiet respite during your day, a time where you can unplug from the demands of life to hear and reflect on God’s Word. And there’s another way you can join Alistair for a closer look at the reality of the cross and the details surrounding Jesus’ death and resurrection. Let me encourage you to sign up for a seven-day Easter reading plan titled The Man on the Middle Cross. It will help prepare you for Easter with a renewed sense of awe and wonder.

It’s free to sign up for this seven-day email devotional at truthforlife.org/readingplans. And while you’re on our website be sure to check out the book we’re currently recommending. It’s titled Praying the Bible. It’s a book that teaches a biblical approach to prayer that will help you overcome common struggles such as repetitive prayers or the wandering mind that can cause you to lose focus. Praying the Bible explains how scripture provides the perfect words and themes to guide your prayers. It teaches you to pray more faithfully and joyfully by allowing God’s Word to shape your prayers to Him.

This book is yours for a donation to Truth For Life. You can give online at truthforlife.org/donate or call us at 888-588-7884. I'm Bob Lepine. Thanks for joining us this week. Hope you have a great weekend and are able to worship with your local church and then join us Monday when we’ll consider where we as Christians fit into God’s plan and purpose which was established before the world even existed. I hope you can join us. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth For Life, where the learning is for living.