9
Eight
St. Paul’s Intercession
Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful, who also will do it (1 Thessalonians 5:23–24).
All through the Bible the separation of a people by God is revealed, and the individual members of that people have to separate themselves to God’s service. We are set apart that we may set ourselves apart. God who requires the separations requires also that the person be sanctified intrinsically.
Two ideas are brought out in regard to our Lord. First, the Father separated Jesus for His redemptive work: “Do you say of Him whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God?’” (John 10:36). Second, Jesus sanctified Himself for the work of God: “And for their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also may be sanctified by the truth” (John 17:19).
But our Lord was holy. Why did He say “I sanctify Myself”? To coin a phrase, Jesus Christ “sanctified His sanctification,” that is, He determinedly sacrificed His holy Self to His Father. Jesus Christ separated—or sanctified—Himself by sacrificing His holy Self to the will of His Father. He sanctified His intelligence by submitting His intelligence to the word of His Father. He sanctified His will by submitting His will to the will of His Father.
As the sanctified children of God we need to bear in mind that after the experience of sanctification we have to separate our holiness to God. We are not made holy for ourselves, but for God. There is to be no insubordination about us.
The majority of us are too indifferent, too religiously sentimental, to be caught up in the sweep of the apostle Paul’s intercession. Have we a lesser idea than that God should do in us what He wants to do? Are we prepared to pray with Murray McCheyne,[9] “Lord, make me as holy as Thou canst make a sinner saved by grace”?
Some people pray and long and yearn for the experience of sanctification, but never get anywhere near it. Others enter in with a sudden marvelous realization. Sanctification is an instantaneous, continuous work of grace. How long the approach to it takes depends upon ourselves, and that leads some to say sanctification is not instantaneous. The reason some do not enter in is that they have never allowed their minds to realize what sanctification means.
When we pray to be caught up into God’s purpose behind this intercession of the apostle Paul, we must see that we are willing to face the standard of these verses. Are we prepared for what sanctification will cost? It will cost an intense narrowing of all our interests on earth, and an immense broadening of our interest in God. In other words, sanctification means an intense concentration on God’s point of view—every power of spirit, soul, and body chained and kept for God’s purpose only. Sanctification means being made one with God, even as the Lord Jesus Christ was one—“that they may be one, even as we are one.” That is much more than union; it is one in identity. The same disposition that ruled in Jesus rules in me.
Am I prepared for what that will cost? It will cost everything that is not God in me. Am I prepared for God to separate me for His work in me, as He separated Jesus, and after His work is done, am I prepared to separate myself to God even as Jesus did? It is this settling down into God’s truth that we need.
The type of sanctified life is the Lord Jesus Christ, and the characteristic of His life was subordination to His Father. The only way to get right with God is to soak in the atmosphere of the life of the Lord Jesus.
The one mark of spiritual people today is insubordination. We have wild spiritual impulses that would give an opportunity to Satan as an angel of light to switch the very elect, if it were possible, away from God’s plan. If you want to know the result of spiritual insubordination, read 1 Corinthians 12. There we see a portrait of spiritual lunacy—absolute insubordination to the dominant sanity of the Spirit of God. The characteristic of the Holy Spirit in a man is a strong family likeness to Jesus and freedom from everything unlike Jesus.
The best of us are all too shallow and flippant in our attitude to this tremendous secret of sanctification. Are we prepared to let the Spirit of God grip us and put us under His searchlight, and then do a work in us that is worthy of God? Sanctification is not our idea of what we want God to do for us. Sanctification is what God does for us, and He has to get us into the right relationship, the right attitude of mind and heart, where at any cost we let Him do it. Are we prepared to concentrate on the Holy Spirit’s ministration?
The apostle Paul is not talking about scientific or intellectual truth. He is talking about spiritual truth, and the only way we can prove spiritual truth is by experience. People say, “I don’t understand this doctrine of sanctification.” Well, get into the experience first. You only get home by going there. You may think about getting there, but you will never get there till you go. Am I prepared to do what Jesus said—“Come unto me”? Am I prepared to let God make me real? Reality is the proof in my own experience that this thing is true. God grant that every worker may see the peril of not applying this spiritual logic, “Prove it.” Every time we give a message that we have no experience of, the Spirit of God will bring it back to us, “Where are you in regard to this matter?”
The Value of Calm
Now may the God of peace. . . .
By the guidance of the Holy Spirit, Paul puts the subsiding of suspicion in first place. The very nature of the old disposition is an incurable suspicion that Jesus Christ cannot do what He came to do. If we have the tiniest suspicion that God cannot sanctify us in His almighty way we need to let the God of peace slip His great calm all through our insidious unbelief till all is quiet and there is one thing only—God and our soul; not the peace of a conscience at rest only, but the very peace of God that will keep us rightly related to God. “My peace I give to you,” said Jesus (John 14:27). When once we let the God of peace grip us by salvation and squeeze the suspicion out of us till we are quiet before Him, the believing attitude is born, there is no more suspicion, we are in moral agreement with God about everything He wants us to do.
One of the things we need to be cured of by the God of peace is the petulant struggle of doing things for ourselves—“I can sanctify myself; if I cut off this and that and the other I shall be all right.” No, Paul says, “the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely” (1 Thessalonians 5:23). Has the God of peace brought you into a calm, or is there a clamor and a struggle still? Are you still hanging onto some obstinate conviction of your own? Still struggling with some particular line of things you want? “The God of peace Himself sanctify you completely.” If we are to be sanctified, it must be by the God of peace Himself. The power that makes the life of the saint does not come from our efforts at all. It comes from the heart of the God of peace.
Some use a phrase, “to pray through.” What we have to “pray through” is all our petulant struggling after sanctification, all the inveterate suspicion in our hearts that God cannot sanctify us. When we are rid of all that and are right before God, then God lets us see how He alone does the work.
When we stay our feeble efforts,
And from struggling cease,
Unconditional surrender
Brings us God’s own peace.
The great mighty power of the God of peace is slipped into the soul under the call of supreme sanctification. Some of us are far too turbulent in spirit to experience even the first glimpse of what sanctification means. People noisy in words are not always turbulent in spirit; excessively quiet people who have nothing to express in joy and shouting may be suspicious in heart.
The Value of Massive Truth
Sanctify you wholly. . . .
When once we get calm before God and are willing to let Him do what He chooses, He gives us an outline of some of His massive truths. “And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly,” preserve you in unspotted integrity. Integrity is the unimpaired state of a thing, unblameable, undeserving of censure in God’s sight. Paul’s intercession is for an instantaneous and insistent sanctification that will preserve a man in unspotted integrity “unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The majority of us have never allowed our minds to dwell as they should on these great massive truths; consequently sanctification has been made to mean a second dose of conversion. Sanctification can only be named in the presence of God. It is stamped by a likeness to Christ. Wholly means in every detail—mystical, moral, and material.
Mystical. “And I pray God your whole spirit . . . be preserved blameless.” The word spirit here is not the same as in verse 19. “Your whole spirit” is the personality of a man imbued with the Spirit of God till all the highest mystical reaches of his personality are living in God. Where are your imaginations? Where are all the fancies that break through language and escape? Where do they live? Where are our dreams that make us afraid of ourselves?
They are in our subconscious, super-conscious, beyond the range of what we are able to grasp. The great mystic work of the Holy Spirit is in those dim regions of personality where we cannot go. If we want to know what those regions are like, we can read Psalm 139. The psalmist implies, “You are the God of the early mornings, the God of the late-at-nights, the God of the mountain peaks, the God of the sea; but, my God, my soul has further horizons than the early mornings, deeper darkness than the nights of earth, higher peaks than any mountain, greater depths than any sea can know. My God, You are the God of these; be my God! I cannot reach to the heights or depths. There are motives I cannot touch, dreams I cannot fathom; God search me, winnow out my way.”
When God gives His calm, do we realize the magnitude of sanctification through His omnipotent might? Do we believe that God can garrison our imaginations, can sanctify us far beyond where we can go? Have we realized that if we walk in the light as God is in the light that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin? If that means cleansing from sin in conscious experience only, God almighty have mercy on us! The man who has become obtuse through sin is unconscious of sin. Being cleansed by the blood of Jesus means cleansing to the very height and depth of our spirit if we walk in the light as God is in the light.
None of us soaks sufficiently in the terrific God-like revelation of sanctification, and many a child of God would never have been led astray by the counterfeits of Satan if they had allowed their minds to be bent on that great concept of Paul’s—your whole spirit—from the vague beginnings of personality known only to God, to the top-most reaches, preserved entirely, garrisoned by the God of peace.
Moral. “Your whole . . . soul preserved blameless.” There are those who want to form a religion on mysticism—live according to their temperament. Every sanctified soul is mystic, but he does not live in that region only. He is soul and body as well as spirit, and what is true in the mystical sphere is true in the moral sphere. Soul is man’s spirit becoming rational in the body, explaining itself.
When a little child wants to say something and has not a vocabulary, it speaks through gesticulations and facial workings. It has not the power of soul to express itself in words. Paul says not only “your whole spirit preserved blameless,” but “your whole soul.” Are we forming the mind of Christ? A man has the spirit of Jesus given to him, but he has not His mind until he forms it. How are we to form the mind of Christ? By letting His Spirit imbue our spirit, our thinking, and our reasoning faculties. Then we shall begin to reason as Jesus did, until slowly and surely the Spirit that fed the life of Jesus will feed the life of our soul.
Sanctification covers not only the narrow region where we begin the spiritual life, but the whole rational man, sanctified wholly in imagination and reasoning power. How do we read history? Do we discern the arm of the Lord behind it? How do we sum up the circumstances of our own lives? “The sun shall no longer be your light by day, nor for brightness shall the moon give light to you; but the Lord will be to you an everlasting light, and your God your glory” (Isaiah 60:19). The light on the inside will guide you, a reasoning soul, to understand the facts revealed by common days and nights you cannot understand otherwise. A humble, ignorant man or woman depending on the mind of God has an explanation for things that the rational man without the Spirit of God never has.
Material. “Your whole . . . body preserved blameless.” Man is not only mystical and moral, but material. Never say because you have a body you cannot progress. According to the apostle Paul the body is unutterably sacred. The Bible does not say that the body is a curse and a hindrance; it says it is the temple of the Holy Spirit. “Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you?” (1 Corinthians 6:19). It is only when garrisoned by the God of peace that the stupendous sanctity of the Holy Spirit preserves a man—spirit, soul, and body—in unspotted integrity, without blame, unto the coming of Jesus. Our whole body is preserved as we come into contact with all the different relationships of life. In the beginning of spiritual education we are apt to pay too much attention to one of these spheres and Satan gets his chance with others. If we pay attention to the spiritual, Satan will pay attention to the nerves.
Sanctification is an instantaneous, continuous work of God. Immediately we are related rightly to God. It is manifested instantly in spirit, soul, and body. The reason the Church as a whole does not believe it is that they will not soak in the massive truths of God. Consequently every now and again in the history of the Church, God has had to raise up some servant of His to emphasize afresh this intense, vivid sanctification of the whole spirit, the whole soul, and the whole body, preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
O Lord, my approach to You is dulled because of my physical dimness, but my spirit and heart rejoice in You and my flesh shall rest in hope. Touch me bodily, O Lord, till I answer in thrilling health to Your touch.
Insulate me, O Lord, from the things of sense and time, and usher me into the presence of the King.
O Lord, I am distressed at my slow manifestation of any of the beauty of holiness that might express my unspeakable gratitude for Your salvation. O Lord, cause me by looking to You to be radiant.
O Lord, I would bless and praise You. How hard I find it to praise You when I am not physically fit, and yet why should I—that means that I praise You when it is a pleasure to me physically. O Lord, that my soul were one continual praise to You.