Unrealised Truths of Sanctification
Unrealised Truths of Sanctification
Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to Himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation. 2 Corinthians 5:17-18
I want to deal with some of the unrealised truths of sanctification, the things we do not readily notice, from the standpoint of the new creation (rv mg) in Christ Jesus.
As we have seen, the idea of sanctification is not that God gives us a new spirit of life, and then puts Jesus Christ in front of us as a copy and says, “Do your best and I will help you”; but that God imparts to us the perfections of Jesus Christ. By the perfections of Jesus we do not mean His attributes as Son of God. What is imparted to us is the holiness of Jesus, not a principle of life that enables us to imitate Him, but the holiness of Jesus as it met life in Him.
1. Creation through Christ
For by Him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by Him, and for Him. (Colossians 1:16)
And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write; These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God. (Revelation 3:14)
These verses are chosen out of a number in the Bible which reveal that God Almighty created the world and everything that was created, through the Eternal Son. Some people tell us that Revelation 3:14 means that the Son was the first Creation of God Almighty. The Bible does not say so. The Bible says, “He is before all things, and by Him all things consist.” Jesus Christ was introduced into the world in this way: the Spirit of God took hold of a part of that creation, of which the Son of God was Himself the Creator, in the Virgin Mary and formed in her the Son of God—“therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). That is the last reach of the creation of God. The Son of God was the One Whom we know as Jesus Christ, and in the life of Jesus we have the pattern life of all God desires man to be, and also the pattern life of sanctification.
2. Creation in Christ
All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made. That which hath been made was life in Him; and the life was the light of men. (John 1:3-4 rv mg)
By creation we are the children of God; we are not the sons and daughters of God by creation; Jesus Christ makes us sons and daughters of God by regeneration (John 1:12). The idea of the Fatherhood of Jesus is revealed in the Bible, though rarely mentioned. “Everlasting Father” refers to the Being we know as the Son of God. Paul in talking to the Athenians said, “We are the offspring of God.” But the creator-power in Jesus Christ is vested in a more marvellous way even than when God created the world through Him for He has that in Himself whereby He can create His own image. God created the world and everything that was made through the Son, and “that which hath been made was life in Him” (rv mg); therefore just as God created the world through Him, the Son is able to create His own image in anyone and everyone. Have we ever thought of Jesus as the marvellous Being Who can create in us His own image? “Wherefore if any man is in Christ, there is a new creation [mg]”! (2 Corinthians 5:17 rv) We do not sufficiently realise the wonder of it. Those of us who are in the experience of God’s mighty salvation do not give ourselves half enough prayerful time, and wondering time, and studying time to allow the Spirit of God to bring this marvellous truth home to us.
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that believeth on Me hath everlasting life.” The very life that was in Jesus is the life of the soul who believes in Him, because it is created in him by Jesus. This life is only in Jesus Christ, it is not in anyone else, and we cannot get it by obeying or by praying, by vowing or by sacrificing.
“Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.” We must have the image of God in our spirits, and Jesus will create His image in us by His sovereign right. The fullest and most gracious meaning of regeneration and sanctification is that in Christ Jesus we can be made a new creation (rv mg). Sanctification is not being given a new start, not that God wipes out the past and says it is forgiven, but something inconceivably grander, viz., that Jesus Christ has the power to create in us the image of God as it was in Himself. Paul says “My little children, of whom I travail in birth again”—every strand of my spirit and soul and body aches—“until Christ be formed in you.” “I fear,” he says, “lest by any means . . . your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.” “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy.” We have already dealt with this along the line of faith; we have to receive Jesus Christ in implicit confidence and let Him do His work in us.
Creation in Christ means that Jesus Christ is able to create us into His own image, not merely re-create us, because what we get in Jesus Christ is something that Adam never had. Adam was created a “son of God,” an innocent being with all the possibilities of development before him; God intended him to take part in that development by a series of moral choices whereby the natural life was to be sacrificed to the will of God and turned into a spiritual life. Adam failed to do this. Jesus Christ creates in us not what was in Adam, He creates in us what He was and is. “Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us . . . sanctification.” This is the meaning of the grand old evangelical hymn—
My hope is built on nothing less
Than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.
3. Creation like Christ
As He is, so are we in this world. (1 John 4:17)
Those of us who are God’s children ought to stand in determined reverence before this verse. It can mean only one thing, and that is that the image and character and holiness of Jesus Christ is ours by the sovereign right of His creation. Sanctification means that we are taken into a mystical union which language cannot define (cf. 1 John 3:2). It is Jesus Christ’s holiness that is granted to us, not something pumped up by prayer and obedience and discipline, but something created in us by Jesus Christ. No wonder the New Testament puts Jesus Christ upon the throne! No wonder Jesus said that the Holy Ghost would glorify Him! And no wonder this talk is called “unrealised truths of sanctification”!
We are potentially sons and daughters of God through God’s claim upon us in Christ, but we are only sons and daughters of God in reality through our will. Do we will, not to imitate Jesus, but to hand ourselves over to God until His claim is realised in us? Paul says, “We pray you,” we passionately entreat you, “as though God did beseech you by us, . . . be ye reconciled to God.” It is one thing to realise in speechless wonder, when the heart is attuned to an impulse of worship, what the claim of God is, and another thing to tell God that we want Him to realise His claim in us. “My God, I am Thine by creation, I am Jesus Christ’s through His Atonement, and I choose that Thy claim shall be realised in me.”
“Wherefore if any man is in Christ . . .” (rv). “Any man” means ourselves—men of no account. Our Lord never taught individualism; He taught the value of the individual, a very different thing. Does Paul mean that I, an ordinary man with no particular education, with ordinary common-place work, surrounded by commonplace people, can be made a new creation (rv mg) in Christ Jesus? He does, because he says “any man,” and you must come in there. Will you choose to be one of the ordinary common rut, the “any man,” and let God get hold of you? You are part of the creation of God, then let Jesus Christ make His creation good in you.
Jesus Christ does not make us original characters, He makes our characters replicas of His own; consequently, argues the Spirit of God, when men see us, they will not say, “What wonderful, original, extraordinary characters.” No, none of that rubbish! They will say, “How marvellous God must be to take poor pieces of human stuff like those men, and turn them into the image of Jesus Christ!” “. . . which things the angels desire to look into.” We are too free from wonder nowadays, too easy with the Word of God; we do not use it with the breathless amazement Paul does. Think what sanctification means—Christ in me; made like Christ; as He is, so are we.
4. The Transient Life
Old things are passed away.
By “old things” Paul does not mean sin and the “old man” only, he means everything that was our life as natural men before we were re-created in spirit by Christ. That means a great deal more than some of us mean. The “old things” means not only things that are wrong, any fool will give up wrong things if he can, but things that are right. Watch the life of Jesus and you will get Paul’s meaning. Our Lord lived a natural life as we do, it was not a sin for Him to eat, but it would have been a sin for Him to eat during those forty days in the wilderness, because during that time His Father’s will for Him was otherwise, and He sacrificed His natural life to the will of God. That is the way the “old things” pass away.
In his Second Epistle to the Corinthians Paul uses as an illustration of this the glory which came from Moses. It was a real glory, but it was a glory that was “to be done away” (3:7); and the writer to the Hebrews writes of a covenant which was doomed “to vanish away” (8:13). The natural life of man is a real creation of God, but it is meant to pass away into a spiritual life in Jesus Christ’s way. Watch Paul’s argument in the Epistle to the Romans—“But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit . . .” (8:9). Paul was talking to flesh and blood men and women, not to disembodied spirits, and he means that the old order is passed. “You used to look at things differently from Jesus Christ,” he says, “but now that you have turned to the Lord” (God grant you may if you have not) “the veil is taken away, and “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”
5. The Transfigured Life
Behold, all things are become new.
Have those of us who are in the experience of sanctification learned the practical insistent habit of realising that the “old things are passed away,” and that “all things are become new”? In their testimony people put it in this way—“God alters the thing that matters; it used to matter to me what certain people thought, now it does not matter at all.” “Old things” are passed away, not only sin and the old disposition, but the whole old order of things, and “behold, all things are become new.”
Paul is trying to get us to an amazed state of mind—“Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature”! Some of us talk about sanctification as if we were talking of a new book, or an article in the newspaper. With Paul the wonder never ceased; however often he talked about it, each time he was more full of wonder than the last.
The great mighty work of God’s grace in sanctification is a Divine work. Do we choose to walk in God’s way and let Him make it real in us? Then let the things that are passed be passed, and when the circumstances come again that tempt us to self-pity, remember that the old things are passed away. Do we choose never to let things affect us that never affected Jesus Christ? Immediately we do, we will find it is possible because the perfections of Jesus Christ are made ours by the sovereign right of His creation. No wonder Paul talks of “the unsearchable riches of Christ”! No wonder the marvel of the revelation breaks through his language and escapes until those who are not sanctified think him mad; and John is called an old man in “the sere and yellow leaf” who talked vaguely about the possibility of living without sin! Those who talk in this way have never entered into the wonderful experience of sanctification, but, thank God, it is for “any man.”
6. The Truest Life of All
All things are of God.
“Be ye therefore followers”—of good principles? Of holiness? Of the life Jesus lived on earth? No! “Be ye therefore followers of God.” “Be ye therefore perfect, as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” God by sanctification creates us into the image of His Son. Do we choose to walk in the light of that life? Never make excuses, never turn to the right hand nor to the left. Keep the life concentrated on this marvellous gift of God, “Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us . . . sanctification.”