What is Sanctification?

Apr 24

Sanctification is a very theological-sounding word, yet it’s one of the defining pursuits of the Christian faith. It is the act of being made or becoming holy. It isn’t a one-time or static event but an ongoing experience of God’s grace. This blog explores what sanctification is and how it furthers our relationship with Christ.

Salvation Is Step One

Salvation, which is when you come to know Jesus Christ, is only the beginning of our journey with Christ. God in Christ bled and died for our sins. It was through that act that He birthed repentance into His kingdom. Now, there’s a new life that goes into eternity.

However, there is so, so, so much more to our faith.

The Apostle Paul wanted God’s people to understand this, so he wrote about it many times in the New Testament. One of those times is found in Romans.

“I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.” Romans 6:19

Sanctification is a very theological-sounding word, so what does it mean?

Sanctification: being made or becoming holy. To sanctify is to literally be set apart for particular use in a special purpose or work.

John Wesley said, “The people are not happy because the people are not holy.” In other words, to be holy is to be fully set apart for the purpose of God, which is the purpose of living into your design as a creation of God.

Wesley believed the doctrine of entire sanctification was Methodism’s distinctive gift to Christianity. He called it “the great promise of God” [IV. 138], Christian perfection, the holiness of heart and life. Christ’s death on the cross made it possible not only for sinners to be saved by grace but for us to be saved to the uttermost.

Wesley believed that sanctification was our restoration of the image of God within us, through Jesus Christ, by being made perfect in love toward God and our neighbor.

Here’s a common sense statement: We walk faster when we see plain, definitive steps before us. With God’s help and through the revelation of His Word, God will empower us to take these steps in our sanctification.

What is Sanctification?

1) Sanctification Is The Gift of the Fullness Of Your Salvation

Salvation is not a static, one-time event in our lives. The ongoing experience of God’s gracious presence transforms us into who God intends us to be. It’s a movement that God opens in the believer’s life and the ongoing experience of God’s gracious presence working through His word to transform our hearts.

“If he gives you the grace to make you believe, he will give you the grace to live a holy life afterward.”

— Charles Spurgeon

John Wesley described this dimension of God’s grace as sanctification or holiness. Through God’s work of sanctifying grace, we grow and mature into our ability to live Christ-centered and grace-empowered lives that reflect the very heart of God, not only in and for us but through us for others.

As we pray, study the Scriptures, fast, worship, and share in fellowship with other Christians, we deepen our experience and knowledge of love for God.

As we share Christ with nonbelievers, respond to human needs with compassion, or labor to set people free from oppression—we join Jesus on mission and are, at the same time, being conformed to His image.

All the while, God is working in our inner thoughts and motives, as well as our outer actions and behavior, to align them with God’s will and testify to our union with Him.

We’re to press on, with God’s help, on the path of sanctification toward perfection. By perfection, Wesley did not mean we would not make mistakes or have weaknesses. Instead, it is a continual process of being made perfect in our love of God and each other and removing our desire to sin. Then, when we discover the joy of the Lord, our desire for sin is diminished.

What God does in sanctification is give us more of Himself. He is the gift of the fullness of our salvation.

2) Sanctification Is Not Works Righteousness

I have an acquaintance from Knoxville, Tennessee, who was a senior pastor at a Presbyterian Church. He participated in a prayer summit and came to know Christ during that time. Strange, right? A man in the pulpit, teaching God’s Word, and by his own testimony, God brought the revelation of Jesus during that prayer summit.

If it can happen to a Presbyterian minister, it can also happen to you.

Until a person knows Jesus, the kind of joy, happiness, and holiness we’ve described is impossible. Minister James H. Aughey said, “Holiness is not the way to Christ; Christ is the way to holiness.”

Entire sanctification is not an achievable goal but a gift to be received. Like justification, sanctification is the gracious gift of God received by faith.

“I have continually testified in private and in public that we are sanctified as well as justified by faith. And indeed, one of those great truths does exceedingly illustrate the other. Exactly as we are justified by faith, so are we sanctified by faith. Faith is the condition, and the only condition, of sanctification, exactly as it is of justification. It is the condition: None is sanctified but he that believes; without faith, no man is sanctified. And it is the only condition: This alone is sufficient for sanctification. Everyone that believes is sanctified, whatever else he has or has not. In other words, no man is sanctified till he believes: Every man when he believes is sanctified.” John Wesley [Sermon 43]

We see very clearly in the writings of Wesley that this is a faith based upon Scripture. He also maintained that he was preaching no new doctrine but simply recovering an old doctrine that the Church had long forgotten. With great zeal, Wesley and the early Methodists obeyed God’s call “to spread Scriptural holiness over the land.”

3) Sanctification Is The Gift of Being Perfected In Love

“Entire sanctification, or Christian perfection, is neither more nor less than pure love; love expelling sin and governing both the heart and life of a child of God. The Refiner’s fire purges out all that is contrary to love, and that many times by a pleasing smart. Leave all this to Him that does all things well, and that loves you better than you do yourself.” John Wesley, Letters to Mr. Walter Churchey, of Brecon

How is one sanctified? Wesley often had to defend this doctrine against charges of preaching some form of works righteousness.

“It is thus that we wait for entire sanctification; for a full salvation from all our sins, from pride, self-will, anger, unbelief; or, as the Apostle expresses it, ‘go on unto perfection.’ But what is perfection? The word has various senses: Here it means perfect love. It is love excluding sin; love filling the heart, taking up the whole capacity of the soul. It is love ‘rejoicing evermore, praying without ceasing, in everything giving thanks.’” John Wesley, Sermon 43, The Scripture Way of Salvation

To take on God’s character is to take on a heart at peace.

To take on God’s character is to take on a Spirit of joy.

To take on God’s character is to take on Love. And not just any love, but the endowment of perfect love and the abiding fullness of the Holy Spirit.

When Christ comes into your life, He takes your dead spirit and makes it alive. Therefore, faith in Christ is not merely your arrival but your new beginning in a new world.

Why do we say that sanctification makes us blameless, not faultless? Because the Grace of God working in us does not make us infallible. Sin has so perverted our moral and spiritual powers that we shall never in this present life be free from the infirmities of human nature.

The only perfection possible on earth is the perfection of love.

TL;DR

Salvation, which is when you come to know Jesus Christ, is only the beginning of our Christian journey.
Sanctification: being made or becoming holy. To sanctify is to literally be set apart for particular use in a special purpose or work.
What is Sanctification?