SANCTIFICATION (DECLARATION # 6)

SANCTIFICATION    (Declaration # 6)

                We BELIEVE IN: Sanctification subsequent to the new birth, through faith in the blood of Christ; through the Word and by the Holy Ghost.

                I haven’t read a whole lot of statements of faith from a whole lot of religions, but what I do see in the world today is a great falling away from sound biblical truth. For this reason Pentecostal groups have often been called the “Holiness People.” That is to say, they consider Justification to be the beginning of a journey with Christ and His Word and not the end of the journey.

                There are a lot of religions out there that like to add a lot of requirements to the Christian walk, but it usually just middies the water. The essence of Christianity is that we enter by faith into Christ’s death where we die to the flesh and to the world and then we are raised up by the resurrection power of Christ to be transformed from glory to glory by the indwelling Spirit of Christ and by His Word

Paul said in Col. 2:6: “As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him.” It is rally that simple.  And then of course there is Paul’s signature statement found in Gal. 2:19, 20.

                “Through the Law I died to the Law, that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now love in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and delivered Himself up for me.”

                There is nowhere in the Bible where it tells us to “Get Saved” and then go out and do your own thing. No, salvation is the beginning of a journey in which we stop living by the power of our flesh, so that we can live by the indwelling power of Christ. We are temples of the Holy Spirit. We are being transformed by His presence in our lives and by obedience to His Word and that transformation is called sanctification.

               

                In another of Paul’s signature statements he said: “For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did; sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.” Romans 8: 3, 4

                The New Covenant gives us something better than the Law. It doesn’t do away with the Law. Instead it places the very Spirit and power of Jesus Christ into our born again spirit so that we can have something inside of us that is more powerful than our flesh. This then gives us a choice as to whether to live by our flesh (something that ends in death) or to live by His Holy Spirit (which leads to eternal life.)

                I preach a great deal out of Romans 8 these days because it gets right at the heart of the true Christian life. If the Law had been sufficient to save us, then Jesus Christ would not have needed to die. He would have just come and said to the Pharisees, “Keep up the good work boys.”
but instead Jesus drove a stake in the ground when He said to Nicodemus: “You must be born again.”

                The flesh that we received from Adam was in no way capable of pleasing God and the Law was not a solution to the problem, rather it defines the problem and then drives us to the foot of the cross where we die to the Law in order that we might live by the resurrection power of Jesus Christ.

                But it is exactly in the ministry of Romans 8 that a large part of the church is falling away from the fundamentals of the Gospel. Dying to the Law does not in any way put your flesh in charge so that you can “Do your own thing and God will understand and He will not judge sin because “God is good all the time and all the time God is good.”

                Now there is the example of a statement that is absolutely true and also absolutely false. God IS good all the time, but neither will He clear the guilty. His goodness requires both love and justice and sin must be judged if it is ever to be brought to an end.  Sin must be dealt with. It must be put out of our lives by the indwelling power of Christ. This is the difference between the Old and New Covenants.  The Old Covenant shows us the problem… while the New Covenant gives us the power of Christ so that we can do something about the problem. In Christ we die to our flesh in order to live by His power and not our own.

                Like Romans 8:29 says: “For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, that He might the first-born among many brethren.”  And Paul follows up that statement in Romans 12:2 saying: ”And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”

                Within Christianity there is a growing hatred and separation taking place between those who believe in living holy sanctified lives (fundamental Christians) and those who are falling away from the faith once given to the saints. You can identify them because they are compromising on all of the basic doctrines of the faith in order to be acceptable to the politically correct crowd and you can also identify them as those who are crossing the gulf to rejoin the pope in his global religion. They are seeking power in numbers rather than power through the Holy Spirit and the Word.

                We who are set up as watchmen should be crying out in anguish right now as we see a large portion of the church, even fundamentalists, falling away from the faith in order to join the religion of the antichrist. You can put this stake in the ground… that those who remain faithful to Jesus Christ and His Word will be persecuted by those who are abandoning the Holy Spirit and the Word.

                On this count, those who believe in the pre-trib rapture must be very careful. I will not refute the rapture, because the Bible is clear that there are two appearances of Christ, One is when we are caught up to meet the Lord in the air. (The rapture: 1 Cor. 15:51-58 and 1 Thess. 4:13-18) and the other coming known as the “Second Coming of Christ or His glorious appearing is when He will return with His saints (1 Thess. 3:13, Zech. 14:5, Rev. 19:8-16)

                One event happens either before or during the tribulation, but before the wrath of God is poured out, while the other event comes at the end of the tribulation as Jesus returns with His Bride from the marriage supper of the Lamb, to destroy the armies of the antichrist and to take up His earthly millennial reign in Jerusalem, the City of the Great King.

                I say that the pre-trib rapture people must be very careful in their timing of the rapture because Paul clearly tells us in 2 Thess. 2: 1-4. Here Paul seeks to answer a question that has come up. Some false teachers had followed Paul around telling the people that they were already in the tribulation and it was easy to believe since they were being persecuted by a Roman Emperor and it looked for all the world like end time prophecies were being fulfilled in every detail.

                But Paul told them saying: “Let no one in any way deceive you, for it (The rapture) will not come unless the apostasy (The falling away) comes first and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction (perdition) who opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, displaying himself as being God.” 2 Thess. 2:3, 4

                Now these things have been fulfilled many times throughout history. We saw it played out by the Popes of Rome and through many despotic world leaders like Hitler, but they were only birth pangs and not the final birth, or coming of the Lord. So, over and over again we have seen the birth pangs of the coming of the Lord played out and many have said, “This is it!” But there were indeed many literal signs to be fulfilled that had been written off as allegory. Today we see the technologies and the global powers that will make the final birth pang the last one. But even that was not the big sign of the end.

                No one could have seen back then that there would be a literal return of the Jews to their land, or the building of a literal temple in which the antichrist would commit his Abomination of Desolation. And yet today we are literally watching these events take place right before our eyes and while we still cannot make any date predictions, we do see the final global kingdom of the antichrist being set up right before our eyes, and according to Daniel’s statue in Daniel 2, we are living in the days of the ten toes and the ten kings when the Kingdom of Christ will come and destroy the kingdoms of this world and set up a kingdom that will fill the whole earth.

                So, with these things in mind, it is more important than ever for us to live sanctified and obedient lives. We must take the Bible much more seriously than those who are falling away. In fact the general message of the entire Bible is that we are being restored to the image of Christ that Adam lost in the fall and when Jesus returns, we will be like Him.

                “Beloved, now we are children of God and it has not appeared as yet what we shall be. We know that when He appears we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him just as He is. And every one who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself just as He is pure… Little children, let no one deceive you; the one who practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous, the one who practices sin is of the devil… the Son of God appeared for this purpose, that He might destroy the works of the devil. No one who is born of God practices sin, because the seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God… we know that we have passed out of death and into life because we love the brethren. He who does not love abides in death… whatever we ask, we receive from Him because we keep His commandments… and this is His commandment that we believe in the name of His Son Jesus Christ and love one another just as He commanded us. (Excerpts from 1 John 1 chapter 3)

                There is much to ponder in the book of 1 John. When we were born again a seed was planted in our spirit and that seed cannot sin because it comes from the Holy Spirit as Jesus Christ Himself who already overcame the world. IF we will live by that spirit rather than by our flesh, Jesus will deliver us to the Father “sanctified entirely in spirit and soul and body without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is He who calls you and He also will bring it to pass.” 1 Thess. 5:23, 24.

                Contrary to what many so called Christians are believing today…There are not many pathways to heaven, but one… through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and our new birth in Him that places His Holy Spirit in us so that we might overcome even as He overcame. “God is Spirit and those that worship Him must worship Him in Spirit and in Truth.” John 4:24

                Take courage my friends, for “Greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world.” 1 John 4:4