I’m participating in Tim Challies’ Reading the Classics Together program. The book is Redemption Accomplished and Applied by John Murray, and this week’s reading is the seventh chapter of Part 2: The Order of Application. Tim’s summary of this chapter is here.
Of all the other steps in the order of salvation, sanctification, John Murray says, is most closely related to calling and regeneration, because all three have their effect in us. Calling and regeneration set the stage for the work of sanctification by uniting us to Christ and giving us victory over the power of sin. This victory over sin resulting from our regeneration is “the radical breach with the power and love of sin which is necessarily the possession of every one who has been united to Christ.” This doesn’t mean that regeneration eliminates all sin from within us, and that’s where sanctification comes in. “Sanctification … has as it’s aim the elimination of all sin and complete conformation to the image of God’s own Son, to be holy as the Lord is holy,” but is not completed until we are glorified.
Here are some important things about the sin that remains in a believer:
- We are God’s children and the Holy Spirit dwells in us, so our remaining sin goes against everything we are as regenerate people. And it is an offense to God’s holiness and deserves the wrath of God, even though we will not be condemned for it.
- Our remaining sin causes conflict within us. “Indeed, the more sanctified the person is, the more conformed he is to the image of his Saviour, the more he must recoil against every lack of conformity to the holiness of God.”
- This remaining sin does not have dominion over us. It is, in a sense, a defeated enemy harassing “the garrisons of the kingdom.” It is this truth—that sin no longer has dominion over us—that is our incentive to mortify sin and cultivate holiness.
The agent of sanctification is the Holy Spirit. Murray calls this sanctifying work of the Spirit “secret workings” because the ways he works is beyond our understanding or awareness, but we do know that every advance toward holiness is energized and worked by the Holy Spirit. We are completely dependent on him, and if forget this, we will perceive our sanctification as coming through our own power and be proud rather than humble. Moreover, the Spirit works our sanctification by the “efficacy and virtue that proceed from the exalted Lord … by reason of his death and resurrection.” The Spirit’s work is dependent on Christ’s activity at the right hand of the Father.
Yet sanctification is not simply done to us. We work to become like our God, but we can only work because God is working in us. “All working out of salvation on our part is the effect of God’s working in us….” All the scriptural appeals for us to labor in the pursuit of holiness are to remind us that our whole being—our heart, mind, will, purpose—is engaged in the process of sanctification. Because, says Murray (and this is my favorite line of the chapter), “sanctification is the sanctification of persons, and persons are not machines….”
And what is the end—the goal—of sanctification?
…[T]o know even as we are known and to be holy as God is holy. Every one who has this hope in God purifies himself even as he is pure (1 John 3:3)
Glossary for Part 2, Chapter 7
- apodictic: necessarily true