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Part I - Biblical Sanctification The Bible presents the one true God alone as being the Holy One. He is removed from us, different from all people, in that we are fallen and sinful and not holy. At the same time God makes it clear that the only way any person will get to be in His presence, indeed to have salvation, is that they must be holy. This requirement is seen from the very beginning and appears numerous times throughout the Old Testament
This necessary attainment of holiness and righteousness, the idea of sanctification, was not fully developed in the Old Testament. The giving of the Mosaic Law showed how they should live to please God, but the reality of it was that it couldn't attain holiness and righteousness. Due to everyone's failure to uphold each and every aspect of it, it became a continual reminder of the sin that prevents personal holiness and righteousness. Paul, a Jew raised under the Law, said it well:
With the coming of Christ, the New Testament makes it completely clear that salvation, right standing before God, has only been through faith. By His grace, through the payment of our sins on the cross, it is God who justifies. Herein a believer is declared righteous and treated as righteous by God solely due to the merits of Jesus Christ. This new standing does not excuse or do away with the concept of sanctification; it provides a foundation for it. The unchanging requirement of God is that we still must be holy and righteous in our thoughts and deeds. Whether a Jew in the Old Testament or a Gentile in the present, anyone who believes that merely attempting to do the right things will save them - whether the acts of the law, or a host of good works by any definition - they have missed the point. It is God who saves and justifies solely by faith, it is only then that God truly begins the work of actually changing us. As such, the substance of sanctification is God working to turn us into what He has already declared us to be - holy and righteous! God's original plan in saving us was with this in mind.
The command to be holy is repeated throughout the New Testament, in fact Jesus even used wording that shows the extent that true holiness encompasses - perfection.
This process of making us holy - sanctification - has two aspects in view. Firstly, there is a past tense, absolute, that God has sanctified everyone He has justified. In this, the word means that we are forever set apart for holiness. God has saved us, made us a new creation in Him, and irrevocably set us apart for all that it will take to see us saved completely - body, soul and spirit. We can legitimately speak of our sanctification as something that is accomplished, because God has guaranteed it in Jesus Christ.
Two Greek words are primarily in view when considering the topic of sanctification. The NT number provided with each definition is the Strong's numbering that makes it easy to refer to a particular word in later citations.
As mentioned earlier, while it is legitimate to refer to sanctification as something accomplished, many additional references highlight it as something that is ongoing. This is not a contradiction; it merely shows that there is an aspect that is ongoing. Certainly, what God has decreed, planned and started, He will finish. While the ongoing aspect of sanctification requires our cooperation with God, the emphasis still remains that it is God who is at work in us to accomplish it.
Notice that sanctification is spoken of as something requiring learning. We learn to conform our will to His, to surrender our desires to what God is teaching us. Because we are a new creation in Him, set free to do what is right and good, we are capable of learning to think right thoughts and do right actions.
Renewing is a process, not an accomplished fact, though the fact is that it will be accomplished! God works in all His children, doing so in His timing and through whatever timeframe He desires. Paul had more to say on this subject:
It is evident in Paul's analogy that the ongoing need to serve, to follow the commands and live out the desires of our Master, is a continual part of a believer's life. Some have tried to claim that entire sanctification is attainable in life, that somehow a believer can reach a point where they have arrived and are on a new plateau, no longer willfully sinning. Yet, over and over again, Scriptures refers to a struggle, to exerting effort, to trying, in regards to the process of becoming holy. Returning to a verse quoted earlier, in the book of Hebrews:
We need to make an effort to both live in peace and to be holy. This command is given without time limit, a requirement that continues until death. Though it is we who do the learning and struggling, earlier in Hebrews it was made completely clear the source of our victory.
By the time we appear before God, we are not only declared holy but we will be made holy. Along with having become a new creation in Christ, this spiritual transformation will be followed up by a mental and physical transformation until we are no longer tainted by sin - and indeed incapable of sinning again. This is not complete until the day we are resurrected, to stand fully made new, physically in the eternal presence of our Savior and Lord.
Notice the future tense of this passage in 1 John 3, "What we will be has not yet been made known". We wait for the time when we will be like Him - complete in our sanctification, made fully holy; pure in all aspects. In the interim we learn and struggle to not sin, indeed we no longer keep on sinning, for sin is not our identify any longer. Though we may fall into sin, God gets us up, and having forgiven our sin, keeps us going. In contrast, the unbeliever falls continually into sin, or more correctly stays continually in sin, shunning one for another sometimes due to consequences or desire for some type of reward. The unsaved continues to sin; the believer desires to stay free from sin. Praise God that our completed sanctification, our perfection in holiness, has been promised when we see Him! Before considering a passage that speaks of our sanctification both as something accomplished and as something being accomplished by the result of a past action, another Greek word needs to be defined:
In reading the following passage from Hebrews, take note of not only the past and continuing aspect, but most of all that it is by God's will and by the accomplished work of Jesus Christ.
Even as Jesus "waits for his enemies to be made his footstool", a future happening that is 100% guaranteed by His past actions, believers too wait for the completion of our sanctification which was also 100% guaranteed by Jesus' past actions. It is legitimate to speak of both as accomplished and still being accomplished (i.e. 1 Corinthians 15:25-27 in regards to Jesus' enemies).
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Part II - Wesleyan Sanctification John Wesley (1703-1791), father of Methodism and subsequently Holiness movement churches including The Church of the Nazarene, Salvation Army, and the Wesleyan Church, taught a doctrine of "Entire Sanctification" or "Christian Perfection". Wesley, while holding to a clear distinction between Justification and Sanctification as with all orthodox Protestantism, did not believe that a Christian needed to wait until death to attain full sanctification; he held that it could be found in this life.
As to practical application of this teaching, Wesley clearly held and taught that this Christian perfection included...
Within the various Wesleyan denominations, there has been redefinition and differing views on Sanctification, typically all while still appealing to Wesley. My mail has included statements such as this...
Like most, this writer keeps moving back to statements of perfection (i.e. intent) yet denying perfect means perfect, let alone that entire means fully. This inconsistency is exactly what has led to much variance and dispute within the Wesleyan traditions. A Wesleyan writer made this summary assessment back in 2006.
Bounds goes on to list the five differing definitions of Sanctification that he has found within what he calls Wesleyan-Holiness. A quick summary of each, retaining his wording, are as follows
Wesley's original teaching, as quoted earlier, leans far more toward the last of these definitions than to the first four. The first time I was exposed to this Wesleyan concept it was through one of my staff who actually believed he had not sinned in years having attained entire sanctification. While some Wesleyans, such as Michael (email quoted earlier) may hold to a lesser position, I would argue that they have adopted a position that is not fully in harmony with what Wesley himself taught. Much of these other positions end up redefining what "entire" means in the phrase "entire sanctification" or what "perfect" means or pertains to in regards to "Christian perfection". For those holding one of these lesser positions, they would do far better to use different terminology that would be less confusing versus grasping at retaining Wesley's labels for the sake of claiming continuity. An excerpt from a Bible Encyclopedia provides additional understanding of what Wesley taught.
Wesley understood the full implication of his teaching. He believed that Christian Perfection or Entire Sanctification was the fulfillment of the process of sanctification that began with salvation. As such, a person would/could no longer willfully sin. This culmination was an end in itself. The only thing a believer would wait for was to be freed from unintentional sin following death. In fact, it appears that Wesley normally held Entire Sanctification to happen closer to a person's death, even admitting that the Apostle Paul did not appear to have attained it while writing his epistles! Yet this did not dissuade Wesley from teaching that a person could expect it earlier in life. This perfection is "spoken of as receivable by mere faith, and as hindered only by unbelief" (A Plain Account of Christian Perfection). Again quoting from Wesley's writings, this conversation was recorded - the answers being Wesley's direct responses.
I find it incredible that Entire Sanctification has been turned into something that people commonly expect to attain early in their Christian life - as such, by Wesley's admission, making them better believers than the Apostle Paul and most others in Bible times and Wesley's day for that matter. Because Wesley had been witness to those who, in his mind, had attainted perfection yet later entered into sin, he held that a person could fall from grace and perfection - indeed loose their salvation - needing to be saved again. Clearly Wesley allowed his experiences to shape his view and interpretation of Scriptures.
As section I shows, the totality of the Bible's teaching on sanctification does not support Wesley's belief that entire sanctification comes about in an instantaneous transformative moment. Any teaching that claims a believer can love God and his neighbor in perfection, in this life, dangerously sets up those people as being absolute examples and also prevents the one so believing from striving to attain even a greater love. (And how did Paul dare to tell people to follow his example if, by Wesley's own admission he had not yet attained Entire Sanctification?). Lastly, those who minimize the doctrine of Entire Sanctification by redefining perfection end up minimizing all of God's standards throughout Scriptures. How can we understand God telling us to be perfect and holy if it means something different for us, if it's all relative? One book in support of Entire Sanctification provides excellent illustration of this type of thought.
Contrary to this low view, God instructing us to be perfect as He is perfect (Matthew 5:48) isn't just telling us to be the best we can be right now. This allows a believer to target mediocrity in the name of "just doing them best I can at the moment". God's standard is the perfect, absolute, unchangeable standard of holiness and perfection that is rooted in His very being - take a look through all the times God's actions, word, and ways are called perfect throughout the Bible, Old and New Testaments. |
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(c) 2009 Brent MacDonald/LTM. Non-profit duplication is permitted as long as the source is cited.
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