Sanctification is the continuing change and growth process worked by the Spirit of God that inwardly renews and cleanses the individual being transformed into God’s image. Through the process of sanctification your relationship with God is strengthened as the Holy Spirit brings you into closer union with God so that God can be glorified in and through you. You become a person of distinction. As Paul said, “for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13).
RELEVANCE
I was once in a large fast-growing church (over 10,000 members) where the pastor said “we don’t talk about sanctification here because it confuses people.” I grieved for that congregation. Sanctification is one of the most important topics for God’s people to understand. Without it, a real relationship with God is not possible. Sanctification is how God brings us to Himself, transforms our old nature to the new nature in Christ and conforms us into His image. Paul specifically related how it is the very will of God.
“For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you should abstain from sexual immorality; that each of you should know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, not in passion of lust, like the Gentiles who do not know God; that no one should take advantage of and defraud his brother in this matter, because the Lord is the avenger of all such, as we also forewarned you and testified. For God did not call us to uncleanness, but in holiness. Therefore he who rejects this does not reject man, but God, who has also given us His Holy Spirit” (1 Thessalonians 4:3-8).
“Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit thekingdomofGod? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, 10 nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:9-11).
REFLECT AND RELATE
How has God been cleansing you from your old nature into His new nature?
REFERENCES
2 Corinthians 3:18; Hebrews 2:10-11