Your Sanctification Is Not for You | Theocast

The Purpose of Sanctification Is Love for Neighbor

Hi, this is John, and today on Theocast, Justin and I have this conversation. Your sanctification is not for you. We hope you enjoy the conversation. Stay tuned.

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Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ. Conversations about the Christian life from a reformed perspective. Your hosts today are Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, and I am John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, which is just south of Nashville.

Justin, it's been a wild ride the last few weeks coming right into the new year. I know that we are both hopping on this. We get in pretty early for me. The problem that we find in this podcast is that we enjoy talking about life and ministry so much that when it's time to hit record, we're trying to channel all of our thoughts.

So today's one of those days where I'm legitimately excited to talk to you, my friend.

Likewise, man. Life is a little bit bananas right now in my corner of the world. Not in a bad way, necessarily, just a lot. I feel a little bit weird saying things like that because I think that I've been saying pretty much the same thing for the last year and a half, that it's just very full and tons to do and more things to do than time there is to do them and all that stuff.

We've had good conversations this morning about different things related to Theocast and are just trying to iron out plans and thoughts that we have. Now we're going to try to record a podcast and pray to the Lord that he'll be gracious and guide this conversation and that it'll be useful to the people who are tuning in to listen to what we might have to say.

I don't think that we're exactly scattered. I think that's too strong of a word, but we are definitely having to try to rein ourselves in and get ready to produce some content that has a logical progression of thought.

To it.

And what I mean is, we have so much that we want to talk about in a short amount of time, it feels like a scattergun. It's like, how about this?

How about this?

How about this?

How about that?

How about that?

And so, pull back the curtain, truth in advertising, because we like to be honest with our listeners. This is completely unscripted. Literally we said, let's talk about this, and we hit record. So, we are going to be off and running.

Off and running, completely unscripted, no bullet points. For those watching on the video, my whiteboard is blank, and we're going to roll.

I have the title from the last podcast on here. Well, and that's really been how...

At least I erased that.

Yeah, I know. That's how Theocast has been for a long time, but there are times we have heavily scripted episodes, but those tend to be very technical.

We get upstream and all that kind of stuff.

Sanctification Is Certain, but Its Purpose Is Misunderstood

Yeah, today's going to be a good one. I would say today is probably a conversation that we as pastors have almost every week. I had it yesterday with a congregant, so we feel like we want to always try and come at it at different angles, trying to help think through...

There's two things that I think all Christians, and I'll let you walk us in, JP, but there's two things that all Christians wrestle with. Am I saved? Am I being sanctified? So, we are always helping the listener pull the clutter off of those two questions and really try to think at it from a biblical perspective.

So, JP, what is our subject for today?

Yeah, so when it comes to sanctification, go ahead and say this out of the gate because it's not what we're going to be talking about today. Our sanctification in the Lord Jesus Christ is certain. It's not something that's in doubt or in question.

It will happen because of our union with Christ and because of His Spirit's work in us. And so those who are in the Lord Jesus do not need to worry about whether or not they're being sanctified or whether or not they will be sanctified.

That's a certain yes, you are and you will be sanctified because you are in Christ by faith. So now that we've kind of gotten that out of the way, we're going to have a conversation today about sanctification, but in particular, we're going to talk about what the point of it is and what it's for because I think in the evangelical world anyway, I think that at least implicitly, if not sometimes explicitly, it comes across that our sanctification is in large part about us.

Of course, all of it is for the glory of God. We all can agree on that. Let me just go and say that now. God is glorified by His people as His Spirit carries out His work in us. Amen. Soli Deo Gloria.

We would uphold that and shout that from the rooftops. But when it comes to life on earth and our usefulness here and things like that, it comes across often in our modern church context like our sanctification is ultimately for us and it's about us.

It's about our progress. It's about our development, our improvement, and our lives will go better. It's about how well we are doing in abstaining from sin or how well we're doing in our disciplines or how we are doing with our affections.

It's all about me and what my life looks like on a day-to-day and what the trajectory of my Christian life is. We want to come in and have a conversation that will kind of turn all that on its head and hopefully be very liberating.

I trust even on the face of it, very biblically obvious, that this is good. I'll go ahead and just kind of set the grenade on the table, pull the pin. People have already seen the title of the episode.

Your sanctification is not about you. Your sanctification, I'll even say, is not for your good. It is for the good of your neighbor. So as Martin Luther is credited with saying, and we say all the time, God doesn't need your good works, but your neighbor does.

So that is today's conversation in a nutshell, is that our sanctification by the work of God's Spirit in us is not ultimately for us, it's for the good of our brothers and sisters and all of those who are close to us.

Now we've got to prove it. Let me put it this way. One of the things that I would say most Christians, when it comes to sanctification, the way I would describe their life is proof of purchase. You need to prove that you've been purchased by Christ.

So everything they do, all of sanctification is a proof of purchase. When I talk to people coming out of a Calvinistic background or Calvangelical, as we like to say, or not even that, just an Evangelical background, you hear, you better be demonstrating, you better be showing, you better be proving, you better be examining, and we just did a podcast on that, you can go back and listen to that, the examination episodes.

But one of the things that I struggle with is when you look at the New Testament, you don't have the New Testament pushing the believer towards this constant proof of purchase. You need to be proving to yourself and to others around you and to God that you are.

And I know that they would say, well, of course, that's not what we're saying. But in many ways, if you think about what they're calling the believer to, it is, it is a proof of purchase. So one of the things I say is, all right, if God is sovereign and God knows all things and he knows my heart and he knows to whom belongs to him, because I wouldn't be surprised if God goes, oh, I adopt, I would be surprised in the mind of God, he goes, oh, I adopted you?

Oh, I don't remember that. Hey, won't you prove to me that I did that? God knows his own, that that is the glorious promise of the nature of God is that he cannot be surprised. He does not learn. He does not change.

So if you are trying to prove that you belong to God, and unfortunately, final salvation and misinterpreting Hebrews, where people say God is going to look at your good works to determine whether you belong to him, is a complete misinterpretation of scripture.

We did a whole podcast on that. I will put it in the notes called Dazed and Confused. And just go look at it. We did it on, help me out, it's Hebrews 12, right?

Yeah.

Hebrews 12.

Yeah.

Then when it, when it comes down to now proof of each other, there's this list that's getting given to you. These are the things that you need to be working on as an individual, and we'll call it sanctification.

And if you aren't doing this, if you aren't sanctifying yourself in these ways, then most likely you're not a believer. Again, now we've gone from proof of purchase to God, to proof that I am living up to the claim of Christianity, which there's a lot of movements out there that are calling people into question.

If you say you're a Christian and you don't act like it, then you better start acting like it. And so what I'm going to push back with in this beginning section is the point of good works or the point of sanctification is proof, almost 100 of the time, is the design of it.

Yeah, absolutely.

Go ahead and finish your thought.

Yeah.

So what we're going to argue this morning is that when you listen to how the New Testament writers describe fruit and the purpose of your fruit and the growth in godliness and the growth in Christlikeness, they tell you why you need to be doing it.

And what's interesting to me is that there are a few times, which we will reference in this podcast, there are a few times they will say, show me your faith by your works, but there's a context to it, and it has nothing to do with proof of purchase, which is interesting.

It has everything to do with what we're going to be arguing with right now, which is your neighbor needs your love and you're unwilling to give it, so you can't say, I love Christ and not love your neighbor.

That's what James is saying and 1 John.

So go ahead. So we could start any number of places, and like you said a minute ago, now we need to prove and demonstrate not our legitimacy before the Lord, but we need to prove and demonstrate what we are arguing for today, which is that your sanctification is for the benefit of your brothers and sisters.

So again, like I said, we could go to a number of passages in the New Testament. I'm going to start, if I can, with Ephesians chapter four, verses one and.

Following.

Many people are familiar with that wonderful letter and how the letter, at least in our modern chapter breakdown and everything else, it does break down nicely into two large sections. The first three chapters and then the latter three chapters.

The first three chapters being just like soaring doctrine of the eternal plan of God, his grace, his mercy, his purposes realized through Christ, the finished work of Jesus for us, all of that stuff. Then he pivots at the beginning of chapter four to then talk to the Ephesian Christians about how they're now to live together in the church.

I am actually preaching through Ephesians right now, and when I got to this section of the letter, the way that I framed this piece of that letter is this, if you were asked to write a letter to a church about how they are to live together, how would you start it?

Based on everything that you have ever heard, everything you've ever read, or everything you've ever been taught, how would you begin such a letter to a church about how they're to live together? Just let that question sit in your mind and then consider how Paul begins.

How does he begin his exhortation? He begins with words like this. He says, to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you've been called. By that he means walking away commensurate with the gospel, not walking away that would make you worthy to be saved.

That's impossible. The walk in a way that's commensurate with the gospel. What does that look like, Paul?

Justin, can I just jump in? When people hear that, automatically they think morality. That's what they think. These are the moral things that you need to be doing, and these are the actions. Reading your Bible, praying, tithing.

Listen to what Paul says. Here is what it would look like in the mind of the apostle to walk in a way that's commensurate with the gospel. He says, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace.

Then he goes on for a few verses to talk about the basis of that unity. There's one body, one spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. Where does the apostle begin?

This is very instructive for us. He begins with humility and gentleness, patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain unity in the body of Christ. It's quite clear in all of these things that he is exhorting the Ephesian Christians to, that the point of this is that all of these things are things that your neighbor, your brother and sister, is desperately going to need from you.

This is not ultimately about you. This is about what your brothers and sisters need from you so that we all together, because this is where he's going, so that we all together might be built up in love unto maturity in Christ Jesus.

I just think it's such a paradigm shift, John, for people who have been catechized, explicitly or implicitly, to think that their sanctification exists primarily for their own improvement and for their own moral uprightness and their confidence before the Lord and all that.

Indirectly, as they're grown in these ways, they may be useful to other people. It's like, no, flip that on its head, because the main point of your sanctification is that you would be good for your brothers and sisters, that you might walk in love and humility and patience and gentleness with them, and that there might be unity in the church around the Lord Jesus Christ and the fact that we have a common confession in him, that we are saved not by what we do, but by what Christ has done for us, and we cast ourselves upon him.

We together are clinging to each other as we all cling to Jesus, as we often say. So, that's where the apostle begins, man. It's super instructive and helpful.

To add to that, Justin, what is interesting is that he says, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace. What I hear people eager to do is prove or somehow, let me put it this way, everybody that I meet that is hyper sensitive to their own sanctification is a good thing.

I appreciate their love and affection for God. They truly are trying to find ways to suppress sin and reflect godliness. The problem that I have here is that they have been misled to think that the purpose of the Christian life is to decrease sin and increase godliness.

The increasing of godliness, though, is absent from this very thing that Paul says, which is to maintain the unity and the bond of peace. Their increase of godliness is actually isolated from maintaining unity and peace because they are increasing in godliness in ways which they think is that less sin means more godliness and more discipline means more godliness.

So, if I am more stoic, disciplined, and well-knowledged, like I've got a lot of knowledge about the Bible, and I pray a lot and I read a lot, I'm a godly person. Paul does not describe worthy or godly in that fashion.

He actually describes it with patience and meekness and longsuffering. Let me read you another section. We have to get to the latter part of Ephesians 4, which I know we will, but just something else that is very similar to this.

I'm going to read to you 1 Corinthians chapter 13. Paul is making this point.

Before you do this, we need to apologize to everyone who has ever had 1 Corinthians 13 read at their wedding because everybody thinks it's a wedding text, when in reality it's about love and the church.

Now, if you want to say, love your wife like this, then I guess whatever, but it's really for the context of the church. Again, Paul writing to the Corinthian church, Paul writing to the Ephesian church, you have to understand these are not individual letters to be read individually, these are to the congregation to be applied.

So, he says this, if I speak in the tongues of men and angels but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clinging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and all understanding of mystery and knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

If I give away all I have and I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I am nothing, love is patient and kind, love does not envy or boast, it is not arrogant or rude, it does not insist on its own, it is not irritable or resentful, do I need to keep going?

The point of it is to say that you love someone is the fruits of the Spirit are coming out of you. Sanctification is the process of loving your brothers and sisters without envy and strife, without thinking about unity, thinking about patience and kindness.

He even says this, love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. The idea of that being, we are carrying the weight of our brothers and sisters by the motivation of love.

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Love, Patience, and Unity in the Church

Two big jump in interjections right here on 1 Corinthians 13. One, love and patience go together. They're inextricably linked. It's very clear in the way that Paul describes love in 1 Corinthians 13, that love by definition is long-suffering.

So that whole idea of bearing with one another is just kind of wrapped up in love, because like he says, love is patient, right, and it's kind. Love endures all things. It bears all things. I mean, it's just what love is, right?

So I think that's an important observation. So like if we're always just getting uber frustrated with our brothers and sisters because they're not doing as well as we think they should be, or, man, why are you still struggling with this?

Like, this is just hard for me. You know, like your weaknesses and the bends in your frame, it's just making my life difficult, and it's hard to bear with you and live with you. Love will carry the day in that environment where we say, no, this is what we do in the church.

We love one another and we bear with one another as we are all struggling against the corruption of our flesh. But then second thought from 1 Corinthians 13, it's really cool, like the way he begins that chapter.

It's like, you can have all the gifts in the world, like prophecy and tongues. You got all the gifts in the world that you want. You can have like the strongest faith in the world. You can have unmatched zeal.

Like I'm willing to die for the gospel. I'm willing to give away everything I have for the gospel. But if you don't have love, he says, it's all meaningless. So it's very clear that love and bearing with one another in this kind of gentleness and patience piece is absolutely primary in the Christian life.

So if we're going to talk about sanctification, we ought to be talking in those terms. You're laughing at something. I'm not quite sure what.

Well, I was just thinking about giving your life. You think about even these street preachers who go out and you look at what they do, and I'm like, look, you're definitely telling truth, but you're missing out on 1 Corinthians.

And also when it says, speak the truth in love, you are receiving so much criticism and yet you are forgetting. And I'm not saying don't go to street preaching, but you need to understand the point of what we're communicating is the love of Christ to redeem people from their sins.

And anyways, I just wanted to interject there. I just thought it was funny.

No, it is funny.

All right.

So I'm going to take us to a different passage, which is also incredibly important.

So I do want to go back to Ephesians four eventually.

Okay. Yeah.

Why don't you jump back on that after I do this one? We'll just kind of keep going back and forth.

This is fun.

Walking by the Spirit Means Bearing One Another's Burdens

So Galatians five, 25 and following.

All right.

So like the end of Galatians five into the early part of Galatians six. So Paul has just in verse 16 through 24 of Galatians five, it's the famous section on the works of the flesh and the fruit of the spirit, and then he says in verse 25, if we live by the spirit, let us also walk by the spirit.

The very next verse, verse 26 says this, let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another. Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness.

Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. Bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. Like those verses, John, because there's that chapter division in between them, you know, where chapter six starts.

A lot of times these words are somewhat pulled apart. Like how many times have you heard people talk about what it might look like to walk in the spirit? And they say all kinds of stuff, which is not, you know, most of the time what's said is not bad at all.

But in the immediate context of Galatians five, where Paul says, let us walk by the spirit, what does he write? He says, let's not become conceited. Let's not be arrogant and proud in the way that we deal with one another, looking down on other people and being condescending and all that stuff.

Let's not provoke one another. Again, that's gentleness, right? You know, not trying to provoke people and stir people up in a bad way. Let's not envy one another.

Okay.

Then he says, if there are people among you who are caught in sin, those of you who are spiritual, those of you who are mature should restore that person in a spirit of gentleness. There's that word again, gentleness and restoration.

And we want to see sinners restored to the fold, not beaten to death, but brought back in lovingly and gently. He says, you know, keep watch on yourself lest you to be tempted. There's humility, realizing that if it's not for the grace of God, there go I.

And then bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. So you walk with your brothers and sisters in such a way where as they are struggling, you bear up underneath those burdens with them.

You come alongside and you aim to be helpful. You don't pile it on if their lives are going badly. You say, brother, how can I be of help to you? Sister, how can I encourage you in Christ and help you think through this matter or this matter?

How can I be of assistance here? So those are the words that immediately surround Paul's exhortation for us to walk in the spirit. And that's just not the way that it's often discussed. At least it wasn't discussed that way in my context for a long time, John.

And because again, walking by the spirit, people would immediately assume, well, if I'm going to walk by the spirit, it has everything to do with my personal disciplines and what I'm doing in my time that's quiet and alone, right?

Not how I'm living in the context of the community of the church, but clearly in the minds of the apostles, walking by the spirit is a corporate thing that we do together, right? And again, man, it's just paradigm shift all over the place.

I trust after we do a few passages of Scripture, we can probably talk about how liberating this is and how it kind of reorients the focus. So I'm just going to pause and let you go to Ephesians 4, because you've been wanting to do it for like 10 minutes.

Well, I got to go to 2 Peter first, and then I'll go to Ephesians 4, because the two go together.

You just pump faking everywhere. I left the floor and you drove baseline on me, man.

I got my LA gears back on, bro. Come on, man. I got my 80s kicks.

LA gear.

Reebok's back, baby.

All right.

So 2 Peter 1, I just want to read a couple of verses so you understand. It says, his divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

So he is saying that, and he goes on to talk about the great, very great promises that we are saved by God's divine power. So then he says, for this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue and virtue with knowledge.

So he's describing sanctification. He's describing, this is the outflow. You are now going to be sharing or expressing what's new about you. And then he says, and godliness with brotherly love and brotherly love with affection, verse 8, for if these qualities are yours and increasing, they keep you from being ineffective and unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Well, God does not need this from you because he doesn't need anything from us. Well, who needs it? This is why he says ineffective. Ineffective in who needs our love, who needs our patience, who needs our godliness.

Not God, our neighbor does. So if we go back to Ephesians chapter 4, so you have Peter talking about this ineffectiveness, how we already then take this knowledge of God's divine nature of saving us, and then we use that as our means of loving our brother, let's go to Ephesians chapter 4 now and look towards, let's say right around verse 16.

So we'll start in verse 15. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head and to Christ. So every Christian understands they want to grow.

Yeah, I want to grow.

From whom, verse 16, the whole body joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. So you hear Paul talking about maintaining the bond of peace, walking in a matter worthy of the call which you have been called.

Then he says growing in the knowledge of Christ and how is that accomplished? It's accomplished in the local body. Do you know where Paul gets the most angry? Well, I'd say all the New Testament writers get the most angry, is that when someone's coming up and dividing the body, that's causing division.

Because what ends up happening is if a body is divided, it's not working properly, and therefore it's not growing. So when we make the statement, your sanctification is not about you, it's not, it's about us, it's about the body, it's about the local congregation.

So when you are so individualizing, proving your purchase, you are detaching yourself from the very thing that Paul and Peter and the New Testament writers are driving you into.

The Church, Not the Individual, Is the Context of Growth

Really quickly, I'm just going to reference James 2 in a drive-by fashion. I know that that is a text that's raised often about needing to prove our faith by our works. And we have no issue, because the confessions have no issue, with using the language of our fruit being evidence of the fact that we've been justified.

That's entirely fine. So that's what we think we would understand James to be saying. It's not that we're saved by works, but that in the good works that we do, that, by the way, God has already prepared beforehand for us to walk in, Ephesians 2 .10, that is a validation of the fact that we have already been justified and united to the Lord Jesus.

But what is the context of James 2 that has to be asked if we're going to rightly understand it? Like we always say, I think we joked about this a few weeks ago, or maybe it was a recording we did a few weeks ago that's yet to air, I'm not even sure.

We were talking about how so often guys that do biblical interpretation and exegesis will say that the top three rules of biblical interpretation are context, context, and context. And so we're just saying, hey guys, let's apply rule one, two, and three, as we aim to understand particular passages.

Well, the context of James chapter two is the sin of partiality, where in the church there is impartiality and there is favoritism being shown toward people who are wealthy, and the people who are kind of haggard and poor and don't have a lot are being marginalized.

And so he is rebuking the congregation for that reality, and then goes into his piece about demonstrating your faith by what you do. And I would argue that the works that he has in view in writing that, that he's just written about, is if you're going to claim Christ, then you need to love the weak, and you need to love those who are marginalized, and you need to love one another and not show favoritism in these worldly ways.

This whole business, I mean, this is completely off script, like everything else that we're doing today, you hear people talk a lot about the church shouldn't look like the world, to which I agree, but it's not often in the ways that we frame that conversation about what movies you watch or what music you listen to or whether or not you go dancing or something.

It's like, no, the world shouldn't look like, or the church shouldn't look like the world in that we ought to love one another in such a way that it's obvious that we belong to Jesus, a la John 13. We should love one another in such a way that people look at the church, and it's like, man, the weak are being cared for, and the marginalized are being brought in, and they love each other, and they don't seem to have this kind of class system that the world inherently does.

That's how, in a most pointed way, at the top of that list of how the church shouldn't look like the world, I think that's it, and that's what James, I think, is speaking to.

So, we've got a few minutes left here. I think we need to talk about where there are probably people feeling like we just pulled the rug out from under their feet, and they're not sure where they're going here, and it is so disorienting when you hear that your sanctification is not about your personal progress so that God's pleased with you.

Last, really, I'm so sorry to do this, John, but just one last text that I'm just going to mention to the reader, and you can go read it yourself. Romans 12, right? That's a famous text where Paul pivots in Romans from doctrine to life, right?

And he's going to exhort the Roman Christians to a number of things, but look through the list of stuff that's in Romans 12 and tell me how many of those things are individual. The vast majority of them have an inherently corporate nature to them, whether it's love or hospitality or not avenging yourselves.

Trust God that vengeance belongs to the Lord, et cetera, and love your enemies and all these things. They're corporate in nature, and I think this is just undeniable when you go to the New Testament, pick any epistle, and it's the same tune over and over and over again.

Anyway, sorry.

Yeah, well, I might as well throw one more in there. You got Philippians, so almost in every epistle, you have these instructions of the application of loving your brother. He says, so if there is any encouragement in Christ, chapter two, any comfort in love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind, doing nothing for selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility, count others more significant than yourselves.

Let each of you look not only at his own interests, but also the, I can keep going, having this mind among yourselves, which is also in Christ Jesus. He is describing living a life in tune with the nature of Christ, which is what sanctification is, right?

It's us orienting our life towards Christ.

Other passages, we could do this all day, and I'm really going to try to restrain myself, but even the weaker brother passages, 1 Corinthians 8, 1 Corinthians 10, Romans 14, that are in these epistles too, about how we're to live.

Well, what's the weaker brother stuff about? It's about love. It's like, hey, we have all of these freedoms in the Lord Jesus Christ, and it doesn't matter what you eat or drink, right? Obviously, there is such a thing as abuse of food and drink, but it doesn't matter what you eat and drink.