Apologetics Session 21 - Sanctification - Part 2

Sanctification as the Longest Stage of Salvation

Last week, always been fascinated with the whole idea of sanctification because actually in the whole process of salvation, justification, everything, the longest period of time in our life is sanctification and we really don't talk about it that much.

And there's a lot of confusion regarding sanctification within the church itself and what does it actually mean or not mean and it kind of goes on this track where it can fall on the side of legalism of fundamentalism or it can go over the other track which we're seeing right now where we have this paganism that's happening within the church itself where they're just saying, well, you know, the unary truth of scripture is not there and we're not gonna believe it.

And so we're in this battle where we are kind of like riding this wave of saying, you know, we're justified in Christ and we're having the Holy Spirit in us and at the same time, we're saying, okay, what happens next?

What's going to go on? So, you know, sanctification is the work of God. All our efforts towards holiness are useless apart from the work of Christ on the cross and Hebrews 10 .10 speaks about that. The work of God's spirit is in us and Paul highlights the Holy Spirit's role with the repetition of this phrase, by the spirit that happens within us.

And that's in Galatians 5 .16. And he uses the phrase sanctified by the Holy Spirit and the dwelling of the Holy Spirit that's within us itself there. So Paul's always constantly going back to that theme, that thematic part there of saying that those who are justified in Christ are indwelled with the Holy Spirit and there's this process that's happening that is divine within you that's happening for the remainder of our lives until we meet with the Lord and can glorify with them.

However, sanctification involves our cooperation. So, again, by walking in the spirit, living by the spirit, keeping in step with the spirit, whereas justification is entirely God's work with us, we can't do anything to that by God's grace, it involves a cooperation with God of us trying to live to what God's mandates are supposed to be in our lives.

And so we have a responsibility of walking in that spirit. And so there's a battle that happens there. In Romans 7, Paul's very explicit about the duality of man and what happens in the duality of man.

While we're trying to walk in the spirit, our flesh is gonna fight us every step of the way. And then on top of that, we have spiritual darkness, this world that we're living in that's not ours. So we're constantly in a fight.

We can never let our guard down. And we're constantly moving in a direction that says we always need to touch base, we always need to know, we always have to ask ourselves, now, how are you doing today?

Really, it's an important part of who we are. So it's an ongoing process. Justification is once, and we have that. Sanctification is for the remaining part of our life, continuing the process. The Greek verb for that is called peripatio, which literally means to go about, to increase.

And as we're growing in Christ and through the Holy Spirit, we're increasing our knowledge, we're increasing his presence in our life, we're constantly increasing there. And at the end, we're gonna do a little exercise at the end here to talk about that.

It's the same word that Jesus used when he was talking to the paralytic. He says, get up and take your mat and walk. Same type of word of the believership that happened with that person is what we're gonna be going through in our lives.

So the word walk can be used as to mean, there's a certain walk in our life, a certain walk in our conduct, a certain walk in how we live on doing that. And Paul uses the tense of this word to reflect a continuous, ongoing activity.

This walk reminds us that sanctification is a roll ever so laid down as a superhighway that treks resolutionally up to an arduous path, and I had it up here for a second. And there's the path. Notice how the path goes.

And I can tell you just on my testimony that it's not a straight line at all. It's constantly, you fall down, you get up, you fall down, you get up. Just for me personally, just when I think I get it, something happens to remind me that I'm a still sinner.

So, and that's a good thing to happen to what's going on. And plus, from all the different trials that we go through, making confession of faith, we know we're gonna have trials, and that's always gonna test our sanctification through our lives.

So the goal of the measure of sanctification is Christlikeness, which we're trying to get to. So it's trying to transform us more and more to being like Christ through the Holy Spirit there. And really, the primary instrument that we do this with here is three ways.

One is the Word of God, of course. Two is the church body that we have here. And number three is prayer. And so prayer is a continuous thing, and prayer is not the Nancy type of behavior where you have to set a time, it's talking to God, just constantly, when you have a chance, talk to Him, just talk.

And that relationship there is what develops the optimum of what we are going through in sanctification. And this is God's will for our life, to have that happen. With that being said, as an overall entry, there are many views on sanctification, and I want to pass this out to everyone there, because this is where we start to get into the weeds about what is and what's going on there, if you can pass it around.

There's five views on sanctification, and I'll try to go through this, not to read the whole thing, but I think it's a good thing for people to have. If you remember from the first class, I spoke about, we always talk about the outside world and understanding that the lost needs to be spoken to about God's word and Jesus and all that.

But we have an enemy inside the church there that doesn't understand a lot of things that are going on here. And that's one of the roots of people that we really have to teach them about what's happening.

So there's five views of sanctification. The Wesselin view, the Reform view, the Pentecostal view, the Keswick view, and the Augustine dispensational view, and not to make everybody fall asleep with it.

I just want to kind of run through some of these things here and you can see an idea of what's going on there. So the Wesselin view basically is about entire sanctification. Has anybody heard about that?

If you know about it, perfectionism. Yes, John? I taught at the Church of the Nazarene. Yeah, very well. Yeah, and it's the idea that somehow, John Wesley was pushing this belief that at the end we will be perfect and we will not be able to basically sin, which there's a lot of problems with that.

So the entire sanctification was made through experiential, through the second work of grace that opens up ways for growing in grace and has made a great emphasis placing and perfecting the work of love.

If you're showing Christ's love through your life, that is perfection according to that, what that sanctification was gonna be talking about. And so in there, what I have here, I broke it down to the beginning points, how they think God's work works, our responsibility for it, and the effects of sanctification and what the extent of sanctification there.

And you'll see a difference there. The Reformed view, which is a view that we adopt or I adopt, emphasizes on positional truth and having that truth be with us for the remainder of our lives. And it's about regeneration, precedes faith, makes faith inevitable.

It follows that the faith will continue to operate as God's progressively sanctifies us through the individual. If one fails to persevere, then the individual is regarded as not having been genuinely saved, therefore emphasis is placed on living right to persevere.

And that's basically is, we're always going to try to strive to be Christ-like as best as we possibly can on there. The Pentecostal view on, this is very, very different, and you've probably, you went, Phil, you were in, you were?

Yeah, but they didn't teach any doctrine, so I already know. Okay. The apparent differences between a holiness Pentecostal who believe in the definite second work of grace and the assemblies of God who believe in the progressive sanctification, but for each, the baptism of the Spirit is heavily emphasized as the gifts of the Spirit.

And I attended, just to see what the church was like, I attended a Pentecostal church in Whitestown. And in the middle of the service, and this is, I'm not trying to be disparaging there, everybody got up and started speaking in tongues, everybody started, a couple people were running around the church, there was people rushing over to the stage where the pastor was, it was like an experience.

Yeah, it was just like out of control. Any interpretations? No, no interpretations, no nothing there. It was very emotional, very high-pitched, people were speaking, you couldn't understand a word they were saying.

And afterwards, when I was leaving, Joyce was with me, we were leaving, we were looking at each other and we went to one of the elders over there and we said, what's going on? They said, oh, the baptism of the Spirit is the driver behind this.

But when I was there, I just never, I never got a real sense of any grounding, anything that was substantial, that had meat to the bone, so to speak, where I felt like they were speaking about God's word and scripture and all that, just didn't feel that at all happening there.

That's the holiness Pentecostal one that's there. Then there's the Keswick view. The Keswick view emphasized positional truth and it's as well as provisional truth in the dwelling life of Christ that can be accessed through faith.

That started back in England, back during the 19th century. A big believer of that movement was Billy Graham and Oswald Chambers. If you know anything about Oswald Chambers' work, he wrote all these different books on it.

My utmost for his highest. Yes, yeah. And they adopt this viewpoint here. And the last one was Augustinian dispensational view. And this view adopts a two-nature concept. And the emphasis is placed on God's provision and man's responsibility to appropriate that provision by faith.

And in this respect, the view is similar to Keswick, but with a Schafrian articulation and basically Keswick said there was two different types of blessings that would happen. One, when you have justification and it could be a period of time before you have a second blessing through sanctification, which is not true at all on what's going on there.

And while the Justinian view doesn't take that view, they already kind of follow what's going on there. So those are like the five different views. And at your leisure, read them, get to know them because when you're speaking to other believers, other people in churches, they will start to espouse certain things and you'll get to notice right away that there's a different way of looking at things and it gives you a good idea of what's happening.

The Drift Toward Woke Theology and Fault-Based Counseling

Now, when I was in seminary over in Princeton, they also had their own view of sanctification. Now, they've gone completely woke. So, and they're pretty much reformed when they first started back in the turn of the century.

Now, it's so totally on the woke side that they will not even attest to the authenticity of the gospel. And for them, they more lean towards a rustling view where it's all about love and all about care.

If you can show Christ's love in everything, despite what the circumstances are, that's okay. And I had a very, well, I can give you a little anecdote about what had happened to me. So, when I had to make my dissertation there, my subject was really about this subject matter and it was, and the name of the paper I wrote was It's Nobody's Fault but Mine, which was completely opposite to what we were being taught in school, because they were always doing these positional pieces where they were talking about, well, it could be the environment you grew up with or it could be these other events that are taking place and all that stuff.

And I was very blessed that somehow, something inside of me was saying, now you gotta be accountable for yourself. You constantly have to go back to that place and you have to put yourself before the Lord and you have to be on your hands and knees and say, Lord, just tell me.

Obviously, from a place of repentance but also from a place of just trying to get answers. And there was some loggerheads that had happened there. What ended up being kind of like an apex for my journey there was, I had to take counseling classes there.

And the counseling class, one of them was about the miracle questions. And they were pushing to have us as students to take up some sort of cohort to work in there. My cohort was doing a prison ministry and I was with these group of people that were having us do this prison ministry.

And one of the things they wanted us to do was to start counseling based around the miracle question. I think I spoke about this the first time that I talked about what is faith. But the miracle question is that, and this gives you a good idea about what the underbelly is on what was happening there, is if you can change anything in the world, what would that be and how can we help you attain it?

And it ended up being a place where I had to basically confront my teachers and say, hey, wait a minute, what about scripture? What about allegiance? What about acknowledgement to the Lord and we're supposed to be following this?

And they kind of pushed me to the side and said, no, we're beyond that now. We're not doing that now. Now it's about the individual itself. So there's very much a sense of the subtlety that kind of permeates within the church body where in the beginning of my first time I spoke about what is faith, I talked about the fact that you can break it down very simply.

There are two gods. There is our sovereign Lord and then there's us who wants to be God. And the slow, subtle part of this is that the church is trying to make themselves like God instead of acknowledging who the authority is.

And that was starting to permeate in all the slum seminaries too and I was underneath that. So this will give you a good background as a starting point to really understand the subtleties that are happening there and what is biblical truth.

So I hope that you really utilize it. So with that being said, one of the questions I always run across is that is sanctification just free will? Or is there divine governance or providence there? I mean, so if you go through the process of justification, and now you're sanctifying yourself with the Holy Spirit, basically who's driving the bus?

What's really happening here? Is the Holy Spirit driving us? Are we have free will to do stuff? What's really going on there? And so divine governance and sanctification goes hand in hand. One of the things that Paul talks about is that if you're in the Holy Spirit, you're actually a slave to Christ.

He says that very emphatically. A slave being that everything you do in your life is to the master. This is what is going on there, which is very different than what we talk about now. But it's very emphatic in Ephesians and Colossians and Philippians that Paul talks about that, being a slave to Christ.

So the doctrine of sola gratia, or saved by grace and grace alone, and justified through grace through faith allows us to have that category where we are a slave to our Lord and Savior. And Matt, you had spoken about the whole idea about election and free will.

There's a fine line between divine governance, election, free will, what is being done in terms of our adoption into Christ's family there. And so in Ephesians 1, 11 to 14 says, in Him we have attained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purposes of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will, so that we who were first to have hope in Christ might be praised of His glory in Him.

You also, when you heard the word of the truth, the gospel of your salvation and believed in Him, were sealed with a promised Holy Spirit who has guaranteed our inheritance until we acquired possession of it to the praise of His glory.

Now, not to get too deep in the weeds with this, but if we believe that Christ and the Trinity is all-sovereign and omnipotent, there has to be a divine governance that's gonna be happening there within that.

So within our sanctification process, He knows, the Holy Spirit knows the beginning, the middle, and the end to what's going on there. And of course, my chart keeps on timing out here. So until we see Him, that this divine governance needs to be acknowledged and understood that part of our sanctification process, there's a point to what's going on here.

So there's three parts to this. There's the necessarily part to what is happening with our sanctification and divine governance. There's a free part, freely part to it. And there is a contingency part to it, contingency on events.

So I'm gonna read you a couple things here. It says, in Nehemiah 9, six through seven, it says, you are the Lord, you alone. You have made heaven and the heavens of heavens, and with all the hosts and the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them, you preserve all of them.

And the host of heaven worships you. You are the Lord, the God who chose Abram, brought him out of the Ur of the Chaldeans and gave them the name Abraham. So he oversees everything anyway, we know that.

And he knows every single thing that's going to happen before, during, and afterwards. Such as in Proverbs 16, 33, it says, the lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord. Now, think about that for a minute.

We're going through sanctification, we're choosing to be in Christ's light, yet God knows everything that's gonna happen for us. Why? Simple question is why. All right, so here's a, and you should be familiar with the story in Judges.

So Caesarea fled away on foot of the tent of Jael and the wife of Hibber the Cainite. For there was peace between Jabba the king of Hazor and the house of Hibber the Cainite. And Jael came out to meet Caesarea and said to him, turn aside my Lord, turn aside to me, do not be afraid.

So he turned aside to her into the tent and she covered him with a rug. And he said to her, please give me a little water to drink before I'm thirsty. So she opened the skin of milk, gave him a drink and covered him.

And he said to her, stand at the opening of the tent. And if any man comes and asks you, is anyone here, say no. But Jael the wife of Hibber took a tent peg and a hammer in her hand. Then she went softly to him and drove the peg into his temple until it went down into the ground while he was lying fast asleep from weariness.

So he died and behold Barak was pursuing Caesarea and Jael went out to meet him and said to him, come and I will show you the man whom you were seeking. So he went to her tent and there lay Caesarea dead with a tent peg in his temple.

Now, when you listen to that story, you listen to what just occurred, the background of that was God wanted to defeat this enemy. And he was using by providence Caesarea to go ahead and make a decision on her own to go ahead and fulfill what God wanted to get done.

And it is one of the ways that during this process that God uses us to do that by our own, almost seems like our own free will. But he knew that at the end, this is what's gonna be the plan that he wanted to protect and bring justice to what's going on there.

Another way is freely, man's inspired decisions. So in Isaiah it says, woe to Caesarea, the rod of my anger, the staff is in my fury against the godless nation, I sent him. And against the people of my wrath, I command him to take spoil and seize plunder and to tread them down to the mire of the street.

But he does not so intend and his heart does not so thank.

But it is his heart to destroy.

And to cut off nations, not a few. So again, God uses free will to go ahead and decide what he's gonna be doing with nations. He already knows what the end result's gonna be. And in Romans in 3, 9, 18, he says, what then, are we Jews any better off?

No, not at all, for we are already charged that all both Greek and Jews are under sin as it is written, none is righteous. No, not one. No one understands, no one seeks God. All that turned aside together, they have become worthless.

Not one does good, not even one. Their throats is an open grave, they use their tongues to deceive. The venom lasts and is under their lips. Their mouth full of curses and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood in the paths of ruin and misery.

The way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes. And so with this, we're getting a clearer understanding that man's free choice is to go ahead and do what they do in their life and people are going through the process of sanctification.

There is a providence that happens at the end there. There will be justice to be done. And then he continues, in Ephesians, Paul continues in Ephesians 2, 1, 10. And you were dead in the trespasses and sin in which you once walked, following the course of the world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the son of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh.

Carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, whereby nature, children of wrath, like the rest of mankind, but God, being rich in mercy because of the great love of which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.

By grace, you have been saved. And raises us up and seated with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages, he might show, and this is the key, in the coming ages, he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace of kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.

And that's part of that process that happens there. For by grace, you have been saved through faith. This is not your own doing. It is a gift of God and the results of works so that no one may boast for we are his workmanship, creating Christ Jesus for his good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

And so we're kind of now going through this path knowing that there is a purpose, we have free will, we can make decisions, if we are in Christ, these decisions, God already has a plan for us to do that.

And it kind of goes against what the whole thing about, and I talk about this a lot, about the whole Jesus code, that when we go into a church and everybody, you go to some of these churches, they all look the same, they all act the same, they all like, almost like robots.

That's not what should be happening. That's not what we are about. That's not what God has us to be. We are the bride of Christ, we are all individuals, and yet at the same time, we have goals, we have things that God wants us to accomplish in this life.

So that's about the free decision. But then there's the contingency, contingence on events. So Mark 16, 15 through 17, and he says to them, go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation, whoever believes and is baptized will be saved.

Whoever does not believe will be condemned. So there's a clear delineation between those who are in Christ and going through this process and those who are not. And there's other events that happen, such as in Genesis 50, 15 through 21, when Joseph's brothers saw that their father was dead, they said, it may be that Joseph hates us and pays us back for the evil that we did to him.

So they sent a message to Joseph saying, your father gave this command before he died, and say to Joseph, please forgive the transgressions of your brothers and their sin, because they did evil to you.

And now please forgive the transgressions of the servant of the God of your father, Joseph wept. And he forgave them the transgression of the servant. And his brothers also came and fell down before him, behold, we are your servants.

But Joseph said to them, do not fear, for I am in the place of God. As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. To bring it about that many people should be kept alive as they are today.

So do not fear, I will provide you and your little ones best and comforted them and spoke kindly to them. So another part of our process is that God knows that through different events are gonna happen within our lives.

During this sanctification, even when we fail, he's gonna use them for good. He will use them for good, no matter what happens. And in Ephesians 1 .11 says in him, we have obtained this inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him, who works all things according to the counsel of his will.

So it is a unique discovery to go through life, knowing that for the remainder of my life, even when I fail, God can use that. He will use it for something. And when we triumph, he will use that for something.

And the people we meet, he will use that. In the intersections that happen, he would use that, the interplay we have. He will use everything to sanctify us and do that. And we have to be mindful of it, that we're not all gonna be the same following the same things.

Does that make sense to everybody? That, okay, I don't wanna go too quickly through this. So basically the final part of this thing is so how do we measure sanctification? How do you do that? Does anybody have an idea how you do that?

Should we? Should we measure it? Well, in Galatians 5 .16 -25, he talks about the fruits of the spirit. And so while we have a little time, I have this to pass out to everybody. Here, pass this out. And I think, and this is something that, it's an individual thing that everybody can take a look at.

And it kind of gives you a good idea of what sanctification could mean in their lives. We're having a problem.

If we have to write humility in here. Yeah, I don't see humility.

So the fruits of the spirit was advocated by Paul in Galatians 5 .22 -23. And it doesn't occur only here, but also in other parts of scripture. And most of the attributes of those by God himself lives.

But this is our sanctification process once we are justified through Christ our Lord. And when we look at this list, what's interesting, and we're not gonna put anybody on the spot, but I think it's a good exercise for us that when I did it myself, I could tell you, there was a lot of different things that I think I'm pretty good at, but there's a lot of things I'm not good at at all.

And Paul was very specific in terms of what the fruits of the spirit are and how we do that. So what I had done here was basically do a rating from one to five, and you do this in your own time. One being that you need work, and five being you're very blessed that you were able to do that.

I fall short in a lot of these areas, and I had a parade about it and everything, but I think it's a good thing to do to check in with yourself and to see what's going on,.

To be truthful with yourself.

And then I have a column there that has a reasoned solution about why what's going on there. And I think it's a very practical way to look at where you're at. I know that for myself personally, I can be a little bit high and mighty, thinking I know too much, and so I don't give myself a pretty high score for that, and I always have to, to your point, to be a little more humble.

Other places where I think that I do okay, I try to be a peacemaker in everything I do, so I think I do that. But when you take this and you put it, let's say, towards marriage, or you do it towards work, or if you do it towards coworkers, and you do it towards customer service, how does all these things fit in there?

And you can make a pretty decent matrix of your life and say, wait a minute, there's aspects of error that I need to work on. And so I would encourage you to do this on your own, do it with your wife and friends, just to get a bearing on where you're at.

And what?

Another question, go ahead.

Well, you just said it, because I was thinking it might be better to have somebody evaluate you. Exactly, yeah, exactly.

Joyce do it, or? Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, you do what you think is, and then have someone else, like Mike Joyce, say, okay, what do you think? And do that. And you see how they compare. Yeah. Yeah. But like I said, when I was going through this exercise, I'm like, eh, I don't know.

Only give it to somebody that scores very high on kindness, though.

I think it's interesting, because this whole class has been about the truth, and knowing the truth, and walking in the truth, and holding firm to the truth. But when the Lord lists the gifts of the Spirit, and we know how important the truth is, but that's not necessarily on this list.

So you can have all your doctrinal ducks in a row, Correct. And be a darn bitter old scoundrel, and that's not gonna do you any good. Yeah, I agree with you. We need to walk with the Spirit.

To that point, last week I had spoken about, Martin Luther and Calvin, and I just pointed out different things, that while they're great doctrinal giants, and they also had their issues there. And I was gonna bring on some other people, and I thought about it, I actually prayed about it, and I'm like, no, I'm not gonna do that.

You know, I'm not gonna do that. There's a book from Frank Biola that's about the forefathers, and his premise on it was that we have a tendency to make, and it's a natural tendency, to take these titans, these spiritual titans, and we put them on a pedestal, but they're still human, and they still go through the same things that we go through.

And so what he did was break down a lot of these people from Augustine, all the way through, through D .L. Moody, and he went through all of them, and just talked about their humanity. And it's a really neat caveat to, to what we read about their doctrinal premise, to who they were as human beings.

And I'll never forget, you know, one of the things about Billy Graham, I read his biography years ago, but what has struck me in the story of Billy Graham, I don't know how everybody feels about Billy Graham or not, I have my own opinions about it, but one thing he wouldn't do, which I just thought was, I had shared this with Joyce, was he would not go into an elevator by himself with a woman.

He just wouldn't do it. He would always wait for somebody else to come with him in there. It was just one of those things that he did in his life. It doesn't make him better or worse or whatever, but he just wouldn't put himself in that position to do that.

And I thought that was just an interesting aspect. I made fun of Mike Pence for the same thing.

What? I made fun of Mike Pence for the same thing, because he said he won't be alone with a woman other than his wife. Meeting or lunch or anything.

Yeah, I think that's a good rule of thumb. Yeah, yeah. So, this is all I have for us today, and I want to thank you all for going through this. I will be putting these, there's a bunch of documents that I'm gonna be putting up on the Google service, so look for the link.

And does anybody have any questions or anything that they want to add to this?

Mutual Admonition, Fruit Inspection, and Bearing One Another's Burdens

Yeah. When we counsel each other as brothers, because we do love each other, and when we see a brother fall short, in gentleness, we're to advise them. We're not to be judgmental, but we are to be fruit inspectors.

We're to exhibit the fruit of the spirit, and if we see a brother lacking in that, we know he's been a Christian for a while, he shouldn't be doing that. Right, right. You know, we do it gently and a lot, because we all fall short.

And I appreciate it when somebody tells me, hey, I gotta work on that. Right, right. You know?

Yeah, that's the biggest, last week I had spoken about a lunch I had with a brother, and it was a really difficult lunch. And it was one of those type of things where we were kind of burying our hearts, and two things were happening with me during that time.

One was, I wanted to do what you were talking about, Rich. The fruit inspector. Right, but I was doing everything I can not to judge him. Like, I was doing everything. I almost wanted to yell, and didn't do that.

And I kept on saying, please, Lord, just make me just be peaceful about this, and do it. And that's really, really hard to do. It's just hard to. And the Holy Spirit grabbed you and said, you gotta watch on your pride.

Yeah, exactly. You know, and it's weird, because when I got home, I felt really bad, I felt really, really bad. So much so that I called Joyce at her work, and said, we gotta pray, because there's something, like, I shouldn't feel like I need to tell this person how to live their life, you know?

I mean, you should be inspired by the Holy Spirit to do that. So there was an internal struggle with me, and like you're saying, about pride, to do that, and not to do that.

And it's cool that the Holy Spirit reveals to us what we need to pray for about ourselves. Right. I gotta work on that, Lord.

Help me, thank you. And he's gracious, because a lot of things we would never see for ourselves, but when the Lord talks about, I'll say, change in our lives, there's a lot of painful words that come up, like refining, or crucible, or pruning.

And none of those things are pleasant to go through. But if we trust the Master in what He's doing in our lives, no matter what we're going through, we know that the end of it all is that He wants us to bear more fruit, and He wants our fruit to remain.