Lesson One
Grace-driven Sanctification
An Introduction to the Centrality of the Gospel
INTRODUCTION:
The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the very “food” of the Church (Jn 6:53-58). The Gospel, or as Paul describes it at times, the “word of grace,” or “word of truth” is the sphere in which the church operates (Acts 20:32). It is her life breath and atmosphere. For it is by the Gospel that the Church worships, progresses in her knowledge of God, wars against her soul’s enemies, maintains purity, pursues unity, and fulfills her mission to the world.
The Gospel is “our canon within the canon.” It was the Apostle Paul who said, “For I determined, while among you, to be unconscious of everything but Jesus Christ and Him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2).
Those who disbelieve the Gospel are literally at war with who God is. They show themselves hostile to God’s self-revelation; and consequently hostile to the knowledge of God (2 Cor 10:3-6; Rom 1:18-20). The only way to know God, and therefore to be saved, is to become a friend of the cross (for the Gospel of the cross reveals the glory of the knowledge of God in the face of Christ—2 Cor 4:6).
True believers literally love the way God has saved them. They love the truth and feed upon it; they “preach the Gospel to themselves.” They cherish Christ as revealed in the Gospel. They meditate upon the word of God’s grace, marveling at God’s wisdom in the cross. Therefore the Gospel is their constant meeting place with God; for it is the revealer of the heart of God toward us (1 Jn 4:9-10).
Our boldness to draw near to God in prayer and the confidence that we are heard is because the Father has graciously called us to meet Him at the altar of the slain Lamb of God (Heb 14:8-15).
The Gospel is the wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:30). Oh how the Gospel towers over the human intellect. Consider that God has taken man’s salvation into His own hands—for the love of God and the wisdom of God have carved out a hiding place for believing sinners by means of the justice of God in the cross—so that by the sovereign calling of God the sinner may take refuge in the mercy of God from the wrath of God.
The fruits and dividends of preaching the Gospel to ourselves are immense. It will greatly help us keep a godly perspective that focuses our attention upon the cross of Christ. It will enable us to understand our life in the world and our identity in Christ. It will give us a vantage point by which we interpret everything; for the cross puts all things in true relation to each other. It will fill us with peace, hope, and joy in believing (Rom 15:13). It will cause us to live upon Christ by faith. In a word; it will exert a sanctifying force upon us.
I. Ongoing faith in the Gospel is the source of our
spiritual renewal .
As Luther said, the fiends of sin and guilt are always beating up the believer and assaulting his conscience. How the saint needs to see that Christ was given for his sins. Renewal by means of the Gospel is our constant need.
Those who are willing to continually drink deeply from the well of the “word of grace” (the Gospel) are never bored with God. On the contrary, they are renewed by fresh views of God—views which produce awe, adoration, wonder, fear, and amazement. That’s why the Gospel is central to worship. For it is by the Gospel that God exalts, preserves, makes known, and glorifies His holy character in the face of Christ (2 Cor 4:6). The saint is renewed and transformed as He continues to behold God in Christ (2 Cor 3:18).
By nature even saved men and women are prone to live by sight and sense. Like silt settling to the bottom of a lake, our thoughts find the lowest common denominator and eventually return to a temporal value system and a system of legal working. Only the Gospel can renew us, and lift us to another “dimension” by which we live grace-based, “God-ward” lives.
Just as gravity causes water to flow downward so that it eventually finds the bottomland, the swamp, and the stagnant slough, so also the old nature tugs at the saint, pulling him away from faith living. It takes energy and a plan to move pure water uphill to the water tower at the hilltop. So also, feeding on grace is a matter of intentionality.
In order to
rebound
from spiritual declension, one must
assess
the spiritual malnutrition in his own soul. He must stir himself past the carnal apathy that has left him contented with spiritual dryness and a lukewarm disposition toward Christ. The Lord Jesus Christ as He is revealed in the Gospel answers all of our spiritual hunger. We must keep feeding upon Him and not upon the dry
husks offered to us by
the world. Isaiah warned his readers about seeking to feed the soul on ‘bogus bread’ (Is 55:2).
The believer must take seriously the fact that Christ sharpens His rod of discipline to chasten believers who exhibit more complacency than zeal. Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline; be zealous therefore, and repent (Rev 3:19-21).
The believer is frequently confronted by the gap that exists between what the N.T. requires of him, and what his actual obedience consists of. The true believer is always to be about the business of closing the gap by ongoing repentance. But, his efforts to close the gap must be by means of evangelical repentance, not legal repentance.
Evangelical repentance is grounded upon the fact of our union with Christ. Evangelical repentance looks to Christ as our
completeness, our entire eligibility for God’s acceptance and favor, and for our right-standing with God and for our qualification to be sons of God in the kingdom of God.
Our efforts in pursuing holiness MUST flow from grace motives that stimulate evangelical repentance. Ongoing repentance for the true believer flows from his foundation of union with Christ. (Every single sub-Christian cult practices the opposite—they all practice legal repentance; which is an effort, though religion and moral effort, to measure up and be approved and accepted by God so as to win His favor.)
Paul guarded against all forms of legalism; he consistently anchored N.T. commands upon the foundation of the gospel truths of grace and redemption. His arguments for obedience were soundly developed from the believer’s union with Christ.
Without that connection, Christians are left with free-floating exhortations that have the hollow echo of “be-good, try harder, just do it.” A discipleship approach, or ministry pattern, of attempting to improve the Christian life by right attitudes and behavior modification falls woefully short of the grace-based pattern set by the Apostle.
If the precepts we teach are disconnected from the word of grace, the struggling believer is frequently left with the impression that his Christian life is a non-stop effort to
measure up . To keep our
sanctification
gospel-driven,
the exposition of biblical principles must be joined to a glorious exhibition of the majesty of the Savior who loves the redeemed to the uttermost.
The Apostle Paul’s controlling burden for his converts was that they would be granted (by the Holy Spirit) a “spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Christ” (Eph 1:17ff.). This prayer request for his converts involved a Spirit-imparted understanding of the doctrines of God’s sovereign grace and calling in a way that would penetrate their hope and affections.
The Christian life is a life of walking worthy of our calling (Eph 4:1). The first three chapters of Ephesians set forth the infinite riches and glory of our calling. The believer who understands, and highly esteems his calling by the Gospel of grace is in the best position to obey his Lord from right motives.
But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ
(2 Pet 3:18a).
Our sanctification progresses as our knowledge of God increases.
We mature in the knowledge of God
as we keep on considering the Lord’s saving work toward us as it is spelled out in the Gospel of God’s grace (Eph 1:15-23; Phil 3:8-12).
When the saints are awakened to the all-pervasive spiritual reality that they owe their life, their future, their sonship, their status, and their favor with God in Christ solely to the unobligated sovereign mercy of God, it has a life-transforming and renewing effect. (The Holy Spirit keeps
renewing us by
ongoing faith in the Gospel of God’s grace given to us in Christ.)
II. Ongoing faith in the Gospel produces a
passion for God’s glory .
Once the saint begins to understand (by means of a spirit of wisdom and revelation, not just
academically, but in his deepest affections
) that God’s sovereign mercy is not just how God is taking poor sinners to heaven, but it is the very center of God’s plan to glorify Himself—then the saint begins to see things from a different perspective; a perspective which we could designate the
Divine View Point (DVP).
A believer operating from Divine View Point takes to heart the message of Ephesians one; God’s
glory is exalted in the entire salvation of the sinner. God is lavishing grace on the sinner for His Name’s sake!
(Ez 36:22, 23.)
When the believer is stuck in patterns of spiritual defeat, it is frequently because he had not lifted his eyes above his own struggles. Unbelief keeps us focused upon our own circumstances and performance. As long as the saint is stranded in a Human View Point (HVP) perspective, he has little incentive to exercise passion for the glory of God.
By contrast, living by Divine View Point produces a kind of “grace awakening;” it elevates our thinking to live in compliance with Colossians 3:1-3.
“If this be so; if you were raised with Christ, if you were translated into heaven, what follows? Why you must realize the change. All your aims must center in heaven where reigns the Christ who has thus exalted you, enthroned you on God’s right hand. All your thoughts must abide in heaven, not on the earth. For I say it once again, you have nothing to do with mundane things: you died, died once for all to the world: you are living another life” (Expanded paraphrase of Col 3:1-3—J. B. Lightfoot’s Commentary, p. 208).
In the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the believing sinner discovers to his utter astonishment that God has planned from all eternity to join His matchless glory to the unending blessedness and welfare of the believing sinner. (God’s glory is forever joined to His plan to make you glorious in Christ.)
In response to such infinite grace Calvin says, now let us fall down before the majesty of our good God, with acknowledgement of our sins, praying Him to make us perceive them more and more. And may He enliven us with the doctrine of the Gospel that we may see our own sins and shamefulness and be ashamed of ourselves, and also behold the righteousness which has been shown us in our Lord Jesus Christ, and lean upon it with the endeavor to be fashioned thereafter, so that daily we may come nearer and nearer to it, until we cleave thoroughly to it (Calvin’s Sermons on Ephesians, pp. 445, 446).
By God’s design, the glorious effect of grace—namely to be taken up and “intoxicated” with God (hungering and panting after Him and delighting in communion with Him) is the prerequisite for selfless ministry to others (including a zeal for evangelism—genuine ministry is the overflow of worship).
The Gospel of grace alone can make us leave our
comfort zones
on behalf of the needs of others. Grace alone can move us past self-protection. Transforming grace is what is needed in order for us to be lifted out of self concern and to be taken up with God. Apart from
Divine View Point, our tendency is to
settle into a relational life characterized by personal interests, independence, guarded privacy, prickly defenses, and cherished masks.
The saint “stranded” in the HVP perspective of things tends to operate from the carnal vantage point of self concern. His vantage point turns upon his self-ordered world of personal peace, protection, and prosperity. (EX. When God had extended Hezekiah’s life, the Judean king had settled into an HVP mindset of personal peace and prosperity—don’t let trouble or the troubled near my door—Is 39:8.)
HVP is a truncated “keyhole” vision of things has no picture window to see what God is doing in the world. In spiritual practice he lives in a dingy hut, contenting himself with the “bread and water” of carnal security and comfort. Though seated in the heavenlies, he doesn’t stir himself to see past the tiny walls of his little stick hovel of HVP.
Religion has become a spiritual compartment characterized more by deadening duty than delight. Instead of glorying in an all-pervasive relationship with Christ that dominates exceptionally in his life, his heart is smothered in layers of guilt, obligation, and fear. He is like a prisoner in his grey castle of self.
The Gospel of grace is the cure. The kind of grace thinking enjoined by Paul is what is necessary to raise us from a state of spiritual lethargy to a pervasive consciousness of all that God is toward us in Christ. Only by a grace awakening can we be lifted out of carnal self concern to function from a DVP vantage point (
Divine View Point ) laid out by Paul in Ephesians 1-3.
And what a vantage point it is! Meditate for a moment upon God’s plan revealed in the Gospel. Consider what it means to be taken from dust to glory: “What is [God’s] goal? What does He aim at? . . . His ultimate objective is to bring [redeemed mankind] to a state in which they please Him entirely and praise Him adequately, a state in which He is all in all to them, and He and they rejoice continually in the knowledge of each other’s love—men rejoicing in the saving love of God, set upon them from all eternity, and God rejoicing in the responsive love of men, drawn out of them by grace through the gospel” (J. I. Packer, Knowing God, p. 81).
This is God’s glory and man’s glory bound up together in a setting in which the whole created order has been transformed (Packer, pp. 81-82).
Oh how the Church needs to feed on the grace of the Gospel. A passion for God’s glory in our lives is the blessed byproduct of walking through the gates of Ephesians chapters one through three, and (by the Spirit’s enablement) understanding what God is doing in the world—He is glorifying His grace, and He desires that the saints align their entire lives with His plan.
III. Ongoing faith in the Gospel produces a series of sanctifying “
Grace Awakenings
.”
The maturing saint has numerous “grace awakenings” as his Christian life progresses over time. The spiritual cycles of these awakenings bear a strong resemblance to one another. Every time, it is the Gospel order—first there is a withering and stunning view of our weakness, sin, pride, inadequacy, smallness, pettiness, unbelief, unmortified lusts, and frigid love for God. Exposure precedes clothing (as with Adam when he hid.) We become utterly disillusioned with our Christian lives.
Then, just when we are ready to write ourselves off as useless to God, as unfruitful and failures as Christians, then the Holy Spirit inspires us to exercise “mustard seed” faith in a passage of Scripture, or a promise from the Word.
Even a single line of living Scripture believed anew with struggling faith can be a staging area from which God can give us fresh revelations of His faithfulness (and from which He can do new things in our lives).
Amidst our self-loathing, the Holy Spirit “
shows us the blood
” yet again. We feed our faith again upon the grace of God in Christ. We fall at Lord’s feet and consent to be loved by Him for Christ’s sake alone. Suddenly duty becomes delight—we move all the way into renewed enjoyment of all that God is towards us in Christ.
It is through the lens of the Gospel that we see that we are God’s possession. Our identity as sons of God is drawn directly from the word of grace. To the degree that the saint defines himself by the Gospel, literally drawing his identity from what God says about him, to that degree his life will demonstrate eternal values.
By contrast, the saint adrift in the dwarfed faith of HVP tends to define himself primarily by temporal things. His job, his income, his possessions, his friends, his status, his hobbies, his appearance – all these define the HVP saint in his own mind, more than his holy, God-possessed status in Christ.
Preaching grace truths to ourselves regularly is not an option. Without a steady spiritual diet of the word of grace, of Christ and Him crucified, the lower nature will assert itself. Performing, pretending, self-protection, and a passionless spirit will dominate our lives if we are not feeding upon Christ as He is revealed in the Gospel.
Here is the unbreakable truth, if your own identity in Christ, as defined by the Gospel, is your controlling identity, then you will see the Gospel as your life. The Gospel through Christ’s constraining love will animate you; it will determine how you see everything. It will mark out your value system.
“Grace-awakenings” have a sanctifying effect upon the Christian life. As Pastor Al Martin noted, the inescapable repetitive theme of Scripture from cover to cover is sin and grace. As pastors, we have the often unappreciated task, but awesome privilege of persuading folks that God loves people by
His active confrontation of their sin followed by the application of grace.
By His Word, His Spirit, and His ministers, God continually brings people to the crossroads of repentance. We are heralds of a message that is always timely: Repent, confess, mortify sin – experience renewed cleansing and restoration. Delight in God again, find new wonder and gratitude as you commune with Him; have the joy of your salvation restored. Experience joyful integration (as the Psalmists) when you come out of hiding and walk in the light again; living a sin-judged life of transparency before God.
But how do most of our parishioners live in the private world of their spiritual lives? What lies behind the guarded shutters of their souls? Beneath their quiet desperation and patterns of spiritual defeat is a fear that if their rebellion, and weakness, and failure were to come into the full light of God’s gaze, they would be devastated.
As a result, they shore up the little hovel that conceals their depravity with self-protective strategies to defend against judgment. Beneath that stiff upper lip is a proud, but fearful spirit that won’t take the “risk” of running to the atonement one more time.
The flesh works overtime to shield itself from any feelings of condemnation, shame, diminishment, and failure. Chutzpah becomes the rule of the day—the posture that is maintained says, “I have it all together.” Prickly defenses are employed to keep others from drawing too close. Personal brokenness is kept at arm’s length as a repugnant thing too filled with weakness to be considered beneficial.
What is needed is a grace awakening (a series of renewals in the Christian life). When Mike Horton wrote the book, Putting the Amazing back in Grace, he was addressing a pervasive problem—it’s all too common for believers to lose their wonder and awe of God’s grace. Why does this happen?
Amazement at God’s grace is a function of being conversant with our ill desert and ruin by reason of sin. The greater our apprehension of our need for Christ, the more we will marvel at God’s grace. The reverse is also true—without a deep awareness of our ill desert and ruin by sin, we will unintentionally devalue divine grace.
It’s needful, but humbling to wake each day with the intent of facing our utter dependency upon Christ. The alternative is choosing to be managers of our own depravity. When we lose our amazement at God’s grace, it’s generally because we have drifted into a lifestyle of managing our own dereliction and depravity with something other than the grace of God in Christ. Preaching the Gospel of God’s grace to ourselves each day is the solution! Do you do the ‘book keeping’ of your soul and conscience by the Gospel?
IV. Ongoing faith in the Gospel shows us that sanctification is driven by
relationship more than
rules .
Historically, the Church has always found it a battle to keep the doctrines of justification and sanctification joined (and operating in their logical relation—especially as set forth in the Pauline epistles). Pietism separates the two cardinal doctrines; as does quietism. Legalism and antinomianism mitigate against their unity as well.
Of all the groups in church history, the Puritans seemed to have best understood the essential and practical relationship between justification and sanctification (many of the Reformers did as well, but they did not write on it as prolifically as the Puritans).
As servants of Christ, our anthropology ought to reflect an extremely keen insight into the hearts of our hearers. We’re preaching to people who carry in their bosoms the seeds of the Galatian error. We should never be shocked at how religious the flesh of man can be. We should always keep in mind how enormous our capacity is to forget the Gospel.
Orthodoxy can be a forum for the flesh. We are preaching to folks like ourselves who carry in their souls an internal enemy of God’s grace, even though they are believers!
Carnal sense has no trouble understanding moral obligation, ethical responsibility, duty, performance, reward, merit, production, and law, BUT, it requires the ongoing work of God’s Spirit to understand and live by the grace of the Gospel. The flesh loves control more than grace.
The flesh of man prefers a formal, manageable approach to religion. True religion always tends to degrade in the direction of heartless orthodoxy which is characterized by formalism and compartmentalization. (See essays: Orthodox Formalism and Thoughts on Church Renewal).
Only fresh acts of faith take us off of ourselves and dislodge self from being at the center (even Christians would rather do some work of service than do the work of believing—note Heb 4. Christ was witness to this propensity in hearers; a tendency to work rather than believe—Jn 6:27-29).
Due to this bent in all of us, the challenge is to keep before the brethren the union of justification and sanctification. And the fact that grace is not primarily a principle or a possession; grace is a
relationship; it is relational.
God has made us His possession that we might know and enjoy Him and in so doing glorify Him—all flows from Christ, our “Source Person.” We are saved to commune with the Trinity and in so doing ultimately realize (that is be transformed into) our true identity in Christ.
Grace is a love relationship with our Heavenly Father through Christ our Lord in the power of the Spirit. Sanctification is the outworking of this love relationship. When the believer maintains his relationship with the Lord, he is living a “separated unto God,” or “sanctified” life. Thus sanctification involves caring for our relationship with God (David Peterson, Possessed by God). Grace is relational throughout.
FOR DISCUSSION:
- Why does preaching the gospel to ourselves renew us?
- Is it true that we will do more for God when we consistently hear what Christ has done for us
rather than hearing what we ‘ought’ to be doing for God?
- Why is repentance so closely associated with renewed fellowship with Christ? (See Rev 3:19-21).
- Explain what is meant by, “The gospel takes us ‘off of ourselves’ by filling our minds with the
Divine Viewpoint of life.”
- What has to happen in our Christian walk in order for us to take delight in our spiritual duties?
- What does it mean that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the very ‘food’ of the church?
- What is the difference between legal and evangelical repentance?
- How would you define a grace awakening?
- How do these renewals and awakenings cure our fleshly tendency to be weary of the things of
God?