Part 2
Chapter 2. Sanctification, its nature. We are now to consider together the nature of that great experience described in the word of God as sanctification or the entering into a state of holiness of heart. We may define it as righteousness imparted, just as justification may be called righteousness imputed.
Hebrews 12 verse 14. The sanctification without which no man shall see the Lord. I think it may help us if we glance for a moment at the constituent elements of our nature.
The activities or I might say faculties of the human soul may be described as follows. Conscience, will, mind, memory, imagination, affections, and desires. Though of course it is obvious that in each one of these mental activity is present.
There can be no exercise of any of these faculties without the activity of the intellect and yet for practical purpose we can divide our nature in some such fashion. We are all conscious of these faculties and their activity and we are all equally conscience if we will but reflect that every one of them has been distorted, perverted, poisoned, and rendered ineffective by the work of Satan, the arch enemy of man. But the son of man was manifest to destroy the works of the devil, sanctify the soul, and bring us back again to a perfect happy confidence in God.
I think therefore it may be helpful to consider what is done in the various faculties of our nature, taking them one by one and finally investigate the cause and root of all the trouble. But above all I want you to be convinced that God desires to purify all these faculties and powers so that everything within shall bless his holy name and there be nothing remaining that cannot say amen and hallelujah to his gracious will. Do we believe it possible or is it too good to be true? Surely not with such a God as our God and such a Savior as the Lord Jesus Christ.
First of all then there is the conscience. Hebrews 9 verse 14 says, How much more shall the blood of Christ purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God? When as a sinner we seek and find pardon of our sins, the clamor of our awakened conscience is forever stilled. The blood of Jesus silences its fierce and implacable accusations.
Its sting is extracted. Its voice is silenced. But there is a still greater change.
The conscience is renewed. Some of the most unregenerate men and women have been most conscientious. But when the grace of God reaches the heart, the conscience is both enlightened and renewed.
Our text, however, speaks of a yet deeper experience. Purify from dead works to wait on the worker, even the living God, not merely freed from past sin and guilt, nor from mistaken and misguided zeal, but from doing things in our own strength and urge to wait on the one who works for us. The conscience is cleansed and purified.
And it is the blood of Jesus that does the work. The allusion in our text is to the sprinkling of water containing the ashes of the red heifer upon the priests who had been engaged in burying the bodies of the dead slain by the plague, instead of waiting in prayer and praise and worship in the holy place. So shall it be with our conscience when we apprehend the blessed cleansing of the blood of Jesus in all its fullness.
We shall wait on God who waits to work for us. Now, the will. Galatians 2 verse 20 says, I am crucified with Christ.
The will is the citadel of my soul. We may call it the ego, the very self of man. Till this is captured, till this is surrendered, there is nothing.
When we are born again of his spirit, it is then that through God's free grace, the will is transformed. The ego is crucified with Christ. The self-will, the rebellion, the disobedience are removed.
There is, in other words, a real surrender to the claims of God. In a way that, I suppose, we shall never understand. This is accomplished through the sacrifice of Calvary.
I am crucified with Christ, says the apostle. Through his death and sufferings is dealt the death blow to my self-will and rebellion. Here is sanctification begun, a glorious beginning when the citadel falls.
This is, I know, wrought in us by the Holy Ghost, but it is only possible because he who knew no sin was made sin for us. And yet, though the citadel may have fallen, sanctification is certainly not complete. Many suppose that the surrender of the will is all.
Alas, we soon discover our mistake. When the devil did his work, he made a thorough job of it. Every part of our nature was twisted, perverted, poisoned, and vitiated by his serpent virus.
But praise be to God, he can effect a perfect cure and thoroughly undo all that the devil has wrought within. Strictly speaking, our conscience and will are the two great spheres of our nature in which God's regenerating grace operates. Our conscience is purified, Hebrews 9.14, and our will is crucified, Galatians 2, verse 20.
But entire sanctification covers wider and deeper grounds than these. Number three, the desires. Galatians 5, verse 24.
They that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts. I have spoken of ground deeper than the conscience and the will. I refer, of course, to the desires of the heart.
In the Greek and Hebrew originals of the scripture, there are some 16 words used to express the noun, and about 26 the verb desire. Sanctification reaches these deep places of the soul. Most of us are all too conscious of the truth of Wesley's line, my will seemed fixed, yet wide my passions rove.
Conscious that lower and deeper down than our wills, there are hankering desires so strong that they bring again into captivity the will that has been set free. Let us look well to our hearts. What are our real desires? Desire nothing but God, said John Wesley.
Do we? Are there no hankering desires for worldly things, ease, comfort and pleasure? As the Lord draws nigh to ask, what shall I do for thee? We say, Lord, give us the plenitude of thy spirit. But do we find in our hearts desires for other things stronger, far than the petitions of our lips? 1 Peter 1.13 says, set your hope or desire perfectly on the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Are our desires thus fixed? The word of God speaks a good deal of this permanent fixing.
Here it tells of our desires being fixed. The psalmist cries, my heart, or my affection, is fixed. The prophet Isaiah talks of our mind or imagination being stayed or fixed on God.
And yet before this fixing and establishing of our desires wholly Godward can be secured, the Holy Spirit uses a stronger word, crucifixion. They that are Christ's have crucified the desires. Here is the nature of true sanctification.
There has to be a cleansing of dross from the desires of our soul. Our conscience can be cleansed from dead works, Hebrews 9 verse 14. Our will can be crucified with Christ, Galatians 2 verse 20.
And our worldly and carnal desires too can be nailed to the cross, Galatians 5 verse 24. And number four, the affections. In Deuteronomy 30 verse 6 it says, the Lord thy God will circumcise thine heart to love the Lord thy God with all thine heart and with all thy soul.
There is one command, the greatest in the word, more beautiful than all others. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and mind and soul and strength. There is a promise too more comforting and precious, the one I have just quoted.
The Lord thy God will circumcise thine heart to love. Why is that command so beautiful? Is it not, thou shalt serve or worship or obey in the first place, but thou shalt love. We can't conceive of anyone giving such a command unless he first loved the one to whom he gave it.
No man asks the love of a woman unless he first loves her. So too of God. He could not bid us love him with all our heart if he had not first loved us.
Why is consecration and devotion to God so difficult with some of us? Surely it is because we are not in love with him. Let us imagine the case of a young man who has to go to his place of work some 10 or 12 miles distance every evening. He has to go in all sorts of weather, wet or fine, hot or cold, storm or sunshine.
Oh, how he grumbles and murmurs as he has to toil along in a blizzard or a gale of wind. Let him, however, fall in love. The woman he loves residing at the end of his journey.
How easy is his road now. How delightful his daily travel bringing him to the one he loves. There is no complaining now.
Hardship is now no hardship at all. So may it be when our hearts are circumcised to love the Lord with all our strength. I ask you to notice the word circumcised.
Saint Paul, in applying it to our sanctification in Colossians 2, verse 11, uses another word for circumcised, never found anywhere outside the New Testament. A very strong word, a quote, putting away from and out of, unquote. Us, the whole body of the flesh, the whole body as opposed to the part taken away in physical circumcision.
Yes, it is a blessed taking away from and out of us all that deflects our love and mars our wholehearted devotion to the Lord that we love and feign would follow. The imagination every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. Genesis 6, verse 5. The subject of the imagination in the scriptures is very wide and deeply interesting.
The prophet Jeremiah speaks much of, quote, walking after the imagination of our hearts. And in every case, he uses it in contradistinction to the law or the voice and the word of God. The imagination is followed and trusted and obeyed rather than God's word, etc.
There are three distinct words in the Old Testament, all translated imagination. The first means formation. The second means device.
And the third means stubbornness. It is the last that Jeremiah uniformly employs. We may say that imagination, the faculty that is always forming and giving shape to things that do not exist, is the stronghold of unbelief.
We imagine that God is hard and austere, that his way is difficult, his will unbearable. We imagine trouble that never comes, difficulties that never appear. This is all the work of unbelief.
Unbelief says it can't be done. It's too good to be true. Unbelief whispers that sin is too strong, the giant's too great, the circumstance is too difficult, and the price too costly.
Unbelief paints upon the imagination fearful specters of failure and disappointment and all sorts of trouble. Oh, that diseased imagination permeated and saturated with the poison of unbelief. Can it be healed and made pure? Can it be filled with praising, believing, loving, rejoicing thoughts of God? Hear what the psalmist said as he saw the people lovingly giving their all to God.
Oh, Lord God, keep this forever in the imagination of the thoughts of the heart of thy people and prepare their heart unto thee. 1 Chronicles 29 verse 18. Yes, the heart will never be established or fixed till the imagination is cleansed and that too stayed upon God as the prophet Isaiah declares.
Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind, and it's the imagination in the original, is stayed upon thee. Oh, beware of forming a God of your own, one made after your own likeness, the outcome of your diseased imagination, saturated as it is with the poison of unbelief. Yes, God can sanctify even our imaginations and cast out all unbelief so that we shall walk not according to the imagination of our own evil hearts, but according to his law, his voice, and his word.
Number six, the mind. Renewed in the spirit of your mind, it says in Ephesians 4 verse 23. In speaking of the mind, I shall only refer to it in the sense of the thoughts of the heart.
Some people seem to think that God cannot deal with our thoughts, and yet in Proverbs 23 7, as a man thinketh in his heart, so he is. So a thought, you reap an act. So an act, and you reap a habit.
So a habit, you reap a character. So a character, and you reap a destiny. Truly, the thinkings of our heart are the most important of all.
I am well aware that desire, imagination, and will are all elemental in the construction of our thoughts. But for the sake of plain people, I think we may consider the cleansing of the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of his Holy Spirit as a separate theme. There are, quote, thoughts of evil, unquote, passing through our minds.
They come in a moment and are gone as quickly, leaving no stain, no sense of guilt, no sting, or aftermath of pain. Of these I am not speaking, but there are, quote, evil thoughts, unquote, arising from the heart that mar and scar, blister and burn, that whirl us along in captivity and hold us there. These are they which fix and make our character.
Is there no balm in Gilead for these wounds? Is there no remedy, no deliverance, no inward cleansing of the source from whence they spring? Must censorious, bitter, complaining thoughts, not to mention others more polluted, always arise? Verily, nay, the blood of Jesus Christ does avail, not only to pardon, but to cleanse and remove the evil, making us pure at the source and fountainhead of our being, or as the scripture declares, renewed in the spirit of our mind. Surely this touches the cause and source of all the trouble, not the mind, but its innermost spirit. He can bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.
2 Corinthians 10 verse 5. Now number seven, the memory. I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance. 2 Peter 3 verse 1. Perhaps there is no part of our nature that reveals the evil effects of the fall of man more than our diseased memory.
Why is it that we find it so easy to remember the evil and forget the good? For this there must be some reason. God's plaint through the prophet Jeremiah was ever, they have forgotten me, days without number. Moses in the closing charge to the Israelites reiterated again and again, remember, remember, and lest thou forget, lest thou forget was his constant warning.
Remember the bond service in Egypt. Remember the sin in the wilderness. Remember the judgment of Pharaoh, he says.
Remember that God is the giver. Remember the hindering amulek. Remember the Sabbath.
Saint Pete repeated it also more than once, that he wrote to put them in remembrance, though they knew it already and were established in the truth. Oh, how treacherous and fickle and foolish is the memory even of the saint. There are only three things that can change and heal and keep it fresh.
One, the word of God. These things have I told you that you may remember. John 16 verse 4. And two, the spirit, the Holy Ghost shall bring all things to your remembrance.
John 14 verse 26. And three, the blood of Jesus. This do in remembrance of me.
Luke 22 verse 19. How can we remember unless we read and meditate on his word? How can we remember unless his blessed spirit be the divine remembrancer? Come thou everlasting spirit, bring to every thankful mind all the Saviour's dying merit, all his suffering for mankind. Come thou witness of his dying, come remembrancer divine.
Let us feel thy power applying Christ to every soul and mind. How shall he keep us in remembrance unless the blood has first been applied to cleanse and heal the water of the word, the spirit and the blood? These three bear witness and keep the memory pure, fresh and true. Such, dear friends, is a sevenfold work of sanctification.
Our conscience purified from dead works and renewed, our will transferred, transfigured, I crucified with Christ, our affection circumcised, our desires nailed to the cross, our mind renewed in the spirit, our imagination stayed or fixed on God, and our memory healed. And now, before we close, I want to look a little deeper to find out the cause of all the trouble. Whence comes the perversion, distortion, defilement and disease of these faculties of the soul? The story of the fall directs our minds to Satan, the great archenemy of man.
Here is the primary cause. But is there no secondary one with which we can deal? There is. As we read our Bible daily, we cannot have failed to notice something which appears everywhere in its pages again and again as the reason of our disasters.
That something has many names or designations. Here are some of them, though there are many more. The old man, the old leaven, the carnal mind, indwelling sin, the evil heart of unbelief, the body of sin.
Had I time, I could take each of these and show you that these designations, so carefully chosen of the Holy Ghost, give us different aspects of our evil nature, inherited from our first parents. The cause, however, is but one, depravity of nature imparted by Satan to the human race. Here I have only time to speak of three, the carnal mind, the sin that dwelleth within, and the evil heart of unbelief.
So, the carnal mind. The special mark of this designation is idolatry, or perhaps we may say hostility and enmity towards God. That aspect of depravity that says no to God's command.
Something within us that says, I won't obey when he orders. As Christians, of course, we would never utter the words with our lips, but often in our hearts these sentiments are obtained. Yes, I will go nine-tenths of the way, but here on one point I will not obey God.
Alas, we have all felt its power, this rebellious spirit, this carnal mind, which is enmity to God. Thank God he can deal with his own enemies. He has gifts for the rebellious also.
He can take away even this spirit of idolatry, for such it is. It is not our business to destroy this tenacious foe. We have but to acknowledge and humbly confess the awful fact of its presence before him, and he will cast it out.
The sin that dwelleth in me. The special mark of this designation is impotence. In Romans 7 verse 19, the evil which I would not, that I do.
Here it is not I won't, but I can't. I can't keep sweet. I can't keep control of my temper, my passions, my disordered desires.
I can't love and suffer and obey. I can't cast out this critical, censorious spirit or stop the murmuring, complaining thoughts of my heart. I've tried a thousand times but can't.
Yes, the sin that dwelleth within, this natural depravity, is the paralyzing thing that makes us cry every time. The evil that I would not, that I do, and the good I would, that I do not. Now the evil heart of unbelief.
But there is something worse, far worse, even than I can't or the I won't. Its reigning power can be defined. I don't believe it can be any different.
Here is the root of the whole trouble, as I have already pointed out. All other sin can be detected by a holy ghost reveals it to us. We can never feel unbelief to be sin, the sin of the world, the one most orphaned, damning sin.
It causes terrible pain. To have no confidence in a husband or wife or parent is the most cruel thing on earth. It ties the hands of those who want to help us.
If we don't believe that our would-be benefactor has true disinterested motives, he may try to help us as much as he will, but he can't. Not that he won't, but he can't, because we won't let him. Let us apply all this to our relationship with God.
Can we not begin to see that worse than any evil under the sun is an evil heart of unbelief towards a God of love? I want you, however, to notice that this unbelief is not necessarily in our wills, if we are true Christians. It lies lower than the sphere of the will. It is the poison that vitiates our whole nature, our mind, memory, imagination, and can only be dislodged and cleansed by the mighty power of God.
Here then is the cause of all the disorder and distortion in our God-given faculties, this trinity of evil, disobedience, impotence, and unbelief, three names or designations of that inward bias implanted by the devil, that carnal and depraved nature inherited from our first parents. Can God's sanctifying grace radically deal with so grave a problem and so mighty a force? Can he make us free and clean and whole? Can he sanctify every part of our nature? In reply to this question, may I turn you to that wonderful Old Testament story as told in 1 Kings 20. It is hardly necessary to point out that King Ben-Hadadad, mentioned there, was a hereditary foe of God's people, surely a striking type of our inherited evil, a veritable barabbas, merciless and unrelenting, demanding and seizing all in his power, as the opening verses of that chapter describe.
You can no more satisfy or appease the carnal mind than quench Vesuvius. You will notice as you read the story the conflict and the victories, two of them, but God's intention was more than victory. He has made us more than conquerors through Christ.
After his second defeat, Ben-Hadadad escaped and fled to Ephek, where we read in the marginal versions he hid himself in a chamber within a chamber. What a picture of the elusive power of indwelling sin! Feeling a little secure, he comes forth to plead for his life. Oh, how humble he appears and consecrated! All the cities I took, says he, shall be given back to you, and you can even make streets in my capital, Damascus.
Yes, the old man can be both humble and consecrated, if only his life is spared. We know the rest of the story. Ahab spares him, makes a covenant with him and sends him home.
He does not, however, hesitate to murder one of his loyal subjects, Naboth, as is told in the next chapter, though sparing his deadliest foe. In the following chapter we read of Ben-Hadadad once more in the saddle and at war, giving instructions to his guards, quote, to fight with none save the king of Israel, the very man who had spared his life. That is true of the carnal mind every time.
It can never change its enmity. It can no more be altered or changed than Ben-Hadad. Later on we read of Elisha healing the Syrian commander of leprosy and sending home, clothed and fed, the army which came to take him prisoner.
But Ben-Hadadad still remained the same old, ungrateful, unrelating enemy to God and his people. So it is with the carnal mind. Oh, in what solemn fashion does the Spirit of God give us warning? A prophet of the Lord goes to the king covered with his own blood, for no mere word of warning, however solemn, would suffice.
But his wounds shall speak, his blood and suffering shall bring conviction. The man appointed of God to utter destruction, says the prophet, has escaped. Therefore thy life shall go for his life.
And so indeed it came to pass. Shall we not see in this type the Christ of Calvary? God has appointed to utter destruction the man of sin within our hearts. Shall fear or unbelief spare him? Nay, let us cry with one accord, Crucify him, crucify him, away with him.
Let none of Ahab's spirit lurk within our breasts. Only believe. Let us consent to the curse and we shall see Jesus lifted up as a servant and made a curse for us.
Then let us bow in faith and worship, praising him till we find in blessed experience that all the evil is cast out, our hearts purified, and that everything within us does bless his holy name. Amen.