Q. If We Are Fit Already, What About Growth?

A. Growth implies immaturity, but not the presence of evil. A child grows in knowledge as it has before it the perfect thing to which it is growing up, and it grows up to the measure of the life by which it is surrounded. In the same way God puts Christ before His babes, and they grow up unto Him by learning what He is.
In 1 Cor. 1:2 we have positional sanctification; chap 1: 30, the principle of progressive sanctification. Christ, as the object before us, sanctifies. These are the two things seen in the 'leper (Lev. 13 and 14.). He is restored to God by the blood of the trespass offering, i. e., the restoration offering, sanctified by blood; then the oil is put upon the blood; he is set apart to God, as purchased by the blood of Christ, and the Holy Spirit then makes this a practical reality (verses 9 and 10). All Christians are addressed as having the Spirit of God.
Gal. 3:5 shows the means by which the Spirit of God came upon the Gentiles. The Jews having rejected the Messiah, had to take new ground by baptism in order to receive the Holy Ghost (Acts 2 and 19.). Cornelius (Acts 10), as the pattern of the Gentiles, receives the Holy Ghost apart from baptism; so also in Eph. 1:13, the Ephesians who were Gentiles. "If Christ be in you the body is, dead, because of sin." The body is not yet redeemed, and if we allow it liberty it will be only sin. It is to be used by the new man as machinery, so to speak, and kept in the place of death. Not only are the eye and ear avenues of temptation from the outside world, but the very constitution of the body is altered by sin. Sin has disorganized it. It is well known that the child of a drunkard may have naturally a thirst for drink, and in this way how many propensities to evil may there be apart from the fact of what the old nature is itself? Mortify your members which are upon the earth " (Col. 3:5). You yourself are a man in Christ, but you have members, and so yield your members (Rom. 6); but our present mortal bodies shall be quickened by the Spirit in the day of resurrection. We see here (verse 11) the distinctness of the believer's resurrection. There is a resurrection of life and a resurrection of judgment.