Essential Grace: We Are His

Did you ever have one of those moments in your childhood where a bunch of kids were going to do something together, such as play baseball, and two people were chosen to be captains of the teams? If so, and if you were ever picked to be a captain, then you got to experience something similar to what has happened to every believer there has ever been. You were set apart.

In Christianese, there is a special word for being set apart. That word is sanctification. It’s a word that I understand differently today than how I used to understand it. It’s important to have a proper understanding of what sanctification is because having the correct understanding can impact how we relate to God and to one another.

The word sanctification comes from the same Greek word that means holy. So to be sanctified is to be made holy, or to be set apart. What I misunderstood for many years is how and when I was sanctified.

I always understood sanctification as an ongoing process. I would become increasingly sanctified, so I thought, as I cleaned up my life and stopped sinning. In other words, as my behavior changed and I started to look more like Christ, I was becoming more and more holy. So I saw  justification as a one time event that occurred at the moment I was saved, which is biblically accurate.  However, sanctification, or what I thought of as a cleaning up of my life, was something that would happen progressively as I lived in obedience to God.

Do you see the problem with that way of thinking? It puts the emphasis on me and what I was or wasn’t doing. It was performance based; I was only as holy as I was living. And it’s not only putting the responsibility for sanctification on the wrong person (me) but it’s also not altogether an accurate way of perceiving what sanctification is. And to add more to it, thinking of sanctification as a progressive process is not really biblical.  Let’s dig into Scriptures and learn more about it.

Read the following verses and pay attention to how the word “sanctified” is being used.

“Now I commit you to God and to the word of his grace, which can build you up and give you an inheritance among all those who are sanctified. (Acts 20:32)

“I will rescue you from your own people and from the Gentiles. I am sending you to them to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.” (Acts 26:17-18)

To the church of God in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be his holy people, together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ—their Lord and ours. (1 Corinthians 1:2)

And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. (1 Corinthians 6:11)

And by that will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. (Hebrews 10:10)

Jude, a bondservant of Jesus Christ, and brother of James, To those who are called, sanctified by God the Father, and preserved in Jesus Christ. (Jude 1:1)

Notice how each of these verses refers to sanctification, or being made holy, in the past tense. It’s already been done. If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, you have already been set apart. It is not a progressive thing. It is not a process you experience throughout the rest of your life. It occurred at the moment you were saved. So just as justification is a one-time event, so is sanctification.

Moreover, it also has nothing to do with trying to clean up your life or improve your outward behavior. If it did, then apparently Jesus needed to improve his behavior too. Look at what he said to a group of Jews who were ready to stone him during the Feast of the Dedication in Jerusalem. “If he called them gods, to whom the word of God came (and the Scripture cannot be broken), do you say of Him, whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’”? (John 10:35-26) Jesus is talking about himself being sanctified. Is he needing to clean up his act? Obviously not. Another translation of the Bible puts John 10:36 this way: “what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own.” Now that makes what Jesus was saying very clear and it provides us with great insight as to what is happening when we were sanctified.

When a person puts their faith in Jesus and what he did, they are declared right with God. As I mentioned in last week’s article, that is what the Bible refers to as justification. What I failed to realize for many years was that sanctification occurred at that very moment too. When God declares the new believer to be right, He also sets him apart as His very own. In other words, He has sanctified him or made him holy.  

As long as we think of sanctification in terms of cleaning up our outward behavior, we will struggle to understand what sanctification truly is. It is simply God making us his. We belong to him. Jesus Christ purchased us by his blood. He has set us apart from sin and from an unbelieving world and has adopted us into His family.

And it certainly isn’t anything we could have accomplished on our own. As Paul explained to the Romans, “He gave me the priestly duty of proclaiming the gospel of God, so that the Gentiles might become an offering acceptable to God, sanctified by the Holy Spirit.” (Romans 15:16) Notice who Paul gives credit to when it comes to our sanctification. It’s the Holy Spirit who sanctifies us (Also see 2 Thessalonians 2:13 and 1 Peter 1:2). It is not something we can accomplish by working hard to quit sinning, live better, and be obedient to God.

So once again we see the essential nature of God’s grace. We are his, not because of anything we did to deserve it, but because of His unquenchable love and His essential grace. Rejoice in this truth. You’ve been set apart to be a captain on God’s team. And there is certainly no team that is as victorious as His.