Sanctification in Christ
He believer’s sanctification is at once both complete and incomplete. As “sanctified in Christ yesusl’ and embraced in his comprehending holiness, he can no more improve this grace than he can add lustre to a sunbeam. It is a work of God, and “Whatsoever God doeth, it shall be forever: nothing can be put to it, nor anything taken from it.” As fulfilling in himself that sanctification which has been wrought for him in Jesus Christ, this grace is only too painfully partial and incomplete. For imperfectness is as characteristic of the creature as perfection is of the Creator.
We shall be little likely therefore to fall into error and confusion concerning this doctrine if we keep in mind the distinction between what we are as “his workmanship”
1 Eccl. iii. 14. * Eph. ii. 10.
and what we are as “workers together with Him!’ 1 As the first we are not only” created in Christ Jesus,” but “created in rights eousness and true holiness!’ Christ and his attributes never part company, and it is impossible to be made in Him without being made into all that belongs to Him. In the same transfiguration of faith by which we put on the Lord Jesus, do we put on his raiment of holiness, “exceeding white as snow, so as no fuller on earth can white it.”
This may seem to some indeed like an assumption perilous to our humility. But do we honor God most, let it be asked, by limiting his grace to the degree of our worthiness and capacity .? Is Christ best pleased that we take Him piecemeal, and according to the narrow measure of our deserts, when He has given Himself to us wholly and without reference to our deserts? Nay, we have no more right to find a partial sanctification in Christ than we have to find a partial justification. Both are contained in the same Legacy of love, and bequeathed to us on the same condition, simple faith.” Of Him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom and righteousness and sanctificatiojt
2 Cor. vi. I. 2 Eph. iv. 24.
and redemption,” made unto us all these in their fullness, and not some of them and partially as we can receive them, — unless indeed we make a distinction, which would seem unnatural, between the manner of bestowing righteousness and sanctification, holding that the one is immediately imputed and the other only gradually imparted. Would not the truth seem to be rather, that both are imputed to faith to be wrought out by obedience and holy living? — God’s justifying of us in Christ being more and more realized in the answer of a good conscience in ourselves; and his sanctifying or setting apart of us in Jesus being more and more fulfilled in our own sanctification or separation from sin.
And it is because we can thus rest on a completed work in Christ that we have hope to go on unto completeness in ourselves, “to apprehend that for which we are apprehended of Christ yesits!’ Hence also the harmony between texts that have seemed strangely at variance, such as,” Ye are washed and ye are sanctified,” against, “This is the will of God, even your sanctification; “and, “For by one offering He hath perfected forever them that are sanctified,”
against, “Let us go on unto perfection.” In Christ Jesus all contradictions are reconciled; the things that are incomplete, and the things that are not, becoming the things that are, and the things that are complete. As a gift of grace, then, sanctification is conferred on each Christian as soon as he believes. But it is a gift yet Jield on deposit, if we may say so, “hid with Christ in God,” to be appropriated through daily communion and gradual apprehension. And so, while the believer’s realized sanctification appears painfully meagre, at most a thin line of light, like the crescent of the new moon, he yet sees it ever complemented by the clear outlines of that rounded perfection which is his in the Lord Jesus, and into which he is to be daily waxing till he attains to “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” Is not the most fruitful root of misconception on this subject to be found in the idea, that while our justification stands wholly in Christ, our sanctification stands in ourselves t As though it were our human nature that is to be improved and brought to ultimate perfection! One surely could never harbor such an error, were he mindful of that form of doctrine to which he was committed in baptism. That declared the putting off and burial of the old man, and the putting on of the new man. And it cannot be that this forecast of the Christian life is so reversed that we are now called to exhume what has been buried, and to clothe ourselves again in the cast-off garments which we have solemnly declared to be beyond the hope of renovation. No! what has been crucified must be mortified, what has been buried must be kept down. So hopeless and irreparable is the doom of the flesh, that we know not that it is any better in the believer than in the unbeliever, only that its instincts are repressed, and its dominion circumscribed. “In me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing.” Whither, then, shall I turn in my deep desire to attain a sinless life, a fruitful obedience, and a holy walk.? Even unto Him who, having begotten holy desires within me, is able “to give unto them their meat in due season,” and who, having clothed me with salvation as with a garment, can also nourish and build me up in inward sanctity and perfectness.
Let us note then how, as every condition of our accredited sanctification rests on our being in Christ, so every condition of our practical sanctification rests on our abiding or continuing in Christ.
In the first place, sanctification implies holiness. To the question. How shall I attain a sinless life? the Word has but one answer: “/;/ Him is no sin; whosoever abideth in Him sinneth not!’ As the soul that is in Him through the union of faith, is covered with his stainless righteousness, so that soul abiding in Him in the unbroken fellowship of love and obedience, is filled with his sinless life. It sins not actively, since its activities are for the time controlled by Him, and so the principle of evil is inoperative and lying in abeyance. Not that the root of sin has been eradicated. This is entwined with every fibre of the carnal nature, “like ivy in an ancient wall,” as Flavel says, “which, however plucked and uprooted, can never be wholly gotten out of it till the wall is taken down.” But it is kept for the time in blessed unfruitfulness, its leaf withered by the brightness of the Saviour’s presence.
Doubtless manv Christians have known such experiences, — periods of happy exemp-
I John iii. 5.
tion from willful transgression, because the will has been given up to the guidance of the Holy One; seasons of communion with Christ in which the fetters of fleshly bondage have been for the while so thoroughly broken, and its cords cast away, that the favored one has almost questioned whether he was in the body or out of the body. We may instance such privileged days as those which Flavel describes, when he was permitted to have such intimacy with Christ, “such ravishing tastes of heavenly joys, and such full assurance of his interest therein, that he utterly lost sight and sense of this world and all the concerns thereof;” those favored engagements with the Lord Jesus, which Brainerd records when he felt within himself such “lively actings of a holy temper and heavenly disposition, such vigorous exercise of that divine love which casts out fear,” that it was literally Christ for him to live; tha’. deep entering into the divine life which Edwards enjoyed, and which he describes as “a calm, sweet abstraction of soul from all the concerns of this world; and sometimes a kind of vision or fixed idea of being alone in the mountains, or some solitary wilderness far from all mankind, sweetly conversing with Christ, and rapt and swallowed up in God.” But surely never more than after such abundant manifestations of the power of the divine grace to lift one beyond the control of the flesh and into uninterrupted communion with Christ, does he need to be warned to take heed, lest, thinking that he thereby standeth in a state of sinless perfection, he suddenly fall. There is a wide difference between a present attainment and a permanent attainment. And who has not found that it is easier to rise to lofty heights than it is to maintain one’s self there y These grapes of Eshcol, these “days of heaven,” full of deep communion and freedom from conscious sin, remind us, by their very rarity and infrequency, that we have not yet reached the promised land of perfect holiness. But they tell us where to find that land, — not back, beyond the waters of our baptism, in the Egypt of the flesh and in the bondage of the law, — but onward over that Jordan of death in which we shall put off this corruptible forever; in that land which the Lord hath given to us for an inheritance, where we shall abide continually in Christ, because sundered forever from the root of Adam. Such wild dreams as that of perfection in the flesh would be little entertained if men kept clearly in view the distinction between what we are in Christ and what we are in ourselves. To be in Him is to be saved at once and forever from the condemnation of sin, but as the lives of the highest and the lowest saints alike testify, not immediately from the presence and inworking of sin. Christ had sin upon Him, though He had no sin in Him. He that is in Christ has no sin upon him, though he still has sin in him. And just in proportion to the completeness of his abiding in Him by communion and obedience, will he be free from sin within him as he is from sin upon him. But let us not be deceived. Because the Spirit addresses us as those that are “sanctified in the name of the Lord yestis” let us not therefore claim to have reached a state of practical and realized sanctification in ourselves. “We are in Him that is true,” and “In Him is no sin.” *’ But if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in tis!* Not yet have we reached that Paradise of holy perfection for which we sigh, that sweet millennium of inward peace and righteousness where sin can hurt and destroy no longer.
I Cor. vL II.
For that we wait till the old leaven of the flesh has been purged out and we have become a new lump. And then when Christ who is our life shall appear, — appear witJiout sin unto salvation,’’ — shall we appear also with Him in glory, without sin either in us or upon us forever.
Is Death then the great sanctifier .? it is impatiently asked. Is his cold hand endowed with a skill and cunning to do the work for us in a moment which the Spirit and the Word and the ordinances have failed to perfect in a lifetime 1 Nay, death is but the letting go of a hand that has been constantly hindering that work, the final relinquishment of his hold on the part of that carnal man who is neither subject to the law of God himself, nor permits the believer in whom he dwells to be subject to it.^ This much negatively; and then it is
1 St. Francis de Sales writes to one who complains of sad heart sickness over the evil of an unsanctified will:” Thank God, ’ this sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God.’ You are like Rebecca when two peoples struggled within her womb, but the youttger was destined to prevail. Self-lmie only dies with our natural death; it has a thousand wiles whereby to keep a hold within the soul, and we cannot drive it forth. It is the first-born of the soul; it is upheld by a legion of auxiliaries, emotions, actions, inclinations, passions; it is adroit, and knows how to employ also the rending of the veil that keeps us from full communion with the Lord. For to be with Christ where He is, whether that presence be gained by our going to Him or by his coming to us, is doubtless essential to a state of complete abiding in Him, and hence of full conformity to Him.
Who knows what depth of meaning is hidden in that, “For we shall see Him as He isl’ in which John finds the reason and pledge of our likeness to Christ at his appearing y All our holiness is in Him and from Him, as the sunbeams are in and of the sun. But how is its lustre dimmed in passing through the medium of our fleshly life, and how are its rays broken and refracted before they fall upon the retina of our inward eye. Only in the open vision of his face and in his light who is “the Light,” can our likeness to Him be rendered perfect. For only thus can we truly reflect his purity, seeing Him as He is, and having the last germs of impurity in ourselves consumed in that light which is above
endless subtleties. On the other hand, the love of God, which is later born, has its emotions, actions, inclinations, and passions. These tv’o struggle within us, and their convulsive movements cause us infinite trouble. But the love of God must triumph.” — Spiritual Letters, XII.
the brightness of the sun. It is not only that our Lord will give us more of Himself, but will give it “directly from Himself in place of its coming through an ’ earthen vessel,’ which both limits the abounding flow of his fullness and also gives an earthy taste to the living water.”
And what we have said of holiness applies equally to another element of progressive sanctification, its very evidence and attestation indeed, Christian fruitfulness. This is from Jesus Christ only.” He that abideth in vie atid lin him J the same bringeth foHh miichfniity In Him by faith, and hence one with Him in that unchangeable justification which enwraps the Head and the members together, we may be very far from abiding in Him by that full communion through which his life flows into us without interruption, and abides in us without stint. The feeble branch may be in the trunk as truly as the fruitful one, knit into its structure by the same compactness of grain and fibre. But because it has little communion with it through the vital sap, it bears little fruit, and adorns its station with little greenness and beauty. Christ our Vine
Adelaide Newton. - John xv. 5.
is not straitened in Himself, but only in us. As impossible as it is for the fruits of holiness to grow upon the stock of human nature, so impossible is it for anything else to grow upon the divine. That which is born of God cannot commit sin. It is only a question of presenting such an open channel for the inflow of the life of Jesus, that the holy principle shall be transmitted to us without obstruction, and reproduce itself without restraint.
Is there not a painful tendency among believers to seek fruit from without instead of from within, and to be satisfied with such good works as are the mere extrinsic adornments of faith instead of its direct outgrowth t But whether we speak of fulfilling righteousness in ourselves or towards others, the same principle obtains, that “whatsoever is not of faith,” and hence not of Christ, “is sin.” For sanctification we have not to copy another’s holiness, however excellent, but to work out our own salvation; to unfold to its utmost limit that divine life which is ours in Christ. And for service the law is the same. Love to neighbor and self-denial for mankind are to be no borrowed graces, lent us either by philanthropy or the law. With the disciples, who so significantly met our Lord’s demand for a sevenfold forgiveness of a sevenfold offense, with the prayer, “Increase our faithl’ we shall learn more and more that the only way to augment the fruits of charity and long suffering is to strike the roots of our faith more deeply into Christ, and entwine them more intimately about that cross from which the first-fruits of divine forgiveness were gathered, and from which all subsequent fruit must also spring. So directly indeed is likeness to Christ dependent upon communion with Christ, that John makes the two equivalent terms. “He that saith he abideth in Him ought himself also so to walk even as He walked.” Relationship to Him determines all other relationships, those of conformity to God and those of non-conformity to the world alike. Adjust the heart therefore to Him, and the world is sure to be in its proper place. Put on Christ, and you are certain to put off sin. “If y ore are clothed with the sun, the moon (all sublunary things) will be under your feet.”
If from the conditions, we turn to consider the means of sanctification, we see how obviously these are such, because they are the media of communion with Christ, and of participance in his life.
“Sanctify them through thy truth;’ the truth not only as it is in Jesus, but as Jesus is in it. For the word, it need not be said, is the earthly repository of Christ, filled by his informing presence, and vital with all the yet undiscovered meanings of his hidden wisdom. Therefore is it able to be the daily bread of the soul, and to satisfy all possible cravings yi its divine hunger. “Thy words were found of me, and I did eat them.”
“Chosen to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit!’ the Holy One whose office it is to take of the things of Christ and show them unto us. For this we must always remember, that He does not speak of Himself. He brings “the Life” to our life, and makes the sanctified One to be more and more our sanctification, until we are filled with all his fullness.
Thus slowly, and as it may seem to us quite imperceptibly, is God bringing this divine work to completion in us. Blessed are they who shrink not from the sharper but not less needed means of its accomplishment, those trials and chastisements, those humiliations and self-denials, which are the pangs of transformation through which Christ is to be fully formed within us. “Though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.” “The more the marble wastes, the more the statue grows,” wrote Michael Angelo. And impossible as it will be for nature, let it not be impossible for grace to cry daily, “Welcome cross, welcome trials, welcome all things sweet or bitter, which shall bring forth within us that perfect man, that divine ideal, visible ever to the eye of God, and growing more and more upon our sight as we grow up into Him who is our Head.”