The Spirit of Holiness
“Ye are sanctified by the Spirit of our God.” i Cor. vi :ii.
Holy Spirit is the Sanctifier. Next to conversion His greatest work is to deliver from the power of sin and restore to the image of Christ.
He does this by producing in the believer the spirit of conviction for cleansing. This is different from conviction of sin as it precedes justification. Then the soul is chiefly concerned about its acts of sin and the danger of sin’s dread penalty. But now the Holy Spirit opens our eyes to see our innate sinfulness. He reveals the law in all its length and breadth and searches the heart in all its hidden depths, until, like Job, we cry: ‘‘Now mine eye
seeth Thee, and I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes.”
Sometimes in this experience the soul becomes utterly discouraged and even questions the genuineness of the former work of conversion. But it is just because of God’s inexorable love to us that He presses us on to the full realization of our utter corruption and helplessness. It is as when the miner discovers or buys a piece of precious ore. He has bought it and it is of priceless value in his eyes. But there is another process through which it must go. It must be crushed to powder. It must pass through the separating floods which wash away the sand and leave the gold. It must go through the fiery crucible until all the dross is separated. We can imagine the ore protesting against all this violence, but the owner might well reply, ‘‘It is because you are so precious that you must sufifer all these pains in the process of purification.’’ And so the Holy Spirit witnesses to the heart under the searching fires of His cleansing the sweet message of His love, and the trusting soul can answer back, “When He has tried me I shall come forth as gold.”
We have a fine illustration of this work of the Spirit in the seventh chapter of Romans, where the apostle describes a man immediately after his conversion. “I was alive without the law once, but when the commandment came sin revived and I died.” He felt very much alive in the joy of salvation and perhaps imagined that he should never want to sin any more. We have all felt like this. But when the Holy Spirit began to search him through the law, he found the flesh resisting and rebelling and leading him back into former sin and his hope died and for a little he gave up even the assurance of salvation. God has to let us fight this fight alone in order to find out that we are unequal to it. At last he gave up with a cry of despair, ‘’Oh, wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death?’’ It was then that the revelation came to him through the blessed Holy Spirit of God’s divine method of sanctification.
This leads us immediately to the next stage of the Spirit’s sanctifying work, which we find in the succeeding chapter of Romans, the eighth. The principle of divine holiness has never been better stated than in the second verse of this chapter, “For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.” Here are two laws, the old law of sin and death bearing us down and stronger than our power of resistance. It is like the law of gravitation that allows an object to fall when I drop it from m.y hand. But when I put forth my hand and lift it up I overcome the law of gravitation by the stronger law of life. This is exactly what the Holy Spirit does when He sanctifies us. He puts into us the new law of life by putting Christ Himself into us as our life and the old law of sin and death is overcome and the soul rises by a new law of gravitation to its heavenly sphere in the life and love and will of God. The Floly Spirit is represented in this passage as doing this, and yet He does not do it apart from Christ. He does it as ‘’the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.’’ And so it is true on the one hand that we are sanctified by the Holy Ghost; and yet it is just as true on the other that “Christ is made unto us of God our sanctification.”
The following verses of the eighth chapter of Romans unfold the successive stages of the Holy Spirit’s work in our deeper life. The Spirit is represented as leading us. “We walk after the Spirit.” “We mind the things of the Spirit.” “And the minding of the Spirit is life and peace.” “As many as are led of the Spirit are the sons of God.”
In this connection we must not overlook the place of the Word as used by the Spirit in our sanctification. “Sanctify them through Thy truth, Thy Word is truth.” And so we read of Christ sanctifying the church, having “cleansed it by the washing of water with the Word.” The Comforter brings to our remembrance the Word of God as the apostle expresses it, “for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.”
There is, therefore, at once an instantaneous and also a progressive experience of sanctification and it is the province of the blessed Comforter to give us both.