To Sanctification

2 Thessalonians 2:13 - But we should always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters beloved by the Lord, because God has chosen you from the beginning for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and faith in the truth.

Sanctification begins at the moment the Holy Spirit indwells you as part of the salvation experience and ends at the saint’s last breath. The process is summed up in Romans 8:29 - “For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.” That’s it’s purpose, to take sinners and bring them up to the sinless image of Christ. Tall order to say the least. But the Spirit’s up to it. Bible.org has a good description of the process and I invite you to take a look at it. God, too, has a good, although much shorter, description of the process that goes like this: Romans 8:13 - “for if you are living in accord with the flesh, you are going to die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” Sanctification is the Spirit working with your conscience, your wisdom, your sense of right and wrong, to identify the sin that separates you from God - that would be all sin - and working with you to scrape it from your soul. And once this process is begun, it is carried on to completion - to the day of Christ Jesus, as Philippians 1:6 tells us: “And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.”

Sanctification is the sure sign that you are saved. When 2 Peter 1:10 tells us - “Therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election, for if you practice these qualities you will never fall.” Peter is telling us to search within ourselves and make sure sanctification is taking place, that our sins are being relentlessly done away with, that the Word of God continues to be our guide, and is even becoming increasingly such. By doing this we affirm our salvation. Not that we can lose our salvation, but perhaps we were never saved in the first place. Remember, the parable of the sower tells us the seeds (God’s word) falls on three of the four places where it doesn’t produce lasting roots. Only on the good soil does it flourish. Make sure your salvation is growing in the good soil.

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My Sanctification Miracle

Hi guys, Bill Kritlow here for Christian Men dot com. Sanctification is the lifelong journey of the Christian. It begins at the moment of salvation and ends at the saint’s last breath, then, in the twinkling of an eye, it is completed before we are in the presence of Jesus. So far for me it’s been nearly 43 years. It’s not a steady process, for me it’s come in fits and starts, some steps small and without major impact, others in the miracle class. I want to tell you about one of those.

I grew up, as I’ve revealed before, in an alcoholic home. I didn’t get much nurturing, mostly I got a father belittling me and a mother, for reasons I’ve never understood, who competed with me, put me down when I achieved anything at all – from an early age. Anyway, all that said, I had a rage inside of me that rivaled a blast furnace in intensity, and a jungle cat in ferocity. It took me a while to realize this – a lot of explosive reactions to things, a lot of avoiding potentially explosive situations – a fist fight with my dad at my graduation party.

It became a real issue when my first marriage began to crumble. I went into a massive depression, then into counseling, and that’s when the rage was identified as something I had to deal with. But how? It was huge. Once I envisioned screaming it out of me. But the house was too small to contain it. I thought about being in a desert and screaming it out of me, but the desert was too small. The world actually seemed too small to hold it. And while I plotted ways to get rid of it, that jungle cat within me continually paced – back and forth – waiting for someone to trip the wire that would loose him. He was loosed far too many times.

Once, while driving to a counseling session, I had a strange vision. Right there in the windshield - a large walnut, of all things, and after a second or two, the top opened like a casket and inside lay a baby. Since the anger could be seen as a very hard nut inside me, the counselor thought this was telling me my anger had started when I was a baby. Someone told me of an incident when I was less than a year old. My dad was in the navy, building landing craft at Norfolk, Va. While my mom was home with me in Gary, Indiana. Dad had a girlfriend there and mom knew just how to get him back. She bundled me up, boarded a train (this was in ’44 or early ’45) and arrived in Norfolk about 1 in the morning. Having not fed me, she arrived with me upset and needed milk. Dad’s only option was to run around the base looking for milk for me. Babies get angry when they’re not fed.

But when it started wasn’t an issue anymore, how I get rid of it, that was the issue. And I needed to get rid of it. It had already reared it’s ugly head several times in my new marriage, in my new Christian walk. God tells us not to let the sun set on our anger. Colossians 3:8 tells us: “But now you also, rid yourselves of all of them: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene speech from your mouth.” This anger wasn’t from anything I could resolve, it was from years and years of abuse.

I was at a Promise Keepers gathering at the Colosseum in L.A. We were singing a song about growing closer to God. I can’t remember the song except for that. What happened next I can never forget. As I was singing, I realized, “Lord, I can’t grow closer to you, this anger is in the way.” I remember saying it although I don’t know if I said it aloud. I do know that at that very moment, the anger left me. I could actually feel it draining away. Mem singing around me, and this world-sized rage fell away from me like a coat as I entered a warm room. God had taken it away so that I could get closer to Him. Which I did. It was a long time before I could tell that story and not collapse in tears.

Only recently have I come to realize, the reason the Spirit worked to show me how big the anger was, was to show me that my God was big enough to simply pull the plug on it.

I still get angry. But now it’s normal. Not the explosive rage that once plagued me, once kept me away from my savior. Whenever I doubt or think God’s not big enough to take something of mine on, I think of that miracle or the evaporating rage. God is big enough for anything.