The Key to Sanctification
What is the key to sanctification? The answer is simple, but not simplistic. The key to sanctification is the gospel. Even more specifically, the key to sanctification is the cross.
I think one of the greatest weapons in Satan's arsenal is showing us how far we've come. When someone first becomes a Christian, especially one who is saved out of a life of gross sin, they typically have a pretty accurate view of their self. They don't look down on very many people because they recognize their self as having just been rescued from their own sin and are therefore overjoyed by the abundance of grace that has been shown to them. Rather than looking down, they typically look up. They look up to at Jesus; they look up at other Christians; they look up in general; but, they rarely look down.
Then something happens. Time. As time goes on, so does the memory of their sin. Along with the memory of their sin goes the memory of the cross. The cross is still present in their songs, around their neck, and in their testimony of when they became a Christian, however, it is no longer a daily reality. They stench of their sin has weakened and therefore so has the horror of the cross with its stench--the stench of a beaten, bloody, and dying man.
How does this happen? We become one of the people that we look up to. We become a "more mature" believer with "more time" under our belt. Worse yet, we become pastors who stand looking down at "poor sinners" as we point them to the cross. In the end, we stop looking up and we start looking down.
Once this happens, real sanctification ceases. Now, that doesn't mean that we stop being moral or that we quit gaining in theological knowledge. What it means is that we begin to equate our morality and our theological knowledge with sanctification. This concept of sanctification leads to pride because we become the key to sanctification. We are more faithful than others and therefore we are more moral than others. We are more disciplined than others and therefore we are more knowledgeable than others. This leads to our looking down. We begin to look down from our perch high in the tree of morality and theological insight. Too bad we can't see far enough down. If we could, we would see the roots of the tree and they would read, "Self-Righteous", and we would recognize ourselves to be in the same tree that the Pharisees and Sadducees once sat in. The same tree that they looked down upon Jesus from. We would discover around us a company of very proud people who have erased the memory of the tree on which Jesus was crucified.
While seated in our tree of self-righteousness, if we were to shift our gaze up instead of down, we would quickly be knocked off our perch and fall hard and fast to the ground below. Why? Because we would discover true righteousness in the face of God. Calvin said, "Again, it is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he first looked upon God's face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself. For we always seem to ourselves righteous and upright and wise and holy--this pride is innate in all of us--unless by clear proofs we stand convinced of our own unrighteousness, foulness, folly, and impurity. Moreover, we are are not thus convinced if we look merely to ourselves and not also to the Lord, who is the sole standard by which this judgment must be measured. For, because all of us are inclined by nature to hypocrisy, a kind of empty image of righteousness in place of righteousness itself abundantly satisfies us."
It is this knowledge of God's holiness and our sinfulness that leads us to the cross. Really there is no other place that it can lead us to. Surely such knowledge will not lead us to further pursue our own morality. Our own morality, at best, will still prove absurd when looking up instead of down. The more we contemplate God's holiness, the more the truth of our own wickedness becomes. The more we contemplate our own wickedness, the more the truth of God's holiness becomes. The two work together, in tandem, always. You cannot consider one without the other. Such consideration leaves us with nowhere to run. Rather, just as with Bunyan's Pilgrim, it intensifies the weight of our burden until we cannot move at all, much less run. And it is here, in this condition, that we finally stumble and fall. We fall to our knees and as we lift our heads we see the cross. It is here at the cross that our burden--God's holiness and our sinfulness--rolls away.
The more our knowledge of God's holiness increases and the more our knowledge of our own sin increases the larger the chasm becomes. Thankfully, the cross becomes larger and larger as it fills the chasm and provides us not only a place of justification, but a place of sanctification and glorification as well. The key to our sanctification is the gospel. If we are going to become more like Jesus, we will do so at the foot of the cross as grace flows down.
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