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Sanctification

I Thess 5: 12 – 28

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 19 Feb, 2006

I HAVE a Methodist family background. I have read a lot about Methodists, and I like their emphasis on “entire sanctification.” However, our goal is always to find what the bible is saying.

This passage sums up Paul’s message, because his ultimate goal for the Thessalonians is that they should be entirely sanctified.

Isn’t that what God wants for us all? Doesn’t he want us all made holy from start to end?

That word, ‘sanctified’ comes from the same root as the word, ‘saint’. Paul wants us to become saints in the fullest sense of the word.

He wants them to choose to live a saintly life; but he also wants them to choose to let the Holy Spirit work in and among them.

That’s why he tells the Thessalonians about respect and care and kindness, but also tells them to listen to the voice of the Spirit.

When Believers are good at doing the right things, they can also be open to the Spirit; but if we neglect the basics, we will fail at the spiritual level, too.

So what I want to talk about today is very simple things. To get on track with sanctification, we need to attend to the basics and keep in touch with the Spirit. That is the groundwork for entire sanctification so we will be fully prepared when Jesus returns.

So there is a simple formula:

● Attend to basics

+ Listen to the Spirit

= Become sanctified.

Attend to the basics

There will always be someone who wants you to do something special to be a real saint. You have to eat the right foods, or specially observe the Lord’s Day, or pray in a certain way, or exercise certain gifts, or sing in a specific way.

The Biblical way is much simpler. The basics boil down to two things: loving relationships and spiritual alertness.

These are matters of simple choice and disciplined determination. And these basics feed into a stream fed by the Holy Spirit, so that we become sanctified in our wills and in our own spirits.

A famous psychiatrist was in Sydney recently. He told how his life was transformed soon after his daughter’s fifth birthday. He was gardening and his daughter was chatting to him when she said, “Daddy, on my 5th birthday, I made a decision. I decided not to whine any more. It was really hard, but I don’t do it very much now. Maybe you could make a decision not to be such a grouch.”

He chose that day the life he was going to live, and it was a happy life that he chose.

Love is one of the basics of happiness, because love is so close to the heart of our God himself. We choose to love.

But don’t we all have difficulty with loving other people? We all have different mental checklists of what loving people do. We have mental images of how love is put into practice.

When Chris and I were first married, we had very different ideas about leisure time. I suppose that I am straight–down–the–line Homer Simpson in his underwear in front of the TV, only with wine instead of Duff beer.

But I really liked visiting or having visitors.

Chris preferred to get all the housework done, then go on a picnic away from everyone. She saw visiting and being visited as stressful.

So we were loving towards each other in many areas, but leisure time was often stressful to us both, no–one’s needs got satisfied, and love broke down in that area.

Some people lose their kindness and compassion as soon as they have to deal with someone in authority. They will stop loving you if you get promoted. It’s not jealousy, it’s just resistance to control.

Their mental image of love doesn’t include loving bosses.

Have you got the picture? We all have two problems with love. The first is that we are inconsistent about loving anyway: sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. The other is that we all have holes in our love. We love some and we fail to love others.

Overall, our love is rather scrappy and frayed around the edges, forget about the holes where we ironed right through.

So Paul’s first warnings are designed to help keep our love on track. We all need reminders about love.

He writes,

1TH 5:12 Now we ask you, brothers, to respect those who work hard among you, who are over you in the Lord and who admonish you. ¹³ Hold them in the highest regard in love because of their work. Live in peace with each other. ¹⁴ And we urge you, brothers, warn those who are idle, encourage the timid, help the weak, be patient with everyone. ¹⁵ Make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always try to be kind to each other and to everyone else.

Here are the basics: respect, peace and kindness, compassion, and justice. Without going into each in detail, I’m sure we all know how lack of these things erodes love and destroys fellowship.

I've seen people in churches who undermine their leaders, who get into petty squabbles which grow and grow because each wrong is paid back by another wrong, who abandon kindness and encouragement. It’s all wrong, and wrong–headed.

Changing these things doesn’t mean that we become doormats. There is room for rebuke, for confrontation. But surely we also need to ensure that we act gently and kindly towards each other and towards our world!

The other side of attending to the basics is to be spiritually alert. Paul writes,

1TH 5:16 Be joyful always; ¹⁷ pray continually; ¹⁸ give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

We can learn to change our attitude. We can choose to be joyful. Recent research has shown that people who smile more often will also begin to feel happier than people who don’t smile a lot. Psychiatrists have even begun to introduce “smiling groups” into some psychiatric hospitals, and it is working.

You can be happy for no good reason, just because you choose to be. How much more reason is there to be happy because God is so good to you!

I am a pessimist. I look on the black side. Yet I know that when I hear jokes, when I laugh with friends, when I get just a little help to feel better about life, I do feel better about life.

So there’s a lesson here for me — rejoice always. There’s another lesson: pray always. And the final lesson is to give thanks in all circumstances.

Merlin Carothers was a chaplain for years before he started his first pastorate. It was a shock to him. But he decided to give thanks even when things didn’t look good. He discovered that often those situations didn’t change — but he did! And it’s a well–known fact that when we change, other people change, too.

It became his guiding principle.

When parents came to him, angry and hurt about unbelieving children, he told them, “Give thanks for your child — not for his unbelief, not for her rebellion — but for him or her as a person.” Many were converted when their parents began to value them instead of always wanting to change them.

That’s where prayer comes in. Even in prayer, we can give thanks, and see how God changes our perspective, how he changes others, how he changes the entire circumstance.

Do we nag God instead of trusting him?

Phyllis Gardiner used to come here. She had many troubles in her life. One day she told me, “I take it all to the Lord in prayer.” Then she thought a bit more and said, “Mostly, I take it back again instead of leaving it there.”

Not everything in her life came good, but she began to cope better when she knew how she needed to change. Not everyone has that kind of insight.

Have you noticed that it is almost impossible to separate being joyful, praying continually, and giving thanks? God knows that they belong together.

We can choose these behavioural basics, and start on the road to entire sanctification.

LISTEN TO THE SPIRIT

But the sanctification process won’t go far without the Spirit of God. It has to be empowered and motivated from within. If you don’t add the Spirit, you will never reach the answer.

One of the great problems in the church is the work of the Holy Spirit. He does not always fit conventional moulds, and you do get people who go overboard into wild and empty imaginings.

The bad habit of the Church throughout history has been to prevent the exercise of the Spirit’s gifts.

It seems that the Thessalonian church was drifting into the same error. Because some people were teaching distorted or erroneous views, they wanted to limit all prophecy.

Paul is quite specific here — don’t block off the Spirit when he inspires prophecy.

He says,

1TH 5:19 Do not put out the Spirit’s fire; ²⁰ do not treat prophecies with contempt. ²¹ Test everything. Hold on to the good. ²² Avoid every kind of evil.

About a century after Paul wrote, a great controversy arose in the church. A group in central Turkey known as The Montanists emphasised prophecy, but some were going into trances, and some so–called prophesies were quite weird. They said that the New Jerusalem was coming within months to a nearby village.

The reaction in the church in general was to want to block prophecy altogether.

Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons in France didn’t like the Montanists, but wrote that he was opposed to the suppression of prophecy. After all, several people in his church prophesied every Sunday. Why should they be made to stop?

Paul had some wise words. Don’t accept things uncritically. Test what is said, and hold onto what is good and avoid what is evil.

At times in my life as a Christian, I have been bursting to say something. I could see some issue which the church needed to address, and there was no forum to express it.

One church had seen an open door for ministry and, just as it was on the point of entering, a couple of the deacons killed the move. They didn’t straight out oppose it; they just shifted the terms. Instead of our church reaching out to the next town, it became the district association sponsoring a church plant in a future development area. So, instead of our people reaching out to the next town, and labouring in mission to achieve that goal, it became our church making an extra donation once a year so that something could be done somewhere else once the money was all in.

Fifteen years later the Association itself was nearly dead, and handed the church plant over to the Baptist Churches of NSW and ACT.

So much for the local church in mission!

But when the church began backing off, I felt that God was saying, “Stop! You are going the wrong way! You are going to miss out on the blessing I have for you!”

How do you say that kind of thing in church?

That’s partly why I introduced a sharing time when I started here. You can speak. You can say what the Spirit lays on your heart. Paul tells the Corinthians how prophets should behave. If they are respectful to each other, if they are caring, kind and compassionate, what law is against that?

I enjoy Pentecostal services. But sometimes in Pentecostal churches you hear a “word of prophecy” and I wonder what it really is. Someone says, “I am the Lord. I love you. You are all doing very well. Don’t give up.”

The Lord does encourage us and build us up, and that is always something to hear. But where is the word that says, “You must change. You have done well: now you can do better. You haven’t achieved your potential.”

Prophets generally bear both kinds of message, and I worry when I hear only the comforting side. Shouldn’t God’s word comfort the troubled and trouble the comfortable?

Don’t despise prophecy. Don’t throw water on his fire. Kindle a blaze of sacred love on the mean altar of every heart.

My mother was teaching a school scripture class many years ago, about the wedding at Cana in Galilee. She asked the kids if Jesus was a wet blanket. They didn’t know the expression, so she explained that, if you have a fire, you can often put it out by soaking a blanket in water and throwing it over the flames.

One little boy got the answer immediately.

“No, Miss!” he called, “Jesus was a dry blanket!”

If we want to be entirely sanctified, we need to be dry blankets for the fire of the Spirit!

The thing is, that it is when the Spirit speaks, when he prompts a word or inspires a thought, then we are comforted and challenged. Sometimes comforted by a word of encouragement. Always comforted by the knowledge that the Spirit of God would not speak to us if he did not aim for our growth and well–being.

And challenged because even the word of encouragement will inspire further efforts if we take it rightly, and the word of rebuke will bring us to repentance and change.

Let’s listen to the Spirit!

BECOME SANCTIFIED

God’s plan for us is our entire sanctification. Our purpose has to be to work with God’s plan.

I have a friend who has just applied for two jobs. One was for the Olympics. I said, “London!?”

She said, “Yes — it’s there in 2012.”

I said, “You like to plan ahead.”

It turns out that she wants to be in on the early promotion and planning phases, so she could start in the next few months if she gets the job. Quite an adventure.

But it struck me that that is like what God plans for us, our complete and entire holiness, our entire sanctification.

Ultimately it will be ours if we persevere in the faith of Jesus, in whom we first believed.

It is a process, involving both our own will and choice, and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

We need to start right now, so that the process will be well advanced when God issues his declaration that enough has been done, when the full–time whistle is blown, and Jesus returns. Then we will be holy, we will be saints in actuality and not just in potential. Then the world will see what real saintliness is like, and will have no answer — because then the world will see in us the exact representation of Jesus.

Let’s start today! AMEN!

© Peter R. Green 2006. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)