#11: The Holy Spirit & Sanctification

I. Introduction
A. Regeneration
1. On May 29th we talked about how the first miracle in the life of each believer is regeneration. The love of God is an objective fact, a fact that manifested itself 2000 years ago before we were born. We were unaware of it in our early days, most of us. It was there. It was real. But it hadn’t been made known to us personally yet. But by the power of the HS God broke into our lives & opened our blind eyes to the truth of His love.
2. Just as Jesus was conceived in the womb of the virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit (HS), so every follower of Christ has been born of the Spirit. That is, the HS has planted within our souls the seed of Jesus Christ, so that His life is now in us: we call that regeneration.
B. However, when God the Holy Spirit (HS) does His work of regeneration, it’s just the beginning.
1. God doesn’t just save us and then leave us. He forgives us and accepts us, but He still has an agenda for us. He has not just “predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ” (Eph.1:5), “He also predestined [us] to be conformed to the image of His Son.” (Rom.8:29)
2. He is the author of our faith and also the perfecter of our faith. (Heb.12:2)
3. God is working to fashion His people to be like His Son. God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life, a plan that includes changing you to become more and more like Jesus.
C. And sanctification is another one of those things which the HS does in our lives.
1. “We...are being transformed into his (Christ’s) likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” (2Corinthians 3:18)
2. And that’s what we’re talking about this morning: the sanctifying ministry of the HS in the life of the believer.
II. Sanctification
A. On th surface, it might seem like God does this great act of redemption through Christ and then in response, believers live lives of obedience and worship and good living.
B. But let me tell you why it won’t work that way:
1. Though we have become objects of the grace of Christ, though the guilt of our sins has been washed away through the atoning death of Jesus, sin is still alive and well in our hearts.
2. “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh.” Romans 7:18
3. Even after conversion, the world, the flesh and the devil all still pull us away from godliness.
C. It takes a miracle of God to transform a sinner into the image of Christ. It simply cannot be done by human strength. But what is impossible with man is possible with God! (Lk.18:27)
D. The Christian life begins with the miracle of regeneration. And the miracle continues!
E. “He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.” (Phil.1:6)
F. This is what we call sanctification. Sanctification means to make holy.
1. God is holy and He works to make His people holy as well.
G. This is very good news!
1. We are destined for glory! And that doesn’t just mean we’re destined to witness glory and experience glory. It means we’re destined to be made glorious.
2. God has committed Himself to remaking us into a beautiful masterpiece!
3. Recently some of us witnessed the incredible glory of the Grand Canyon, perhaps the world’s greatest masterpiece. If God can make something so beautiful out of dirt and rock, think what He can make with us!
4. Certainly He won’t complete the process until our lives on earth are over, but He’s already begun. He’s already making headway. We’re not what we should be, and we’re not what we will be, but thank God we’re not what we used to be!
5. It’s not easy. It involves struggle and suffering and lots of testing. And it takes a very long time.
6. The fact is, some art projects are very messy. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a glorious masterpiece in the making.
7. It’s easy to grow discouraged in the process. I know I do. Sometimes I get discouraged by who I am, I get discouraged about how far short I fall.
8. But we’ve got to remember who the Artist is. We’ve got to trust the Artist to do His good work.
9. Those who are in Christ are inevitability, irrevocably moving in the direction of holiness, righteousness, and perfect joy, just as surely as the Lord is faithful!
10. The Lord loves us so much that He is committed to our becoming all He made us to be.
III. Gal.5:16-23
A. Gal.5:16-23 talks about the sanctifying work of the Spirit in the life of a believer.
B. Here we read about the Fruits of the Spirit.
1. Gal.5 tells us what kind of results the Spirit is producing in our lives: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.”
2. The HS is where these things come from. That’s why these things are called the fruits of the HS.
a. Love is worked in us by the Spirit (see Colossians 1:8 and Romans 15:30); whatever true love you have in your heart for people was put there by the Spirit.
b. Joy is also of the Spirit (1Thess. 1:6 refers to “the joy of the HS”, see also Romans 14:17 and Luke 10:21a): you can’t make yourself truly joyful; real joy comes from the HS.
3. And as the CCEF brothers say, fruits grow from roots. You don’t staple them on to the tree. They grow from somewhere very deep. The HS’s work isn’t on the surface. He works in us in the deepest places of our hearts. Fruit comes from the HS’s work in the root.
C. Conflicting Interests
1. But Gal.5:17 also tells us that we have two conflicting sets of desires at work in us. We have the HS who is at work in believers promoting Christ-likeness. But we also have the flesh, which is the remnant of our sinfulness that remains even after we come to faith in Christ. “The desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other.”
2. And Gal.5:19-21 lists the kinds of fruit that are produced in a person’s life by the flesh: “sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these.” (In other words, the list could go on a lot longer.)
3. Now it might be easy to think of the things on this list in the context of the barroom, the back alley or the brothel. But even religious people, even conservative people are prone to “enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions,” aren’t they?
4. Not only that, but look at 2Tim.1:7 “God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power, love & discipline.” This too talks about the fruits of the HS & the fruits of the flesh — using different language:
a. Fruit of HS: power, love, self-control
b. Fruit of the flesh: fear (timidity)
5. This is the tension of the Christian life. This is the battle that every believer must fight: the HS’s influence drawing us to Christ and remaking us in His image versus the orientation toward sin that still resides in our flesh.
IV. Two questions
A. How does this take place if our flesh never changes?
1. Someday our flesh will be removed, but until then it will not improve. It is a constant.
2. How then can we grow in righteousness? In our spirits we grow in our ability to see the beauty of Christ.
3. The HS is the One who glorifies Christ to us. “He shall glorify Me; for He shall take of Mine, and shall disclose it to you” Jesus said in John 16:14. So one primary ministry of the Spirit is to magnify and glory and promote Christ to His people.
a. It is the HS who wins our hearts by revealing Christ in all the excellencies of His perfections so that we melt in adoration and appreciation and in awe.
b. It is the Spirit who opens our eyes to spiritual realities, giving us eyes of faith to see the real riches and hope for future glory.
c. It is the Spirit who makes the things of Christ seem like the most wonderful and beautiful and precious things in the whole universe.
4. Satan, on the other hand, is the great diminisher of Christ. Every ploy, every trick, every heresy takes something away from Christ. Whenever Satan tempts us to sin, he is tempting us to think less of Christ. Eat this food, look at this girl, buy this luxury. Every temptation is Satan’s attempt to make us think of Christ as not big enough or good enough or satisfying enough, so that we need this other thing to be really happy.
5. So the HS is working to promote Christ and Satan is working to detract from Christ. Whenever we see Christ as our all in all, it is the HS who is doing that in us. Whenever Christ doesn’t seem like enough for us, or when His provision seems inadequate, that is the influence of the world, the flesh and the devil.
B. If sanctification is the HS’s work, what are we supposed to do about it? If it is the fruit of the Spirit, how can we seek it? What can we do? This will be the topic of our 7/17 sermon on the Indwelling of the Spirit. But for today, there are means God has graciously given us by which we can pursue these things:
1. First of all, we must realize our need for them. Sometimes Christians are so desperate to feel good about ourselves that we are too easily encouraged. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” (Matt.5:4) We need to live in the awareness of how far short our lives fall short with regard to the way of Jesus, & in the awareness of God’s commitment to do His mighty work in us.
2. The second thing we must do is pray. We see this in Eph.3:16, where Paul prays that God “would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man.” Jesus assures us in Luke 11:13 that the “heavenly Father will give the HS to those who ask Him.” It is not enough to understand about the HS, we need to pray. And yet even in our praying, we aren’t so much asking to get something we don’t have as we are asking that our eyes might be opened to something we already have – see Eph.1:18-19.
3. The third thing is to act. It is not just a matter of knowing our need and praying; it is also a matter of doing. The Levites stepped into the Jordan when it was still water (Joshua 3:14ff.). We need to step out in confidence that God has given us the Spirit to strengthen us in His service. We need to step out saying, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” (Phil.4:13). We are not supposed to just sit around and wait for the HS to move us to be and act like Christ. We are to step out in obedience. But that doesn’t mean we step out in our own strength. As Philippians 2:12-13 says, “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you, giving you the will and the power to achieve His good pleasure.”