340. Sanctified
Hebrews 10:10 By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.
Christ’s once for all offering of His body sanctified us according to the will of God. “This is the will of God, your sanctification. [1 Thessalonians 4:3]” It is God’s will that you be made holy. The Son of God carried out the will of God for us through His life, suffering, death and resurrection. The context of this verse is that you abstain from sexual immorality. Abstaining is a part of sanctification. The strong God-given sexual drive in each person is meant to be kept under the control of marital commitment and faithfulness, which leads to a good and beneficial life for stable families. By extension, the keeping of all the Commandments is designed by the Creator to maintain a good life for all people. This is sanctification.
God promises sanctification. Sanctification embraces two parts, the narrower and wider senses. The narrow sense is the one time sanctification that happens when the individual receives the gift of forgiveness, life, and salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. This reception happens once in a lifetime and recurs again and again when faith in the Gospel is renewed weekly and daily. Sanctify = make holy. Jesus is our sanctification. When we believe in Him we have the holiness He earned for us, and grants to us. By faith we are declared holy and righteous because of Christ. This declaration of sanctification is something that cannot be challenged, though it can be rejected. God leaves us free to say, “I don’t want to be holy; I don’t want God.” But even though we don’t act very holy, God says we are. We take His word for it.
The wider sense of sanctification is different: it is a process, not a one-time event. It is a lifelong process and it will not be completed until death. In this sanctification process we continue to grow, by fits and starts, into the holiness, which we were given by grace. This is the daily experience of our lives, what we can expect to live with every day: we are always being sanctified. We grow to become more and more like what we have already been declared to be. “Become what you are.” The actual living of life does not match up with the declaration, but God is not finished with me yet.
We do not try to live a better, holier, life to become sanctified, but we live a holier life because we have already been sanctified. We have the promise of sanctification to make us believe who we are, and to help us believe that the Lord is continuing to work in us to bring our behavior more and more in line with His will. For instance, the motivation to abstain from sexual immorality is to remember that I am not that person; no, I am sanctified. So we take hold of this promise in two ways: I remember and thank God that I am sanctified; and I am motivated to come closer to the holiness that I have been given. Be bold to declare: “I am sanctified!”