The One Who Sanctifies

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Transcript:

I remember when each of my three kids was born, which it hadn’t been that long ago, but I remember getting to hold each of them for the first time. Benjamin was born at 36 weeks, and I remember after they cleaned him up, after the C-section and all that, they took him down to the nursery. I got to go with him, and he was cold, and he curled up like a roly-poly, which is why I call him Bug to this day.

I remember getting to hold him and hold him up to the glass for the family to see him, and then they ended up taking him to the NICU. They were concerned about something. He was there for a week, but I remember getting to hold him that first time and then subsequent times there in the NICU until they let him go home and just thinking, I’m supposed to keep this tiny thing alive now.

It was incredible. And then Madeline, she was born at 34 weeks. I didn’t even get to hold her the first day because after they cleaned her up, you know they’re not telling me anything they just start bringing stuff into the room and they’re working on her and they’re getting concerned not telling me anything and finally I got them to tell me something they were concerned she was having some respiratory distress they’re trying to pump air into her and I follow them down to the NICU again and my family’s going oh what’s wait what’s wrong I don’t know but I went down there with them it was the next day before I got to hold her.

And I have pictures of me holding her the first time and she’s wearing a bow bigger than her whole head. And I remember Charlie getting to actually hold him in the room where they did the C-section. That was a new experience.

And then, you know, it was the next day before I got to hold him again because everybody else swooped in and took the baby. But I remember each of these times holding one of these babies. And if you’ve never had a child, it’s difficult to describe how you could be so in love with somebody you have just met.

You know, that, you know, I’m not a believer in love at first sight, but, you know, there are three examples. And in that moment, they were, they were mine, and they still are mine. But in that moment, they were already as much mine as they were ever going to be.

You know, they’re never going to be any more mine. They’re never going to be any less mine. I remind them all the time, you know, I’m really mad at what you just did, but I still love you.

I will always love you. I will never stop loving you, no matter what ridiculous thing you do. They’re mine, and they’re as much mine as they’re ever going to be.

They act like me, sometimes for better or for worse, depending on the day. They have some of my mannerisms. I was telling my mom the other day, Benjamin said, Madeline walked into my room and she straight up slapped me. And mom said, you know where he got that, right?

I’m glad she said, you know, that instead of, you know why she did that, right? She’s taken after you. Now for him to say, she straight up slapped me.

Apparently that’s something I used to say about my sister. Then Madeline with all her little opinions, you know, she takes after me. So they were as much mine as they were ever going to be, but yet I’m spending this time until they’re 18 and probably then some, because parenting doesn’t stop, as my mother tells me, after they’re 18, spend all this time training them for what they’re supposed to be.

And those of you who have had children have had the same experience, that they were, that child was as much yours as they were ever going to be. They were yours in that moment, but then you spent the next however many years, 40 some, you know, in some of your cases, 40 years molding them and shaping them into what they were supposed to become. And this is a, it’s not a perfect example, but this is a good example to show us what it’s like, the work of the Holy Spirit in us as God uses the Holy Spirit to sanctify us.

We’ve been talking over the last few weeks about some of the roles that the Holy Spirit plays in our lives. And some of the reasons for which the Father and Son sent the Holy Spirit here to indwell us. And we’ve talked about how the Holy Spirit convicts the lost world of sin and draws people to Jesus Christ. Makes people realize, helps people realize, causes people to realize their need for a Savior.

And we’ve talked about how the Holy Spirit indwells us from the moment of conversion, from the moment we trust Jesus Christ as our Savior and we are born again by that Spirit. He lives inside of us and He marks us out and says, we belong to God. And there’s some overlap between that and what we’re going to talk about today.

We talked last week about how the Holy Spirit guides us. He’s not just there with us. He’s there with us to guide us and to point us in the right direction if we’ll just listen.

A lot of times I don’t. A lot of times I’m so wrapped up in what I think that I don’t even hear the Holy Spirit. And that’s where we go wrong.

If you ever think God’s not guiding me, God’s not telling me what he wants me to do, God’s not speaking to me, just be quiet. And that’s good advice for us all. I’m saying that to myself too.

Just be quiet sometimes and listen to the Holy Spirit. Today we’re going to talk about how he sanctifies us. This is how he changes us from the inside out.

Now, there’s a past sanctification. We’re going to talk about this a little more as we look at the passage. But there’s a point at which he indwells us.

We’ve been born again by the Spirit of God. And after that second birth, we belong to God as much as we ever will. And we’ve been declared righteous before God as much as we ever will.

But then he spends the rest of our natural lives, the Holy Spirit does, not just sanctifying us in that moment and saying, okay, you belong to God, but then spends the rest of our lives shaping us to make us more like Jesus Christ. That’s what sanctification is. And we’re going to see some of how he works this morning as we look at this passage in Romans chapter 8. Starting in verse 5, I know it says verse 6 in your bulletin, but I decided to start at verse 5.

That’s not a typo. Verse 5, for they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh, but they that are after the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. So he says, basically, if we’re walking in the flesh, we’re going to live in fleshly ways.

If we’re walking in the spirit, we’re going to walk in spiritual ways. We’re going to think spiritual ways. The example that I’ve given you, and you’ve probably heard elsewhere before, the old story, and I won’t go into all the details, but the old story about the two dogs, the man giving the example to his grandson of the two dogs fighting inside each of us, the two wolves.

And he says, which one wins, it’s the one we feed. If there are two dogs fighting, and one of them’s caged up all the time and doesn’t get fed, and the other one’s fed and well-nourished and well-cared for, it’s the dog that gets fed that’s going to win the fight. And the same thing in our lives.

We’ve got the flesh and we’ve got the spirit. If we feed the spirit, we’re going to walk in the spirit. The spirit is going to win out more often than not.

If we’re constantly feeding the flesh and not the spirit, then the flesh is going to win out more often than not. 6 says, for to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. And to be carnally minded, to have a mindset that follows after fleshly things and indulges in fleshly things and loves fleshly things is death.

And we know that because the wages of sin is death. It leads to death, not only physical. We die because there is sin in the world and because we’re sinners. Death entered into the world because of sin.

But it also means a spiritual death. Death in the Bible, according to biblical terms, is separation. Now, depending on what we apply that to, it can be separation from this life, separation from our loved ones.

Spiritual death is separation from God. And all sin and all fleshly behavior leads to separation. And so he says to be carnally minded is death.

Something in us dies as a result of giving into the flesh. but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. When we start thinking about things the way the Holy Spirit thinks about things, it changes our entire perspective on the world.

It’s not just that our thoughts change, it’s that our whole entire perspective changes. And there’s life and there’s peace in following after the Spirit. He says in verse 7, because the carnal mind is enmity against God.

Whenever you see that word enmity in the Bible, it means that somebody is enemies with somebody else. Enmity is not a word that we use much anymore, but that’s essentially what it means. It means to be an enemy of somebody else.

So to be carnally minded is to be the enemy of God, because the carnal mind is enmity against God. And this goes back to the earliest days of creation. You think of Adam and Eve in the garden.

God created them. God loved them. God made this perfect paradise for them to exist in and gave them only one rule.

Think of that. You’re in a perfect paradise. You have perfect fellowship with God, and there’s only one thing you have to remember not to do.

Sounds a whole lot better than now, doesn’t it? And yet, mankind looked at God and said, no, I don’t care what you say. I’m going to do what I want to do.

And so mankind ever since then has collectively looked at God and says, no, you know what? I like my way better. Get out of here.

leave me alone that’s been sort of our collective attitude toward God as a human race for six thousand years that we have looked at God as being our enemy because God you know right God keeps us from doing what we want to do we hear that objection all the time I wouldn’t want to become a Christian because then I couldn’t have any fun lots of fun it’s just a different kind of fun but there’s this idea in the world that God you know God is up there ready to stomp you if he catches you having fun. If you’re enjoying yourself at all, God is going to know and he’s going to stomp you out. That’s not how this works, but that’s what we in our mind have decided that God is against fun.

God’s against me enjoying myself, really, because we want to do things that are against what God says, and so we’ve looked at him and said, okay, you must be the enemy because you’re here to spoil my good time. The carnal mind is enmity against God, a mind that loves sinful things. A mind that pursues fleshly lusts is a mind that is going to be constantly at war with God.

For it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. We can’t bring ourselves to subject ourselves to God’s law. We don’t want to be under anybody’s law.

It’s part of our human nature. We don’t want anybody to tell us what to do. Okay?

I didn’t like it when I was a child. I don’t like it now. That’s why, no offense, I mean, that’s part of human nature.

It’s really hard to preach on these things when my mother’s sitting here today. I didn’t like being told what to do as a child. I did it because I was scared of my parents.

But I didn’t like it. I don’t like being told what to do now, which is why I lean libertarian on lots and lots of things. Just leave me alone and let me decide, okay?

But when it comes to spiritual things, that is our undoing, to look at God and say, I don’t want you to tell me because I don’t want anybody else calling the shots in my life. There’s a couple things wrong with that. There’s a couple things wrong with that.

First of all, God knows way better than we do what’s going to hurt us and what’s good for us. So to look at God and say, I don’t want you telling me what to do is just foolish. But on top of it, we’ve somewhere gotten the idea that if we could just shake off the shackles of God, that somehow we’ll be free and we’ll get to call our own shot.

What we don’t realize is that when we run away from God, we run right into the clutches of Satan and we are bound to sin. And we’re really not free. Look at some of the things that the world indulges in and thinks they’re free.

When somebody is such a slave to the bottle of whiskey that they can’t put it down and they are at a point where they cannot make a rational decision to stop, are they really free? When somebody will do anything, and I mean anything that they have to, to get their next fix of whatever drug that they want, are they really free? Well, they might feel free because they’re having a wonderful time, but they’re not free.

They are a slave to something. And we could go through the list, whether it’s money, people become slaves to money, people become slaves to sex, people become slaves to all sorts of things. In their pursuit of trying to be out from under what they see as God’s boot, they refuse to put themselves into subjection to God’s law because they don’t want anybody telling them what to do, and yet we run right into something else that’s going to tell us what to do.

And not only that is going to tell us what to do, but it’s going to destroy us in the process. But there’s something in our human nature that says, no, you can’t tell me what to do. And so the carnal mind is the enemy of God because it’s not subject to God’s law.

It looks at God’s law. It looks at God as being an enemy and it can’t even bring itself to submit to God’s law. We can’t reason our fleshly selves into saying, well, you know, just do what God says.

Even if it’s not what you want to do, it’s better for you in the long run. We’re not even in that rational place where we make that decision. We in the flesh cannot bring ourselves to that point.

So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God. How could we live lives that please God when we are slaves to sin, when we’re slaves to the very thing that God said, I hate that, and part of the reason why I hate that is because it’s going to hurt you, okay? What God says is sin is not just arbitrary.

I remember being confronted with this in a freshman philosophy class at OU, and it took me until years after college and years into pastoring before I came up with an answer to it, is what they call the euthyphro dilemma. ancient Greek philosophy said, you know, the things that the gods love, do they love it because they’re good, or is it good because the gods love it? And the question was asked about the Christian god as well.

Is sin, is right and wrong, do right and wrong exist because God says they exist, or does God say they exist because they do? And the idea being that if God, if right and wrong is not arbitrary, then God is under some other principle, okay? That’s not acceptable to me as a Christian.

God makes the rules. But then if it’s just coming from God and it’s just something he decided on, then they would say it’s totally arbitrary. Well, that’s not acceptable to me either.

And the idea was, ha ha, in philosophy class, we got you. Your conception of God is broken and not right. And it took me years to realize, no, no, it’s not subject to something else outside, and it’s not something God just made up totally arbitrary.

God’s law about sin and God’s law about what’s right and wrong is based on his own nature. It’s based on his own nature. Because God is a God of truth and God is a God who cannot lie, then he says telling the truth is right and lying is wrong.

Because God is a God who is faithful, he says that faithfulness is right and unfaithfulness is wrong. See, it springs from his nature who he is. And he looks at the things that are consistent with who he is and says, that’s what’s right and that’s what you need to shoot for.

And he looks at the things that are opposite of who he is and he says, that is wrong and that will hurt you. And it’s true. So there’s a little Bible and some philosophy for you thrown in today.

Right and wrong spring from God’s nature. The law springs from God’s nature. We can’t please God because his very nature is these things that we’re rebelling against. So when we’re rebelling against truth, when we’re rebelling against righteousness, when we’re rebelling against purity, it’S not just His laws.

It’S His very nature. And we can’t please Him while we’re looking at everything God is and saying, I want no part of that. That’s our human nature to say, I want no part of that.

He says, verse 9, but ye are not In the flesh, but in the spirit. He says, but you, believer, you are not in the flesh. You’re in the spirit.

Now, we still have the flesh in us. The flesh is in us, but we are not in the fresh. we are in the spirit the spirit is in us and it’s supposed to be the spirit who overrides these fleshly desires that ye are in the spirit if so be that the spirit of God dwell in you so how do you know that you’re in the spirit if the spirit of God dwells in you if he dwells in you and as we’ve looked at in previous weeks we know that the spirit of God dwells in us if we have been born again if we have come to that place where we have trusted Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ alone as our one and only Savior, as the one who could pay for all the sins that we’ve committed, as the one who could pay for all of the debt that we’ve incurred with God.

If we’ve come to that place where by faith we have bowed the knee before Jesus Christ and said, I was wrong, you were right, and I trust in you and you alone for my forgiveness and for my salvation. If we’ve come to that point, then we are indwelled at that moment of conversion by the Holy Spirit of God. He comes to dwell inside of us and he will never leave us.

And so this morning, if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, and I don’t mean just that he exists, but I mean you have trusted in him for your salvation, then not only is the spirit of God within you, but you are in the spirit, the Bible says. Now, yes, you still have the flesh in you, and there’s still that voice whispering, but you don’t have to listen. See, before when we’re slaves to sin.

Sin says, do this. And we say, yes, master. Now the difference is the flesh whispers, we don’t have to listen.

The spirit is there to override. And we can look at sin and say, get lost. Now, will we always do that? No, because we’re fallen and we’re sinful.

But we get up. We ask God’s forgiveness again. We get the fellowship back right by the power of the Holy Spirit.

And we go on empowered by the Holy Spirit to hopefully do better the next time. Now, if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. Now, that Holy Spirit that Christ sent, Jesus said, I’m going to go back to my Father, and we will send you, he will send the Holy Spirit, who will guide you into all truth.

Now, that Spirit that was sent on Christ’s behalf, if we don’t have that Spirit within us, the Bible says we are none of his. We do not belong to Jesus Christ if we do not have the Holy Spirit. And don’t get the cart before the horse here.

It’s not that we get the Holy Spirit, so that means we belong to Jesus Christ. But he’s saying, if you have not been indwelled by that Holy Spirit, who he sins just as a matter of, that’s part of it. At the moment of conversion, when you’re born again, the Holy Spirit comes in. And he says, if you don’t have the Holy Spirit, that’s a sign that you did not have Jesus Christ either.

And if Christ be in you, he says, hear this, if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin. If Jesus and his spirit live within you, the body is dead because of sin. The spirit is life because of righteousness.

So we are indwelled by the Holy Spirit who is alive and who will lead us to life and righteousness. The flesh has been put to death. The problem is we just don’t realize, you know, we don’t know enough to bury it.

Sometimes we don’t even think about having the funeral. Now, there is something to be said that we have to continually put to death the flesh in our lives. I don’t know. I saw about, there was about, there was about 10, 20 seconds of The Walking Dead that came on the TV at my house, and I could not get out of the room fast enough, okay?

I did not grow up watching horror movies. I’ve watched documentaries on the killing fields, the bloodshed in communist Cambodia that was one of the most brutal things that’s ever happened, ever, and The Walking Dead was worse, okay? I saw that these, these zombies just, they come back to life.

They’re undead, or I don’t know what the term is. They’re undead and you have to kill them. They’re just constantly killing zombies.

I cannot emphasize to you how horrifying this was and I could not get out of the room fast enough. But that’s kind of the picture we have of sin in our lives. It’s brutal and it’s ugly and we have to kill it over and over again because it’s just always there right around the corner.

You turn a corner, oh great, more zombies. You just have to put the sin to death again. But we have victory.

We don’t have to let the zombies bite us. I never thought that I would use a walking dead sermon illustration, but there it was. Sometimes sin just comes back.

You got to kill it all over again. The bottom line is we as believers will still sin, but we don’t have to. We don’t have to give in every time sin wags its little finger.

We don’t have to come running because we’ve got the Holy Spirit and we could look at sin and tell it to drop dead. But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you. But if the Spirit of him that raised Jesus up from the dead dwell in you, if the Holy Spirit dwells in you, and he reminds us again that Jesus rose from the dead, Jesus has experienced victory over death, hell, and the grave.

If he that raised up Jesus dwells in you, Then he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his spirit that dwelleth in you. If you have the Holy Spirit, then the same one who raised Jesus will raise you, will raise you to new life. Now, folks, I believe that doesn’t just mean in the next world, in the next life, when he gives us a glorified body.

I believe that means now he raises us to newness of life to walk with him from the moment that Holy Spirit comes to live within us. Therefore, brethren, we are debtors not to the flesh to live after the flesh. He says we are debtors.

We will serve something. We will end up serving something. He says we’re not debtors to the flesh to live after the flesh.

We are not slaves to sin, to live in sin. But for if you live, verse 13, for if you live after the flesh, you shall die. But if you through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, you shall live.

This is where I’ve been talking a little bit lately about mortifying the flesh. It’s not the idea of walking around whipping yourself and punishing yourself for your sins in a physical way, but looking at sin and saying, no, you’re dead to me. I’m not going to do that.

And putting sin to death every day, mortifying the body. He says, you shall live. And by the way, we can only do this through the Holy Spirit who lives within us.

And he says, verse 14, for as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. If you have the Holy Spirit in you and you follow according to his leadership, the Bible says you are the sons of God, which I think is pretty incredible in and of itself. God didn’t have to save us in the first place.

He didn’t owe us salvation. And so it would have been gracious enough if God had looked at us and said, you were my enemies, but because of what Jesus Christ did, I tell you what, I will let you be servants in my household, kind of like the prodigal son. That would have been gracious enough.

That would have been in and of itself a gift that we could never earn or deserve. But God does us one better and says, come on in. You’re my children now.

Wait a minute. We rebelled against the king. We were traitors.

We were enemies. And yet God said, because of Jesus Christ, you’re my son now. There’s nobody who has ever loved you so much as God the Son who gave his life for you and God the Father who adopts you into his family on that basis.

For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. This morning, believer, if you are indwelled by the Spirit of God, you are his child. And you have not received the spirit of bondage.

For you have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear, verse 15, but you have received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. He says, you’re not slaves. You’ve received the spirit of adoption.

The Bible does describe us as being God’s servants, God’s slaves. It depends on what translation you’re reading. The Greek word doulos means both words.

But we shouldn’t think of it in an early American history version of slavery, brutality, whipping, beating, dehumanizing, but saying that we belong to God. And it’s not just a slave relationship, but he says, I’ve adopted you, you are my children, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. And as I’ve told you many times, that word Abba means daddy.

It is an intimate term. It’s an intimate term that we’re able to talk to God on the most intimate terms. And I’ve told you before, I only let three people call me daddy. Well, the dog, but he can’t say it.

Charlie can’t say it yet either, but he’ll be allowed to. If we’re out somewhere and I’m corralling the children and somebody says, now, dad, excuse me, that goes all over me. I know they don’t mean anything, but it just something inside me rises up and says, I am not your dad.

You don’t get to call me that. They get to call me that because of the relationship. And God looks at us and says, you have the same thing with me.

You can call me in the most intimate of terms, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself, verse 16, the Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit that we are the children of God. He says, the Spirit bears witness.

The Spirit will remind you that you are God’s child. And if children, hear this, we’re not just children, then heirs. God’s written us into the will too.

than heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. You know what? He did all the work, and yet by his grace, we share with him in the inheritance. Joint heirs with Christ, if so be that we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified together.

So the Spirit does this work where he looks at us, and you should see this in the progression of the passage as I’m talking about it, that he starts out this really bleak picture of us as enemies of God, and it’s just, it’s horrible. So it may hurt your feelings a little bit to think about, wait a minute, that preacher saying I’m an enemy of God. That’s not me.

That’s the Apostle Paul saying that. That’s how we start out. And it’s not because God says I hate you.

It’s because we’ve looked at God and we’ve said I hate you and we’ve put ourselves on the opposite side of him. We’re not going to listen to you. And the Holy Spirit takes people who are in that condition and God loves us enough that he devised the plan of salvation, sent his son to die for us, and sends his Holy Spirit to draw people to salvation.

So from that point, he wakes us up. He sends the gospel our way, which is the power of God unto salvation. We hear that message.

The Holy Spirit connects it with our hearts. We trust in him by faith. We’re born again.

We’re indwelled by that Holy Spirit. We’re marked out at that moment as belonging to him. He says, you’re mine now, and you’re as much mine as you’re ever going to be.

He then spends our entire lives working through us and working in us to make us what we ought to be, to transform us from those wretched, horrible enemies of God into sons and daughters of God and brings it all the way to completion where we get to be joint heirs with Jesus Christ and glorified with him one day in heaven. That is the incredible work of the Holy Spirit in sanctifying you as a believer, marking you out as belonging to God and then spending the rest of your life making you what you ought to be until he brings it all the way to completion. That’s the work of sanctification.

That he says, I’m going to call you mine and I’m going to declare you holy, meaning you’re set apart, you belong to God. I’m going to declare you righteous, meaning God looks at you and chooses to remember your sins no more. And then what I’ve already legally declared, I’m going to spend all this time making that in reality the case.

And so we see in this passage, just very quickly, three stages to sanctification. I want you to realize that there are three stages to sanctification because sometimes when we just look at what’s going on right now, we think, well, God’s not really doing anything in my life. It’s like when I see my kids every day, I don’t realize how much they’re changing, how much they’re growing up until I go back and I look at the photos on my computer.

Well, that was just a year ago. Look at how little you looked. And I see the changes.

Sometimes it’s so gradual, and I don’t recognize it. And we need to recognize that sometimes the work of God that’s going on in the background and going on within us is so gradual, we may not realize it until we get 10 years down the road and say, wait, didn’t I used to, or didn’t I used to think this, or didn’t I used to do that? And we realize the change that he’s made.

There are three stages to sanctification. First of all, past, the Holy Spirit set us apart unto God. In the past, the Holy Spirit, if you’re believer set you apart to God.

From that moment of conversion, from that moment of the second birth, you belong to God as much as you ever were going to. And a few weeks ago when I talked to you about the seal of the Holy Spirit, the stamp, the immovable seal that he placed on you, that’s part of that. And you belong to God at that moment as much as you’re ever going to.

You can’t do good things to make God make you any more of his child than you were at that moment. God doesn’t look and say, well, Julie’s been super good, so she gets to be mega Doppler, my child now. And God doesn’t look at you and say, well, Kay did a lot of bad stuff, so she’s on probation as far as being my child.

No, it doesn’t work that way with our kids, and it doesn’t work that way with God’s kids. And he says, you’re mine. He marked you out at that point, the Holy Spirit did.

The Holy Spirit set us apart unto God. And he said at that moment, you’re his child. That’s why we received that spirit of adoption that it talks about in verses 15 through 17, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.

So if you’r