Basic Theology: Sanctification - What sanctification?
What sanctification?
It is not simply feeling closer to God or experiencing His presence.
It’s not a collection of secret insight and personal encouragement from Him to you.
It’s not a vague sense of subjective spirituality.
It’s not measured, engaged, or informed by your emotions or feelings at all.
True sanctification, according to Scripture, is the process of God’s transforming work in your life.
The moment of your salvation, you are declared justified by the Lord through the sacrifice of His Son and freed from the guilt of sin.
Then from there, sanctification frees you from the pollution of sin, helping you destroy sinful patterns and abandon your former life of wickedness.
Sanctification is the fruit of salvation. It’s the transforming process by which God’s people shed their past sinfulness and grow to reflect His holiness. And if you truly belong to God, you’re undergoing the process of sanctification right now.
Sanctification meaning:
The first and the root meaning of the word sanctify (and ‘holy’ and ‘saint’, for they all come from the same words in Hebrew and the Greek), is to set apart to and for a sacred purpose.
Leviticus 21:8, Therefore you shall consecrate him, for he offers the bread of your God. He shall be holy to you, for I the Lord, who sanctify you, am holy.
Because He is unique in His person and alone qualified for the whole work of redemption, Jesus sanctified Himself.
In the Old Testament, we read of days, places and things being sanctified that is, set apart for a holy and a sacred purpose.
Genesis 2:3, Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.
Exodus 29:43, And there I will meet with the children of Israel, and the tabernacle shall be sanctified by My glory.
Exodus 40:10-11, You shall anoint the altar of the burnt offering and all its utensils, and consecrate the altar. The altar shall be most holy. 11 And you shall anoint the laver and its base, and consecrate it.
But there is a further meaning in the use of the word sanctify. Because of the presence of sin, of evil, in man and in the world, the word also, when it refers to man, means not only separation TO a sacred and holy purpose, but separation FROM that which is evil, sinful and unclean.
An illustration of this in the Old Testament is found in
2 Chronicles 29:5, and said to them: “Hear me, Levites! Now sanctify yourselves, sanctify the house of the Lord God of your fathers, and carry out the rubbish from the holy place.
and in the New Testament in
2 Corinthians 7:1, Therefore, having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.
The word sanctification, therefore, has in it a two-fold meaning.
➢ separation FROM sin and defilement, and
➢ dedication TO God
This brings us to the place where we must consider the use of the word sanctification in relation to believers.
1 Thessalonians 5:23-24, Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is He who calls you, and He also will bring it to pass.
The word translated here as sanctify literally means to be set apart—in its noun form it is usually translated as holiness. So, in basic terms, sanctification is the Lord’s process of separating us from sin and setting us apart for holiness. Paul’s prayer is that the Lord would bring about that transformation in the lives of the Thessalonian believers that their lives would reflect a decreasing frequency of sin and an increasing frequency of holiness.
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