Five Myths of Sanctification
Sermon Manuscript
I’m willing to bet that Philippians has more famous verses as a percentage of total verses of any book of the Bible. This week’s super familiar verse is “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” Because of all God has already done for you, and is doing for you in Jesus, work out your salvation with fear and trembling. This is about our pursuit of personal holiness, a process we call sanctification.
So, what is sanctification? The word comes from Latin and basically means ‘to make holy.’ Sanctification is the process of becoming more holy. When we first believe, we were made perfect in the eyes of God. But down here on Earth, we’re still a kind of a mess and we begin the process of making actually true, what in heaven has been declared legally true. And this isn’t a process that will ever be finished in this life. It will only be fully complete when we die or Jesus comes back.
This morning, I want to talk about why sanctification is hard. I want to address five myths about our sanctification that are commonly embraced and will make the process of our sanctification very hard. And all five of them are addressed by Paul in this passage.
Myth 1: I can’t break free of my sin. All Christians sin. Some even sin and begin to doubt their own salvation or the power of the gospel and the Holy Spirit. They hear Paul’s call to sanctification and they feel like a second class Christian because they struggle with sin. And if that’s you, I hope it’s encouraging to see Paul had the same struggle. Romans 7, 18 For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. - Romans 7:18,19
Paul’s very words ‘work out our own salvation with fear and trembling’ assume that the Christians he’s writing to struggle with sin. But, they also assume that we can break free of our sin. Paul clearly believes that God has ordained that the Christian life be one of pursuing more Christ-likeness. This is why Paul says to the Romans, For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son… - Romans 8:29 That’s sanctification in a nutshell. Being conformed to the image of Jesus. It is a process of Christ being formed in us.
This is a helpful way to think about the three phases of the Christian life:
Justification (the moment we first believe) brings us freedom from sin’s penalty.
Sanctification (the pursuit of holiness) brings us freedom from sin’s power.
Glorification (when we die or Jesus comes back) brings us freedom from sin’s presence.
We have to understand that we are in the middle part. We have the expectation and power to free ourselves from sin's grasp, but we are still very much in sin’s presence. Sanctification at its core is a battle against our sin. A war against our flesh. When we become a Christian, there is a whole new world of things we aspire to. A whole new way we desire to live our lives.
And this war IS hard! In Paul’s words we are to crucify our sin! He uses this word intentionally because, again, the Christian life is lived in the pattern of Christ. Just as his body was crucified for us, we are to crucify our fleshly desires. That is God’s design. Often, the problem is that we are not taking advantage of all He has given us. Which brings us to myth two.
Myth 2: It’s just me and Jesus. One of the great tragedies of our culture is how individualized we have made our sanctification. Paul’s clear expectation is that this is something we are going to do together. This verb ‘work out’ is in the plural. Paul is basically saying, “Y’all work out y’alls salvation together.” This is why this fits so well into Paul’s larger plea for unity in the church. When someone says that God feels so far away or silent in their pain and sin, but they are not regularly worshiping with other believers, they are not in a community group, they aren’t serving in the body, and might not even be a member of a church, my response is that I would feel the same way if I were them! We aren’t meant to do this alone.
Being alone is one of the greatest hindrances to working out our salvation. When we are in pain we need the encouragement, perspective, and hope of others because we are often stuck in guilt or anger or shame. And the enemy will do all he can to leave us there. Maybe a good question to ask if you feel alone in your suffering is ,”Are you choosing to keep others out?” or “If you are choosing to keep others out, why?”
And it’s the job of the church to pull people like this in. When Angela went back to school to get her counseling degree, I started to learn a lot about the skill of curious listening. And the more I learn about it and the more I try to do it myself, the more amazed I am at the power of it. Curious listening is listening to understand someone, not to reply to or fix someone. Asking thoughtful questions, instead of questions that someone can respond to with a yes or no. Trying to feel what they feel, trying to understand why they feel it, and trying to understand why they act the way they do. If this is our posture toward people who are isolating themselves, we can powerfully show them the blessing of being more significantly connected to the body.
What’s interesting is that the skill of curious listening also helps with Paul’s command in verse 14 to “Do all things without grumbling or disputing.” What’s so interesting is that you can’t be curious and critical at the same time. Those two attitudes can’t coexist. So I find myself actually becoming less critical and more curious. My heart toward other people changes. My counselor always says, “All behavior makes sense when you understand someone’s story.” Whenever I’m with someone that I don’t understand or even flat out disagree with, I have the temptation to grumble or dispute, but I try and instead ask myself, “What would it look like to be curious right now?” And all kinds of helpful questions pop in my head. Questions about their childhood, their hopes, their hurts.
Now, please don’t hear me say that curious listening is an end in itself, but rather a tool. I’m also not saying that we can’t ever be critical, but rather that we shouldn't be critical before we are very curious. Curious listening safely draws others out and invites them to risk being a little more open. It helps us to suspend judgment. And it creates relationships where we can confess our sin to each other, where we can be more fully known and more fully accepted, where the Spirit draws us together, and where grumbling and disputing cannot survive.
Myth 3: God helps those who help themselves. Angela and I were asked to speak at a conference last April in Lake Tahoe. And there is this rule in ministry that whatever the conference is, if it’s in Lake Tahoe, you say yes. We also got to bring our daughter, Ivey, for her 14th birthday which was so sweet. We had a morning to drive around and there is this skinny road there that feels like it’s going straight out into the lake with about a thousand feet of sheer cliff going down each side.
And, as I stared at this beautiful road, it hit me that this is a picture of Christian sanctification. Sanctification is a beautiful road, but if we don’t understand the real role we have in our pursuit of holiness and the real role God has, we can fall off either cliff on the left or right. And this is where we get to myth three. Paul tells us to work out our salvation, but then tells us 13 for hit is God who works in you, both to will and to work forihis good pleasure. - Phil 2:13. So we play a role AND God plays a role. The phrase, ‘God helps those who help themselves' skews the emphasis away from God and toward us. This phrase was popularized by Benjamin Franklin and it essentially says that if we get the ball rolling, God will help us in the end. But Paul says that the very desire to grow in our sanctification in the first place is given to us by God.
It was God who first opened our eyes to our sin, it was God who first moved our hearts toward Jesus, and it was God who gave us the desire for sanctification. If you ask any Christian, “How do you know that Jesus is real?” They would likely articulate an external answer and an internal answer. The external reasons are that we believe the Bible makes the most sense. We believe with our minds that the Bible explains our experience better than any other world view. We believe the Bible is historically reliable. And we believe that Jesus offers the most plausible hope given the realities of sin and death. But then there are the internal reasons behind our faith. We believed and we can feel the Holy Spirit changing our desires and making us despise our sin in a way we have never felt before.
We can change all our behaviors, but only the Spirit can change our desires. That is what it means that God is working in us. The Holy Spirit is working inside of us to make Jesus greater in our hearts than anything else. So, when we ask the question, why do I keep sinning? The answer is always that our hearts are drawn to something other than Jesus. So, the Spirit is inside of us to show us the surpassing worth of Jesus.
The 20th century was interesting because you had the rise of both theological liberalism and fundamentalism and the core problem in both was a misunderstanding of our role and God’s role in the world. Robert made some helpful slides for me here. Slide one we see Liberalism. Liberalism began to take God out of our lives which puts the work on us. This was Einstein’s view when he said, “A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary..” And when the work is increasingly on us, we create a new moral standard. Often an easier moral standard. Maybe it’s a moral standard that serves our sinful desires. This is what gave way to worldviews that live by phrases like ‘Just be true to yourself,’ ‘Listen to your truth,’ or ‘You do you.’ This view offers no real help in killing our sin - rather it merely kills the idea of sin, and in so doing, it drives off the cliff.
Fundamentalism went the other way, but had the same problem. Slide two. They also couldn’t see how God and man both work together so one strain of Fundamentalism, what I’m calling Fundamentalism A, took the Bible very seriously, but embraced a “God helps those who help themselves” theology. Like if you are bench pressing heavy weights, you need to give it your all and, if you do, then God comes in like a spotter to give you the extra help you need. Most of the work is ours, but God helps you out some. So they didn’t lower the moral standard, they raised it to essential orthodoxy. They self-righteously taught that if you didn’t act and behave the way they did, you were out.
So both theological liberalism and fundamentalism fall off the left cliff by putting more emphasis on us in our sanctification than God. The right side of the cliff we see in myth four.
Myth 4: Let go and Let God. This is the other side of the cliff because instead of skewing the emphasis of our salvation to our own effort, it skews the emphasis toward God in a way that ignores Paul’s command for us to work out our salvation. So there is a high view of God’s role, but a very low view of ours. There is real work on our part to be done if we are going to see progress in our sanctification. Now, it’s important to see that Paul doesn’t say work for your salvation. He doesn’t say work on your salvation. He says work out your salvation. We can only work out things that we already possess. I think the way Paul intends us to hear this is akin to rehabilitation after a terrible accident. It’s hard work, but it’s the restoration of the faculties you already possess, but aren’t experiencing the full blessing of.
Here is another way to think about it. I have no idea how many premarital counseling sessions I have done. But, in all of them, at some point, I have told them that this marriage they are entering into is something they are going to have to work at. There is work to do. Once they have the gift of their spouse, they will have to work at loving each other better. And do you know what I have never heard in response? Man, that’s a bummer! No, they are eager to get started and often naively optimistic about how easy it will be. But, in those moments, I think we could learn a lot from these infatuated engaged couples. They are eager to get to know each other better and eager to work out their marriage. To enjoy the gift of marriage. That’s the way we should look at working out our salvation.
So, how do we work out our salvation? By dying to ourselves and living for Christ. By descending through the pain of the death of killing our sin, but then rising as we live for Christ. Jesus’ path moved downward into death before rising upward into resurrection and that is the pattern for the Christian life. This is what Paul means when he says in the next chapter that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, - Philippians 3:10 The Christian life is a process of dying to ourselves. Dying to our overt sin, dying to our perceived rights, dying to our expectations of this life so that we can live for Christ and the enjoy the blessings of the resurrections that will take place in our hearts.
I’ve talked about liberalism and Fundamentalism A. But, there was another stream of Fundamentalism, I’ll call Fundamentalism B, that we see in slide three that went a very different direction. It went a hyper-Calvinist direction and teaches that God is SO in control that it really doesn’t matter what we do. Just let go and let God. All three of these camps, liberalism, fundamentalism A, and fundamentalism B, make the same mistake. They don’t understand that it’s not a pie where God gets part and we get part. But, it’s that all our efforts begin and end in God’s work in us. And that actually gives us more joy and more motivation to work! Paul is teaching what we see in slide four, where it is all of God and all of us. All the red and all the blue to make it all purple.
The Reformed Protestant movement is largely responsible for the retrieval of the Christian doctrine that God and natural means are not competing against each other, but working with each other. Our confession of faith says, “God, in his providence makes use of means, yet is free to work without, above, and against them at His pleasure.” So we have categories to better understand and embrace that we have real work to do AND God is working in that work from beginning to end.
Practical example. Are you having a hard time forgiving someone? Someone has wronged you and your flesh is resisting offering forgiveness. But, the Holy Spirit works to soften your heart and you make the choice to forgive. You refuse to nurse the bitterness or replay the offense in your mind. You may even pray the words of forgiveness even though your emotions don’t feel it yet. But, the Holy Spirit reminds you of Jesus’ mercy and forgiveness toward you. He works in you, empowering you to actually release the offender from their offense in a way you could never manufacture on your own. Then, you offer the forgiveness your flesh hates and the Holy Spirit produces a supernatural fruit of peace that is so sweet that it overpowers the resentment that was once in your heart. That is sanctification.
Myth 5: My sanctification really doesn’t matter if I’m saved by grace. This is a bit different than ‘let go and let God.’ This myth tells us that even if we do work at it, what’s the ultimate benefit? We’ll end up in heaven anyway. We know we SHOULD do it, but is it worth the hard work? Paul gives us two huge benefits to our sanctification. It accomplishes our joy and their hope. So, first our joy. Look at verse 17: Even if I am to be poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrificial offering of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with you all. - Philippians 2:17 Even though Paul may be looking at the end of his life, he is able to have joy. His sanctification has brought him to a place where he can genuinely have joy in all circumstances. So, how does sanctification bring joy? True joy and sin cannot coexist. But now, as we kill that sin, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we experience the joy God intended. We die a little bit, but then we live a whole lot more! Again, it won’t ever be fully complete in this life, but we don’t give up because there is always more joy to be had in Jesus in this life. As we crucify our flesh, we feel God’s love…the love He has already set on us…even more. Do you want more joy in Jesus? Sanctification is that beautiful road.
And as we experience that joy, secondly, we become a shining beacon of hope. Verse 15: that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, - Philippians 2:15 Paul is surely drawing here from Matthew 5:14 where Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount says, "You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. - Matthew 5:14”
In Jesus’ day, cities were built on hills so they couldn’t be easily attacked. Imagine Jesus preaching this sermon as the sun set and the sky got darker, the brighter the cities became. In the same way, the darker the culture, the more crooked and twisted the generation, the more we shine. We aren’t called to run from darkness, but to shine brightly in it. But, we only shine if we are experiencing the joy of our sanctification.
The light in us is not produced by us any more than the light of the moon. The light of the moon is a reflection of the sun. In the same way, our lights are the light of Jesus in us and the more we walk with Him in our sanctification, the more joy we experience, and the more of His light we reflect as our hearts are conformed to His. And, again, Paul isn’t talking about our individual light shining, but our collective lights.
Let me finish with a few quick diagnostics to see how we are doing in our sanctification. First, is your pursuit of holiness different when no one is looking? Paul says in verse 12 Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, - Philippians 2:12 Paul knows they were obedient in his presence, but were they obedient in his absence? Is our pursuit of holiness different when no one is looking?
Second, does your sanctification extend to all areas of your life? Verse 14 Do all things without grumbling or disputing, - Philippians 2:14 Do all this! Emphasis on all. I’m sure this has never happened in your house, but there are times when we have had people coming over to our house, and when they arrived, the house looked very clean…as long as no one looked in our garage. That’s where we shove lots of loose items we didn’t know what to do with. But what happened is that the garage became so messy, the thought of cleaning it was totally overwhelming. We were embarrassed to even open the garage door because we didn’t want anyone to see what was inside. Do we look at our life this way? Does our pursuit of holiness extend to every area of our life or are there rooms we don’t want to clean? Are there rooms that have become overwhelming to even think about cleaning? Are there secret rooms, we are content to keep messy because we think no one sees them.
Third diagnostic, how much do you feel the need for God in your sanctification? Generally, in life, maturity is marked by our journey from dependence toward independence. If all goes well, our children go to school, they graduate, they get a job, and they get married. That’s the journey from dependence to independence. Our spiritual lives, though, are the exact opposite. This is why in verse 15, Paul calls us blameless children of God. That is our permanent state. Our spiritual maturity is marked by our journey from independence toward child-like dependence. Our sanctification can be graded by how much we feel the need or God in it.
Our sanctification, our joy, and our light are all fueled by Jesus’ love given to us. A love that will overpower all the desires of our flesh, that will give us a joy that will cast out fear, and a light in this city that cannot be ignored. I want to finish by reading the refrain to our last song, Living Hope. Sanctification is singing a refrain like this 1000 times in your life and finding more joy in them each time you do.
Hallelujah, praise the One who set me free
Hallelujah, death has lost its grip on me
You have broken every chain
There's salvation in Your name
Jesus Christ, my living hope
