Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth (v. 17).
In our last two studies, we have been looking at God’s method of sanctifying us. We laid down the negatives and warned about certain dangers, and so now we are in a position to approach the truth positively. The great statement, as we have seen, is that the work of sanctification in us is done by God through the medium of the truth. If we say that our sanctification takes place by God bringing us into the realm of the truth, in order that the truth may act upon us, then the vital question for us is, therefore, What is this truth which God uses in order to promote our sanctification?
Here again there is more than one view. There are those – and this is the teaching which I think needs to be counteracted first of all – who seem to regard the truth to which our Lord refers here as just being some wonderful, special teaching which they go on repeating. But that, surely, is quite a false understanding of what our Lord means by the truth. Indeed, our Lord here, at once realising the danger, it seems to me, safeguards us against it by defining the truth: ‘Sanctify them through thy truth, thy word is truth.’ What, then, is this word? The answer can be found in this chapter in verses 6, 7, 8, which we have already considered.1 It is not some peculiar teaching about sanctification which a man goes on to after justification. No, it is the holy word. Our Lord says, ‘I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world: thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have kept thy word. Now they have known that all things whatsoever thou hast given me are of thee. For I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me.’ ‘Thy word is truth,’ he says here in verse 17 – and that is the truth.
So our Lord is teaching us that God sanctifies us through the truth, by means of the truth and in the truth. He is referring partly to his own teaching – the truth by which we are sanctified is not only what we read in Romans, chapters 6, 7 and 8, it is all the teaching of the Gospels, this word which God had given to the Son, and which the Son taught his followers. It is not just one section of the truth, it is the whole of the truth. Everything he teaches in the Sermon on the Mount, and everything he teaches elsewhere, all that is what God uses in order to bring about our sanctification.
But, of course, it does not only include that. In John 14, 15 and 16 our Lord has just told these disciples that the Holy Spirit, when he comes and is given to them in fullness, will teach them and lead them into all truth; it is still the same idea. Our Lord describes him as the Spirit of truth: not simply as the true Spirit as against the false spirits, but in a very special way as the Spirit through whom the truth of God comes to men and women and is mediated to them. Our Lord says, ‘I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth’ (John 16:12 – 13). And, of course, when the Holy Spirit came he did enlighten these apostles, and we have their teaching recorded for us in these various New Testament epistles. So we see that the truth that God uses in order to bring about our sanctification is all the truth we have in the Gospels, together with all the truth that we have in the New Testament epistles. All the demonstration and doctrine, all the exhortation and appeals, the whole of the New Testament, is the truth which he has used in order to bring about our sanctification. So that is our basic definition; the truth about sanctification, and the truth which leads to it, is not some isolated department on its own to which you go, having been somewhere else first. The whole of the truth about the person of our Lord is this word of God which leads to our sanctification.
Because of this, then, we must now consider this truth, because without it sanctification is not possible. We saw in our negatives that sanctification does not take place as the result of God acting directly upon us. No, he does it through showing this particular truth. So if we are anxious that we should grow in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord and that we should conform more and more to the image of God’s dear Son; if it is our supreme ambition to know him and to be devoted to him, then the first thing we must do is to pay attention to this truth.
Now it is a truth which is divided up in the Scriptures into many aspects, but before we come to look at them in detail, or in terms of these different facets, it is important that we should begin by looking at it as a whole. To do this, therefore, we must stand back and look at the great New Testament message which promotes sanctification, and realise that there are certain major principles with respect to it. Most people get into trouble in the Christian life, and in almost every profession, because they rush to details before they grasp the principles. In order truly to understand any science or any branch of knowledge, we must start with great fundamental principles, and it is only as we have them firmly in our minds that we can go on to details, because if we have not grasped the principles, the details will not help us. Most heresies have arisen because men have fastened on details in that way.
So, then, here are some of these principles which I would put for your consideration, and which seem to stand out on the surface of this New Testament truth, this word of God. The first is that we again see the importance of not regarding sanctification primarily from the standpoint of an experience. Sanctification is primarily the application of the truth to ourselves, it is not first and foremost having or receiving an experience. Rather, what happens in sanctification is that God takes this truth, this word of his, and by the Holy Spirit brings it to us, opens our understanding of it and enables us to apprehend it. So that after we have received the truth and apprehended it, we then proceed to apply it to ourselves. And the whole time God is enabling us to do that.
I emphasise this first great principle because I would not hesitate to assert that perhaps the main trouble which most of us have in this matter of sanctification is that we tend to be waiting for some experience instead of taking the truth, applying our minds to it, and then applying it entirely to our lives. We seem to think that what happens is that somehow we are put into a sanctified position and that once we get there, everything is going to be all right. But it never seems to happen – we are still waiting for some experience. That is not the New Testament teaching at all. What the New Testament says is that we must realise the truth about God, the truth about ourselves, the truth about what Christ has done for us and about our standing and status.
That is why Paul offered that prayer for the church at Ephesus. What you need, he says, is that ‘the eyes of your understanding’ may be enlightened (Eph 1:18), because if you only knew the truth, then your position would be changed. So we must not wait for the experience and say that then everything will be all right. No, the way to come to an experience is rather in dependence upon the Holy Spirit who is at work within us, to approach the truth, to study, to understand and to grasp it and then to apply it to ourselves. Now that is surely the argument of all the New Testament epistles. Why were they ever written? Why was not just a brief note sent to all those Christian people saying, ‘All you have to do is to wait for an experience of sanctification’? No, these people had received the Holy Spirit, so what they were constantly being told was that they must grasp the truth that had been given to them, live by it, and apply it to themselves. That will become clearer as we come on to certain other things.
I would put my second principle like this: our main and basic need in sanctification is not power but light and knowledge and instruction. Now I put it in that form deliberately. I think it is true to say that we all tend to feel that our basic need is the need of power – we want power in our lives; we feel that we know what is right, and we want to do it, but we somehow lack the power to do it, and we long to be charged with this power, which will enable us to live aright. ‘Sanctify them,’ says our Lord in his petition, but it is ‘sanctify them in thy truth, thy word is truth.’ Fill them with knowledge, he says, give them the understanding, apply the truth to them.
There is no question at all but that the devil encourages us to think that our need in sanctification is power, because the devil’s object is to keep us in ignorance. He first of all keeps the whole world in ignorance about its condition and its relationship to God. He blinds the eyes and the minds of them that believe not, he blinds their minds to the truth about God and about themselves and about righteousness and about judgement. He tries to keep us out of the entire realm of the Christian faith, but if in spite of his efforts we become Christians, he still continues with his work and he now tries to blind us to the real truth about ourselves as it is in Christ Jesus.
I suggest that as long as we are in this life, there is a sense in which even Christian people will always have to fight the battle of justification by faith only. As Paul pointed out to the Galatians, the danger is that having started in the Spirit we continue in the flesh, and we are all constantly faced with this danger. It is always the work of the devil, and he does it in a particular way in connection with this whole question of sanctification. We think that what we need is power, so that we have nothing to do but wait till the power comes, whereas the teaching is that what we need is to know this truth, the truth about ourselves in our relationship to God – ‘The eyes of your understanding being enlightened that ye may know what is the hope of his calling, and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints and what is the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe’ (Eph 1:18–19).
For as Christian people the power is already in us. You cannot be a Christian without having received the Holy Spirit. ‘No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost’ (1 Cor 12:3). We are not Christians unless we have received the Holy Spirit, it is a part of our regeneration and rebirth; the gift of the Spirit is the possession of every truly converted Christian believer. Therefore, the power to live the Christian life is already there. So what we really need is to know the truth about ourselves as Christians; we need to know that we are children of God, that our sins have been forgiven, that we are reconciled to God, and that we need have no worry about that. We need to see ourselves ‘seated in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus’. We need to know that the very hairs of our head are all numbered, that we are thus special people in the sight of God and we need to know about the blessed hope that is awaiting us. That is the teaching of the New Testament. For our real trouble is that we tend to have our own ideas as to what a Christian is, instead of accepting the New Testament definition.
I am most anxious to emphasise this, because there is nothing which is so blessed and so releasing as to be taken out of that subjectivity that is always looking at itself, and, rather, to see one’s self as one truly is in the purpose of God, as it is outlined in the New Testament. The trouble is that we tend to go to the word with these prejudices of ours, and we do not really take in what we are reading; we do not allow it to speak to us. We fail to realise that this description of the New Testament man should be a description of us, not only of the first Christians, nor of some ideal person, but a description of every one of us if we are Christians. Thus the vital thing is to realise what we are and if we realise that, then we should begin to realise ‘the power that worketh in us’ (Eph 3:20).
So my third proposition is that most of our troubles in this matter are ultimately in the realm of the will. Now I want to put this carefully. Here again I say that we tend to fool ourselves and to think that our wills are all right, but that what we need is the power to carry out the will. Once more we are deluded by the devil at that point. People often tend to put it like this: ‘You know, I have tried and tried for years to get rid of this thing out of my life, and I pray to God about it.’ We need to pause between the two parts of that statement, because it generally happens in this way. They first of all try to get rid of their problem themselves. Then they go to somebody who seems to be an expert in these matters, and he says, ‘Ah yes, but of course that is exactly where you have gone wrong. You have been trying to do it yourself, and you never will. You must give up trying and you must pray about it – stop your own efforts and just pray to God about it, and ask him to take it from you, and it will go.’ Then they tell you that they have prayed about it, and they have gone to meetings, and heard other people say that their sins have suddenly been taken away, but they themselves are still burdened, and they do not know what to do next. They feel that they are failures and they are desperate.
It seems to me that there is only one real trouble with such people and it is entirely in the realm of the will. Otherwise they are either saying that God does not want to deliver them, or that he cannot deliver them. That is their position. They have tried the proposed remedy, they have tried to surrender themselves utterly and they have asked God to take this burden from them, but they say that they still have it.
But that is where the trouble arises, and I feel that there is only one thing to do at this point, and that is to be brutal, and to say to these friends, ‘The real trouble with you is that you have a divided will. You are saying, in effect, either that God does not want to take this thing away, or that he cannot. But the trouble is that you do not really want to get rid of it; you are fond of it. You are not hungering and thirsting after righteousness, you are really unhappy in your mind. You know it is wrong but you like it – that is the trouble. It is as we read in John 3:19 “Men loved darkness rather than light.’”
The only thing to do with such people is to bring them face to face with truth, and to confront them with the fact that if they claim to be Christians, they are really saying a number of things about themselves. If they claim to believe in God, and in the Holy Spirit, how can they go on with this particular thing, whatever it may be? You have to convince their wills about this matter, you have to put their will right.
Then the fourth proposition is this: the will, as I understand this New Testament teaching, is never to be coerced or forced into a decision. Now that must be said, even in the light of what we have just been suggesting. I still say the sort of people I have been describing, you have to be brutal and show them that their trouble is in the realm of the will, but it is very important that you do not force the will, or get them to do so. You must show them the truth, in order tha their wills may be persuaded by the truth. Let me put this practically. So often you find that what happens with such people is that pressure is put upon them – ‘You must decide it here and now,’ they are urged; their will is forced, and then they are told they have promised and that they must never go back on their word.
But people who have done that often find themselves later on in the position that the only thing that really holds them there is their own decision or their own view. Now that may be quite a good thing in a practical sense – it is certainly extremely good psychology, – but it is utterly bad New Testament teaching, if indeed it is New Testament teaching at all. This is because you and I must be held to the New Testament position not by our pledges, but by the truth. We must realise, therefore, that the will is to be persuaded by the truth, and that that is how God works. He never forces our will, but rather presents the truth to us in such a way that we want it – ‘Every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure’ (1 Jn 3:3). So what the New Testament does is hold the blessed hope before us, and then, having seen it for ourselves, we say, ‘If I am going there, I cannot behave like this here and now; I am jeopardising my own liberty.’ The truth has come to us, and as we see the truth we want to be delivered from sin, and to belong to God.
Let me put it quite plainly. I cannot see, from New Testament teaching, that there is the slightest justification for ever calling upon people in a meeting to decide to go in for sanctification and for bringing pressure upon them to do so by forcing them to a decision. If that procedure is wrong in evangelism, it is equally wrong in this matter of sanctification. A man’s will must never be approached directly, because the will must always be approached through the truth. The truth should be presented to the will in such a way that the will desires it, needs and accepts it. This it does freely and without any sense of constraint, and puts into practice what it has willed. Therefore, if you are ever confronted by a man who tells you that he is defeated, and that he is a slave to, or a victim of, something, the thing to do is to remind him of the whole nature of the truth. You do not spend your time discussing the particular problem. Rather, you say, ‘Are you a child of God?’ You address him in terms of the truth, and so the will, the whole time, is being influenced by the truth which is being presented.
Let me put that in the form of another proposition. According to this truth, this word of God in the New Testament, sanctification is not just a matter of being delivered from particular sins. So often you will find that that is what is taught. People seem to think that if only they could get rid of this one sin, they would be sanctified; and it becomes still worse when the entire doctrine is focussed upon deliverance from one particular sin. No, sanctification is a matter of being rightly related to God, and becoming entirely devoted to him. Sanctification means becoming positively holy. It does not just mean I am not guilty of certain sins, because the moment you begin to think of it negatively like that, you are satisfied that you are sanctified; but you may be as far from sanctification, if not further, than the man who is guilty of one or other of those sins, because now you are now guilty of smugness! Sanctification means being devoted to God, not only separated from the world but separated unto God and sharing his life – it is positive holiness.
I proceed, then, to my next principle, the sixth, which is that the New Testament method of dealing with particular sins is never to concentrate upon the particular sin as such, but to bring it into the light and the context of the whole Christian position. I cannot emphasise that principle too strongly. Speaking out of pastoral experience, I have found in practice, that that particular principle is probably the most important of all. May I give you one illustration. I remember a lady once, some twenty years ago, coming to tell me of a crippling problem in her Christian spiritual life. She told me that she had a terrible horror and dread of thunderstorms. Apparently she had once been in a bad thunderstorm, and it had looked as if she might be killed. Ever since then the fear of thunder and lightning had gripped her, and it had come to such a pass that if she was going to a place of worship and happened to see a large cloud, she would begin to say to herself, ‘A thunderstorm is coming! So there would be a terrible conflict within her and it usually ended in her turning back and going home. It seemed to her that the one problem of her life was this fear and dread of thunderstorms. She told me she had struggled with this problem and done her best to get rid of it. She had been to consult many Christian people about it and they all told her to pray about it, and to ask God to deliver her from it. She had been praying for this for twenty-two years, but it was worse rather than better, and she went on to tell me how she longed to be delivered from this one thing which was marring her Christian life.
Now it seemed to me that the one thing to say to that woman was this – and it came as a shock to her – ‘Stop praying about this particular fear, for while you are praying, you are reminding yourself of it. You must stop thinking about yourself in terms of fear. Never think about thunderstorms; turn your back upon that altogether. What you must do is to think about yourself as a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ and as one who belongs to him. You are known as a Christian, therefore you are claiming certain things. You must concentrate upon positive Christianity, not upon a negative fear of one sin.’ And after much instruction she saw it and the fear of thunderstorms was forgotten. It did not happen suddenly, but as she concentrated on the Christian life, the fear just went.
Often people come and talk about one particular sin. They have been concentrating upon that one sin as though the whole Christian life is in just that one sin. But I adopt the word of Paul in Romans: ‘The kingdom of God is not meat and drink’ (Rom 14:17). There were people in the church who seemed to say that Christianity was one particular thing: What should you eat and drink? Which day should you observe? But that is not the Christian life! So when a man comes and talks to me about one thing, I talk to him about peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, all these positive elements, and I tell him, ‘You must be stretching out after them, and if you do so you will be delivered from the one sin.’ That is the New Testament method; it brings the truth to us and gives us this glorious picture of the new man in Christ Jesus.
The next principle is that sanctification must never be thought of as an end in itself but rather as a means to an end. Here again is a very important principle. Our eyes should not be only upon the cultivation of a holy life and freedom from sins. I go further: it should not even be our ambition to be holy men and women. I remember a man saying to me, ‘You know, my greatest ambition is to be a holy man.’ I said to him, ‘Yes, that is the trouble with you!’ The goal, I say, is not even to be holy men, nor to attain holiness, but rather to live in fellowship with God. Our goal is the knowledge and the love of God and of his Son Jesus Christ. The goal is not that I should be sanctified, but that I should be walking with him in fellowship and communion, in the light of the knowledge that I am going to spend my eternity with him.
This is the main problem during every season of Lent.2 The Catholic conception of holiness and mysticism, it seems to me, goes wrong at this very point, for it always concentrate upon the holy condition of the believer. If you read any manual on the holy or devoted life ever written by a Catholic or a mystic, you will usually find that you are exposing yourself to that particular danger. They concentrate attention upon the experimental condition, upon the experience, and then, of course, they take you through the different stages – the stage of torment, the stage of the dark night of the soul – until you ultimately arrive at the stage of holy contemplation.
I remember a man once, an old minister of the gospel, telling me that he was struggling, and in a sense really living in order to pass through the experience of the dark night of the soul, because he felt that he had never gone through it. Poor man! It was all subjective; he was simply concerned to be a holy man. But that is where the error comes in. Is it not exactly the same with this observance of Lent? To observe Lent for a certain number of weeks during the year is just to concentrate upon your experience. It is to look at yourself and try to make yourself better, to pull yourself up to a higher level. And, incidentally, what I am saying is not only true of the Catholic form of sanctification and holiness, you will find it coming out in evangelical piety too. The man who is anxious to think of himself as pious, falls into the same error.
But the whole biblical emphasis is not upon that at all, for the New Testament truth, the word of God, always puts it in terms of our personal relationship to the Father and to his Son, Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit. In other words, let us forget about our state and condition. Instead, the one question I need to ask myself is this: ‘Do I know God? Is Jesus Christ real to me?’ Not, ‘Am I now no longer full of the sin of which I used to be guilty?’ Not, ‘Am I observing certain rules and regulations?’ It is not, ‘Do I spend so much time in reading and prayer?’ No, rather, it is this: ‘Am I having fellowship with him?’ If you do not know this living experience of God, all your negative righteousness is of no value to you.
And that brings me to my last principle which arises out of all that I have been saying, and it is this: the truth about which our Lord speaks is a great truth, a large and comprehensive truth. You can read certain books and listen to certain addresses and you get the impression that the truth which leads to sanctification is really a very simple truth, just one little message – all you have to do is to surrender and wait and keep looking. But this truth about which our Lord speaks is the whole Christian truth! It includes all the epistles, all the Sermon on the Mount and the teaching of the Gospels. It is the whole Bible; it is everything that tells us anything about God.
We hear complaints sometimes that certain types of teaching about sanctification seem to be running to seed, that they seem to be lacking body. It is not surprising, since if you nail the truth down, you cannot get any other result. No, the truth which is concerned about sanctification is not only found in Romans, 6, 7 and 8 – though you are sometimes given the impression that it is there, and nowhere else – it is everywhere. It is all the truth, it is this vast body of doctrine; it is the whole Christian message. That is why I would reiterate that an evangelistic meeting should include sanctification, if it is truly evangelistic. If a Christian can sit back and feel that the message has nothing to say to him, then there has been something wrong with the evangelistic message, for it is one which tells about the holiness of God, and immediately the process of sanctification is going on as it describes the heinousness of sin and as it tells about Christ dying on the cross. Indeed, I can never look at the cross without that truth prompting my sanctification. It is tragic to think that we have divided these things into departments, and separated them from one another. No message whatsoever about the cross is isolated from sanctification; sanctification is involved in every iota of the truth, in all the knowledge of God and our relationship to him, whether it tells about the Eternal Council before the creation of the world, whether it tells about being foreordained and elected, or whether it tells about principalities and powers and a blessed hope. It is all the truth that works upon me by the Holy Spirit, and leads to and promotes my sanctification. ‘Sanctify them through thy truth, thy word is truth’: every word of God is a word used in our sanctification. ‘O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!’ That is it! We are facing this never ebbing sea, this ocean of God’s eternal truth, and to be sanctified means an increasing apprehension of it and an increasing application of it in our daily life.
1 In Volume 2, Safe in the World (Crossway Books, 1988)
2 This sermon was preached during Lent in 1953.