Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth (John 17:17).
These words are an extraordinary and most comprehensive petition offered by our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ on behalf of his immediate followers and disciples, and, indeed, on behalf of all his followers and disciples in all ages and in all places. We have been expounding verse 17 in detail, because it is one of the crucial petitions in this high-priestly prayer which our Lord offered and which is recorded in John chapter 17.1 He is concerned about these people not only because of themselves, but because he is leaving them in the world to do certain work. He reminds his Father that as his Father has sent him into the world, so he is sending them into the world; it is for this reason that he prays that they may be kept from the Evil One, and, further, and positively, that they may be sanctified. We have looked in particular at the method of sanctification as it is here taught by our Lord, and as it is taught everywhere in the Scriptures. ‘Sanctify them,’ he says, ‘through thy truth.’ Bring them into the realm of the truth; keep them there so that the Truth shall work upon them and influence them and produce their sanctification.
Furthermore, we have been at pains to emphasise that this process of sanctification depends finally and essentially upon our understanding of what this truth is. Our Lord says, ‘Thy word is truth,’ so the way to be sanctified is to look at this word and to receive it. And we have seen that it is a great word and a great truth which can be divided into certain central propositions. The whole word itself is something which promotes our sanctification, but there are certain aspects, certain emphases, which are of particular importance and significance, and we have looked at six of them. These, I would suggest to you, are the six main aspects of this great truth of our salvation. First is the truth about God himself: we must ever start there, everything in connection with our salvation concerns our relationship to God. To be saved is not primarily to be happy, it is not primarily to have an experience; the essence of salvation is that we are in the right relationship to God. From the beginning, the great promise of God with regard to salvation is this: ‘I will be your God, and ye shall be my people’ (eg Lev 26:7), so if we find that our tendency is to view salvation in any way except directly in terms of our knowledge of God and our relationship to him, it is a false tendency. We must ever be careful to avoid that subtle temptation and we must never be tired of reminding ourselves of the danger of being too subjective.
We might, I know, immediately add that there is an equal danger of being too objective, but let us remember that both are true, and perhaps the greater danger is that of being too subjective. We are living in a difficult world. The times are cruel; we are all tired as the result of wars and the uncertainty that has followed this last world war, and the craving at the present time is for some release and quiet. We require that subjectively and that is quite a good thing, but we must be very careful lest we put it in the first position and fail to realise that the thing which, after all, marks and differentiates the Christian is that he is someone who is in a given relationship to God. The great doctrine of God, the being and character of God, must override everything else. The whole purpose of the Bible is to reveal God to us and to bring us into communion with him, which is the life eternal. Why? So that I should be happy? No! ‘...that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent’ (Jn 17:3). That leads to untold happiness and the greatest bliss imaginable, but there are times when it leads to trembling and to fear and drives us to Christ.
Having looked at that, we then went on to look at the doctrine of sin, so that we might see man as he really is in the sight of God; and all this promotes our sanctification. From that, we looked at what God has done for us in our sin, the doctrine of the sending of his Son into the world, and especially his death upon the cross, that amazing action whereby we are purchased and reconciled, redeemed and rescued – all that is absolutely vital to the doctrine of sanctification. And our emphasis there was that we must never regard the cross as something that belongs to the initial stages of our Christian life; we must never get the impression that we have passed by the cross. No, we do not go on from the cross to sanctification, but we find our sanctification in the cross. It is by the precious blood of Christ that we have been purchased, we are not our own – that is sanctification.
Then, having laid down the great fundamental proposition of our fall, we went on to see how Scripture, particularly in this matter of sanctification, introduces us to the great doctrine of our identification with Christ and of the fact that we are in Christ. And from there we considered the truth that always should be taken with that: that Christ is also in us. We are in him and he in us – how astounding that is! Then we considered the relevance of the doctrine concerning the Resurrection to this question of our sanctification. The argument, according to 1 Corinthians 15, is not that the doctrine of the Resurrection is only a comfort to those who are dying or bereaved, it is not something that we should rejoice in on one Sunday in the year only – rushing to church on that Sunday, then neglecting to go again until the next Easter Sunday comes along. No, says the Apostle, in the light of this doctrine, ‘Therefore,’ and the ‘therefore’ leads to concentration upon daily life and living: ‘...be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord’ (1 Cor 15:58); ‘evil communications corrupt good manners’ (1 Cor 15:33). So we must ‘awake to righteousness and sin not’ (v. 34); and we must go on to labour and to realise that our labour is not in vain in the Lord. Those, then, are the great fundamental doctrines, and our sanctification is ever, always, the result of our realisation of them.
So having laid this down, we now come to a more practical aspect of this whole matter. ‘Sanctify them,’ says our Lord, ‘through [or in] thy truth.’ But before that can happen, we have to learn that this great, vital truth, at which we have been looking, is something that must of necessity be constantly applied by us, and that the application of the truth is quite as important as the truth itself. There is no value whatsoever in having an intellectual awareness of the truth unless we proceed to apply it, and there are many who fail at that point. So I want now to come to this truth and to its application, and if you read Romans 6 you will see that this is precisely what the apostle Paul does. In the previous chapters he has been laying down his great doctrine of justification by faith only. He has been demonstrating it from the Scriptures, making it perfectly plain and clear. So he has stated the doctrine, but, wise teacher as he is, he knows that men and women in a state of sin and under the influence and at the suggestion of the devil, are liable to fail to apply it at all, or to apply it in the wrong way.
Now the Christians in Rome, having heard the doctrines of justification by faith only, of their union with Christ, and incorporation into him – as you were once in Adam, Paul has just taught them in chapter 5, so you are now in Christ; and as the result of Adam’s transgression came upon you, so everything that Christ has done has happened to you – having heard this, they might come to a wrong conclusion. Paul realises that some might say, ‘Very well, then, if that is so, it does not matter what we do.’ They might even say, ‘The more we sin the greater will grace abound, or the more we sin the more grace will show itself, therefore let us continue in sin.’ And, immediately, he rejects this with abhorrence and alarm, and proceeds to work out this great argument in Romans 6, the essence of which is that, in a final sense, you must not divide justification and sanctification. For the man who realises truly what it is to be justified, is one who realises the absolute necessity of sanctification.
Let me put that in a slightly different form. I want to suggest to you that it is not enough, even, to be aware of this great doctrine; but before our sanctification can proceed, these doctrines must be applied. There are many ways in which we can apply them. One way is to consider together what it means to walk and live by faith. William Romaine, a great evangelical clergyman who lived in London some two hundred years ago, published a book which he called The Life and Walk and Triumph of Faith. This title correctly indicates that the whole of the Christian life is a life of faith. We walk by faith not by sight – all the great doctrines are held by faith and as Christians we must view our life in this world as a walk, as a great progression in this life of faith.
But people encounter many difficulties with regard to this life, and I want to mention two of them in particular. Furthermore, I shall deal with them purely on a practical level because any preacher who is not practical is not a true preacher of the gospel. The first danger is that of imagining that because we have believed, because we are Christians, these truths are going to apply themselves automatically in our lives. That is a great fallacy. Faith is not passive, it is very active. We must, it is true, always be aware of the danger of relying upon our own activity, but the opposite of that is not just to do nothing! Faith is active. The first step in the life of faith is the constant application of the truth which we have believed, the bringing to bear upon our daily lives of these great doctrines which we have been studying. That is the first thing. In other words, we must not wait for some great experience. Rather, if we want the great experience, the thing to do is to apply what we believe. Then we shall receive it.
The second difficulty which people encounter with regard to the sanctified Christian life is this: they expect to feel something special happening to them. We must learn that sanctification is not so much a matter of feeling and sensibility, as the application of the truth which we have believed. This is almost a constant problem. We all seem instinctively to desire to have the feeling before we believe, and there are large numbers of people who spend years in waiting and pleading for some particular sensation, some experience. The argument is: ‘If only I knew these things, if only I were absolutely certain, if only I could experience what I read has happened to others, then I would live the “sanctified life”.’ So they wait for an experience which never seems to come, and the result is that their lives are bound in shallows and miseries. And there again is this same fallacy, for the Christian life is a walk of faith, it is a life of faith. The feelings may come and they may go, but the walk of faith must always continue. The Bible does not say anywhere that whosoever feeleth certain things shall be saved, but whosoever believeth, and we must grasp that. We must not be waiting for these sensations and feelings, but, having looked at these great doctrines, we must proceed to walk in them, to live by them, and to apply them to our daily life.
What does this actually mean in practice? Let me try to summarise like this. First and foremost, of course, we must familiarise ourselves with the doctrine. That almost goes without saying. If we are not aware of these doctrines we cannot live by them. We must believe them and we must accept them. There is no Christian life at all apart from that. We must accept these doctrines because they are revealed in the word of God, the same word of truth of which our Lord speaks. So we start there; but that is not enough. The point I want to emphasise in particular here is that we must constantly remind ourselves of them. I can best put it in the words of Romans 6:11: ‘Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ That is what we must do, and the life of faith, the walk of faith, the life of sanctification, is, in reality, just that – reckoning ourselves to be dead indeed unto sin but alive unto God in and through Jesus Christ our Lord.
How, then, do I remind myself in this way? Let us be perfectly simple and practical. The most essential step is constantly to read the Scriptures. If you look at any saint who has ever adorned the life of the Christian church, you will find that they have always done that. They have always been men and women who have spent a great deal of their time in reading the Bible, studying it and familiarising themselves with it.
Once again I want to issue a very important warning. There are many ways of reading the Bible, and I mean reading it in a very particular way. I have known people who seem to read their Bible like this: they say, ‘Yes, I am now a Christian. I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and have surrendered myself to him. I have had this experience.’ So now they seem to be living on that experience and they believe that henceforth they have nothing to do but look to him.
‘Well then,’ you say, ‘do you not read your Bible?’
‘O yes,’ they reply, ‘I read my Bible.’
But they seem to read the Bible as a good bit of discipline, as the sort of thing a Christian is expected to do. That is not the way of reading the Bible that I mean here. I am advocating that I should read my Bible daily not because I believe it is a good thing for me to read the word every day, not because I think it is going to do some general good, not because it is a good thing to be familiar with the word of God – no – I must learn to read the word of God in order to look for the doctrines that are in it. I must search for doctrines which I can apply to myself, I must be looking for particular teachings. My reading of the Bible must not be general, but very specific.
It is possible to be very familiar with the letter of the Scriptures and yet not to know its doctrines; indeed, there are many who are familiar with the words of the Scriptures who are not familiar with the word of God. You can know your Bible in a mechanical sense without ever having come face to face with its doctrines. And my whole understanding of John 17:17 leads me to say that all that is useless. In other words, if I do not read my Bible in such a way as to come to a deeper knowledge of the greatness and holiness of God, there is something wrong in my reading, and the same is true if my reading of the Bible does not humble me, or bend me to my knees. In other words, my attitude towards Scripture reading must not be, ‘I have a certain amount of time before I go to work,’ or, ‘I read my daily portion if I can’ – that is not the way to read the Scriptures. We must be very careful not to become slaves to the daily portion. We must be searching for the doctrines not merely that we may know the contents of particular books of the Bible, but also that its spiritual message may come out to us. We must see it and know it, and we must daily remind ourselves of it.
Every day I must remind myself of God and his character, and of my position as a human being, an inheritor of original sin in Adam, the remnants of which – the pollution of sin – still remain. Day by day, then, I must remind myself of the law and of God’s condemnation of sin; I must ever look at the cross, and meditate upon it every day, bringing it constantly before me. You see what I am saying? We all know from experience how easy it is to take these things for granted, and so much for granted that we never stop to think about them at all. Christians are people who live daily in the light of these things; and they must go to the Scriptures more and more frequently in order that they may remind themselves of these things which are so absolutely vital to their sanctification.
Then you must not only read the Scriptures, you must also meditate upon them. There is a line of a hymn which says, ‘Take time to be holy.’ I am not sure but that it is not something which we all ought to have pasted upon the walls of our homes in this foolish, ridiculous, hectic age in which we are living. We are all involved in this mad rush which is so meaningless. We allow the world to govern us and our time. We say we have no time to do these things I have been talking about – people are not reading the Bible as they used to, because they are doing something else. The hours of work are shorter than they have ever been, so why do we have less time? It is because we are reading other things, for if we spend our time reading journals and magazines, obviously we have no time to read our Bibles, nor do we have time to meditate. Indeed, the art of meditation has practically disappeared out of life; people do not think. As the poet tramp said:
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?
W H Davies
We do not look at things, we do not consider them as we ought, and above all, we fail to meditate upon these spiritual things.
So we must turn them over in our minds – and we have to make ourselves do this; we need discipline. We must confront these things. How easy it is to find that our day has gone before we think it has started – time slips between our fingers and it is gone. The days hurry along and the weeks and the months. We are all hurrying towards the end of our life in this world, and we have not done all that much. We must take hold of ourselves firmly and be drastic with ourselves. We must insist upon these things and make ourselves confront them day by day.
I suggest that this means that we must cultivate the lost art of talking to ourselves. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean talking to ourselves audibly. But more and more I find that the very essence of the truly spiritual life is that people talk to themselves about these things. It is my business as a preacher not only to preach to others, but to myself also, and the real value of my preaching to others is the extent to which I preach to myself before I preach to them. As I understand this term ‘reckon yourself to be dead unto sin’, it means that I talk to myself, and I say, ‘Do you know who and what you are?’ I preach to myself as I get up in the morning and I say, ‘You are a creature in this world of time who has been placed in it by Almighty God. You are not merely an animal evolved out of some primitive slime, you are a man made in the image and likeness of God, there is that dignity about you – remember it!’
How easy it is to take a false value of ourselves from the newspapers, or from the way of the world. If we unconsciously tend to do that, our life will not be truly sanctified. So talk to yourself about yourself, and talk to God about yourself. Talk to yourself about sin; examine yourself; view the day that is ahead of you and at night review the day that has gone. Have you ever tried to do that seriously? Have you gone over the day and the things you have done during the day, even the good things you have done? When you examine them, my friends, you may find that you have done even the good things in a very bad way. You have to know yourself, you have to know what you are doing and you talk to yourself about yourself, and then you talk to yourself about the cross, because if you do not talk to yourself about the cross you may go for months and years without knowing anything about it. Remind yourself of what happened there, that the Son of God died and rose again, and say, ‘If he rose, I rose with him.’ Say that to yourself daily! Remind yourself daily of who and what you are. Talk to yourself, too, about the fleeting character of your life here and about the glory that is coming.
Oh, I do commend this to you. God knows I do so as a man who is a failure himself at doing what he is advocating, but I do it, and I want to do it more and more, and I can assure you that there is nothing so blessed and so rewarding. Have you ever conceived of yourself and thought about yourself in the glory? Have you ever thought of what it is going to be to look into his blessed face and to see him as he is? Remind yourself of these things, reckon yourself to be dead unto sin but alive unto God. Say to yourself that you are only a stranger in this world, a sojourner, a traveller. Tell yourself, ‘Heaven is my home, I am a citizen of heaven, I belong there. I daily, nightly, pitch my moving tent a day’s march nearer home.’ That is what it means to ‘reckon yourself dead unto sin’. It is not only that I know the doctrines of justification and sanctification, and something of the doctrine of God. Yes, but what matters is whether I am applying them. Am I living in the light of these things? That is the life and walk of faith. Faith means that this is the truth about me and therefore I live like this.
That, then, is the great emphasis, and from that I must go on to draw certain deductions. First, I must work out this great argument in the same way as the Apostle does in Romans 6. If all this is true, then I am in a very definite and given relationship to God – I am in Christ. This means that I am dead to sin and I am alive unto God. I sometimes think that if we only realised that, we would not need to worry about anything else. It means that God is my Father and I can go immediately into his presence and speak to him in Christ. If only we realised that, there would be no need for us to exhort one another to prayer and to a life of prayer, it would follow inevitably. If only we knew God’s love to us; if only we realised that God is indeed our Father; if only we realised that he is interested in us, in everything we are and in all we do to the very smallest, minutest details of our life – even to the numbering of the very hairs of our head – if only we realised all these things, what a difference it would make!
But our problem is that we get up in the morning and there are things to be done. Then we read a hurried word of Scripture and off we go. We might as well not have done it, I am afraid. Rather, we must ‘take time to be holy’, we must take time to realise what we are doing. If only, when we are on our knees, we could realise what the real truth is at that moment, that the eternal, everlasting God is listening to us, is stooping towards us, waiting to hear what we have to say, waiting, not for our hurried petitions, nor to hear us, like fretful children, asking for this, that and the other; but rather waiting to hear us thanking him, praising his name, loving and adoring him, giving ourselves to him and telling him we want to live day by day to his honour and glory. If only we took time to think like that! For that is real prayer; that is the life of the saint; that is the life of faith and we must take time to remind ourselves of these things – to ‘reckon’ as Paul tells us.
You may wake up in the morning feeling dry and hard in spirit and absolutely lifeless in a spiritual sense. The reason may be partly physical or any number of other things, and you may feel utterly opposed to real prayer. But it does not matter what you feel. You must say to yourself, ‘I reckon myself to be dead to sin and alive to God; I know that this is true and therefore I am going to talk to my Father.’ In the natural sense we do not wait to feel like doing things before we do them – at least, I hope we do not. I trust that as husbands and wives and parents and children we do the things that we must do, however we feel. The same applies to our relationship with God. Reckon yourselves, act on this great truth which you say you believe, and go into his presence, asking him first and foremost to forgive you for your dryness and for your lack of a lively sense of the Spirit. Confess it, acknowledge it, and ask him to give you liberty and to manifest himself to you. That is the life of faith, and you have to do it. Do not wait until you are moved; move yourself and then you will find that the Spirit will be present.
And, secondly, in the same way we are to realise that our life should consist of walking in the light with him, and that, of necessity, will lead us to a dedication of ourselves and of our faculties to him: ‘Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God’ (Rom 6:13). You go to him and say: ‘Here I am, my body, my mind, my spirit, every power and faculty which I have. You have given them to me. I have not generated them, they are gifts from you. I am giving myself to you from this day, use these gifts, take possession of them, every faculty I have, let them be used, that you may be glorified.’ You are reckoned to be dead to that selfish life and you are living to God and righteousness.
And, finally, you draw the deduction that sin is something which is quite unthinkable. Listen to this: ‘What fruit had ye then in those things whereof ye are now ashamed? for the end of those things is death’ (Rom 6:21). When we are Christians we have an entirely new view of sin. But it is only as we remind ourselves of these truths, and apply them to ourselves, and talk to ourselves about them that these deductions become evident, and at the same time inevitable.
So let me sum it all up again in that little phrase: ‘Take time to be holy.’ It does take time. Read the lives of the greatest saints this world has ever seen and you will find that they spent hours every day in reading their Bibles. John Wesley said that he had a very poor opinion of Christians who did not spend at least four hours every day in prayer. The great saints agonised and strove in prayer. Some of them prayed so much that when they got up from their knees there was a pool of sweat on the ground. Others wore out their chairs or tables, or the oilcloth on the floor (you can see where Henry Martyn did that in Cambridge); that is the life of faith. These people took time to be holy. They did not say, ‘It is quite simple, all you have to do is accept it.’ They trusted finally, as we must inevitably do, to the action and the power of God. But trusting to that, they studied the word of God and loved it, they laboured, they agonised in prayer, they meditated, and thus they grew in grace and in the knowledge of God, and were sanctified and holy persons for whom we still continue to thank God. ‘Take time to be holy’ – ‘If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them’ (Jn 13:17).
1 See Volume 1, Saved in Eternity (Crossway Books, 1988).