Sanctification

A Google search of the phrase “how to grow as a person” (or even just “grow as a person”) reveals 520 million related links. For points of reference, let’s look at the results of some other popular Google searches:

“how to make money” – 426 million
“world peace” – 120 million
“the pope” – 176 million
“Donald Trump” – 334 million
“Star Wars” – 431 million

“How to grow as a person” is a topic much discussed (even more than Star Wars, and that is saying something!), with many diverse and often conflicting prescriptions. Cutting through the noise is a simple Biblical formula that allows us to access strength much greater than our own. Let’s take a look at that formula, beginning with John’s contrast of darkness and light.

Read the series.

A New Approach - Life Led by the Spirit

The simple fact is that many people around you today are driven. They are trying to satiate their inner lusts. Others are clothed in religious piety and chasing a list. Neither of those things will work for very long. They are both exhausting and will leave you tired and empty. There is a third way, and Paul offered us a picture of it in Romans eight.

Read the series so far.

Believers need to set aside their hunger for earned righteousness.

Sometimes we chase after inner desires. Other times, it isn’t lust that we serve, it is a list. Paul went back in Romans 7 to the death illustration he used in Romans 6, this time to move into the argument against living to serve religious lists and keep God happy:

Do you not know, brothers and sisters—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law has authority over someone only as long as that person lives? For example, by law a married woman is bound to her husband as long as he is alive, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law that binds her to him. So then, if she has sexual relations with another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress. But if her husband dies, she is released from that law and is not an adulteress if she marries another man. So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. (NIV, Rom. 7:1-4)

Using the death illustration (see Part 1), Paul taught that we can choose to allow God to transform our allegiance to following our desires and let Him work in us to engage a new life. Here, we’ll take apart what Paul wrote, because it has some “religious” terms that can lead us in the wrong way if we don’t carefully understand them.

First, Paul made clear in verse two that sin’s hold on us is changed because we have died as believers.

I feel alive, how about you? Who has died? Clearly what he said was that our surrender to Jesus Christ was like a “death” to self-direction, or at least that is what it was supposed to be. Let me illustrate: If I were to join military service this week, I would cease my ability to serve this congregation. I would cease making most all decisions in my life, and my days and nights would be surrendered to the military authorities to whom I gave charge of my life. I wouldn’t decide when I woke up in the morning, nor when I went to bed. My clothing, hairstyle and daily schedule would be entirely surrendered to their charge. I would eat what they told me to eat, when they told me to eat it. I would, in effect, “die” to self-choices. Paul made it clear that my commitment to Jesus was intended to be very much like that.

The first issue we explored from Paul’s letter to the Romans was the meaning and message of the gospel—in Romans 1-5.

Portions of the epistle to the Galatians have been used in a manner that breeds confusion and misunderstanding regarding legalism, grace, sanctification, and Christian living. It’s a pity, because the epistle speaks powerfully and clearly on all of these topics. The book’s teaching on adoption is an especially potent message for our times, carving a clear, joyful—yet responsible—path between the opposite errors of justification by works (legalism) and sanctification without works (antinomianism).

But that’s not all. The reality of believers’ adoption as God’s children not only answers the extremes of legalism and antinomianism, but also counters other common errors. Here, we’ll consider two additional errors as well as the two opposite extremes.