Sermon Ideas For 1 Thess 5:16-24 Part
1
Sanctification
Paul's custom was to close his letters with words of exhortation and doxology.
In 1 Thessalonians a bridge passage is inserted affirming that the God of peace
assures the people of God of their sanctification at the coming of the Lord Jesus
Christ. The doctrine of Sanctification is among the most prominent, and disputed,
elements of church teaching throughout history. Its significance derives from
the conviction that all that is truly of God, including the people of God, partakes
of God's own holiness (or sanctity) in some manner and measure. Disputes surround
every attempt to specify in what sense the people of God can be rightly said
to partake of God's own holiness, and when, and why—because of God's acts
or because of theirs?
At its root, sanctification has to do with being set apart for, and hence
set within, the sphere of the divine, the sacred. In the context of Hebrew and
Israelite religion, this sphere came to be defined in terms not only of divine
favor or favoritism but of God's moral righteousness, revealed in the law and
the prophets. Thus the calling to be God's chosen people—the saints, the
holy ones of the holy God—was at once a matter of amazing grace and awesome
responsibility.
This sense of calling was embraced by the early church. Their sins forgiven
by the grace of God in Jesus Christ, the faithful are ever thereafter to live
in loving obedience to the will of God. The relationship between these two aspects
of the Christian life—sanctification as gift and as task—was by no
means obvious, and so variously explained. The "orthodoxy" which emerged
in early Christianity excluded as "heretical" claims that the church's
holiness or sanctity rested upon the moral perfection of its every member, or
even of its clergy.
Yet commonplace in early Christianity, East and West alike, were views
making forgiveness (justification) and the empowering activity of the Spirit
moments of an extended process of sanctification. God's grace initiates the life
of faith, which is a path toward fulfillment in perfected love. This path is
a walking with God in which the Spirit enables redoubled human efforts. Elaborations
of this model of thinking in medieval Roman Catholicism so emphasized the obligation
to make use of the sacaramental means of grace and to live virtuously that these "good
works" along the road to sanctification could be taken for necessary preconditions
as well as necessary outcomes of God's saving act in Jesus Christ.
This was certainly why Luther, Calvin, and many other Reformation protestants
accused their home-church Roman Catholicism of "works righteousness." Luther's
emphasis was that the Gospel was God's justification of sinners. The faithful
are declared righteous and God's saints not because of any meritorious efforts
or achievements of their own but because, by God's mercy, their sinfulness is
covered by the perfect righteousness of Christ. Justification is by grace alone,
received through faith—alone. Faith is itself not a human work at all,
but an awareness of having been rescued from sin, including the sin of works-righteousness.
This awareness, at the promptings of the Spirit, arouses the desire to be instruments
of God's love, which expresses itself "freely" and spontaneously in
human actions. Even so, the power of sin remains. And remaining, too, is the
fact that the
"goodness" of the works performed by God's saints is ultimately a value-judgment
that God rather than humans makes.
The terminology and certain key features of Luther's views were taken over
by others of his protestant contemporaries. Calvin was as emphatic as Luther
with regard to justification by grace through faith. He too based the hope and
assurance of salvation solely upon God's mercy toward sinners, as revealed in
Jesus Christ. Christians are righteous, accounted as saints, not by their own
merits but by Christ's ministry. Yet Calvin and his Reformed-church associates
distinguished themselves from Lutheran tradition by stressing that justification
is the beginning of a regeneration of the heart. The desire to declare the love
of God that is born of genuine faith will inevitably express itself in actions
conformed to God's will. By what is called "the third use of law," the
moral commands of Scripture give direction to the Christian life, as well as
identifiable form and content. These works of obedience are undertaken not in
order to earn salvation but to proclaim the life-transforming effects of grace,
to the greater glory of God.
The practical impact of these emphases is seen in both the "worldly
asceticism" and the "social activism" of the Reformed churches.
The most masterful of their theologians—one thinks, e.g., of Karl Barth
in this century—go to lengths to hold together in proper measure the diverse
and tensive themes of justification and sanctification, grace and sin, faith
and works, and invisible and visible saintliness. The objective (divine) and
subjective (human) sides are to be united in a complex, balanced whole.
Whether some such "balance" is right, and if so, rightly struck,
has been a point of contention in Protestantism. Among the
"radicals" of the Reformation were those insistent upon a church of
demonstrably spotless purity. Puritans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
uplifted the ideal of "visible sainthood." A century later, amidst
a great pietistic evangelical revival, Wesley and the Methodists promoted a highly
disciplined "striving for perfection." So, too, did its nineteenth-century
offshoot, the Holiness movement.
It is understandable that so many Christians have so often advised that
Sanctification must be thought of as a paradox, at once a gift and a mandate.
Hence Paul's bridge passage is especially relevant. "God's saints" at
Thessalonica are exhorted to become who and what they already are. But they are
also reminded that it is not their faithfulness but that of the one who has called
them that assures their sanctification.
James O. Duke
