The biblical concept of sanctification includes the idea of perfection, first given forensically to an individual by God’s grace and then progressively brought about into the individual’s experience by the Holy Spirit. It explains the differences between justification and sanctification, highlighting that justification is the gift of perfect righteousness given by Christ’s sacrifice, while sanctification is involved in this but also in the ongoing process of becoming more Christ-like. The message encourages believers to rely on the Holy Spirit for spiritual growth and to understand that their ultimate perfection will be realized in glory.

Automatically Generated Transcript
[00:00:00] I went to see my podiatrist a couple of weeks back and a problem that I’ve had for, I won’t tell you how many years, she actually fixed when she pulled out a little plastic thing and stuck it on the second toe in this foot. Because I have a toe where the ligaments somehow didn’t keep pace with the growth, and the bigger I got, the more the toe bent. And every time at school when we went down to the swimming pool I would sort of have to stand around and I’d move my feet so that the toe got turned under and other people couldn’t see, peck in, you know, the bitness of it. It was something that I’ve been covering up all my life and that podiatrist recently helped… a little plastic thing that helps it not be quite so bent. So strange thing how all of us physically are very aware of our imperfections. There are There are not many people alive who actually everything is perfect.
[00:01:13] We are covering up something somewhere. In my case there are other things that were imperfect, I was too skinny and my older brother called me Sticks. I told that story before. I remember sitting on a bus going home from school, sitting next to a very well-rounded handsome young man Nothing could be I think wrong with him but he said, Jim, he says, why can’t you fat up
[00:01:43] just eat more. And he didn’t know I eat, eat and eat that didn’t do any difference, you know. But so all my life, I’ve had certain things of imperfections and wanting somehow other to cover up the imperfections or maybe grow. Maybe you do a bit more muscle work. It doesn’t really work for me. Do you know my family, some of them are skinny like me
[00:02:11] and there’s one member sitting here. I won’t say what her name is. But she’s like I am and she took me, she wanted me to go down to the gymnasium where she had started the membership. And I said, why do you want me to come? Eventually she admitted it. She said, I wanted them to have an explanation what I’m like this. What do those effects. Sorry. But all of you are aware of the need for perfection that is put to us through the media
[00:02:47] about your physical looks and all. But what about your character? We’ve been going through in the morning services about the beatitudes where Jesus teaches what true Christianity is and how we should be. And we’ve got in chapter five. This is a little bit of history now, a few months back, we’ve got to chapter five where Jesus says, Be ye therefore perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect. And that the purpose of Christianity is actually aiming at perfection,
[00:03:24] not necessarily in your physicality and what you look like in the mirror but in your righteousness and where to be perfect. In fact Jesus took the example of the leaders of the Jewish people the Scribes and the Pharisees, he was always stressing it . They had all the do’s and don’t’s and whatever and they thought they are pretty righteous. They weren’t actually but they thought by their measures they were. And Jesus said, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you won’t ever get in the Kingdom, you won’t see the Kingdom.
[00:04:04] Now, a lot of people don’t know that the Bible actually teaches that God only accepts perfection. Did you know that? That’s our problem because morally, none of us are perfect, we’re all a part of a fallen race. And the Bible says, For all have sinned and are fallen short of the glory of God. And the word sinned, or sinned, is a word that came from the archery contests, they’d set up a target. people would shoot their arrows. But if you didn’t have a strong enough arm to pull back the thing
[00:04:51] and make it go far enough, or if your aim was wonky, or some other reason and your arrow fell short, the person down near the target would call out, it fell short. And the word they used in the original language was that word we get sinned. And what sin is, is how we fall short of hitting the bullseye.
[00:05:15] God wants you to know that’s you. And from his scriptures, he tells us, for all have fallen short of the glory of God, the standard of perfection. And it may not be that you’re a criminal who’s done some terrible thing, or may not be that you’ve been swindling the church and creeping in during the week and finding the collection or something. It may not be that you’ve got something else where you fail. We all actually do, when none of us are perfect. That’s my point. And in God’s eyes, he does not accept anything but perfection.
[00:06:07] Now, Christian conversion is when God deals with our complete impossibility of getting to be anything near perfect, let alone the depths of our sins and how bad they are. Because Jesus came and lived out the law and kept it. And Jesus offered himself, listen to this, as a perfect sacrifice. And the Old Testament picture that the Old Covenant did give us, that no sacrifice was going to be useful, unless it was perfect, so those little lambs that were chosen had to have no blemishes.
[00:06:49] They wouldn’t allow a wounded animal to be used as a sacrifice, it had to be a perfect one. I no doubt those perfections were relatively perfect because even in the animal well, there’s imperfections, but it would be a perfect example that was needed, as the old covenant required in the Law of Moses. But when Jesus came, he was a perfect sacrifice for our sins such that there’s no need for any other sacrifice. His death is sufficient, and he died for all. This perfection is what I’m talking about this morning, and I gave the heading of my message to be perfection.
[00:07:37] And the fact that we’re a foolish person who thinks we can approximate some offering to God by how good we are, when in fact we’re people that need the blood of Christ to let us get in to that communion with God. I’ve got some Bible verses that talk about this, and in 1 Peter chapter 1 and verse 19, it talks about Jesus’ blood shed, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. That’s perfection. Jesus has sacrificed in order for you to get into the communion. Did you know that? There’s no reason for us to try and outbid Jesus’ blood.
[00:08:46] You know, I often meet people who are very upstanding citizens. They don’t necessarily go to church, or they don’t necessarily see themselves as within the Christian fold, but they try their best. There’s a lot of very good people in our society. They’re all a part of a fallen race as I say. We’re all fallen but not the less they’re doing their best and they restrain themselves from some of the more worse things that others get into. But that doesn’t mean that they’ve got something to outbid Jesus with.
[00:09:27] He shed his blood, his precious blood. And you can’t get any understanding or something more precious that later the eternal Son of God who came into this world to bring God to us and reveal God to us and then to lay down his life as the sufficient sacrifice for all sin. And he’s done it once and for all the Book of Hebrews says, there’s no need for it to be repeated.
[00:09:58] You can’t outbid Jesus and offer your little offerings. There’s no need, it’s a bit of a slight on him when you even try. But with a precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot, his sacrifice was perfect. If you were to accrue a debt, 25 million dollars, I’m never likely to do that. Although, never mind. I had a good joke coming to mind, I’ll leave that for another day. If I were to accrue a debt of $25 million dollars, and somehow someone heard of my need, and came and said, Jim I want you to know I’ve paid off your $25 million, I would not reach into my pocket and pull out,
[00:10:55] usually I might have 35 cents in my pocket. doesn’t buy you much for these days but and pull it out and say woh, take this at least. It would be a slight on that person. You know the only thing you can do when someone pays off your debt and it’s far more than you could ever own in all your life, the only thing you can do is say thank you.
[00:11:25] And the only appropriate thing to do in the light The key point, of the New Covenant Cost, to Jesus of his precious blood, is to say thank you. I’m asking you the question, have you actually come to Jesus and said, Lord, thank you. When someone comes to me and they say I want to become a Christian, I don’t mean they already may be believing, they may be acting as Christian believing, but they mean by their statement that want to come into the communion with Jesus, they want to come to know him. They want to be a part of the people of God, that we celebrated in the communion today.
[00:12:09] I have a prayer that I sometimes lead them in. In the prayer the first part of it is that I get them to give an acknowledgment of being a sinner because you can’t really do business with Jesus if you’re not going to agree with him about what and He’s trying to tell you all the time, the Bible is screaming out the fact that we’re all sinners. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who could know it?
[00:12:38] Me, you don’t even know your own heart because you’ve got a heart that has a fallen heart. Like everybody else, you might well have the benefit of a good upbringing and a home and the training of a wonderful education. and you might do your best to be a nice personality. I don’t think you should stop trying. Pity us Christians when we don’t try to be nice personalities.
[00:13:02] It’s something we should work on. I’m not lessening the need to learn to socialize and also to be people who are conscious of others and help them out by being a more sweeter person than what sometimes we can be. But even though that’s the case, There’s no way that you can compete with Jesus when he’s paid the ultimate price which is the precious blood of Christ. And the only thing you can do is say thank you. So, the prayer I lead a person in is to say, Lord,
[00:13:44] I know that I’m a sinner but thank you that you came and died for me. And then the prayer goes on, Lord, I want you to be my saviour not just saviour of the world which he is not just leader of the church which he is not the one who’s one day gonna judge the world which he will but to be the person that you trust in to get you into the new covenant. This is the new covenant in my blood, said Jesus. And so the prayer goes, Lord, I want Jesus to be my personal Saviour. And I welcome him by the Holy Spirit to come into my life and make me a Christian. And it is, I think, one of the greatest joys of my life to have opportunities. When people come and say, Look, Jay, how you are talking on Sunday morning, I really need that.
[00:14:52] Sometimes I get phone calls and people want me to meet in here so that no one will see them. They don’t really understand that when you come to Christ he will need you. To what I tell everybody one day. There is something we call confessing Christ as your own Saviour that you end up doing. Recently we had a baptism where someone was confessing having become a Christian. It actually happened a few years back that girl. We’ve heard about the camp where young people came in varying ways… sometimes it’s worded they came to get their faith understood or come to establish, but the heart of it is getting in the door through Jesus. I sort of determined, especially listening to some of the comments about a camp,
[00:15:44] to make sure no one got out of this door here. Without being absolutely clear, there’s only one way in. I’m not talking about the doors now. I’m talking about there’s only one way into the communion. It is through the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, and when you come to know him, that’s the moment. Now one of the things we’ve been learning, and I’m adding this on as an extra piece of learning that’s also important, is that in the perfection that Jesus provides for us, it’s actually more than just your forgiveness.
[00:16:29] your forgiveness is total, it is a perfect forgiveness. Now that’s called your justification, and justification is that God makes you just in His eyes, you’re no longer to be condemned, you are forgiven. Justification. This justification is followed by two further steps in the salvation process, and the second step is a process indeed called sanctification.
[00:16:57] And when the Bible uses the word sanctification, it’s using a word that’s used a bit more broadly than we understand by it. Although people differ as depending what church you go to is what’s meant by sanctification, but in the Scriptures where the word, hagiazmos is used, it’s the Greek word, to be sanctified, where it’s used is sometimes implied about the death of Christ, that by his death you have been made holy is a part of your justification.
[00:17:32] that you got a righteousness, listen to me! it took me ages to work this out not just this week, but in my life But when the Bible talks about us being made righteous it’s not just us being helped to do better You know you often hear people helping young people, you can learn to do better, and that’s nothing wrong with them being taught how to do better. My son Callum, he’s not here but he has a saw, he sings … you can hear it on the internet, the song was about
[00:18:11] the call that God make me a better man, I can be a better man is a very good thing Christianity helps people he needed to be one a better man sight And he thinks of it, but actually it’s not that you’re getting to be a better man and approximately heading towards perfection by what you do. This is the beautiful good news of the Gospel, but the justification you get when you come to Christ is not a righteousness that you get out of yourself And because you’ve come sometimes we have to teach people this. I’d like to be baptized and I make sure they don’t understand
[00:18:55] that this is some work of righteousness they’re going to do and then they’ll go away a better person, because they got baptized. Frankly most people who get baptized, discover temptations often come the ground that they’ve given to Christ gets tested and they discover they’re still sinners. because our salvation has the start of been getting a gift of righteousness, but guess whose righteousness it is? This is the good news. That when you come to Jesus and you pray, Lord I know I have a sinner, please forgive me.
[00:19:32] He gives you his righteousness. The Bible tells us it’s a righteousness that comes from heaven. gospel is the message that reveals the righteousness of God, that came from heaven. It came in Jesus and it was offered from heaven when you preach the gospel. The people come and know Jesus and they get given his righteousness that he alone can have. And you never will, of your own that is. And partly Christian conversion awaits when people give up trying to offer a sacrificing competition to Jesus like I was saying. And they come and say Lord, I know I’m a sinner but please forgive me as a gift. The wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord. And when we accept it as
[00:20:33] That’s why it’s done by faith. Faith is we just believe him for it. Not believing that you can do it, but believe him that he can do it. And he gives you a gift of righteousness. I’ve met people who are forever unable to really take Christian steps of service because they still feel guilty about the sins many years back. They’re actually giving witness to the fact that they haven’t understood the Gospel. Not only is Jesus’ forgiveness total, but his gift of righteousness is a righteousness that is perfect.
[00:21:24] And when you have the righteousness of Jesus, you can lift your head under heaven and know the smile of God is on you. You can take your place, that’s why, in the Christian community, everybody is on the same level. There’s nobody who’s got a better place to boast before God because of whatever reason they might have. We’re all one, at the same level, beneath the cross. That’s what we mean by that metaphor of coming to the cross, is recognizing you had no way of being right with God, just the same as every person who comes. You know that song I love? I knelt in the shadow of Calvary’s cross, ashamed of a lifetime of wanton and loss.
[00:22:20] My burden was heavy, I’d borne it alone, but now at last, to the Saviour, I have come. And I’m leaving you with a question today. Have you come to the cross in the sense that you recognized you had no righteousness, you never would be perfect? But the perfect righteousness of Jesus, justifying you, is on offer with this Gospel message, with every Gospel message. But I’ve got an extra little bit I told you I was adding on, and that is, if we go to, and I’ll jump here to the final verse that I have for us, In Philippians 3, 12 to 14, we have the Apostle Paul speaking.
[00:23:19] Because I was telling you the first step is justification, but the second step is the sanctification, but the word sanctification could mean made holy, or you’re justified, but you are. But it’s one of those words with a breadth of application, of application, it can also mean made increasingly more righteous in terms of being set apart for God, and that’s the process that follows your conversion. God works in you and you gradually become more Christian by the Holy Spirit taking over. And here’s the good news. Listen, this is a point I hope that I haven’t gone too long when you’re not listening anymore, please listen.
[00:24:03] Just the same dynamic applies to coming to the righteousness of justification. It’s when you quit trying to justify yourself. When you stop offering your competitive offering to Jesus’ precious blood. When you come and simply accept the free gift of his forgiveness and a perfect righteousness that comes from heaven on you when you come to Christ. Listen, the same dynamic applies to how to get the progress of your sanctification,
[00:24:36] which is when you get made progressively more to live up to that perfect righteousness. It’s a progress. People when they’re first coming to Jesus, come to Jesus, often, they have a whole lot of baggage, which the rest of us recognise, And we know in church life, oh, he’s got a long way to go to work out, you know, what it is to live the Christian life. But, the same dynamic that applied to coming to Jesus for justification is when you get desperate and know you can’t do it yourself, when you don’t try and compete with what he offers as a gift, applies to sanctification as well.
[00:25:20] And, when you realize that being sanctified is something that takes the Holy Spirit to do, and all of your efforts sometimes when people become Christians and they join in the church and they see people doing things. You see them getting busy for a while and joining in and trying to serve the Lord but then there comes some experience. They seem to be dropping back, or they seem to be covering up or they seem to be a bit ashamed of themselves. When they found they kept falling They found it very hard to live out what they’d given testimony that they’d done by becoming Christians. And you always discover in churches quite a good percentage of the people who come and sit in the pews
[00:26:07] like you’re sitting now, who don’t want the rest of the church to know their areas of failure. A bit like me trying to turn the swimming pool and always stand in a way that pushed that crooked foot straight, crooked toe straight. Because I was ashamed. And all the little things I used to do looked fatter were two pairs of long underpairs or something because the imperfection, I didn’t want to be seen. And do you know that churches are filled … they have lots of people who are doing that spiritually because they are aware of their difficulties. And I have some good news for you,
[00:26:57] not only about the justification story. But when you apply the word sanctification to be the progress the spirit makes afterwards, And it’s when you give up trusting your own strength and rely on God to do what you’ve been failing to do, sometimes you meet a Christian and when you’re a travelling preacher like I’ve been, you get told these stories of people’s lives, and they tell you that they’ve been trying hard for 20 years and they’re still going to give me a go. I’ve got good news for you, and that is that we don’t progress in the sanctification step of progress that happens in growing as a Christian by our doing it in our strength.
[00:27:54] But when we come desperate because of our failures and by faith you call on him to do what you cannot do, that’s when you find the work of the Holy Spirit is doing something by his grace to make you into what he wants you to be. I had to have a very dramatic experience of failure in order to realise it’s God who does the work not me. It was a turning point in my life. I’ve got a bible verse, it’s in here, Philippians, and we’ve got it on the screen. And this is the Apostle Paul, because this is where he talked about the one sacrifice of Jesus once for all, how you know… we’re sanctified by it, but he says “…not that I have already obtained this,
[00:28:50] or am”, look at it, “…are you really already perfect, not, says Paul, that I am already perfect.. But I press on to make it my own. There’s a sense in which in the Christian life you draw from the power of God to help you for that sanctification to be yours because Christ Jesus has made me his own. He’s got me and he will do it. Brothers, I do not consider that I’ve made it my own, but one thing I do forgetting that which lies behind, and that is one of the secrets is that you don’t quit because you’ve got in your mind your failures. Put your failures behind you, that’s where they belong. Forgetting that which lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead.
[00:29:47] Do you know what that is? The third step of salvation is when you hit glory, when you go to heaven, and your sanctification will be made total. You are not gonna be in heaven with all sorts of failures advertising on your person or in your character. Your sanctification is going to be completed. There are rewards and failures to get rewards for Christians going to heaven so there’s a sense of justice where someone didn’t really bother much
[00:30:27] and didn’t turn up very sanctified they will still get to be made perfect, but with a loss I won’t go into the details of that But forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” It’s a bit mysterious, this prize of the upward call of God, just as the upward call. That’s when God says, it’s time for you to come to me. And there is a time, as appointed under a person who wants to die. you’ll die and after that the judgment and Christians get judgment, not as though they can get thrown into hell, but you’ll get rewards or told of for times that you should have done better.
[00:31:20] But you will be made perfect… and the perfection that is the goal of Christian salvation will be achieved for you in glory. And in this second step of sanctification you’re to press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. That’s the Apostle Paul. So even though Jesus has done it all and sanctification is his work, we’re to cooperate with it, but we do so by recognizing that it’s his work, not ours. And it’s quite a dramatic experience to come to the place of realizing that you’ve been striving hard to be a good Christian.
[00:32:10] Excuse me, but you’re never going to make it on your own until you say, Lord, I can’t, but Jesus can. It’s a faith thing. And just as becoming a Christian in the first place needed you to admit that you are a sinner, stop trying to offer your own outbid Jesus when his blood was enough. So in the living of the Christian life, exactly the same dynamics when you come to the end of the certain pride we have that you will do it in your strength. The pride that wants to be the success by who you are. And you say, Lord, I can’t but Lord, don’t stop there, but Jesus you can, you will, and I’m asking you to do something that’s beyond me.
[00:33:05] I want to tell you it’s a fantastic thing when something happens in your life and it excels what you ever could know you could do. I think I told my story before at a crusade in Papua New Guinea and I just in an area of my life I would enjoy and say that I had made a mess and I was so annoyed at the whole scene of the mess that I had made and I got invited to go as a preacher for a whole week up in Paroko that I was cranking at God
[00:33:43] And I said, Lord I’m not going to bother with this crusade. I’ll still go. I’ve got some old messages I’ll give. They won’t know the difference. I borrowed a big camera so I could go and take photographs all around the place, lakes and animals. I’m going to have a holiday. Lord, you can bother with a crusade. I basically said to God. It was the best set of meetings, the most amount of people
[00:34:13] that I never had. When I came on the plane home, I wept and had to admit to the Lord, I said, Lord, you had for yourself a very good crusade. It wasn’t me. God had to teach me, it’s always never been. It’s always Him. And just as coming to know Christ, the first place to get forgiven is when you quit trying to outbid Jesus’ sacrifice and you accept Him as your personal Saviour. So in the Christian life, when you quit thinking you’ve got it all for you and you’re going to be the hero and you think you made it, and when you cry out to Him, sometimes with some people it’s like they’d need a crisis moment of really recognizing what bigger flop they’d been as a Christian, and they say, Lord, you lived the perfect life in your own body when you came and you can live a
[00:35:30] Or, would want a better one than me. A good one than what I do. And you transfer your trust from you and who you are, to Jesus, and the perfection that he is – be perfect, said Jesus as your father in heaven is perfect – is not an ask that no-one can do. It’s an ask that he’s wanting to do in you. And I welcome you to think on that, as to what Jesus can do in you. Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, I thank you for the beatitudes where Jesus said, Be ye therefore perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect.
[00:36:18] Lord, that standard is one that used to annoy me, and I’ve used to dodge the beatitudes. I have to be honest. It’s something to even preach on because The whole idea of a performance revue was not my idea, but a happy idea. And, Lord, I thank you for the teaching of Jesus, that it’s not that He thinks we can achieve perfection, but that He’s offering Himself just as He offered Himself on the cross And, shed his blood, gave his life
[00:36:57] and has achieved what we could never do. Thank you, that in the step of salvation, that is our sanctification, our change, our growing as a Christian, that Jesus, you offer the same deal. Forgive us for when we try to do it on our own, when you’re making available the perfection of the work of the Holy Spirit. Help us to walk with you. Thank you for the wonder of the communion that’s in your precious blood and in your present person. Thank you, Lord Jesus. In your name we pray. Amen.