Connecting the dots Connecting to God through sanctification 10/20/19

Connecting the dots

Connecting to God through sanctification

10/20/19

 Is “almost good” good enough?

Consider, if you decided that 99.9 percent was good enough …

The IRS would only lose 2 million documents this year.

o          only 22,000 checks will be deducted from the wrong bank account in the next hour.

o          Telecommunications companies would only misdirect 1,314 telephone calls every minute.

o          Only 2,488 books would be shipped with the wrong covers on them each day.

o          Only 5.5 million cases of soft drinks in the next year will be flat.

o          only 20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions will be written each year.

o          And best of all only 12 babies will be given to the wrong parents each day.

In some arenas, there is no “good enough?” 

 No matter how many hours I practice I will never be good enough to play on the Carroll Tigers basketball team, let alone the NBA.

No matter how many books I read about heart surgery, I’ll bet none of you would let me cut your chest open to do bypass surgery.

And I am absolutely sure if the shoe were on the other foot, I wouldn’t let you.

I can try my very best to make this building sprout wings and fly, but it just is not going to happen.

The same would be true if I tried to be a truck driver, teacher, CNA,  or computer technician. My “best’ would just never be good enough. 

Some times in life doing the best we can just is not good enough.

 In faith, any time we rely on our own best efforts to get us to heaven, we are making a mistake. Doing our very best will never get us into heaven.  No matter how many years I spend preaching, or how many souls I help get saved, or how often you go to church, or how often you pray… nothing you ever do will win you that all-expenses-paid trip to the corner Golden Street and Pearly Gate Avenue.

Paul might have said it best

“I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.  Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. ”

So what is a person to do?

We have been talking about the church's new mission statement  “CONNECTING PEOPLE TO GOD” and how we do that.  We spent a couple of weeks talking about how we connect UP to God in worship and scripture. Then we spent a week talking about how we connect IN to each other in friendship and community. Now we are on the 3rd quadrant of our circle connecting DEEPER. We are talking about some ways that we connect with God by going deeper within ourselves.

Last week I left off with a passage from Romans 12 “be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind “ We all know that there is a change in our lives when we accept Jesus. But to tell you the truth the biggest change happens as we learn to live out our faith, The Holy Spirit is in the business of changing us day after day after day to be more and more like Jesus.  The Holy Spirit is busy changing us day by day to live the new life in Christ.   The $10 word for that is “sanctification.” Sanctify means to make something holy. The new life in Christ is living more and more holy, more and more like Jesus every day. That sounds like something we DO, but it is not.

 John Wesley talked about the process of sanctification as the Holy Spirit moving us on toward Christian Perfection. Now that might sound strange to your ears. In Wesleyan theology, perfection is a  heart "habitually filled with the love of God and neighbor" and as "having the mind of Christ and walking as he walked." In other words, by the Holy Spirit, we are being perfected in love.  Perfect in this case does not mean without any flaws.  It means whole, or complete, or mature.

This emphasis on sanctifying grace is perhaps the most distinctive theological contribution of Wesleyan theology to our understanding of the Christian life.

John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, says, justification (salvation) is what God does FOR us, but sanctification is what God does IN us. …at the same time that we are justified, … in that very moment, sanctification begins…. We are enabled by the Spirit to [subdue] the deeds of the body,” Of course, it is the power of the Holy Spirit that overcomes our sinful nature, and as we become more and more dead to sin, we are more and more alive to God.

But why would we want this thing called sanctification? Here’s one way to look at it. Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 4:3 “this is the will of God, your sanctification.” We pursue, hope for, and expect sanctification because it is what God desires for us. Sanctification is the means by which we grow to live out the great commandments of Jesus to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. This is the fullness of life that Jesus died to bring.

For Wesley, sanctification, perfection, discipleship (take your pick) is all about being filled with love, which happens by the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit. We may not be there yet; but by God's grace, as United Methodists say, "we're going on to perfection!"

In order to do that we have to be ready to change. We have to be willing to be transformed by the renewing of the Holy Spirit poured mind. and heart, and lives.

           

OK, we kind of understand what sanctification is and why we would want it,  but let’s ask what it looks like. in real people? To try to answer that question the Barna Group, a Christian research organization, surveyed more than 15,000 people over a 6 year period. Barna identified what he called 10 “stops” along the journey of transformation– or 10 plateaus that people get to and then stop.   You might say these are rest stops in the Christian life, but some people end up setting up housekeeping instead of moving on.  Notice that we can think of these as rings on our circle growing deeper and deeper.

Follow along with slides  

Plateau 1 is the ignorance of Sin. 1% of adults never understand that sin is a real thing and it is in them.

Plateau 2 is being aware of sin, but indifferent. 16% of adults stop there.

Plateau 3 Questioning or wondering about faith is 39% of the adult population. (that’s the biggest percentage 1/2 of the adults never get past the wondering stage of faith.

Plateau 4 -9% of all adults profess faith in Jesus but never do anything with it. 

Plateau 5 the 24% of people are committed to the faith and serve through a local church.

Plateau 6- is the 6% of adults who really deeply yearn for a closer relationship with God but never peruse it.

Plateau 7 is to know your own brokenness and be desperate for God. 3% make it this far, but never go farther.

Plateau 8 is Choosing, again and again, to surrender fully to God. It is radical dependence.

Plateau 9-  ½  %  of adults experience a profound intimacy with and love for God.

And finally, Plateau 10 is ½ % who experience experiencing profound global compassion and love for humanity. Like Mother Theresa.

Clearly, this is a very simplified roadmap. But instructive to us in that, we can see that there is a movement in our faith after Justification or salvation. A transformation of our lives. True conversion of our inner and outer being. That movement is not something we do.  It is not our choice.  It is the work of the Holy Spirit sanctifying us… tuning us into the people God wants us to be.

It’s also worth noting that these “stops” are more practical observation than biblical necessity. God is not bound to march people through steps 3 through 10. Like many theological descriptions, your results may vary slightly. For instance, for some people stop 8, choosing to surrender and submit fully to God, belongs back with stop 4, confessing Jesus as savior. We can discuss what the order should be, but the point remains that there is movement.

 Paul describes it this way in Galatians 2:19 “For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. 20 I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. 

Sanctification is our calling. It is the real point of having faith. If the only point of faith is forgiveness of sins it is really a very selfish process.  But sanctification helps us to re-frame the purpose of God’s wonderful redemptive act in the cross. To see that God’s plan for us does not stop with the cross and forgiveness of sin. The point of salvation is to move us toward a process of growing into a  profound love of God and a profound love of humanity. That is the ultimate goal of the Christian life.

Transformed people are used by God to transform the world. At that point, you are fulfilling Jesus’ greatest commandments.

And it is all a work of God. It is God who calls us, saves u,s and God who refines us in sanctifying grace.

Do you have a profound love for God? A profound love for humanity? If not, then keep growing in your faith. I had been ordained for 25 years before I began to realize that I was missing something because I stopped at point #5. The best was yet to come. And still is.

 Charles Wesley, John’s brother and s a prolific hymn wrote a song we all probably know that speaks of this great journey of connecting to God as we grow in faith. Let’s sing the last verse.  Of loves divine all loves excelling p 384 in the red hymnal or on the screen