CHAPTER 4
SANCTIFICATION THE CURE OF DEPRAVITY The careful reader has already observed that the author holds, with the many authorities he has quoted, that the word sin is used in the Bible with at least two very distinct meanings. It is also so used in theological
literature generally. This may be a misfortune; but if so, we can not help it.
We have been born too late in the history of the world to correct the language of St. Paul and St. John, and the theologians of the Christian ages.
We do not invent language usually; we use it as we find it ready-made. The word sin designates: 1. Actual transgressions, willful acts of disobedience to a known law of God. “Sin is the transgression of the law.” It is very frequently used in the plural, as “sins,” “iniquities,” “transgressions.” It is for this kind of sin that every man’s conscience holds him directly
responsible. 2. The word “sin” is often used, without any adjective and, as scholars who have studied the subject most carefully tell us, always in the singular number, to designate a sinful STATE, not an act. This second use of the word refers to that sinful state of our moral nature brought upon each of us by our connection with a sinful race. It is that natural lack of conformity of our whole being to the moral law. A small Greek lexicon of the New Testament lies before me. The first three definitions of a common Greek word for sin are “error, offence, sin,” but the next three definitions are, “A principle or cause of sin; proneness to sin; sinful propensity.”
These two sets of definitions of a Greek noun in an unbiased dictionary prove that this double use of the word sin in the New Testament is no fanciful notion of the author, but the actual Bible usage. The Apostle John used the word in the first sense when he wrote: “If we confess our sins he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins” (I. John 1:9, R. V.). He used the word in the second sense when he wrote: “All unrighteousness is sin” (I. John 5:17). The same Greek word is used in both passages. St.
Paul used the word in t his second sense when he wrote of “the sin that dwelleth in me” (Romans 7:17).
Now this corruption of our moral nature, this disordered state of our faculties, this abnormal condition of our being, needs to be rectified. It is a perpetual source of temptation to acts of sin, which in turn react upon the innate corruption and intensify it. We are not primarily responsible for this diseased condition of our moral nature. It was born in us through no fault of ours. As Dr. Steele writes: “Under the remedial system, it involves no guilt till approved by the free agent and its remedy is rejected” (Love Enthroned, p. 11). A man may not be blamed for taking involuntarily a contagious disease; but he is to blame if he keeps it by willfully rejecting a known remedy.
Though a gracious God does not hold us responsible primarily for the evils of the fall that have perverted our beings, yet he can not be pleased with the fact that his children, designed to be perfect images of himself, are morally diseased, infested with “sin that dwelleth in us” “the body of sin,”
“the old man” of corruption, “the law of sin and death,” “the body of this death,” “the lusts which war in the members.” These striking expressions all mean the same thing, and constitute what is called “depravity” or
“indwelling sin” or “inbred sin.” It makes us unlovely in the eyes of a pure and holy God. So he has made a provision of grace for us, “that the body of sin might be destroyed,” that “our old man might be [is] crucified with Him.” He “condemned [to destruction] sin in the flesh,” that he might
“take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you an heart of flesh.”
This inbred sin produces a sad harvest of unlovely fruit — pride, anger, self-will, jealousy, covetousness, peevishness, impatience, hatred,
variance, emulations, strife, envyings, unbelief, and such like. These do not reign in the justified believer, but they keep up an incessant warfare
against the holiest purpose of his soul. The thoughts and feelings and cravings and appetites are unclean, and displeasing to God. The conduct and inner life of the disciples grieved Jesus. They were converted men, ordained preachers, with power to work miracles and cast out devils. Jesus said of them in his intercessory prayer: “Thou gavest them me,” “and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.” Jesus also said to the disciples: “Rejoice that your names are written in heaven,” and “ye [which] have followed me in the
regeneration.” And yet the Saviour had found it necessary to reprove them for unbelief, instability, selfishness, a worldly, secular spirit, a retaliating spirit, a cowardly and vacillating spirit, and repeated feelings of jealousy.
These manifestations of the “indwelling sin” — the “carnal” nature, — troubled the Master, and he prayed for them that they might be
“sanctified.” When the Holy Ghost came upon them that “old man” of sin was crucified, and they were sanctified. He took the cowardice out of Peter, and the unbelief out of Thomas, and the overgrown ambitions out of James and John. The “Son of Thunder” became the “Apostle of Love.”
And right here we touch the meaning of SANCTIFICATION. It is the work of the Holy Spirit — the act of God’s grace, by which “our old man is crucified” and the moral nature is “cleansed” of all unrighteousness,” — unrightness, “proneness to sin,” “sinful propensity.”
Sanctified souls have called this experience by different names. The Apostle Paul, filled with ecstatic rapture, called it “The Fullness of God.”
John Wesley, following the Apostle John, called it “Perfect love.” Mrs.
Jonathan Edwards, with doubts forever slain and looking with steadfast gaze upon her Saviour, “whose presence was so near and real” that she
“was scarcely conscious of anything else,” called it “The Full Assurance of Faith.” A. B. Earle, the great Baptist evangelist, was so conscious of a deep, sweet resting in Christ, after his painful struggles for holiness, that he called it “The Rest of Faith.” President Mahan, filled and thrilled by
“the refining and sin-killing Spirit” chose Pentecostal language and called it
“The Baptism of the Holy Ghost.” Prof. Henry Cowles, with heart aglow with the conception of a church some day purified and walking with God, called it the “Holiness of Christians.” President Finney, with a flood-tide of rapture flowing over his soul, used the language of Christ, and called it
“Entire Sanctification.”
But the work, by whatever name called, is essentially the same. It is God’s act of cleansing the soul.
When he was eighty-two years old, the venerable Mahan wrote: “Facts of experience of the most palpable character, and of every variety of form, absolutely evince that in the renewing of the Holy Ghost believers are fully cleansed from indwelling as well as from actual sin. Tens of
thousands of eminent and most trustworthy believers testify to being as conscious of permanent changes and removals of evil appetites, tempers, and dispositions, of the longest standing and dominion, as they are of their own existence. Nothing can be verified by testimony if the fact of such changes can not be. Those who deny that such changes are among the possibilities of faith render impossible, this unbelief continuing, their
‘deliverance from the body of this death.’ ‘ If ye will not believe ye shall not be established’” (Autobiography, p. 345).
In another passage he wrote: “My inner life, as I came unto God by Jesus Christ, not only for pardon, but for heart purification, was taking a
surprisingly new form. Old habits, evil tempers, and sinward propensities which had been the bane of my impenitent career, and the cause of the groaning servitude of my primal Christian life, had suddenly lost all power and control. I became distinctly conscious to myself of being no longer
‘carnal, sold under sin,’ but the Lord’s free man, emancipated from former enslavement, and now a divinely inaugurated sovereign over those
propensities.” … “I seemed to anticipate the great verity thus
impressively set before us by Dean Vaughan, Master of the Temple: ‘We are to believe, not in the suspension or supersession or down-trampling of what we call the laws of nature, … but in certain other things which to eyes not spiritually enlightened are at least as difficult; we have to believe in the actual forgiveness of things actually done; we have to believe that that black, hateful thing done or said yesterday — even though it had, fever in its breath and corruption in its influence — can be, shall be, obliterated and annihilated in the blood of Jesus Christ; we have to believe that that bad habit formed in boyhood, weakly yielded to in manhood, still strong, still predominant, can, by the grace of God, — shall, by the grace of God, — be VANQUISHED in us, ERADICATED, BURNT OUT of us, so that we shall be more than conquerors through Him that hath loved us’” (pp. 326, 327).
We are now ready for some formal definitions of sanctification.
Revelation Luther Lee, President of Leoni Theological Institute, defined sanctification thus: “Sanctification is that renewal of our fallen nature by the Holy Ghost, received through faith in Jesus Christ, whose blood of atonement has power to cleanse from all sin; whereby we are not only delivered from the guilt of sin, which is justification, but are washed entirely from its pollution, freed from its power, and are enabled, through grace, to love God with all our hearts, and to walk in his holy
commandments blameless” (Elements of Theology, p. 211).
Wesley, in his Plain Account of Christian Perfection, says: “It is the loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. This implies that no wrong temper — none contrary to love — remains in the soul; and that all the thoughts, words, and actions are governed by pure love.” “By one that is perfect, we mean one in whom is ‘the mind which was in Christ,’
who so ‘walketh as Christ also walked,’ who is cleansed ‘from all
filthiness of flesh and spirit,’ in whom is ‘no occasion of stumbling,’ who
accordingly ‘does not commit sin,’ one in whom God hath fulfilled his faithful word, ‘From all your filthiness and from all your idols will I cleanse you; I will also save you from all your uncleannesses.’”
Revelation Isaiah Reid, an exceedingly clear writer on this subject, says, in
‘The Holy Way’ (pp. 10,11): Doctrinally, holiness may be defined as that secondary work of grace by which the depravity of the soul is remedied … Holiness or entire sanctification is the application of redemption to the depraved, corrupt nature in which we were born. It is that feature of salvation which lies back of pardon, — which is for an act and back of justification, which refers to our adjusted relations: it relates to our
depravity. For the inheritance of our depravity we are not responsible. We never committed the sin that produced it, and can not repent of being so born, nor seek pardon for it. God’s remedy is CLEANSING, called ‘entire sanctification,’ ‘holiness,’ ‘perfect love.’ On the side of man it is through consecration and faith. On the part of God it is the application of the cleansing blood. Entire sanctification makes us morally pure from our inherited depravity. It destroys the old man of sin, the carnal mi nd. The subject is perfected as to the kind of his Christianity or religion, yet not in such a way that the measure of it can not be increased. He is holy in the sense that he is morally pure. He is sinless in the sense that his past sinful acts have all been pardoned, and his corrupt nature cleansed. He is
blameless in the sense that God sees in his pardoned and cleansed soul nothing condemned by the gospel law. As to his love, it is perfect in the sense that he loves with all the heart, mind, soul, and strength, and in the sense that ‘love is the fulfilling of the law.’ As to progress, he is growing in it. ‘His soul made in kind heavenly, now matures in degree, and ripens for glorification.’
“Holiness is properly the name for the state of a soul sanctified wholly, and denotes (1) the absence of depravity, (2) the possession of perfect love. A heart emptied and a heart refilled.”
If such an experience is possible in this life, then there is a blessed privilege offered to every child of God.
President Mahan gives this definition: “Sanctification is exclusively the work, not of the creature but of God, a work wrought in us by the eternal Spirit, on the condition that ‘God be inquired of by us to do it for us.’
Entire sanctification implies ‘salvation to the uttermost’ from sin in all its forms as God sees it, and perfect moral purity as he requires it”
(Autobiography, p. 375). “By the state under consideration I do not understand mere separation from actual sin, and full actual obedience. I understand more than this, namely: a renewal of the spirit, and temper, and dispositions of the mind, and of the tendencies and habits which impel to sin, and prompt to disobedience to the Divine will. A fully sanctified believer is not only voluntarily separate from sin, and in the will of God, but is in this state with the full assent of every department of his moral and spiritual nature. He not only ‘feareth God and escheweth evil,’ but loves righteousness and hates iniquity” (p. 322).
Dr. W. McDonald, of Boston, defines as follows: “It is to be cleansed from all actual sin and original depravity. Sin exists in the soul after two modes or forms, — actual and original, — the sins we have committed, and the depraved or sinful nature inherited, which was ours before we were conscious of sinning … A fully saved heart can look up into the face of Jesus, and without mental reservation say, ‘Thy will be done,’ while the whole nature responds, ‘Amen.’ This is entire holiness … But if depravity remain, it will rebel and refuse to yield. But to have
‘A heart in every thought renewed And full of love divine
Perfect, and right, and pure, and good, A copy, Lord, of thine,’
is to be saved from all sin, and made perfect in love. A soul in possession of such a blessing can sing,
‘Thou art the sea of love, Where all my pleasures roll, The circle where my passions move, And centre of my soul.’
There is no longer a conflict between the inclinations and the judgment.
The desires are no longer at war with the will. The seat of war has been mainly changed. Formerly we not only contended with outward foes — the world and Satan — but with inward enemies — our own unholy desires and tempers. Now the citadel is purged, the heart made pure, the enemies are without, and the fort royal is all friendly to the king” (Saved to the Uttermost, pp. 25-32).
The Methodist Catechism says: “Sanctification is that act of divine grace whereby we are made holy.”
Dr. Steele says: “The act is that of removing impurity existing in the nature of one already born of the Spirit — the deliverance from sin as a tendency born with us.”
These definitions have been sufficiently extended to make clear to the most careless reader the meaning and scope of sanctification. We are now prepared to see a broad and clear distinction between regeneration and justification — the primal experiences of the Christian life, and
sanctification, about which some writers are strangely confused.
Regeneration is the work of the Holy Spirit in the heart, graciously inclining the sinner to repentance and faith in Christ, and so renewing the voluntary nature that the power of sin is broken, and the principle of obedience is planted in the heart. It is accompanied by justification and adoption, which we may treat together.
Justification is the sovereign act of God by which the sinner, on condition of repentance of sin and faith in an atoning Saviour, is forgiven his past transgressions, and restored to the Divine favor, and treated legally as if he had not sinned. The clearest extended picture of justification in the entire Bible is found in the parable of the Prodigal Son. The father takes the repentant boy to his bosom and reinstates him in the home, puts on him the ring of adoption and the robe of charity to cover the shame of his guilty past, and does not twit him of his sinful career, but treats him as if he had never wandered.
But that prodigal was still diseased in body and mind and soul, in passions and appetites and feelings, in thoughts and imaginations and desires — the vile effects of his riotous living. But if that father had been a mighty physician, as our Saviour is, and had laid his dear hand on the child and said, “My son, be thou clean through all thy being,” as Jesus used to do, and does yet, that would have been a picture of sanctification.
1. Regeneration is God’s work done ut us, rectifying the attitude of the will toward him and holy things.
Justification is God’s work done for us, making us at peace with his law and government.
But sanctification is the work of God purging the whole being.
2. Regeneration removes the love of sin.
Justification removes the guilt of sins already committed.
Sanctification removes the inclination to sin in the future.
3. Regeneration changes the state, the character, of the will toward sin and plants within us the germ of the divine life.
Justification secures the pardon of actual sins.
But sanctification removes inbred sin, and, by correcting the nature of the whole being, confirms the will in obedience.
4. Justification remits the penalty of broken law.
Regeneration plants the principle of obedience, and breaks the reigning power of sin and makes us children of God.
But sanctification so “cleanses from filthiness and idols,” and puts within the soul such “a new heart and a new spirit,” that the whole man
reinforces the will, and perfect obedience and a holy heart are secured.
5. Justification brings the favor of God.
Regeneration gives a relish for holiness and a longing for the image of God.
But by sanctification, “we are transformed into the same image from glory to glory,” and we are “made partakers of the divine nature.” The longings for holiness and the image of God become realized. (See Lee’s Theology, p. 200.)
In short, regeneration brings renewing, justification brings forgiveness, and sanctification brings cleansing. I know not how to make it more plain.
Revelation William McDonald adds the following pithy distinctions:
1. “In regeneration, sin does not reign; in sanctification, it does not exist.
2. “In regeneration, sin is suspended; in sanctification, it is destroyed.