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TopAccording to the Pattern
A Manual for Church Planting by
Edwin Stube
CONTENTS
5. Sanctified Christian LivingWhen a person is newly born again of water and the Spirit, he feels very happy and confident. His old life of sin and trouble is over. The new life in Jesus is wonderful, and he feels nothing can ever disturb him again.
But very soon trials and testings come: temptations to turn back to the old ways, pressures from family, friends and neighbors. In a village near our Indonesian school one week, the new Christians were told, “If you die, we won't let you be buried in this village.” The next week the villagers said, “You were married according to the Moslem religion. If you are a Christian, your marriage is not valid. You will have to return your wife and children to her parents.” Another time they were denied water for their rice fields, kicked out of their homes and off their land. The trials may be very brutal or they may be very subtle. In any case, the new believer needs a deepening understanding of the foundations of sanctification and victorious Christian living, so that he can overcome both the temptations which arise in himself and those that are imposed from outside.
It is important to present the initial teaching of this victory to new converts, or to church people who may not know their real heritage in Christ Jesus.
Many times we think of sanctification as bad news. We think it means giving up smoking, going to the movies, and everything else we ever enjoyed. Some of these things we really would like to get rid of, but we find it too difficult. Soon we become discouraged, decide it doesn't work, and go back to the way we used to live.
But there are some disturbing statements found in the Bible: “The one who says, ‘I know Him,’ but does not keep his commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him” (1 John 2:9). “No one who is born of God will continue to sin” (1 John 3:9). “No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him” (1 John 3:6). “Be holy, because I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16). “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).
“Such a high standard,” the new believer thinks, “who can ever do that?” But, since it is commanded, you try your hardest, fail, and become frustrated. It seems, the more serious you are about serving the Lord, the more frustrating it becomes.
So you ask the Lord to strengthen you so that you can fulfill the demands He has made, but He does not seem to answer the prayer, and you remain as weak as ever. In fact, the more you think about some sins and try to avoid them, the more you find yourself doing them. Satan comes with stronger or subtler temptations, or the pressures of life or other people get too strong, and you fall back into the old patterns.
Often we find that the very act of trying to serve the Lord brings new temptations. A woman recently testified that the worst year of her life was the one after she gave up smoking, because she thought when she gave up smoking she had arrived at sanctification. The resulting spiritual pride was worse than the smoking.
Sometimes we even wonder if we want to resist certain temptations. Can God give us the desire to overcome those temptations?
Our lives are supposed to be fruitful for Jesus. We want them to be. We want to be able to lead people confidently to Jesus and see their lives changed. We want to pray for their healing and deliverance and know that we are going to see results.
But how can we really believe for these victories, when we cannot even find victory over a few little sins in our own lives? “If Christianity works, why doesn't it work for me in this very basic problem of my life?” Is holy living really possible?
Public opinion says No. Past experience says No. The world says it is impossible, but it is commanded by a God who is supposed to love us. Bad news?
No, the Bible actually presents our sanctification and victory over sin as good news. Of course, if it is really possible, it is Good News. It is only bad news if you have to do it and cannot.
There is a secret to it, and the secret was revealed by Jesus, who is quoted in John 12:24 as saying, “Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains a single seed. But, if it dies, it produces many seeds.”
When you stop to think about it, it is really pretty ridiculous to take a good seed and throw it into the ground to rot and break up and be destroyed. And yet farmers do this every spring. They plant seeds in faith — faith that a whole new plant and fruit will grow.
Similarly Jesus, “for the joy that was placed before Him, endured the Cross, the shame, the suffering.” He allowed His Body to be planted in the grave in faith — faith that He could rise to a new and more glorious life, and bear much fruit throughout eternity.
This must somehow become the pattern for our life, too, because, in the very next sentence, He says that we must lose our lives in order to find them.
Actually our prayers were not answered because we were praying the wrong prayer. We were asking to be strengthened, helped out, and guided. This is like asking for the seed to be strengthened to bear fruit without being planted. God doesn't want to strengthen us. He wants us dead. Dead does not mean strong; dead means perfectly weak. Dead, so that He can perform the miracle of new life. Not the old life repaired and fixed up a little, but a whole new life in Christ with the old life-style dead, destroyed.
Why dead?
Think for a moment about a dead person, that is, a corpse. The corpse does no sin. It does no immoral acts, has no annoying habits, uses no bad words, thinks no evil thoughts, and has no selfish motives, does not get riled up or angry. It has no greed or lust. It has no problems with sex. Nobody can make it jealous, discourage it, frustrate it, or hurt its feelings.
But what about our good qualities? Does God not want to strengthen and refurbish those? No, because these have been thoroughly corrupted and perverted. The more they are strengthened, the more they will be tied up with wrong motives. If we think we are strong in certain areas, we will pursue those things without His help and increase our independence from Him. The way of death and resurrection, the way of new life in Christ Jesus, involves the death of the entire old nature.
So the corpse we were talking about cannot do anything good either. It has no strong points, no rights, no special abilities, no bright ideas, no plans for the future, no emotions of its own, no compassion or love. It cannot even pray, much less testify for Jesus. It cannot defend itself or develop self-control.
The corpse is now available for resurrection to new life. And this new life is to be the very life of Jesus Himself. “It is no longer I that live,” says St. Paul in Galatians 2:20, “but Christ who lives in me.”
I am dead. I do not live here anymore, Jesus does. He lives His perfect life in me. He does no sin, He performs the perfect will of God through me. He overcomes temptation, and bears much fruit.
In baptism, we are united with Christ in His death. The old man with all his sins and all his good points dies and is buried. Christ becomes our life.
Then, why do people seem to get baptized without this radical change taking place? Because this truth has to be perceived and accepted by faith. St. Paul says, “Don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus are baptized into His death?” (Romans 6:3). The efficacy of the baptism depends in large measure on its being received by faith. “Count yourselves dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:11).
At one time, I failed to receive the benefits of all this because I thought the word “count yourselves” meant “pretend” or “believe something which is not really true yet” — sort of like wishful thinking. But actually “count yourself” here means facing the facts as they are. When a banker reckons an account, he does so in order to establish the actual value of the account. If we believe the reckoning, we can claim the money that is in the account. Similarly, we can believe the reckoning which God has given us of our heavenly account. Christ has already died, been buried, and risen. I have also died with Him, been buried, and risen to new life.
How do I know this? Is it because I feel like it or because I observe it in my conduct? No. I believe it and reckon it accurately because that is what God says through His servant Paul. Just as people believe what their bank reckons to be in their account, so (and much more surely) I can believe what God says is in my spiritual account.
For every serious Christian, there can be a time of seeing the truth of all this and accepting it for himself. It can happen at the time of baptism if we bring people to baptism with this expectation; or the acceptance of it can come at a later date. When the promise of God has met with faith in the believer, life is not the same again. Old things are passed away; all things are become new.
The acceptance of Christ's sanctification is both a crisis experience of acceptance at a particular time, and also a continuation or daily “walk.”
When we have presented the above ideas to new believers and find our hearers anxious to enter into the experience of sanctification, we can lead them in prayer to confess all past sins of deed and thought and motive. We can ask them, in the Lord's presence, to renounce all sins and all the bondage which may still be in their lives.
When they have confessed everything they need to, we can encourage them to accept God's forgiveness and sanctifying power and to enter by faith into the new life of sanctification and victory in Christ Jesus. We can encourage them to believe that they will enter into a new life-style of victory and fruitfulness, because now Jesus will be living His victorious and fruitful life in them.
We should also warn about temptation, because temptations will not cease in the world until Jesus comes. The devil wants to rob us of this new victory, and God wants us tested so that we can know experientially that His strength is sufficient.
We need to remember that temptation is not sin, and only becomes sin when we yield to it. But we do not have to yield any more, because we are not fighting it ourselves. In fact, we cannot fight temptation (remember, we are dead). So we talk back to Satan, standing on the Word of God, as Jesus did in the wilderness. We can tell Satan, “I don't live here any more. I'm dead, buried. Jesus lives here now. Try your old temptations out on Him.”
This approach is 100% successful.
We probably need to warn new believers also that sometime Satan may trip them up again. One of the temptations will be so sneaky that they won't recognize it until too late. But that must not rob them of their victory. All they need to do is to apologize quickly to the Lord for having yielded to the wrong voice. The Lord will forgive and bring the believer back into the place of victory. The Lord can even make former weak areas into areas of strength — His strength.
His strength, as He told St. Paul, is made perfect in weakness. The strength is His, the weakness is ours. The greater the weakness, the more glory He receives.
The continuation of the sanctified life, like its beginning, is a life of faith — faith that Jesus is our life, that He has given us the victory, and faith that every temptation and trial can be overcome by Christ who is living in us.
The sanctified life is a life of total dependence on Him and total submission to Him. “Offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness” (John 6:13).
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