“…a vessel unto honour, sanctified, and meet for the master's use, and prepared unto every good work.”~ 2 Tim. 2:21
I just finished reading again an article by my older son, Andrew, on the subject of sanctification. Would to God I had read it years ago. It would have saved me from some insane teachings on the subject that I ignorantly adhered to and taught.
Sanctification, first and foremost, has to do with ownership, not virtue. Paul tells the new converts at Thessalonica to abstain from fornication, not because it’s virtuous, but because it is the Will of God. One can be the former, without doing the latter. God sanctifies “things” as well as people, and the first has nothing to do with moral character.
Obedience comes before personal virtue. If this were not true, neither Isaiah nor Hosea would have carried out God’s orders. But both of these men knew God had exclusive property rights to their lives (1Cor. 6:19), and thus they obeyed Him.
Whenever we equate virtue as the main objective of sanctification, rather than obedience, we end up with a man-made list of taboos. And each “no, no” that we give up makes us think we are holier than before. But there are untold numbers of virtuous Christians who are not obedient to God, who pass themselves off as “sanctified saints.”
When you move from “Spirit” sanctification to “Self” Sanctification there is nothing but continual frustration. You become the center, rather than Christ. It is then that we become obsessed with a kind of morbid introspection that leaves one self-conscious, rather than God-conscious. This is a form of humanism. Let each of us remember “…that to obey is better….”