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Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Amen.
In this is love, not that we love God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. You may be seated. In the name of Jesus. Amen.
Dear Saints of God, it is important when we approach the Scriptures for us to understand, and first of all, this distinction between the law and the gospel, or I want to give it to you this way today, the distinction between justification and sanctification. And let me just warn you guys right at the beginning that we’ve got some theological work to do in the sermon today, so we’re going to be working with some vocab. Justification and sanctification.
Justification is that doctrine and teaching of the Holy Scripture that says that apart from any works that we’ve done, apart from any earning or deserving, the Lord Jesus comes to us and gives us His righteousness, His perfect keeping of the law. He declares us holy. He takes away our sin, and He gives us His good works, His perfection. By grace, through faith, apart from works, like St. Paul says, to the one who does not work, but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, faith is accounted as righteousness.
Justification has nothing to do with your earning, with your deserving, with your working, with your living, with your obedience, with your following the Lord, with your living with Christ, any of it. It’s completely, purely by God’s free grace and pure, free mercy. But that faith which believes the Lord’s promise also grabs ahold of the Holy Spirit who comes to us, and the Holy Spirit cannot help but share His holiness with us. He makes us holy.
This is the doctrine of sanctification, our growth in good works, how the Holy Spirit begins to work in us both to will and to do according to His good pleasure, how the Holy Spirit changes us, renews us, gives us a new life, bears fruit in our lives—the fruit of love and joy and peace and patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, and self-control. These are the fruits of the Holy Spirit. Now, these fruits of the Holy Spirit have nothing to do with earning your salvation. They do not come before you are saved, they come after you are saved. That’s why they are the fruits of the Holy Spirit. They grow later.
Now keeping this straight, this distinction between justification and sanctification is so important. In fact, I’d say, I mean, the big majority of theological errors come from mixing those two things together, thinking that our justification has something to do with our working or our deserving or our earning, or thinking that Jesus starts us on the path to salvation, but then we finish it. Or that we start and Jesus finishes it. No, your salvation, your justification is completely Jesus, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, all the way through. He is the one who does it by His Word.
But He also gives us more gifts. And that’s the second danger. If there’s a danger of mixing justification and sanctification, there is perhaps the danger of just missing the doctrine of sanctification altogether. And if we do that, if we ignore the parts of the Scripture that talk about how we as Christians receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, how we abide in God and God abides in us, that we live a life of love by the strength of God, then we miss so many of the riches of the Scriptures. We miss so many of the blessings that the Lord has for us.
Now this distinction, both Jesus and I think John, who in his epistle lesson, 1 John chapter 4, I think is preaching on the words of Jesus, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit.” Both Jesus and John are careful to make this distinction. For example, Jesus says, “Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you.” That’s justification, and it’s true. If you don’t hear anything else, hear this, you are clean because of the word that Jesus has spoken to you. His word is gospel, His forgiveness of sins, it does what it says, so that you now, by His declaration, are ready to stand on the judgment day. You don’t have anything to be afraid of.
John says it like this, “In this is love, not that we’ve loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” Propitiation means sacrifice that takes away wrath. It comes from the Old Testament, a picture of the mercy seat. Remember in the holy, most holy place, there was the Ark of the Covenant with the Ten Commandments there, preaching against the people, always showing them their sins, but there was a golden seat above it where the Lord’s glory would rest, and once a year the priest would come and put blood on that chair.
It’s enough for us just to know this, that God calls His seat, He doesn’t call it His judgment seat, He calls it His mercy seat, His grace seat, His love for you seat, His forgiveness of sins seat. That’s the seat that you want the Lord to sit on. That’s what it means. He is the propitiation for our sins. It means He forgives you.
But when the Lord forgives you your sins, He’s not done with you yet. He comes to live in you. He comes to be with you. This is the doctrine, and this is really what I want to talk about today, but I realized this morning in the early service that I just don’t know how to preach on this, so bear with me. I’ll keep trying. But this is this doctrine that the early church called the mystical union, the unio mystica. When we talk about union, I mean, that’s a big theological thing, and when two things are joined together, the major union that we talk about is the personal union, how the divine and human natures in Christ are united into the single person of Christ.
Or sometimes we’ll talk about the sacramental union, how Jesus puts His body and His blood in the bread and the wine for us Christians to eat and drink, the sacramental union. But here we’re talking about the mystical union, and that is this mystery that Jesus joins Himself to us, that we are in God and God is in us, that the Holy Spirit dwells in us, that God the Father dwells in us and we in Him.
Here’s some verses. 1 Corinthians 6:17, “He who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him.” Ephesians 5, where Paul’s talking about husbands and wives being one flesh, he says we Christians are members of His body, of His flesh and His bones. Galatians 3:2 says that by faith we receive the Holy Spirit. Ephesians 3:17 says that Christ dwells in our heart by faith. In John 14:23, Jesus says, “We,” that means the Father and the Son, “will come into him and make our abode with him.” John was preaching this all through the Epistle lesson. “By this we know that we abide in Him and He abides in us because He has given us His Spirit.”
And this is what Jesus says, “Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in Me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit.” Now, we know that God fills all things. There’s not a place that we can go to escape from God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but the Scripture says that God dwells in a unique and special way with His people.
That is, then, to say that God dwells in a unique and special way with you, that when you were baptized, you were filled with the Spirit, that Jesus lives in your heart, that God the Father is in you, even as you are in Him. And the Holy Spirit who is in you is not sleeping. The Holy Spirit is alive. The Holy Spirit is busy and active and working. The Holy Spirit is busy doing a number of things and we can just consider a few of them.
Number one, He’s busy fighting against your flesh. This does not mean, when we talk about how God lives with us, this does not mean that we are through with sin. This doesn’t mean that there’s ever a time when we can come into church and everybody else kneels down to confess their sins, and you say, “Well, I don’t need that this week, Pastor.” No. There’s not a moment when you don’t need Christ Jesus and His mercy, and we’re always driven back to the doctrine of justification, to the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins. This does not mean that the Holy Spirit in us completely overwhelms sin so that we have nothing to confess. That’s not the case. You always have the flesh with you, but the Holy Spirit is fighting against the flesh, your flesh, fighting against your sinful desires, and giving you the strength also to fight against your flesh and against your sin. And also, He gives you the strength to love, and to serve, and to bless one another, to pray, to give up your life, to confess Christ, to live boldly in this dark and fallen world.
I mean, when you look at the commands that the Lord has given and you look at the life that He’s given us to live, you just think to yourself, or at least I think to myself, “How can I do it? How can I even start?” And here’s our confidence. The Lord is our helper. He gives us the strength that we need. Look at what Jesus says. This is a beautiful promise. We should not pass over this promise as if the Lord didn’t want us to see it. Verse 7, Jesus says, “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.”
If you do not have, James says, it is because you do not ask. The Holy Spirit, who lives in you, brings your requests and your petitions before God the Father. Jesus perfects them and carries them to the Father’s ear and heart, and God the Father delights to hear your prayers and to answer them as Christ and the Spirit abide in you. So He will come to you, and He will strengthen you, and He will give you all that you need.
Now, again, remember, we started with law and gospel, justification and sanctification, because when we talk like this, we don’t want to think that our life of putting down the flesh and our life of serving God and loving one another is why we are saved. No, you can never be good enough. You can never, even by the Holy Spirit working in you day in and day out, you can never be good enough to present yourself holy and blameless before the Lord. You will be condemned that way, but the Lord will give us the gifts that we need to truly bless and serve one another, so that you will bear fruit.
What is the fruit of the Spirit that Jesus is talking about that happens when we abide in Him? We heard it earlier. Paul says in Galatians, the fruit of the Spirit is this: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, or self-control? Or listen to how Paul says it in Philippians chapter 1. I guess there’s only one, so it is the first, but let’s just call it Philippians. Philippians chapter 1, verses 9 through 11, he says, “I pray that your love would abound more and more in knowledge and in judgment, that you might approve the things that are excellent and sincere, and that you might live without offense until the day of Christ, being filled with the fruits of righteousness unto the glory and praise of God.”
So we praise the Lord. We praise the Lord that Jesus died for our sins and rose for our justification. We praise the Lord that Jesus ascended into heaven and now is our advocate before the throne of God, declaring us to be holy and righteous. We praise the Lord that He has sent His Holy Spirit to live in us, so that we might abide in Him and He would abide in us, so that we would bear much fruit.
And when we see in our own lives the fruit not of the Spirit, but of the flesh, we come running back to the Lord who is merciful and gracious and patient, and He loves us and forgives us and fills us again with the Spirit, so that we might rejoice in Him.
By grace, we are saved through faith, that not of ourselves, it’s a gift of God, so that no one may boast, so that we might be His workmanship, His workmanship doing the works that He has appointed for us. God be praised, both for His gift of justification and sanctification.
In the name of Jesus, amen.
And the peace of God that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
