Get Sanctified!

As a college dropout, I went to my first interview for a newspaper with no real expectation that I’d get the job.

I’d spent four years at Virginia Tech learning how to party. I’d never taken a single journalism class. I didn’t really READ newspapers, though I’d always enjoyed the comics section and the Green Sheet. (Anybody here remember the Green Sheet?)

I didn’t really have ANY appreciable connection to or affinity for newspapers. All I knew was that I could write reasonably well and that I didn’t have any other significant talents or skills to bring to the marketplace.

So, when I saw the classified advertisement looking for a part-time community newspaper reporter in Franklin, I naturally concluded that THIS was the job for ME.

Frankly, what made it so perfect was that it didn’t involve pouring concrete or digging ditches, which were pretty much the only other work I’d ever done.

I distinctly recall arriving at The Tidewater News for my interview and being ushered into Publisher Hanes Byerly’s wood-paneled office. I’d brought my resumé and a copy of a paper I’d written in high school, the last time I’d had an English course.

Mr. Byerly was understandably focused on my lack of experience, and he dismissively pushed my high school paper back across his desk after I’d given it to him to prove my writing talent.

“We work on deadlines here,” he said. “You might have worked on this paper for weeks.”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t know if it will help my case, but I can tell you that I’ve always worked under pressure, because I’ve always put my papers off until the last minute.”

I don’t know whether this confession helped me or not, but he then asked me what turned out to be the last three questions of the interview.

Can you spell? I’m a great speller, I said, fully expecting a test to follow.

Can you type? Of course, I can type, I lied. I’d never typed a paper in my life. That’s why I had a mother and girlfriends. But I’d just picked up a typing textbook, and I was certain I’d be able to learn to type over the weekend.

“How fast can you type?” he asked me. “Hmm, about 20 words a minute?” “So, you can’t type.”

And then, finally, the question that got me the job: “The job pays $25 a day. Are you still interested?”

Since I was living with my parents at the time and had absolutely no concept of what a reasonable pay rate should have been at the time, I figured I had exactly the qualifications needed for the job, after all.

I wasn’t ready to be a newspaper reporter, but I’d learn to be one on the job, right along with learning to type on deadline.

Living life on mission as a follower of Jesus has a lot in common with the experience I had as a cub reporter at The Tidewater News.

We begin our Christian lives with no experience in what it means to follow Jesus. We’re unqualified for the work He has for us until God MAKES us qualified. We have certain talents and gifts that can help us achieve what He’s set out for us, but they’re not enough without the power of the Holy Spirit working within us.

At my first newspaper, what it took for me to become an effective journalist was training. For the follower of Jesus, what it takes to become an effective witness is sanctification.

Now, please understand that sanctification and training are not the same thing, though training of a sort is PART of the process of sanctification.

In the passage we’re going to look at today from Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer in chapter 17 of the Gospel of John, we’re going to see our Savior pray for His followers to be sanctified FOR the work that Jesus sends them to do.

They’re SET APART for that work. They’re trained for it. They’ve been given the example of Jesus to follow in it. And they’ve been sent to DO it.

Let’s look at verses 17 through 19 of chapter 17 this morning.

John 17:17–19 NASB95

17 “Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth. 18 “As You sent Me into the world, I also have sent them into the world. 19 “For their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they themselves also may be sanctified in truth.

Now, you might recall that in this portion of His prayer on the night of His unjust arrest, Jesus prayed for His disciples. He’d already prayed for Himself.

And in the passage we studied last week, we saw that He began the portion of His prayer that was devoted to His disciples by asking God to keep them from the power of Satan, to give them unity of purpose and love, and to give them joy.

And as I mentioned last week, all three of those things are dependent upon the disciples’ connection to God’s word — both His word in Scripture and His incarnate Word, Jesus Christ.

And, just as they would be kept from Satan’s attacks, kept in unity, and kept in joy through their connection to the Word of God, so are we.

But God’s word is also the key to our sanctification, and that’s what Jesus is concerned with in this part of His prayer.

Now the term “sanctification” means to set apart for God’s service. Both sanctification and holiness come from the same root word, so they’re closely related.

In the Old Testament, priests were sanctified or consecrated for their work in the temple. So were the temple furnishings.

The people of Israel were called to be sanctified, as well, which brings up another dimension of meaning: They were called to be holy, to be morally upright, obeying the commandments of God so that they’d be different — set apart — from the people of the pagan cultures that surrounded them.

As God said to Moses in Exodus, chapter 19:

Exodus 19:5–6 NASB95

5 ‘Now then, if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, then you shall be My own possession among all the peoples, for all the earth is Mine; 6 and you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words that you shall speak to the sons of Israel.”

It’s important to note that the holiness of the people of Israel — to the extent that they ever WERE holy — was directly related and inextricably connected to the holiness of God.

As God said in Leviticus, chapter 19, “You shall be holy, for I, the Lord, your God, am holy.”

God’s holiness is part of His character. But the people of Israel could only be holy through their relationship with Him. He was both the source of their holiness and the reason they SHOULD be holy.

And what we see in Jesus’ prayer is that nothing has changed regarding sanctification between the Old and New Testaments.

God is still the source of sanctification for followers of Jesus. And the holiness of Jesus is the REASON believers should desire sanctification. He is holy, so we who call Him our Lord and Savior should be holy.

The only difference between sanctification in the Old Testament and sanctification in the New Testament is that now we have the Bible and the example of Jesus’ life to show us what it really looks like to BE holy.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself here. First, it’s important to note what Jesus DIDN’T mean when He asked His Father to sanctify the disciples in the truth.

He DIDN’T mean that they should withdraw from the world. Remember, He’d already said He wasn’t asking God to take them OUT of the world, but to protect them from Satan, and to give them unity and joy, while they were IN the world.

Sanctification isn’t simply being set apart. It’s being set apart FOR service to God.

And we can only be of service to God to the degree that we are connected to His word.

First, we have to be connected to Him whom John describes as THE Word, the incarnate Jesus Christ. He is the image of the invisible God, the perfect representation of God’s character in human flesh.

The Bible tells us we are all born as slaves to sin. We have within us a sin nature that’s inherited from Adam, and we all confirm that nature by sinning in big ways and small ways.

Only the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit, who comes to live within us when we place our faith in Jesus, can make any significant difference regarding our relationship to sin.

We’re not called to clean ourselves up before coming to Jesus. In fact, we CAN’T. Jesus calls each one of us AS WE ARE, and then He CHANGES us by His Holy Spirit. So, if we’re not following Jesus, we can never really BE like Jesus.

He is the Word made flesh. And He is the way, the TRUTH, and the life. And so, our sanctification can only take place to the extent that we remain IN Him, to the extent that we believe in Him and are walking in His light and following His commandments.

For us as modern believers, with Jesus no longer physically present, that means studying God’s word so we can know the truth about what it means to follow Jesus.

This is a major theme of His prayer. Our trinitarian God has given us the Bible to teach us about Himself and about ourselves. He’s given us His Word to as a manual for life.

And if we’re going to be IN the world but not OF the world, as Jesus put it in the verses we looked at last week, then we need a manual to get it right.

Yesterday, Michael and I set up a new screen in one of the classrooms in this building. Now, there’s not much to setting up a television. In our case, all we had to do was attach a couple of feet to the bottom of the screen.

But after getting one of the feet attached, Michael asked me, “Is the long part supposed to face the front or the back?”

Well, I had no idea. But when we looked at the manual, we saw that it gave us the answer as clear as day.

Folks, you can’t expect to understand God or to know His will for you or to know how to live a godly life if you’re not reading the manual, if you’re not being sanctified — trained in this case — in the truth.

And remember that there’s a purpose for this training, and it’s not so we can be all self-righteous. The purpose for the training is so that we, like the disciples in verse 19, can be SENT.

The Christian life should be a life on mission. And the mission field is everywhere outside of those doors.

Look back at that verse from Exodus, chapter 19. God called His chosen people to be a holy nation and a kingdom of priests.

They were being set apart by Him for service TO Him. And their service TO Him would take place as their obedience to His commandments resulted in blessings that caused others outside of Israel to seek God.

Just as the priests of Israel drew the people of Israel to worship God, the people of Israel were called to draw the nations to worship Him.

Sadly, that’s not what happened. But, praise be to God, then Jesus came, and He was the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets.

HE is the new High Priest, and we who follow Him in faith are the new kingdom of priests, charged with the same duty that the people of Israel were charged with.

Here’s how the Apostle Peter puts it, in 1 Peter, chapter 2:

1 Peter 2:9 NASB95

9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light;

Do you see the “so that” clause there? Peter had clearly been listening as Jesus prayed during the Last Supper.

For we who’ve turned to Jesus in faith, our salvation AND our sanctification have the same purpose: to proclaim the excellencies of our Savior so that others might come to a saving knowledge of Him.

So, the purposes of salvation and sanctification are the same. And so is the basis of salvation and sanctification. Look at verse 19.

“For their sakes, I sanctify myself,” Jesus prays here. In other words, I sanctify myself FOR THEM.

Now, this doesn’t mean that Jesus needed to become holier. He is and always has been perfectly holy.

Remember that in just a few hours, Jesus would be arrested, given a sham trial, and then brutally murdered. And I think what He had in mind here was to consecrate His impending sacrifice.

Much as the firstborn of Israel’s flocks were consecrated to God for sacrifice, Jesus was devoting His very death to God so that God could use it to bring salvation to all who turned to Jesus in faith.

The 11 disciples who remained in that upper room at the time of this prayer had all believed in Jesus. But their sins still demanded justice, just the same as your sins and mine.

And at the cross, when Jesus, the sinless one, took upon Himself the sins of all mankind — and their just punishment — He made a way for us to be forgiven.

He took upon Himself the penalty WE owe for our sins so that all who repent and believe in Him can be welcomed into the Kingdom of God as adopted sons and daughters.

Because Jesus was sanctified, then all who turn their lives over to Him can also be sanctified.

And just as HE was sent to draw humanity to God by demonstrating the character of God, WE are sent to draw others to God by demonstrating the character of Jesus. By our sanctification. By our holiness. By our obedience.

He is our example, and the Holy Spirit is our trainer.

Folks, things might be a lot easier for us if we COULD just move to an island together and wait for Jesus to return. But that’s not the life He called His disciples to, and it’s not the life He calls you to if you’re a believer.

He’s left us IN the world as His new kingdom of priests. And, just like me in that first job as a reporter, none of us is worthy of this calling. And none of us is qualified for this calling.

But the calling is the same, regardless of our unworthiness or our lack of qualifications.

The good news is that, UNLIKE my early days in the newspaper business, we have the Holy Spirit within us as a helper — training us in righteousness, making us more like Jesus, and empowering us to do what we couldn’t do otherwise.

To the degree that we submit to the Spirit’s work within us, we are changed, we are empowered, and we are motivated to go and do what we’ve been created as new creatures to do: to witness to the grace and glory of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Maybe you’ll go to Haiti or Portugal or some other far away place to do that one day. I sincerely hope so, because I’ve seen and experienced the change that can take place among those who take short-term mission trips.

But the mission field isn’t only overseas. It’s in Whaleyville and Holland and Carrollton and every other place your feet or your wheels can take you.

It’s in the office and it’s in school. It’s at your family reunion and with your neighbors and friends as you sit around the fire pit.

For the Christian who’s walking in truth, the mission field is everywhere and all the time. Which means that your holiness isn’t something you should be putting on just for Sundays, like a special suit.

If your life looks just like the lives of your lost friends and family, why would they ever want to turn to Jesus?

Be holy. Be sanctified in the truth. Take seriously your commission as one sent into the world with the good news of Jesus Christ.

The lost world desperately needs to see Him, and YOU might be the only Jesus they ever see.