#sancification

[tullos]

Approachable

We can approach Him. To do so is to be rescued from the typical  and baptized into the extraordinary. We can come boldly because He replaced the burden of our shame with the throne of grace. May we not miss the bliss of God’s pleasure and purpose in our calling. We can run to him for mercy in our time of need. Unlike some who treat God as an angry tyrant, we know the truth. He is Abba, our loving…

Approachable

[tdstasko]

The church is to be set apart (sanctified) not by possessing a special religious piety but by participating in and manifesting the perfect eternal love of God.

Gregory A. Boyd, Repenting of Religion

[davebinggeli]

‘Accounted Righteous before God’

The Reformer’s past-tense juridical language (‘accounted righteous’) easily led to the objection that the moral renewal of humankind was unimportant to them. This was especially the case in the context of progressive (or factitive) justification (ie. becoming righteous), dominant in mediaeval discussions. 

O’Donovan, though, points out the importance of the finality of the Reformer’s metaphor (it was, after all, taken from the Apostle Paul). Jesus, having been risen and ascended, denotes finality, completeness and victory!

“We must say that all is finished and complete. The sanctification of the many can do no more than realize the implications of what has already been accomplished. The coming of the Spirit to struggle with the flesh is simply a communication of the triumph that is won for all time. The doctrine of representation permits us to say no less and no more. What God does for the individual believer, then, is not a new and different work, a further ‘making righteous’, but an application of the one complete work, a ‘counting’ of this believer into the righteous Kingdom already established and in place. In saying that we are counted righteous, the Reformers did not challenge the link between salvation and wholeness; they challenged the restriction of salvation to the sphere of the individual soul. We cannot comprehend justification in terms of what God does for each soul; for what transpires within that private sphere is but the expression of a public work upon the widest cosmic front already achieved: the redemption of the human race.”

[davebinggeli]

The ultimate goal of sanctification and discipleship is to shape us into a certain kind of person: one who is like Jesus, exhibiting the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22–23), loving God and neighbor, caring for the orphan, the widow, and the stranger (Jer. 22:3; James 1:27). He has shown us what is good and what the Lord requires of us: to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God (Mic. 6:8). These are all just translations of the broader human vocation, which is to bear the image of Christ as renewed image bearers of God. The primary aim of discipleship is to create a certain kind of person who acts in a certain way, not someone who simply thinks in a certain way. According to the Scriptures, knowing the truth is only instrumental to ultimately doing the truth... Our corporate worship should be aimed at constituting us as disciples who are countercultural agents of redemption. Communion and confession, foot washing and economic redistribution are ways of practicing what it means to be citizens of the kingdom. And such practices inscribe this telos of the kingdom into our character. Christian worship is one of the primary arenas in which we participate in the practices that shape who we are. If our worship simply mimics the disciplinary practices and goals of a consumer culture, we will not be formed otherwise. Conceiving of the church as a disciplinary society aimed at forming human beings to reflect the image of Christ, we will offer an alternative society to the hollow formations of late-modern culture.

Who's Afraid of Post-Modernism? J.K.A. Smith

[thereis-hope-blog]

See that no one repays anyone evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to everyone.

1 Thessalonians 5:15 (ESV)