You look just like your father. I've heard that since I was a young person, and I never really fully understood it. And I never really appreciated it either. I sort of felt I was an individual. I was unique. I was distinct. And I didn't really think that was such a compliment. But as I've grown older, I can see now more what people were getting at because occasionally I look in the mirror and I'm startled because I see my father. And I'm just amazed by that transformation. Now, in his later years, my father had his hair permed. I don't think I'm going to do that. But I do see the resemblance now. But my point in bringing that to your attention is that if we are followers, of our father in heaven, we are meant to look like our father. We are meant to be able to have people look at us and say, wow, you look just like your father. The old Puritan author and preacher Thomas Watson writes that sanctification is a principle of grace whereby the heart becomes holy and is made after God's own heart. A sanctified person bears not only God's name, but his image. I want to talk with you this morning about that process, the process of sanctification. The process of sanctification in the life of the believer is inseparably linked to having saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. According to Romans, Chapter 8, verses 28, 29, and 30. We've looked at those verses several times this fall. All those whom God calls, all those whom God justifies, all those whom God has predestined are ultimately given all of those graces. and all of those blessings for one supreme reason, one purpose, and that is to conform them to the image of Jesus Christ, to be made to look like Christ. The word sanctify means to set apart or to separate. And as the Lord unfolds the benefits of salvation in the lives of his children, God sets them apart by separating them from the sin that so easily entangles and by giving them a hunger for holiness. to help us better understand what sanctification is and what our role is in participating with the Holy Spirit in this purifying process. I want to invite you, please, to open your Bibles to 1 Thessalonians 5, verse 23. You'll find it on page 988 if you want to use one of the Bibles in the seat in front of you. But I've mentioned to you before the wonderful example of the Thessalonian believers and the way in which the testimony of their faith became well known throughout the surrounding region as they turned away from idols and began to serve the living God. Early in this letter that Paul writes to the believers in Thessalonica, he commends the Thessalonians for their faith, their work of faith, their labor of love, and their steadfastness of hope in the Lord Jesus Christ. And Paul is just filled with thanksgiving for these brothers and sisters because of the way in which they embrace the Word of God. for what it is. Accepting it, Paul says, not as the word of men, but what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in believers. As Paul brings this first letter to the Thessalonians to a close, he offers a beautiful prayer for them, which we sometimes use as a benediction at the end of our services. And Paul's beautiful benediction details for us the sanctification process. So if you read with me verse 23, it says, Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely. And may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful, and he will surely do it. If you look at that very short selection, you see that sanctification is God's work. It is the work of the Holy Spirit who lives inside all believers. Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you. God does this work himself. God does not delegate the work of sanctification to an angel or to an apostle or to some other intermediary. God does not accomplish his work by some kind of distant decree. No, God does this work himself directly in our lives through his own action, through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. And through the ministry of the Holy Spirit, believers are privileged to enjoy the blessings. of sanctification. And I want to assure you this morning that growing in holiness is a privilege. It's not a drudgery. It's not a duty. There are those who may wonder why they should not live life like they want, on their own terms, in their own way, and then turn to Christ at the last minute and cash in on all the blessings and benefits of salvation like the thief on the cross. but they have no idea what they are missing out on. For one thing, it's rarely clear when that last minute is coming. But more importantly, those in whom the Holy Spirit is actively at work, they live with an ongoing confidence and an assurance that they belong to Christ. If God is doing his sanctifying work in you, you have assurance that your eternal destiny is never in doubt, your salvation is assured, and the Holy Spirit works to ensure that you will never deny that Jesus is the Son of God and that Jesus has come in the flesh. That is what is described in scripture as the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. That is described as the unforgivable sin, to deny that Jesus is the Son of God and that Jesus has come in the flesh. All those who have the Holy Spirit have the assurance they're never going to do that. They're never going to Step over that line. All those in whom the Holy Spirit is at work are ultimately kept and preserved from abandoning themselves again to a life of iniquity and the devil's destructive agenda. If you enjoy the privilege of the Spirit's presence, you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world. In his prayer for the Thessalonians, Paul prays now, may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely. Now that word completely could cause a moment of confusion if we don't stop to understand what Paul is getting at here. The word that's translated for us as completely is a compound word that means all the way to the finish. May God sanctify you all the way to the finish line. May God sanctify you all the way through. May no part of you, your spirit, your soul, your body, be left untouched and unaffected by God's sanctifying grace. In sanctification, we don't become perfect, sinlessly perfect in an instant. No, as we've seen before, God's purpose in saving us is to make us increasingly like Christ as we are transformed from one degree of glory to another. Yes, indeed, the ultimate goal of our redemption is to make us completely like Christ. And the time is coming when we will be sinlessly perfect, and even the possibility of sinning will be removed from us. But none of us will reach that goal in this life. However, When you respond to God's call with faith and repentance, when you are justified on account of Christ's righteousness, when you are adopted into God's family, Jesus' Spirit begins to renew you and to remake you and to reshape you in the way of obedience. The Holy Spirit works to strip away from us our sinful habits, our sinful inclinations, bit by bit, step by step. It's kind of like peeling back the layers of an onion. That's the Holy Spirit peeling away the sinful actions, attitudes, thoughts, words in our hearts. In salvation, the Holy Spirit unites you to Christ on the basis of Jesus' death. and resurrection, your old self is crucified. It's put to death. Your body of sin is destroyed. Sin is no longer your slave master. With Christ, you are raised from death to life, and you become a new creature, a new creation in Christ. You have a new master. You are under new management. And the Holy Spirit gives you a new plan and a new power that enables you to press forward in the Christian life, to obey Christ. and to be made more and more like Jesus. Romans 8-11 tells us, if the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his spirit who dwells in you. The blessing of sanctification brings you out of your slavery to sin and enables you to live in alignment with the purposes and the precepts for which God designed you. For everyone who is born again, the Holy Spirit becomes the controlling and the driving force in that person's life. But Being set free from the power of sin and sin's defilement does not eliminate from the heart and life of the believer all of our sin. Sanctification is God's work, but we must still deal with it. and contend with indwelling sin, sin that's still living within us. And until these sin-stained, sin-scarred, sin-corrupted earthly bodies are transformed to become like Christ-glorified bodies, until this corruptible body puts on incorruption, until this mortal body puts on immortality, It will deal with all the fallout and all the effects of indwelling sin. You see, all sin is a contradiction of God's holiness. The nature and the character of sin does not change because the person in whom it dwells and by whom it is committed is a believer. Yes, we have a new relationship with God through Christ. Yes, we are no longer under condemnation. And praise God, the judicial wrath of God no longer rests upon us because of Jesus' triumph. Jesus is our advocate with the Father. And the Holy Spirit alongside of Jesus, who indwells us, is also our advocate, working on our behalf. But nonetheless, The sin that remains inside of us prevents us from looking fully like our Father. The sin that remains in us justly deserves our Father's wrath, our Father's displeasure. So we must never take sin for granted. We must never make alliances or treaties with our sin. Well, I can do this. I can get away with that as long as I don't cross this one arbitrary line that I establish for myself. We must never become content with the status quo of sin and make excuses for ourselves like, well, Nobody's perfect or, well, it's just the way I am. We must not indulge sin. We must not take grace for granted. We should do what the Apostle John encourages us and calls us to do in 1 John 3, 3, and get on board with the sanctifying work of God. He says, everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself as he is pure. We need to align ourselves with God's program and, in every way possible, resist the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the boastful pride of life. I want you to listen to how the Apostle Paul expresses the agony of his heart and the tension that exists within him because of the conflict and the contradiction he experiences between the new creation he is in Christ and the remaining sin that plagues his soul. This is Romans 7, beginning in verse 19. Paul says, For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now, if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Oh, wretched man that I am. Who will deliver me from this body of death? I think if we all take time, if we all look inside, if we are honest with ourselves, we will all identify with what Paul is pouring out from his heart for us here. This tension, this contradiction inside of us. The more you grasp God's majesty, the more you love the Lord, the greater your yearning to grab hold of the high prize and the high calling in Christ Jesus will be, as the more conscious you will be of the gravity of the sin which remains in you, the more you will detest it. The more you will hate it, the more you will mourn over and be grieved by it. The more you will cry out with Isaiah of old, woe is me for I am undone because I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips. The more you will resonate with the words of Job when he says, I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes see you. Therefore, I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes. The more you identify with the holiness of God, the less self-complacent you will become about your sin. The more you hunger and thirst for the righteousness of Christ, the more you will understand and pursue the standard that Jesus calls us to in his Sermon on the Mount when he says, you, therefore, must be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect. an impossible standard for any of us to attain, but a calling that we have and an empowering that we have because of Christ to set the orientation of our life in that direction. We must cultivate a growing appreciation of the fact that Even though sin remains within us, it no longer has mastery over us. There is a total difference between surviving sin and reigning sin. It is one thing for us to live with sin. It is quite another thing indeed for us to live in sin. So if you are in Christ, sin does not have dominion over you. Sin does not have authority over you. All the power of God's redeeming, regenerative, and sanctifying grace, it has been unleashed on your behalf. You are a temple. You are a dwelling place for the Holy Spirit of God. You are not your own. You are bought with a price. Christ is in you, the hope of glory. Again, Paul in Romans 6, 12, he says, let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body to make you obey its passions. Do not present the members of your body to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life and your members to God as instruments of righteousness. God's sanctifying grace extends to every part of us, the body, which thinks and feels and acts in response to the holiness of the inner person that the Spirit is uncovering within us. As we've seen throughout the fall, each and every facet of God's saving work, there is a mystery here. Though we do not sanctify ourselves, although it is God who sanctifies us, our participation, our cooperation is enlisted to the fullest extent in the sanctification process. And from a human standpoint, it is completely impossible to understand how this symbiosis works. On the one hand, our text for this morning from 1 Thessalonians, it cries out, Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you. He who calls you is faithful. He will surely do it. On the other hand, Paul exhorts you in Philippians 2.12 to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure. We may not understand how the Holy Spirit does what he does in us to conform us to the image of Christ and as he draws us toward holiness, yet sanctification is not an unconscious, subconscious process in which you play no part. You cannot, you must not rely on your own strength, your own resolution, your own purpose for salvation and sanctification. You are saved by grace alone through faith and you are kept. by grace alone through faith. Bearing that in mind will help you to keep a keen and a sharp focus on just how helpless you are, how humble you are, how dependent, how needy, how weak you are. Yet God calls you to work out what he is working in you. And the beauty and the benefit of cultivating and holding on to that mindset and Scripture's promises is that it will help you to come to terms with just how weak you are in the flesh and how strong you can be in the Spirit. Remember, how weak you are will cause you to grab hold of the Spirit's power. It will cause you to work in cooperation in conjunction with the Spirit to cut the legs off of anything within you that smacks of self-righteousness and pride. You will stop putting confidence in your own lists of do's and don'ts or trying to make other people measure up to your own standards because any Such thinking, that is just a huge red flag that pride is gaining the upper hand in you. So we need to embrace the humility and contrition the Holy Spirit promotes, confess and forsake all of our sinful, disfiguring behavior, and then depend upon the Holy Spirit to enable us to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. You are not a passive spectator in this process. You are not one who sits on the sidelines cheering God on, because God works, you work. It is God who works in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure. You must work out what God works in. When you work out your salvation, In that kind of way, the words workout always bring to my mind the whole idea of some sort of exercise routine. The more you work out a muscle, the stronger and the more flexible it becomes, the more instant, the more reflexive its action becomes, the better able the muscle is to respond properly when any demand is made of it. And the more persistently active you are in working out what God works into you, the more aware, the more persuaded you will become that all of that energizing grace, all of that power that you experience, it's coming straight from God. The sanctifying grace God gives us, it touches every dimension of our life. Paul says, God's work within us touches the spirit and it touches the body, it touches the soul, it touches us in the physical dimension of our lives. Sanctification is not just some sort of ethereal, obscure process, it's real, it's concrete, it's practical, it's grounded in our physical, earthly nature. However, we should be quick to note that in sanctification, God works from the inside out, not the other way around. God does not begin by modifying our outward behavior. God begins by making changes, changes in our mind, changes in our heart, changes that show themselves to be real by the way that they reshape our attitudes and our actions. and our affections. And as God keeps on in this process, as God works within us and as we work out what God works in, we make it our aim to develop a deeper and clearer focus of thought and interest and heart and mind and will and purpose to set our focus on the prize of the high calling we have in Christ Jesus. And so as we do this, we need to keep the end in view. We need to keep our eyes on the prize. Keep your whole spirit, soul, and body focused on taking advantage and making use of all the rich resources that God makes available to you for this process and for achieving His good pleasure in you. All the means of grace, the ministry of the word, participation in the ordinances, prayer, fellowship, growing grace, Receive what Christ graciously grants you through His Spirit. Remember your weakness. Remember your need, remember your dependence, and make the spirit an attitude that keeps pushing you forward in the Christian life, the same attitude that Paul discloses about himself when he writes to the Philippians, not that I've already obtained this, or I'm already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own, but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. There's a couple very important takeaways for us there that we need to just tuck away and have go with us this morning. Paul says he's forgetting what lies behind. Forget about any past sin. Forget about Satan wagging his finger and making accusations against you. All that is designed to discourage you and defeat you. I mean, think of what Paul had to forget that lay behind him. He killed Christians. forgetting what lies behind, but also forgetting, forgetting any sense of victory, sense of accomplishment, not resting on your laurels, not everything. I got that one licked. I've arrived. No, no, you've never arrived and you never will arrive until you cross the line from this life into the next. So forgetting what lies behind and pressing on towards the goal, he says, I'm straining forward. I'm straining forward to what lies ahead. When you fall flat on your face, and we all do, welcome God's grace to get up and to get back in the race. Pursue the holiness without which no one will see God. Pray with Paul to be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. And by blameless, the word there means to have an integrity, to have an intact, undamaged self to move forward with. Sanctification is an ongoing and a beautiful reality in the lives of all who belong to God through faith in Jesus Christ. Sanctification is God's priority for all who belong to him. Sanctification is God's will for his children. And so if you belong to God through faith in Jesus Christ, then sanctification is really what you're living for. For the child of God, there is no other goal, no other goal in life than to be more like Jesus. Let's pray about that. God, as we think about these things this morning, and we think about your high and holy call in our lives, we pray that you would continue to give us a great hunger, a great zeal to pursue them, to follow after them. And also, Lord, that we would know the power at work within us, not something we manufacture, not something we gut out or make happen, but a power that comes to us from outside and works within us to make us more like Christ, to push away the sin, to cause us to hunger for holiness. I want to pray this morning that you would just continue to help us as a people, to be the people that you have died to make us to become, the people that you rose from the dead to make us become. Lord, that we would bring you the glory and the honor that you alone deserve. As we come to your table this morning, as we feast again on the elements that you have for us here, we pray that this meal would indeed renew us in our faith, would renew us in our resolve, it would strengthen us in our desire and ability to follow after you in these things. In Jesus' name, amen.