I'll make a confession from the get-go. I am the one who is responsible for that long-winded confession of faith. Because today we are going to discuss sanctification and the good news of sanctification. We began a sermon series just recently at Trinitas Church in First Corinthians, and this is the second installment of it. The first one considered what it meant for the Apostle Paul to call people to faith in Christ who were members of the Jewish synagogue in the city of Corinth. This sermon, which is focused on the scriptures we're about to read, focuses really more on what it would have meant for Paul to call people to faith in Christ who were, say, Gentile natives of the city of Corinth. And what we're going to discover is that the good news that we preach doesn't simply center on justification that we're forgiven of our sins, but on sanctification. The good news that in Christ we are made holy. So please open your Bibles with me to first Corinthians. We're going to read chapter one, verses one through three, rather short reading today. And I do have to confess. I often forget whether it's your custom here to say, thanks be to God again. Okay. So look at that. Well done. Um, I normally say, this is God's word at Trinitas and people respond. Thanks be to God. And so let's do the same thing here. 1 Corinthians 1, verses 1-3. Paul, called as an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God and Sosthenes, our brother, to the church of God which is at Corinth, to those who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, saints by calling, with all who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, their Lord and ours. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. This is God's word. May be seated. What I'm going to do for a moment here is take a look at this city of Corinth. Try to acquaint ourselves with a city that most of us would not be able to find on a world map. A city that in many ways seems more ancient and mythical than it seems like reality. This city of Corinth sits in the modern country of Greece. In biblical times, it was called Achaia. And it was more like a state of the Roman Empire than it was anything else. The city of Corinth actually sat on a geographical piece of land called an isthmus. If you don't know what an isthmus is, think of Panama and the Panama Canal. Think of a little strip of land that connects two larger pieces of land. And one of the most distinctive features, of course, therefore, of this isthmus is that on both sides of it there sat harbors, through which incredible amounts of commerce and trade and travel would take place. On the east side of the city, you had the harbor of Sencreia. And from that harbor, you would have just about a straight shot to Italy, and then up the eastern side of Italy, you'd end up in Rome. On the western side of this isthmus, you had the harbor of Lycaon. And from there, you would have a virtual straight shot if you were to go eastward, or rather, west, yeah, eastward, and you would end up in the city of Ephesus. This city, therefore, was of no small significance historically. In fact, this isthmus at its most narrow point was less than four and a half miles long, and a classic road called the Diakalos extended from east to west. So if you were trading goods or you're trying to move goods from one side of the empire to the other, you might stop in Corinth, unload some things there for Greece and Macedonia, and then cross that highway to another ship which would take them to the western side of the empire. Historically, the significance of this city was recognized for several thousand years. It happened to find itself on the wrong side of a military conflict with the Roman Empire in about 146 and got demolished. But in 44 BC, this city was rebuilt by Julius Caesar, specifically because of the great strategic value of this location. What he ended up doing is repopulating the city after it was rebuilt with, first off, freedmen. Those would be slaves who had been manumitted and wanted to start a new life. They would go to this city of Corinth. He also populated it with veterans, men who had done much in service for the empire, and as a sort of debt of gratitude, they were given some piece of land or property in this city of Corinth. And the third type of person who would settle there were urban tradespersons, who well understood what an important port city this would be. Eventually, this city became a center of trade and immigration, and the center of the Roman Empire in the land of Greece. In fact, it was made the capital, the Roman capital of Achaia, or Greece. If you were to look into the culture of this city, you would see this, and most historians and Bible commentators will point you to this again and again. It was a culture of recreation, indulgence, moral relativism, and pragmatism. You see, when cities are booming and doing well, these are the sorts of things that people do. They find themselves looking for things to do with their money. How to indulge it. You find that those who are considered great are those who are successful in pragmatism. If it works, well then, let's do it. That rule rules the day. What we discover, therefore, when we look at the city, we would have known as much by just ancient records, but when we look at it archaeologically, we can find old, massive amphitheaters where people would gather for the arts and for plays. We find a thriving market. where service and trade were prominent aspects of it. We also find that every four years in between the Olympic Games, the city of Corinth actually hosted an international set of games, kind of like the world championships of track, you know, it goes in between Olympic years. They had these games called the Isthmian Games. Every year after the Olympic Games and before the next Olympic Games, so it'd be like if the Olympics were 2000, you'd have the Isthmian Games in 2001 and 2003. There would be massive influx of people there to see the greatest athletes in the world show their skills in this city of Corinth. You also find pagan temples of all kinds throughout this city. No shortage of opportunity not only to worship false gods, but also to do engage in all of the sorts of activities which normally accompanied that sort of worship. usually indulgence of alcohol and food, and of course, prostitution was prominent as well in all of these temples. In fact, the crown jewel of Corinth in the secular mind was this incredible temple to Aphrodite. It sat on a tall protrusion of land that sat to the south of the city called the Acrocorinth. It bolts out of the ground like a mesa, if you can think of what it looks like in the southern part of the United States, these just massive pieces of land that just shoot out from the relative level of all the land around it. There, this worship of Aphrodite would, of course, especially be marked by prostitution of various kinds. Aphrodite was, in fact, the goddess of love, but it would be more accurately to say that she was the goddess of sensuality. What this makes for is this, when you tie it all together. In the ancient world, they actually had a saying. They would call you a Corinthian if you were engaged in scandalous sexual behavior anywhere in the Roman Empire. They'd say, well, aren't you a Corinthian? That was the reputation that this city had made for itself. We don't tend to speak in those sorts of generalizations today in the same sort of way. We are a little bit more concerned about sounding prejudiced, but I'll bet you probably have certain stereotypes in your mind of what people are like from, say, Southern California, or maybe Los Angeles in particular. We don't tend to speak in those terms anymore, but we still have the term. It's a bit archaic. We might call someone a Philistine if they're a bit rough around the edges, kind of a bull in a china shop sort of a person, right? We still have that, at least back in the annals of how we once spoke. I want you to consider something, therefore, if the very name Corinthian had these scandalous connotations to it. Consider what it might have meant For Paul to write a letter to people living in this city and to say, Paul, called as an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God and Sosthenes, our brother, to the church of God, which is at Corinth, to those who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, saints by calling. What would it have meant to have been a part of this widely regarded, scandalous people? What would it have meant to be called a saint, a holy one? For many of us, the very definition of this term saint is a bit nebulous. We're not really sure what it means. In fact, in the Greek language, the word for saint, the word for sanctification, and the word for holy all come from the same root. And when used of people, being called holy or being called a saint means at least three things. To begin with, it means to be cleansed. All throughout the Old Testament, objects would be sanctified or cleansed so that they could be put in service to the Lord in God's temple. To be sanctified means to be cleansed and to be holy. not only means cleansing or removal, it also means renewal or restoration. Once again, the pictures in the Old Testament are powerful. If a person were to touch a dead body, they would be defiled. And they had to be cleansed, cleaned, which would not only take away defilement, but it would restore a person to fellowship and community. It would renew them to their ability to go and interact with the common man. Until then, they would have to remain outside of the city. Cleansing and renewal are implied in this term, holy. But I'll note something else as well. The concept of being dedicated or set apart for special purposes and special uses is inherent to the meaning of the word saint, sanctification, and holy. We noted today in our confession of faith that there is a remarkable difference between sanctification and justification, and it is this. We will preach again and again and indeed every Sunday that you are forgiven by God for all of your sins by grace through faith alone and nothing else. Forgiveness is a free gift. But there's more to what we believe than that. If justification is being forgiven of our sins, sanctification is being enabled to defeat our sins. It is the ability to triumph over our deepest and darkest sinful inclinations in our being. Sanctification is about our sinful nature being defeated and not just forgiven. There's a remarkable thing in terms of how this opening statement might have sounded to all of the Corinthians, and it speaks to two errors that we all run into when it comes to the concept of sainthood. There were undoubtedly certain people who heard this greeting, this greeting to the saints in Corinth and said, oh my goodness, I am not a saint. Are you kidding me? Paul must not be speaking to me. I am no saint. I am certainly not holy. I am certainly not clean. And I am definitely not special. set apart for anything special or abnormal. I just ask how many of you today would have trouble saying, I am holy, I am pure, I am fresh, and I am for special uses for my God and his purposes. How many of you would have trouble saying that? In fact, I'll bet you, if many people heard this statement in the ancient world, Corinthian saints, it would sound like a contradiction of terms. I struggle at ways to communicate this to you, but it'd be like if you heard someone say, St. Harvey Weinstein. Yes, holy Harvey. To how many of us does that sound like a perverse use of those two words and names in the same sentence? Surely many, many people in this big city did not consider themselves this way. for my wife and I's anniversary a weekend or two ago. We stayed downtown for a couple of nights so that we could, well, eat at some good restaurants without having to find parking. That's the best part about it. But see, when you're in the city, when you're in the city, what you discover very quickly is you see both the winners and the losers of a society in a way that you don't in the suburbs. You see people who have done very, very, very well, their successes, and you also see those who have, for lack of a better phrase, struck out at life. The fact of the matter is, is those in Corinth who became Christians were by and large those who had struck out. As Paul will say later in the same chapter, in verse 26, he will say, not many of you were wise, mighty, or noble. When I first came to you and preached the gospel and you believed. It's very hard to believe that you are of any special use to the Lord when you're not particularly wise, not particularly mighty, not particularly noble, and yet that's what Paul is saying. There's a second error that accompanies all talk about sanctification or holiness. Maybe sometimes you hear the statement that you are saints, holy ones, and your thought, whether you admit it or not, is, of course, I'm a saint, but I'm not so sure about fill in the blank. See, we are prone to erect different tiers of sainthood. We are prone to mark out in our own mind a sort of scale of winners and losers, not only in the world, but in the church. And you know what? The church can become a rather perverse, a rather perverse subculture that is no different from the world. People in the world can figure out that I've been unsuccessful in business, I've been unsuccessful in popularity and in fame and fortune in the eyes of the world, and they then look at the church and go, now this is a place where maybe I can be a winner. This is a place where maybe I can set myself apart from my peers as more holy, more humble, more knowledgeable, more righteous. And this place really just becomes a microcosm of the world in which we live. This is going to be one of the great struggles with which the Corinthians are struggling and that Paul is going to be discussing all throughout this book. But note what Paul emphasizes in his opening statement. He would have this church know. that they are saints by calling, and not just them, but with all who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that is sufficient to be a saint in the most basic sense of the word. Therefore, it's a status that belongs to all of us. We should be very clear, therefore, that if there's one error to which people are prone when it comes to the concept of sainthood, it is the reservation of that term for a select few. Inevitably, therefore, we are rather uncomfortable with the practice that is prevalent in the Roman Catholic Church of reserving the term saint for certain special people in the history of the church. It is a term that belongs to us all. And it ought not to be so reserved. So how, I ask you, Hope Presbyterian Church, do you speak about yourselves? And how do you speak about your brothers and sisters? Do we fall prey to this fundamental error, if not in our language, but in our hearts, of limiting this term of saint to any class of believers? What I want to do is consider this concept of sanctification in greater depth. I'm going to make four observations about it with you from our primary text here in 1 Corinthians, and I hope that we can reflect on the wonder of this term being used to describe not only you, but the person next to you in the pews in this church. My first observation for you goes like this. Sanctification is the ongoing fruit of God's powerful and loving attention. What this means for each one of us in this room is that we who have believed in Jesus Christ are the subjects of God's powerful and loving and special attention. Consider this with me. It comes out at the very beginning of this letter. Notice that Paul says that he has been called as an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God. And he says to the church, which is at Corinth, saints by calling. I want to talk to you about this term calling. Many of us know the story of Paul's calling to be an apostle. And it's an incredible one. You know, it has something to do with him virtually being knocked off of his horse. by an appearance of the risen Lord Jesus Christ. How many of us, when we hear that story, we go, it is patently obvious, it is undeniable, Paul was the special beneficiary of God's loving attention and calling. This guy, this guy was set apart for special uses. How many of you have no trouble coming to that conclusion? You actually recognize, as our confession speaks of it sometimes, that Paul's calling to be an apostle was not an invitation. Rather, it was what we call effectual calling. You just can't read his story and think that God meant to do anything but to select him, to set him apart for a special use, and that was his calling. But do you notice that in this passage, Paul says he was called to be an apostle and his audience was no less called to be saints. See, there's a sort of calling that goes out from God that's not an invitation. It is more like the command with which God called light to shine into darkness in the creation events. And how many of us could read Genesis 1 and think that God was inviting the light to shine in the darkness in Genesis 1 on day one of creation? We all know too well that it was in fact an effectual command. Let me read to you Paul's calling and I'm going to ask you if you notice any affinity with your own. We read in Acts 9, 3-7 that this occurred. He was traveling and it happened as he was approaching Damascus. And suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. And he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? We read this. The men who traveled with him stood speechless, hearing the voice, but seeing no one. Look at that. Only Paul can see and fully hear and understand, but the others can't. As this same story is described elsewhere in Acts 22 9, when Paul is telling it himself, he says, and those who were with me saw the light to be sure, but did not understand the voice of the one who was speaking with me. Paul sees, hears, and understands, but his companions are not given the same ability. Could you possibly read this passage and think that the same effectual calling is going out to everyone? As it goes on, Paul is actually told, and those who are to meet Paul are told, that Paul is actually not just being invited to be an apostle, but he is being chosen. The man that Paul is to meet, a guy named Ananias, is described this way in Acts 9.15. Jesus tells him, for Paul is a chosen instrument of mine to bear my name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel. He is a chosen instrument. As Paul tells his story, he says this, that Jesus said to him, there you will be told of all that has been appointed for you to do. Jesus says, for this purpose, I have appeared to you to appoint you a minister and a witness. My friends, it is rather clear that when Paul was so efficaciously called to his post as an apostle, it is as if a bright light began to shine in a multitude that was a spotlight on him, that gave him the ability to see his Lord and was a blinding light to all those around him. Would you believe it that whether or not these phenomenon accompanied your belief in Jesus Christ, A miracle no less profound occurred with each one of us in this room. It may have occurred in your adulthood when you heard the gospel preached for the first time at a youth event or an evangelistic rally. It could have happened at some undiscernible moment in your youth, or the moment your mom and dad told you about Jesus Christ and His status as a Savior. You never thought to disagree or disbelieve. But let us all be certain that we were set apart by God in his profound calling. And out of that flows a life of sanctification and holiness, a following after Jesus Christ. And it is no less miraculous than the calling of the apostle Paul. Many of you might say, how do I know that I'm the beneficiary of this effectual calling? Look what Paul says here. You are saints by calling with all who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Do you call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ? Do you do so in sincerity? Then take comfort that you have, you've been set apart by God's powerful and loving attention. You have God's full attention. Do you believe that? In fact, there is no other kind of attention that God can give his people. God is not a being made of parts such that he could have a degree of attention here or there. If you had the attention of the eternal God, you have his full attention. It's the only kind he has. It's saints by calling. Second thing I want to observe with you is that sanctification involves a physical change. We are all often inclined to speak about spiritual things as affecting our souls only, maybe just our mind, maybe just our wills. But theologians, particularly in the Reformed tradition, have always emphasized that sanctification is a holistic change of our entire natures. Let me explain what I mean. and Adam and Eve fell into sin, the effect, the corrupting effect was holistic. It affected every aspect of a person's nature. It affected our body, soul, and spirit, and it made all of them prone to confusion and to death and to sin. When we have this profound effectual call of which I just spoke, God enables us to believe in Jesus Christ, to receive forgiveness of sins, and to be sanctified and set on a course of holiness, and that solution must affect our entire person. It must therefore affect a physical change in us. Many of us will say, what in the world are you talking about, Brant? Are you saying my flesh began to glow when I believed in Jesus Christ? What do you mean? The answer is rather straightforward. See, our appetites for sin affect our mind, they affect our will, and they affect our bodies. All of these things. When we have been sanctified in Jesus Christ, we have been given fundamentally different appetites in our being which war against the sinful flesh that is in us. My friends, to be given an appetite is not just something in our mind. It is something that affects our very flesh in our bodies. It is a change. It is a miracle. It is no less wonderful than when Jesus Christ touches a man's eyes and enables him to see, or when he touches his ears and enables him to hear. For sinners to desire that which is good and holy is a change in our whole persons. The way that being born again is described in John 3 is like this, that which is born of flesh is flesh, that which is born of the spirit is spirit. We have appetites and inclinations in our whole person that are like unto our holy God and spirit. This is a wonderful truth. Not only do we have different appetites that we can act upon now, but as we progress in following Christ, And as we labor to pursue His character and nature, to be more like our Lord, to pick up our cross and follow Him, we actually form new habits in ourselves. And habits are also not just a mental or spiritual thing, they're a physical thing. That is why the science of psychology is valuable. Psychologists will explain to you that those who engage in rampant drug use, they form habits. They actually form what they call mental trenches in their brain, paths through which they are used to going down. For the synapses fire inside of this hardware in us, they're very hard to break. Sanctification is not just having new appetites. It is an ability to form new trenches, new habits, new regular ways of behaving. This, my friends, is a spiritual and physical change. You know, the wonderful truth of this remarkable change in all of us, this physical change, is nowhere more evident than your being here right now. If you call in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and you came to church this morning because of it, you will know that you are in a physically different place than you would have been otherwise. You would still be in your bed, or if we had a football team that was playing, you would be watching it. We're not for the fact that you were not only changed in your person, but as a result of that, you are in physically different places as a result. Note that the Apostle Paul calls this Corinthian group a church. Do you know what church means? It means an assembly. It's always ironic to me when I'll meet Christians who say they don't need to gather with other Christians when the very essence of the name church means an assembly, those who assemble together. Believe it or not, what we are here to do is we are here to form different habits. We go through a liturgy where we confess sin, where we respond to God's Word, where we are shaped and cut by His Word every Sunday, where we confess our faith, that these sorts of things might be the words on our lips, that we might be a different sort of people. You know, it's noteworthy that Paul opens his letter with the very basics. He gets it all in in this greeting. See, a typical Roman greeting would be something like greetings or grace to you. It's the word chairein. It's related to the word grace. Paul alters that, first of all, by making it sound more like the Jewish high priestly blessing. He says grace, charis, to you and peace. You know what we do at the end of the service? Make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. Gracious? Lift his countenance upon you and give you peace? But Paul doesn't just change it into a more Jewish sort of greeting, he makes it an explicitly Christian one. Grace and peace to you from our God, our Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ. We are here in a physically different place to form different habits, to be reminded that God loves us and has grace for us, and to have peace among us in Christ. That's what we're here for. My friends, would you believe that holiness and the pursuit thereof, being more like Jesus Christ, is the fundamental pursuit of believers in this life even more than anything else? Our comfort, our happiness, or even evangelism. Evangelism is a wonderful thing that we do as a church, but guess what? We might be bedridden someday. We might be put in jail like Paul was someday. We can still pursue the Christian life there because it's a calling to holiness. A calling to be more like our Lord and more like our Savior and more like our King. That's what it's a calling to be and to do so with gladness and to enjoy God forever, like our confession says, right? Let us consider a third aspect, therefore, of sanctification. Sanctification can only be pursued by reliance on the person of the Holy Spirit. I emphasize this because I will bet, if we're honest with ourselves, Every one of us at one point in our life has had the tendency to think of the Holy Spirit not as a person, but as an impersonal power or force. Have you ever thought of the Holy Spirit that way, as primarily an impersonal power or force resident in you and in others? My dad was raised in a heterodox cult called the Worldwide Church of God, where they explicitly taught that the Holy Spirit was not a person. Not only that, you might even look at this greeting and say, well, it does appear to me that the Holy Spirit is the most inconspicuous of the persons of the Trinity. He's not even mentioned in this greeting. The Father and the Son are mentioned. I got two persons of the Trinity. Where is the Spirit? Let me emphasize to you that never, never ever do Paul's greetings fail to implicitly mention the Holy Spirit. In this passage, it says, all who call in the name of the Lord are saints. 1 Corinthians 12.3 says no one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit. He's here, friends. Paul says grace to you. And the same Paul says in Romans 5.5, the love of God, the grace of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit. Paul says peace to you, and you would be mistaken if you thought of the peace that exists between us as being a mere condition or state of affairs. The peace of God we are told in Philippians 4, 7. will actively guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus, because let me make something clear to you. The peace of God is not a mere state of affairs. It is the divine third person of the Trinity, the spirit in whom we have a bond between us, the spirit who makes harmony in our midst, the spirit of God. And we must never make the mistake of regarding him as a real power or force, a drug, a feeling, or an energy. And I'll give you two reasons why we mustn't. Not only does the Bible teach that the spirit is a person, but let me make this clear. Only persons can birth a new personal nature in you. Only persons can cultivate a new personal nature in you. Ask yourself this, who gave you your personhood in the flesh? Another person did. We call her your mother. Who nurtured your person and your character in the flesh? Who did that, friends? Was it an impersonal power or force resident in and around you from childhood? The answer is that it was a person. Would you believe that if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, there has been a person who, from the very beginning, birthed you, that you might believe in Jesus Christ to the glory of the Father, and has been cultivating in you a new sort of character that is becoming to our God. He has been there all the time, and frankly, like our mothers, it too often goes unnoticed. He has been giving from the very beginning of our life of faith. But let me explain one other important point for you. If the Spirit of God is anything less than a person, God Himself working and acting in us, your salvation is still in your own hands. Let me explain to you what I mean by that. You can have all the power in the world, You can have all the strength in the world. You can have all the intellect in the world. But see, at the end of the day, those powers and abilities and forces are at your disposal as a person to choose to use them or not. I have got good news for you. The spirit who dwells in you is not a force that you wield. He is a person who changes and affects and guides you. What this means is that there will be times in your Christian life, and you may have not experienced them yet, where you go, God, I just don't think I can forgive this person. God, I just, I don't think I can get rid of or kick this habit. Lord, I just don't think that I can make this sacrifice. And the good news for us is that we pray to a spirit to whom we can say, God will enact in me as I cannot. We can pray to the Spirit to pray in us when we do not know what to pray for, to act in us when we cannot act in obedience. He is a person who lives and dwells in us. This is good news. My kids, they love it when we play this game where I take their hands and I move them and I make them shake them up in the air, do a little dance. They just think it's great because their dad is working and moving in them. And when you teach your kids to ride a bike, you stand over them and you hold their hands over the bars so that they can find that center of gravity. We do this. because we understand that persons have to act in other persons for them to really know and to learn how to do new things. We cannot pursue sanctification as if we simply have a power at our disposal. We must pursue it in conscious reliance on the third person of the Trinity to act and to work in us. Let us consider a fourth, perhaps even curiosity, about sanctification. Our holiness and our overcoming of our sinful natures and lives, our pursuit of sanctification, is not and never will be completed in this life. It's implicit in this greeting, isn't it? Why in the world would Paul be writing a letter to these Corinthians at all to give them instruction in anything if in fact they had already attained a status of full and complete holiness? What good would it be? Why would Paul need to remind people God's grace is to you and for you? Why would he need to evoke a blessing over them for them to have peace if in fact they had attained it all completely now? Be no purpose for it. The fact of the matter is, is that although we have been made holy by faith in Jesus Christ, and we have been changed into people with different appetites, our old nature, our old man is still there. And Paul can even speak of himself at the end of his life as the foremost of sinners. How many of you, if you're honest, are gonna say, my goodness, why in the world would Paul write a letter for people to pursue holiness when they can't ultimately be perfectly holy? How many of us would take on a job project where we knew from the outset it would be impossible for us to finish? How many of us would feel crushed at the idea that the degree we're pursuing, the degree we were pursuing, could never actually be attained? This is a wonderful thing, and naturally, therefore, as a pastor, I've been asked many times why we would pursue a goal that we cannot realize from the outset. And undoubtedly, there is a degree of mystery here that we cannot penetrate, but let me point something out to you that is evident to us. We must pursue this goal of holiness, even though we cannot fully attain it, because in doing so, in doing so, We are actually made into lovers of holiness more than we are made into lovers of success. Let me explain what I mean. There is a difference between loving success and loving sanctification. If what you ultimately love more than anything in life is success, being successful at attaining the goals that you are pursuing, you will quit pursuing sanctification very quickly. You will reason like this, I've failed, I've failed, I've failed, I failed last time and the time before that, so guess what? Who cares if I fail again? The person who reasons like that loves success, not sanctification. It is the person who says, I've failed, I've failed, and even if I should, in spite of myself, fail again this time, this time, I will serve the Lord. because I love holiness. Loving holiness as an end in itself, loving Christ's nature, loving his righteousness and the course he has laid out before us is something different than loving success at it. And which is more indicative of a living love for God, the guy who says, I won't do this or pursue this unless I can have perfection and be an absolute success, or the person who says, I will pursue this to no end, Lord, so long as you have called me to." Can you see that loving holiness is different than loving success at being holy? It is our privilege in this life to pursue holiness without absolute success prior to the resurrection, when God, the Holy Spirit, will make us, by His grace, a final and complete, perfect success. is our privilege to do so because it is indicative of a true love for God. I should emphasize that although we cannot be perfect in holiness, we can make progress. I want to challenge everybody in this room. I would bet if you have been a believer for any length of time, if you really survey your own soul, you will observe that there are some appetites, some sinful tendencies, Some fears that once governed you, that if you're honest, they hardly afflict you anymore. Maybe it's that fear that you had in middle school of what your middle school friends would think of you. How many of you have shaken that fear? Praise Jesus. Maybe there are just some downright sinful tendencies, ways of dealing with conflict. It used to be for you a complete, complete chasm between you and the Lord. You fell into it every single time, but praise the Lord Jesus Christ, you have gained some mastery over those tendencies. I'll bet if you were truly reflective, you would find that many of those things are true. And let me note something else. I know the tendency of many others. I know that many of us right now are saying, Brandt, you don't get it. I'm actually fighting the exact same sins that I was fighting 20 years ago. The battle is just as present, just as fierce, and it's the same battle I've been fighting for 20 years. And Brant, to be honest, I'm a little bit scared based on what you're saying, that I have been sanctified at all, that I've made progress at all. Let me speak to you good news, if that's what you've been thinking right now. Persistence in battle for decades, maybe even the same battle. Persistence in holding the same line against a fierce enemy is progress. Do you understand that it is progress to be fighting a battle, holding a trench for 20 years in the same place with no advancement? It is progress on the man who, after two years, simply turned his back and fled. Fighting the same battle for 20 years is progress, perhaps not in the particular area of sin that you want to overcome, but it is progress in the virtue of endurance, in the virtue of patience, in the virtue of faithfulness and hopefulness. Fight on. Fight on and let it be known what progress really is. It is the life of faithfulness in Jesus Christ, and it is Christ who said, he who endures to the end. He who endures to the end. Our Lord told us that we would have seasons that look a lot more like intense endurance than moving the battle lines. I hope that we will be able to say to one another, saints, Saints, Christ will be done. He has fought for me. He has bought me. I love Him and I will do His will. I hope that we can encourage one another to speak these things in gratitude for a salvation we have. I say to you, Christian brothers and sisters in this room, grace to you and peace from God, our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. It is my hope, it is my prayer that you will persist in the good fight. You will have peace and wholeness in doing it. Let us never forget that we are saved by God's grace through faith alone. We have therefore been set free that we may make progress in holiness. Oh, and celebrate it like nothing else. And I just ask you, brothers and sisters, are you in the fight? Are you in the fight or did you throw in the towel a long time ago because you weren't the sort of success you wanted to be? This isn't a community of successes. Are you glad to be fighting? There is no more privileged activity that you could be doing in this life, nothing more worthy of your time and attention. And have you come to celebrate the peace, the peace that comes from seeing some of our small victories, progresses, and advances? Have you been trained to celebrate that? Perhaps you're an unbeliever in this room and you're honestly, by your own account, mastered by sin. Maybe anger, envy, addiction, whatever it may be. The gospel that we believe, the good news we believe is about forgiveness, that we can be holy and completely forgiven by God for our sins. But there is more, my friends. It is also that we can have substantial victory over those things that have mastered us. That's what we're about here. That's what we're about. So I just plead with you to join us. We are all in this room, Corinthian saints, if you will, contradictions of terms, sinners, sinners together, just like you, but set free and made holy by the grace of our God through faith in him. Bow your heads with me. Mighty God, we confess it in so many ways, the good news, the joy, that we can have in being called saints and called to sanctification often falls on deaf ears, even when they're our own. We pray, Lord God, we pray for forgiveness for this callousness that is often in us. Lord, frankly, this spirit of pride that says unless we can be best, unless we can be successes wholly and completely by our own labors, we're not sure we want to do this anymore. Pray, Lord God, that we would all be prepared to pursue a course of holiness, that you'd give us the gift of endurance, and that, Lord God, we would celebrate that gift. I pray, Lord God, in the battles when we seem to have lost against our sin, we would rejoice that your Spirit still hungers and groans inside of us for a holiness, a holiness that is different from our fleshly way of living. Lord, what a gift. We pray that we would not grieve your spirit, but that we would know him more intimately, that we would indeed be given victory, victory in this life and ultimately in the resurrection to glory to come. We ask this, Father, in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ, and by your Holy Spirit. Amen.