Let's pray. Father in heaven, we come now to your word, this extraordinary gift that you have given to us. Only one gift greater indeed than it, and that is your son himself and life in him. We ask your blessing upon our hearing, our considering of that word this morning. We may think your thoughts after you, And then not simply think them, but take them to heart. Make them still more the fabric of our daily life. For the sake of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray, Amen. When Paul said the very thing he didn't want to do, he did. The very thing he did not want to do, he did the very thing he should have done, he didn't do. He was mostly thinking about the way he got angry when technology let him down. Our Word of God, just three verses from Paul's letter to the Thessalonians, the first of his letters. The first three verses of verse four. of chapter four rather. Finally then brothers, we ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus that as you received from us how you ought to walk and to please God, just as you are doing, that you do so more and more. For you know what instruction we gave you through the Lord Jesus. For this is the will of God, your sanctification. That or this is God's word. With walk, Paul means way of life, conduct, behavior. We are, he writes elsewhere, to walk worthy of the grace that we have received. We are not to walk as the unbelievers do. But I want to draw your attention specifically to the phrase more and more. These Christians were living the Christian life, Paul says they were. But Paul urges them to do that more and more. That more and more is my subject this morning. The moral renewal of our lives. Our transformation from sinful living to righteous living. That is one of the great purposes of God's grace in the world and in our life. And certainly one of the principal themes of the Bible. This moral renewal in Christian theology is ordinarily referred to as sanctification or making holy and so my choice of the text this morning. This is one of the very few places in the Bible actually where the term sanctification is used for this moral renewal of our lives. J.C. Ryle, the Anglican champion of biblical Christianity in the 19th century, defined sanctification as the increase in the degree, size, strength, vigor, and power of the graces which the Holy Spirit plants in a believer's heart. Put that way, we may say that sanctification is the fulfillment of the promise of the new birth. We are reborn into the Christian life and out of that new nature. becomes more and more a new way of living. The Bible refers to the same thing in many different ways. Of course, as you know, Paul teaches that those whom God saves through Jesus Christ are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works. That's the objective side of sanctification. God's intention And God's work within his people transforming them from being one kind of a person into another kind of person. He saved us to make us holy. pure, good, loving. Sanctification is not the forgiveness of our sins, it is the increasing eradication of sin in our lives. This moral transformation is what Robert Murray McShane, the famous Scottish pastor of the 19th century, famous really not for anything he did, but for the man he was, what he called the better half of salvation. Christ didn't die simply to get you off the hook. To spare you the punishment that your sins deserved. He died to make you good. He died to make you the kind of person you want to be. Then Paul, speaking of himself as a Christian, says that he presses on to take hold of that for which Christ took hold of him. that he's forgotten what's behind he's straining forward toward what is ahead that's the subjective side of sanctification every Christian's effort to put on a righteous life and to do so more and more to put his sins more and more to death and to strive more and more to obey God's commandments to serve him faithfully and so on to as Peter would put it, to grow in the grace and the knowledge of our Lord. What that means in practice of course is to grow stronger in faith which is the master wheel that moves all the other graces and to grow in love which is what all the other graces are at root. The deeper the faith The more confident we are of the truth of everything that God has said, that He is there, that His promises are yea and amen in Jesus Christ, the stronger the faith, the greater the love. The deeper the faith and the love, the more like Christ we become. And so it becomes our sacred obligation as Christians to pursue that holiness of thought and speech and life everyday, all day. Moreover the Bible teaches us in many ways that God always sanctifies those he saves without holiness no one will see the Lord we read that in Hebrews chapter 12 and the Lord in his sermon on the mount says even more famously that they and they only who do the will of God will enter the kingdom of heaven forgiveness is one thing moral transformation is another but in the salvation of sinners they are always found together you can distinguish them but you cannot separate them now I don't have to prove to you that the whole Bible is preoccupied with the different sort of life that Christians should live that life that will separate them observably demonstrably constantly from the life of those around them who are not disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ the Bible everywhere teaches us and then shows us what that life is to be and more and more as we search the scriptures how that life is to be achieved Peter reminds us, of course, that Jesus Christ left us an example that we should follow in his steps. One does this by loving God, loving one another, keeping God's commandments. Holy Scripture, as you know, is chock full of illustrations of both the failure and the success of God's people to live like Jesus, both their moral tragedies and their moral victories their triumphs and all of those illustrations are meant either to warn us or to inspire us or to teach us how important it is how necessary and how beautiful it is to live this life to which we have been called as the followers of Jesus Christ but I also don't need to prove to you that here too As in regard to so much of the experience of salvation in a believer's life, there are difficulties and confusions and deep mysteries. There's much that the Bible does not say and never explains. You may be aware, at least some of you, how many controversies have been spawned through the ages by the Bible's teaching of sanctification. Controversies about what a holy life is exactly, and certainly controversies about how such a life is to be found and achieved. Even in our Bible-believing Presbyterian circles, sanctification has often been an issue, and of late has become an issue again. In the present dispute regarding believing homosexuals, a dispute that has roiled our Presbyterian Church in America, the very definition of sanctification as well as its experience in the lives of God's people have become duly controversial questions are being asked questions like these can Christians say as many earnest Christians who struggle with same-sex desire say as do many Christians who struggle with heterosexual sexual desires, can they say that their sinful inclinations and their temptations, such as these sexual desires, can they say that they are deeply rooted in their psyche and in this life are unlikely to change? Is that a failure to take God's promise of sanctification and our duty to pursue it seriously? Can Christians say that they can only prepare themselves for a lifetime of resistance to those sinful passions that come so naturally to him or to her? In such a case is sanctification not the eradication of sinful desire, but simply the courage and the spiritual strength to say no to those temptations to the very end of one's life. So this morning my purpose is not simply to remind you that God intends to purify your life. To change your life. He intends to change it throughout the entire course of your life. That it becomes therefore your sacred duty to seek that change yourself. to bend your efforts to become a more faithful, useful, a more holy man or woman. My purpose is to go deeper and only briefly, of course, to explore the many-sided experience of sanctification in the life of God's people. Our Shorter Catechism defines sanctification this way. Sanctification is the work of God's grace Whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God and are enabled more and more to die unto sin and live unto righteousness. That more and more comes from our text this morning. 1 Thessalonians chapter 4 verse 1. As a general definition, that suffices. However, as any thoughtful Christian and any careful reader of the Bible knows, the reality is a great deal more complex and complicated. It is not the case that Christians grow gradually, steadily, more holy as they live their lives in the world, as the Catechism might be taken to suggest. The fact is, as the Bible teaches and as we all know and in fact can observe, there's nothing gradual about sanctification and it is hardly always steadily upward. For most of us, nothing gradual at all. Our moral life is a long, sometimes painful series of ups and downs, successes and failures, sin and repentance, a foolishness giving way to wisdom, and alas, sometimes the reverse. What is more, times of progress and times of regress are often separated by what seem to us, anyway, to be plateaus. in which very little happens in my experience and that of many others while much of the Holy Spirit of what the Holy Spirit is doing in our lives must happen below the surface deep within our hearts much of which is invisible and insensible even to us at least on the surface at least where we can see sanctification and measure it it happens not gradually but violently crises of failure and repentance, of temptation and obedience, crises of illumination, sometimes crises of ecstasy and the joy of salvation, or, contrarily, crises of disappointment, doubt, and spiritual anxiety. the more you read Christian biography the more you will understand this is the experience of the Saints has always been and is today what is more consistent progress is not inevitable and the sad fact confessed by many faithful godly men and women of God is that we can lose the holiness we once obtained and finish our course on a lower level of spiritual achievement than we once enjoyed The Bible is candid about that sad reality. It intends to make us worry about it in regard to ourselves. It gives us examples. David was not the man after God's own heart at the end of his life to the extent he had been early on. Solomon's spiritual life collapsed almost entirely in his later years. Asa, so faithful a king of Judah early in his reign, was a deep, deep disappointment by its end. So was Hezekiah himself, perhaps Judah's greatest king. A terrible disappointment at the end of his life. And a great many thoughtful believers have admitted the same about themselves. They may be much wiser, in some ways much sounder Christians than they were early on. But they've lost their zeal. Their passion for God does not burn the way it once did. They have more light, but they have alas less heat. I would tell you I think this is true about myself. I treasure the wisdom and discretion that long experience with the Bible and the Christian life have given me. But I want back that first love. I've read so many Christians of the past saying a similar thing. Richard Greenham, a 17th century Puritan and like so many Puritans a master of Christian psychology and Christian experience. said that it was very difficult for him to, he said, keep together his older discretion and his young zeal. That's my difficulty as well. And I suspect some of you, perhaps the older among us especially, will say the same thing about yourselves. And then there is this. It isn't the case that all our sinful desires gradually weaken and then disappear to be replaced by holy ones. It's been the united testimony of the Christian ages that while some desires may be once and for all eradicated by the grace of God, very often, perhaps most usually, at the very beginning of one's Christian life, others we drag with us as if a ball and chain to the very end of our life in this world after all it was the Apostle Paul himself so great a Christian man as that so favored with the power of the Holy Spirit who far nearer the end of his Christian life than its beginning admitted that he remained a bond slave At least to some of his sinful desires. Even then, 30 years into his believing life and his apostleship, Paul was still doing what his true self did not want to do. Failing to do what his true self wanted to do. Even so late in his Christian life he acknowledged the still great power of his temptations over him. He was willing even to say in virtual despair that he remained a bond slave of sin. There's no man of Christian history I admire more than the Scottish theologian and pastor of the late 17th and early 18th century, Thomas Boston. I would enjoy, if I could, spending a good deal of time telling you about this man. I admire him so much. He suffered greatly, but he served the Lord in extraordinary difficulty with an astonishing faithfulness. Near the end of his life, when Boston knew he was not much longer for this world, he conducted, over the course of several days, an end-of-life self-examination. Serious Christian that he was, he was a man who took his own salvation seriously. He took eternity seriously. if he was to die he wanted to be absolutely sure he was ready to die first over the course of some days he went over the gospel piece by piece in prayer before God and once again confessed his faith in every part of it His sin, God's love, Christ's sacrifice, faith and repentance, forgiveness and sanctification, the promise of eternal life. He believed it all, and he believed all of it from his heart. Then he went over the covenants that he had made with the Lord through the course of his spiritual journey. That was something they did in Scotland in those days. Writing out their confessions of faith, of their promises to God, their willing dependence upon his grace and love. Almost a sort of formal contract with God. God, this is what I promise you, signed Thomas Boston. It's almost as if he took all of those covenants out of the drawer, read each one again, and then re-signed it. At the end of that he says in his own words, he took hold of God's covenant of grace for life and salvation to me with my whole heart and rising up from prayer I stood and lifting up my eyes to the Lord I silently read before him the acceptance I had written and subscribed it with my hand. That was followed by a lengthy and detailed confession of his sins. He wished to hide nothing of his moral failure from the Lord, but to confess it all and once again to ask for God's forgiveness. But then comes this. One of the most remarkable few pages of spiritual theology you will ever find or ever read. What of his besetting sin? What of his failure to overcome this temptation? Could this cancel out everything else that he had said and done? Did God not say to him who overcomes, I will give a place in my kingdom? But Boston had not overcome this sin. He had mentioned his besetting sin many times through the course of his memoirs. He had never identified it. But he did not deny that the story of his Christian life would be seriously incomplete without including it. It was, he said, the special continued trial of the most part of my life and it had often threatened to baffle all my evidences for heaven as being the one thing lacking. Then comes this extraordinary exercise. He listed five reasons why he believed that his failure to overcome this sinful desire did not mean that he wasn't a true Christian did not mean that he was not a child of God not an heir of eternal life did not mean that he'd not been sanctified And interestingly, he didn't list among any of his five reasons the things that would have occurred most immediately to us to mention. For example, he never made a point of the fact that the Bible itself says that even the exemplary Christians in its history lived with sin to the end of their lives. Their own sins. Here were his five reasons. He sincerely desired to be rid of this sin and to live in this dimension of his life as in every other one in a way that would please his Lord and Savior. He had sometimes enjoyed victory over this temptation from spiritual principles and motives out of his love for and loyalty to Christ. Though it had often held him down, he was heartily ashamed of that fact. The recollection of that fact was the main reason why the review he had been making of his life had been so disappointing to him. And in that way, it had made him still more anxious to have Christ and Christ's salvation. He knew, he continued to feel his desperate need for the grace of God in Jesus Christ. And bad as that sin was, it at least had had this wonderful consequence. It made him realize he would never get over his need for Christ, for the forgiveness of God. For the grace of God. He could say to the Lord from his heart as the Lord was his witness. That he would rather have a cross of Christ's choosing for him. Than a crown of his own choosing for himself. and finally he could say with complete honesty that he would always have been willing to abandon this sin altogether and would always have been satisfied to have God and Christ without that sin but would never have been satisfied to have that sin without God and Christ in other words at any time the day or the night if the Lord had come to him and said Thomas Boston if you really want to be free of that sin I'll take it away from you but it's going to cost you something he would have said in reply Lord take it away whatever it takes all of this led him to the conclusion an absolutely proper conclusion given the Bible's entire teaching that he loved God in Christ above all that he loved God more than he loved his sin and that he was not a hypocrite he was simply weaker than he wanted to be and should have been here was a very great Christian man I dare say far beyond anyone in this room including myself certainly in the things of God a very great Christian man there have been a very great many like him Indeed, I would say every great Christian man or woman is like him in just this way, who admitted that he would leave this world with some sinful desires, still powerfully waging war against his new life in Christ. The wearying battle would continue to the end of his days. The new Christian, believe me, the new believer He's rarely prepared to understand that the moral transformation of his life is going to be like that. But there's still more that's mysterious about sanctification. There is so much in a Christian's life that only God can measure. There are those who start in life with so hurtful the family in which they were raised, the abuse they suffered, leaving scars that will never go away in this world. So many homosexuals, for example, have been sinned against, sinned against greatly when they were young and must carry with them through life the consequences of sin. Not even their own sin, but the sins of others. Much depends on the culture, the time, the place in which a Christian lives. For some, righteousness is made so much more difficult by the evil of their times. Many Christian lives have been diminished by the weakness of the church when and where they lived. The teaching they were given was poor. The examples of other Christians weighed them down rather than lifted them up. Other believers suffer so terribly, lives of trouble and pain, pain sufficient to preoccupy them year after year, illness of body, of mind, the loss of loved ones, massive disappointments in life, war, famine, poverty and persecution while others live in comfort amid pleasures that weaken and enervate the soul. only God knows how to calculate any of this only He can measure the sanctification in a believer's life how much there was how much there should have been how difficult his or her path to holiness to whom much is given much is required the Bible says but who knows but God how much has been given or how little to each and every follower of Jesus Christ then consider this the Bible makes clear perhaps more often than you realize that in regard to righteousness or a holy life some Christians have a lot more of it than others there are those who will receive a great reward And there are those who will be saved, though as through fire, with their work in the world burned up because of its poor quality. So we read in 1 Corinthians 3, there are theological depths here, I admit, much that we struggle to understand, much that we really cannot understand. There is Christ's perfect righteousness that is ours through faith, but there is also our own very imperfect righteousness that the Bible teaches us unmistakably will likewise be measured. I read recently Ron Chernow's magisterial biography of Ulysses S. Grant and along the way I was arrested by a remark of Abraham Lincoln when he was asked whether he ever doubted the North's final victory in the Civil War. Never for a moment, he replied. And then he quoted William Seward, his Secretary of State, who had said on one occasion, that there was always just enough virtue in the Republic to save it. Sometimes none to spare. but still enough to meet the emergency. Well, the Christian life of some believers, I think, must be like that. How much holiness must we see in order for someone to get to heaven? Well, for some there must be just enough. If we must do the will of God to enter heaven, as the Lord says we must, how much of his will must we do? And how well must we do it? Again, deep and in many ways unanswerable questions here. But it is what the Bible says again and again when speaking of a believer's life. It matters how we live. It matters for time. It matters for eternity. Sanctification is not an extra. It's part and parcel of salvation itself. And every true Christian has his or her own measure of it. Now what should we do with all of this? As we ponder the Bible's straightforward teaching that God intends to change us and that we are duty-bound to seek that change day and night throughout the whole course of our lives to read the Bible for that change, to pray for that change, to practice obedience for that change that we are never to content ourselves with some holiness but are to seek it always more and more I say what should we do with all of this mystery all of this experience that is so much more complicated than we might first have imagined it to be well the one thing you cannot do must not do would do to your peril and the peril of all who depend upon you for a genuinely devout and exemplary Christian life, I say the one thing you cannot do is to think, well, if I can go to heaven with less than perfect righteousness, I need to stop worrying about my lack of godliness and relax. I believe in Jesus. It'll all be fine. After all, every Christian remains a great sinner to his or her dying day. I'm never going to kill all my sins, so I spend my life trying to do so. Read again the Lord Jesus at the conclusion of his Sermon on the Mount, read again his teaching in Matthew 25, the parables of the wise and foolish virgins, the separation of the sheep and goats, and read again the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 9. until it sends a shudder down your spine Paul a far godlier man than you or I a CV that puts yours and mine to shame who said nevertheless that he beat his body and made it his slave and listen to this lest having preached to others he would himself be disqualified for the prize no one who takes the Bible seriously no one who realizes what is at stake in salvation no one who gives a thought to eternity and to heaven and hell will think it wise will even think it possible to ignore the Bible's more and more and content himself or herself with less and less Or as an English Puritan once warned, the garments of Christ's righteousness must never be made a cloak of sin. It's one thing to struggle with sinful desires, even to suffer from repeated defeats. It's another thing altogether to give up the struggle in hopes that it won't matter to God when He has said so plainly and emphatically that it matters a great deal to Him. There is a great, great difference between a deserter and a prisoner of war. There can be no justification for us to do Anything less. Only. More and more. And there's every reason for you to press on and take hold of that for which Christ has took hold of you. Think of the reasons. God's love. Christ's sacrifice on the cross for you. Your loved ones. Your responsibility for Christ's reputation in the world. Your own eternal reward. What you are going so much to want to have done when you're on the threshold of eternity. But it is something else I want to leave with you this morning and thinking about Paul's more and more. Thinking about how incomplete our sanctification remains considering how poorly we so often live as the followers of Christ. How often invisible we are as Christians amongst the non-Christians that we know. Christ having done so much for us, we doing so little for him in return. Remembering how often we have fallen prey to sinful desires and then later regretted our pathetic weakness. It leads us to wonder, surely it must, why God puts up with us at all. Why he is willing to have us on these terms. C.S. Lewis in his, The Problem of Pain, refers to this as God's humility. If God were proud, he said, he would never be willing to have us on such terms. Having made such terrible sacrifices for us, our being unwilling to make even minor sacrifices for him. But God never stops loving us, or working for us, or working in us. He forgives us no matter how countless our transgressions of His will. We may far too often demonstrate that we seem to prefer almost anything to God. But He never prefers anything to us. That, brothers and sisters, is love. And that's the greatest mystery of sanctification. The greatest of all. That it should happen at all to people like us. And if we would only remember that, we would say no to our sinful desires more often than we do. Let J.S. Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach, be our example and our model. His work is the perfect illustration of sanctification. Paul's more and more. He would write at the top of every one of his musical manuscripts, J.J. Yehzu Yuhwa, Jesus help me. and at the bottom the letters S.D.G. Soli Deo Gloria to God alone be the glory but he never stopped working on a piece with every new performance of his work some of the finest music ever written he was making corrections even his most famous work his most beautiful work was always more and more. You're Christian people. You've come some way in your Christian life. But you know, I know, there is a great deal more distance to travel. Be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect. More and more, always more and more. I remember that our Dr. Buswell, the first professor of theology in our Covenant Theological Seminary, An old man then, and recovering in the hospital from a stroke, was found by a friend drilling himself, flipping through Hebrew vocabulary cards in his hospital bed. Right to the end, he was at work mastering the Word of God. Well, let it be said of us that we were doing more and more about following Jesus until the last breath we drew. Here is a motto for your life and for mine.