"sanctification" Tagged Sermons
1. God’s abundant ___________________ of the spiritual equipment we need for living godly lives in the midst of an ungodly ____________ (v. 3).
2. The very great and precious _________________ that God has given to us believers (v. 4).
Paul’s prayer is itself a gift of grace, and there Arminian and Reformed accounts of sanctification and prayer part ways. Sanctification means becoming what believers already are in Christ. All boasting belongs to the Lord.
Philippians 3:8-10 has a careful structure, and it gives an already-and-not-yet account of sanctification. Paul knows Christ covenantally, the way a husband knows a wife, far beyond acquiring information. Hosea and Jeremiah supply the Old Testament’s covenant vocabulary for that intimate, binding knowledge.
Scripture and the catechism both define sanctification, and they distinguish its definitive, once-for-all side from its ongoing, progressive side, a distinction several popular ideas collapse. Hebrews 12 fills out the progressive side with the language of endurance. God’s act comes before ours at every point, and that makes the elect ‘holy ones’ in the first place.
Philippians 3:9-11 amounts to a compressed seminar in doctrine, moving through justification, sanctification, and glorification in just a few verses. Justification by faith alone anchors the whole sequence, tested against Luke 5’s healing of the paralytic as a narrative instance of the same principle. Christ’s own righteousness and faithfulness, rather than the believer’s, are what the seminar actually teaches.
A summary of 2:12-13 sets up a closer look at just how broad ‘his good pleasure’ actually is, the same phrase appearing in both Ephesians 1 and Philippians 2:13. Sanctification and good works, once again, carry a genuinely corporate dimension that individual application easily loses. God’s pleasure, rather than human effort, remains the operative cause throughout.
Philippians 2:12-13 raises the question of human responsibility and God’s sovereignty, and the text answers it directly. Justification and sanctification belong together as obedient faith. God’s prior action grounds every human action, and no human action stands beside it as an independent contribution.