Sanctification: How the Holy Spirit Makes You Holy
For 7 weeks now we’ve discussed the Apostles’ Creed – 3 on God the Father, 4 on God the Son. Today we turn the Third person of the Trinity – God, the Holy Spirit – and our main goal is to answer the question, “What does the Holy Spirit do?”
The Holy Spirit is probably the most underrated member of the Trinity. It’s easy to praise the Father for creating the beautiful world we live in; every time we look out the window, we can see the work of his hands.
Jesus, of course, gets most of our attention. He is the namesake of our religion. He is our Saviour from sin. He is the one who hung on a cross which is the symbol of and basis for our faith. Jesus is central to everything we believe and do. His importance to our lives could not possibly be overemphasized.
But then there’s the Holy Spirit. You can’t see the work he does. He didn’t become a human being and walk this earth like Jesus did. In fact, of the Spirit, Jesus says this: “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”[1] In other words, the Spirit is elusive and invisible and virtually imperceptible as the wind.
And yet the work of the Holy Spirit is absolutely vital for your salvation. In fact, you could say that without the Holy Spirit you could not be saved. The Holy Spirit is 100% necessary for your salvation, even though he doesn’t get nearly enough credit or attention.
Well, it’s our goal to begin to remedy that starting today as we look at the Third Article of the Apostles’ Creed and the main “job” of the Holy Spirit, which we call “sanctification.”
Now, that’s a big “church word” that we don’t use very often in everyday conversation. It literally means “the process of making or being made holy.” So, there you have it – the answer to our question for the day! “What does the Holy Spirit do?” He makes me holy!
But what does that mean? Well, it can actually mean two things. We’ll talk about one of them today; the other is the focus for worship next week. The first and most basic way that the Holy Spirit makes you “holy” is by bringing you out of the darkness of unbelief into the light of faith. He turns the lightbulb on for you and makes you aware of something you couldn’t have possibly known on your own.
Now, what I’m about to say doesn’t directly pertain to the Holy Spirit, but it will in a minute, so bear with me. Have you ever heard of the battle of Thermopylae? How about the movie “300” starring Gerard Butler? That’s the story of the battle of Thermopylae.
In the year 480 BC – 2,501 years ago – King Xerxes of Persia was trying to invade Europe. Some historians claim that he came with an army numbering in the millions, while the Greeks, whom he was attacking, only had a couple hundred soldiers.
The odds were astronomically in King Xerxes’ favour, but that didn’t stop King Leonidas from Sparta from taking 300 of his soldiers and holding the entire Persian army at bay for 2 days with a fraction of the troops.
It’s a heroic and inspiring story about freedom and spirit and brotherhood. Some people even credit that battle with preserving Western civilization. Life as we know it, even here in Canada centuries/millennia later, could have looked drastically different had it not been for that moment.
But did you know that the battle of Thermopylae was a complete loss? All but one of those 300 Spartans died. That one man’s name was Aristodemus and he only survived because he was sent home with an injury before the battle started. So, how can a complete loss be considered a victory for all of Western civilization? It’s because news of the Spartans’ sacrifice spread like wildfire and gave the rest of the Greeks the courage to stand up to Xerxes and expel him from Europe.
King Leonidas and the other 298 Spartans did all the work, but had it not been for someone like Aristodemus (the one who survived to tell the story), no one would have ever known what they did.
That’s kind of like what the Holy Spirit’s work of sanctification is like. Jesus did all the work for your salvation. He battled with the devil and ultimately died on a cross, sacrificing his own life to save you. That was the moment some 2,000 years ago when Jesus won your salvation.
But if no one ever told you about Jesus and the sacrifice he made, you would never know, and the salvation he won for you wouldn’t make a difference for you. Someone needed to take you from the darkness of ignorance into the glorious light of understanding, and that’s exactly what the Holy Spirit does – only, the problem is, we’re not just ignorant about Jesus; it’s actually far worse than that.
Paul said to the Ephesians, “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins…” What was our natural condition?
We were dead in sin. I don’t mean to be crass or morbid, but what can a dead person do? Not a whole lot, right? In fact, a dead person can do nothing at all except decay, waste away into nothing.
Because of sin, that’s our natural condition. On our own, we can’t do anything. We can’t go and search for God. We certainly don’t have the power to live such a good life that he comes and finds us. All we can do – all we have the power to do – is waste away in sin.
If that weren’t damning enough, Paul doubles down on our depravity in Romans 8: The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Again, what is our natural condition?
We are naturally hostile to God. Even if we weren’t by nature already dead in sin – even if we had the power to come to him – we wouldn’t because our natural inclination is to hate God, to fight him.
Paul puts it another way in Galatians 5:17 – For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other.
It’s not too hard to see that in our lives, is it? The flesh – my natural self – desires what is contrary to the Spirit. So, God tells you to remember the Sabbath Day by keeping it holy. He tells you not to despise preaching and his Word but to regard it as holy and gladly hear and learn it. But what happens on Sunday mornings? “I’m so tired. I don’t think I feel up to making the drive. I’ll catch up on YouTube, make it next week.” But do you? Or, when you give in to your natural impulses and let your sinful self win the battle over the Spirit, do you find it harder and harder to let the Spirit win the next one?
What happens when you wake up on Monday and you know that now is the time to do your daily devotion? It’s a battle, isn’t it? You want to do anything and everything else. You do the dishes. You take the dog for a walk. You watch TV. Before you know it, the day is over and you’re in bed again and you haven’t read the Bible or a one-page devotion or even prayed.
Our natural inclination is to want everything the Spirit doesn’t want. And so we show that we really were dead in sin, hostile to God. We wanted what is contrary to the Holy Spirit of God.
But that’s exactly why the Holy Spirit is % necessary for our salvation. The Holy Spirit needs to sanctify us – to reach into our grave of guilt and to yank us out of our sinful stupor and into saving faith in Jesus.
That’s what Paul wrote to the Thessalonians: “But we ought always to thank God for you, brothers and sisters loved by the Lord, because God chose you as firstfruits to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth. He called you to this through our gospel, that you might share in the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.”[2]
The truth is that Jesus saved you. Your belief in that truth is what makes that salvation yours personally. The way you come to believe in that truth is through the Holy Spirit who gives us the opportunity, the power, and the will to believe.
Most of the time you don’t even know it. You might even think that you’re the one who found your way to Christ and accepted him. But God found you first and worked on your heart with the still, small voice of the Spirit.
Think about how you came to be listening to these words today. Did your parents bring you to church as a child and it became a habit that you stuck with or a heritage you’re coming back to? Did your Christian friend mention Jesus once and it aroused your curiosity so you came to see what all the fuss is about? Did the floor fall out from under you, and you had heard that Christians have hope and peace, so you came looking to find some of your own? That was the Spirit at work in you, calling you out of the darkness of unbelief and into the light of faith.
You might not have heard the voice of a disembodied spirit calling your name. It may have just been the sound of your spouse or your neighbour saying, “Come to church with me.” It might have been a public speaker whose lecture you heard or a pastor who knocked on your door and asked, “Can I tell you about Jesus?” But whatever human voice you heard, it was the Spirit working through their words, like Paul said to the Thessalonians, “He called you to this through our gospel.”
See, the Spirit doesn’t just snap his fingers and magic faith into your heart. He works through the Word which he puts into the hands of sinful people like me so that you can hear about Jesus and believe, so that you can be convinced that what Christ did 2,000 years ago makes a difference for you today and forever. And what a comfort that is!
Your salvation doesn’t hinge on a decision you have to make; it’s given to you by the Spirit before you had the power to choose. Your eternal life isn’t a great mystery you have to spend your entire earthly life sussing out in the foothills of Nepal or the rainforests of the Amazon; it’s right here in black and white, in ink on paper and literally available to you online anywhere you go.
The Holy Spirit makes you holy through the gospel, i.e. the good news of Jesus, spoken, read, written for you. So what do you think you should do with that information? I’m asking, really, what do you think you should do?
You should do everything within your power to hear the gospel again and again and again throughout your life – and not just on Sundays, or when you feel like it, but every day, because there are threats and challenges to your faith that you face every day that require the Spirit’s strength to overcome.
That’s why the psalmist says, “I rejoiced with those who said to me, “Let us go to the house of the Lord.”[3] Rejoice that you have this blessed privilege to engage with the Holy Spirit of God every day of your life.
But what else do you suppose you should do with this information? With the knowledge that the Spirit of God works through the Word of God that the people of God – like you and me – are privileged to speak? You should probably share it, right?
How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation.[4] That could be you!
God may just be using you to be a conduit of the Holy Spirit to bring your friend, your neighbour, your family member to faith, to Jesus, to salvation through the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit through your words. Again, what a comfort that you aren’t responsible for changing anyone’s heart. You’re just responsible for making an introduction to the Spirit of God who does that for you through the truth of God’s Word.
The Holy Spirit’s job is to make you holy. He does that by bringing you to Jesus through the proclamation of God’s Word. May we never take the gospel for granted, but may we always give his Holy Spirit our love and our loving attention every time we hear or speak his Word. Amen.
[1] John 3:8
[2] 2 Thessalonians 2:13,14
[3] Psalm 122:1
[4] Isaiah 52:7