Great Commission Fellowship (GCF) (gcfi.com), the church where I serve as the Lead Pastor, is located in
Wilmore, Kentucky. Wilmore is the home of two institutions of Christian higher education: Asbury
College and Asbury Theological Seminary. Both institutions arose out of the Holiness movement of the early 1900’s. The Holiness movement was primarily concerned with spreading the message of justification before God by faith in Jesus as well as the doctrine of sanctification before God by faith in Jesus.
Over the years, the doctrine of sanctification became quite skewed and misunderstood. In fact, many came to believe that sanctification meant that it was possible to live in some sort of “sinless perfection” (two words, by the way, that John Wesley, the motivator in so many ways of the first Holiness movement; also called the Methodist Movement of the 18th century; never put together in the same sentence anywhere in any of his extant writings)! Sanctification came to mean and now means for many people that someone has had a second experience with the Holy Spirit and has been given the strength and power to no longer sin in this life.
I believe in sanctification. I believe that I have had a second experience with the Holy Spirit that changed my life. You can call this sanctification, you can call it a second touch of the Holy Spirit, you can call it an infilling of the Holy Spirit. The label does not matter much to me. What happened during that experience and what has transpired in my life since that experience are what really matter to me, so . . . it can be called whatever you want to call it.
Before I go any further, I want to state something very clearly: the doctrine of sanctification, like so many other Christian doctrines, has suffered the insult and injustice of having been treated so systematically and, at times, with so much dogmatic fervor that it has robbed many Christians and the Church of much of the mystery and embrace of God that are so important to the corporate and personal experience of leading a sanctified, spirit-filled life. Read this previous sentence a couple of times. I believe that this point can scarcely be overstated, nor can we afford to misunderstand it.
If we are to understand what it means to be a sanctified, spirit-filled believer then it is probably wise that we do our best to think outside of the systematic, fervor-filled, dogmatic terminology of the previous discussions on sanctification and being in-filled by the Holy Spirit. As has happened to so many of the great doctrines of our Christian faith, our attempts to systematize them and lay them out in nice, neat little charts has indeed robbed the Holy Spirit of many priceless opportunities to make the doctrines real experiences in our day to day living.
The last two paragraphs, I think, should help explain the frustration with which a member of GCF recently wrote me a letter. The gist of the letter was this: I grew up in a Holiness background and went to a Holiness college. I understand the doctrine of sanctification as theology, but I am not sure that I, along with many others, understand it as a practical reality in our day to day living. The question she asked, in so many words, was this: can you explain sanctification in such a way that it can seem like a real possibility in the life of a believer?
What will come in these next few posts will be my feeble attempt to answer that very big question.
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