Today’s Scripture: 2 Corinthians 5:17

“If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.”

One of the best descriptions of this initial act of God in sanctification is found in Ezekiel 36:26-27 where God makes this gracious promise: “and I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.”

Note the changes God brings about in our inner being when he saves us. He gives us a new heart and puts a new spirit within us—a spirit that loves righteousness and hates sin. He puts his own Spirit within us and causes us to follow his decrees and obey his law. God gives us a growing desire to obey him. We no longer have an aversion to the commands of God, even though we may not always obey them. Instead of being irksome to us, they have now become agreeable to us.

David said in Psalm 40:8, “I delight to do your will, o my God.” Why did David have this delight? It was because, as the remainder of the verse says, “your law is within my heart.” David found a law written in his own heart corresponding to the law written in God’s Word. There was an agreeableness between the spiritual nature within him and the objective law of God external to him.

It’s that way with a person who’s a new creation in Christ. There’s a basic though imperfect correspondence between the law written in a believer’s heart and the law written in Scripture. (Excerpt taken from Transforming Grace)

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Today’s Scripture: Psalm 119:105

“Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.”

A defining moment in my life occurred very quietly one evening in the first Bible study group I attended. The leader of the study said to us, “The Bible wasn’t given just to increase your knowledge but to guide your conduct.” As obvious as that truth is to me now, at the time it was brand new. It was as if someone had turned on a light in my mind. I saw clearly what I’d been completely oblivious to before.

It wasn’t that I was living what we would consider a sinful lifestyle. Quite the opposite was true. I’d grown up in a church setting, trusted Christ as my savior, read the Bible every day, and even memorized a few Bible verses. But the idea of applying Scripture to specific situations in my daily life had never occurred to me. That night I prayed a simple prayer: “God, starting tonight I want you to use the Bible to guide my conduct.” My whole approach to the Word of God changed overnight, and the Scriptures suddenly became very relevant. That was the beginning of my own personal “pursuit of holiness.”

The Bible is indeed a very relevant book, giving instruction and guidance for our daily lives. In following this instruction, however, we’re continually faced with a series of choices. Of course, life is a constant series of choices from the time we arise in the morning until we go to bed at night. Many of these choices have moral consequences. For example, although the route you choose to drive to work each morning is probably not morally significant, the thoughts you choose to think while you’re driving are moral choices, as is the way you choose to drive.

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Today’s Scripture: 1 Corinthians 6:11

“You were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Sanctification and justification are both gifts from God and expressions of his grace. Though they’re each distinct aspects of salvation, they can never be separated. God never grants justification without also giving sanctification at the same time.

I think of justification and sanctification as being like the jacket and pants of a suit. They always come together. A friend once wanted to give me a suit. He took me to a clothing store, and I walked out with a jacket and matching pants—a complete suit. Neither the jacket nor the pants alone would have been sufficient. I needed both to have what my friend wanted to give me.

Sometimes we think of salvation as more like a sports coat and a pair of slacks. We think God gives us the sports coat of justification by his grace, but we must “buy” the slacks of sanctification by our own efforts. But salvation is like a suit. It always comes with the jacket of justification and the pants of sanctification. God never gives one without the other because both are necessary to have the complete suit of salvation.

Sanctification in us begins as an instantaneous act of the Holy Spirit and is carried forward by his continued action in our lives. This instantaneous act is described in a number of ways in Scripture. It is called the “renewal of the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3:5), making us alive with Christ when we were dead in transgressions and sins (Ephesians 2:1-5). It results in the new creation Paul referred to in 2 Corinthians 5:17: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”

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Today’s Scripture: John 14:24

“The word that you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me.”

Everything I’ve taught about the disciplines of Bible study, Scripture memorization, continual meditation, and application of Scripture in daily life has been based on Scripture. I have not developed man-made theories about Christian growth. All I’ve done is point out what the Scriptures say about these disciplines. And what Scripture says, God says. If we ignore these disciplines, we’re ignoring God.

We must always remember, though, that practicing these disciplines does not earn us any favor with God. It’s helpful to distinguish between a meritorious cause of God’s blessing and an instrumental cause. The meritorious cause is always the merit of Christ. We can never add to what he has already done to procure God’s blessing on our lives. The instrumental cause, however, is the means or avenues God has ordained to use. God has clearly set forth certain disciplines for us to practice in pursuing holiness. As we practice them, God will use them in our lives, not because we’ve earned his blessing but because we’ve followed his ordained path of blessing.

We also need to keep in mind that the imperative in Romans 12:2 to be transformed immediately follows the imperative of verse 1—to offer our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to him. Both exhortations are based on the mercy of God. The discipline of developing Bible-based convictions, then, should be a response to God’s mercy and grace to us through Christ. If we truly desire to live by grace, we’ll want to respond to that grace by seeking to live lives that are pleasing to God. And we simply cannot do that if we do not practice the disciplines necessary to develop Bible-based convictions. (Excerpt taken from The Discipline of Grace)

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Today’s Scripture: Psalm 119:139

“My zeal consumes me.”

If God’s favor comes to us only on the basis of Christ’s merits, is there any place in the Christian life for the spiritual disciplines, obedience to God, and sacrificial service to him?

Absolutely! There’s no doubt Paul was just as diligent and zealous, probably more so, after he trusted Christ as he was before. We have only to read his own words: “one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13-14).

Note the intense expressions Paul used: “straining forward” and “press on.” The first is a graphic picture of a runner straining nerve and muscle to cross the finish line. The phrase “press on” has the idea of vigorous pursuit.

There’s a direct correlation between faith in the righteousness of Christ and zeal in the cause of Christ. The more a person counts as loss his own righteousness and lays hold by faith of the righteousness of Christ, the more he’ll be motivated to live and work for Christ.

Let me ask you two questions: are you trusting in the righteousness of Christ alone as the basis of your right standing with God, or are you still depending on your religious performance, even to a small degree? And if you’ve clearly trusted in Christ alone for your salvation, are you still clinging to the idea that you must now earn God’s favor in this life by your own performance?

May we clearly see that in the unsearchable riches of Christ and in right standing with God that comes from those riches, we have both the assurance of eternal life and God’s favor in this life.

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Today’s Scripture: Romans 15:2

“Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up.”

Selfishness is so easy to see in someone else but so difficult to recognize in ourselves. Moreover, there are degrees of selfishness as well as degrees of subtlety in expressing it. One person’s selfishness may be crass and obvious, while ours will likely be more delicate and refined.

Several areas of selfishness may be observed in believers. One of them is selfishness with our interests. Paul wrote in Philippians 2:4, “let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.” In using the word interests, Paul was undoubtedly referring to the concerns and needs of other people, but I’m going to use it in a narrow sense to mean subjects we’re interested in.

What are our interests? At this stage of our lives, my wife and I are interested in our grandchildren. We like to talk about them and show pictures of them to our friends. The problem is that our friends like to do the same. So when we’re with them, whose grandchildren will we talk about? The answer, of course, is both if we and our friends are sensitive to the interests of each other. But if one or both couples are not sensitive, the conversation is apt to be one-sided, or else we find ourselves waiting for our turn to share instead of showing a genuine interest in the other couple’s grandchildren.

A good test of the degree of selfishness in our interests would be to reflect on the conversation after you’ve been with someone (or with another couple). Ask yourself how much time you spent talking about your interests compared to listening to the other person. (Excerpt taken from Respectable Sins)

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Today’s Scripture: Ephesians 2:8

“This is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.”

I believe that human morality, rather than flagrant sin, is the greatest obstacle to the Gospel today. If you ask the average law-abiding person why he expects to go to heaven, the answer will be some form of “because I’ve been good.” And the more religious a person is, the more difficult it is to realize his or her need for the righteousness of Christ.

Have you renounced any confidence in your own religious experience and trusted solely in Christ’s blood and righteousness? Perhaps you grew up in a highly moral and religious family. You’ve always been good and essentially blameless in the eyes of other people. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. But if your hope of eternal life is based on that goodness, your religion has actually become dangerous to you. It will keep you from heaven.

Or you may think your sin is too great to be forgiven. But the blood of Christ can indeed cleanse us from all sin.

All of us have a natural drift toward a performance-based relationship with God. We know we’re saved by grace through faith—not by works (Ephesians 2:8-9), but we somehow get the idea that we earn blessings by our works. After throwing overboard our works as a means to salvation, we want to drag them back on board as a means of maintaining favor with God. Instead of seeing our own righteousness as table scraps to be dumped, we see it as leftovers to be used later to earn answers to prayer.

We need to remind ourselves every day that God’s blessings and answers to prayer come to us not on the basis of our works, but on the basis of the infinite merit of Jesus Christ.

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Today’s Scripture: Titus 2:13-14

“Jesus Christ . . . gave himself for us . . . to purify for himself a people for his own.”

Holiness or sanctification is an actual conformity within us to the likeness of Christ begun at the time of our salvation and completed when we’re made perfect in his presence. This process of gradually conforming us to the likeness of Christ begins at the very moment of our salvation when the Holy Spirit comes to dwell within us and to actually give us a new life in Christ. We call this gradual process progressive sanctification, or growing in holiness, because it truly is a growth process.

The holiness we have in Christ is purely objective, outside of ourselves. It’s Christ’s perfect holiness imputed to us because of our union with him, and it affects our standing before God. God is pleased with us because he is pleased with Christ. Progressive sanctification is subjective or experiential and is the work of the Holy Spirit within us imparting to us the life and power of Christ, enabling us to respond in obedience to him.

Both aspects of sanctification are gifts of God’s grace. We deserve neither our holy standing before God nor the Spirit’s sanctifying work in our lives. Both come to us by his grace because of the merit of Jesus Christ.

Progressive sanctification begins in us with an instantaneous act of God at the time of our salvation. God always gives justification and this initial imparting of sanctification at the same time. The author of Hebrews described this truth in this way: “?his is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws on their hearts, and write them on their minds,’ then he adds, ‘I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more’” (Hebrews 10:16-17). (Excerpt taken from Transforming Grace)

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Today’s Scripture: Romans 10:4

“Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.”

Like his fellow Jews, Paul sought to establish his own righteousness through keeping the law (Romans 10:3-4). But there came a time, possibly during his three days of blindness and fasting in Damascus (Acts 9:7-9), when he realized his efforts to become righteous through law-keeping were going nowhere. They kept him from the only means of salvation God has provided. As he realized more clearly the perfect righteousness God has provided through his Son, Jesus Christ, he saw his own efforts to be righteous as no more than garbage to be dumped overboard.

Paul made what I call his “great exchange”—his own righteousness for the perfect righteousness of Christ. He not only threw his own righteousness overboard, but he regarded it as mere garbage compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ as his savior and being credited with his righteousness. He exchanged the garbage of his goodness for the unsearchable riches of Christ.

Of course, Paul could make his great exchange only because God had already made the great exchange described in 2 Corinthians 5:21: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him [that is, through union with Christ] we might become the righteousness of God.” God laid our sin upon Christ that he might lay Christ’s righteousness upon us.

Note the subtle wording. Paul exchanged his righteousness through keeping the law for Christ’s righteousness that comes by faith. Yet in 2 Corinthians 5:21, God exchanges our sin for Christ’s righteousness. Our own efforts at righteousness are, at bottom, only sin because they fail to measure up to the perfect righteousness required by God’s law. They’re only scraps to be thrown out as garbage. (Excerpt taken from The Gospel for Real Life)

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