Sanctified by Graced Alone

There are some revelations that just stop you dead in your tracks, illuminates God’s love and brings about repentance. This passage was one of them, I remember it so vividly. I was microfibre mopping the auditorium stage, and I heard this on my audio bible. “Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?” The season I found myself in was heavily burdened by sin and shame. I felt condemned and disqualified from the faith I professed to believe, and couldn’t understand how God could save a person like me.

I stopped cleaning for a moment and began to weep. It’s not by my works that I could be saved, but by grace alone. You see, this moment was an illustration of a revelation that changed my life. All my life I had tried to clean myself up, to use my own works to make me clean. Yet, Christ had come with His own righteousness and lived the life that I couldn’t. He had made me clean.

However, I knew that already. Here was the revelation in this passage. Grace does not only apply to the sinner for salvation. Grace also applies to the Christian for sanctification. You are not saved because you are made perfect. You are saved because you have received the Holy Spirit who works within you to make you perfect.

God does not expect holiness without first imparting the Holy Spirit. It’s the Spirit that makes you holy.

Righteousness comes not from doing good works, but only by believing. Do you believe? Do you believe that Christ’s good works was enough to satisfy the holiness God requires from you?

How can one man’s holiness bring about the righteousness of all of humanity? Well, in the same way one man’s sin brought about death in all of us, one man’s righteousness brought about salvation for all. Christ was the new man by which God saw humanity.

Shall this grace give us license to sin? Certainly not, as Paul writes, for how will we who have died to sin, continue to live in it? You no longer live in sin, you live in grace.

You are no longer an outsider, a counterfeit in the presence of your Saviour, but you are accepted in the beloved. Counted among those saved and sanctified by grace alone.