If you believe that Jesus is the Christ and your savior, you live in constant tension.
As we have discussed over the past several weeks, Jesus’ death on the cross accomplished making us as sinners having a right standing before our holy God. At the time of our conversion we are regenerated, or born again, with a new nature and desires. Our old nature desired to sin. Our new nature desires to please God. However, we still live in a sinful world and so there is tension.
We have this new nature we are trying to figure out in the midst of a sinful world. We are trying to be more free of sin and more like Christ in our daily lives. At it’s most basic, this is sanctification.
On Sunday, Lord willing, we will dive into the Scriptures to learn more about sanctification. We’ll look at some questions like:
- Is it a process or has it already happened? How can Paul say both “you WERE sanctified” (1 Cor. 6:11) and we “ARE being transformed” (2 Cor 3:18)?
- What’s God’s role in this and what am I to do?
- What parts of my life does sanctification affect?
Since sanctification is really practical to our daily lives, we’ll look a bit into the lives of Peter and Paul and what they went through being sanctified. Below are a couple of passages that really stood out to me.
For Paul read Romans 6 – 8, particularly focusing on Paul’s struggle in Romans 7:13-25.
For Peter, read Luke 22:54-62 and compare his reaction there to his reaction in Acts 2:13:-36.
Here is a link to my notes.
Update: Here are links to the two John Owen books I talked about in class.
