Aug
29
Holiness 101
Filed Under Christian Living
We had the joy of considering together the topic of holiness this past Sunday evening. One of the things I wanted you to hear was that God’s sovereignty applied to our sanctification as well as our justifiation. OUr God will see that we are made holy. He will have His way with us. The questions then are, “Is their a typical pattern by which God works to make us holy? Can we look over the Bible and narrow down the means by which God makes us more Chirst like?” The answer to these questions is, “Yes there are.” The term we use for God’s usual method for perfecting His children is “the means of grace”.
What are the means of grace? There is some argument amongst theologicans as to how many there are, but for the sake of discussion we’ll say that there are four: the Bible, prayer, the sacraments, and church discipline. I’m going to spend some time over the next week or two talking about each of these four in my blog posts. For now be content with this analogy. A dear friend of mine talked about the means of grace this way. He relayed the common conversation he had with Christian college students as to their lack of health in their Christian life. They would say things like, “I feel far from Jesus” and, “My spiritual life is dry”. He would then ask them four questions. “Are you reading your Bible? Are you praying to God? Are you participating regularly in your church appointed times for partaking of the sacraments? Are you in a accountable realtionship with the body of believers in your local church?” The answer to these four questions (the means of grace) was typically no, no, no, and no. He would say, “No wonder! You aren’t standing behind the God ordained fire hydrant of grace. You are standing to the side hoping the mist hits you! Open up your mouth and put your face in front of the hydrant of grace. Take a gushing gulp of the means of grace and be satisfied.” That is good advice to any of us that have lost sight of communion with Jesus.
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[...] To follow up on my post from earlier in the week, I want to briefly consider with you the first and foremost “means of grace”. In all lists for all times by all true Christians, the main means of growth has been by the Bible (aka the Scriptures, Word of God, God’s Word, etc). This is the kind of thing that could and has taken up thousands of pages of explanation. I want to pause as we face the weekend before us simply to reflect on the environments in which the Word of God is a means of grace. [...]