As always, we thank you for taking a little time out of your day to join us in looking at the Word of God. Hopefully this is encouraging to your own devotional life and your walk with God. We thank you for letting us be a part of that.
Today, we are continuing to look at some of our riches that we have in Christ. Last time we looked at the fact that beyond all belief, it’s hard to imagine, but we are holy. We are holy because God has set us apart, and loved us, and declared us holy in Christ. We want to look at a complimentary word today. That is the world sanctified. We know the word holy, and we use the word holy even though as I indicated last time it is easy to misunderstand what that really means. The word sanctified is even more difficult because that is not a word that we use in everyday life. I can think of hardly any other context, outside of the Christian life and Scripture, that uses this word sanctify in any meaningful way. The word itself means that we are set apart. 1 Corinthians 1:2 is a good example. Corinth is probably the most difficult church in the New Testament. They had all sorts of problems, yet Paul writes to them and says, “To the church of God which is in Corinth, to those who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, saints by calling, with all who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, their Lord and ours.” Here we have this fact that here is a group of Christians who are really struggling in their everyday Christian life and Paul writes all sorts of stuff to them to correct them and help them change, but he still says you are sanctified in Christ. That means you have been set apart for Christ. I like this illustration of one of my grandchildren to explain what this means. My grandson wanted a donut. We were going to pray, and we had these donuts laid out on a box and he licked one of the donuts before we prayed to sanctify it, which meant that it was set apart for him. He didn’t want anyone eating the donut he wanted, and he knew that if he licked it everyone else would leave it alone. After we got done praying, he had his donut because he had set it apart for his own purposes. On a much more profound level, we have been set apart, sanctified, by God for His holy purpose. So, the word itself simply means to set aside, or set apart, just as my grandson set apart his donut. In the biblical use, spiritually speaking, it means to be set apart for a holy purpose. So, God has set us apart for Himself for a holy purpose . . .
