Justified and Sanctified By Faith Only

 Justified and Sanctified By Faith Only

Gil Rugh Indian Hills Community Church The One who begins the work finishes the work. The issue here is that salvation and sanctification are both the work of God. Salvation and sanctification or justification and sanctification are both accomplished and carried out by the work and power of the Holy Spirit. The works of the Law do not enable you to be justified before God nor do the works of the Law help or enable you to be sanctified before God. It’s absolutely crucial. Paul says for a person to profess to be a believer and to practice anything else is stupidity. It's mindless. It's senseless. It's irrational. To say on one hand I believed in Christ and His death and on the other hand deny it by saying something else or something more is necessary to mature in Christ is irrational. It's senseless. It's mindless. And yet it was going on in the churches of Galatia that Paul had established, that Paul had taught. But they had come under the spell of these false teachers.

I'm going to read you quote from one commentator on this portion in Galatians. He says, "There is no evidence that these law-observant teachers denied either the fundamental fact of Christ crucified or the manifestation of the Spirit among the Galatians. Their claim was rather that the entry-level Gospel proclaimed by Paul was insufficient for the higher spiritual realities offered only through the works of the Law." That is the deceptiveness, the subtleness of these false teachers. They didn't deny the Gospel verbally. They simple said there is something else necessary. Now in saying that they are in effect denying the Gospel. But it confuses us. People come and say I believe in the deity of Christ. I believe in His death on the cross. I believe He was raised from the dead. You say, well, they are like minded believers. But I also believe you have to keep the Law. I also believe you have to be baptized. I also, and we add all kinds of things. Paul's dealing with the addition of the Mosaic Law but the principle that's established here carries over into other things. And so wait a minute. That's mindless. You can't have it both ways. It is either the work of God from beginning to end or it is not the work of God. And that's the point He is making.

Now let me digress a moment. This same error has infiltrated the evangelical church today. And by the evangelical church I mean the church that would claim to be believing the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We are being told, and we have swallowed this in a mindless, hypnotized way, that the work of the Spirit of God is enough for justification but it is not enough for sanctification. I challenge you to read any list of Christian books that are published by those who sell them. Or go to a Christian bookstore and look at what they have on the doctrine of sanctification and the Christian life. And you'll find that it is material that are put together by those who entitle themselves Christian psychologists. Now why tell me please do we not go to Bible teachers and theologians when we want to know about God's plan and provision for living the Christian life, for dealing with sin as God's people. Oh, we don't, you know, we don't go to a Bible teacher for that. We need someone who has what? Added expertise, added information.

I was talking to a former seminary professor about the destruction of an evangelical seminary that I at one time attended. And he told how the error came in. That we had to add a Christian psychologist to the faculty because the Bible teachers and theologians they did not have the expertise and the understanding to train men to help people with these serious troubling problems of life. I say that is the Galatian heresy all over again. The same apostle Paul that taught us the great truths of books like Galatians who proclaimed justification by faith in Christ also taught us about living the Christian life. You go to Christian bookstore or Christian publishers today and you don't find books on the doctrine of sanctification teaching Romans 6, 7 and 8. You have to go to a Christian psychologist. Woe be if you say anything bad about them.