The Need and Value Of Being Sanctified Wholly

I. Entire sanctification is absolutely essential to make us what we ought to be. We are called unto holiness. We are commanded to be holy; but we are not holy by nature. Time does not cure sin. We cannot grow sin out of the heart, but God can take sin out of our Spirit, soul, and body, by an instantaneous work of grace through faith in Jesus' blood. This work of grace is properly designated entire sanctification and it is further proper to speak of it as a second work of grace.

But you reply: "I know holiness folk who are not what they ought to be." This may be true. It is possible for people to embrace the letter of the truth of Christian holiness and contend for it as a doctrine and yet be destitute of the grace experientially. It is further true that our human personalities differ, our abilities and limitations will all remain much the same after we are made holy. Nevertheless, after both of these considerations are acknowledged I am going to insist that the blessing of entire sanctification does so take the old sin-self out and it does so temper our natural selfhood, that we are made what we ought to be.

A holy man is good without the presence of any admixture of evil in him. He may err in judgment. He may make a mistake in practice but when you get close to the man and understand him, you will find that he is altogether good in the condition of his real selfhood. There is no other way for any man to be made what he ought to be except by the route of the provision of divine grace in sanctifying power which makes us holy.

II. We need to be sanctified wholly in order to live right. I am thinking now not only of continued, consistent outward conduct, but I am thinking also of the inward life every one of us lives, in thought, in purpose, in motive, and in imagination. We live in the realm of attitudes and of faith or of unbelief. The blessing of entire sanctification conditions one to live right inwardly where only God's eye sees and where we ourselves know what transpires.

To live with a conscience void of offense toward God and toward men is a standard which requires a full cure of sin and the empowering of the indwelling Holy Spirit.

III. We need to be sanctified wholly to be satisfied truly. Our spirit nature has appetites of hunger and thirst and insatiable desire. The blessing of sanctification is remarkable in its satisfying effects in our spirit nature. It is to the inner nature the river of living water flowing.

The satisfaction of sanctification is not the satisfaction of stagnation, but it is the absence of the hunger of want in the presence of the hunger of relish. We are kept with a keen appetite for all that is holy but without the weakening condition of lack which comes from the hunger of want. The human spirit both hungers and thirsts with insatiable desire for something, and that something is found and exactly fits our need when in entire devotion to the will of God our faith claims and receives the sanctifying fullness of the Holy Spirit.

IV. We need to be sanctified wholly to condition and prepare us to meet our Christian obligation in the realm of service. This blessing in its illuminating effect upon mind and heart envisions its possessors with regard to human needs and divine provisions, until a holy urge possesses all who are enjoying the blessing to accomplish real things for God. Not only is the vision clarified, but the heart is fired with holy passion so that a wholly sanctified individual will in some measure, dependent possibly upon his natural gifts, see the world's need as Jesus sees it and will feel toward that need something like God felt when John 3:16 was born in His infinite nature. We will share the sufferings of Jesus and be moved to holy activity by the passion of love that fills every part of our being when our cleansed temple is filled with divine love. How we need holy passion in Christian activity. The absence of this means coldness and death in the service of God. Its presence means fervency and aggressive act ion. It is one of the glories of Christian holiness that it carries in its own content experientially the elements which serve to propagate it.

It is unthinkable to me that any one should possess this grace and have this divine love shed abroad in his heart by the Holy Spirit and fail to have deep concern for the welfare of others, both in the salvation of sinners and in the spreading of the truth and experience of entire sanctification. It is not uncommon in the early stages of this experience for its possessors to start out with an idea that they are just about going to change the whole situation in their church or community as soon as they can reach individuals to tell them what has happened to them. Alas, all such are soon disillusioned and have to recognize that God has a great many others working at the task for a long time and that they will have to learn to pull steady and take their place as abiding witnesses and at best only win trophies from the masses rather than stirring the multitudes to action.

When I first received the grace, I felt as though I could go out and right every wrong, turn the world upside-down and get rid of all its dirt and turn it right side up and have it as it ought to be in about thirty days. That is a fair expression of the zeal that possessed me. I thought surely every one in the church would quickly want what I possessed when I witnessed to them. I shared, of course, with all others who started out in the white heat of passion with the expectation that multitudes would immediately seek and enter the experience that some failed to understand, others turned a cold shoulder, while still others took a pitying attitude, and some openly criticized. Thank God there were those who were glad to hear the good news and expressed hunger for the blessing.

In spite of the facts just named, it is nevertheless true that the vision and passion given one in the blessing of entire sanctification is essential to furnish us with motives and power for sustained Christian activity, and after one is disillusioned regarding rapid successes and large immediate results, he nevertheless is possessed of the passion which makes him alive to the embrace of every opportunity to help men to God, and he undertakes things he never would undertake without the holy urge that this experience gives.

V. We need to be sanctified wholly to condition us to engage in the highest activity of which a human personality is capable, namely; the consistent and persistent worship of a holy God. We live in temples of clay. The material things about us are very real. God is a Spirit. Without the clarifying of our souls and the impassioning of our lives by the sanctifying grace of the Spirit of God, we are very apt to experience, even after the grace of regeneration, the fulfillment of the poet's picture when he declared, "Our souls, how heavily they go, to reach eternal joys." Again, "And shall we ever live at this poor dying rate?"

I am by no means advancing the thought that possessors of Christian holiness live in a frame of ecstasy continuously, or that we do not have periods of suffering temptations; but I do say that wherever the Spirit abides in a cleansed heart, the fervency and fire of devotion which condition us for the worship of God in spirit and in truth are continually fed as having the source of the same dwelling within. How this grace does furnish us with the fuel of holy devotion for the spiritual worship of God. We do not have to assemble in a public place of worship to experience this, though when we possess it we certainly will avail ourselves of all such opportunities, but it is a heart condition and life experience which is in a very proper sense continuous.

The song writer of Israel cried out, "While I was musing the fire burned." Holy men and women worship God while at their work, riding on trains or in street cars, driving automobiles, or plowing furrows in the fields or washing dishes in the kitchen. There is such a harmonizing of our spirits with the divine Spirit and such sacred and perfected relationship between us and our God that the experience of the Psalmist is often repeated. "We muse and the fire burns."

The gracious benefits of the grace of entire sanctification are such that if believers were perfectly safe so far as the eternal future is concerned without it, they could not afford to continue to live in the present world without this grace which brings such gracious benefits into the life and which is obtainable immediately by faith in Jesus Christ. The question is not, "Who can live it?" It is rather, "Who can live as he ought with- out it?"

Dear reader, accept no substitute and make no delay in your personal possession of this Bloodbought grace. It is the Father's will that you should be sanctified. The blood of His Son was shed to make it possible and the Holy Spirit is now present where you are to make it real. The Word has revealed it and as God's ambassador I am commissioned to declare this truth and to call the believers in Jesus to immediate possession of this grace.