“What does the Bible say about praying for sanctification?”

November 2017 – Grace & Truth Magazine

QUESTION: A church teaches that upon salvation one should pray for sanctification, by which they claim that their Adamic nature is uprooted and the person attains sinless perfection in this present world. What is the position of the Word of God on this?

ANSWER: God’s Word is plainly in disagreement with the teaching of this church. Nowhere does the Lord Jesus instruct His disciples to do this, and there is certainly no evidence in Scripture of any of them ever doing this. The disciples repeatedly quarreled about which of them was the greatest, even just before the last supper with the Lord Jesus. They all forsook Him and fled when He was taken prisoner in the garden of Gethsemane. Peter cut off the ear of the servant of the high priest, and then repeatedly denied the Lord when Jesus was being tried before the Jewish Sanhedrin. Later Peter said, “Not so, Lord,” to the voice from heaven (Acts 10:14 NKJV), and Paul and Barnabas had such a sharp disagreement that they parted company and went off in different directions (15:39).

Nowhere in the Acts or the Epistles is the doctrine of this church on sanctification taught. Rather, believers are addressed as sanctified in Christ Jesus in 1 Corinthians 1:2 and are repeatedly referred to as “saints” in the Epistles. In 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 the apostle referred to the many wicked kinds of persons the Corinthians had been before they were saved and went on to say, “And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.”

The word “saint,” used so often in the New Testament to refer to believers, always refers to a person who has been sanctified, that is, set apart for God. All who have believed on the Lord Jesus for salvation are sanctified positionally, because we belong to Him, even though our lives often are not consistent with this in a practical way. As believers, we are often urged to be what we are – to make our day by day lives consistent with the fact that we are set apart for God. For example, in Colossians 3:5-9 we are told to “put to death your members which are on the earth: fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry ... anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy language out of your mouth. Do not lie to one another.” This certainly does not sound like having the Adamic nature uprooted and having attained sinless perfection in this present world!

The apostle John wrote: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 Jn. 1:8-9). Sin comes from that old nature that we were born with when we came into this world, and that we will only lose when we are absent from the body and present with the Lord.

In the Bible this nature is often referred to as the flesh. Galatians 5:17 says, “For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish.” Romans 7 graphically shows us the battle the believer often has with the flesh. Chapter 8 shows us the way to victory, making it clear that victory will only fully come when we are with the Lord.

Scripture gives us no hope of attaining sinless perfection while we are here in this world, but it does not permit us to take sin lightly either. We are to confess our sin, not to attempt to hide it or to cover it up. We are to put to death, or to put off, the sinful thoughts, words and deeds that so easily want to surface in our lives. We need the help of the Holy Spirit to do so. He is more ready to help us than we are to seek His help.

Answered by Eugene P. Vedder, Jr.