"Holiness" cannot be manufactured by man; it must be given by God; man can only receive it.
This is absolutely basic. In the words of Andrew Murray: "There is no other way of obtaining sanctification save by the Holy God bestowing what He alone possesses." Now it is the glory of the gospel that God bestows both His righteousness and His holiness upon sinful man through Jesus Christ His Son. As Paul says:
"But of Him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righnteousness, and sanctification, and redemption" (I Cor. 1:30).
How does God do this wonderful thing? How is Christ "made unto us—sanctification"? There are three stages or phases: (1) The miracle of the new birth. (2) The crisis of heart-cleansing. (3) The process of growth.
We have said that when a sinner is converted God does two things to him. First, He justifies him; and, second, He regenerates him. These experiences are simultaneous in time, but must be distinguished logically. In justification Christ is "made unto us righteousness," our black record is forgiven and we are able to stand in the Presence of God through the merit of Christ. In regeneration Christ becomes our life. He actually takes up His abode in our hearts. (Colossians 1:27; I Corinthians 2:16; Galatians 4:6.)
Now this life which Christ lives within us is the life of true holiness. This is how God bestows His holiness upon us. He does not put it on us or in us in some kind of lump. It is latent within the new Christ-life; potential, at first, rather than actual. But as surely as a seed, given the right conditions, will grow into a plant or a tree, so will the Christ-life develop within us a holy disposition and character.
Given the right conditions! And the first condition is the elimination of all resistance from the heart in which Christ has come to dwell. That there is such resistance, deeply rooted and strongly entrenched, is the clear testimony of the Word of God and the general experience of Christian people. The "flesh" or the "sin that dwelleth in me" (to use two Pauline terms) is certainly not eliminated at conversion. It seems, in fact, to be aroused to fiercer opposition to God by the presence of the Holy Seed now planted within the heart. A struggle now develops within the soul, the Christ-life striving to grow, the "flesh" striving to strangle that growth (Galatians 5:17).
Many Christians imagine that this civil war is the normal, life-long, Christian experience. If it is, who can conceive anything more devastating to inward unity and peace, to mental and physical well-being? Surely, God has a plan for dealing with the "flesh," and for creating inward unity. If He has planned to plant Christ within our hearts to live a holy life through us, surely He has planned to deal with all inward resistance.
That plan is described in the Bible by various terms, perhaps the clearest of which is heart-cleansing (Acts 15:9 R.V.; I John 1:7, 9). This term does not indicate what God does with sin's guilt, but with sin's pollution and sin's power, "that infection of nature (which) doth remain, yea, in them that are regenerated." Andrew Murray says, "Scripture does not speak of being cleansed from guilt. Cleansing from sin means deliverance from the pollution, not from the guilt, of sin." And again, "This word 'cleanseth' does not refer to the grace of pardon received at conversion. . . . Cleansing is something that comes after pardon, and is the result of it, by the inward and experimental reception of the power of the blood of Jesus in the heart of the believer."
How is this blessed cleansing received? How, indeed, but by faith? How are we justified? By faith! How are we regenerated? By faith! In the same way our hearts are cleansed "by faith."
The Holy Spirit is the efficient cause of heart-cleansing. The blood of Christ is the material cause. Faith is the instrumental cause. As our faith lays hold of the promise of cleansing, the Holy Spirit applies the blood of Christ to our hearts, purging away the elements of antagonism and opening the way for a marvellous manifestation of the holiness of God in the cleansed heart and life.
All teachers of scriptural holiness have had to grapple with confusion in the minds of critics between "purity" and "maturity." Thomas Cook, in his New Testament Holiness, declared, "The error of confusing purity of heart with maturity of Christian character lies at the basis of nearly all the objections made to instantaneous and entire sanctification." We do not say that the crisis of heart cleansing carries one in a single moment to finality of Christian character, but we do affirm that it is a vital step towards it, a step for lack of which multitudes of believers are halting in the way of holiness.
The miracle of the new birth plants the germ of Christlikeness in the believers heart. Out of that germ a holy disposition and character grows. The New Testament shows clearly that such disposition and character may have various stages of development. There are "new-born babes" in Christ (I Peter 2:2). There are "little children," and "young men," and "fathers" (I John 2:12-14). The implication is that Christian maturity is reached gradually and progressively. Furthermore, within the New Testament is the phenomenon of arrested development, or stunted growth (I Corinthians 3:1-4; Hebrews 5:12-14)—a phenomenon as common and as challenging in the 20th century as in the first. Genuinely born-again souls often seem unable to advance in holiness of disposition and character, or do so only at snail's pace.
Now the crisis of heart cleansing deals with the fundamental attitude of the heart which is the cause of such arrested development. The heart is purified from inbred sin by faith in the blood of Christ. The immediate result is not finality or maturity. The babe in Christ does not suddenly become a father in the faith. But a condition of inward cleanness and concord is created which assists and accelerates the processes of growth. Rather does it aid and encourage those processes. Without it they are impeded.
Let us, then, describe briefly some of the things which are essential to growth.
Perfect understanding of the mind and will of God is not given in a moment, either at the crisis of conversion or the crisis of heart-cleansing. It has to be learned patiently and progressively before the open Bible and in the hard school of experience, by what Calvin called "the interior illumination of the Holy Ghost."
Wesley said of the Law of God: "It is the grand means whereby the blessed Spirit prepares the believer for larger communications of the life of God." That is true of all God's teaching methods. In the Divine school our minds are continually enlightened more fully and more clearly concerning God's will so that we may be continually "forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before" (Phil. 3:13-14).
From time to time throughout the Christian era men have been led to imagine that they could safely dispense with these means of grace. Wesley rightly insisted that such an idea was "a device of Satan." The means of grace are more meaningful and more necessary for the fully sanctified believer than for any others, inasmuch as the life of God planted in the soul at the new birth must be daily nourished from the source from whence it came if a holy disposition and character is to be developed and sustained. And nothing is clearer in the New Testament than that this nourishment is to be derived, not from unpractical mystical absorptions, but through faithful attendance on the means of grace. We neglect these means at our peril!
Development in Christian character involves a perpetual bodily discipline. Beware of the idea that God, through His regenerating and sanctifying grace, "lets us off" this responsibility. Even St. Paul said of himself; "But I keep under (R.V. 'buffet') my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, 1 myself should be a castaway" (I Cor. 9:27).
The complex machine which is the human body is a two-way instrument. It is a channel along which temptations make their appeal to the soul; and it is the vehicle by which holiness is lived out in the world. It must be "kept for the Master's use" by an unceasing vigil. It is a terrible fact of history that some who have known sanctifying grace and a high degree of Christian character have failed at this very point, and have been dragged down to sin by some uncontrolled physical appetite. There is no substitute for careful and constant bodily discipline.