The Sanctified Life

When Jesus went to sleep on Tuesday night, His days were few enough to count on one hand.  As we read the gospels, there is a growing awareness on our part that Jesus not only steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem, but He knew why He was going.  He knew the will of the Father and He was in step with it.  He did not count the breath of this life too great a thing to keep if obedience demanded another way.  His life was the Father's life.  His will was the Father's will.  There was no difference between the two.  It is to such a life that the Holy Spirit seeks to take us through the spiritual work we have come to call sanctification.  

There are some who speak of sanctification as work come and done.  It is an experience that sets the believer on a spiritual pedestal for the rest of life.  The proof of sanctification is found in some spiritual experience such as speaking in tongues, or being gifted with some unusual spiritual gift.  While sanctification may have a beginning point, it has no ending point.  It is a work of grace which begins in our heart by the Holy Spirit and is only regarded as completed when we reach our heavenly Home. Between beginning and end, life is not about marking notches on the cover of our Bible as we experience some spiritual high, but about a work which the Spirit does in our life which brings our heart in step with the heart of God.  

Through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, we move closer and closer to living with a spirit that does not count breath as to great a price to pay in order to live in obedience to the Father's will. When we gather with the community of believers on Sunday and pray "Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven," we are praying that the it will be on earth as it is in heaven, but we are also praying that Spirit's sanctifying work begun in us will move toward completion.  There is peace walking in sync with our Creator God.  There is purpose in stepping where He has stepped and where He is leading us.  As it was that week long ago, so it is today.   Not everyone wants to walk all the way to the cross.  Even today we are tempted to find a way in which our will can be supreme instead of His.