The Scope of Sanctification: Positional, Progressive, Perfected

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Jesus prayed, “Sanctify them in the truth. Your word is truth” (John 17:17). That prayer is not a mere wish but a certainty. Every request of the Son is perfectly aligned with the Father’s will, and every prayer of the Son is answered. He Himself declared, “Father, I thank You that You always hear Me” (John 11:42). His intercession is never denied, never delayed, never ineffective. When Jesus prays for His people, it is as good as done. If you are in Christ, your sanctification is not left hanging in the balance, dependent on your strength alone. It is secured by the perfect petition of the perfect High Priest. Holiness, then, is not an optional add-on. It is God’s unbreakable purpose for you, and He will bring it to completion.

The word sanctify comes from hagiazo, meaning to set apart, to consecrate, to make holy. In Scripture, ordinary things became holy when God set them aside for His service, such as the vessels in the temple. If that was true of bowls and lampstands, how much more is it true of blood-bought people. “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). Holiness is not mere rule-keeping. It is belonging to God for God, separation from sin and dedication to the Lord. Those vessels, once consecrated, could not be taken home by a priest for a private meal. They belonged exclusively to God’s house, set apart for His service, and to be used only when and how He commanded. That picture helps us grasp what it means to be sanctified: we are not common any longer, not available for just any use, but kept for the Lord.

The Bible speaks of sanctification in three tenses: past, present, and future. The first is positional sanctification. At conversion, God decisively sets us apart in Christ. This is a change of status and realm. Paul can tell a very messy church, “You were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified” (1 Corinthians 6:11). He even addresses them as “those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints” (1 Corinthians 1:2). Every Christian is a saint in this sense, not an elite few, but all who call upon the name of the Lord. This aspect is done, completed, and entirely God’s act. It gives us a new identity and standing before Him. And because it rests on Christ’s finished work, it cannot be undone. When shame whispers, “You are what you did,” positional sanctification answers, “No, I am who I am in Christ.”

The second aspect is progressive sanctification. This is the daily, lifelong work of the Spirit making us more like Jesus in thought, word, and deed. It is what Jesus prayed for in John 17:17. God uses a holy instrument, His holy Word, to produce holy people. Like produces like. “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable… for training in righteousness” so that we are “equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16–17). Teaching shows the path, reproof shows where we left it, correction brings us back, and training helps us stay on it. Growth is not a straight line upward but often three steps forward, two steps back. Bear in mind, struggle with sin is itself evidence of life, for before conversion we made peace with sin, but after conversion we make war. Yet we must be clear: in this world we never quite reach perfection in holiness. Progressive sanctification is real and observable, but it is always partial until the day of glorification.

And here is the certainty: the Spirit never abandons His work. Paul prayed, “May the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely” (1 Thessalonians 5:23), and then immediately added, “He who calls you is faithful; He will surely do it” (v. 24). The God who began the good work will not leave it half-finished. As Paul writes in Philippians 1:6, “He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” He takes personal responsibility for your growth in holiness. Theologians have described this beautifully. Berkhof called it “a gracious, continuous work that delivers from the pollution of sin, renews the whole nature, and enables good works.” Hodge said sanctification is both definitive and progressive: a decisive break with sin at conversion and an ongoing renewal. Calvin insisted that Christ justifies no one whom He does not also sanctify. Justification and sanctification are distinct but never divided. The Spirit works through the Word, prayer, the ordinances, and the fellowship of the church. Growth in holiness is a community project, not a solo endeavor, and it is guaranteed by the faithful hand of God.

The third aspect is perfected sanctification. One day the process will be complete. We will be presented “without spot or wrinkle” (Ephesians 5:27). “He will establish your hearts blameless in holiness” at the coming of Christ (1 Thessalonians 3:13). This is glorification, when there will be no more sin and no more inward war, only full conformity to Christ. For the believer who dies before Christ returns, glorification occurs at death, when the soul is made perfectly holy and enters the immediate presence of the Lord. For those alive at His return, glorification will happen in a moment, as our bodies are transformed and we are caught up to be with Him forever (1 Corinthians 15:51–53; 1 Thessalonians 4:16–17). So certain it is that glorification will occur for the true child of God, Paul writes of it in the past tense: “those whom He justified He also glorified” (Romans 8:30). In other words, it is as good as done. Every struggling saint will be glorified. Nothing can derail God’s purpose—not Satan, not the world, not even the weakness of our own flesh. We aim at holiness now with all our might, but we rest in the assurance that God Himself will finish the work.

These truths protect us from confusion. Sanctification is not the basis of salvation. We are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. Yet it is not optional, for “without holiness no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14). Fruit does not save, but living trees bear fruit. It is also not passive. The Christian life is not “let go and let God.” Scripture calls us to “work out” what God “works in” (Philippians 2:12–13). We strive, but God supplies. We labor, but God empowers. And because His power undergirds our striving, the outcome is never in doubt.

Think of a surgeon’s scalpel, sterilized and placed in skilled hands. By itself, it does nothing. In the surgeon’s hands, it becomes an instrument of healing. The Spirit is the divine Surgeon. The Word is His pure instrument. The Spirit takes the Word and cuts away what does not belong, not to harm but to heal, until the likeness of Christ emerges more clearly.

Holiness requires balance. Some fall into legalism, defining holiness only by what they do not do. Others abuse grace as a license to ignore God’s commands. True holiness is both putting off the old and putting on the new. It is separation from sin and consecration to God. It is not isolation either. We grow together in the church through worship, preaching, fellowship, and discipline. Nor is it despair. Positional sanctification reminds us that we are already set apart. Progressive sanctification assures us that God is presently at work within us. Perfected sanctification guarantees that one day we will be made complete. In every stage, certainty rests not on us but on Christ.

What does growth look like in practice? It means daily intake of the Word, praying that the Spirit would make it fruitful. It means continual repentance, keeping short accounts with God. It means walking in fellowship with the church and making use of the means of grace. It means guarding our inputs, since what we behold shapes what we become. And it means serving others, for holiness grows as we give ourselves away. As Luther put it, “God doesn’t need your good works. Your neighbor does.”

At the heart of it all is Christ. Sanctification begins, continues, and ends with Him. He is the One who sets us apart, the One who by His Word and Spirit is making us new, and the One who will present us faultless with great joy. The gospel not only pardons, it purifies. The grace that declares us righteous begins to make us righteous until the day when faith becomes sight. We have been sanctified in Christ. We are being sanctified by the Spirit through the Word. And we will be sanctified completely at His coming. And because Jesus prayed for it, it is certain.

A Thousand Years

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We should and must take the Bible literally. But taking the Bible literally does not mean we interpret everything in a wooden or flat way. To take Scripture literally means to take it according to its literature. The Bible contains poetry, prophecy, apocalyptic visions, parables, and historical narrative, and each must be read in light of its genre. Genre plays a huge role in guiding us toward the right interpretation. A failure to do this wreaks havoc in hermeneutics, leading to distortions of meaning and confusion about what God has actually said. For example, when the Psalms tell us that God covers us with His feathers, we do not picture God as a bird. We understand it as poetic imagery meant to communicate His protection. In the same way, when Revelation speaks of dragons, chains, and “a thousand years,” the point is not to read with wooden literalism, but to recognize the symbolic language of apocalyptic literature and let it speak in the way it was meant to.

I once held to dispensational premillennialism, and even taught it at eschatology conferences as far back as the late 1980s. In those circles very little time was given to trace the word “thousand” through the Scriptures. Yet that tracing is essential. The essence of Bible study is not to let our assumptions govern the text, but to let Scripture interpret Scripture. This is what theologians call the analogy of Scripture, the principle that the Bible, being God’s Word, never contradicts itself, and the clearer passages shed light on the more difficult ones. Closely related is the analogy of faith, which reminds us that all of Scripture must be understood in light of the whole system of truth it presents, with Christ at the center. When we apply these principles, we begin to see that the use of “thousand” in Revelation 20 is not isolated or unique, but consistent with the way the Bible elsewhere uses numbers symbolically to convey completeness, vastness, or fullness.

When Dr. Brian Borgman was preaching for us at King’s Church he gave an insightful analogy summarized as follows:

Where we live, the Gardnerville Fairgrounds sits dusty and worn, the air often heavy with the smells of horses, hot dogs, and popcorn. One week they set up a traveling carnival. My grandson, Calvin, spotted the Ferris wheel and begged to go. I promised we would. For several days we drove past the bright lights, and each time I told him to be patient. Finally I said, today is the day. We got in the car and drove, but instead of turning into the fairgrounds, I kept going. Calvin protested, that is what you promised. Be patient, I said. We passed the town limits, then the county line, and his disappointment grew. Hours later we reached Anaheim. I asked him to close his eyes, pulled up to the entrance of Disneyland, and said, open them. He looked up at the castle and the park spread out before him. No one who receives Disneyland would complain that he was promised only the local carnival. When God fulfills His promises in Christ by giving more than we imagined, He has not failed to keep His word. He has fulfilled it in a greater way, a supra fulfillment that points us to the new heavens and the new earth.

This is exactly how Scripture uses the language of a “thousand.” Psalm 50:10 says God owns “the cattle on a thousand hills,” but of course that means all the hills are His. The psalmist is not suggesting a limit, as if hill number 1,001 somehow lies outside of God’s possession. Rather, he is painting a picture of vastness. Every beast in every forest, every herd grazing on every mountain belongs to Him. The word “thousand” here is not arithmetic to be counted, but majesty to be marveled at. It is the language of abundance, meant to remind us that God is not the Lord of part of creation, but the Lord of all creation.

Deuteronomy 7:9 and Psalm 105:8 promise that God’s covenant love extends to a thousand generations. That is not a limit but a picture of unending faithfulness. Deuteronomy 7:9 says, “Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love Him and keep His commandments, to a thousand generations.” If taken literally, it would imply an expiration date on His mercy, which would contradict the very point Moses is making. The phrase stresses permanence and boundlessness. A thousand generations is far longer than the human mind can practically reckon, and the point is that God’s steadfast love endures without end. His covenant loyalty is not fragile or dependent on changing human performance. It is anchored in His own eternal character.

Psalm 84:10 tells us that one day in God’s courts is better than a thousand elsewhere. The point is not arithmetic, but the surpassing joy of being with Him. Psalm 90:4 and 2 Peter 3:8 take the language even higher: “a thousand years are like a day” to the Lord, and “a day is like a thousand years.” This is not a conversion chart between God’s time and ours, as if one of His days equals one thousand of our years. If we insist on strict math, we miss the very truth the text is meant to communicate. God is not bound by time at all. He does not experience delay the way we do. He is not aging or waiting, He is not carried along by the stream of history, and He does not measure His purposes by the ticking of our clocks. To the eternal God, what feels to us like long centuries may be as a moment, and what feels to us like a brief breath is eternally present in His sight. His promises are not late and His reign is not slow. His timing is always perfect, because He stands over time itself as the sovereign Lord of history.

And in Revelation 20, the “thousand years” of Christ’s reign fits the same biblical pattern. The number stands for fullness and completeness, not a literal countdown. In fact, everything around the phrase “a thousand years” in Revelation 20 is rich with imagery. Satan is described as a dragon, bound with a great chain, and cast into a bottomless pit. Thrones appear, and the martyrs are seen reigning with Christ. The nations are gathered under the symbolic names Gog and Magog, coming from the four corners of the earth. Fire comes down from heaven to consume the enemies of God. All of these elements show that the language is meant to convey spiritual truths through symbolic pictures. So when John says “a thousand years,” it belongs in the same symbolic category, describing the completeness of Christ’s reign rather than a literal block of time.

The interpretation of the “thousand years” in Revelation 20 as symbolic rather than literal is the general consensus among Reformed theologians. This flows out of covenant theology, the recognition of apocalyptic genre, and the consistent symbolic use of numbers throughout Revelation. From Augustine’s City of God onward, the mainstream Reformed tradition has understood the millennium as describing the present reign of Christ, not a future thousand-year earthly kingdom.

This matches the wider pattern of numbers in Revelation. In Revelation 5:11 John hears the voice of angels “ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands.” That is not meant to be tallied up as 100 million plus a few more. It is a way of saying beyond counting, echoing Daniel 7:10. The number 7, repeated throughout the book, represents perfection and completeness: seven churches, seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls. The number 12 speaks of the fullness of God’s people: twelve tribes of Israel, twelve apostles of the Lamb, twelve gates, and twelve foundations in the New Jerusalem. The 144,000 in Revelation 7 and 14 is not a census figure but 12 x 12 x 1,000, a symbolic way of showing the entire redeemed people of God.

So when Revelation speaks of a thousand years, it is consistent with the way numbers function throughout the book. They are symbols pointing us to spiritual realities, not statistics to be added up. The thousand years stands for the fullness of Christ’s reign, the complete accomplishment of God’s purposes in history, and the assurance that all His promises will be perfectly fulfilled.

Put simply, when Scripture speaks of a thousand, it points us to abundance, fullness, and forever. Just as the grandson discovered in Brian Borgman’s illustration that Disneyland was far more than he expected when all he could imagine was a small carnival, so God’s people will discover that His promises in Christ are greater, richer, and more complete than we ever dared to hope.

And this is the encouragement for us: God’s promises are never smaller than they appear, they are always greater. His faithfulness is never cut short, it always endures. What may look to us like delay or distance is, in fact, the outworking of His perfect timing. In Christ we can rest assured that the fulfillment will not disappoint. It will be more than we asked, greater than we imagined, and better than we dared to hope.

Membership and the Lord’s Supper

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As we read Acts 2, we see a clear sequence in the life of the early church. Luke writes: “So then, those who had received his word were baptized; and that day there were added about three thousand souls. They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer” (Acts 2:41–42). All who repented and believed the gospel were baptized, and in doing so they were recognized as citizens of God’s kingdom and immediately became active members of the local church. Out of that new identity, they joined together in the Word, prayer, fellowship, and the breaking of bread.

This biblical pattern helps us see why membership is inseparably connected to participation in the Lord’s Supper. Paul writes, “We who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Corinthians 10:17). That visible unity assumes a defined and counted people. In 2 Corinthians 2:6 Paul refers to discipline being carried out “by the majority.” That phrase only makes sense if the church knew who belonged to them, since a majority can only be known when the whole is counted. Hebrews 13:17 adds that elders must keep watch over the souls of those entrusted to them and will give an account to Christ. This shepherding cannot happen where there is no belonging. And part of that shepherding includes elders being able to affirm, by welcoming someone to the Table, that they are indeed a true believer walking in repentance and faith.

This is why church discipline and the Lord’s Supper go hand in hand. In 1 Corinthians 5 Paul commands the church to remove the unrepentant from their fellowship, using Passover imagery: “Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival” (vv. 7–8). To be excluded from the church was to be excluded from the covenant meal. Discipline includes withholding the Supper from those who persist in unrepentant sin. But without membership, that discipline is impossible. To partake while refusing membership is to seek the benefits of belonging without the accountability Christ requires.

Our Baptist forefathers recognized this. The First London Confession (1644) restricted communion to baptized believers walking in obedience. The Second London Confession (1689) stated that the Supper is “to be observed in His churches until the end of the age” (30.1), and that “all who are admitted to the privileges of a church are also under its censures and government according to the rule of Christ” (26.12). The privilege of the Table cannot be separated from the accountability of discipline, nor from the responsibility of elders to guard the Supper and affirm the faith of those who come.

For these reasons, we ask that those who partake of the Lord’s Supper be members of a faithful, gospel-preaching church. This is not about excluding anyone harshly. It is about following the pattern Christ has given for our good. Repentance, faith, baptism, and membership prepare the way for communion at His Table. Through membership, believers share the ordinary means of grace, enjoy fellowship, hear the preaching of the Word, and partake of the ordinances in a protected environment under the care of Christ’s under-shepherds. In this way, the Supper becomes what Christ intended it to be: a covenant meal of the redeemed, shared in unity, truth, and love.