(c) It is distinguished from regeneration as growth from birth, or as the strengthening of a holy disposition from the original impartation of it.
Eph. 4:15—“speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into him, who is the head, even Christ”; 1 Thess. 3:12—“the Lord make you to increase and abound in love one toward another, and toward all men”; 2 Pet. 3:18—“But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”; cf. 1 Pet. 1:23—“begotten again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, through the word of God, which liveth and abideth”; 1 John 3:9—“Whosoever is begotten of God doeth no sin, because his seed abideth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is begotten of God.” Not sin only, but holiness also, is a germ whose nature is to grow. The new love in the believer's heart follows the law of all life, in developing and extending itself under God's husbandry. George Eliot: “The reward of one duty done is the power to do another.” J. W. A. Stewart: “When the 21st of March has come, we say ‘The back of the winter is broken.’ There will still be alternations of frost, but the progress will be towards heat. The coming of summer is sure,—in germ the summer is already here.”Regeneration is the crisis of a disease; sanctification is the progress of convalescence.
Yet growth is not a uniform thing in the tree or in the Christian. In some single months there is more growth than in all the year besides. During the rest of the year, however, there is solidification, without which the green timber would be useless. The period of rapid growth, when woody fibre is actually deposited between the bark and the trunk, occupies but four to six weeks in May, June, and July. 2 Pet. 1:5—“adding on your part all diligence, in your faith supply virtue; and in your virtue knowledge”—adding to the central grace all those that are complementary and subordinate, till they attain the harmony of a chorus (ἐπιχορηγήσατε).
(d) The operation of God reveals itself in, and is accompanied by, intelligent and voluntary activity of the believer in the discovery and mortification of sinful desires, and in the bringing of the whole being into obedience to Christ and conformity to the standards of his word.
John 17:17—“Sanctify them in the truth: thy word is truth”; 2 Cor. 10:5—“casting down imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ”; Phil. 2:12, 13—“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”; 1 Pet. 2:2—“as new-born babes, long for the spiritual milk which is without guile, that ye may grow thereby unto salvation.” John 15:3—“Already ye are clean because of the word which I have spoken unto you.” Regeneration through the word is followed by sanctification through the word. Eph. 5:1—“Be ye therefore imitators of God, as beloved children.” Imitation is at first a painful effort of will, as in learning the piano; afterwards it becomes pleasurable and even unconscious. Children unconsciously imitate the handwriting of their parents. Charles Lamb sees in the mirror, as he is shaving, the apparition of his dead [pg 872]father. So our likeness to God comes out as we advance in years. Col. 3:4—“When Christ who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested in glory.”
Horace Bushnell said that, if the stars did not move, they would rot in the sky. The man who rides the bicycle must either go on, or go off. A large part of sanctification consists in the formation of proper habits, such as the habit of Scripture reading, of secret prayer, of church going, of efforts to convert and benefit others. Baxter: “Every man must grow, as trees grow, downward and upward at once. The visible outward growth must be accompanied by an invisible inward growth.” Drummond: “The spiritual man having passed from death to life, the natural man must pass from life to death.” There must be increasing sense of sin: “My sins gave sharpness to the nails, And pointed every thorn.” There must be a bringing of new and yet newer regions of thought, feeling, and action, under the sway of Christ and his truth. There is a grain of truth even in Macaulay's jest about “essentially Christian cookery.”
A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 63, 109-111—“The church is Christian no more than as it is the organ of the continuous passion of Christ. We must suffer with sinning and lost humanity, and so ‘fill up ... that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ’ (Col. 1:24). Christ's crucifixion must be prolonged side by side with his resurrection. There are three deaths: 1. death in sin, our natural condition; 2. death for sin, our judicial condition; 3. death to sin, our sanctified condition.... As the ascending sap in the tree crowds off the dead leaves which in spite of storm and frost cling to the branches all the winter long, so does the Holy Spirit within us, when allowed full sway, subdue and expel the remnants of our sinful nature.”
(e) The agency through which God effects the sanctification of the believer is the indwelling Spirit of Christ.
John 14:17, 18—“the Spirit of truth ... he abideth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you desolate; I come unto you”; 15:3-5—“Already ye are clean.... Abide in me ... apart from me ye can do nothing”; Rom. 8:9, 10—“the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. But if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness”; 1 Cor. 1:2, 30—“sanctified in Christ Jesus ... Christ Jesus, who was made unto us ... sanctification”; 6:19—“know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which ye have from God?” Gal. 5:16—“Walk by the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh”; Eph. 5:18—“And be not drunken with wine, wherein is riot, but be filled with the Spirit”; Col. 1:27-29—“the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory: whom we proclaim, admonishing every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ; whereunto I labor also, striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily”; 2 Tim. 1:14—“That good thing which was committed unto thee guard through the Holy Spirit which dwelleth in us.”
Christianity substitutes for the old sources of excitement the power of the Holy Spirit. Here is a source of comfort, energy, and joy, infinitely superior to any which the sinner knows. God does not leave the soul to fall back upon itself. The higher up we get in the scale of being, the more does the new life need nursing and tending,—compare the sapling and the babe. God gives to the Christian, therefore, an abiding presence and work of the Holy Spirit,—not only regeneration, but sanctification. C. E. Smith, Baptism of Fire: “The soul needs the latter as well as the former rain, the sealing as well as the renewing of the Spirit, the baptism of fire as well as the baptism of water. Sealing gives something additional to the document, an evidence plainer than the writing within, both to one's self and to others.”