1 Thessalonians 5:23-24
1 Thessalonians 5, 23 and 24. The Apostle Paul says to the
Thessalonian church, as he writes from Corinth, Amen. The word
of the living God. I think a number of you are familiar
with the ancient church father, St. Augustine. He was the Bishop
of Hippo, a city in North Africa. Perhaps some of you in Western
civilization have had to read the confessions of St. Augustine,
basically his autobiography, his long writing of how he came
to faith in Jesus Christ. Maybe if you’ve read in theology,
The City of God, how he differentiates between The Jerusalem above and
the Babylon that is below, you understand the two worlds we
live in. Well, in his biography, he will
tell you how bad of a person he was. Pretty rotten guy. His mother, Monica, prayed for
him 30 years or so. Eventually, he comes to faith. The effectual call of God comes
as he passes a playground and hears a group of children playing
a game, Tolelege, take up and read. And he hears that Tola
Lega take up and read. And he lands in the book of Romans
and reads about how a righteous God saves unrighteous people.
And in his life, his later life, as he became one of the greatest
theologians, probably next to St. Paul, we might skip the dark
ages, maybe except Thomas Aquinas. We like most of what he said.
It takes getting to Luther and Calvin and the modern day theologians
who got back to the scriptures, back to the fountain of truth. But in St. Augustine’s time,
he prays a prayer that gets him in hot water. And the prayer
goes something like this, Lord, command what you will, but give what you command. In
a sense, if you wanted to paraphrase, Lord, you tell me whatever it
is you want me to do, I’ll do it. insofar as you give me the
strength to do it. And it’s a prayer that speaks
of submission and resting in God’s sovereignty. Lord, tell
me you’re the king. Tell me what to do. I’ll do it.
But you’re going to have to give me the strength to obey your
commands. And he got in trouble with Pelagius,
the heretic who believed that there was something good in man.
He wasn’t totally fallen or radically corrupted, he still had an ounce
of good in him. And from the ounce of good, he
could seek God. Well, we understand from the
scriptures, there is no one righteous. No, not one. We understand from
the scriptures that man is radically corrupt from birth. In fact,
I think we just prayed that from the pen of King David. Do we
want to argue with David under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit?
Probably not. He’d win. So Pelagius thought
there’s a little ounce of something good. And so we can reach out
to God or reach up to God. And we can also, out of our own
little bit of human strength and dignity left in us, we can
also obey God. Well, if you know from the scripture
in your own Christian experience that to not be true, which we
should, we love the prayer of St. Augustine. Command what you
will, but give what you command. And we think of that in light
of all that Paul has taught the Thessalonians. Perhaps you’re
lost in the forest for the trees. So let me remind you just briefly
what Paul has taught the Thessalonians. Baby Christians, with them four
weeks, got run off, skips through Berea and Athens. And now he’s at Corinth. He sent
Timothy back up there to check on them. So this is maybe Less
than a year later, he’s writing to them a letter and he’s told
them a lot of things, who they are in Jesus, what they have
in Christ, but he’s told them some things they ought to do.
And if you look at just chapter four and chapter five of the
letter to the Thessalonians, he’s given them a lot of things,
in a sense, what Augustine said, command what you will. So God,
through the pen of the apostle Paul, through the authority of
the Holy Spirit, has encouraged the Thessalonians to abstain
from immorality. He’s asked them to continue in
brotherly love. He’s commanded them not to grieve the dead as though
they don’t have Christ Jesus and have no hope. He’s encouraged
them to be awake or watchful for the day of the Lord. He’s
encouraged them to respect their leaders, admonish the unruly
or the idle. not to repay evil for evil, to
rejoice always, pray without ceasing and everything, give
thanks and test all things. And so his encouragement to the
saints, the baby Christians at Thessalonica is to abound more
and more in walking with God and pleasing God. So learn and
know the will of God and progress in your sanctification or your
holiness. So to think through St. Augustine’s
prayer, give what you command, that’s a hefty list. but command
what you will. Give the strength to do all that
I have commanded.” And so this prayer or this benediction, some
see it as both, is very helpful. Now, may the God of peace himself. So who’s going to help you? The
God of peace himself. May he sanctify you completely
and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be kept blameless at
the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you as faithful,
he will surely do it. Normally, the apostle does not
give a summary prayer at the end of his letters. You’ve sat
through sermons, hopefully none of mine, where you went through
the sermon, you took notes, and then the prayer comes at the
end and the sermon gets re-preached in the prayer. Usually Paul doesn’t
do that, but here he does. And so this prayer you can see
is a direct blessing or a benediction or wish on the heart of the apostle
Paul that the Thessalonians would fulfill all righteousness. Now
there’s a couple reasons for this. One is only God can do
it. That’s important. Second is Paul can’t be there.
He’s relying on other baby Christians to encourage other baby Christians
to live the difficult Christian life. And so this is his prayer. We want to think about this prayer
beginning with God and ending with God. But in the middle,
we want to think about a couple important words that pop up that
that are important salvation words in the life of believers.
And those words are calling, sanctification, glorification,
and assurance. So we’ll begin and end with God,
but we want to think about our calling, our sanctification,
our glorification, and our assurance. Let’s begin with God. How do
we know God? Well, God reveals himself to
us. We call that the doctrine of
revelation. God reveals himself to us. And we say that he has to condescend. God is so great and so incomprehensible
that he has to condescend to tell us about himself. You walk
up to a little child, a little baby, and you don’t say, well,
hello, child. Would you like to talk about,
you know, free market economies and capitalism and all the rest?
No. You take your finger and, you know, do the little thing
over your lips. And the great theologian, Don Calvin says,
God has to prattle. He has to prattle in order that
we can understand him. He can’t speak in the language
that is so grandiose about him. In fact, the English language,
the Hebrew language, the Greek language could not even begin
to describe the greatness and grandeur of God. And so we see
revelation as a condescension. God condescends. He gets down
on our level. He gets down on our knees and
looks us eye to eye and face to face. And we believe God speaks
to us or reveals himself in two ways, one through the world and
everything in it. General revelation, Psalm 19 tells us there is a
God and the world tells us there is. We in the science world refer
to that as intelligent design. Everybody’s always trying to
figure out what’s the big bang. What is the catalyst? What is
the thing that made the world come to be? We know what the
big bang is. We know it’s the voice of God,
who in Genesis 1, as he hovered over the face of deep, said over
and over, let there be. And he gave form and fashion
to this world. So God reveals himself. You look
at a tiny baby. You look at the stars in the
sky, the colors in the trees in autumn. You look at ecosystems. You look at the wonders of the
world. Perhaps you’ve flown over the earth and looked out of your
airplane and seen the little spots of land, or you’ve looked
into your telescope. You’ve looked into your microscope.
The world and everything in it screams to us, it proclaims to
us, it heralds to us there is a God. That’s not enough to save
us. And that’s why we need what we
call special revelation. General revelation in the world
tells us there’s God. Special revelation in the scripture
tells us, and he saves you through his son, the Lord Jesus. And
you can most clearly and most wonderfully know that God. through
the scriptures. And so we read the scriptures.
We learn of the character and the actions and the promises
of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit throughout
redemptive history. We can see it in our own lives.
We can read of it in biographies and in history. And the point
is this, and this is what Paul is saying to the Thessalonians
and what we want to remember today. It is God who saves. It is God who saves from start
to finish, from A to Z. And we can pray like St. Augustine,
Lord, command what you will, but give what you command. And our God who reveals himself
says, I’m a holy God. I’m a righteous God. I’m a just
God. And I can by no means clear the
guilty. Can’t lift up the rug and sweep
sin under. Sin has to be dealt with. It
has to be paid for. And so the unfolding pages of
scripture tell us how God in Christ does exactly that. And so we read of the God of
peace. May the God of peace himself, kind of a twofold thing here,
sanctify us and then get us to heaven. Perfect. That’s really
the split of the passage. May the God of peace sanctify
us in this life and get us to heaven safe and whole, safe and
sound. And so this God of peace sent
his son to bring peace between God and man. There was enmity
between us because we lost communion. with God at the fall. So that’s
God. We’re going to begin with God,
as we’ve done. We’re going to end with God. But let’s think of
the couple words that pop up. And I’m going to jump to the
end of the passage and deal with calling. In verse 24, it says,
he who calls you is faithful and he will surely do it. So
we’ll think of calling. If you’ve been in the ladies
Bible study, the young adult Sunday school class, if you’ve
been in the men’s Bible study, you’ve been through the confession
of faith. And for sure, you’ve heard me
ramble on about the order of salvation, the golden chain of
salvation. You’ve heard it in the Romans
8 Sunday school class. You’ve heard it in the Roman
study y’all just completed a few weeks back. You hear it come
out in sermons. And I love how Sinclair Ferguson
says our theology is the Velcro. It’s the Velcro to which sermons
and scripture sticks. And this word calling ought to
be familiar to you. If you read your New Testament
epistles, you’ll see the word calling quite a bit. We’re to
live in a manner worthy of the calling to which we have been
called. Be all the more eager to make our call and our election
sure. So what does this mean, this
calling word? Well, if you think about the
golden chain of salvation, we often say it’s predestination,
effectual calling, there’s the calling, regeneration, faith,
justification, adoption, sanctification, perseverance, and glorification.
Now we’ll talk about the S, sanctification, and the G, glorification, but
way at the beginning, we have calling or effectual calling,
and that’s our word for the moment. And calling is all theology is. It’s split up into twos and threes,
right? Theology is about distinctions.
We speak of the call in two ways. There’s the outward gospel call.
We’re to go into all the world and preach the gospel. That preach
word is the herald word. There’s an evangelism word. We’re
to go out into the world and herald the good news. We’re to
go out in the world and preach the gospel. And then there’s
kind of a general preaching word, Sunday by Sunday. But we go out
and we do not distinguish or discriminate. We speak the gospel.
We call out the gospel, sort of like John the baptizer did
in the wilderness, preparing the way for the coming of Jesus. We go out in the world and we
call people to repent for Jesus is on his way back a second time.
And so there’s this general call. We want all men and women and
boys and girls to hear of their sin, to see their need of a savior
and to lay hold of Jesus Christ by faith and to worship him in
this life and the life to come. But then there’s what we call
the effectual call. And as God has called you to
faith in him, you can see how this works. Nitty gritty nuts
and bolts. Perhaps you heard of the gospel
from your parents. Perhaps you heard the gospel
from an evangelist. Perhaps you heard the call to
take up and read and you picked up a Gideon’s Bible in a motel
room or a hospital. Perhaps someone left a gospel
track and you picked it up and read it and inquired more. Maybe
you went to a Billy Graham crusade. Perhaps some means of the outward
call brought about the inward work of the spirit. where God
convinced you of your sin and misery. He convinced you of your
need of Jesus Christ. And you heard his voice so clearly
say, come to me, all you who are weary and heavy burdened,
and I will give you rest. And so we understand this calling,
this gospel calling in light of the Thessalonians, Paul went
there because he was forbidden to minister in Asia. He went
there because in a dream, He heard a man say, come over to
Macedonia and help us. And so as Paul went in the synagogue
and preached, he gave the general gospel call. Some rejected him,
including the Jews, but we’re told in Thessalonica, many Jews
became believers in Christ, as well as many Roman citizens,
many Gentiles, and even leading citizens. The gospel call went
out. Some rejected it. Some got angry
about it, ran him out of town. but others had the work of the
spirit in them. And like Lazarus, dead in his
tomb, they heard the voice of Jesus saying, come forth. Or
perhaps like the voice of Jesus to Zacchaeus, come down from
that tree, come down from your life of sin and let me enter
in your home and have fellowship with you. The gospel call is
a command of God to leave darkness and death and to be raised up
and born again into newness of life. And that leads us to the
Christian life. We start with God, we end with
God, but what of the call? Now what of sanctification? May
the God of peace himself sanctify you completely. May he make you
holy through and through is another way to put it. You know, sometimes,
nice spring day, it’s good to get outside and wash the car.
And you know, you scrub every nook and cranny, You dry it off,
you wipe out the door jamb so there’s no mold and mildew and
all the rest and make it look really, really good. And about
two weeks later, it’s dirty again. You say, well, I don’t have energy
to wash it like that. So you get over to Little Donnie’s, right?
And you run it through the thing and you get home and you look
at it and you say, well, it’s mostly clean, right? There’s no wash job like a good
driveway scrubbing. And you can get by with a little
zip through touchless. You put your credit card in,
you sit there and change radio stations and wonder why they
don’t come through because you’re in the tunnel, you’re in the cave,
and you can’t be bored that long, so you flip through your phone.
But you’re just passive, right? Sanctification, we say in our
theology, is the work of God’s free grace, whereby we are renewed
in the whole of man after the image of Christ. And we are enabled
more and more to die to sin, the doctrine of mortification,
And we are enabled to live, that’s vivification, unto righteousness.
I think y’all have learned about that in the Christian ed hour
as well. So sanctification is our lifelong
growth in grace. We die to sin, we live to righteousness.
So it’s a daily dying and rising, dying and rising. If any man
wants to come after me, he must deny himself, take up his cross
and follow me. The Christian life is a dying
and rising, a constant dying and rising. We die to our sins.
We die to our idols. We die to the deeds of the flesh.
We die to the desires of the world. We die to the temptations. And it’s a lifelong struggle.
a lifelong battle. But in this wonderful work of
God Almighty, we also lean into it as well. We always say salvation
is holy of God. Yes, it takes divine initiative
to love a hateful people. It takes divine initiative to
send a son to save a people for himself. It takes initiative
to send the spirit to renew and awaken and enliven people. And
in our sanctification, Sometimes we say it’s a 50-50 proposition.
That gets into a little bit of God is my co-pilot business,
doesn’t it? It’s a 100-100 proposition. God wholly leans into your holiness,
and you 100% lean into your holiness. And it’s that daily dying and
rising. And it’s a struggle because we, like the pilgrim and pilgrim’s
progress, we see Vanity Fair and say, looks fun. We see the
Slough of Despond and say, pity party. We see all the attractions
and temptations and we can get off the narrow path very quickly. But sanctification is an important
aspect of the Christian life. And just as there was a distinction
with the call, there is a distinction with sanctification that I think
is important. When we come to faith in Jesus,
God sets us apart. That’s the sanctify word. He
sets us apart from paganism and from idolatry. In fact, Paul
will say to the Thessalonians, you traded in idolatry to serve
the living God. You left that behind. You repented.
But when we come to faith in Jesus, we are set apart. We are
made holy by the washing of the water with the word. And we are
a holy people. So when Paul even writes to the
Corinthians who were, well, they were Corinthianizing. Remember
how bad they were? I got four letters. He says to the saints
of God, to the holy ones. And so we have this position
in Jesus Christ of being holy ones. Now we may continue to
do unholy things until the rest of our lives. That is a fact
that is true. And it led Martin Luther to say that Latin phrase
that we know so well, simul justus et peccator, at the same time,
righteous and a sinner. Have you seen the, I think it’s
a tattoo shop somewhere in town, saints and sinners. And I kind
of chuckle and think, do they know what they’re saying? They
should have called it symbol justus et peccator that made
Luther happy. But as Christians, there’s this
definite sanctification when we become Christians. You are
holy. But there’s also a progressive
sanctification. We are being renewed in the inner
man. We are being transformed by the
renewal of our mind. And so as you begin to read your
Bible with these theological words from our confessions and
creeds and catechisms, you begin to have the Velcro in your mind
and heart to which the scripture sticks. You’ll start thinking,
Oh, call. I wonder if this is the general
call Paul means, or if this is the effectual call he means.
So Paul says, I’m going to go out and preach the word to all
kinds of people. He probably means general call. But if he addresses
a letter to the called ones who are living in Jesus, it’s the
other. And the same with sanctification. There are places in the New Testament
where it says you are holy people. And then there’s the places where
it says you need to get more holy. And this is one of those.
Now may the God of peace sanctify you completely or make you holy
through and through. And let me give you the encouraging
and the discouraging news all at once. The encouraging news
is God himself will sanctify you by his word, by his spirit. You lean into it. This isn’t
go through a little Donny’s and fiddle with your phone or your
radio stations while the car sort of gets washed. This is
get out in the driveway and get sweaty and wet, right? This is
get out in the driveway and scrub and have, you know, soap pans
later, right? This is clean every nook and
cranny so that your car is, what do we say, showroom clean? Well,
the Christian life, as we read, as we pray, as we worship, as
we suffer, and as we take the sacraments and we rinse and repeat
the rest of our lives, we die and rise, die and rise. We struggle
in our mind with the thing we ought to do and the thing we
ought not to do. And like Paul in Romans 7, sometimes
we know the very thing we should do and we don’t do it. Our flesh
takes over, our remnant sin, our remnant corruption takes
over. And then we know the right thing to do. And what does he
say? We don’t do it. And then he says, Oh, wretched man that
I am who can deliver me from this body of death. And so sanctification
is a lifelong and imperfect battle, the spirit warring against the
flesh and the flesh warring against the spirit. It’s win some, lose
some. It’s two steps forward. Sometimes three steps backwards.
It’s flat on your face. And one of the surefire ways
not to get sanctified, It’s to stop praying. It’s to stop reading
your Bible. It’s to stop coming to church.
It’s to stop staying in the breeze of the spirit. It’s to quench
the spirit as we spoke of last week. It’s to harbor enmity against
others. It’s to love the lust of the
world and the lust of the flesh and the pride of life. If you
want to kill sanctification, just do everything opposite.
of living in the habits of grace. And you know this to be biblically
true, but I’m sure you know it to be spiritually and personally
true. You know, when your life is out
of whack, we need to get to worship for a front end alignment, right?
You know, when your life is out of lack, like the psalmist in
Psalm 73, I looked around the world and wondered why the righteous
suffer and the wicked prosper. And I got upset. In fact, the
psalmist says I was rather brutish, like brutish towards God. until he went to church. And
when I went in your sanctuary, I saw again what is good, right
and true. And it straightened out my thinking. You see, you
get in the word, you get in prayer, you get in fellowship with other
saints, you get in worship, you sit under the sacraments, receive
the sacraments, and you live a life of hating sin and holding
fast to what is good and dying to sin and living to righteousness.
It’s a terrible, and I mean that in the right sense of the word,
it’s a terrible life. but it’s the way God has intended. It’s a lifelong battle, a struggle,
and it’s an irreconcilable war until the next word, which is
glorification. So in this passage where Paul
says to the Thessalonians, do all that I commanded you, but
let’s ask God to help you. We’re gonna start and end with
God. We’re gonna speak of calling and sanctification. We wanna
speak now of glorification. And that pops up in our passage
where he says, may he keep you blameless at the coming of our
Lord Jesus. We speak of sanctification, dying
and rising in this life, but glorification is being made perfect,
being made perfect in the next life. And it’s perfect in the
presence of God. Remember, God’s presence can’t
can’t stand the sight of unholiness. What did Isaiah say when he entered
the presence of God? I’m a man with unclean lips. What did John do on the Isle
of Patmos? He fell on his face as though
dead. But glorification is that great
word that we should all strive for and look for that moment.
One of the things we like to say from time to time is the
job of the church to get you safely home. Now, not back to
whatever number and street you live on in Burlington or surrounding
communities after church, but safely home to heaven. And glorification
is that G, it’s at the end of the golden chain. We begin with
predestination, effectual calling, regeneration, faith, justification,
adoption, sanctification, perseverance, and then the G, glorification.
And our shorter catechism is very helpful. Again, the Velcro,
it asks and answers two questions. What are the benefits? of believers
at their death? And this answer I always give
at a graveside service. The souls of believers are at
their death made perfect in holiness. That’s the glorification. And
do immediately pass into glory, but their bodies being still
united to Jesus. Rest in their graves until the
resurrection. And until the resurrection or
the second coming of Jesus, we call that the intermediate state
where our bodies are in the grave. Perhaps the grave could be the
sea. Perhaps it could be the earth and a proper funeral. Perhaps
it’s something else because of some other tragedy in this life,
this side of the fall, but whatever state our body is in, it rests
in the grave until the resurrection and it is united to Jesus. But
then the next question, what are the benefits to believers
at the resurrection or the second coming of Jesus? And at that,
our bodies are raised up after resting in the grave in Christ.
Our bodies are raised up in glory, united to our souls again. And
we are openly acknowledged and acquitted in the sight of Almighty
God because of the righteousness of Jesus, not because of our
own righteousness, our own good works, for they are as filthy
rags. But we are openly acknowledged
and acquitted, our body and our soul forever in the glorious
presence of Almighty God, enjoying Him without interruption, enjoying
Him without any hindrance or lack of clarity. We see Him as
He is. We see Him face to face. And
so glorification in the scriptures is often called our first resurrection.
The book of Revelation says, blessed are the dead who die
in the Lord, for they shall rest from their labors, their deeds
shall follow them. Our spirits, our weary spirits go to heaven
and receive rest. Our bodies rest in the grave
until the second resurrection where those bodies are raised
up with all. We get a little down payment
of that, don’t we, at the cross. Remember those funny little things
that happen about the time of Jesus’ death, the earthquakes,
The curtain of the temple is torn in two. Some tombs are open
and some who have died have been resurrected. We don’t really
have stories of who they were, how it happened. Then it comes
up again in Hebrews, doesn’t it? Some receive back their dead. And so we get little down payments,
even in Lazarus or some of the healings Jesus does. We get down
payments of what full restoration, gospel restoration will be like. And so we look forward to the
end of our sanctification and the beginning of our everlasting
glorification. If you get the chance to go to
the Billy Graham Museum and you go to the grave sites of Mrs.
Graham and Billy, on her grave site, it says, end of construction,
thanks for your patience. That captures sanctification,
doesn’t it? But it also captures glorification, end of construction.
We sang in that song earlier, which I hope you’ll look back
at later today. We sang of what could be, will
be, what shall be, will be, something like that. A bunch of possible
words there weren’t there. It was interesting to read and
to sing and to let it settle into your soul. Well, the next word, we want
to begin and end with God. We want to think about calling
and sanctification and glorification. We really want to land on assurance.
How do we know that we can do what God requires? Well, that
pops up in verse 24. He who calls you is faithful. He will surely do it. So St. Augustine’s prayer, command what
you will, but give what you command. You see right now how biblical
that sort of prayer is. You know, a lot of people have
a low view of God. They have the deist view, right? God took
the world and spun it like a Harlem Globetrotter, got it spinning,
and then he tossed it in the air and it’s spinning as long
as it will, but eventually it will give out. Now, God controls
the beginning and the end and the in-between, and he will make
all things as they ought to be according to the councils of
his great, holy, and mighty will. But we have too low a view of
God. We kind of do our Christian life like the little engine that
could, I think I can, I think I can, I’m gonna make it, I’m
gonna make it. And that’s not how it works. God does mighty
work in us. And yes, we lean into things,
especially like our sanctification, but sometimes we have too high
a view of man because we’re post-enlightenment people, where man is the measure
of all things and man is not so bad. In fact, man is great.
And we see the effects of that in our world and our culture,
but we need a high view of God and a low view of man. And then
we’ll begin to get things right. Sometimes we say God is not that
sovereign and I’m not that bad off, but the news is and the
experience is God is that sovereign and you’re far worse than you
could ever imagine. Thanks be to God. for Christ. But what about assurance? How
do we know that in the thick of the struggle with sin, sanctification,
how do we know in the thick of hardships, how do we know in
the thick of sickness or illness or persecution or whatever life
gives us, how do we know we’re going to make it? Where do we
get assurance from? Well, we’re told we’re to grow
into our assurance, be all the more eager to make your calling
and election sure. I think Peter writes. And so
we should lean into our assurance as well and embrace the promises
of God that are yes and amen in the Lord Jesus Christ. You
know, a lot of people think Christianity is like picking daisies. He loves
me. He loves me not. And how do we pick daisies? Well,
I’ve been a terrible person. God would never forgive me. Well,
the cross of Christ, the blood of Jesus, the power of the spirit
to hover over the face of the deep and to take what is formless
and void and form it and fill it, the power of the spirit to
hover over the dead bones in Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones
vision, to breathe life into those bones and they rattle,
right? That’s what God does in us, in our new birth, but also
our sanctification. He is the life giver. He is the
Lord, as we confessed, In the Nicene Creed, he’s the Lord and
giver of life. And so our assurance needs to
be cerebral, needs to be intellectual, but it also needs to be experiential.
We sing from time to time his oath, his covenant, his blood,
support me neath the whelming flood. When all around my soul
gives way, he alone is my hope and stay. That’s not picking
daisies, is it? And we go on to sing on Christ.
the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand. Our assurance comes from the
things that we know in our mind and have seeped down into our
heart. We have learned the character and the actions and the promises
of God. And that’s what Paul is telling
the Thessalonians. The God of peace himself will
do this. The God of peace himself is faithful. And this is your assurance. God
is at work in you. The book of Jude, that one little
chapter book. He who began a good work in you
will be faithful to complete it. God is going to sanctify
you through and through. He’s going to glorify you completely
in his holy presence. And he’s going to be faithful.
He’s going to complete what he started. You know, some of us,
most of us have incomplete projects, you know, our workshops, our
baby books, our family albums, our checkbooks, or, you know,
we got piles, right? God does not have piles. He has
completed trophies of grace in his glorious presence. And we
want to end with God. We want to end with God. Now,
may the God of peace himself. And then verse 24, he who is
faithful, he will surely do it. This is the God of peace who
could have dusted off his hands in the garden and said, you know,
Adam and Eve, you flunked my test. So have at it. Instead, he went looking for
them. And he says, I’m going to clothe you in righteousness.
Those skins were harbingers or pointers to the righteous robes
of the Lord Jesus that would be given to us. We exchange our
filthy rags. He gives us his righteous robes.
The God of peace himself could have dusted off his hands, but
he went looking for them. He clothed them. And then he
began to sanctify them by his word and to bring them safely
home. Salvation is a big subject. And it begins and ends with God
himself, with God’s oath, his covenant. God swears an oath
by himself because there is no name greater by which he can
make an oath. And he says, even on the death of my own son, will
I complete this word that I have given to you? And so I know we
all live in this world that tempts us. I know we all have the flesh
remnant sin in us that wreaks havoc in our lives. I know we
all struggle with the temptations of Satan. But this is a sure
thing that what God commands, God will give you the grace to
complete. It won’t be pretty. He uses suffering. He uses the brokenness of this
world. And he uses the ups and downs and losses and crosses
to consume our dross and refine our gold and to hack off and
to form and fashion those rough edges away until he makes us
into the image, conforms us to the image of his dear son. If
you’re going to memorize scripture, this is a good one. Now may the
God of peace himself sanctify you completely. May your whole
spirit, soul, and body be kept blameless at the coming of our
Lord Jesus. He who calls you is faithful and he will do it. Amen. Let’s pray. Lord, we can’t,
but you can. And so make our faith strong
now to believe in the Lord Jesus, the author and perfecter of our
faith. And we ask it in Christ’s mighty name. Amen.