Sanctification
“When you get that it’s ‘not about’ you, you become a powerhouse for the Kingdom. You receive unstoppable strength and understanding.”
After you receive Christ, the process of sanctification begins: being made like Him. A large part of this process is experienced by being in His Word. After you have saturated yourself in the Word, consistently for a time, you may begin to be aware of the process of sanctification going on within you.
Most people have a hard time putting it into words because they try to figure out the “change” that is occurring within and/or around them, but they are unable to do it. For one, it’s unlike anything they’ve ever experienced so they don’t have anything to compare it to. For two, they try to explain it in logical, human terms and they can’t find the words.
When I was writing The Warrior Mom Handbook, I was in the Word for hours at a time, sometimes for 8-10 straight hours. Towards the end of writing the book, something was occurring within me and/or around me, and I couldn’t understand it. Then, God showed me that it was the process of sanctification.
It has been a full year since He started teaching me about the process of sanctification. The following study on sanctification was written a year ago, but just last night, God said, “When you get that ‘it’s not about you,’ you become a powerhouse for the Kingdom. You receive unstoppable strength and understanding.”
Immediately, I understood a new level of sanctification. My prior struggles in this life were ‘all about me.’ I suffered in my childhood and in my adult life due to my parent’s choices or my choices, and those choices were based on human sin and or human goals.
Throughout many years of experiencing sanctification (and me not knowing it was happening) as well as through this new season of God teaching me about it, I began to realize I was suffering in regard to bigger things (not just about my sin and my parents’ sins). I realized that I was struggling and/or suffering for the sake of the Kingdom. I was being criticized or attacked due to my belief and advocacy of the Word of God. No longer were attacks about me, personally, they were about my desire and actions of advancing the Word. As I learned this concept, I thought how people who consistently take things “too personally” don’t accomplish much because they constantly need to stop and lick their wounds.
I realized that I will be attacked and suffer more for the Word than I ever did for myself. I also realized that because I now knew that I was merely a vehicle through which He worked, my strength was limitless in Christ. Through the Warrior Mom Handbook study God revealed that I have a limitless supply of strength through Him. No longer was I limited by my own weaknesses or inabilities. I had learned that I could show up to any situation and let Him work through me. It was liberating!
God’s new lesson on sanctification showed me that the authority that He gives me through His strength and His wisdom allows me to show up anywhere, and speak to anyone – not based on self – but based on the Savior. You see, if I think attacks are personal attacks on me, I will get my feelings hurt, get scared, get angry, cry and run and hide in my car or under a table every time. But when I realize that the attacks are not about me, personally, but about the fact that I represent the Kingdom, I won’t get my feelings hurt and try to figure out what it is about me that people don’t like or won’t accept. I already know: it’s the Kingdom!
When we stop trying to figure out what it is about us, personally, that people don’t like, we are freed up to receive unstoppable strength and understanding! We truly become limitless in Christ. In The Warrior Mom Handbook I discuss that the answer to any Why? question is Love. I now know that the answer to why I am being attacked is because of what I represent: the Word of God. Knowing this really simplifies things.
The process of sanctification can be compared between an 18-year-old who enlists in the Army and a 20-year-Veteran who has endured many battles. The 18-year-old goes into their first battle, relying on their own strength and the sense of security that their weapon brings. The 20-year-Veteran goes in with the knowledge and security of understanding the mission, knowing and trusting that the process of practice and discipline (of not just himself but the entire Army) will enable victory to prevail.
When you are sanctified, your armor is sealed so that the arrows of the enemy cannot seep into the vulnerable, open places of your armor. Once you sense the process of sanctification beginning within and around you, you can be assured that God is preparing you to step out and lead countless others to the Truth of His Word. God needs sanctified, sealed, wise, and prepared servants to step out and spread the Truth. So, He prepares you for many years and then He gives you your “spiritual stripes” and sends you into battle because He knows that you now know that it’s not about you – it’s about the Kingdom.
I pray that you recognize the process described in the following study on sanctification. If you don’t recognize it, buckle up and get ready because the mere fact that you are reading this book means that you have probably been in the Word on a consistent basis. The Word sanctifies everyone who consistently saturates themselves in it. Be excited! God is working within and around you.
Websters’s Definition of:
Sanctify:
To set apart as holy or for holy purposes; consecrate, to free of sin purify or make holy, to give religious sanction to; render sacred or inviolable, as a vow, to render productive of our conductive to holiness or spiritual blessing
Consecrate:
To set apart as sacred, dedicate to sacred uses with appointed ceremonies, to dedicate solemnly as from emotions of gratitude or convictions of duty, devote, to make reverend or venerable
Consecration: separating from a common to a sacred use as of a saint
Inviolable:
That must not or cannot be violated
Scriptures regarding Sanctify and Sanctification:
Sanctify them by your truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified.
Now, I commit to you God and to the word of his grace, which can build you up and give you an inheritance among all those who are sanctified.
I am sending you to them to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.
I have written to you quite boldly on some points as if to remind you of them again, because of the grace God gave me to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles with the priestly duty of proclaiming the gospel of god, so that the gentiles might become an offering acceptable to god, sanctified by the Holy Spirit.
To the church of God in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy, together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ – their Lord and ours.
And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of God.
For the unbelieving husband is sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified through her husband, otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is they are holy.
It is God’s will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality; that each of you should learn to control his own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like the heathen who do not know god; and that in this matter no one should wrong his brother or take advantage of him.
May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through.
But we ought always to thank God for you, brothers loved by the Lord, because from the beginning God chose you to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth.
The blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean sanctify them so that they are outwardly clean. How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death so that we may serve the living God!
How much more severely do you think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God under foot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace?
To God’s elect, strangers in the world, scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynai, who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit for obedience to Jesus Christ and sprinkling of his blood.
1 Peter1:2
As I read through the scriptures, and as I contemplate on what happens within the process of sanctification, an image comes to mind. When the artist forms a jar out of clay, it must sit for a certain amount of time, and then it gets “fired.” The process of being fired seals it and makes it shine.
Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.
It provides a coat of protection. This is how I think of sanctification. I compare it to a Warrior who has been studying the Word – contemplating and putting into action the armor of God and the fruit of the Spirit.
After a while, the Truth begins to resonate within. You begin to think differently, act differently, hope more, stress less, trust in God – not your own abilities – or be full of fear due to your inabilities. You becomes strengthened in God – not self – not man. And once you have sat in this for a while, God invites you into the fire. He pulls you onward and asks you to “step up and experience the process of sanctification.”
He does this in unique ways, and he does it gradually and ever so kindly. He may put it on your heart to lead a group in a Bible study. He may ask you to help someone else (even though you don’t have time), He might ask you to tithe extra, donate to a cause (with your own allowance money – your own “stash,” He might simply bring someone to mind out of the blue – asking you to pray for someone.
The instances that He may invite you into the fire of sanctification will be as unique as a snowflake and intimately personal – to you. You have a choice to make. Will you do it? Will you blow it off as “just something you do not have time for, - as something someone else can do or is probably already doing so why should you bother doing it too? – or will you say, “Hu?” to the thought of that random person, and go about your day NOT praying for them?
I believe God gives us opportunities to respond to his beckoning echo. The more we chose to respond, the hotter the fire (the attacks) becomes and the more potential God has to shine through us. At a certain point, a Warrior notices something different about themselves. You almost “looks around,” wondering who or what is in the room with you – a sense of ….. something different is going on and you can’t quite put your finger on it.” No, you are not delusional thinking someone is in the room when nobody is in the room, but have you ever had a realization that you overcame something – say depression for example – and then you actually looked around for it – wondering where it went? Have you ever just noticed that something new was happening and you couldn’t explain it?
See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland. The wild animals honor me, the jackals and the owls, because I provide water in the desert and streams in the wasteland to give drink to my people, my chosen, the people I formed for myself that they may proclaim my praises.
Welcome to being aware of the process of sanctification! It comes from developing a servant-like heart. It comes when one begins to understand sacrifice. When one begins to sacrifice themselves with their time and resources – their heart – they begin to understand Jesus’ life of sacrifice for them. There is a boundless, outpouring of love and grace that fills you when this happens. It can’t even be put into words, but let me try.
In simple terms, you are given a gift of connectedness – a gift of connected protectedness (I just made up that word). For me, my whole life was about this part, and that part, and that part, and this part. I worked so hard to see how this part connected with that part and on and on. And when I finally found a connection, a new piece got introduced, and or a piece that I forced to fit broke off. And when things don’t fit together nicely (say armor for example) you are more prone to letting unhealthy things seep in. You aren’t as emotionally, physically, mentally, or spiritually protected as you could be or would have been – had you been sealed with a covering of protection. The sealing protection comes from being in the Word. If you think about a puzzle, if it doesn’t fit together nicely, it falls apart more easily. The same is true for us. My puzzle of life looked like a tired kindergartener stomped on it!
Understanding sacrifice through serving and sensing the process of sanctification feels as if I went from jumping from pond to pond, exhausted, tired and muddy, to a river of never-ending, limitless, free-flowing grace! It’s like entering a river and realizing that the river has always been flowing and will always continue to flow and all you have to do is JUMP IN AND be an active part of it.
The great thing is, God doesn’t just throw you in the river helpless. He has been preparing you for it. He has been forming you in his hand, teaching you, molding you, inviting you to learn and serve so that by the time you reach the river, you get it. Also, by the time you reach the river, He has equipped you with the supplies (characteristics) you need for the river. And the best part is, He enters it with you because He never leaves you or forsakes you. (Joshua 1:5).
There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells.
The Lord your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul. It is the Lord your God you must follow, and him you must revere. Keep his commands and obey him; serve him and hold fast to him.
He turned the desert into pools of water and the parched ground into flowing springs; there he brought the hungry to live, and they founded a city where they could settle.
Becoming aware of the process of sanctification happens when an individual begins to realize the power of the Word in their life. They thirst for it, they read it – as if it is breath – as if it is water - because they have realized that IT IS!
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be filled
Kristina Seymour loves to encourage and equip women through the Word and through community. She is the author of The Warrior Mom Handbook, The Warrior Mom Leadership Manual, and The Warrior Wife Handbook; they are available at Amazon.com. Kristina's Bible studies are for women who desire to live by faith in the midst of their everyday lives. She has learned that women can't survive on caffeine and animal crackers alone; women in the Word and in community are united and able to stand firm. To learn more about Kristina, please visit her website, https://kristinaseymour.com/. God loves to share His story of love and grace through us all, and Kristina believes that everyone has a story to tell.
Originally published Tuesday, 16 June 2020.
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