Set apart already

Holiness has been badly handled. Some people hear rules. Some hear judgement. Let me give it back to you as the Bible uses it. To be holy is to be set apart for God. Sanctify means to make holy, to consecrate, to set something apart as his. And the first thing to understand is the tense.

Paul writes to a church in Corinth full of people with appalling pasts and lists them without flinching: the sexually immoral, idolaters, thieves, drunkards. Then: "this is what some of you used to be. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God." Sanctified. Past tense. Washed, in the name, by the Spirit: the same three things you met in chapter one.

Hebrews says "we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all." Paul says God chose you "through sanctification by the Spirit" (2 Thessalonians 2:13). Peter says you were "sanctified by the Spirit to be obedient to Jesus Christ and to be sprinkled with his blood." This is holiness applied at regeneration. You did not make yourself holy any more than you made yourself alive. God set you apart when he saved you, and he did it with the blood of Jesus.

That matters, because a lot of new converts spend their first year trying to become something they already are. You are clean. Washed, set apart, holy, past tense. The question is not how to get there. It is how to live like it. That is the next session.