Someone told me in high school that if I passed human physiology we would get to see cadavers.  But in order to take human physiology I had to take biology, so I spent a fair bit of time my senior year studying science amidst my courses in English and history. Our science teachers were fairly demanding and, when I was not cracking jokes in class, I learned a few things. One of them is that, in the wise providence of God, the human body is a wonder. Our bodies are constantly changing. There are a myriad of processes at the cellular level and beyond that which are constantly taking place—for example, red and white blood cells are constantly being regenerated. Yet we are entirely unaware of these processes even as they take place. Our lack of consciousness of them has no effect on whether they occur, because they occur by God’s providential ordering.

Our sanctification—that gradual, gracious conformity to Christ, being wrought in us by the Holy Spirit through the due use of God’s ordained means—is something like those quiet natural processes occurring within us. We do not always feel those cellular operations within; nor do we always feel the secret, faithful work of the Holy Spirit within us putting to death the old man and making alive the new; and yet it is just as surely happening.

The intent of this analogy is not to counsel passivity any more than basic human physiology becomes an excuse for laziness. Yes, lots of things are happening in our bodies, but they will function better if we care for them with diet and exercise. Just now, however, I am trying to establish a baseline of facts. It is a fact that everyone who has been granted the free gifts of new life (regeneration), true faith, justification, union with Christ, and adoption has also been granted the gift of sanctification. There are no believers in whom the Holy Spirit is not working.

The apostle Paul had to remind the congregation in Rome about these behind-the-scenes realities:

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” (Rom 6:2–4)

If you are a child of a believing parent and were baptized as an infant, you probably do not remember your baptism any more than Abraham’s son Isaac remembered his circumcision (Gen 22:4), but both you and Isaac were outwardly identified with Christ’s death. Isaac’s identification was prospective (forward-looking), and yours (like mine) was retrospective (backward-looking). This is just what Paul says in Colossians 2:11–12: “In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead.” Our identity has been established in our baptism. Those of us who like Isaac believe have received what was signified in circumcision and baptism: righteousness before God, the death of the old man, and new life (Col 2:13). We were not literally at the cross, but it is a fact that at the cross God cancelled “the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross” (Col 2:14). It is a fact regardless of our feelings at any given moment. Our feelings do not change objective reality. Those of us who have been given the gift of new life and union with Christ—a union represented by but not effected by our baptism—have been “buried with him in baptism into death” (Rom 6:4). In that union our “old self” has been “crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin” (Rom 6:6). These are facts, objective realities brought into being by the sovereign unconditional favor of God for his elect, when the Holy Spirit applied the work of Christ to them. So, Paul explains, “One who has died has been set free from sin” and “death no longer has dominion” over him (Rom 6:7, 9). This is what it means to say “sin will have no dominion over you” (Rom 6:14). By his death, Christ accomplished a decisive break with sin.

It is because these facts do not depend upon our feelings for their truth or power that it is possible for us at all no longer to let “sin reign” in our mortal bodies (Rom 6:12) and to refuse to “present” our “members to sin as instruments of unrighteousness” (Rom 6:13). The Holy Spirit, the “Lord and giver of life” (Nicene Creed) is so at work in us, having raised us from death to life (Rom 6:13), and we are so made recipients of the benefits of the covenant of grace—not merely participating outwardly like Esau (Rom 9:13) or Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5)—that we do actually resist sin and we do actually begin to experience the new life we have been given.

Our intellects, wills, and affections are being renewed in the image of Christ. We are being conformed. This is what we confess in the Westminster Shorter Catechism:

35. What is sanctification?
Sanctification is the work of God’s free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God, and are enabled more and more to die unto sin, and live unto righteousness.

By the free, sovereign grace of Christ, we are being renewed by the Holy Spirit. We are being renewed “in the whole man” and “after the image of God.” Indeed, those who believe were “predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers” (Rom 8:29). It is a fact that, by that same grace, we are being enabled to die more and more to sin—we call this mortification—and to “live unto righteousness.” The second part of sanctification we call vivification. Please do not miss the fact that the whole of sanctification is the “work of God’s free grace.” Our obedience is the fruit and evidence of the sanctifying work of the Spirit; but just as we can see some evidence of the secret processes happening within our bodies, so it is that we cannot experience with our senses everything that God the Spirit is doing within us. But our experience is not the ultimate arbiter of the work of the Spirit within us.

Paul experienced this very same tension. He reflected on it at length in Romans 7. The same apostle who wrote of the decisive break with sin by our union with Christ’s death also wrote of his experience of the struggle with the old man and sin, “The law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Rom 7:14–15). Indeed, so intense is the struggle with sin sometimes for the Christian that Paul even lamented, “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out” (Rom 7:18). He wrote of delighting in the law in his “inner man” (Rom 7:22) and of a “war” raging among his “members,” sometimes “making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members” (Rom 7:23). He spoke for all of us when he cried out, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom 7:24). As soon as he said it, however—since he was a believer as he wrote about the universal Christian experience of the struggle with sin—he was able also to exclaim that wonderful, if mysterious, doxology: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin” (Rom 7:25).

As an old friend once said to me many years ago: never leave people in Romans 7. Always take them to Romans 8:

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. (Rom 8:1–4)

The gospel is that, despite our struggle with sin, the good news is that we who believe in Jesus have been declared righteous. Indeed, the struggle with sin is evidence that the gospel’s mysterious work of sanctification is occurring, even though we are not able to monitor it in the way we might like. Trusting that just as we have been declared righteous once for all, so also we are now being sanctified by the Spirit who raised Jesus (and us) from death to life is just that: an act of faith wrought in us by the Spirit. When the father of that convulsing boy said, “I believe, help my unbelief” (Matt 9:24), he spoke for all of us. But that man’s profession of faith was itself evidence of the mysterious work of the Spirit. The righteous requirement of the law is slowly, gradually, graciously being fulfilled in us who, sola gratia now walk according to the Holy Spirit, not because we so walk, but in us who do walk by grace.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• R. Scott Clark

  

  R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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