Confessing Evangelical

I recommended this article in a comment on Twylah's blog recently, but thought it was worth sharing more widely. It's (yet) another cracking article from the Modern Reformation archives, this time an article on sanctification by Harold Senkbeil entitled "How Can Our Good Works Please God ... God's Work or Ours?"

Senkbeil writes:

Religious best-sellers focus on the sanctified life, but precious little gospel is contained in these books. What gospel we do find is couched in command language, not motivation language. The books are essentially lists of "how to's" for the Christian life, what to do and not to do in order to make sense out of the complex world in which we live. The issues of modern life are not examined in light of the good news, but almost exclusively in light of the proscriptions and prescriptions of moral imperatives.

Senkbeil goes on to summarise the biblical alternative to this unbiblical -- but, of course, highly popular -- model of sanctification:

Christian salvation (or justification) and Christian living (or sanctification) are but two aspects of one divine reality: the life bestowed in Jesus Christ. Such life is received by faith. And Holy Scripture declares that faith is God's work from beginning to end: "[I am] confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus" (Phil. 1:6).