(upbeat music) We end the week with episode 1800. Yes, episode 1800. It's an incredible benchmark for us and it's only possible for us because of you. So thank you for a decade of support and for your encouragements and email questions and for your 250 million episode plays and for hundreds of thousands of subscribes over the years.

This podcast happens because you invest time with us, precious time we don't take for granted. And that's one reason why we don't have ads or sponsors. And it's one reason why we don't dilly dally around with windy introductions. So moving on to the episode, today's question is a great one, Pastor John.

Scripture gives us a constellation of ways to think of the Christian life. And a listener to the podcast named Jason wants to know how they relate. Here's what he asks. Pastor John, hello, can you help me figure something out? Is the key to personal sanctification more about looking to Jesus, as Hebrews 12, two says, or is it more about being united to him who has been raised from the dead?

As Romans 7, four puts it, some more on union, or is it mostly about beholding Christ's glory as 2 Corinthians 3, 18 puts it? Or is it more just about obeying and doing the work of faith, as 2 Thessalonians 1, 11 says? I know the answer is likely gonna be yes, all of those, but I'm trying to connect them all in a way that is practical to teach and to live.

And I find myself jumping from one to the other as though they are multiple things. Surely there are logical connections that make them all one and the same. Pastor John, how would you put this puzzle together for Jason? - Wow, I just love this kind of-- - It's a great question.

- Not only this kind of question, but just this way of thinking. - Yeah. - Taking different parts of scripture, they use very different language, and asking, are there deep, common, unified, coherent realities here? That is so helpful to do. So let's see if I can weave these four strands together into some kind of cord that the Lord might use to bring us along in our pursuit of sanctification.

That's what they're designed for. And I think the Lord is very pleased when we try to put the different parts of his word together in order to see the common realities behind them, even when different words are used to describe those realities. The realities in these four passages of scripture would include, I just made a list of them as I read these passages, God, word of God, Christ, death of Christ, glory of Christ, law of God, faith in Christ, faith in his word, hope, joy, Christian freedom, the Holy Spirit, human resolve.

All of those are realities, and they are all at work in these passages, and they are not doing contradictory things. There is one great work of God, weaving all these realities together in the process of making us holy, making us sanctified, more Christ-like. Different texts focus on different ones of these realities, but none of them leads us in a direction that would in any way contradict the other passages.

We've misunderstood the text. If one text is sending us off in a direction that flies in the face of the other passages. So let me take them one at a time and just see if I can draw out some of the common connections. Hebrews 12, one and two. Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and sin that clings so closely and let us run.

Let us run with endurance, the race that is set before us. And here's how, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him, endured the cross. That's how he did it. Despising the shame and seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

So in this text, looking to Jesus is given as the means by which we run our race with endurance. That race, of course, includes becoming holy, staying on the narrow racetrack to the end. And when we look to Jesus, we see three things that affect our running. First, he's called the founder and perfecter of our faith, which means he has done the decisive work in dying and rising and sitting down at the right hand of God.

Because of Christ, our faith is well-founded and well-finished. It's as good as done. In other words, because of Christ, we're going to make it to the finish line. He founded our faith, he'll finish our faith. Second, we look to Christ as inspiring our endurance because of his endurance, enduring the cross.

He ran his race successfully through suffering. This emboldens us to run our race through suffering. And third, when we look to Jesus, he shows us how he ran his race. He says he ran it for the joy that was set before him. Therefore, the key to our endurance is to stand on that finished work of Christ and be confident that all satisfying joy is just over the horizon.

He's going to finish it. He's going to bring us great joy in front. That's how we keep going, because that's how he kept going. So this confidence in the joy that is set before us is called in Hebrews, faith. In the chapter just before, faith is the substance of things hoped for, the joy hoped for.

Faith is the foretaste, the substance. Right now, you can taste it. The foretaste of the joy of the promise of God. Over and over in Hebrews 11, the saints obey by faith. It is this faith, this confident hope of a joyful future is the key to their obedience, just like it was the key to Jesus' obedience.

So that's the picture, and that's the reality of how we are sanctified in Hebrews 12. Now here's Romans 7, 4, and 6. You also died to the law through the body of Christ so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead in order that we may bear fruit for God.

We are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive so that we may serve in the new way, the new way of the Spirit, not the old way of law-keeping or the written code. Now, the new reality that Paul introduces here that wasn't in Hebrews 12 is the fact that when Christ died, we died, specifically, we died to the law.

We were released from law-keeping as the way of getting right with God, as the way of ongoing fellowship with God. Now that's new, that's new, right? Nothing was said about the law in Hebrews 12, 1 and 2. So Paul is coming at sanctification with a different problem in view, not the need for endurance through suffering, that's the issue in Hebrews, that's not the issue here, but the need for liberation from law-keeping, that's the issue here.

How do we relate to God? How do we become holy without law-keeping as the foundation for our lives? Because that we died to. And the other new reality that Paul introduces in Romans 7, 4 is the Holy Spirit. He says that we have died to the law so that we might serve in the new way of the Spirit, not the old way of law-keeping.

And that wasn't in Hebrews. And I would say that this new way of the Spirit is precisely the way of Hebrews 12, describing the Christian life, namely the life of faith in the promises of God to fulfill us, to fill us with hope for future joy. That's the new way of the Spirit in Romans 7.

That's the alternative to law-keeping as a way of walking with God. So they are complementary texts coming at sanctification from two very different angles. Thirdly, Jason introduces, or he brings up 2 Corinthians 3, 18. In this text, Paul combines the reality of the Holy Spirit mentioned in Romans 7 and the reality of looking to Jesus mentioned in Hebrews 12.

And he adds the realities of glory and freedom, neither of which had been mentioned explicitly in those other two texts, but are mentioned here. So he says, "Now, the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit." What this text adds to the new way of the Spirit described in Hebrews 12 and Romans 7 is that looking to Jesus in Hebrews 12 means not only seeing him as enduring the cross, but seeing him as glorious in all that he's done.

The focus is on how beautiful and glorious and magnificent he is, and finding that glory so riveting, so satisfying, that it has the effect of transforming us. We tend to take on the traits of those we most admire. This is freedom because it happens by the Spirit as a natural process.

This is what Paul called bearing fruit for God in Romans 7. Faith and hope and joy are not mentioned in 2 Corinthians 3, but I would say that they are implied in the phrase beholding the glory of the Lord. I think that transforming beholding is the sight of faith.

That's the way faith sees Christ. Faith beholds the beauty of Christ. Faith finds joy in him when it looks at him and all that God promises to be for us in him. And beholding him that way, faith transforms. And that's sanctification. And one more, Jason refers us to 2 Thessalonians 1, 11, where Paul says, "May God fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power." So in the process of sanctification, we do make resolves.

Yes, we do. We intend things, we will things, we exercise our will. But Paul says that all of these volitional actions are "works of faith by God's power." In other words, we are back in the realm of God's empowering Spirit. We work by trusting God's promise that he is at work in us.

So Jason, good question. I think if you bore into the actual reality of these four descriptions of sanctification, you will find they are deeply unified and mutually illuminating. It's a thrilling thing to meditate on the realities of scripture until we see how beautifully they cohere. - Thanks for assembling that constellation of texts for us, Pastor John.

And thank you for joining us today on episode number 1800. It's amazing, we're so grateful for each of you. It's taken us a decade to build this archive and you can search all of it, all 1800 episodes at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn. Well, for the next two weeks, we're gonna look at hard Bible questions related to eschatology, questions you have asked us on the first two chapters of 2 Thessalonians.

Namely, there's three of those questions. Is God present or is he absent in his eternal judgment? That's a question from 2 Thessalonians 1.9, which seems to say that he's absent. That's on Monday. Then many of you have asked about the man of lawlessness in 2 Thessalonians chapter two. Who is that?

That's next Friday. We're gonna address that. And then a question about God sending strong delusions into the world. Does he do that today? If so, how so? That's a question on 2 Thessalonians 2, verse 11. And that will be on the table in two Fridays from now. Some hard but very important texts that we need to address.

I'm your host Tony Renke. We'll see you back here on Monday. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)