Being Transformed by Beholding Christ's Glory (text)

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We are in a series entitled This Grace In Which We Stand, and last week we considered the great doctrine of justification – that we are legally declared not guilty and righteous because Jesus Christ took our sin upon Himself, and died in our place. Justification is the great exchange: our sin was imputed to Christ on the cross and his perfect righteousness was imputed to us at conversion.

This morning we’re going to be moving on to the doctrine of sanctification. Theologian Wayne Grudem defines sanctification as the progressive work of God and man that makes us more and more free from sin and like Christ in our actual lives. Sanctification is about how we’re doing living out our Christian walk. Are we growing in holiness and shrinking in sin? Are we becoming, in our actual day to day experience, more like Jesus Christ?

We will run into big problems if we don’t understand the difference between our justification and our sanctification. Justification has to do with our position before God, sanctification has to do with our progress in holiness. Justification is entirely the work of God on our behalf - we contribute nothing to our justification. Sanctification is a cooperative work of the Holy Spirit and the believer. We do add effort to our sanctification. Justification is complete at the moment of conversion – we don’t grow in our justification or grow more justified in the sight of God as we go on. It is 100% complete because it is based entirely on Christ’s life and death and resurrection. Our sanctification won’t be complete until the day we see Jesus face to face.

As Christians, it’s vital that we know that our salvation and our relationship with God is built on the solid, immovable ground of our justification, not the shifting, changing ground of our sanctification. Nevertheless, a true believer will find themselves growing in sanctification and it is God’s will that we grow in sanctification.

Finally, then brothers, we ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus, that as you received from us how you ought to live and to please God, just as you are doing , that you do so more and more…For this is the will of God, your sanctification… 1Thess 4:1,3

2 Cor. 3 never actually mentions the word sanctification, but I believe it describes two aspects of the Spirit’s work of transforming us into the image of Christ that are the wellspring of our sanctification. Let me state those two aspects (and they are related to each other) and then we’ll unpack it from this chapter:

The Holy Spirit writes God’s laws on our hearts and opens our eyes to see and love the glory of Christ

2 Cor. 3:1-2

Here’s what’s happening: there are some self-appointed apostles who have come to Corinth who are seeking to discredit Paul in the eyes of the Corinthian believers and Paul is finding he needs to defend the credibility of his ministry, which is pretty incredible because the Corinthians became Christians and the church exists because of Paul’s ministry. So Paul asks, do we need to send letters of recommendation to you? You are my letter of recommendation! But the imagery of the Corinthian believers being a letter written on his heart leads Paul to make a contrast between the letter of the law and the work of the Spirit, between the glory of Moses and the glory of Christ. Let’s continue reading.

2 Cor. 3:3-11

I. The Holy Spirit writes God’s laws of on our hearts

Here we see the first aspect of the Spirit’s transforming work: He writes the laws of God on our hearts. In the old covenant God wrote the law on tablets of stone. Exodus 31 tells us God wrote it with His finger on two tablets, but those laws became fingers of condemnation pointing out our inability to live up to them. That’s why the letter kills. It’s not that the law is bad or death, the law of God is good and righteous. The problem is that our sinful hearts can never keep the law, and the law is powerless to enable us to keep the law, so instead of producing righteousness in us, it produced condemnation and death.

But the OT promised that the day would come when God would make a new covenant with God’s people. Listen to that promise in Jeremiah 31:31-33

31 “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, 32 not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. 33 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Jeremiah 31:31-33

God would write the law on the hearts of His people. That’s what Paul means when he says, you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.

Sanctification doesn’t begin with us doing something different, it begins with the Spirit making us something different – a new creation in Christ with a new heart, a heart that sees the rightness and beauty of God’s laws and wants to keep them. The laws of God aren’t imposed on us from outside, but impressed on us from within. We want to obey God’s word because the Holy Spirit has made us new creations with new hearts.

ILL: Augustine was known for his immoral lifestyle and admitted that the biggest obstacle to his coming to faith was that he knew he could no longer be sexually promiscuous. When God began convicting his heart, he prayed, Lord change me, but not yet. He didn’t want to give up his sin.

But finally he came to Christ and one day he saw one of his old girlfriends in town and she invited him away for a weekend of immorality, but he turned her down. Thinking maybe he didn’t recognize who she was, she said, “Augustine it is I” but Augustine turned to her smiling and said, “I know, but it is not I.” Christ had changed Augustine from the inside by the power of the Holy Spirit and now his heart had both the desire and the power to obey God’s laws.

That’s sanctification: the Spirit of the living God changing who and what we are from the inside. There have been times in my life when I have been so aware of the Holy Spirit’s work in me, and to be honest there have been times in my life when I feel way too little of this going on. Sometimes it’s a roaring flame, and other times it’s just a small spark of desire to obey God. But if it’s just a spark in your life right now, don’t be discouraged – it’s still the work of the Spirit. Fan that spark into a flame! Our next point about sanctification will help to tell us how we can do that.

2 Cor. 3:12-18

II. The Spirit opens our eyes to see the glory of Christ

With new hearts, we are given new eyes as well. The veil that blinded Israel from seeing the glory of God is taken away when someone turns to Jesus Christ and verse 18 is a key verse for understanding how sanctification works in our lives. Paul writes that as we behold the glory of Christ we are transformed. What does this mean, behold the glory of Christ? It means that, because of our new hearts, we now have eyes that see and love and prize the glory and beauty and supreme worth of Christ, and as we see and love his glory more and more, an amazing thing happens to us: we are transformed into his image.

Christ-focused, not sin focused

I believe this passage, and especially verse 18 tells us something very important about how we grow in sanctification. We don’t grow in sanctification by primarily focusing on our sin or the areas we need to change, we grow in sanctification by primarily focusing on Christ and seeing his glory.

Now the Bible is clear, we do need to put off sin and put on godliness. Colossians 3 is an excellent example of the Christian’s need to deal with sin and put on godliness. Please turn with me there. In vs 5 Paul says (vs 5) Put to death, therefore, what is earthly in you; sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire and covetousness, which is idolatry… (vs. 8) …but now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.

Then in verse 12 Paul will encourage believers to put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility meekness, and patience…and he goes on with Christlike qualities we are to be putting on.

So the Christian is to be putting off sin and putting on godliness. But notice Paul doesn’t open chapter 3 with put off’s or put on’s. He opens chapter 3 with the exhortation to set your minds on things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. We are to put off sin and put on godliness, but first we are set our minds on Christ. If we disconnect dealing with sin from focusing on Christ, I think we run into problems.

We can become sin-focused rather than Christ-focused. So a meeting’s success is assessed by whether people confessed sin, or a friendship’s depth is judged by how much sin is being confessed, or a message’s power is determined by how hard the preacher hit on sin. Christians can think that they are “sin police” and start bringing “observations” to others way more often than is healthy.

Now it’s important that we have this in balance. Christians are people in process and we should be real about that. There should be repentance and truth-telling. I know my life has been immeasurably helped by my wife and honest friends who lovingly (and sometimes maybe not so lovingly) point out sin or blind-spots in my life. If it’s not happening at all in, church can become a place where we all just slap a happy image on, and then go home and draw the drapes on our lives so no one ever knows what’s really going on. God can’t anoint unreality and we won’t grow in sanctification if we just slap happy images on and are never real or honest. But here are two reasons why Christ, not our sin, should be our focus:

1. We can be deceived into putting on an image of repentance and godliness

Just because we talk about sin or godliness doesn’t mean we can’t be guilty of slapping on an image as well. We can confess certain sin because it’s what’s expected, or because it’s considered humble to do so, not because our hearts are broken or repentant or even just really want to change. We can put on an image of godly character, like being humble, in a way that is comprised of saying certain words in certain ways that we know are considered humble and that we know are admired by folks around us. So at the bottom of our image of humility is pride – we want to look humble. I’m not saying this as something that some horrible person out there might do – I’m saying that this is something my heart can easily do. And probably yours can too. When we get focused on sin we can be deceived into putting on images of repentance and godliness and miss the real thing.

2. Our sin is like an onion – and no matter how many layers we peel away, there’s always another layer

I heard David Powlison share on this once, and it’s true. When we get sin-focused, there’s a misconception that we can somehow get to the “root” of our sin and then it will be fixed. But when we peel back that layer – there’s another layer. And we can just keep going deeper and deeper and get really introspective.

At the risk of sounding simplistic, I think a lot of times when the Holy Spirit brings conviction of sin, we just need to repent and move on. Unless the Spirit is specifically revealing layers of a sin to help free you from it, don’t keep digging. Repent and move on.

ILL: In the first Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark, there’s a scene where Indiana is trying to find Marion and he’s been fighting all these people in a middle east bazaar when suddenly the crowd parts and there is this really intimidating guy in a black robe with a fiendish laugh and twirling swords deftly in the air and you think, this is going to be a long, difficult fight for Indie. But after sword man twirls his swords impressively for a few seconds, with a look of impatience, Indie pulls out his gun and shoots him – fight over.

Sometimes I think the Spirit would have us fight sin like that: just repent and stop. Fight over. Stop stealing, stop lying, stop lusting, stop boasting, stop arguing, stop getting drunk, stop being greedy. Paul says to put it to death, but it sounds like he has a rather quick execution in mind. Don’t toy with it, don’t torture it over a period of months and years. Just pull out the gun (of the Holy Spirit) and shoot it. Fight over. Repent and move on.

And where do we move on to? To beholding the glory of Christ. The more we see Jesus, the more like him we will want to be. And the Holy Spirit will transform us into his image as we behold his glory. Because our hearts are filled with Christ and his beauty – have you ever sensed his glory in your heart? Have you ever felt your heart filled with the preciousness of Jesus? When our heart is filled with Christ and loving him, sin looks shabby and empty and valueless. When we are treasuring the promises of Christ, the momentary promises of sin lose their value in our eyes. We see them for what they are. Seeing Christ’s glory pries our fingers loose of our sin. The more we love Christ’s glory, the less we love our glory. The more we love Christ the less we love our reputation. The more we love Christ the more we love others. The more we love Christ the more we are transformed.

Not all at once, in fact one degree of glory to another. Sometimes so imperceptibly that we don’t see any change at all until we look back and see we’ve grown, we’ve changed.

How do we behold Christ’s glory?

• Notice that Paul highlights the important role of the Spirit in this. It is the Spirit who writes on our hearts (vs 3), it is the Spirit who gives life (vs. 6), it is the ministry of the Spirit that has more glory than the ministry of death (the law) (vs. 7-8) and where the Spirit is there is freedom (vs. 17). Finally, Paul sums up our ability to behold the glory of the Lord with unveiled face to the Spirit: For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. In our sanctification we must depend on the power of the Holy Spirit, daily asking Him to fill us and empower us to live godly lives and become more like Christ each day.

• The primary place we “behold the glory of the Lord (Christ)” is in scripture. But it teaches us how to read scripture – so as to see and be enamored with the glory of Christ. We shouldn’t read the Bible simply to get information, but to get impartation – and this is a cooperative work between us and the Spirit and the Bible.

• And by the Spirit we can behold Christ’s glory and be transformed in our prayer time and as we are singing songs of worship, as we are fellowshipping, as we are just talking to people, as we are alone. All of life. Live it aware of the Spirit, aware of just how beautiful Jesus Christ is.

• And as we are beholding Christ, the Spirit will bring conviction of sin. And be honest. If you aren’t broken, tell God. Ask Him to help you see how ugly it is. Most of all repent – shoot it – and move on.

• And as we are beholding Christ, the Spirit will make us aware of the beauty of Christ’s character – maybe his humility, or his compassion, or his courage, or his love, or his selflessness, or his honesty. And ask the Spirit to help you be that.

Conclusion

The church is full of people in process. We need grace because we are broken and sinful and messed up at time. Even the person whose life looks so manicured is messed up if you know them deep enough. We don’t want to look manicured, we want to real, we want to be honest. And we want to genuine in our sanctification. If we’re stumbling and taking baby steps, but its real, it’s better than the appearance of running a four minute mile, but it’s not real.

The Spirit is doing a real work of grace – little by little He is transforming us into the image of Christ. We have God’s promise on that. Fix your eyes, behold the glory of Christ, grow in love for Jesus, and the Spirit will be transforming you.