On Santification

It's fall and time to get back to blogging the Westminster Confession. We've just studied Chapter 12 Of Adoption. I love how Dr. Gerstner covers this important chapter - He reads the text from the Confession and then he says, "What more can I say? Why gild the lily?" and he moves on to the Chapter 13, Of Sanctification.

Well I'm afraid that studying this chapter is not about 'gilding the lily' - it's going to be about seeing the lilly in the garden of weeds that has grown up around the doctrine of sanctification. Here we go

J.C. Ryle defines sanctification this way,

Sanctification is the actual making a man inwardly righteous, though it may be in a very feeble degree.

Sounds simple. Sanctification is largely about mortification of sin. But we will spend the next couple of weeks disabusing ourselves of sanctification misunderstandings.
I came across a great quote today from my gospel hero, D. Martyn Lloyd Jones:

I do not know of a single scripture— and I speak advisedly— which tells me to take my sin, the particular thing that gets me down, to God in prayer and ask him to deliver me from it and then trust in faith that he will.

Now that teaching is also often put like this: you must say to a man who is constantly defeated by a particular sin, "I think your only hope is to take it to Christ and Christ will take it from you." But what does Scripture say in to the man who finds himself constantly guilty of stealing, to a man who sees something he likes and takes it? What am I to tell such a man? Am I to say, "Take that sin to Christ and ask him to deliver you?" No, what the apostle Paul tells him is this: "Let him that stole, steal no more." Just that. Stop doing it. And if it is fornication or adultery or lustful thoughts, again: Stop doing it, says Paul. He does not say, "Go and pray to Christ to deliver you." No. You stop doing that, he says, as becomes children of God.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

From D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Sanctified Through the Truth: The Assurance of Our Salvation (Wheaton: Crossway, 1989), 54.

Sanctification is more than just 'Let go and let God''. Ryle says elsewhere: