What it's like to be sanctified

Have you ever experienced the process of sanctification? Perhaps you will relate to what I am about to describe from personal experience.

Perhaps you have regular fellowship with believers in your church. Perhaps you live alone, but you visit family once in a while. You are a single man, and in love with Christ the Lord. Every woman you meet is a dead end. Every email you send on dating sites is dismissed or missed. Those who did reply to you no longer reply. Those who are not believers try to woo you, and you distance yourself, knowing a marriage is doomed to fail when it is on unequal footing. God's calling is clear on your life, and on your location. He has maintained you and actually increased your abilities and resources over the years. He has made you productive and useful, despite your personal failures and utterly ignored desires.

You have been abandoned in marriage. You ended up divorced, but God protected and ministered to you through family and church. Now you are shaped into a message that God wants to share with other singles, and other divorced Christians. People who are hurting need to read your life. They need to see how you lean on Jesus. They need to see you, a broken yet healed minister of the Gospel, reaching out to help them from a place of true fellowship - the fellowship of suffering. They need hope that Christ is MORE than sufficient for a single Christian. They may be in regular fellowship, yet they often feel isolated, just like you. These people need healing and they need direction. They need to use their God-given gifts and their time to serve Jesus and His people. They look to you to help them see God's plan for singles in Scripture. He sets the solitary in families. Church families.

Perhaps you didn't understand the isolated feeling at first. You thought God didn't care about your desires for remarriage. You told yourself that your desires no longer matter because it was less painful than hoping for a miracle that never came.

Perhaps then, just in the last day or two, God has given you a word: "Sanctify". He has given you this word now, after 5 years of struggle and defeat and growth and victory.

So, after you received this word from the Lord, you sit down. You look it up in Scripture. You come across the prayer of Jesus for His disciples, both current ones and future ones:

John 17:16-21 GNV

¹⁶ They are not of the world, as I am not of the world.

¹⁷ Sanctify them with thy truth: thy word is truth.

¹⁸ As thou didst send me into the world, so have I sent them into the world.

¹⁹ And for their sakes sanctify I myself, that they also may be sanctified through the truth.

²⁰ I pray not for these alone, but for them also which shall believe in me, through their word,

²¹ That they all may be one, as thou, O Father, art in me, and I in thee: even that they may be also one in us, that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.   

Then you thank the Lord for helping you to understand what He has been doing for the past 5 years: He has been answering Jesus' 2000-year-old prayer request for you... requesting that God would sanctify you, set you apart from the world, make you holy to be used in service to God. He has been making you into a living letter, written with God's Spirit. Jesus has been praying for you to be ONE with Him and the Father, that the world might believe that Jesus Christ really did come from God.

You log in to your dating site. That person you were corresponding with has vanished, and is no longer a member. It serves to further prove what God spoke to you. You are sanctified for Him.

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If you ever sense that isolated feeling, where the world is so far away, yet God is so close.... then count on it... you are yielding to the process of sanctification. He is preparing you as a chosen vessel. It is an ongoing process, and none of us have been perfected in that process just yet. But He is faithful and just to finish the work He began.

The music video below is my own completely original song from 2014 based upon Psalm 51 and upon my testimony.

God bless,

Pastor Curtis

Thurs. Jan. 1st, 2015 7:37pm EST