Christ Our Sanctifier

And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly …Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:23–24

In 1874, at Louisville, Simpson was pastoring the leading Presbyterian church in the city and was privately at the end of himself. He was working at a pace that would break him, and he knew the work was running on his own resources. He was orthodox, admired and dry. Reading W. E. Boardman’s The Higher Christian Life, he came into what he afterwards called the reception of Christ as his sanctification — and he dated the real beginning of his ministry from it.

Not achievement but reception

The heart of Simpson’s teaching here is contained in a preposition. Most believers approach holiness as something to be achieved. We identify our faults, resolve, apply effort, monitor progress, and fail with tiresome regularity. Sanctification becomes a self-improvement project in religious language, and its characteristic products are exhaustion and pretence. Simpson taught that holiness is to be received, because it is not a quality but a Person.

But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption. 1 CORINTHIANS 1:30

Christ is our sanctification in exactly the sense that He is our righteousness. We did not manufacture the second and we shall not manufacture the first. The same Christ who was received for pardon is received for holiness, by the same faith, on the same terms.

As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him. COLOSSIANS 2:6

As ye have received — that is, by faith, freely, as a gift. So walk — by the same method, all the way down.

The branch and the vine

Simpson’s governing image, like that of most deeper-life teachers, is the vine.

Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. JOHN 15:4

He drew out the point that a branch does not produce fruit by effort. It bears fruit — which is a passive verb — because sap from another source flows through it. The branch’s whole responsibility is connection. This is not an invitation to inactivity, and Simpson’s own schedule refutes any such reading. He worked harder than almost anyone of his generation. The question is not whether the Christian labours but whose energy the labour runs on.

Whereunto I also labour, striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily. COLOSSIANS 1:29

Paul labours; he strives; and he does it according to an energy that is not his. Simpson considered that verse the exact description of the sanctified life.

Crisis and process

Here we come to the part of his teaching that is contested, and it should be set out plainly. Simpson held that sanctification involves a definite crisis — a moment at which the believer, having seen his own insufficiency, deliberately hands over the whole of himself and takes Christ by faith as his holiness. He did not regard this as optional or as a refinement for advanced Christians. He thought most believers were living far below their privileges because they had never made that transaction. He was equally clear that the crisis is not the end. What follows is a lifetime of growth, in which the surrender made once must be maintained daily and applied to territory not yet surveyed.

But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. 2 PETER 3:18

Now the honest qualification. Many careful Christians read the New Testament differently. They hold that sanctification begins at conversion and proceeds gradually throughout life, that Scripture nowhere teaches a distinct second crisis, and that Simpson’s framework can leave believers either presuming on an experience they once had or despairing because they cannot locate one. The Reformed tradition in which Simpson himself was raised takes broadly this view. The reader should feel free to weigh it. What is not in dispute — and it is the substance of the chapter — is that holiness is Christ’s work in us rather than our achievement, that it is appropriated by faith rather than manufactured by resolve, and that a great many believers have never definitely handed themselves over at all.

Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God. ROMANS 6:13

Whether that yielding is a crisis or the first of ten thousand small consecrations, it has to happen.

There is a diagnostic in this that anyone can apply. Take the fault you have fought longest — the temper, the tongue, the appetite, the fear. Ask honestly what method you have been using. If the answer is resolution, monitoring and effort, you have been trying to produce what only Christ can be in you. That is not an argument for doing nothing. It is an argument for doing something different.

What it does not mean

Simpson was careful to fence this doctrine, because the language of holiness teaching has been used to claim things Scripture does not. It does not mean sinless perfection. Simpson denied that any believer arrives at a state in which sin is impossible or temptation has no force. He held that the capacity for sin remains, that the believer stands only by continuing dependence, and that anyone who claims otherwise is contradicting the apostle.

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 1 JOHN 1:8

It does not mean the eradication of the old nature. What Simpson taught was displacement rather than removal — the indwelling Christ occupying and governing what remains, moment by moment, in the way a stream keeps a channel clean by continuing to flow rather than by the channel being altered. And it does not mean the end of growth. The believer who has made the fullest consecration he knows how to make has surrendered only what he could see at the time. Ten years later God will show him territory he did not know existed, and the same handing over will be required again on new ground.

But the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day. PROVERBS 4:18

The image is of increasing light, not of arrival. Simpson used it to protect believers from two errors at once: the presumption that says the matter is settled and needs no further attention, and the despair that says nothing has happened because everything has not.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Identify the sin you have fought longest by willpower. Bring it to Christ as something to receive victory in rather than achieve. 2. Make a definite transaction if you never have: hand yourself over, in words, on a date, and tell someone. 3. Examine whose energy your service runs on. Exhaustion and resentment are usually the first symptoms of the wrong answer. 4. Practise abiding concretely: a fixed daily time of conscious dependence before the day’s work rather than after it. 5. Hold this doctrine graciously. Sincere believers differ about the crisis; none differ about the necessity of holiness.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, I have been trying to produce a holiness that only You can be in me.

I have resolved and failed, resolved and failed, and called the cycle the Christian life. I am tired of it, and I think that is Your mercy.

I hand myself over — not a portion, and not on conditions. Be my sanctification as truly as You are my righteousness.

Keep me abiding. Let the fruit be Yours, and let me stop straining to grow what only sap can produce. Amen.