How to Apply the Bible to Change Your Life Today
The Fall in the garden seriously marred the image of God in man and made man an object of God’s just wrath (Eph. 2:2, 3). But from eternity past God has had a mission. He is on a mission to redeem and restore fallen people to the likeness of His Son to the praise of His glory.
Everything God is doing in men and women targets this goal. Once He draws a sinner to Himself through the proclamation of the “good news” and the sinner repents of His sin and turns to Christ, a new life begins (2 Cor. 5:17). The Spirit of God then begins the process of progressive sanctification—leading the believer away from his flesh and empowering the believer to serve Christ and bear the fruit of His Spirit.
Protestant theology regarding sanctification has separated into several major streams—Lutheran, Reformed, Wesleyan, Pentecostal, Keswick, and Contemplative. Each because of its particular emphasis has minimized, ignored, or accentuated some element in the sanctification process such as the role of the Holy Spirit, the role of the Scriptures, the role of the believer, etc.1 We will look briefly at the role of the Scriptures in sanctification.
Two Erroneous Views
First, we must note that the Scriptures are wrongly used in the contemplative view of sanctification. Drawing heavily from Catholic and Eastern mystics, many current “spiritual formation” teachers include “contemplative prayer” as a key discipline.2 Contemplative prayer often uses the Word of God merely as the source of a “mantra”—a word or phrase—that can be repeated while in solitude to put the individual into a state of mind emptied of all content in order to receive truth directly from God. In stark contrast, the Scriptures teach that sanctification comes not from emptying the mind but from filling the mind with specific content—the words of God (Ps. 1; Josh. 1:8; Rom. 12:1, 2).
All views of sanctification flowing from the Reformation emphasize the Word of God and see practical holiness as the Spirit’s work in a Word-filled life (Col. 3:16, 17). God’s Spirit uses the Word to teach, reprove, correct, and instruct in righteousness in order that the believer may be matured (2 Tim. 3:16, 17).
Another current erroneous view (based upon a Lutheran tendency to nearly equate justification with sanctification) is that “worship is sanctification.” The preacher needs only to get the people to adore Christ and “sanctification is done on the spot” as they worship.3
To a Lutheran, “sanctification is the art of getting used to justification. There is a kind of growth and progress, . . . but it is growth in grace . . . coming to be captivated more and more . . . by the totality, the unconditionality of the grace of God. . . . It is like lovers who just can’t get over the miracle of the gift of love and so are constantly saying it over and over again as though it were completely new and previously unheard of!”4 In this view, Biblical change is equated with adoring Christ in worship.
Worship of Jesus Christ should certainly be the believer’s first response to any revelation of His person and work in the Word, but adoring Christ without engaging in the spiritual battle against the flesh to emulate Him is not sanctification. Take note of this battle in Romans 6–8 and Galatians 5:16, 17.
The apostolic discussions of Biblical change (Rom. 6–8; Eph. 3–4; Col. 3; James 1, etc.) teach that sanctification involves a Spirit-enabled response to the Word that rejects the deceit of the flesh’s lusts and by grace obeys the Word’s commands and purposefully emulates Christ’s virtues.
Aberrant Lives Must Be Corrected by the Word
Paul instructed Timothy to “preach the Word” using it to “reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine” (2 Tim. 4:2–4). The implication is that aberrant lives must be corrected by the Word. God’s people need more than adoration of Christ. Believers must patiently be rebuked when necessary and must be instructed to walk in Christ’s ways.
The apostles teach that we must “put off [the ways] . . . of the old man” which has been crucified with Christ, “be renewed in the spirit of [our] mind,” and “put on the [ways of] the new man” (Eph. 4:22–24). This is a deliberate process that requires the believer’s active, Spirit-enabled, God-dependent cooperation with the Word if progressive sanctification is to take place.
James 1:21–25 tells us how a believer applies the Bible to change his life today. With the Spirit’s aid he must deliberately turn away from the flesh’s propensities. He must simultaneously turn to the Word of God for direction, strength, comfort, grace, and wisdom. There is no substitute for the daily, systematic reading of God’s Word. Change begins with an open Bible and a humble heart.
James says he must “receive with meekness [humility] the engrafted word” (v. 21b). The believer must be humble enough to see that he cannot change without God’s Word, and he must humbly submit himself to it with the intent to obey it, which is the meaning of being a “hearer of the word.” Having his devotions to merely get it checked off so that he can get on with his day won’t cut it. He is “deceiving” himself (v. 22).
James says, “whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty . . .” (v. 25). “Looketh” means to peer intently into the Word with a purpose to discover something from God. This is the Proverbs 2 intense search for God and His ways in the Word. Sanctification thrives with this kind of intake of the Word.
But then James says the believer must “[continue] therein” (v. 25) Once he has determined what the Scriptures demand of him as a child of God as he meditates, he must then determine how his life must change as a result of his newfound knowledge of God and His ways.
Finally, he must keep up that activity for however many days or weeks it takes until he becomes a “doer of the work” (v. 25). Often this requires not only study and meditation upon the Scripture text but actual memorization of the passage as well. Unless the believer is thinking in Bible terms in the heat of the battle, he probably will make little change.
James warns that if the believer quits the process before he is seeing change, he is deceiving himself (vv. 22–24). The process is simple but demanding. Humble exposure to, meditation upon, and obedience to the Word of God are central to the process of sanctification.
Dr. Jim Berg served as the dean of students at Bob Jones University for thirty years before becoming a professor of Biblical Counseling at Bob Jones University Seminary. He is the author of many books on how to apply Scripture to life, including Changed into His Image, a perennial bestseller on Christian growth and discipleship. He is founder of Freedom That Lasts, a ministry to those suffering from life-enslaving addictions.
(Originally published in FrontLine • January/February 2014. Click here to subscribe to the magazine.)
- For further study consult Five Views of Sanctification by Stanley N. Gundry, ed., Zondervan, 1987, and Christian Spirituality: Five Views of Sanctification by Donald L. Alexander, ed., IVP Academic, 1988. [↩]
- Whenever the terms “spiritual formation” and “contemplative prayer” show up, the believer must be extremely cautious. Much error creeps into the church today under these terms. [↩]
- Words of Tim Keller quoted in “‘Getting Sanctification Done’: The Primacy of Narrative in Tim Keller’s Exegetical Method” by Timothy F. Kauffman, The Trinity Review, May–June 2013. [↩]
- “The Lutheran View” by Gerhard O. Forde in Christian Spirituality, pp. 27–28. [↩]