The Two Stages of Salvation

➡ Paul, the voice over for a ministry called Your Daily Bread, discusses the two stages of salvation in Christianity: conversion and sanctification. Conversion is a spiritual transformation where a person turns away from sin and towards God, becoming a new creation. Sanctification, on the other hand, is a continuous process where the Holy Spirit makes a believer holy, freeing them from the power of sin. This process begins with conversion and continues throughout a believer’s life, leading to increasing holiness and decreasing sinfulness.
➡ The text emphasizes that when you become a believer, you experience a real transformation, separating from sin and moving towards increasing degrees of practical holiness. This process, which starts at the moment of true salvation, is not optional but a critical part of a believer’s journey. The text also stresses that justification (being declared righteous by God) and sanctification (the process of becoming more holy) are inseparable parts of a believer’s life. If one doesn’t start, it’s likely the other hasn’t either, meaning a true believer lives under God’s lordship, striving for holiness.

Hello, my name is Paul, and I am the voice over for a ministry provided to you by Jim Pugh at God Is Government called Your Daily Bread, taken from Christ’s teaching of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6, verse 11. This is a daily devotion ministry focused not only on uplifting Scripture, but Scripture that will grow your spiritual connection with Christ. We hope that you receive these devotions to uplift you, encourage you, but most importantly advance your knowledge base of the Holy Scriptures. Today’s focused discussion will be on the two stages of salvation.

The two-stage kind of idea in salvation seemed to be a comfortable way to explain people who made some kind of outward commitment but doesn’t have any change in their life. This became a very popular part of Christianity. The Christian church ostensibly was filled with all kinds of saved people who had never made Jesus Lord, and it was convenient for parents to say things like, well, my child prayed a prayer and asked Jesus to be his Saviour, and he just never has asked him to be his Lord. People would say about one another, even as adults, well, you know, that person needs to be consecrated, that person needs to be surrendered.

And there were preachers who were preaching that. That was kind of the nature, a sort of revivalist kind of preaching for years. But it never was really what the church, what the great faithful preachers and teachers of the church, through the years ever taught. Martin Lloyd-Jones said, you cannot receive Christ as your justification only, and then later decide to refuse or accept him as your sanctification. JC Ryle, well over a hundred years ago, said, 1879, sudden, instantaneous leaps from conversion to consecration I fail to see anywhere in the Bible. More consecrated he doubtless can be, and will be, as God’s grace increases.

But if he was not consecrated to God in the very day that he was converted and born again, I do not know what conversion means.” End quote. Well, let’s go back to what we said last time. What does conversion mean? As we learned in our last study, conversion is a term that describes the actual spiritual transformation, and that’s why I’ve titled this little section spiritual transformation. The first element in spiritual transformation is conversion, and the second one then is sanctification. Conversion describes the actual spiritual transformation wrought by God in the very life of the believer by the gospel.

Once God regenerates, and then the spirit of God elicits from the heart faith in the truth and repentance from sin, a real miracle takes place called conversion, and someone is turned around and sent in the other direction. Second Corinthians 5-17, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things pass away, new things come. There is real transformation. Sanctification then begins with conversion, which is simultaneous with justification. Simultaneous with regeneration. And while, as I said last time, we can kind of separate these out a little bit, in our logic we can’t separate them in our chronology.

It is a monumental and it is a terrible and injurious error to say a person can be justified, converted, and not sanctified. It fails to understand, listen, that God does not declare anyone righteous, that he does not also make righteous. It fails to understand the nature of conversion, which is a real transformation, as well as failing to understand sanctification. And at the heart of it, it fails to understand that Jesus is not just Saviour ever to anyone, he is Saviour and Lord. Those who are justified are also sanctified. There can be no distinction.

Well, that gets us back to our text, Romans 6, and to an initial question before we look at it. And I’m not intending, necessarily, to tell you how far I’m going to get through this section. I want to see what comes into my mind as we look at it. But I want to look at the doctrine of sanctification. Now that we’ve said it’s essential, it’s a reality, it’s inseparable, what are we talking about? Let me give you a simple definition. Sanctification is the continuous operation of the Holy Spirit in a believer, making him holy.

Making him holy. It’s that simple. It is the continuous operation of the Holy Spirit in a believer that makes him or her holy. Now one other thing to add to that. It is a process. It is a process. Justification, an event. Justification, a declaration. Sanctification, a process. Sanctification, a promise. Justification, an event, and a declaration. Sanctification, a process, and a promise. Justification frees the believer from the guilt and the penalty of sin. Sanctification frees the believer from the pollution and the power of sin. Justification takes place at one point. Sanctification is progressive through our whole Christian life.

But at justification, mark this now in your mind. At justification, we surrender the principle of sin. We surrender that. That’s what repentance is. We come and say, I want to be delivered from my sin. I want to be rescued from my sin. I want to be forgiven for my sin. I want to be set free from my sin. Jesus came to save his people from their sin. That’s what you say when you ask God to save you, to justify you. I surrender the principle of sin. I yield up my life. I want to be delivered from sin.

And in that, of course, is the deliverance from self-rule. The ultimate of all sins is pride and self-rule. True repentance couldn’t say, I want you to take away all my sin except the one that dominates me, which is I want to maintain control of my life. I want you as Saviour, not as Lord. That’s ludicrous. You would be asking the Lord to accept a repentance that was partial and stopped short of that for which we must of all things repent, and that is self-rule. The essence of our sin is our pride. At justification then, we in true repentance, embracing Christ, surrender the principle of sin totality.

We yield it up, I want to be delivered from sin. And that’s why we said, as we were looking at the words of Jesus today, I want you literally to subordinate all my relationships, all my self-interest, even my own physical life and everything I possess. That’s what Jesus asks of one who follows him. We are yielding up the principle of sinful self-rule in justification. Where there is no justification, there is no conversion. . Now, in sanctification, we surrender the practice of sin day by day as we mature in grace. At salvation, you surrender the principle.

Progressively, through life, you surrender the practice as you mature. At salvation, we confess Jesus as Lord. We surrender to the Holy Lordship of Christ in principle. After that, our hearts desire to surrender our sins in practice, and we do that again and again and again, once at salvation, over and over in sanctification. So, at justification and conversion, you confess Jesus as Lord. And the working out of that in principle comes in your practice as you yield to his will and his word, and therefore his Lordship in a pattern of increasing holiness, increasing righteousness, and decreasing sinfulness.

Now, let’s look at Romans 6. There is an immediate aspect of sanctification. There is a starting point, simultaneous with justification. Look at verse 11, Romans 6, 11. Even so, consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. That’s very strong language, very strong. Consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. If you’re a believer, if you have been justified and converted, you have a relationship that is very different than what it was prior to that. You used to be dead to God and alive to sin.

Now this is completely reversed. You are alive to God and dead to sin. This is a once-for-all aspect of separating us from sin unto holiness. That’s why, as I read you in 1 Corinthians 1-2, Paul says, those who have been sanctified, and he’s talking there about the initial point of that, the inaugural point. There is a sense in which you have been sanctified. You have been set apart from sin. You are now dead to sin, and you are alive to God. But sanctification, unlike justification, is not forensic. It is connected directly to conversion, regeneration, and new birth.

It is a real separation, not just a declared one. In justification, God declares that you are delivered from sin. But in sanctification, which encompasses conversion, God actually begins to separate you from sin and continues to do so by the Holy Spirit in increasing degrees of practical holiness in your lives as you grow, to a greater or lesser degree in each individual, depending upon how we apply the means of grace. But it is not a second experience, sanctification. It is not an option. It is a reality, and it will take place. That’s why he says in verse 11, consider yourselves to be dead to sin.

Why? Because that’s what you are. Consider yourself to be alive to God, because that’s what you are, and that is a total reversal of what you used to be. That is to say, another way of saying it, sin is no longer your master. It is no longer your master. So he says in verse 12, don’t let it reign in your mortal body. And in verse 13, don’t go on presenting the members of your body as instruments of unrighteousness. It’s not necessary. Verse 9, even death no longer is master over you because it no longer is master over Christ.

Christ conquered death. He conquered sin. And so sin has no tyranny over you. This is so very foundational. When you became a believer, there was a real transformation. And we’re going to see that unfold in chapter 6 and 7. We’re going to come to grips to what really has happened to you and what really is going on inside of you. It is a real separation from sin that began at your true salvation, your true conversion. And it continues in increasing degrees of practical holiness, different for every believer, depending upon how you hear the word, apply the word, and use the means of grace.

But again I say, it is not a later experience, and it is not optional. From the start, God broke the power of sin and its absolute tyranny over every believer. And God began, from the start, having separated you from sin, to continue the distance between you and sin. Donald Gray Barnhouse, the great Philadelphia preacher and Bible expositor, in his commentary on Romans, said, justification intended to produce sanctification. Justification and sanctification are as inseparable as a torso and a head. God does not give gratuitous righteousness apart from newness of life. Holiness starts where justification finishes.

And if holiness doesn’t start, we have the right to suspect that justification never started either. Now I want you to know, some of you may be saying, well that’s what I believe. But you have to understand that I grew up in a whole world of people who never understood this, and they’re still out there all over the place. Understanding that a justified life is a sanctified life is critical. Understanding that practical holiness is as a mechanism God’s work as justification, as regeneration, as redemption, as conversion, is critical. Because if you don’t understand that, then you’re going to live with some illusion that a person who prays a prayer and asks God to be their saviour, but will not live under his lordship, is somehow still a Christian who just hasn’t come to the second level.

There are no such people. There are no such people. Somebody said many years ago, if he’s not Lord of all, he’s not Lord at all. B. B. Warfield, a great, great Presbyterian theologian, one who had an impact on me in my seminary days as I read what he wrote. It says this about Romans 6. He says, Romans 6 was written for no other purpose than to demonstrate that justification and sanctification are indissolubly bound together, that we cannot have one without the other, that dying with Christ and living with Christ are integral elements of one indis.

How did he say it? Indisintegratable salvation. He made up that word, indisintegratable salvation. Indivisible. Thank you for joining us in this exploration of the two stages of salvation. Until next time, remember to keep the faith, stay strong, and continue to shine your light in the world. To hear these daily devotions of your daily bread, please log on to goddessgovernant.com. Goodbye, and may your faith always lead the way. [tr:trw].