The Adventure of Sanctification

Dr. David Fraze: So I'm so glad that we get to share this time together and get to laugh together and get to think deeply together.
Today I'm really excited. This has never happened as far as I know. We have a real-life CFO of our university going to speak.
Tim Miller is our chief financial officer, and he's a unique one because he is, and I just prayed over him,
He loves Jesus more than anything else, and he does his job.
Not that our rest of them don't do their job for Jesus, but you actually see him.
Some CFOs hide behind desks and stuff.
They don't just be walking around.
He goes to the coffee shop.
It's really odd.
And he wants to know how to make your experience better because he believes that if you have a good experience,
you're going to meet somebody that will change your life.
And so we get to hear him speak today, and we get to hear him share from the Word of God.
So help me welcome our CFO, Tim Miller.
Tim Miller: Good morning. Before I start, there we go. I want to do one last plug for a Marty Solomon event
tomorrow night. Tomorrow night, don't have to worry about a date. It's tomorrow night.
And as you'll see, we get two spiritual life credits.
It's in the Baker right across the hallway there, or right across the mall.
Marty is the founder of the Bema Discipleship Podcast, literally by accident.
He was teaching about 15 students at Idaho and started traveling a lot.
So he started recording his information.
And now that information is worldwide.
There's over 500 discussion groups that get together every week to discuss his material from the Bema podcast.
He's written a book, Asking Better Questions About the Bible.
So please come tomorrow.
Welcome, Marty.
Bring your questions.
It is an open mic question session.
As David mentioned, my name is Tim Miller.
I'm the chief financial officer here at the university.
What he failed to remember, apparently my last time that I spoke a couple years ago,
was not very impressive because he forgot this is not my first time.
But because I am a CFO, I get to know a lot of really cool terms like FASB and net present value.
And I get to have cool conversations with Brandon Goen and Tim Evans and Drs. Richardson and Sauerwein about debits and credits.
And sometimes Dr. Cary and Dr. Haggi walk by and kind of whisper under their breath that we're nerds.
And that's okay.
But the reality is every discipline has its own set of terms and language that are unique to it.
And we don't have to go very far.
Just think about your own study right now of how you've got some words that maybe nobody else understands or knows.
And that's kind of across every discipline that we can go through.
Athletics is no different.
Athletics has what they call KPIs, or key performance indicators, and they know this language.
As you can look at all of our different sports, there's one I want to point out.
It's apparently the most violent sport on campus because they track kills.
And apparently, if you have a thousand kills, you get celebrated with balloons.
So don't let the sweet pink outfits confuse you.
They are killers.
but here at Lubbock Christian University Christianity kind of has its own language as well
and it's really easy to get caught up in the and the idea that everybody understands the words that
we're using and it's real easy sometimes for that to get lost in translation and this is not meant
to be a spoiler but it's November you've been here even if you're a freshman you've been here
two and a half months, and Christian is our middle name. So Christianity has its own set of language
and terms, and I want to talk about one that I wish I had known the meaning of when I was your age.
I'd heard it. It had been around for a long time, but even when I was young growing up in it,
I didn't really know what it meant, and back then it was a pretty expensive word. With inflation,
it's $1.52 now, and I've done the math on that, so that's right.
So why is it an important term? It shows up over a thousand times in Scripture. There's
two root words in each language. There's in the Hebrew and the Greek, and if you expand those
root words, it shows up over a thousand times, and if you look at that term, it shows up more
often than the idea of faith or love. So it was a pretty important idea to God.
So what does it mean? What is the word sanctification? We can pull out our dictionary
and Merriam-Webster doesn't really help us a whole lot. Don't confuse that with our young
songstress, Merriam-Keller, who was a sophomore. I think she could give us a better definition than
Merriam-Webster did. And they expanded a little bit, it helps a little bit, the idea of making
holy. Holy is another translation for the word sanctify, and go on, made holy or set apart for
holy purposes. That helps a little bit, but still we're using churchy words to describe a church
idea. So I am left-handed. So that means that I've always done things kind of backwards.
I learned, I didn't know how to spell my name, the forward, until I was like in second grade.
MIT would show up on my papers until I was in second grade. I learned how to ride a tricycle
backwards. I've been told that that's not a left-handed trait and I shouldn't speak it in
public, but there you go. So maybe it helps us to understand the idea of sanctification
if we think of what the opposite of sanctification is. And if the idea of
sanctified or holy, the opposite really is just the idea of calming.
We are conformed to the pattern of everybody around us. We don't look any different. We don't
act any different. We treat people, we see people for their usefulness, not for their humanity.
But I want to reframe that just a little bit. What if we talked about sanctification
as the opposite of sanctification being simply less than what God had in mind for us when we
were created in our mother's womb. The idea of sanctification is a really kind of cool concept
because it has a historical and a future aspect to it. So it is when we are put in Christ,
Ephesians 1 talks about this idea of being in Christ. When we put our faith in Christ,
when we put him on in baptism, we have been sanctified.
So it is an accomplished fact, but it is not yet complete
because we continue to strive on.
Paul talks about in Philippians chapter 3 this idea of I am holy,
but because I am holy, I strive to become more and more like Christ.
I strive to become more holy,
and it is a process of becoming what we were designed to be.
when we hear the idea of rebirth, of being reborn, it's because we were born with all the stuff,
the DNA inside of us. We were born with everything that we need,
but we have a process to become what we are supposed to be. Now, I share this picture for
two reasons. One, it's a picture of my daughter when she was a baby, and today literally is her
birthday. So I would sing happy birthday, but you can tell my voice, nobody wants to hear me sing.
No, that's okay. I won't. And that last phrase there is for Jeff Carey,
embarrassing his children in chapel.
So sanctification, I'm going to phrase it kind of this way, and it's a lot of words,
but we're going to break that down. The choice to accept the invitation to partner with God
in the adventure of repairing his good creation, which includes you.
So let's look at every one of these terms.
Break it down, the choice to accept the invitation.
Now, Dr. Hawley, I believe, would agree with me
that the greatest adventure fantasy series is The Lord of the Rings.
I can kind of see you there.
Yes, he gave me a thumbs up.
And one of the reasons this one is the greatest
is because if you know the very beginning,
a bunch of dwarves show up at Bilbo's door,
and they invite him to join them in an adventure.
They're not forcing him.
Life circumstances haven't forced him into a situation.
He gets to choose whether or not he's going to accept the invitation.
And that's what Christianity is.
It's a choice to accept an invitation.
Now, I'm not saying you can't get into heaven if you prefer Star Wars or Harry Potter.
It's just harder.
It's harder.
Sanctification.
We choose to accept an invitation to partner with God.
Since the fall of man in the Garden of Eden,
God has been looking for someone to partner with him.
And we look through, we read all these heroes of the Old Testament,
and we look at Hebrews chapter 11,
we see the hall of fame of these people who joined God in his good adventure.
And we think, those people were heroes, I couldn't do that.
But they all had one thing in common.
every one of them was a hot mess if you read their story before and even after
their partnership with God they continue to make mistakes but God never gave up on them
sometimes we have this image of God being this angry God is looking to catch us doing something
wrong and we read translations of even his conversation with Cain and Abel he has this
conversation with Cain, and it makes it sound like he despised Cain. He was mad at him. And the reality
is he was saying, Cain, what are you upset about? Abel did a good thing. I know you can do better.
That's all I'm asking. He's always been asking for partners. But it is,
walking with God in partnership is an adventure. How many of you remember last year, if you were
here. Dallas Jenkins was on campus, and he talked about the fact that it made no sense for him to do
the chosen, and yet it's become the adventure of a lifetime because God's math makes no sense
whatsoever. It was the first time it was ever tried. It's the type of math that even Dr. Keith
Rogers can't figure out. It's big math. God takes things, five loaves and two fishes, and feeds
5,000. It's an adventure that we miss out on if we don't partner with him. Repairing his good
creation. God called his creation good. And he's always wanted to bring it back to where it was
when he created it. And he's looking to you and I to partner with him in repairing his good creation.
And finally, that includes me and it includes you.
Sometimes I think we feel like we're broken, we're garbage, we should be replaced.
And God says, what I designed you to be is very good.
And the partnership that we can have today isn't just a partnership of we're walking along beside you.
It's so close that he put his Holy Spirit inside of us.
So that when we're in Christ, he literally is inside of us.
And the whole role of sanctification now becomes a decision to submit to the Spirit that's been put within us.
And it's always for all of us who are in Christ.
How do I get in Christ?
I put my faith in Him.
I put Him on in baptism.
So this morning we just sang a wonderful song about what it looks like to love others,
to see others for who they are, and to treat them with respect and honor.
That is what a sanctified body that is partnering with God looks like.
So this morning as we're about to be dismissed,
I just want to remind you, if you're in Christ, sanctification is accomplished.
And your role is to continue to grow in it.
And how you grow in it is submitting to the spirit within you.
And that's done in community.
So it makes no sense for me to be up here.
I'm an accountant.
I'm an Enneagram 9.
If you know what that means, it means that I love social events.
I love big parties.
I just prefer to do them alone.
But sometimes you've got to choose to partner with God
and do things that are outside your comfort zone.
So this morning, as you're dismissed,
you have been sanctified if you're in Christ.
Go out and choose to treat one another like you're sanctified.
Thank you.