However, it is not sufficient to be separated and made holy unto God positionally. After we are sanctified positionally and reconciled to God, as we begin to pursue in life, we will sense something within us which is not our disposition but God’s nature. This nature within us deals thoroughly with our natural disposition, our peculiar disposition, and our temperament so that the divine nature becomes our disposition. This is to sanctify the believers dispositionally that they may partake of God’s holy nature and be one with God in this attribute of His (Rom. 15:16). This kind of sanctification uses the element of God’s life as the material and is carried out through the sanctifying work in the believers by the Spirit of life (Rom. 8:2).
This is exactly my experience. After I was saved, because I loved the Lord and was growing in life, God’s holy nature continually carried out a sanctifying work in me. When I went to the department stores, I looked at one item, yet I could not wear it; I looked at another item and I could not use it. When I first changed to wearing Western clothes, buying neckties was a big problem. Some neckties were too wide, others were too narrow, and still others were too fancy. Today my neckties are neither too wide nor too narrow nor too fancy. This is because when I go to buy a necktie, there is a nature within me that wants me to buy this kind of necktie. Brothers, the yardstick for our living and our clothing is the divine nature within us. This divine nature of God within us is the yardstick for our living. Stanza 1 of Hymns, #841 says, “Thou art all my life, Lord,/In me Thou dost live;/With Thee all God’s fulness/Thou to me dost give./By Thy holy nature/I am sanctified,/By Thy resurrection,/Vict’ry is supplied.” By the Lord’s holy nature we are sanctified. This kind of sanctification is not outward but inward. Therefore, we do not say that this is positional sanctification; rather, we say that it is dispositional sanctification.
The yardstick for our living is not the outward regulations or laws but the inward divine nature. In some parts of Pennsylvania and Ohio there is a Christian sect with many established criteria for not loving the world, mainly concerning the believers’ wearing of clothes or hats. They even limit the women’s clothing to only three colors: white, black, and dark blue. They also specify that the men should wear hats with a broad brim. Some fashionable people did not like hats with a broad brim, so they secretly made their hat with a narrower brim. But their pastor condemned the narrow brim as worldliness. Eventually, some of them kept two kinds of hats in their home, one with a broad brim and another with a narrow brim. When the pastor came, they wore the one with a broad brim, and after the pastor left, they put on the one with a narrow brim.
Brothers and sisters, do we regulate ourselves with outward regulations? Do we live and walk according to the holy nature of God or according to outward regulations? Today we do not need these outward regulations; we need only God’s holy nature, which is able to make us holy. For example, concerning women’s apparel, the Bible gives us only a word saying that women should adorn themselves in proper clothing (1 Tim. 2:9). But what kind of clothing is considered proper? The divine nature within you will tell you. This is dispositional sanctification; this is the organic work which Christ as the Spirit is carrying out in us. It is not something judicial; it is something altogether organic. This aspect of sanctification implies transformation (Rom. 6:19, 22) for the fulfillment of God’s purpose in choosing the believers (Eph. 1:4). Eventually, both the positional sanctification in the judicial aspect and the dispositional sanctification in the organic aspect of God’s complete salvation will ultimately be manifested in the New Jerusalem for it to become the holy city (Rev. 21:2, 10; 22:19).
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