Sanctification???


Sanctification? What is it? How does it look in the "Post Modern World". How do we model it? I would love to hear peoples definition of sanctification. Is it important for a Christian today or where we wholly sanctified by Christ's blood? If we get a few responses I will share some of my thoughts deeper on this.

 

Saint Patty's Day in Ohio

The Green Fields of Ireland seem to beckon to me,

As the snow fights with the evergreen tree,

The winter, long, dark, dreary

In it's death throe.

The weight on the branches,

The weight on my soul,

Seeks a sign of the end.

 

Noah

This is my son Noah. The little guy has a bad cold and was up all night coughing. He slept next to me all night because mom and the baby (Chloe) went to the living room to sleep on the couch. Amy (my wife) was trying to take Chloe out there to feed her and to keep me from waking up (so sweet) but Noah was just coughing up a storm so I propped him up in our bed trying to keep him at a 45 degree angle. So we are both tired today. I must say I was a little relieved when I woke up and saw that a huge snowstorm has covered us and shut down the schools because we will probably cancel our "Great Commission Night" tonight. We regularly schedule it every Tuesday. We use it to fulfill God's command to GO, PREACH, BAPTIZE, and TEACH. Some people come and go to our Missionary prayer room where they pray over the missionary letters and needs that they have. Some of us go out on "CARE MINISTRY" visits, taking cookies, visiting the Seniors, Struggling, Students... etc., some write letters to all those people including the soldiers, and the missionaries. Some people go out on Soul Winning Visitation to new move-ins and tell them about Christ. The kids go to the Great KidMission, which has missionary stories, they put together crafts and care packages for Missioaries. So it's a usually busy night. But I am just tired tonight so with the weather we may cancel it.

Hard to Reach?

Ok, so the evening service, the closing service of our Missions Conference is in about 1.5 hours. The keynote speaker brought a "death counter" in and started it the first night he was here. It goes by the current death rate of approx. 2.5 souls a second across the world. It is above 600,000 since the Conference began. 600,000 souls dying and MOST going straight to hell. I hear it said that many countries and people are "hard to reach", because they are hardened to the Gospel. Places like the UK, Europe... places that have been bathed in the blood of martyrs through the ages of Christianity.

But it seems to me that as we Americans sit here and say "That Place is Hard to Reach" or "They are Hardened to The Gospel" that we are even more so. What other country on the planet has had the freedom for the propigation of the Word of God. Did not Jesus say... "Woe unto thee Chorazin, Woe unto thee Bethsaida"... because the great works that they saw and did not believe. Jesus said that Sodom, judged and destroyed by God, would have an easier time at the Judgement to come. If he said that to Chorazin and Bethsaida, what is he saying to America today? We go about and play our silly games, watch our silly tv's, buy our silly stuff... and the world goes to hell. We see the latest Jesus movie, buy the latest Kincaid painting, and let the unsaved world perish.

I don't know about you... but our church gets more letters from missionaries that are trying to go the field and just trying to get INTO a church to present their field than we can possible handle. What if we took our ipods, and set them aside, skipped our itunes for a week, gave up soda for a week per month to help send a missionary to the field? Each missionary usually has about 60 supporting churches that give $50.00 plus per month to them to get to the field. What do you waste $50.00 a month on? Does that sound like a lot to you? That would be the equivalent of going to the movies with another person (wife/date/etc.) about 2 times. Or eating out for JUST YOU about 4-6 times.

When we say that someone is hard to reach... it really means... hard for us to give up our own comfort.