1 Thessalonians 5:23 Commentary and Bible Study

These are rich words, with a great deal of help, exhortation and encouragement for us. First of all, there is no sanctification without union with God; and the reverse is true, there is no experience of union with God without sanctification. God is called the God of peace because peace with God is inseparable from sanctification. Peace is meant in the sense of peace after war. Like two nations at war, we were hostile to God and we were under his condemnation, but now the war is over; peace has come. The nations are reconciled; trade can restart. There is friendship and advantage and prosperity and advance in every way. It is the same with reconciliation with God. Now we walk under the smile of God, under his friendship. There can be communication, God’s blessing to us and our prayers and our praise is to him. So if our walk with God and our prayers to him and our relationship with him are poor, our sanctification will deteriorate and the reverse is true also. What is it to be sanctified? The word means separate, separate you from the world, from sin. May you be more dedicated to God and more separated from this world.Secondly, the word ‘wholly’, tells us sanctification must be entire. By that we do not mean the immediate perfection of the person, as if sanctification should be accomplished all at once. It cannot be. It is a process, it is progressive, it is over time God deals with us. But may it be entire, as we go through life, in the sense that it influences every part of our being. We cannot hope to advance if we focus only on one or two aspects of holiness. For instance, if a person wants to advance in self-control, conquer temper, control his passions, and yet is not out-going or giving, thinking of others, that would not be any use at all. You cannot tackle sanctification one area at a time. No, sanctification deals with every aspect, and that is what makes it difficult for us and yet we have the help of God. Calvin wrote memorably that all doctrine is useless unless the Lord at the same time as learning the doctrine engraves with his own finger the doctrine on our hearts, so that it results in action and change within us. It is no good having words but not actions. The third point is that sanctification considers spirit, soul, body. We have to consider the different compartments of our being in the pursuit of holiness. The spirit is the soul communicating with God. The soul is given this ability to pray and to relate to God, but at the fall of man it died – died may be a strong word, but it as good as died. It became dormant, inactive, useless. But at conversion it is revived, and it is brought to life once again. You began to pray, and you received answers to your prayers, but sadly it can slumber again and you can leave off prayer. What a foolish thing. You put your time for prayer at the end of the day and are then too exhausted to give more than a minute or two or three. What about the soul, your conscious thought, your thought life, your inner life, your power of reason, your conscience? The soul is open to so much contamination from the world, and we have got to monitor our thoughts, ration our thoughts. The devil plants bad thoughts in the mind and they rise up from within sometimes: thoughts of hostility to someone else, gossiping thoughts, unpleasant, unkind thoughts of one sort or another. Well, we strive to divert the mind to better things and we pray. And the Lord helps us. And then, the body. It is quite clear that he does not have in mind literally the bodily organs, because sin is in the world and deterioration and decay and the principle of death affect Christians as well as non-Christians. He is praying more for the appetites and needs, the morality of the body, the deeds of the body.