sanctification

I'm Duane Powers. By gifting I'm a teacher — I take the complex and make it simple, because that's how I've done everything in my life. By ordination I'm a Deacon and a Gospel Minister. By calling I'm a prophet. I came to Christ in elementary school. Nearly fifty years later, the conviction that He is who He said He is has only deepened — but the shape of my understanding has changed considerably. I no longer read scripture through the lens of an angry God demanding blood. I read it through the lens of a good Father rescuing His creation from the one who actually requires blood. That shift didn't come from a book or a teacher. It came from a lifetime of prayer, attention, and what I can only describe as the Spirit refusing to let certain questions go. This site is where I write down what I've found. Some of it is rediscovery — older Christian convictions that the church has held for most of its history but that modern American evangelicalism has quietly set aside. The Harrowing of Hades. Christus Victor as the dominant frame for the Atonement. The literal reading of Peter calling Mark his son. Some of it is closer to genuine contribution — structural readings of scripture that, as best I can tell, haven't been articulated quite this way before. All of it is offered to the church, in the hope that some who read will draw nearer to Jesus. I write for the catechumen, the seasoned believer with unsettled questions, and the pastor willing to entertain that the older imagination might have something to teach us. I don't write to provoke and I don't write to flatter. I write what I've been given to write. If something here helps you, thanks be to God. If something here troubles you, I'd encourage you to test it against scripture, against the witness of the first 1,500 years of the church, and against your own life with Christ. That's the test I apply to my own work. Welcome. — Duane

Why “sanctified”?

The concept of sanctification is near and dear to my heart. It describes the believer's walk. It describes our journey.

Created perfect, born into a fallen world, the world got each one of us. Nobody escapes the clutches of sin. But this is the beauty of the Good News: His atonement permits us to have a relationship with God the Father. And as we re-enter into right relationship with our Creator, we begin to work our way back towards being that perfect person God had intended us to be.

I don't believe we will quite reach the end of this journey—perfection—until we are in heaven. But we can daily try to get closer to being the person God created us to be. That's why we're sanctified.blog. It is about the journey.

Three tenses

We were sanctified. The work of Christ was completed on the cross, and with that act, we who follow the Way were saved from the penalty for sin. We call this justification: we have been justified to the Father by Jesus' sacrifice.

We are being sanctified. As we go daily, we grow towards being the person God originally intended us to be when He created us, before sin corrupted His creation.

We will be sanctified. On judgment day, we will be made right before God. This is our promise and the reason for the joy inside us. We call this glorification—we will be made perfect in the presence of God.

In essentials, unity

One of the early church fathers, St. Augustine, is attributed the following: “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.” I believe we honor the Father, and His Son, when we demonstrate liberty and charity—it shows our love for one another. They will know us by our love, one for another.

With shared faith in mind, we must first agree upon a set of essentials. While volumes have been written on statements of faith, a fairly straightforward example can be found in the Apostles' Creed, thought to have been penned in the early 200s and affirmed without reservation by every expression of Christian faith:

I believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried; he descended into hell; on the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty; from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. Amen.

We also look to Hebrews 6:1–3 for guidance, where the author encourages spiritual maturity and expresses frustration that believers haven't matured already. We agree, and that's why we're here—to encourage Christian believers everywhere to grow deeper in their knowledge and faith.

Therefore, leaving the elementary message about the Messiah, let us go on to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works, faith in God, teaching about ritual washings, laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. And we will do this if God permits.

Hebrews 6:1–3