“Sanctify Them by Your Truth” Jesus prayed that His followers would be set apart by truth. Do Christians have a role in this sanctification process? What is sanctification? What is truth?
T
he night before He was crucified, Jesus prayed His longest prayer recorded in Scripture. This prayer occupies an important place in the chapters that John devoted to the final hours of the life of Christ.
“Sanctify them by Your truth”
The events of those hours, and particularly the thoughts of our Savior shortly before He died, should motivate all Christians. The prayer itself fills all of John 17. At one point, close to the middle, Jesus asks the Father to sanctify His disciples through the truth (verse 17). What, exactly, did Jesus mean by sanctify? How does truth make that possible? And why is this important for us to know?
What does sanctify mean?
In the article “Sanctification,” Zondervan’s Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible notes, “In each of the thousand places where this term and its cognates appear in the canonical Scriptures, the meaning of separation is either explicit or implicit, and in no instance is this meaning excluded” (Vol. 5, p. 265, emphasis added). The article also notes that the term carries with it the additional concept of purification, particularly in regard to preparation for service.
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DISCERN
Jesus, then, was asking His Father to separate His disciples, but set them apart from what? The answer lies elsewhere in Christ’s prayer. His disciples were described as “not of the world” (verses 14, 16), having been taken “out of the world” (verse 6). Jesus said that He was “no longer in the world” (verse 11), yet in the same verse said that His disciples are still “in the world.” He said these words knowing that He was about to be crucified. He would no longer be in the world (society), but His disciples would be. Even so, they were not to engage in the selfish and evil ways of this society. They were to be separate from the world in how they lived their lives. The Father—and only the Father—begins this process of separation. Earlier in his Gospel, John quotes Jesus as declaring, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him” (John 6:44). This drawing, however, is just the beginning. The process continues as the Father sanctifies through truth.
How does truth sanctify believers?
For the disciples to live apart from worldly ways, they needed a different standard. That standard is Jesus Christ, whose life and conduct perfectly exemplified God’s truth. At one point in his Gospel, John quotes Jesus as saying, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).
March/April 2021
