Morris Venden @ Atlantic Union College 1978 - Justification/Sanctification
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- Опубликовано: 14 дек 2024
- Back in 1978, Morris Venden had a Week of Spiritual Emphasis at Atlantic Union College. My father had these tapes that we listened to in the car all the time. I wanted to share them with you... Enjoy and be blessed!
These sermons are a blessing 🙏🏻 thank you for sharing these, old though they be, the message is ever new.
Amen!! Yes, I agree, this message is timeless!
Thank you for sharing
Most welcome! I can't count the hours we used to sit there listening to this as kids, singing along to "More about Jesus". Morris' voice is amazing and his honesty and clarity is truly amazing! His son Lee Venden is amazing too! Check out his "All About Jesus" series. There is one on RUclips with Morris in it as well. Truly a treasure!!
Proposal: If a thousand Christians would understand the relationship of justification, sanctification and glorification and apply that understanding in their evangelistic work, the emphasis on glorification which some Christians think is especially needed in “the last days” would “take off like wildfire in dry grass”.
I think the doctrine of justification by grace alone through faith alone was kept alive in various parts of the world, even during the Dark Ages. If the literacy rate was less than 20% in the mid-fifteenth century(1), it is certain that the doctrine of justification by grace alone through faith alone was virtually unknown in western Europe between the sixth and the sixteenth centuries. I don’t know of any evidence that priests of that period articulated the doctrine that God’s forgiveness must be earned or deserved but the practice of confession to the priests seemed to imply that and there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that priests of that period taught the laity otherwise.
The doctrine of justification by grace alone through faith alone was a primary emphasis of the would-be reformers of the sixteenth century.
“More than Luther, (John) Calvin laid before his followers the possibility of victory over sin and challenged them to live each day better than the day before. Whereas Luther recovered chiefly the doctrine of our transformed status before God..., Calvin emphasized the transformation of character....”(2)
There is likely to be some disagreement about this but I think the Wesly brothers, in the eighteenth century, emphasized sanctification even more than Calvin had.
For more than a thousand years, millennialism has had several periods of intense interest. Near the one thousandth anniversary of the death of Jesus, many Christians from Europe made pilgrimages to Jerusalem in the hope of being there when Jesus would return.
In the seventeenth century, English puritans - especially those that migrated to the New world - taught their children that the protestant reformation had broken the power of the papal antiChrist but that the reformation had failed to reach its true potential. The puritans saw themselves as having been selected by God to set up a New Jerusalem - “a city upon a hill” - an holy commonwealth - in North America.
In the twentieth century, Hitler was determined to create a “Third Reich” (empire) which he confidently predicted would last a thousand years.
The above examples are mentioned to show that the millennial fever was not unique to the early nineteenth century.
In the United States at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the most popular version of millennialism was that mankind was embarking on a period of one thousand years during which there would be increasing peace and prosperity and the “whole world” would be converted so Jesus could return.
In the 1830s and early ‘40s, the entrenched postmillennialism was challenged by the doctrine that Jesus would return at the BEGINNING of the millennium to “catch up” Christians into the clouds long enough for God to cleanse the earth with fire and then Jesus would begin a millennial reign on Earth.
In the late 1940s or sometime in the 1950s, that version of millennial fever was challenged by another doctrine, namely, that Jesus would, indeed, return at the beginning the millennium but to catch up Christians not merely into the clouds but into heaven itself (the place from which God rules the universe), that Christians would reign with Jesus in heaven during the millennium but in a judicial capacity (not in the sense of enforcing Christian values) and then he would return to Earth with the New Jerusalem and the saints, cleans the earth with fire and, after the smoke clears, rule the universe from Earth.
Both of these early and mid nineteenth-century versions of millennialism postulated that Christians would be glorified at the time of the second coming of Jesus.
So let’s ask (and answer) the question: Of justification, sanctification and glorification, which is most important?
In one sense, all three are equally important.
In another sense, justification is more important because it is the aspect of salvation about which most people learn first. In places where the majority of the population make no profession of faith in Jesus, it is advantageous for Christians to emphasize justification before and more than we emphasize sanctification or glorification.
In places where the majority of the population profess faith in Jesus, there may be more people who are at a place in their spiritual journeys where, because they already consider themselves justified (forgiven by God), they have more of a need to learn to trust the Lord for sanctification or glorification. In such places, it is advisable to preach justification by grace alone through faith alone but to not necessarily give that aspect of salvation more emphasis than sanctification or glorification.
All of the above is to provide context for the suggestion that Chrsitians would do well to avoid arguing about which aspect of salvation is most important. Let’s praise the Lord that there are groups of people dedicated to each of those three aspects of salvation and let’s adapt our evangelistic work according to our perception of the needs for our audience (public evangelism) or to the needs of our neighbors (personal evangelism).
The world literacy rate increased during the late nineteenth century from 20% to 50% so the 20% figure for the min-fifteenth century is wildly optimistic.
Tell It to the World by C. Mervyn Maxwell p. 111