Office by Alex Penny
5/12/12
My name is Andrea. I am a 28 year old geropsychiatry physician assistant who is absolutely in love with practicing medicine. More importantly, I am a Bible believing Christian. I have decided to share my spiritual journey here with anyone who would like to join me. These are my field recordings...
Hey, this is how John MacArthur defines the components of salvation in the back of his study Bible. I think that you and I think the same thing, even if we don’t have matching lingo. I’m just sharing his paraphrasing of scripture because I suck at explaining non-medical things…as I found out during my membership interview…that was like a trainwreck, man.
I think these all kinda happen at the same time. You’re kinda right though that maybe justification is a little bit ahead of the other two.
Justification: justification before God is an act of God by which He declares righteous those who, through faith in Christ, repent of their sins and confess Him as sovereign Lord. This righteousness is apart from any virtue or work of man and involves the placing of our sins on Christ and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to us.
Regeneration: regeneration is a supernatural work of the Holy Spirit by which the divine nature and divine life are given. It is instantaneous and is accomplished solely by the power of the Holy Spirit through the instrumentality of the Word of God, when the repentant sinner, as enabled by the Holy Spirit, responds if faith to the divine provision of salvation. Genuine regeneration is manifested by fruits worthy of repentance as demonstrated in righteous attitudes and conduct. Good works will be its proper evidence of fruit. This obedience causes the believer to be increasingly conformed to the image of our Lord Jesus Christ. Such a conformity is climaxed in the believer’s glorification at Christ’s coming.
Sanctification: every believer is sanctified (set apart) unto God by justification and is therefore declared to be holy and is therefore identified as a saint. This sanctification is positional and instantaneous and should not be confused with progressive sanctification. In progressive sanctification the state of the believer is brought closer to the likeness of Christ through obedience to the Word of God and the empowering of the Holy Spirit.
If anyone feels the need to tell me I’m wrong or crazy, shoot me a FRIENDLY message and I’ll try to explain myself better, because I think that a lot of the above words could be missunderstood at first glance.
