Justification, Sanctification, and the Holy Spirit

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One of the most destructive concepts taught by William Branham was his concept of the new birth, which was something that you had to earn by your conduct.

What William Branham taught

William Branham taught that salvation was made up of Justification, Sanctification and finally the Baptism of the Holy Ghost.

Justification

William Branham often dismissed justification as a thing of the past, and that anybody can be justified. His view was that justification (like salvation) is something that you may lose at some point. The Lutherans had it hundreds of years ago, so it must not be too important. This of course makes one a borderline believer (like Judas or those who perished in the wilderness) until you make it through the next two stages of being born again.

Sanctification

William Branham used a boxcar analogy to teach that a person wasn't sealed in (filled with the Holy Ghost or truly born again) until all of the loose stuff in the boxcar was packed tightly (sanctification). Then, when God sees that you mean business and that your prayer life is right - you don't smoke, wear shorts ( ___________ fill in the blank here with your personal weakness) - then, and only then, can you be born again.

The burden was placed on our shoulders instead of Christ, and essentially makes the cross of non-effect, and presents a different gospel.

This "second work of grace" is something that he took from the Holiness movement and which was clearly laid out in Keswick theology.

There are two types of Christians in Keswick teaching. The “average” or “carnal” Christian behaves much like an unbeliever. Keswick conventions were “spiritual clinics” designed to turn the average, carnal Christian into a “normal” or “spiritual” Christian, one who is filled with the Holy Spirit. This transformation from the carnal to the spiritual Christian takes place not by a long struggle but by a simple, single act of faith. The secret to the victorious life is for the Christian to make an unconditioned and absolute surrender to God in faith. One must not strive for spiritual victory; rather one must simply ‘Let go, and let God!’ ” H. C. G. Moule, probably Keswick’s best theologian, described this state of victory for the believer as “a blessed and wakeful Quietism.” It appears that Keswick teaching was the first to describe the second blessing as surrendering to Christ’s Lordship.

John Wesley used various terms to describe this second work of grace: Christian perfection, salvation from all [willful] sin, entire sanctification, perfect love (1 John 4:18), holiness, purity of intention, full salvation, second blessing, second rest, and dedicating all the life to God. Its essence is unreserved love for God with one’s whole being and, consequently, love for fellow humans. This complete sanctification occurs instantaneously at a point in time subsequent to one’s justification, but God’s gradual working both precedes and follows it.

Wesley’s primary contribution to the doctrine of sanctification is that he is the father of widespread evangelical views that separate justification and sanctification in a way that the Reformed view does not.

However, the separation of justification from sanctification is effectively a rejection of Christ’s Lordship in conversion because it is only at the time of the believer’s one-time act of dedication ("sanctification") that he submits to the Lordship of Christ.

Filled with the Holy Spirit

Many early Pentecostals had first been influenced by the Wesleyan Holiness movement, and these people believed that every Christian’s life should include a second crisis experience after conversion itself in which the tendency to sin would be displaced by love for God. They referred to this as "sanctification", or the second blessing, and when they accepted Pentecostalism, such people regarded the baptism with the Holy Spirit as a third experience in the order of salvation.

William Branham simply borrowed this concept from the early pentecostal movement.

I found the concept of "three salvations" in the message interesting: first there is basic salvation; then there is sanctification; finally there is receiving the New Birth/Holy Ghost. It's like a loophole so that there might possibly be salvation for people outside the message, yet Message Believers feel that the baptism of the Holy Ghost is only for those who follow the teachings of William Branham (with his "special revelations".) . In fact, the evidence one is filled with the Holy Spirit is that you follow William Branham's teaching.

His analogy was that you are a dirty glass, and that you have to be cleaned and polished without a spot and set aside for service. Then when you're perfect, the Holy Spirit can be poured into you. What he missed is that it is the Holy Spirit that makes us clean.

The Kicker is....once you finally get good enough to be born again THEN you have faith: which is the bottom platform of the Pyramid (as William Branham taught) of the "stature of the perfect man". This means you have to start to work your way into the new birth, which is climbing up the "pyramid" by adding to your faith (or new birth) the virtues Peter mentions. Then, after you do that then you can receive the "True Baptism of the Holy Ghost" and God "caps off the pyramid of your life". This is when you can finally use the third pull and speak stuff into existence.

Quotes and questions

Quotes from the Seals and Leadership

• “Justification, sanctification, the baptism of the Holy Ghost, the last three messages, the last three church ages forms the complete Birth…You can justified without being sanctified. You can be sanctified without receiving the Holy Ghost. That’s exactly.” (Seven Seals)
• “The disciples in John 17:17, was sanctified and given power to cast out devils, but still didn’t have the Holy Ghost.”
• “And you accept the Holy Spirit by faith, but then let the Holy Spirit come and give the circumcision as a witness that He's accepted your faith. You see?” (Fourth Seal)
• "The choice of your conduct. You could... You can't mix it now. You're either for God or against God, and the outward expressions shows exactly what's on the inside. See? The cocklebur... Many of you think, "I got the baptism of the Holy Ghost, I'm going to Heaven." That don't mean one thing that you're going to Heaven. No, sir. You can have the baptism of the Holy Ghost every hour in your life, and still be lost and go to hell. The Bible says so. Uh-huh, that's exactly right." (Leadership, December 7, 1965)

Questions

• If the disciples could cast out devils without the Holy Ghost, how can you be sure that William Branham had the Holy Ghost?
• Did William Branham insinuate that John Wesley and Martin Luther (and everyone in their 'Church Ages') did not have the Holy Spirit?. If the Holy Spirit fell on Pentecost almost 2,000 years ago, why did Jesus say "I will never leave you"?
• Did William Branham fall from grace when he required that people reform to his code of conduct? Why was receiving the Holy Ghost (God himself) not good enough?
• Didn't William Branham teach that "Sanctification" is conduct? Why would he then say that your conduct is what gives you eternal security, and not the Holy Spirit?
• Who saves you? If you are saved by your conduct, than you had better be sinless.
• Will living piously simply make you a Christian Pharisee?

Commentary from Bible Scholars

Justification vs. Sanctification

The purpose of the gospel is to get you to walk into the presence of God knowing that you’re not liable, knowing that he finds you blameless. If you don’t have something that enables you to look God in the eye, to stand on your feet and look him in the face in his presence, you still haven’t gotten the gospel. You may have religion, you may have morality, but you don’t have Christianity.

Imputed righteousness and imparted righteousness

The Scripture always talks about two kinds of righteousness. There’s imputed righteousness and imparted righteousness.

Imputed righteousness is the legal righteousness that comes to you fully and wholly the minute you believe. Then imparted righteousness is the real, actual, supernatural maturity that’s put in your heart, the Holy Spirit, that actually comes into your life and begins to change your heart so that you love, so there’s self-control growing, so there’s courage growing, so there’s gentleness growing, so there’s power growing.

God never, never, never divides imputed from imparted righteousness. The imputed righteousness is first, and on the basis of the fact that you’re legally righteous, he puts his actual Holy Spirit in you to make you actually righteous. He imparts it. A religious person bases your imputed righteousness on your imparted righteousness. In other words, you say, “Because I’m being a pretty good person, I can stand in the presence of God.”

A Christian, however, bases his imparted righteousness on his imputed righteousness. He says, “The reason I’m growing in grace is because I am already legally accepted by him.” That’s the reason why it’s so absolutely critical for you to realize that a Christian bases your sanctification on your justification, not your justification on your sanctification. A moralist says, “The reason I’m just in God’s sight is because I’ve had a pretty good week.” A Christian says, “The reason I can have a pretty good week is because I know he accepts me.”

There’s a huge difference between the way a Christian repents and a moralist repents. The moralist says, “I have to repent or he’ll reject me.” The Christian says, “I have to repent because he won’t reject me. I can’t. I am afraid of grieving a person who at infinite cost has put himself in a relationship with me so that he will never reject me. Anybody who has done that, I’m afraid to grieve.”

A Christian has this great desire for holiness because he’s afraid of grieving the person who would never reject him. A non-Christian, or a moralist, a religious person, has to repent because he’s afraid he will be rejected. Utterly different.

Because you are justified, you are sanctified

Why do we stand against the message, people have asked us. Why didn't you just go away quietly?

In the New Testament, justification (the acceptance of believers as righteous in the sight of God) and sanctification (progress in actual holiness in our lives) are closely intertwined. Justification is God’s acceptance of us. Sanctification is our actual holy life. The gospel, the heart of the gospel, the essence of the gospel is the order.

It’s not just this and this and this and all these things are part of the Christian life. It’s the order, the logic. Which is the primary and which is the result? Which is the cause and which is the effect? That’s everything in Christianity. It utterly changes your view of yourself, the world, God, everything, if you get the cause and the effect mixed up.

Justification and sanctification - which is the cause and which is the effect? That’s everything in Christianity. Because you’re justified, the effect is you’re sanctified. Because you are justified through grace, because of what Jesus has done, you’ve been totally accepted. Now you’re living a life without fear, in gratitude to God. However, that’s not the way it works in the message, not at all. In their day-to-day existence, message churches rely on their sanctification for their justification. They have it reversed... drawing their assurance of acceptance with God from their sincerity, their past experience of conversion, their recent religious performance, or the relative infrequency of their conscious, willful disobedience. Christians who are no longer sure that God loves and accepts them in Jesus, apart from their spiritual achievements, are subconsciously radically insecure persons because they have too much light to rest easily under the constant bulletins they receive from their message environment about the holiness of God and the righteousness they are supposed to have.

Their insecurity shows itself in pride, a fierce defensive assertion of their own righteousness and defensive criticism of others. They come naturally to hate other churches in order to bolster their own security and discharge their suppressed anger.

They cling desperately to legal, pharisaical righteousness, but envy, jealousy and other branches on the tree of sin grow out of their fundamental insecurity.

In message churches, what do you have? You have lives that through willpower have been changed in the sense of, “I don’t cuss anymore. I read message books. I get to church all the time. I dress differently. I don’t hang out with the world anymore. I’m doing all these right things.”

That’s not a changed life.

In message churches, there’s a tremendous amount of insecurity, of defensive criticism of others, of Phariseeism, of legalism, of condescending, condemning attitudes toward anybody who isn’t in the message: baptism, dress, conduct. They’re down on everybody.

Why? There hasn’t been that change on the inside. They’ve utterly reversed the gospel.

Instead of sanctification based on their justification, it’s justification based on their sanctification. Don’t you see the difference? What is the motivation behind the second kind? Fear, being frightened, always looking around to make sure, and you’re never sure you’re being good enough. You never know if you repented enough if you think it’s your repentance that makes you saved. You never know that you are submitted enough, surrendered enough, purified … You never know, so you have to look around all the time, and you cannot handle criticism. In fact, you have to criticize other people so you feel like, “I’m a pretty good person.”

Don’t you see that to lose the gospel at all is to lose it entirely? To change it a little bit? Any other gospel is no gospel.

And if the gospel is at stake, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, “You must not go quietly into the night. You must raise your voice against the dying of the light.”

That's why we have raised our voices against the message. The Gospel is at stake. We can't go away quietly...

More quotes of William Branham

The first thing, there's a glass laying out in the hog pen, chicken yard, whatever it is. You want to use it. The first thing, you pick it up. That's justification. You've got it in your hand. You can't use it yet; it needs to be cleansed. Then you take it in; you wash it, sterilize it, boil it, and takes all the germs and the--out of it. That's what God does through sanctification: takes all the desire of sin out of your heart, cleans you up. And then you are a candidate for the filling of the Holy Spirit. See? Then the word "sanctify" means "to be cleansed and set aside for service." That's the Old Testament: the altar sanctified the vessels. And cleansed and set aside for service is not "in service." It's "set aside for service." And when it's "in service," "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled." The Holy Spirit comes in and fills up that vessel till running over, bubbling over, and then you're "in" the service of the Lord.

You are not converted until you've received the Holy Ghost... And in John 17:17, Jesus sanctified them through the Word,… He said, "Father (speaking to the Spirit in Him), I sanctify them through the Word."… He said, "Don't rejoice because the devils is subject unto you, but rejoice because your name's in the Book." And Judas was with them. See how close he can come, right on up through justification, move right on into sanctification, but where did he show his light? Where did he show hisself? Before Pentecost he showed his colors…

Peter had been saved; he believed on the Lord, followed Him. Jesus told him who he was, had him to follow Him. He gave him power against unclean spirits and sanctified him. But after all of that... And become the chief spokesman of the group, as the Catholics would want to call it, the bishop of the church, or the pope, or whatever it was, the head man of the church. Yet Jesus said the night of His betrayal..."Before the cock has crowed three times, you'll--before the cock crows, you'll have denied Me three times."

He said, "But, Peter, I've prayed for you." Listen. That's not all of it. "I have prayed for you, and after you are converted, then strengthen your brethren." After you are converted... He had shouted; he had probably danced in the Spirit; he--he had done all kinds of things, but he hadn't received the Holy Ghost yet. "After you are converted, then strengthen your brethren." That's true. Carry out His plan.

And so is it in the spiritual realm. It's water; justification by faith, believing on God, receiving Him as your personal Saviour, and being baptized. Second, is sanctification of the spirit, that God cleanses the spirit from all elements of the world, and the desire of the world. And then the Holy Spirit comes in and gives new Birth and fills up that sanctified vessel.

For instance, like this. Now, that, I told you. What you don't believe, lay aside, then take the pie. Notice. Now, a--a glass is laying out in the chicken yard. You don't just pick that up and put on your table and fill it up with water or milk. No. By picking it up, is justification. Cleansing it, is sanctification, 'cause the Greek word sanctify is a compound word, which means "cleansed, and set aside for service." Not in service; for service. Then when you fill it, it is put in service.

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