My Precious

All of you Lord of the Ring fans out there will appreciate this. The trilogy of movies was on television over the weekend here. Against my better judgment, I stayed up late three nights in a row to watch them, even though I own the DVDs of all three and could have watched them without all of the annoying commercial breaks. And gotten to bed at a decent hour.

At the end of The Return of the King, we see Frodo standing above the molten lava flowing in Mount Doom, poised to accomplish the destruction of the ring he has borne through great trial and sacrifice. But as you know, when the moment comes to separate himself from the thing that has brought him so much misery, he cannot bear to let it go. He loves and desires it more than he hates it or wishes it to be destroyed.

How like our sin. We love our sins so much more than we care to admit. We feel justified in committing them. We tell ourselves that they are harmless. We pet and feed and nourish them. Sometimes, even when the moment comes to cast them away and be forgiven of them, we cling to them, cradling them to our breast, refusing to be parted from them.

This would result in great tragedy for us if we were left to our own devices to deal with sin. Fortunately, we are not. For those who belong to Him, God provides sanctification.

Allow me to stretch the illustration of Frodo and the ring a bit more. When it becomes clear that Frodo does not have the will to part himself from the ring, a "terrible" thing happens to him. He is viciously attacked by Gollum, who was once the ring bearer himself. A mighty struggle ensues. In the end, Gollum seems to prevail, by literally biting the finger off of Frodo's hand, and with it, the ring. Gollum's victory is short lived, as he tumbles to his destruction, down into the lake of fire, all the while clutching the ring to himself in ecstasy.

Frodo is left with a permanently maimed hand. But, despite his resistance to the point of violent struggle, he has been freed from the terrible power the ring held over him.

I see a great parallel to sanctification in that struggle. Sometimes God uses "terrible" things to free us and give us life. Surely you know of someone this has happened to? To a small degree, that has been my own experience with sanctification. I resisted it. It hurt and was unpleasant to go through. But in the end, I found myself free. Usually I wasn't even aware of the destruction I was binding myself to until I was free of it. And then, oh, I could fall on my face in thankfulness for the mercy of sanctification.

It would have been so much easier to be obedient to God from the start. To look at my sin and cast it into the fire and be free of it. But I just couldn't. Not in my own power. Mercy was required. Mercy that certainly didn't feel anything like mercy when it happened.

1 Thess 5:23

"Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ."

One more thing here. In my own life, the mercy of sanctification has accomplished something I never imagined I would have. A real hunger and thirst for righteousness. I can honestly say that I have it for the first time in my life. I can also say that I have no doubt that I did nothing to get myself to this point. It was all God. It was all mercy.