Who Am I? by Jerry Bridges

Author:Jerry Bridges
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cruciform Press

Six

I AM A SAINT

Saint is one of the most widely misunderstood words in our Christian vocabulary. At some point in church history, people began to call the original apostles saints, contrary to the plain meaning of the word as used in the New Testament. So now we hear of Saint Paul, Saint Peter, Saint Andrew, and the like. In the Roman Catholic tradition, people of unusual achievement are sometimes designated as saints. Among evangelicals we often think of saints as exceptionally godly and holy people.

The truth is, though, every believer is a saint. That’s why Paul’s greetings in his epistles often include something such as, “To the saints who are in Ephesus,” (Ephesians 1:1, see also Philippians 1:1, Colossians 1:2). Even when addressing Corinth, a church that was all messed up both theologically and morally, Paul wrote, “To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints…” (1 Corinthians 1:2). In fact, sainthood is not a spiritual attainment, or even a recognition of such attainment. It is rather a state or status into which God brings every believer. All Christians are saints.

It is a very unfortunate and unhelpful thing that we so often misunderstand this short, simple word. To use a word that applies to all Christians in a way that suggests there is a special, elite class of Christians, is doubly wrong: it steals from the church important truths that God intended to communicate through the idea of sainthood, and it promotes jealousy and division within the body of Christ by suggesting a hierarchy that does not exist.

Let’s see what being a saint really means.

Christ’s Own Possession

Closely associated with saint are the words sanctify and sanctification. All three words are from the same Greek word family (hagios, hagiasmos and hagiazo). That’s why Paul writes to the Corinthians as “those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints.” So a saint is someone who has been sanctified. If you have been a believer for a while, you may be thinking, But isn’t sanctification a process, the process of becoming more holy? Yes, but that’s not all it is.

The basic meaning of the verb sanctify is “to separate or set apart.” A saint is someone who has been set apart. Set apart for what? A better question is, “Set apart for whom?” And the answer is, for God.

Both Paul and Peter use an identical phrase to refer to Christians: “a people for his own possession” (Titus 2:14, 1 Peter 2:9). Paul says, “Christ, who gave himself for us….to purify for himself a people for his own possession.” Peter says, “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession.” This phrase gets at the heart of what it means to be a saint. We have been set apart to be Christ’s own possession.

This is the language of ownership. As saints we no longer “own” ourselves in the sense that we are free to live as we please.

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