Who Are We? We Are Saints

 

Talking about our identity as saints is controversial; or, at least it makes some Christians uncomfortable.   Some modern translations avoid the term.  In truth, it is a beautiful word describing both a reality and possibility.

Romans 1:1, 7

I want to begin this morning by telling you a little something about “Saint” Arthur.  Now, you will not find this Arthur listed in any catalog of saints and not simply because he was a Protestant.  I’m telling you about him because I want to help you shift the way you think about saints.

Arthur became a Christian when he was a young man.  At about the same time, he began to dream of building a successful business, of producing a product that would be superior to any similar product on the market.  So, while still a young man, in the eighteenth century, he set out to build his business.

As I said, Arthur was a Christian, a Christian who was influenced by the Evangelical Awakening and especially the preaching of John Wesley.  As a consequence, Arthur believed his business ought to reflect his Christian principles.  And, so it did, from the very beginning.

He provided his employees with a decent, fair wage.  As soon as he was able, he provided them with low-cost housing.  Some of those houses still stand today.  He provided doctors when they were sick and nurses to teach the wives good health practices.  He provided training for the men, even though he knew some might take their new skills and work for others. 

Caring for its employees remained the hallmark of Arthur’s business.  In fact, more than a century later, at the beginning of World War I, Arthur’s business made the promise that any employee who fought for the country would find his job waiting when he returned. And, while the husbands were away, Arthur’s company paid their families half their regular salary.

Some of Arthur’s descendants followed him in the business.  Others entered public service.  And several other descendants became missionaries, evangelists, theologians, and Christian writers.  In fact, Arthur’s descendants are still writing popular Christian books today.

A few years ago, Arthur’s business was sold to a conglomerate.  Yet, Saint Arthur’s name and product are still known worldwide.  In fact, I would guess even among the most committed of tee-totaling Baptists, there are many who would recognize the name Guinness.

As I said, I wanted to introduce Arthur Guinness, Christian and brewer, because I want you to begin to think differently about saints.

To do this, I need to deal with a couple more issues before I go on explaining what I mean when I say "We are saints."

àWhen I say "We are saints" I am not referring to our having the endorsement of any human agency.

For many, speaking of saints calls to mind the practice of the Roman Catholic Church in declaring certain individuals to be saints.  It is a practice that made the Protestant reformers very uneasy and most of them opposed it, though they often continued to refer to certain individuals as "Saint," perhaps out of habit.

I don't want to rehash the old arguments but let me try to put the discussion in context.

I think the practice of declaring some to be saints reflected the very human need for heroes and heroines.  The earliest saints were from among those whose commitment to Christ was so intense that it was exemplary.  They became heroic models for other Christians.  These heroes were remembered when certain tough times or temptations were faced.  There may be questions about whether some of these saints actually existed and there are certainly questions about the miracles attributed to these saints. But—real or not—they played an important role.

We can understand the need for heroes.  Looking ahead a few weeks, can you imagine our promoting the Southern Baptist Financial Drive for International Missions?

No, we promote the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering.  Lottie gives a face and a name to the cause of missions. 

We recall her as the genteel southern girl who abandoned a comfortable life for the harshness of the mission field.  We tell of her giving cookies and the gospel to the children of China.  We may even praise her for ending her engagement to Crawford Toy, a one-time Southern Seminary professor whose views were contrary to orthodox Christianity. We recount how, broken in health, she died alone on board the ship that was to bring her back home. We admire her for all these things.

Alongside Spurgeon, Carey, and some others we think of Lottie as a kind of Baptist "saint" but not even the most ardent WMU lady prays to her.  

Here's where the reformers had to break with the cult of the saints. They couldn't accept that prayers might be directed to any other than God.   They certainly couldn’t accept the notion that we ought to ask the saint to go to God on our behalf since God would be more inclined to listen to the saint than to listen to us.

At the same time they couldn’t accept what came to be known as “the treasury of merit.”  According to this notion, the saints lived such holy lives they accumulated more merit or good works than they actually needed to secure salvation.  Crudely put, as the ordinary Christian understood the idea, this excess merit was held in an account that might be drawn on by those who needed help.  Indulgences were a chief vehicle for tapping into this account.  Opposing such indulgences played a major role in Luther’s early efforts to promote reform.  

In fairness, I should say the Roman church has revised its view of the treasury of merit so it has a much less crass implication.  Still, most Protestants remain uneasy about the idea in any form.               

àThen, when I say, “we are saints” I am not saying we have attained near spiritual and moral perfection.   

The legends growing up around the saints stress their unshakable virtue.     Consider the example of the Welsh Saint Winifred.   Wishing to live a life of celibacy, she refused the advances of a would-be suitor.  Angered, he decapitated her.  But Winifred was so pure her uncle was able to reattach her head and she lived on as a devout nun for many years. 

David Foster Estes says this concept of the saints as moral giants obscures the New Testament understanding of saintship.     It certainly makes it difficult to promote the notion that every believer is a saint, according to the Bible.  Yet, that is how the term is used in the New Testament.  Every believer is a saint.

Martin Luther, who was a theological realist if ever there was one, understood this was puzzling to those sincere Christians who were aware of their faults.  He summed up the Scripture’s teaching in a simple phrase that is often cited:  Luther said every Christian is “simul Justus et peccator.”   It means every Christian is “a saint and a sinner.”                                                              

This is not an excuse for Christians to ignore the Bible’s call to live in purity, but it reminds us that our failures do not cancel out our identity.  Perhaps the most vivid demonstration of this is found in Paul’s greeting to the Corinthians in his first letter to that church with so many problems.  It was divided, proud, unloving, confused, to name just a few of its faults.  Yet, Paul addressed the church as “those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours.“ ^[1]

So, what do I mean when I say “we are saints?”

When I say “we are saints” I am saying we are a people with a God-given identity.

God has bestowed upon us an identity we could never gain by our own efforts.

When Paul says the Romans were “called to be saints,” he is suggesting they were constituted as saints by the action of God on their behalf.  The word saint comes from the same word as holy, that which is set apart for God’s use.  God has consecrated us to be his.

In the Old Testament the furnishings, vessels, and implements of the Tabernacle and Temple were said to be “holy” or “set apart” for God.  This wasn’t because of something innate in the wood, silver, gold, or fabric; it was because God had endowed them with that quality.

That passage from First Corinthians I just quoted contains the same idea.  Paul said the Corinthians (and all believers everywhere for that matter) were “sanctified in Christ Jesus.”  That is what made them and us “saints.” We are saints because we are in Christ; not in Christ because we are saints.

We are saints because of God’s doing, not our own. 

When I say “we are saints” I am saying we are a people with a holy ambition.

Though we become saints in the moment we trust Christ, it takes time to become saintly.

As saints, our holy ambition is to become what we are. 

Perhaps this is the time to mention the distinction between our standing and our state.  Were I preaching this sermon at the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century, many of you would have heard what I’m about to say.  Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the ideas are not so familiar.

By “standing” I mean our relationship with God established through our faith in Christ.  Because we have trusted Christ, there is a sense that when God looks at us he sees only Jesus Christ.  As the hymn suggests: “dressed in his righteousness alone,” we are “faultless to stand before the throne.”  The hymn reflects what Paul says about Christ’s work in our lives.  He described it in Colossians 1:22, “[God] has reconciled you to himself through the death of Christ in his physical body. As a result, he has brought you into his own presence, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault.” 

While I by no means agree with everything he wrote, C. I. Scofield speaks beautifully of this distinction.  Here’s what he says about our standing: "The weakest person, if he be but a true believer on the Lord Jesus Christ, has precisely the same title as the most illustrious saint"   In God’s eyes, because we are in Christ, we are perfect before him.

Yet, there is another reality, isn’t there?  Chris Rice, borrowing a phrase from Robert Robinson’s hymn, writes:

On the surface not a ripple
Undercurrent wages war
Quiet in the sanctuary
Sin is crouching at my door
How can I be so prone to wander
So prone to leave You?

We are prone to wander.  Because of this our “state” may not match our “standing.”  Our standing reflects our spiritual condition in heaven; our state reflects our spiritual condition in this world.  Here we may be so fearful of the culture’s criticism we fail to live openly for Christ, so caught up in other matters that we become virtually indifferent to the cause of the Kingdom, we may even live in disobedience because we resisting temptation is too much bother.  Scofield again speaks to this situation.

"A prince, while he is a little child, is presumably as willful and as ignorant as other little children. Sometimes he may be very obedient and teachable and affectionate, and then he is happy and approved. At other times he may be unruly, self-willed, and disobedient, and then he is unhappy, and perhaps is chastised—but he is just as much a prince on the one day as on the other. It may be hoped that, as time goes on, he will learn to bring himself into willing and affectionate subjection to every right way, and then he will be more princely, but not more really a prince. He was born a prince"

 

We are saints but don’t always behave like saints.  So, we are sometimes miserable, guilt-ridden, chastised, joyless. 

What’s the remedy?  How can our standing and our state approach parity?  How can we saints become more saintly?

If we want to become who we are:

We should stand ready to hear God speak to us through his word.  Paul told Timothy, “All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right. God uses it to prepare and equip his people to do every good work.”  The writer of the longest psalm, Psalm 119, a song of praise to God’s Word, asks and answers a key question: “How can young persons keep their lives pure? They can do it by holding on to your word.”

We should stand ready to truly participate in fellowship with God’s people. You’ve heard this before but it doesn’t hurt to repeat it. The writer of Hebrews warned wavering Christians, “And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.”  The Creed says “I believe in …the communion of saints” because its anonymous composers understood the importance of Christian fellowship.  We need each other to help us keep on course, to inspire us to aspire to be who we are in Christ.

When everything is as it should be, going to church makes us better, more saint-like.  Of course, you might say, I don’t need to go to church because I don’t need to be any better.  In that case, I would say you should come to church to help the rest of us be better.

We should stand ready to repent and accept God’s grace to start again.  Though John’s words are often quoted to non-believers to urge them to trust Christ, they were really written to Christians.  In them, the apostle warns against dishonesty and urges us to trust God’s provision when we acknowledge our wandering.

If we claim to be already free from sin, we lead ourselves astray and the truth has no place in our hearts.  If we confess our sins, He is so faithful and just that He forgives us our sins and cleanses us from all unrighteousness.

 

We can take this difficult course because “we have an Advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ the righteous; and He is an atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.”

Repentance is hard, but it is often the way toward that holy ambition.

When I say, “We are saints,” I mean we have the opportunity to make a holy difference.

When God sanctified the tools and implements for the temple, he didn’t do so simply to enhance the beauty of the place.  He gave them a holy usefulness.  God wants his people, his saints, to be useful too.

As saints we can make a difference in the world.  A vivid picture of this is found in Revelation 8.

When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.
       Then I saw the seven angels who stand before God, and seven trumpets were given to them.
And another angel came and stood at the altar with a golden censer, and he was given much incense to offer with the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar before the throne,
and the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of the angel.
     Then the angel took the censer and filled it with fire from the altar and threw it on the earth, and there were peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake.

 

Consider what is happening here.  In the Bible, heaven is pictured as echoing with constant praise.  Yet, that praise is silenced so God might hear the prayers of the saints on earth.  Those prayers become part of the worship God receives.  Then, those very prayers mingled with fire from the altar are hurled to the earth where they have a powerful impact—“thunder, rumblings, lightning, and an earthquake.”

It’s a portrayal of how the saints may make a difference through their prayers.

But their impact is not limited to prayer.

Luke equates the saints with the people of God who are called to be God’s witnesses in the world and do his work in the world.  Perhaps this is why the ancient church so often associated saints with miracles.  The point is not that these miracles actually took place, but that the church believed real saints make a difference in the world. 

Remember, these saints appeared in every venue of life.  There were saints of the kitchen, saints of the garden, saints of various businesses, saints for every field you might imagine.  Again, the lesson seems to be that you may be a saint wherever you find yourself. 

There is a further note in the Revelation that we shouldn’t miss because in its own way it underscores the saints’ influence in the world.  In the Revelation we are told the forces of evil “make war on the saints.” Why should Satan and his forces bother to focus their destructive power of the saints?  I think it must be because the saints are making a difference for the cause of the Kingdom.

  Some years ago, on a cross-country trip, I saw a church sign that reminds us of what's at stake.  It said,"The world at its worst needs the church at its best."  When we live up to our identity as saints, we make a difference.

Conclusion

We are saints.  When the New Testament writers speak of the saints, they almost always see them as part of a community.  Saints are not saints in isolation.  We are not alone in trying to be the saints God called us to be.

There is a Celtic prayer that suggests we Christians are surrounded by saints.  While it mentions some saints by name, it reminds us there many saints of the rank and file.

I walk with the saints . . .Round and round.
With Patrick . . .On the reek's high brow.
With Bridgid . . . In Kildare's town.
With Kevin . . . In verdant Glendalough.
Here today . . .In my town,
Saints surround me . . .Round and round!

 

Who are we?  We are saints.  It’s a surprising claim but it’s God’s claim. 

 

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^[1] The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. 1989 (1 Co 1:2). Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers.