ee for God now
to possess and bless: it is redemption realized and filling my soul,
that will bring me the assurance and experience of all His power will
work in me. In God, redemption and sanctification are one: the more
redemption as a Divine reality possesses me, the closer am I linked to
the Redeemer-God, the Holy One.

And just so, _only holiness brings the assurance and enjoyment of
redemption_. If I am seeking to hold fast redemption on lower ground, I
may be deceived. If I have become unwatchful or careless, I should
tremble at the very idea of trusting in redemption apart from holiness
as its object. To Israel God spake, 'I brought you up out of the land of
Egypt: _therefore_ ye shall be holy, for I am holy.' It is God the
Redeemer who made us His own, who calls us too to be holy: let Holiness
be to us the most essential, the most precious part of redemption: the
yielding of ourselves to Him who has _taken_ us as His own, and has
undertaken to _make_ us His own entirely.

A second lesson suggested is the connection between God's and man's
working in sanctification. To Moses the Lord speaks, '_Sanctify_ unto me
all the first-born.' He afterwards says, '_I sanctified_ all the
first-born for myself.' What God does He does to be carried out and
appropriated through us. When He tells us that we are made holy in
Christ Jesus, that we are His holy ones, He speaks not only of His
purpose, but of what He has really done; we have been sanctified in the
one offering of Christ, and in our being created anew in Him. But this
work has a human side. To us comes the call to be holy, to follow after
holiness, to perfect holiness. God has made us His own, and allows us to
say that we are His: but He waits for us now to yield Him an enlarged
entrance into the secret places of our inner being, for Him to fill it
all with His fulness. Holiness is not something we bring to God or do
for Him. Holiness is what there is of God in us. God has made us His own
in redemption, that He might make Himself our own in sanctification. And
our work in becoming holy is the bringing our whole life, and every part
of it, into subjection to the rule of this holy God, putting every
member and every power upon His altar.

And this teaches us the answer to the question as to the connection
between the sudden and the gradual in sanctification: between its being
a thing once for all complete, and yet imperfect and needing to be
perfected. What God sanc