Jesus at the wedding of Galalli portrayed believers as matured tasting wine of the harvest. Wine takes time to ferment and a good wine is one that has matured under the right conditions. The Seal of Guarantee who guarantees what is to come is the Holy Spirit. Immediately we have to associate the word sanctify to the Holy Spirit.
So what does sanctify mean biblically?
To make complete. It most certainly is associated with glorification and this is what Paul is highlighting "what is to come", in that it is a lifelong process arbitrated by the Holy Spirit.
The fires of purgation within this temporal life is the ongoing process assigned to the Holy Spirit of God to make a justified believer complete and to mold them in the personage of the beloved Son. As it is written, "I reduce, while he increases".
When reading your post, I could not help but capture the spiritual state you are in by your own testimony.
That was not my experience when I received the Holy Spirit 41 years ago. The disabling desire to commit willful sin was gone immediately. In particular, mine was adultery. Where I had been completely weak and defenseless, I was now strong and powerful overnight. All that was left was faults in my fruit.
Am I right to say that those "faults in your fruit" have taken 41 years to iron out?
Well, it is those fruits of the Spirit that are the ongoing process of faith works in progress, that molds you ever so slightly to "what is to come" for you, according to your abilities of how the Lord sees fit for your glorification.
No one is born complete, to begin with, with Jesus being the only exception. We are not 100% complete/sanctified the moment we were justified, for this is why it has taken you 41 years to iron out the "faults in your fruit".
Let me give you an analogy. When a person gets orthodontics treatment, does the Orthodontist put the braces and to physically proceed to put force on the crooked teeth in an effort to straighten them out, on the first adjustment?
Absolutely not! If he did, then he is not a qualified Orthodontist and he will either risk breaking the teeth he wants to straighten or if they don't break, then the patient wanting to get straightened teeth, will be so overwhelmed with pain, that they would have no part of this procedure and would ask the braces to be immediately removed. What a professional Orthodontist does is to make very slight adjustments on a monthly basis, over a period of say 21 months, until the teeth are trained into place, rather than being forced into place through sheer pain and the risk of breakage.
Think of the braces as our Holy Spirit purgation fires that ever so lightly burn away our old carnal self. Think of the Orthodontist as Jesus who makes re-adjustments of the purgation fires over time, so that our old carnal self is trained. As Jesus said the Holy Spirit will be with us and to train us. This maturation process does not happen overnight and requires time and it is biblical to think of this being a process. As Paul in 2 Timothy 4:6-8 calls this an individuals race of faith to the death. The Hebrews writer states, "In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood". (Hebrews 12:4)
We are under obligation that sanctification is a lifelong process until biological death and this is our race of faith that only ends when we as Testators biologically die.
The statement below is false because sanctification does not mean getting sin out of your life over time. Sin should immediately cease if you had genuinely repented, otherwise one is treading under foot the Son of God, by wilfully living lifestyles of sin.
The modern day version of sanctification is a life long process of 'getting sin out of your life.'
