"Sanctify them through Thy truth: Thy word is truth." John 17:1717Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth. (John 17:17). This is a saying much to be remembered. It teaches us that we are not to make ourselves the judges of what sanctification or holiness is; God's Word is to determine this because holiness is that character or mind which is formed by God's Word or truth.
We are apt to think that our own moral sense of things is the rule of holiness. But the Word of God claims to be such a rule: "Sanctify them through Thy truth: Thy word is truth." An act may be unholy, though done with a good conscience, because the "truth," and not the conscience, is the rule of holiness.
If that rule were applied to many a thing which the moral sense or the religious sense of man approves, how it would change its character! And the Lord cannot change His standard of holiness, though He may be infinitely gracious to the shortcomings of His saints.
Those other words, "For their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth," which stand in connection, have their own force and value also. Thus, in the whole of His utterance in John 17, the Lord strongly takes a place apart from the world, and puts His saints in the like place, praying that they may be kept there. In this sense, I believe, He speaks of sanctifying Himself. Through all this Church age, He is apart from the world and the earth; and sanctification depends on our communion with Him in that separated place. "The truth," testifying as it does of Him, links us with Him in that place; and sanctification is thus "through the truth," leading us to fellowship with an unworldly Jesus.