Day 14

“To all in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints...” —ROMANS 1:7

The word ‘saint’ has unfortunately been hijacked by some of the historical churches as a designation for the heroes from the past. We have St. Patrick, St. George, St. Stephen, St. Peter, St. Paul and so on. To qualify, these men have to be dead and have their portraits put into a stained glass window with a halo above their heads!

But that is not so in the Bible. Every Christian, according to the New Testament, is a ‘saint’. The word translated ‘saint’ here is the word “hagios” in the Greek, and it occurs in three contexts. When this word is a noun, it is translated ‘saint’. When it is used as an adjective, a descriptive word, it’s translated ‘holy’. When it is a verb, an active word, it is translated ‘sanctified’. A saint is a holy person in the process of being sanctified.

What do we mean by that? None of us would claim to be ‘holy’, with our normal usage of that word. We might agree we are in the process of being sanctified, and we might dare to use the word ‘saint’ of ourselves in a safe environment of fellow Christians, but it is highly unlikely we would go into our work place and introduce ourselves as ‘Saint ….’!

Some of us think that to be a saint means to be saintly, which has connotations of being very old, very nice, having white hair on our head, and a gentle smile on our face! But that is not what it means.

When we become Christians, we go through a change of identity. We used to be called ‘sinner’ but now we are called a ‘saint’; and what turns a ‘sinner’ into a ‘saint’ is a ‘Saviour’.

As sinners we have come short of the glory of God (which is His moral character); and what the Saviour did in saving us is that He took our sin upon Himself, the sinner, thus cleansing the sinner of his sin, then covered us with His own righteousness, and gave us a new identity: we are now ‘set apart’ (the meaning of ‘saint’) and with a new identity no longer belonging to ourselves, but to Christ who died and rose again for us.

To be a true Christian is to be a saint, in the process of being sanctified (‘saintified’), and who is already declared, ‘holy’, set apart for the purposes of God.

PRAYER: Lord Jesus, thank You for setting me apart for You, and making me your own. I pray that your work of sanctification in my life grows deeper and stronger in me.

TO REFLECT UPON: Am I aware that in becoming a Christian, I am actually a saint set apart for God?