Sinclair Ferguson on Blueprints for Sanctification

Devotion, Union, and the Different Kind of Death

The Anchor Text  ·  Romans 6:4 (ESV)

We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

Key terms: περιπατήσωμεν (peripatēsōmen, “we might walk,” aorist active subjunctive, hortatory) and ἐν καινότητι ζωῆς (en kainotēti zōēs, “in newness of life”). καινότης (kainotēs) denotes newness of kind, not merely of time — a new order of existence, lived out as a manner of walking.

CENTRAL TRUTH

Holiness is not first separation but devotion — being set apart to God. It grows as the believer thinks rightly about the gospel and lives out of union with Christ in his death and resurrection.

SECTION 01

The Author

Sinclair B. Ferguson (b. 1948) is a Scottish Reformed theologian and pastor, a Ligonier teaching fellow, and formerly senior minister of First Presbyterian Church, Columbia, South Carolina, and professor of systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia. Confessionally Presbyterian, he is nonetheless read widely and warmly across the Reformed Baptist world for his pastoral clarity on union with Christ and the Christian life.

SECTION 02

The Work

Devoted to God: Blueprints for Sanctification (Banner of Truth, 2016; 296 pp.) is an orderly exposition of central New Testament passages on holiness — what Ferguson calls “blueprint” passages. In the preface he disarmingly notes that the book “contains no novel teaching” (p. ix); its strength is the careful, cumulative reading of Scripture rather than innovation.

SECTION 03

The Argument

Ferguson’s thesis is that sanctification proceeds by the renewing of the mind: in large measure, how we think about the gospel determines how we live. He defines holiness as devotion to God rather than mere separation, and builds the book on an ordered set of texts, stressing throughout the foundational importance of union with Christ, the rhythms of spiritual growth, the reality of spiritual conflict, and the proper role of the law. The fourth chapter, “A Different Kind of Death,” together with the second appendix, “We Died to Sin … He Died to Sin,” forms the book’s treatment of Romans 6: the believer’s death to sin is a participation in Christ’s own death to sin.

The Ten Chapters

Four appendices follow, of which the second — “We Died to Sin … He Died to Sin” — is the most prized for its handling of Romans 6.