Sanctification

I am speaking in human terms 

because of the weakness of your flesh. 

For just as you presented the parts of your body 

as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, 

resulting in [further] lawlessness, 

so now present your body's parts 

as slaves to righteousness, 

resulting in sanctification.

–Romans 6:19 NASB

Moral progress and transformation. Learning to love more broadly and deeply. Overcoming habits, compulsions, and vices. Correcting harmful thoughts and beliefs. Taking action and actually performing benevolent acts for loved ones as well as strangers. Finding and maintaining a deep connection with God.

All of these admirable improvements in love and virtue are part of what theologians call sanctification. It’s a funny word. It’s a misunderstood concept. It’s something all of us should yearn for.

Sanctification is not simply something nice we could decide to do. Sanctification is what would fix this broken world. The opposite of sanctification is not enjoyment, but terror. The alternative to righteousness is not harmless fun. Ultimately, lack of sanctification is what produces poverty, violence, oppression, and hopelessness in our world.

If people believed that faith in Jesus could actually cause people to be more loving, to have self-control and wisdom, to be kinder and more compassionate, then the Gospel would not be so despised and maligned as it is in our present society.

Let’s first learn a little about the word sanctification. There are some distinctions to be made between ritual and moral sanctification. In the Hebrew Bible (aka the Old Testament), to “sanctify” something meant to make it ritually acceptable to God. Sanctification had to do with symbolic rules, a system designed to teach truths about life and death, right and wrong, reconciliation and redemption.

But most of the time when we talk about sanctification we mean the moral kind. It’s not just about ensuring that slaughtered meat is ritually clean for sacrifice. It’s about growing out of our broken selves into the Christ-like people God created us to be. Sanctification is theological jargon for the process of moral transformation that a person undergoes as a result of God’s influence in their life.

People outside of the church don’t believe in sanctification because they see very little of it happening through the church. People inside the church barely believe it because the challenge of growing in love, of leaving behind compulsions and habitual vices, of overcoming egoism and avarice, of embracing humility and selflessness is just plain hard.

It’s not easy writing a concise essay on sanctification because there is so much to say about it. My intent is to make it an easier concept to understand and implement. 

Sanctification in this present life for Christ-followers is not exactly automatic. If churches were healthier, if the Gospel had not become distorted, we would see more sanctification in the world. 

What causes us to change our ways? I would suggest there are three primary motivations for growth in virtue: fear of consequences, social pressure, and conscience (or moral commitment).

Every recovering alcoholic can talk about “hitting bottom.” That’s when the consequences of decadence become real enough to us that we finally decide to pick ourselves up. Sin and Death are so strong, most of us who journey out of addiction have multiple experiences of hitting bottom. So fear of consequences is a major motivation for growth.

So is social pressure. We talk about people having “skeletons in their closet.” In other words, we know that behind the facade many people hide their acts of depravity. The respectable teacher has child porn on his computer. The caring nurse sometimes treats patients while under the influence. And we see enough examples of “respectable” people being exposed as hiding perverted behaviors that we suspect most people of having similar skeletons.

So perhaps it should not surprise us that one of God’s commonest tools for shaping us, for pulling us up from the slime, is pain. When understood in light of the Gospel (Jesus Christ died and rose in order to bring us along with him on a journey to God’s New Reality), the pains and heartaches of human existence are a word of hope for change, for something better to emerge. 

As long as we are comfortable, we won’t change. We are far less rational than we imagine. When we decide to be honest, we find that our attitudes and actions are strongly influenced by irrationality. We are emotional beings who have the gift of thought, but we do not live as Stoic thinkers. Passions and yearnings, usually distorted, drive our behaviors more so than logic.

God’s ultimate tool is Death. And Death is the great sanctifier. Many of us will make little progress in this life toward becoming healthy, whole people who think and act like Jesus Christ. But in Death and in the processes that must follow our death, God will transform us, as Paul says:

Blessed [be] the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, 

who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing 

in the heavenly [places] in Christ, 

just as He chose us in Him 

before the foundation of the world, 

that we would be holy and blameless before Him.

–Ephesians 1:3-4 NASB

For those whom He foreknew, 

He also predestined 

[to become] conformed to the image of His Son, 

so that He would be the firstborn among many brothers [and sisters].

–Romans 8:29 NASB

All of us will be sanctified. The question is, are we content to wait for death to work its transformation or do we want to have more peace, joy, and love now?

I am describing what sanctification is and why the world needs it so terribly, but how can I go on to the next phase and describe how to be transformed in Christ?

I can only briefly begin to describe to you the practical workings of sanctification. There are library shelves full of books giving details and theories and practical ideas. I’m able in a short essay to offer a smidge of insight.

Sanctification is a Process; it is Participatory; it is Predestined.

First, the process. Sanctification could be compared to education. Suppose you are becoming educated in a certain field, like say physics. You take the high school course. You take college courses. You find yourself computing the inertia of an aircraft traveling at 600 miles per hour and turning 30° to the left. You find yourself calculating the orbital path of satellites. You feel as though you have learned physics until you approach new problems and find that you still only know the tiniest fraction of how the universe works. A book on dark matter shows you how much you actually do not know. Education is a process with no endpoint—just like sanctification.

Second, this process is participatory. While it is theoretically possible for a person to make major changes alone, this is not the norm. And it is possible for people to grow without specific faith in Christ. Alcoholics recover without religious faith. Immature young people grow into caring individuals in many ways regardless of religious beliefs. Often, people who make some progress in recovery and virtue do so with the help of loved ones and mentors. Even non-religious growth is participatory.

But as Christ-followers, we have the ultimate person to aid us in changing our selfish, childish ways. Paul talks about setting our minds on Christ and things above, where he is seated with God. He more than hints that as we set our minds on Christ, the Spirit of Christ communicates with us so that we participate in the mind of Christ. He also refers to this as walking in the Spirit. This is a mysterious process—not an instant achievement—by which we gain insight after insight over time, always going deeper, always learning more about ourselves, the world, and love.

This topic of participatory sanctification—us and Christ working on transformation—deserves our attention. This is the thing human beings need in this world more than anything else. 

Third, sanctification is predestined. You will be Christ-like. Your fears and failures will all be healed. Your wanton, wicked ways will dissolve with the stars in the remaking of all things. God always wins. You may be reading this as someone who does not claim faith in Christ and you may have been told that being saved requires you to choose God and become “saved.” I say to you, God will save everyone (“As in Adam all die, so in Christ all are made alive,” 1 Corinthians 15:22 NASB). You may be a Christ-follower disillusioned with the faith and feeling defeated and unholy. I say to you, God loves you too much to leave you the way you are. He will conform you to his image—to some degree in this life and then completely in the life to come.

Sanctification is wine and we are water. But there is one who turns water to wine. He can and will insert himself into your life, unseen and silent, but definitely present. But it is in our participation with Christ and active listening that we experience sanctification in our present circumstances. And that is something greatly to be desired.