I’ve been rereading passages about sanctification and noticing how Scripture describes both a moment (“you are sanctified”) and a lifelong journey of becoming more like Christ.
In your experience, does sanctification feel more like a gradual shaping over time, or like a series of moments where God does something deeply transformative all at once?
Or maybe a mix of both?
I’d love to know how you understand this theologically and how you’ve seen it play out in your own life.
Sanctifcation is both a trandormation and a life long struggle.
One is sanctified by the application of Jesus’s grace, but one then has the battle to live as a Christian, to actully love the unlovely, be gracious to the rude,and tobe an example.
BVasicly if someone tells you the Christian lif is easy, a bed of roses etc, they do not know what they are talking about.
From God’s point of view we are “sanctified” (set aside for a holy purpose) when we are saved.
From our point of view we have choices to make that influence the degree to which we walk after the flesh or the Holy Spirit. Few make this transformation in a single step.
There is one sense in which we are already holy, frequently we see “holy ones” (i.e. “saints”) used to refer to God’s people. This does not mean God’s people have attained perfect holiness in their lives, or that they are without flaws, or that sin is still not a serious struggle; for while in this life we must contend with the flesh, with the old man, and so we are called to lives of repentance.
But in that those who are in Christ are in Him, by grace, having received the Holy Spirit and are declared righteous for Christ’s sake (for we receive the alien righteousness of Christ as a pure gift, i.e. justification) we are also called holy. Christ is holy, and so being covered and found in Christ we are also called holy.
But the process of sanctification is that we are, through God’s power and His grace working in us, by the Spirit, as we are called to take up our cross and follow Jesus; is that we cooperate with God and walk in faith, that we walk in the Spirit, that we imitate Christ, etc. So that holiness is a goal we desire and strive for, not by our own power; but God’s power. We look with eyes of faith to see what God promises–that the work of God which He began He will continue until the Last Day, “He who began a good work in you will continue that work until the day of the Lord Jesus”, so that we are being conformed to the image of the Son of God.
This is also where sanctification and theosis meet–our “upward calling of God in Christ Jesus” is the goal, the telos with which we were saved, to be conformed to Christ, that the full Image of God be restored. This is not attained in this present mortal life, but rather in the resurrection when this mortal puts on immortality, when the old Adam has been entirely laid to rest and we bear the full and glorious image of the New and Heavenly Man, Christ, the New Adam. When even our flesh is glorified.
For St. John declares that we shall one day be “like Him” (1 John 3:2), and St. Peter says that by God’s grace and promise we are to “become partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). The ancient fathers echoed this when, for example, St. Irenaeus writes that the Lord became what we are (God became man) in order that we would become what He is; St. Athanasius wrote that that God became man so that man would become God–the meaning of both these statements aren’t that you and I will cease to be human creatures, that we will become by nature what God is. Only God is God, the Eternal, Uncreated, who alone is worthy to be worshiped and adored. But rather that we shall bear God’s likeness. I shall never cease to be a finite human creature, for all eternity I will be finite, human, a recipient of God’s goodness and wholly dependent upon my loving Creator and Abba, wholly dependent upon Christ my Lord, wholly dependent upon the Holy Spirit who causes me to become holy even as He is holy–but yet in Christ, by the Spirit, in the grace of God the Father I shall partake of God’s mercy and love and life so perfectly in that future age, I shall truly bear the Divine Image and Likeness as I was always supposed to.
So that the call to “be holy even as I am Holy” is a calling toward the fullness of life in God in Christ by the Spirit, which is at work now until the day the Lord returns, and when He returns, when these old bones are raised up and made new, I shall finally and at last be found what God always intended me to be: that I should reflect and bear His loving goodness and be a reflection of the Good Creator God in the midst of His new and whole creation. When in the end I shall have no envy, no malice, no greed, no pride, none of the lusts and depraved passions of the flesh which so notably and overwhelmingly mark me here and now.