Why Is Sanctification Hard?
An important part of maturing as a Christian is a growing awareness of our sins. It could be angry outbursts, a foul language habit, neglecting our families, being unloving to our spouse, sexual sin, over-working, neglecting our spiritual lives, or any other number of things.
We must not stop at becoming aware though, we then must work at changing what God has convicted us of. We try to be better. We attempt to change. We put new habits into practice. But inevitably, most of us will stumble upon that path of growing. We fall back into old patterns. Resistance is always found on the journey towards change.
It is here when we can feel most discouraged. When we know what we should be and are striving after it, but find ourselves weak. Or maybe you haven’t stumbled, but you are worn down because of the persistent war with sin. “How much longer can I say no?” you ask.
We can assume God wants to be done with us and maybe we should be done with us too, because if this Christianity thing was real wouldn’t we be able to change much more easily?
THE TRAJECTORY OF GROWTH
We never want to sin or fall back into old ways, but no Christian will ever be perfect until the day Jesus returns. So we must have a framework of understanding how to handle our growth when it isn’t perfectly linear.
Consider 2nd Peter:
For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, 6 and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, 7 and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. 8 For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), 2 Pe 1:5–8.
If these qualities are yours… and increasing. Within the scriptures there is a category where we have these qualities but do not possess them in the fullest measures. Let this encourage you when growth comes slowly. The Christian life is one step at a time.The question of the Christian life is not do you perfectly hold all of these qualities now. The question is, with Christ, are you working towards them with all your might?
With trajectories, small adjustments now result in a large change over time. Consider a ship, they turn their rudder 5 degrees left. In one day, that small adjustment didn’t change their trajectory much. But over the span of 1 or 2 weeks, where they are compared to where they would have been had they not made the small correction is vastly different.
THE HOW AND WHY
Understanding the how and why of fighting our sins will help us stay the path when it is difficult. If we aren’t careful, we will view fighting our sins and becoming a better person in ways the crush us.
Wrong view: I must, by my own power and white-knuckle strength, try to do better and never sin again to make God happy.
Better view: I must, by the power of the spirit and the overflow of my faith (which involves work), work hard at becoming more in line with what Jesus has called me to, not to earn His love, but because of His deep love for me.
Do you see the difference? One has at it’s foundation relationship with God and grace. One has at it’s foundation your strength. The why and how of your fighting sin is important. Give it some thought. Fighting from the wrong foundation will crush you and be unsustainable.
THE OPPOSITE OF SIN
If fighting sin is something deeper than simply “saying no”, how do we actually go about fighting it? Let’s look back at the text:
For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, 6 and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, 7 and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love.
Do you notice in the text the way we grow in sanctification? By implementing good virtues into our life. Now that may feel too simple or not specific enough, depending on how you have previously fought your sinful flesh. But consider what sin could thrive if these are the qualities within our hearts we are cultivating? Knowledge of God by reading the scriptures. Which produces self-control. Self-control leads to growing in steadfastness and that, godliness, and that, brotherly affection, and that, love.
These virtues are the opposite of sin. If a particular vice has you ensnared, consider the corresponding virtue and work on that. For example: if you are struggling to overcome an angry heart, work on being more thankful. If you are being selfish, work on sacrificing for others. If you are prone to lust, work on selfless acts of love. Cultivating the opposite virtue of the sin you want to kill starves your desire for that sin.
CULTIVATING
I use the word cultivating intentionally. It describes two important parts of the sanctification process:
1- Takes time: Cultivate is an agricultural word. To cultivate the land or to cultivate the crops. Is there anything about farming that is quick? No. To cultivate takes countless days and weeks and months. Your growth will not happen over night. That important question is, what is the trajectory of it? Slow growth is still real growth.
2- Takes intentionality: Cultivation does not happen by accident. It takes dedicated work and thought. If you are not putting yourself in places and block out time to cultivate growth, it will not happen. We do not drift into holiness, we drift into failure.
SANCTIFICATION IS A MARATHON, NOT A SPRINT
So have you fallen on your journey of sanctification? If you were a runner running a marathon and you tripped. Would you feel like you have failed your life? The race was over? Like you had to go back to the starting line and begin again? No. You would simply get back up and continue the race. You would learn some lessons from that fall. You would grow. And you would move on, to better things.
So it is with our journey of sanctification with God. Yes, there will be consequences for our sins. And our sin is no small thing nor should it be taken lightly. But, the relationship with have with God is now not one of keeping Him in our favor by running a good race. That is called legalism.
NOT IN YOUR OWN POWER
Jesus Christ has run the perfect race and imputed, or given, to us His righteousness. This righteousness covers our unrighteousness and makes us acceptable before God. God loved us while we were broken and sinful and rebellious and weak. He loved us so much in that state that He sent his son to die for us.
It is not that we were hated by God, but then Jesus came to save us and make God love us again. God loved us when we were sinful and the trinity all worked towards this plan of redemption. Our sin did deserve punishment though, and God sent Christ to take the punishment instead of us, Christ willing submitted, and the Spirit empowered Him. Consider Romans 5:6-10
For at just the right time, while we were still weak, Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. 8 But God proves His love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
9 Therefore, since we have now been justified by His blood, how much more shall we be saved from wrath through Him! 10 For if, when we were enemies of God, we were reconciled to Him through the death of His Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through His life!
And if it is while you were in a state of being weak, ungodly, and sinful, that God placed his love upon you, why do you so easily doubt that once you find yourself in those states again, He will not continue to love you? He has justified you with the blood of His son!
This transforms our running of the Christian life. Because we no longer run to earn God’s love, we run because of God’s love. The fountain of his love is the foundation from which our growth must be built. Do not attempt to grow in these virtues and to kill sin without God. To do so vastly misunderstands the point of growth, to experience more of God. This is the way we kill sin, by finding a superior pleasure than the pleasure of sin. Namely, the pleasure of on-going fellowship with Jesus.
It is this understanding that will help us back up when we stumble upon the path of sanctification.
Working and trusting towards greater sanctification,
Josh.