Your Sanctification: Beware of Imitations

I haven’t always loved the word “sanctification.” It used to strike me as overly pious and churchy and irrelevant. But as I’ve come to see that in my sanctification God’s Spirit is patiently bending the trajectory of my life toward holiness, I’ve been encouraged by God’s commitment to that process despite my waywardness.

So, yes, sanctification is a sweet and precious thing. But not all that passes for sanctification is the genuine article.

When we try to make sanctification about something other than our hearts, when we try to manufacture holiness by some other means than the ones the Spirit wants to use, we embrace a cheap imitation of sanctification.

There are a couple of fakes that are popular in Christian circles.

Legalism

It’s true that as God’s Spirit re-shapes our hearts, our behavior will be affected. We will find ourselves less comfortable with sins that didn’t trouble us before. As the Spirit makes us more holy, our behavior is slowly transformed. But when we understand holiness in terms of behavior apart from heart transformation, we embrace a false version of sanctification, trying to reproduce the effects (right behavior) without addressing the heart.

The Pharisees of Jesus’ day are Exhibit A for this kind of fake. Nobody did external holiness like the Pharisees. Experts at behavior management, the Pharisees were widely admired for their meticulous observance of the Law. Yet their hearts were hard and cold, and they often found themselves at odds with their Messiah, Jesus.

Once we make righteous behavior our primary focus, we have embraced a false and dangerous substitute for genuine sanctification.

Intellectualism

Sometimes we try to make our sanctification all about our heads, reducing the process to the acquisition of knowledge and insight. We listen to good preaching and teaching with enthusiasm, and our Bibles are filled with notations in the margins. We love to take in the podcasts, radio programs, books, and blogs where we find biblical and theological content that is deep and rich.

All that is right and good. Christians have always been about teaching and learning, especially teaching and learning the Scripture. The danger comes when, without realizing it, we reduce discipleship to an intellectual process that never touches our hearts. We vainly imagine that growing in knowledge is the goal and extent of our sanctification.

It’s true that as God’s Spirit reshapes our hearts, our minds will be transformed. But when we try to substitute intellectual development for transformation of the heart, we are entangled in a false sanctification, trying to produce the sanctifying work of the Spirit by engaging our heads without our hearts.

The scribes, experts in the Law, are often mentioned alongside the Pharisees as Jesus’ opponents. The scribes knew the Law, and if knowledge of Scripture could create genuine holiness, the scribes would have been genuinely holy. But like the Pharisees, their hard hearts rendered them incapable of recognizing Jesus and submitting to His authority.

Genuine sanctification

Scripture tells us that more than anything else about us, it is what goes on in our hearts that matters to God. In his provocative words in the Sermon on the Mount, Rabbi Jesus made it clear that the Law of Moses was never about mere behavior. Jesus offers us a radical take on two of the Commandments: A woman could be guilty of murder without lifting a finger, and a man could be guilty of adultery using only his eyes and his imagination (Matt 5:21-30).

And this is not just a New Testament concept. The prophet Jeremiah made it clear that the failure of God’s people to keep their covenant with Yahweh had made it necessary for Him to institute a New Covenant, one in which He promises, “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts” (Jer 31:33).

That promise is fulfilled in the gentle sanctifying work of the Spirit, as He patiently works in our hearts to bring us toward genuine holiness. His objective is to make the character of Jesus – His compassion, His courage, His virtue – more and more natural for us, so that when we do what is right, we are acting not out of a sense of obligation, not as a result of steely self-discipline, but out of a heart that is being transformed.

Why are the fakes so popular?

One reason an outward focus on sanctification is popular is that it is so popular (yes, you read that right). Bad ideas gain a kind of momentum in the company of the confused. If most of the people we know and admire are given to intellectualism or legalism, we can easily be confused about what is genuine sanctification.

But there is something deeper at work here: we are attracted to outward and intellectual versions of sanctification because they are less intrusive. God wants to invade not just our behavior and our thinking; He wants nothing less than our hearts, our affections, our priorities. And there’s something in us that flinches at that kind of intrusion.

As I heard it put once, there is some region in each of our hearts that we want to declare, even to God, “This is mine!” My internal posture says that God can tell me what to do, and He can tell me how to think. But no one can tell me what I must cherish.

And that is where the battle lines are drawn, in the deepest recesses of our hearts, the places we guard most jealously. That is where God’s Spirit wants to do His sweet work of transformation, and that is where we must surrender.

Persevere, Paul Pyle Pastor of Discipleship