Typically we think that the solution to two extreme views will be a blending of the two. So in this case, is sanctification best understood as a cooperative effort where God does his bit, and I do my bit? I don’t think that will help us. Our flesh will corrupt that model. Instead, let’s ponder the big biblical framework for sanctification.

Marriage.

The Sin Problem – Let’s back up a bit. We have to grasp the depth of the problem before we can fathom the wonder of the solution. The core of the sin problem is not bad behavior or faulty thinking or a weakened will. The core of the sin problem is the lie that we can be “like God” – that is, like the false god who made the original offer. We believe that we can be autonomous and it is that self-orientation which drives and corrupts everything about us.

Our inclination to autonomy can show itself in two ways. Some will lean toward licentiousness, casting off all restraint and living like the world. Others will lean toward asceticism and legalistic self-made righteousness, and also living like the world. Worldliness is not just one end of that spectrum. Worldliness is always shot through with the DNA of autonomy.

But God – We were dead in our sin, but God. We were living as dead folks in the realm of death, but God. God sent his Son to die for us, in our place, winning our hearts by pouring out his love into our hearts by the Spirit, and thus uniting us to Christ in a marital union. We are now one Spirit with Christ our bridegroom. We died with Christ. Our life is hidden with Christ. In Christ. Christ in me. Union. Marriage.

When we start to see how much marital union language there is in Scripture, it should start to purge us of the contractual approach we function with in this world so much – i.e. obey stipulations for the sake of gaining reward. But it is not easy to shake this idea, for our flesh will always pull us back in the direction of autonomy.

The danger of autonomy – So how do we see sanctification? In the context of a marital union the groom washes his bride by the washing with the water of the Word, that she should be holy and blameless before him, without spot or wrinkle. So he is proactive and at work in the bride to cleanse and transform her by the Spirit through whom the union exists.

As we read the epistles of Paul, for example, we can start to spot the union language that creates the ethos for the instructive elements . With Christ. In him. Christ in you. This is key to avoiding the danger of our autonomous impulses.

So on the one hand, we have to beware of the danger of autonomy. A healthy marriage is not marked by autonomous action. A healthy marriage is not two individuals doing their own thing, in their own way, by their own strength, with a mere tip of the hat to a status of unity.

The opposite danger – This raises an issue though: if it is not about our self-moved effort, are we saying we are therefore totally passive? Some go that way. It is all of God, and what I do doesn’t matter because it is “all of God.” This can lead to either licentious living – a marriage marked by the bride going off after other lovers. Or it can lead to mere passivity – a marriage marked by the bride being totally unengaged in life.

Again, we need to bring to the fore the reality of our marital union with Christ. In being united to him we do not become puppets. Not autonomy, nor automatons. Christ doesn’t desire to be married to a mannequin.

Thus we have language of union to counter our tendency to self-made righteousness. And we have instruction and direction to counter the possibility of puppet-ness.

Is the bride engaged in life, active and alive? Never more so! Biblical sanctification anticipates an active engagement from us. And in the context of a fleshly inclination that has always dominated us, there is need for clarification of what it means to walk in a manner worthy of the spouse who has captured and won our hearts. But that instruction must never be corrupted into a self-driven autonomous obedience for the sake of reward . . . there is nothing of marital union in that thinking.

Two Ugly Wives – Some churches are characterized by an autonomous self-driven effort, a legalism and rule-based obedience for the sake of reward. Some churches are characterized by an unengaged laxity, a sinful sloppiness that treats the desires of the bridegroom as effectively irrelevant to the life of the bride. Both are ugly. The dutiful wife who works hard but is totally self-absorbed in her diligence to be seen as a good performer of wifely duties, and also the straying wife who cares little for what her husband desires and plays the harlot with other lovers, are both broken images of marriage.

The Glorious Bride – The biblical image of Christ’s sanctified bride is so glorious. She is captivated by Him, beautified by His love, actively engaged in a dynamic communion with him and living moment by moment for him, her gaze firmly fixed on the one who loved her first.

The post Holy and Blameless Before Him first appeared on Cor Deo.

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I’ve spent too long having my steps directed

By those keen to have God’s character dissected:

As if ‘grace’ and ‘holiness’ are opposite poles,

The Yin and the Yang of a life full of holes.

“Yes, of course God is loving… But He’s holy, too,

Sanctified, set apart, from people like you.”

“Grace AND holiness, dear boy, and don’t you forget it!

Your life is unfit; don’t quit – admit and recommit!”

So I served this God through gritted teeth,

Trying to bring Him glory with each grudging deed,

‘Til, Pharisaic and melancholic,

I developed the tastes of a pornoholic.

“It’s laziness”, they said, “You need to pull up your socks,

“Stop making God angry by the filth that you watch.”

So I tried and I tried and I sometimes abstained!

But the desire to sin just always remained.

Turning off my computer felt like success,

But I’d lie up all night full of covetousness,

Conquering lust, but wanting it constantly;

Trading sin for sin was never true victory.

I continued this struggle, perpetually enslaved,

Knowing my heart’s desire was to love the depraved,

Whatever they’d said, this wasn’t “sanctification”,

Obedient in deed, but full of selfish frustration.

(If this sounds like a gross misinterpretation,

Allow me to offer the Genesis explanation).

This inward curvation can be traced back to Eden,

Where we thought our desires would give us true freedom.

That’s the root of all sin, its primary cause,

Not simply the fact that we broke God’s laws,

But that, when our Father offered us choice,

We turned from his goodness and his pleading voice.

Now, I’m not downplaying the evil of disobedience,

But deviance is the result of the heart’s prior allegiance,

To self. To stuff. Things we’ve whored ourselves to –

This problem is deeper than breaking a taboo.

I can’t help thinking that, fundamentally,

There’s something twisted in your anthropology.

It seems that, for you, the will here is king,

Ruling over the heart and pulling the strings

Making rational decisions for God and his law,

Since doctrine calls for duty in its every clause.

To you, the Spirit isn’t regenerating,

But infusing with power and thus accelerating,

Your own capacity for killing fleshly desires,

And doing the nice things that the Bible requires.

But my problem with this is, it’s Aristotelian.

The stoic, hiding in truth like a theological chameleon,

Has convinced us we’re central to our sanctification,

Since just love alone will likely lead to stagnation.

This falsity tells us that God’s saving grace,

Wasn’t quite enough and we must now embrace,

The role of our effort in completing our holiness,

(But with the Spirit’s battery-pack, always there helping us).

Yet, when I read Ezekiel, or Romans, or Galatians,

I can’t help but notice the signs of regeneration:

Grace makes my heart a whole new creation!

We’ve established, of course, that this grace is free,

It’s a gift which neither starts nor ends with me.

But I think you forgot that holiness, too,

Isn’t something you’re just enabled to do,

Since BY his grace you get his righteousness, too!

See, the thing about this ‘grace’ is, He’s a WHO, not a WHAT,

Who turns upward my gaze to the Son of God!

Grace isn’t a substance and he’s not your fuel,

Your gas in the tank for the ‘whole new you’:

Grace IS the Spirit, here to be your companion,

A person, a lover, by whom I’m in UNION!

Jonathan Edwards was quick to help us on this:

“God’s holiness & happiness consist in his loving-ness”

The very Spirit of God, pleased to dwell in unloveliness,

Finds in the depths of my heart his own wedded bliss.

You see, the blossom of righteousness is brought into bloom

When the bride is united in love with her groom.

So, my sanctification isn’t a constant fixation

On the expiration of God’s condemnation.

And having a heart changed by regeneration

Isn’t just “getting used to my justification”.

This is more than a shift in my legal status,

Or a ‘get out of jail’ card, given out gratis,

I’m not being changed because God decided to legislate this;

No. Now my whole apparatus is one with His goodness!

This union isn’t just for my liberation:

It’s about the bride of the King at her coronation!

I’m not ‘controlling desires which once controlled me’,

But I get NEW desires – that’s what it means to live free!

I’m not just a puppet who’s been given new strings,

I’ve got a new HEART which desires new things:

Like my Father in heaven – as the Spirit cries “ABBA!” –

I don’t see Him as Judge, but my new, loving Papa.

Now this struggle, this striving, this “killing of flesh”,

It comes from a heart that’s remade afresh,

Which means effort is in the context of a relationship;

The constant pursuit of deeper companionship.

So stop looking within for the strength you need

To be holy and happy and finally free:

Whatever you’re trapped in, whatever enslaves,

He’s stronger, he’s kinder and he’s mighty to save.

So call out to Jesus, to whom you are wed,

And love all that he is, not yourself, instead.

Ask the Spirit, “Beautify Christ today,

So my gaze is turned upwards, so my sin will decay.”

For if you are truly at one with the King,

Your eyes will be always and only on Him.

The post Poem first appeared on Cor Deo.

In Christianity at least three ways of determining righteousness have been promoted: an applied measure, a legal measure, and a relational measure. Applied righteousness is easy: any conduct that satisfies God’s demands makes a person righteous. Legal righteousness is broader: if a person has been judged guilty for his sins God is free to offer a reprieve by dismissing the legal charges against him.

Martin Luther, for instance, used this understanding when he spoke of Christians having an “alien righteousness” through faith in Christ. In his view a given believer is granted the full moral standing of the Son—absolute righteousness—through faith, even though the believer’s conduct still falls well short of Christ’s applied righteousness. In other words a person’s applied righteousness isn’t critical; the Father’s forgiveness in Christ through faith is what counts.

This debate was central to the 16th century Protestant Reformation as the Roman Church dismissed Luther’s claim and insisted that Christians must work to achieve actual righteousness through a “faith formed by love”. And the Roman version of love was will-based—a function of self-determined obedience—rather than an affective love. Spirituality, then, grows as a responsibility of the seeker rather than as a response to God’s love. God, in their view, is a righteous judge who demands that his followers rise to his ethical standards. Conduct that falls short remains under God’s righteous wrath.

Luther, on the other hand, believed that God is a lover who draws us into the affective bond of the Father and the Son. Love, in turn, is a shared delight and response to a loving God by his beloved ones. And the devotion of love—our faith—is what changes us to be more and more like the Son in our daily conduct. Our hearts follow after the heart of the one we love.

With that historical sketch in mind I was struck with Paul’s discussion of sin in Romans 3. There the relational righteousness of God comes into focus. The chapter famously declares that all humanity is morally broken: “None is righteous, no, not even one; no one understands; not one seeks for God” (verses 10-11). So human righteousness, by this measure, is nonsense and pretense. No one, apart from Christ, ever achieves actual righteousness.

What catches our attention in the following verses is Paul’s resolution of the problem: of “how the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.”

What’s striking is how Paul set out the problem of sin in the earlier verses of the chapter: he began by framing sin as a problem of faithlessness in verse 3—“What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? By no means!” Next, in a restatement in verse 5, Paul set out the same concern but with a new term in place of faith-concerns. “But if our unrighteousness serves to show the righteousness of God, what shall we say? That God is unrighteous to inflict wrath on us? . . . . By no means!” The two expressions are parallel so that unrighteousness is aligned with faithlessness.

Faithfulness and faithlessness are terms that press us towards a relational rather than a legal focus, but the two are coordinate concerns. Think, for instance, of the refrain that comes with so many broken marriages—“The spouse was unfaithful.” In such cases God’s law is certainly broken but the deeper issue is the violation of love.

And that refrain, as it relates to God and his people, jumps off the pages of the Old Testament in any rapid reading of the Bible. Jeremiah, for instance, treats it as a central theme in his warnings to Judah: “You have played the whore with many lovers; and would you return to me? declares the LORD. . . . She saw that for all the adulteries of that faithless one, Israel, I had sent her away with a decree of divorce. Yet her treacherous sister Judah did not fear, but she too went and played the whore” (Jer. 3:1 & 8).

The contrast between the faithful husband-who-is-God and his faithless bride, Israel, is played out again and again in the Old Testament. Hosea’s marriage to faithless Gomer is the vivid picture of God’s anguish over his faithless creation.

In this book the prophet goes beyond Israel to address the faithlessness of humanity as a whole: “But like Adam they transgressed the covenant; there they dealt faithlessly with me” (Hosea 6:7). But God persistently refuses to give his bridal people away to their predilection for evil and promises to draw back at least some to himself: “And I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me. I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul” (Jer. 32:40-41).

Here’s the point: we will do well to reflect on God’s real “heart” and “soul” desire for us to have a love relationship with him that is sound. We aren’t meant to give our hearts away to the love of success, wealth, security, and the like—to self-love—but to be wholly devoted to Christ. This is what we were made for. And this is what ultimately defines righteousness rather than mere law-keeping. Laws only confront broken relationships; they don’t build faithful hearts. Luther was right in his emphasis on God’s role in restoring us. We won’t ever do it on our own.

So faithfulness and righteousness is the fruit of love. The gospel is God’s call for us to turn back to him, to hear his expressions of faithful love. That alone will stir us to love him in return—both wholly and faithfully.

The post Righteous? first appeared on Cor Deo.

This young lady was obviously in the afterglow of her encounter with a clear presentation of God’s grace and the wonder of forgiveness. I could have celebrated with her and probably lived off her excitement for a few days myself, but I was slightly concerned.

After the amazing miracle of forgiveness, what comes next? Some would say that the new believer needs to be instructed in the code of conduct that comes with their new status – after all, privilege brings responsibility. Others would say that the new believer needs to get used to living in light of their new status. Which way is correct? One? Both? Neither?

The amazing grace of the sacrificially benevolent judge has a profound and life changing impact. But how deep does that impact actually go?

What if the afterglow of the great gift of grace fades? Then the new believer will surely drift back into increasing sin, only now with assurance of sins forgiven. This kind of ‘free ticket’ would be a dangerous situation. A gospel of grace that is purely focused on a change in status is dangerously incomplete.

Consequently, does the new believer need training in a new code of conduct to bolster the status of being forgiven and also to protect them from themselves? I don’t think we have to jump there so quickly.

As I enjoyed her excitement about the judge’s remarkable grace I shared another dimension of the gospel story. I said, “You know, it is even more amazing than that,” she looked at me quizzically, “the judge forgave you, and he also proposed to you.” Her eyes widened. She hadn’t thought about it that way.

We discussed the ongoing wonder of being the bride of Christ, the ongoing impact of having your heart enlivened to the delight of knowing and loving him, the ongoing intimacy of being united to him by the indwelling Spirit, and so on. The gospel gives us lots to ponder!

Let me put this in different words to make the same point. If the New Covenant is merely a status change, then it is not enough. The newly forgiven individual will need some kind of external control mechanism and freedom restriction because their natural inclination to sin will soon break through and take charge.

But if the New Covenant is not only about the legal record, but also about the love relationship, then maybe we have a different situation. What if the New Covenant included provision for transformation of the heart, an inside to out supernatural change? What if the New Covenant included provision for the restored presence of the Spirit forging an intimate marital union between the believer and Christ? If this were included then perhaps the newly forgiven individual should be set free to live life to the full in the responsive joy of their new relationship with Christ.

That is an exciting prospect, but surely there would still be an inclination to sin alongside that new inclination to please God? Indeed the flesh versus Spirit tension is a reality we all experience. That is why our understanding of sanctification is so important.

It is easy to see sanctification as our follow-up work, our responsibility in light of the blessing of salvation. But this shifts the new believer’s gaze right back onto themselves. The message easily becomes ‘trust Christ for salvation and then look to yourself as you strive for your sanctification.’ Paul was no fan of this idea, no matter how well it was couched in biblical language.

Walking in step with the Spirit is about living in the reality of the New Covenant – not only learning to live in light of our new legal status, but also growing in our new relationship. The ongoing mechanism for growth is not self-determination, but response to the Son as the Spirit reveals him to us and stirs our hearts to love.

However we phrase it, the bottom line is this: our understanding of sanctification needs to be as God-centred and Trinitarian as our understanding of salvation.

The post Amazing Grace first appeared on Cor Deo.