Beyond Two Works

In the last few blog posts. I’ve been talking about how God works in people to save them from sin’s power and effects. In theology-speak, I’ve been talking about soteriology, the study of salvation.

There are a couple salvation-events that get a lot of attention in preaching: salvation and entire sanctification.

To be clear, I don’t want that to stop. Both are important.

However, I think there’s another piece of salvation that doesn’t get as much air-time as it should: becoming more like Christ gradually (theology-speak: progressive sanctification).

Why should progressive sanctification get more air time than it currently does?

1. A good bit of the Bible’s instructions for believers focuses on helping us up the road of progressive sanctification. For example, check out Romans 12. Verse 1 gets a lot of attention, but the rest of the chapter (and chapter 13, and 14, and 15) are about how to think and act like Jesus in your relationships with others. Fully surrendered people must still need help with learning to be like Jesus.


2. We need not to forget that God usually doesn’t just make us like Christ, *presto.* Normally, He helps us work on increasing in Christlike character over time through our everyday lives.

I heard someone tell the story of their struggle with resentment and anger toward family members. They said that they prayed and fasted for years, seeking God’s deliverance from their anger. They expected entire sanctification to have delivered them from anger and resentment, but it hadn’t, and they felt really confused.

As I listened, it seemed to me like the categories in their mind for the ways God makes us like Christ looked like this:

1. God automatically makes my character more Christlike when He saves me.
2. God automatically makes my character even more Christlike when He entirely sanctifies me.
3. God might automatically make my character more Christlike at other points as well.

It seemed like they might not have a category in their mind for “God helps me develop Christlikeness over time with consistent, patient effort.” The problem (as far as I could tell) was not that they needed to be more surrendered to God. The problem (as far as I could tell) was that they were immature in some areas, and growing out of immaturity usually takes disciplined effort over time.

God was not holding out on them; instead, He intended His deliverance to come as the result of patient, grace-enabled obedience that molded the person’s character over time.

I don’t mean to say that God never makes us more Christlike without our investing effort in the change. In fact, He will make you more Christlike when you get saved, when you get entirely sanctified, and at other points without any of your own effort.

But in a lot of areas, He usually seems to work with us gradually. He helps us in our efforts to love and obey Him, and He causes the results of our disciplined effort over time (which He enables, by the way) to be more than we could have hoped.