The other night a friend was talking about faith, and he commented in passing that it's pretty standard in Protestant theology to put a dividing line between salvation and sanctification. That comment clarified several things, and I found myself mulling over his comment.
So if we put that into a diagram it would look something like this:
Salvation | Sanctification
When I was much younger, I was fully convinced of these categories. In my mind, the Christian life could be divided into two categories like this:
Salvation, New Birth, Justification | Sanctification, Holiness
When I was eighteen, I thought the things on the left were gifts from God, received freely by faith; while the things on the right required discipline, by which I meant hard work.
At some point, I realized that BOTH sides are powered by faith, and "human effort" wasn't really part of either side. But in my mind, there were still two distinct "sides."
And then I read Watchman Nee's book Love Not the World. He makes some surprising statements about salvation, and I followed up on them. It didn't take very long for me to become convinced that the diagram should look more like:
New Birth, Justification | Sanctification, Holiness, Salvation
I became convinced that when Scripture uses the word "salvation," it's almost always meaning something that belongs on the right-hand side of that division. So it became more natural to think of it on the right, not the left.
That was almost thirty years ago. These days I think of the diagram more like this:
New Birth, Justification, Justification, Sanctification, Holiness, Salvation
I've pretty much given up dividing these things into two categories. That's not to say we can't come up with a taxonomy that's meaningful, but I'm not at all convinced Scripture puts them into those two "standard Protestant" categories.
A few years ago, I was told I sound very Catholic. My friend's comments the other night helped make sense of that. If I reject those two very Protestant categories, then I'm likely sound at least a little bit Catholic.
But while I think Catholicism gets it right by not dividing up those things into two categories, it puts them all on the wrong side. In other words, Catholicism teaches something like this:
| New Birth, Justification, Justification, Sanctification, Holiness, Salvation
while scripture teaches something like this:
New Birth, Justification, Justification, Sanctification, Holiness, Salvation |
That is, Catholicism is correct in not dividing those things, but it wrongly makes human effort a part of all of them. Scripture, on the other hand, puts all of them into the "by grace through faith" category.
So let's stop talking about me and start talking about Scripture. Galatians 3:3 and Colossians 2:6 give us a key principle: we walk as we have received. We don't begin in the Spirit and finish in the flesh. We don't start out by grace and finish by law. We don't take our first steps with "Done!" and our last with "Do!"
We receive Justification, Forgiveness of Sins, and New Birth all as free gifts from God. We start out on the principle of "by grace through faith" (Ephesians 2:8–9). That's the very first step. We don't switch to another principle once we have taken a few more steps. We finish the race just like we started it: we set out in grace, we finish the same way.
It's grace all the way down.
For me (and I think for a great many people), the big turning point is the realization that freedom from the power of sin is presented in Romans 6:1ff as something Christ has done for us. When He died, I died. And because I have died, I am free from sin. It changes the entire perspective on "sanctification" from something I have to achieve, to something I have to receive.
And notice that's by faith: we have died with Christ, but it's as we accept it (Romans 6:11) that we come into the good of it. So we are freed from sin's power by grace (by the death of Christ) through faith (as we believe what God has said and reckon ourselves to be what He says we are). Just like "salvation" is by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8–9), "sanctification" is by grace through faith. The key to the entire Christian life, from the first step to the last, is to believe God and accept what He says.
There's a hymn in Little Flock that's appropriate to mention here, Appendix #62:
And when in heavenly gloryMy ransomed soul shall be,From sin and all pollutionForever, ever free,I’ll cast my crown before Him,And loud His grace extol —"Thou hast Thyself redeemed me;Yes, Thou hast done it all."
That hymn captures a lot in very few words. We're not called to achieve something for God, but to receive with gratitude what He has done for us.
