In this episode, Gunner Gundersen, Darby Strickland, and Esther Liu discuss the process of progressive sanctification. They explore its meaning and implications, and how it plays out in the lives of believers. How does our union and relationship with Christ serve as the foundation for our sanctification? How does growing in our understanding of this help us become more like Jesus? While sanctification can be a messy process, there is hope and encouragement in recognizing that our growth in Christ is a journey, not a destination, and that God is committed to us throughout this process.

Mentioned in this episode: Enter our giveaway for a set of notebooks, a tote bag, and a bundle of books on the topic of sanctification. Winners will be chosen July 25. Enter at ccef.org/giveaway.

00:00 Introduction and Giveaway Announcement
04:55 Understanding Progressive Sanctification
7:28 The Role of our Union with Christ
12:41 The Messiness of Growth
26:18 The Goal of Progressive Sanctification
29:50 Hope in the Relational Aspect of Sanctification

Hello, and welcome to our CCEF podcast, “Where Life and Scripture Meet.” My name is Gunner Gunderson and I serve as the Dean of Faculty at CCEF. I'm joined today by my colleagues Darby Strickland and Esther Liu. Before we get to our topic for today, we're excited to be doing a giveaway. We're going to randomly select three winners who will each receive a set of CCEF notebooks, a CCEF canvas tote bag, and a bundle of books. You know what notebooks are, you know what a tote bag is, but what are the books? I'm glad you asked. The books we'll be giving away are “How Does Sanctification Work?” by David Powlison, “Saints, Sufferers, and Sinners” by Mike Emlet, and then “Real Change: Becoming More Like Jesus in Everyday Life” from our friends across the pond, Andrew Nicholls and Helen Thorne. And if you'd like to enter your name for this giveaway, just visit ccef.org/giveaway. That's ccef.org/giveaway. Winners will be chosen and notified by email on July the 25th. So get your names in and enjoy reading those books, whoever wins. Alright, for our topic today, we want to talk about something from a little bit of a different angle than some of our recent episodes, but one that we enjoy and one that we find profitable.

Often we talk about topics where we take a topic of life, an experience in life, a struggle in life, and we bring that to the truth. And we ask, what does Scripture say about this? How does the Lord speak to this in his Word? And we enjoy doing that. Some of those topics can be very murky because life is murky and messy. And Scripture helps bring clarity and hope and reintroduces us to our Lord as he brings hope to us.

We also, though, want to cover topics where we bring truth to life. So for example, exploring a biblical passage and how the truths in that passage affect our lives and shape us, give us comfort, and hope. Also theological topics, and how those theological topics may play out in our lives. And that's what we'd like to do today. Take a particular truth and ask how that's relevant to our lives. And the truth that we'd like to explore is called progressive sanctification. Progressive sanctification. If you haven't heard it before, it can be a bit of a mouthful. Even if you have, it can be a bit of a mouthful. So we'd actually like to start by just talking a little bit about what progressive sanctification is. Now as we begin, this is not going to be a theology lecture. We're not going to be reading off definitions from systematic theology textbooks, although that's a really fruitful enterprise—to read and be exposed to and to let fill out and form our faith.

Our goal today is really to just give a brief summation of what this doctrine is and then to move into how it's relevant for our lives and how it's helpful to us and how it shows us how to walk with Christ, and even sometimes what to expect within our walk with Christ. So what is progressive sanctification? And really, sanctification? I'd just like to highlight two different things before Darby and Esther, you all jump in. I'd like to just highlight two categories of sanctification.

There really is positional sanctification, which is the fact that through Christ and in Christ, God has made us to be saints. He has given us a whole new permanent identity, and we stand as righteous in Christ before him. And so, we are already, in a sense, made holy by our Lord through that union with Christ, which we have received by His grace through faith—that's a permanent and invincible status that we have as being sanctified, made holy before him. It's really a remarkable truth. I think 1 Corinthians 6:11 highlights this. Paul says, “Such were some of you…,” referring to the sinful bondage of the Corinthian believers before they knew Christ. And then he says, “...But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. In other words, they were sanctified—made holy in Christ—at a point in time, and that doesn't change. 

The second category, though, is progressive sanctification, which is the ongoing process by which God makes us actually holy and makes us actually like Christ over the course of a lifetime. And that's what we'd like to really explore today. Would either of you like to add a little bit more shape to what progressive sanctification is and some components of it before we move a little bit into some of the implications and how to think about this and how it's helpful?

I think one aspect that's just really helpful to talk about right up front is the progressive. You know, that word is hinting at this is a process and it's oftentimes a slow process. I just think that's just a really helpful frame as we're looking at our lives and the ways that we're trying to grow, just to recognize that we are always a work in progress. We will be a work in progress until we arrive in glory, but oftentimes there's a super slowness to what that growth looks like. I think highlighting that is important because oftentimes people think, have the question, “Why am I still struggling with this? This just feels like this is a life—not necessarily a life—it could be a life-dominating sin, but it's just more of something that I keep returning to that I haven't seemed to outgrown.” And I feel like that's a very frustrating experience for a believer, right? They know who they are in Christ, therefore “Why don't I look like him yet?”

Yeah, I think of a quote by Martin Luther that I feel like illustrates progressive sanctification really well. He says, 

This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness; not health, but healing; not being, but becoming; not rest, but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it. The process is not yet finished, but it is going on. This is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified.

I just feel like that quote highlights some of the beauty of what progressive sanctification is trying to get at. Once we become Christians and the Spirit renews our hearts and is at work, we want to become more like Christ. And yet I think all of us listening and all of us here know that experience of that frustration between “I want to grow, I want to be holier, I want to overcome these sins,” and the lived reality of, “I'm not, and I'm stuck, and this sin is still there and I see it every day.” So I just think progressive sanctification is highlighting that reality Darby, like you were saying: “What does the journey of growth actually look like? And what does the path of growing and righteousness and overcoming sin and all of that, what does that actually look like in life?” And I feel like progressive sanctification is trying to capture and inform some of the answers to those questions.

In many ways, that quote that you shared, Esther, and your reflections on it just highlight how progressive sanctification is a messy theological category. It involves a number of different dynamics to it, and it's something that plays out at the street level in life. And for that reason, I think it's so important for the Lord to continually bring me back to my union with Christ as I think about my ongoing life in Him and my growing Christ-likeness over—Darby, I love the phrase you use—”the super slowness” of what sanctification can actually look like. Can you all talk a little bit about why it's important for us to understand that our union with Christ has to underlie and root our progressive sanctification, the process of becoming more like Christ? Why is that important for our union with Christ to be our starting point as we think about our relationship with the Lord?

I tend to think about it as… it's when we're not aware that sanctification is something that the Lord's doing, that’s Spirit-led, right? We either wind up in one of two ditches. So I tend to think of this in the negative versus the positive. If we believe that “I don't have to keep trying because I'll never…it's impossible…”, right? I'm gonna keep sinning, I'm gonna keep stumbling. So I'm just going to give up, right? I become kind of a cynic. It doesn't really matter because God has me no matter what. Grace becomes really cheap. Obedience becomes optional. And we become distanced from God, really. And again, we don't see God—his part in—what we're doing. So we give up. 

The other one is where we think it's all up to us, right? We have to keep all His commands on our own strength. And so when we fail, which we will, because we cannot glorify Him in our own strength, we're going to be left feeling distant from the Lord, burned out, shame-filled, feeling enslaved to a God who's a taskmaster. The other side of that is we might fail to see where we're not being sanctified. So we're going to be self-confident. We're going to exalt ourselves and through our works, and it's going to lead to pride. So what does all that say?

You know, on either end of that spectrum, we're not seeing that’s something that the Lord's doing for us. His love is earned. God is tolerating us based on our behavior, which really changes how we see the Lord. When we understand our union with Christ, we understand that he delights in us and he cherishes us. And when we live as someone who knows that we are loved because we understand what it is to be united in him, it frees us from that cynicism and that legalism. It just allows us to be a child who trusts and entrusts our lives to Him and who understands that the Lord actually enjoys us. And I just think that's hard, particularly when we keep stumbling over the same things and we're feeling like a failure.

Yeah, there definitely is an element to the temptation of feeling like “I need to obey in order to be pleasing to God. I need to obey in order to be loved by God.” And I feel like that dynamic can be so common. I think I still fall into that ditch a lot of times and highlighting the union with Christ is so precious because I think it's a reminder, Darby, of what you are saying is just there's a relationship that is already set. There's a connection and an intimacy of that that is already established. And any growth and our strivings towards holiness and all of that is grounded in a relationship that is already firm in which we are his people and he is our God. And when we can endeavor to grow and to do right by him in a secure relationship that is already established because of him, it just gives confidence and the right grounding that it's not earning it, that it's not about to be cut off by God, and I'm on the verge of losing favor with him. And I need to just keep measuring up and keep doing and keep striving. So yeah, I think that's highlighting the legalism part that you were alluding to, Darby. And I just feel like that component is so important to be reminded of: that he already loves us. We were already chosen, adopted. We already belong to him and now we can work out our salvation in that relationship, not trying to earn that relationship while we do it.

And have the guarantee, as Ephesians 1 promises, these things are already complete, right? Which just gives us such freedom, I think, to say, this is who the Lord has made me to be, because this is who I am in Christ. There's so much to savor, even as I'm sloppily living out my life. Yeah.

I think back on the Old Testament word, “hesed,” in that covenant love, steadfast love, loyal love, this kind of divine bedrock that everything else is built on, that can't fail, that won't fail, and knowing that my identity is firmly rooted in the foremost expression of that steadfast love, which is Jesus Christ, the Son of God who came into the world. And when I know that my union with Him is permanent and secure and unchanging, and God loves me with the fullness of love that he has enjoyed with his own Son and Spirit for eternity, then the messiness of slowly and progressively becoming like his Son, slowly and progressively seeing him work out that salvation in me, it becomes something that I expected to take time. And the fact that it takes time, the fact that there are fits and starts in it, the fact that there's bumps along the way, and different seasons in it doesn't lead me to conclude that any given day God might be for me or against me based on how I did. So that's some of why union with Christ is so important as the bedrock below this progressive sanctification and the fuel line for it. 

Okay. Yeah, as you're talking Gunner, an example came to me from my homeschooling years teaching my kids some complicated math processes, right? And there would be two ways I could do that as a mother. I can sit next to my child pointing out every thing that they're thinking is wrong, criticizing them, being frustrated with them if they're not getting it right. And that's only adding to their anxiety and their inability to learn, right? It's just creating. Or I could be...more like, who the Lord would want me to be patient and kind, continually inviting them, encouraging them, delighting in the small successes, even if they haven't completed the whole problem. And that just fostered growth in my children. Like they were excited to come to the table and learn when that was the environment that they were going to be loved, taken care of, even if they didn't get it. Right. And I don't often think we think of God as a mom doing math with her children. I mean, that's very simplistic.

But what is his posture towards us, is what I'm trying to point out. If we understood his posture for us is that he is someone who's rooting for us, he is sitting beside us, and he just has that gentle, persistent patience when we need it. That keeps us from our own fear, our own anxiety, our own even just self-examination and condemnation. That gets stripped away, and it's easier to flourish, when we understand who the Lord is as we're fumbling through the things that he has given us to do.

When my kids were little, they would often bring me pictures that they had drawn of me and them or other members of the family. And I realized over time as I thought about progressive sanctification and what I seek to offer to the Lord in my life as a believer that I just often had such different perceptions of the Lord as the way that I acted toward my own kids. I would never have taken one of those drawings and say, “This is garbage. This doesn't look like us. This is not to scale. This is not an accurate rendering of who I am. This doesn't reflect me. What you're showing to me that you've done doesn't reflect me.” I rejoiced over it. And I knew that over time they will draw differently, but I wasn't even living in that future myself and saying, “Well, for me to love you, I just have to think about the potential,” but there was a genuine love for them that also knew that there was a future if the Lord blessed and provided that. 

And I think that's such a limited, frail, shadowy analogy of the Lord's love for me and for us: that he looks at these things that we offer to him, but he receives them through Christ and the perfection of Christ. And he's committed to me and us for the long haul to continue to grow us. And he can exist in the past, present, future simultaneously knowing what the outcome is and having this, almost truly indescribable patience and is committed to the process of working with us. I was so grateful for those analogies that the Lord has given and continues to give that helped me have really a Scripture-affirmed metaphor and image for how God himself loves us that we just see throughout Scripture of the parent and child, father and children, and so many other illustrations he's given to help me understand what he is like in this long, as you said again, I love the phrase, “super slow process” that I wish was accelerated and immediate, but it's not and it's for a reason.

In the midst of, kind of, the comforts of his patience is also the comfort of the fact that there is a guarantee that there will be an end to our sin. How often I get so discouraged and it feels so entrenched that I really want it to be gone and I'm impatient with that process. And so yeah, there's the component of patience and in this doctrine of progressive sanctification, there's also this sense of promise of what we're headed to and that there will be an end date to that sin. I always often quote Philippians 1:6 and just the idea of it will be brought to completion one day. The work that he has started, the work of righteousness, of growing in holiness, of becoming more like Christ, that work will be brought to completion one day. And I feel like embedded in this theology of progressive sanctification is also that guarantee and that assurance that I won't be struggling with this forever, even if it feels like I do and like I will.

I think that's even like a micro point in what you're saying, Esther, is even for someone who is saying, “I don't want this to be part of my life anymore,” that is showcasing their progressive sanctification because they no longer have a taste for it, right? They are longing for something different. And so even just noting like that's like a dot on the road of having that desire means we've moved. It's not necessarily conquering the thing, it's having a desire to love the Lord in such that way. I think we often miss that because we can't do what we want to do. Scripture talks about that really, right? I keep doing the things I don't want to be doing in Romans 7. But just not having that desire for that sin to remain is a huge step on that pathway. And I think oftentimes we fail to celebrate that change in ourselves.

I remember many years ago when I was in college ministry, there was a young man who had thought he was a believer when he came to our Christian college and over time realized he wasn't and just saw his own deep worldliness and really poor friendships that he had, what he was drawn to, that he didn't have any love for the Lord. There was a spiritual stubbornness and hard-heartedness and the Lord was showing this to him. God graciously regenerated him and changed him and awakened him. And he had this whole new set of desires and hopes. And I remember he had struggled with drug use and he fell back into it at one point and he used again, and he was so discouraged and we were talking and he started to question whether or not he was really a believer because he had made this decision and fallen back into something. 

It was so refreshing to reflect on this truth with him and to just communicate to him that God's gracious work in his life was going to continue and that this was not his identity and was not who he was. And even as you said, that hatred of sin now, this disgust for it, this deep sadness that he had over his own decision was so fundamentally different than the way he was responding before to the choices that he would make where it was just another day of pursuing what he wanted. And I remember telling him that “It's not just that it's now possible for you to change, you can't not change. You can't not grow because God is committed to you. And so you are going to keep growing. I already see it. The people around you see it. Be encouraged that the Spirit is at work.” And it was beautiful over the years then to just see him here and there or hear about him and to see the slow-developing maturity that was so evident in his life.

But that moment was significant because I could tell that for him at that moment early on, he didn't have a category for this progressive sanctification. And there was a sense that it all had to be done now, or else it indicated that something was fundamentally wrong with the process. And I'm so thankful for that truth and how it brought comfort.

Yeah, I think that phrase, right…”You can't not grow.” What a life-giving sentence to say to someone who's ensnared and can't find their way out, right? That's what the Lord whispers over his people. And so any way that we can say to the people in our world, yeah, he has you, he's at work, you can't not grow. That's just a life, it's just a perspective changing when people feel stuck.

As I hear both of you share, it makes me wonder, it makes me realize how much progressive sanctification is actually eye-opening in the sense of there's so much that can be missed if we don't have this category in our minds. There's so much good that we miss. There's so many baby steps of growth and beautiful acts of faith that we overlook when we think that sanctification and growing is supposed to be this super linear, according to some type of pace, some type of speed. And all we see is, “I'm falling short. I still struggle with this. I'm still stuck in this. I haven't overcome this. It's still part of my life.” 

And yet the beauty of this theological reality is it opens our eyes to all those little steps, and all those, yeah, like baby steps in the right direction that really truly are pleasing to the Lord. I know that that has been the fruit of understanding progressive sanctification. I didn't know that that was a thing until I went to seminary, but I feel like that was one of the most life-transforming things for me to learn about that, was that it opened my eyes to see all the ways the Lord was at work in small ways that I wouldn't have perceived or appreciated otherwise when I was in this very binary, like, “Either I've overcome it or I haven't, either it's in my life, or it's not.” And that's just not how God works out his good purposes. It hasn't been for me and it often isn't for those around me. 

And so, yeah, as I hear you two talking, it just helps me realize it's an eye opening—it's wordy and it's a mouthful, it is truly, when we know what it's saying, it truly is this eye-opening, beautiful thing that helps us to see more clearly God and God at work in our lives.

As you're talking Esther, I’m flashing back to my days in Sunday school and just looking at so many of the heroes of the faith, like how they were presented as conquering, right? We weren't really as children presented with their messy lives. We didn't really hear about David's messy life and all the times he had to return to the Lord and was questioning what the Lord was up to. We just see him as conquering. And so many were presented as heroes of the faith. And so I think we tend to flatten that in our own lives, “I need to look like a hero of the faith,” just because of how it was presented to us as children often through simplifying stories. And it's just wonderful to even think about how the New Testament certainly opens up categories of weakness, and the beauty in those things of what the Christian life looks like—that we're not meant to be heroes, right? We're actually meant to be people who depend on the Lord when we're weak and stuck.

My father-in-law used to say there are no spiritual giants. And the other thing he would say is, every Christian puts on their spiritual pants one leg at a time. And it was his way of saying we have the shared commonality that we are humans and we struggle and we grow and there's a normalcy to this rhythm of the Christian life, engaging with the Lord, growing slowly, repenting consistently, doing that under the canopy of His permanent grace that is always toward us and for us. And those comments from more seasoned saints than me that were much farther along in the progressive sanctification journey have been very helpful because I have had at points in my life that lie in my head that there is this arrival date in this life and it was yesterday and I missed it.

Can we talk for a minute about the goal of progressive sanctification? I think there are some ways where we can misconceive the goal of what we're pursuing or what God is doing in our lives. What is the goal of progressive sanctification? And not that there's just one, there are various goals that are interwoven together, but, what is God aiming at? What has he promised? Where are we headed?

I tend to think about it as more as he's changing my affections so that they're more desirous of him than just my behavior. I think that's one way I've tried to be asking myself is, “Where has my affection for the Lord grown?” It's usually out of that that change will come. I think oftentimes we are in distress because of the things that we're doing or not doing and those things seem to get our attention versus the inward posture of my heart, “Where is my hope placed? How do I enjoy spending time with him?”

So I think of it as more, it's actually more of a question of affections than behavior. That's just something that's helped me track, you know, “Am I, yeah, leaning where the Lord wants me to lean, or am I actually seeking my own comfort or my own exaltation by looking a certain way?”

Darby, I feel like that's making, yeah, it's making me think a little bit in terms of how often I am thinking of growth in terms of, “Okay, I have this one sin struggle in my life and I'm going to try to eradicate it out of my life. And that ends up being the goal. But how often the Lord actually is after something different than just eradicating that sin. He is interested in that. But oftentimes, sometimes, well, yeah, what I've found in my own life is there are times where part of the sanctification and the growth that the Lord wants for me is to learn a deeper dependence on him. I think it was a few years ago when I realized that if God answered all of my prayers the way that I wanted him to, I wouldn't need him anymore, because all of my prayers are oriented around “If I can just overcome the sin, if I can overcome the struggle, if I can do this, then my life would be fine.”

But then I wouldn't need Him. And I feel like the Lord over time, and you're reminding me of this as you're speaking, is sometimes that sanctification is actually stripping away some of that perceived self-sufficiency, that I can do the Christian life on my own. And so sometimes it won't be completely eradicating that sin tomorrow or today. But it's allowing me to struggle to be a fruitful life-giving reminder of where my hope is actually found and where life is found in depending on Him through and through, from the beginning of my Christian life to the very end, grace that has led me this far and grace that will lead me home, and how that is actually also sanctification and growth, even if there doesn't seem to be anything moving in that particular sin struggle that I've identified and I'm trying to work on. So there is something just much deeper happening and at play when we think about these things.

I love Darby, how you highlighted the affections and the interior life. And, I think of how Christ himself expressed this constant hunger to do the will of his Father. And in John 17, prayed that the love that is between his Father and him would fill us and that we would enjoy a oneness with them. And that it's ultimately his longing for these pure, holy, satisfying affections for Him—that do flow out on the outside in a life of obedience and in our life, life of repentance until we reach glory, a life of growth—but it's not from the outside in, it's from the inside out, and it's so deeply relational to grow closer to him, to understand his love for us, to love him in return, which in the life of Christ, who didn't experience progressive sanctification because of his constant perfection, in his life that fleshed out in such radical obedience, and it was flowing from this, you know, this bottomless eternal spring of love and relationship. And so I’m so thankful that it's relational, not just a “get yourself into moral shape and reach this standard, but we don't have a relationship, you just need to match this shape,” but that it's Christ-centered to love him, and in loving him and receiving his love to become like him.

I think that's so important, right? It's because that gives us the ability to put in the effort, right? It flows out of a response of loving Him versus just this effort of something I have to do, I have to conjure, I have to obey. It just changes our contribution, the flavor of it completely.

I appreciate a few years ago when Ed brought in something that he was reading and I think it ended up being included in his book, Created to Draw Near. But just the phrase of, we can think of progressive sanctification as actually progressive nearness as one way to understand what's really being captured here, that it's not just growing towards being better at obeying a set of rules, or Gunner, like you were saying, like reaching and being able to meet all these standards of what holiness, godliness looks like, X, Y, Z, these traits, these characteristics, and all of that. Actually, the heart of progressive sanctification is actually a sense in which the Lord wants us to be nearer to him. That there is this relational thrust to it all, that it's not just subscribing to a code of ethics, but it's subscribing to a way of life in which we can most enjoy the Lord and his goodness and know his love for us. And I just thought that that was a really helpful corrective, or addition, to my understanding of what are we really trying to get at when we're trying to grow? And is there a way in which I can actually grow in code of conduct, but actually do it in a way that I'm actually further away from the Lord and not in relationship with him, versus a deeper dependence, a deeper worship, a deeper love for him and also knowing and deepening in my knowing of his love for me? Is my sanctification contributing to that, or is it simply an ethical enterprise, I guess? And so, yeah, I've just really appreciated that phrase and processing how that informs and enriches what we're really after when we speak about growing in righteousness and holiness.

It makes me think of Philippians 3, where Paul describes his former life and he says, “As to the law of Pharisee…” that he was so ardently, zealously pursuing the outer form of ethics and religion and obedience and thought that that was his relationship with God. And then he talks about how he treats all of that as dung. He treats all of it as garbage, as worse than worthless, in light of what he calls the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord, including the sufferings, the fellowship of his sufferings, the hardships, and then his resurrection power in that context of weakness. And then right after that, he goes on to say, “I know I haven't obtained this yet, but I strive for it and I press on.” And earlier in chapter two saying, “I encourage you to press on, working out the salvation you've been given with fear and trembling because God is at work in you to will and to work for his good pleasure.” And in that call to a daily effort in knowing Christ, but underneath the banner of God's complete commitment to us in Christ, and his daily work on our behalf and within us and around us using every means at his disposal, which is everything to make us more like Christ. And I love that it's so whole at the end of it all—that the inside, our affections, our interior life is fully dependent on, reliant upon loving the Lord and how also our outer behavior when we finally meet Christ and we're raised from the dead will also be complete and like him. And when I say it, it just can seem so distant and far off to be honest, but I don't wanna forget that promise because it gives me so much hope for the day by day. 

I'll close with just a word by our former executive director, David Powlison, who I remember asking a question one time. And he said, “Do you ever feel like your spiritual life is like a yo-yo? Your journey is just up and down and up and down. And it just feels like you take a couple steps forward, a couple steps back. And sometimes you wonder if you've grown over the last three or six months or a year or however long.” And then he said, “Well, it is like a yo-yo. But then he said, “But the man carrying the yo-yo is walking upstairs. And I so appreciated that imagery to see, yes, there is a reality on the ground of the progressive up and down nature of our sanctification, but God is carrying us in it and is carrying us upward to be completely like his Son one day. 

Thanks for joining us today on “Where Life and Scripture Meet.” We're prayerful that as you walk away, you might be encouraged in your own journey of faith to trust God, to continue to work out your own salvation in you because he's for you.