Baking and Sanctification

Have you ever had the feeling that the answer you are giving is too simple? That maybe you don’t understand all of the factors or that you don’t have all of the information? That’s how I feel about the issue of sanctification. I just don’t know. There’s not enough information for me to make my decision.

This time, rather than debate if it is God or man does the work, I have been thinking about a couple other questions that stem from that—depending upon which way you answer.

If you believe that sanctification is God’s responsibility, how is it possible that there are people who have been Christians their whole lives who seem very far from sanctification? I think that the easiest answer to this question is that the process of sanctification is not the same as baking a cake: you don’t have a certain number of ingredients in certain amounts that take a specific amount of time. Sanctification can be achieved through many different circumstances in many ways and over many different amounts of time. As humans, we cannot truly understand the processes that another individual is going through as a part of their sanctification. Nor can we judge how long they must be “baked” or sanctified.

On the other hand, maybe, if sanctification is the responsibility of the person, and not God, maybe that is why there are so many people who seem that they ought to be sanctified by now who are not. As with any circumstance, a person is not going to complete a task if they do not even know that it is their responsibility. If people do not know that sanctification is their own responsibility, there is very little chance that they will actively be working on their own sanctification.

So, what is to be done? Perhaps, rather than expending energy on trying to decide the issue, we ought to be using that energy towards our own sanctification. If it’s God’s responsibility, it’s not going to hurt his efforts to have us working towards his goal for us; and, if it is our responsibility, it’s about time we do something about it.