Notes on Sanctification

Today’s reading from Oswald Chambers asked a question I felt was particularly interesting. Measured against 1 Corinthians 13, can I walk tall with confidence, or do I have to walk a bit more like the floor is lava?

Then he answered it in a way that, if I’m candid, I found harder to believe than the question.

The salvation the Spirit works in me, he says, sets me entirely free. As long as I walk in the light as God is in the light, God sees nothing to censure, because His life is at work in every part of me, including the parts that lie deeper than I’m aware of.

This is hard for me to truly accept because I still struggle. I still sin. I still fall, sometimes in the same places I fell ten years ago. I try to do what God wants, and then I lie awake wondering whether I’ve done enough, whether I’m actually in the clear, whether I’m saved or just in a long “wait and see” period where the verdict depends on how the rest of my life turns out.

It feels a bit like a doctor telling me I’m healthy when I’ve been to the gym twice this month and had cereal for dinner 3 out of 5 nights when I’m supposed to be on a diet. I’d like to believe it. I’m not sure the “chart” supports it.

So I went back to the text to see what it actually says.

The New Testament talks about sanctification in two tenses. The verb is hagiazō, to make holy, to set apart. And what struck me, reading through its uses, is that the apostles speak of it both as something already finished and as something still underway.

• Finished: “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” (1 Corinthians 6:11). Past tense, said to the Corinthians, of all people, a church Paul spends most of the letter correcting. “We have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:10).

• Ongoing: “Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely” (1 Thessalonians 5:23). That’s a prayer, which means it isn’t done yet.

And then there’s one verse that puts both tenses in the same sentence. “For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14).

Has perfected, in the Greek perfect tense: a completed action with ongoing results. Those who are being sanctified, a present participle: something still in process. The same people. Perfected for all time and still being made holy.

The writer of Hebrews isn’t confused — he knows I’m not finished. He simply holds that next to the fact that what Christ did for me is.

Paul calls himself both imperfect and perfect, two verses apart.

In Philippians, Paul writes, “Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own” (3:12). The word for perfect there is from teleioō, to complete or bring to maturity.

Then, three verses later: “Let those of us who are mature think this way” (3:15). The word for mature is teleioi. The same root. Paul says he isn’t teleios, and then includes himself among the teleioi.

I don’t think he contradicted himself. I think he was telling us what spiritual maturity looks like. The mature person is the one who knows she isn’t finished and keeps pressing on. Pretending to have arrived would be the immature move.

So when I feel unfinished, that isn’t necessarily evidence that something’s wrong. Paul felt the same way, and called it maturity.

“Walking in the light” doesn’t mean what I assumed too. Chambers is borrowing from 1 John: “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin” (1:7).

For years I read that as a condition I had to meet. Walk in the light, meaning live without sin, and then you’ll be clean. But John doesn’t let that reading stand. The very next verse says, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1:8). And the one after: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1:9).

So walking in the light can’t mean sinlessness, because John assumes the people walking in it still sin. I think it means living exposed. Not hiding. Bringing what’s there into God’s presence rather than keeping it in a back room. And the verb cleanses in verse 7 is present tense in the Greek, katharizei, an ongoing action. It keeps cleansing. Not once, then a waiting period. Continually.

That’s why Chambers can say God sees nothing to censure. Not because I’ve stopped falling, but because I’m walking where the cleansing never stops.

The part about “deeper than my consciousness” caught my attention as a pharmacist.

Most of the medicines I spend my days thinking about do their work where a patient can’t feel it. An antibiotic doesn’t announce itself in the bloodstream. A blood pressure medication works in vessel walls nobody can see. The patient may feel no different for days, and still the drug is doing exactly what it was given to do.

David knew there were parts of himself he couldn’t see. “Who can discern his errors? Declare me innocent from hidden faults” (Psalm 19:12). He wasn’t only asking forgiveness for what he knew about. He was asking God to work in places he had no access to.

That’s what Chambers is pointing to. The Spirit’s work in me isn’t limited to the parts I’m monitoring. Some of the most important sanctifying happens below the level of anything I could measure on a given day. Which means my own assessment of how I’m doing (gym attendance or my diet, for example) just cant be the whole story.

So am I really saved, or am I waiting to see?

John wrote his first letter with this exact question in mind. “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13). Know. Not hope. Not wonder. Not wait and see.

Paul starts Romans 8 the same way. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (8:1). The word now matters. Not eventually, once you’ve improved enough. Now, while the struggle in chapter 7 is still fresh.

And Paul could say near the end of his life, “I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard until that Day what has been entrusted to me” (2 Timothy 1:12). His confidence wasn’t in how well he’d guarded himself. It was in who was doing the guarding.

I don’t think that makes effort pointless, though.

Peter, in the same breath that he talks about God’s power granting us everything we need, tells believers to “be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election” (2 Peter 1:10). Assurance and diligence aren’t opposites. I’m secure, and I’m also supposed to keep walking.

I think the gym analogy holds up better than I first gave it credit for, with one change. I’m not being told I’m already fit. I’m being told I’m alive, I’m enrolled, I can’t be kicked out, and the trainer is very good at his job. Some days I’ll show up and work hard. Some days I’ll barely show up. The membership doesn’t depend on my attendance record. But I still want to show up, because I want to become what He’s making.

So… can I walk tall in the light of 1 Corinthians 13?

If the question is whether I measure up to that chapter, no. I’m not always patient. I’m not always kind. I keep records of wrongs more often than I’d like to admit. Measured that way, I’d fail every time.

But I don’t think that’s what Chambers is asking. I think he’s asking whether I’ll stand upright in the light, honest about what’s there, trusting the blood that keeps cleansing, instead of slinking around the edges hoping no one looks too closely.

That I can do. Not because I’ve arrived there, but because I’ve stopped needing to pretend I have. Perfected for all time. Still being sanctified. Both are true at once, and I’m learning to walk tall in the space between them.