The new year is a time for Christians to remember that Christianity is all about fresh starts. With the cross as the symbol of Christianity, we’re reminded that we are committed to a life of forgiving others as well as being forgiven. It’s about a new chance through grace.
These concepts of grace forgiveness are essential in that they remind us that the Christian faith is much more about a relationship than a transaction. Too often we think of the Christian life in terms of a condition or status. As the Holy Spirit progressively works in our hearts, we become more and more clean, or Christ-like. This is certainly true. At the heart of sanctification, however, is not only a condition or status, but personal relationship. Yes, through the process of sanctification we do become more and more like Jesus, but we also are growing in our personal relationship with Jesus. In this sense, sanctification is the process of growing in intimacy with Jesus.
This is one of the reasons why the Bible forbids sympathetic magic. The philosophical foundations of a worldview with proclivities towards sympathetic magic miss the point that God is personal. Yes, this sort of thinking (i.e., continuity between the physical and spiritual realms) also misses the transcendence, sovereignty, and holiness of God; but it also misses the fact that the unseen workings of the universe is not made up of interlocking mechanical cogs, pulleys and levers. Things are in the world the way they are because God has a personal interest in His creation. God has a personal interest in people’s lives.
Salvation, and sanctification in particular, is not merely a transaction in which God declares us innocent. This, once again, is true and biblical, but it’s not the whole story. Sanctification certainly does have an element of transaction, salvation and sanctification is, at its heart, a personal relationship. God declares that sinners are innocent based on Jesus’s substitutionary sacrifice because He’s a loving Father. He doesn’t simply change our status based on Jesus’s sacrifice so that we can escape judgment. No, he changes our status so that He can have communion with us and us with Him!
This new year my resolution is as simple as growing closer to Jesus. It’s not about being more religious, it’s simply about making him more central in my life. It’s about being courageous enough to let him, as a trustworthy friend and Savior, to ask me hard questions, and give me strength to wrestle through the stuff of life that’s painful. My prayer is to go into the new year trusting that Jesus’s strength is made perfect in my weakness. I know that this year will be hard; probably harder than last year. I don’t pray that the difficulties go away, I pray that God gives me the strength to endure.
