Sanctification (i.e., becoming more like Jesus in our behavior, thoughts, attitudes, and desires) is not about human performance or legalism. It is about healing. But healing from what? Sin is a disease that attacks the image of God in every person. Sin perverts the goodness, purity and beauty of humanity. God made humanity the pinnacle of His creative work. He made all humans unique, eternal, and equal. He made us to be loving, self-sacrificing, and self-giving. In other words, He made us in the likeness of the Holy Trinity.
Sin perverts God’s intentions for humanity. Rather than being self-giving, loving, and self-sacrificing, we are self-righteous, we have self-pity, self-confidence, and are self-admiring and self-loving. Love, which was to characterize the height of God’s creative work, has twisted into selfish lust. Rather than multiplying ourselves in love and generosity, we annihilate ourselves by taking pleasure in destructive habits and behaviors. A. W. Tozer writes,
There is within the human heart a tough fibrous root of fallen life whose nature is to possess, always to possess. It covets “things” with a deep and fierce passion. The pronouns “my” and “mine’ look innocent enough in print, but their constant and universal use us significant. They express the real nature of the old Adamic man better than a thousand volumes of theology could do. They are verbal symptoms of our deep disease. The roots of our hearts have grown down into things, and we dare not pull up one rootlet lest we die. Things have become necessary to use, a development never originally intended. God’s gifts now take the place of God, and the whole course of nature is upset by the monstrous substitution. (Tozer, 2008, pp. 18–19)
Henri Nouwen adds to this,
Through compassion it is possible to recognize that the craving for love that people feel resides also in our own hearts, that the cruelty the world knows all too well is also rooted in our own impulses. Through compassion we also sense our hope for forgiveness in our friends’ eyes and our hatred in their bitter mouths. When they kill, we know that we could have done it; when they give life, we know that we can do the same. For a compassionate person nothing human is alien: no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying (Nouwen, 1979).
Sanctification heals this disease of sin. The blood of Christ makes reconciliation with God possible. This reconciliation is the means by which God’s beautiful intentions for humanity are restored. Sanctification by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is the process through which people are healed from the disease of selfishness, vanity, and pride.
When this happens, we go from being a
rotten stench to a pleasing aroma. Second Corinthians 2:15 says, “For we are the aroma
of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are
perishing.”[1]
Healing and sweet aroma is the oil of sanctification.
[1] Also see Phil. 4:18 and Eph. 5:2.
