Whenever I tell my story, my testimony about God’s working in my life, I always use the great late 19th century poem by Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven. When I was first exposed to it many years ago, it captured my experience of God perfectly, and that was before I’d embraced Reformed theology and Calvinism. It was doubly applicable after that. Here is the first stanza which is absolute perfection when it comes to describing not just my experience, but that of many Christians I’ve known and whose testimonies I’ve heard:
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat—and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet—
‘All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.’
Labyrinthine is such a great and apt word nobody would use anymore. I just learned looking it up, that labyrinth like many great words goes back to ancient Greek mythology meaning maze or elaborate, confusing structure with intricate passages that is very difficult to get out of. How perfectly does that describe sin! He also perfectly captures the emotional roller coaster of trying to live our lives outside of obedience to the will of God, even at times when we deceive ourselves into thinking we are living according to that will. We sinners can justify anything in our self-delusion. And since God will not let us go because he died for us, for his people, we can’t escape! This fact is an important piece of the story of the Hound of Heaven for our entire Christian life, which I’ll get to below.
As I say often, God is never in a hurry. His pace is never perturbed; it’s relaxed and infinitely persistent, in history and in our lives. We sense him, we turn our heads knowing he’s after us, yet we continue trying to find fulfillment in anything but him. It’s the craziest thing, but exactly what we should expect if the Bible is true. We are born rebellious sinners whose natural inclination, like Adam and Eve, is to run away from him. He will never, however, let us find any kind of ultimate gratification in anything that excludes him. The very same thing we can enjoy with and through and because of him, will betray us without him. All sin, as Augustine said, is good perverted. In one of the greatest sentences ever penned, also by Augustine, he wrote in his Confessions:
You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.
The irony of this statement is that in many cases, a la the Hound of Heaven, he has to hound us into finding that rest.
God’s Sovereign Salvific Plans in Sanctification
As I mentioned above, I’m a Calvinist, and have been so since February of 1985. It was pretty much an instant conversion because once I was introduced of God’s sovereignty in our salvation, not only did I start to see it everywhere in the Bible, I saw it everywhere in my life, specifically in God bringing me to saving faith. I knew in some sense it applied to my sanctification as well, that my inner transformation and growth in holiness was God’s work and responsibility, not mine. However, I didn’t quite understand my part in all this, that I am responsible to seek God and obey his law. I recently wrote a post on The Christian Life of Pursuit, how the Christian life is a verb, what we are commanded to do now that we are those who belong to God, his holy ones, set apart for service. Christianity is a doing religion flowing out of our being, who we are, who Christ saved us to be. An example of one verse among many is from 1 Peter 2:
24 He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.
All of this is, of course, God’s working in us, but it is still our work. Just because God is sovereign and in control of all things, doesn’t mean we are not responsible beings with agency whose choices really matter and have real consequences. This is what most Christians misunderstand about Calvinism, that because we affirm God’s sovereign control of all things, that means human beings are robots, that it is just a Christian form of determinism. It’s not. It is a mystery, how God can “control” someone and them still be free and accountable. Nonetheless, it’s true, a biblical reality from Genesis to Revelation. The sovereign power of Almighty God is an important piece of the Hound of Heaven catching those he’s after, his people, which brings us to the biggest theological hangup with Calvinism for most Christians, and to me the most obviously true—Jesus died for his people, not every human being who ever lived. He didn’t make salvation possible for all people, but made it actual for his people.
This means Jesus only died for them, what we call limited or definite atonement. This idea offends many Christians because they think it somehow not fair that God wouldn’t offer salvation to all people, and make it possible that they could believe in Jesus and be saved. God, however, is not obligated to be fair, whatever that means. If justice is what it means, then every human being should be justly condemned and damned. We’re born guilty, and nothing we can do will change that; the penalty must be paid. Over my decades as a Reformed Christian I accepted this, but I don’t think I fully understood the implications. Then at some point God opened my eyes to two verses that transformed my perspective on our sanctification in salvation. This first is part of the birth narrative in Matthew 1 where Joseph has a dream and an angel tells him what the name of Mary’s child is to be:
21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”
I noticed two things. First, Jesus didn’t come to make salvation possible for all people, but actual for his people. In theological terms Paul calls this election; God chooses whom he will save. Then I saw that it wasn’t from sin in general, but the word Matthew uses is plural, sins. God in Christ didn’t just save us from the guilt and penalty of sin, something that was done with animals in the Old Covenant, but from the power of sin as well, something the blood of bulls and goats could never accomplish. Augustus Toplady in the classic him wrote about how Christ’s death provides the “double cure” for sin, saving us from both God’s wrath and also to make us pure. It’s as we say, a twofer. And because our sanctification is part of God’s sovereign plan in salvation, the Hound of Heaven will inevitably make us holy, more like Christ in the process, like it or not.
The other verse is from the Apostle Paul, I Corinthians 1:30:
It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, sanctification and redemption.
It’s a package deal! Back in 2012 I had been going through a bit of a dry time in my faith, partly because I forgot that the Christian life is one of pursuit. So one day I decided no matter how rotten I felt, I would read the Bible and pray every morning, and that I have done ever since. In due course I discovered it made all the difference, and at some point God opened my eyes to this verse. I realized, not only was my justification not up to me, but either was my sanctification. I of course was and am involved in both, but both are the ultimate responsibility of God, the Hound of Heaven. The one part of this we will not be involved in is our redemption, our resurrection because we will be dead. But from the moment we are raised spiritually from the dead in our justification, God works throughout our lives to make us increasingly holy, set apart for good works unto him. As Paul says in Ephesians 2, salvation is the gift of God, and that includes sanctification, as he says:
10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
How does this happen? God.
The Transformation is God’s Work
The first Reformed theology I read not long after my “conversion” was Charle’s Hodge’s Systematic Theology. I’ll never forget the simple sentence for his definition of Christianity: “The work of God in the soul of man.” For much of my Christian life I thought my sanctification was a matter of my willing it. If I just tried hard enough I could overcome my sin, but I found that my experience was much like the Apostle Paul’s as he describes it in Romans 7:
14 For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. 15 For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.
Yet as he discusses the law and the sin dwelling in him, he declares something I felt many times:
24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?
I often felt nobody could deliver me, including God, but the answer that frees us from despair and will deliver us is obvious:
25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
Some commentators think Paul’s description of his struggle with sin is prior to his becoming a Christian, but I don’t think it is. Even after we come to Christ, sin still lives in us, in our flesh as Paul calls it, the body of death we are stuck with in this fallen world. Because of this we can understand why the first of Martin Luther’s 95 Thesis had to do with daily repentance:
Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said “Repent”, willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance.
Somewhere along the way on my journey from 2012 when I learned this, I started to begin every morning prayer repenting of my sin, following it with prayers of thanksgiving. The struggle still exists and always will while we live in this body of death, but now we realize our sanctification is as much the work of Christ as is our justification. This truth is why Paul follows the chapter of our struggle with sin with the assurance of forgiveness and the possibility of transformation in chapter 8:
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2 For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. 3 For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, 4 in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. 5 For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. 6 For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.
I realized I can’t change myself, but God in Christ can change me. That does, however, require something on my part. It is within our power to abide in the true vine (John 15) that we might bear much fruit. So, knowing I was too weak and pathetic with little will power, focused on what I knew I could do. Initially, my prayers were inspired by Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector in Luke 18: “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner.” I figured like the tax collector I could beat my breast and say that. In due course my process every morning became reading God’s word, which along the way also started to include Scripture memory, then prayers of repentance, thanksgiving, and supplication.
At some point I realized that any real, substantial change and transformation of who I am was the supernatural work of God in my soul because of the work of Christ. I still had choices to make, the most important being to ask, seek, and knock, that I might receive, find, and the door opened to me. Then obey in whatever feeble way I could and trust God for the inner transformation to make me want to obey. It is important to understand the power and the beauty of the gospel isn’t that God in Christ just changes our actions, but that he changes our desires and affections and abilities. The inner transformation required to live the Christian life, what we call sanctification, is every bit as up to him as is our being born again in the first place. As Paul says in Philippians 1:
6 being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
The good work he began in us and will continue in our sanctification is just as supernatural as when we were raised spiritually from the dead to eternal life. I love my 1978 NIV translation of Romans 4:17 as it relates to our sanctification and transformation. Speaking of Abraham he says:
He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed—the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.
He literally call things that have no existence into existence, like this universe and us in it. If he has the power to do that, our paltry little sin problem is nothing for him. That’s why Paul’s declaration of deliverance is so exuberant: Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
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