What is Your View of Sanctification?

A few days ago, based on a friend's recommendation, I reviewed David Powlison's chapter from Sex and the Supremacy of Christ entitled, Making All Things New: Restoring Joy to the Sexually Broken. These two paragraphs were EXTREMELY encouraging to me:

Too often our practical view of sanctification, discipleship, and counseling is shortsighted. If you memorize and call to mind one special Bible verse, will it clean up all the mess? Will prayer drive all the darkness away? Will remembering that you are a child of God, justified by faith, shield your heart against every evil? Will careful self-discipline and a plan to live constructively eliminate all failure? Is it enough to sit under good preaching and have daily devotions? Is honest accountability to others the decisive key to walking in purity? These are all very good things. But none of them guarantees that three weeks from now, or three
years, or thirty years, you will not struggle to learn how to love rather than lust. Wemust have a vision for a long process (lifelong), with a glorious end (“the day of Jesus Christ”), that is actually going somewhere(today). Put those three together in the right way,and you have a practical theology that’s good to go and good for the going.

Look at church history. Look at denominations. Look at local churches. Look at people groups. Look at families. Look at individuals. Look at all the people in the Bible. They all have a historyand keep making history. Things are never finished. No one ever says, “I’ve made it. No more forks in the road. No more places I might stumble and fall flat. No morehard, daily choices to make.” Look at yourself. Life never operates on cruise control. The living God seems content to work in his church and in people groups on a scale of generations and centuries. The living God seems content to work in individuals (you, me, the person you are trying to help) on a scale of decades, throughout a whole lifetime. At everystep, there’s some crucial watershed issue. What will you choose? Whom will you love and serve? There’s always something that the Vinedresser is pruning, some difficult lesson that the Father is teaching the children he loves (John 15; Hebrews 12). It’s no accident that “God is love” and “love is patient” fit together seamlessly. God takes his time with us.

You can listen to David's message here. It is one of the best messages on sanctification that I have ever heard, especially in the area of healing from sexual sin.

You can watch it here.

You can order the book here.