Reformed folks like me love Reformation culture. We cannot get enough of it: we preach about it, hold one conference after another about it, travel to the UK to bask in it (I am so excited for this October 2023 event!), read about it, and discuss it. Right now, as I type this, seven different Reformed theologians stare back at me from a nearby shelf. I have Reformer mugs, you see, and they have gone with me everywhere I’ve taught.
You can tell, then, that I personally adore Reformation culture. The Reformation was not an easy drive across a bridge spanning the Medieval and modern world; the Reformation was a crisis event, a recovery of biblical doctrine in one first-tier area after another. It is the greatest extra-biblical movement of God we’ve ever seen. It was a rescue and recovery of the biblical gospel, biblical ecclesiology, and biblical theology proper.
As we know well, the doctrine of justification was at the center of this recovery. That’s what we all talk a lot about, and rightly so. But here is what many Reformed evangelicals discuss very little: the doctrine of sanctification, becoming holy. In fact, as I taught a Soteriology class last month, I thought this to myself: many evangelicals are tempted toward a semi-Pelagian doctrine of holiness. To say it differently: many evangelicals are pulled toward a functional Catholicism.
What do I mean by this? I mean that many born-again believers mistakenly see their daily walk with Christ not as fixed and steady due to God’s grace, but as up and down. I don’t mean this only experientially, but even salvifically. One day, they’re having a rich devotional time and they’re getting along well with family members, and so they’re in God’s good graces. The next day, they fail to get in the Word for any numbers of reasons and they have a tiff with a loved one, and so they’ve fallen out of favor with God. You could put it like this: the first day, they’re effectively justified and loved by God; the second day, they’re effectively un-justified and have lost God’s love.
If I were to think broadly, I would guess that a shocking number of evangelicals, including Reformed evangelicals who trumpet the grace of God, think this way. They talk a ton about God’s saving grace; they scarcely mention God’s sanctifying grace. Accordingly, in practical form, they wrongly think and act as if their sanctification is on their shoulders. If they do well in it, they’re good with God. If they do poorly in it, God is ragingly mad at them, and they’re effectively lost. When they wander and stumble, then they have to pull themselves back up. They have to re-justify themselves through a blitz of good works and quiet times and service to the church and all the rest.
Catholic Holiness: An Exercise in Guilt and Futility
The irony here, as I said, is that many such people have decisively broken with the false gospel of works-righteousness. There are many forms of this false gospel, to be sure. One of the most common is the Catholic “gospel.” It teaches you that you are regenerated (given spiritual life) through baptism, and that grace is “infused” into you from this point forward. This entails that you are justified through a mixture of faith in Christ and your good works. You effectively keep yourself justified through a blend of your effort and the grace of God mediated through the sacramental system.
As a baptized Christian, when you commit lesser sins, called “venial” sins, these do not un-save you. They go on your purgatory tab, though, so you will have to work them off later. If you commit an especially heinous sin like murder (a “mortal” sin), then you do in fact lose your justification. You must now perform acts of penance and many good works. In doing so, you will regain the state of justification. But even there, this state can be lost in this life, and once you die, you may very well pass on to purgatory, where the remainder of your uncleanness must be worked off.
This sacramental approach has funded oceans of what is commonly called “Catholic guilt.” The normal experience of a person trapped in this system is to live in an undetermined state, one in which your behavior really does factor into your salvation. Technically, salvation is of grace, but in actuality, you must work hard—in cooperation with sacramental blessings—to keep yourself saved. If you do not, you will surely lose your salvation.
This is a tough system. It puts the stress on us. It leaves the person in question in a state of ongoing limbo. Yes, the sacraments regularly replenish the Catholic with God’s grace, but even that is not enough. For some, the false gospel of Catholicism creates unsaved legalists who think based on Catholic teaching that they really are a good person who is in some way earning salvation successfully; for many others, Catholic soteriology creates unsaved sojourners who wander the earth scared, exhausted, fearful, guilty, tired, and unconfident.
Reformed Sanctification Can Fall Short in Functional Terms
Praise God, when God saves many of us, he springs us from systems like the one I have just quickly described. We embrace Reformed doctrine. We celebrate the doctrines of grace. We know that we do absolutely nothing to justify ourselves, that justification is a positional reality wrought by God-given saving faith, not a process in which we cooperate. We talk a lot and read a lot about the five solas and the Reformed tradition and we buy the coffee mugs and attend the conferences. So far, so good.
But here is what can happen if we’re not careful, and if pastors aren’t especially watchful. We can slip into the natural self-justifying and self-sanctifying mentality of the unbeliever. At the functional level of our day-to-day lives, that is, we can fall prey to thinking that it is our own power that blends with God’s power to save us. Again, we might renounce Catholicism in extremity, and post quotations about it on our social media. But unthinkingly, we might easily slip into a blend of legalism, fundamentalism, and self-justification. Though truly saved, we might well live as a functionalist: living as if our growth in godliness depends upon us.
In a practical sense, as mentioned above we might think a great deal about our own behavior and effort. We might make the grave mistake of minimizing God’s role in our pursuit of holiness (more on that to come). We might fall into the temptation of defining salvation by our perceptions and our feelings: when we feel close to God through a great time in the Word and prayer, then we’re effectively saved. But when we feel far from God as sin pops up and our zeal for God wanes, even temporarily, then we’re effectively unsaved (even if we technically deny that we can lose our salvation).
In such a mentality, we’ll be tempted to be like the Catholic priests who used to lash themselves over and over due to their sinfulness. They wrongly and tragically thought that the way to overcome sin and atone for sin was to bruise and batter the flesh. We Christians—truly born from above—might not exercise the stigmata in physical form, but we might easily do it in spiritual form. We might hear and repeat phrases like these to ourselves, scourging ourselves repeatedly, even blasting others along these lines:
You’re such a wretched being, and God must despise you!
Don’t even pray, because you’ve forfeited the grace of God, you worm.
Your sin is so horrifically terrible—God’s not going to forgive it, cause it’s too great.
You’re hanging by a thread, Christian, and God is savagely angry at you.
You’re a miserable believer, and you shouldn’t even come to God, you viper.
What’s happening here is awful, because it’s not grace-driven in the least. (These are the devil’s own lies, in actuality.) It is of course totally true that every sin the Christian (I’m speaking of Christians here) commits is heinous. Every sin we commit is cosmic treason against God. Every sin is unspeakably horrible. Every sin is us effectively taking the grace of God and throwing it in the trash. Every sin is us rebelling against the God who saved us and called us to himself. We could go on, but the point stands, and is accurate: the sin Christians commit are terrible!
But we have to balance things here, lest we be functionalists. It is true that we should never sin so that grace will abound (Romans 6:1). It is also true that we should always strive for holiness, as Hebrews 12:14 makes plain: “Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.” It is true that this is not a “letting go and letting God” experience. This is a fight, a battle, a daily war against the flesh. This isn’t optional; this is what every believer does as a matter of identity and calling from the Lord.
In Biblical Terms, Sanctification is Powered by God
Yet absolutely zero of this is funded by our own effort. All sanctification is driven by and dependent on the grace of God. So we are not functionalists, but sanctifists. There are many texts to ground this view; let me give just a few so you get the flavor of biblical godliness, not functional Catholicism. I’ll cite the verse, then give a quick breakdown.
Ezekiel 36:27: "I will put my Spirit within you, and CAUSE YOU TO WALK in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules." In the New Covenant, God causes us to walk in obedience, and he does it squarely through the person and work of the Holy Spirit.
2 Peter 1:3a: "His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness..." There simply is no Christian life nor godliness without "His divine power" coming first. We don’t grant ourselves these things; God in his great might grants us these things.
Philippians 2:12-13: "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for IT IS GOD WHO WORKS IN YOU, both to will and to work for his good pleasure." The order here is essential: God works in you, and so you work. It’s not 50/50. God gives you all you need, and so you by his great grace you seek his “good pleasure.”
Colossians 1:29: “For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.” Again, we “toil” like Paul did, but this is in no way dependent on us. Not one atom’s worth! It’s all dependent on God, and God doesn’t work weakly in us. He works “powerfully” in us.
Galatians 3:1–6: [1] O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. [2] Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? [3] Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? [4] Did you suffer so many things in vain—if indeed it was in vain? [5] Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith—[6] just as Abraham “believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”? This is a longer passage, and there’s much going on here. But for our purposes, note this: Paul positively scorches the idea that the Galatians work to save themselves by “works of the law” (2). His overall point is that God is working in them, and for believers, God “supplies the Spirit” to them so that they glorify him (5). As we’ve seen elsewhere, sanctification is of the Spirit. It’s in no way ultimately dependent on us; it’s literally what the Spirit is responsible for doing, a work that always fully and necessarily invests our will, mind, heart, and strength.
Galatians 5:16–24: [22] But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, [23] gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. [24] And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. What a wonderful encouragement this is: the fruit (singular in the Greek) of the Spirit is what the Spirit produces in Christians. It’s not what you and I produce in ourselves. We can’t bear it; it can only emerge in us over a lifetime as God works in us.
To be sure, as I have noted, we must labor in the work of sanctification. Not for nothing does Jude, as one example, say to “keep yourselves in the love of God” (Jude 21). Yet as the texts above show, when we do systematic theology and synthesize biblical truths, we see quite clearly that all our effort is powered by God’s grace. Our will is fully and necessarily involved in our growth, definitely. But this does not obscure this piercing and hope-giving doctrine from Scripture: sanctification is of God, through God, and to God (Romans 11:36).
This is not a whispered truth in the Bible; this is a ringing bell, akin to the pealing of church bells when the end of World War II came, and joy flooded the globe. For the Christian, every day is Armistice Day; every day the bells ring, and celebrate the end of our captivity, our misery, our imprisonment as a functionalist.
How We Should Approach Our Sin as Christians: Eleven Theses
The foregoing lets us build toward a synthesis. (Wow, what a lengthy post this is—good job persevering to the end, my friends.) Sanctification is not what we do to keep ourselves saved. God keeps us saved every second, minute, and day of our lives. Sanctification is not of our own power. As I just stated, sanctification enlists all our will and all our being, but it is entirely of God’s power. Sanctification is not in any way directed by us. Sanctification is the express assignment of God the Holy Spirit, who works in us continually to bear the fruit of godliness in every dimension of our lives.
What does this mean for our approach to sin? It means several realities, which—for the purposes of your time and mine—I’ll list out here.
First, we are loved by our heavenly Father on the basis of the work of Christ. We are in no way in the position of the unbeliever, who is still under wrath and far from God (Ephesians 2:2-3). Every Christian is loved, and infinitely so, by God the Father. God the Father is the architect of the entire plan of salvation (Ephesians 1:3-14). Our sins are covered, completely and totally, by the blood of Christ. The atonement of Christ is not a partial or incomplete atonement; it is a perfect atonement (Hebrews 10:11-14). No further dying or sacrificing is needed, and no atoning work on our part is even requested by God. How could we ever doubt the Father’s love, and the Son’s accomplishment, with such biblical material?
Second, we must not fear the Father. We can “grieve” the Spirit, yes (Ephesians 4:30). But the experience of the Christian is this: the unbroken and even unbreakable love of God. God the Father is not raging at us when we have those rough days, mentioned above, as we all do. God the Father does not fly off the handle at us as out-of-control earthly fathers do. When we sin and stumble, God the Father does not storm into the room, lash us, backhand us, roar at us, and remain in a frenzy for the next eight hours. When we sin and stumble, in figurative terms God the Father patiently and kindly and tenderly calls us in, hears our tearful confession, lifts up our head, urges us onward through the Spirit, and wraps us in a warm embrace. God the Father is less like petulant Zeus and more like compassionate Aslan.
Third, we must remember that we are positionally safe. In terms of justification, we are counted righteous and positionally innocent. There is therefore now no condemnation for us—not one shred of it (Romans 8:1). There’s sorrow for our daily sin, of course. But that sin does not un-justify us. It cannot, not even 1/1000th of a percentage point. We are uncondemned and never will be condemned. We are righteous and innocent in the cosmic courtroom of God.
Fourth, we must remember that we are positionally holy. We are “saints” (hagios, “holy ones”). This is called “definitive sanctification.” John Murray is especially good on it (buy this little book and devour it on this count, I encourage you). We already are holy in the sight of God. What a glorious truth!
Fifth, we must be honest and realistic about our sin. Christians are going to sin. We all stumble in many ways (James 3:2). If the Bible is honest about our sin, so we must be. We should hate our sin and despise it and fight it. But we must never fall prey to functional Catholicism, nor to functional sinless perfectionism. What a tragic mistake. We cannot and will not be functionally perfect. It will not happen! Nor can we approach our spouse, precious children, friend, roommate, or church members as if they can be functionally perfect. They can’t!
Sixth, we must regularly repent. Every sin is treason against God, so it is appropriate to feel conviction and sorrow about sin. But God in no way wants us to take up the lash and whip ourselves until we bleed, whether physically or spiritually. Instead, God wants us to come to him as a loving Father, and repent of our sin, confessing it to him.
Seventh, we must not confuse ourselves with unbelievers. Christians are not to be engaged and instructed like non-Christians. Christians have been transferred out of darkness into the kingdom of Christ. Pastors must approach Christians in these terms, never giving them a functional Catholicism from the pulpit or in the study.
Eighth, we must preach both love and judgment to unbelievers. We should not rage and thunder at unbelievers. We should warn them, but warn them with self-control, love, hope, kindness, and tenderness. Unbelievers are not our enemy; Satan is our enemy. We must speak truth, absolutely, but we must always speak the truth in love. We must not lash non-Christians with cords of anger; we must tell them the truth about God’s everlasting judgment, but we must spend far more time unfolding the riches of grace that are in Christ. Jude 22–23, for example, does not tell us to terrorize the lost with the truth of God; it tells us the following: “And have mercy on those who doubt; save others by snatching them out of the fire; to others show mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh.”
Ninth, we must continually watch ourselves. We have to watch ourselves in all directions, actually. We can easily slip into antinomianism (living like the world); we can easily slip into functional works-righteousness. It tends to be the case that we associate sinning with worldliness, but functional works-righteousness is just as evil. (Paul brings the blow-torch to it in the letter of Galatians, as we’ve seen.) In truth, we all are tempted both ways.
But the topic du jour is functional Catholicism, and I’ve got to be clear at a personal level: I approached sanctification in this way in days past. I was not a Catholic, and I was born again. But I saw the new birth as what God did, and holiness as something I did. I did not see it as something powered by the grace of God. In my ministry, this had the practical effect of me talking a lot about righteous living, about the ideal, but not enough about God’s empowerment to reach the ideal, and God’s kindness to forgive when we don’t hit it.
So: I’m a recovering functionalist. (I’ve used that imperfect term as a catch-all for what I’m describing in this essay.) I’m a growing sanctifist. (Strange word, but we’ll keep going with it for now.) In other words, I still battle the mentality of works-righteousness, and must fight it every day I live. I strive to do so in joy and hope. Yet if I’m honest with you, I simply don’t always hit this mark. I understand functional works-righteousness as a Christian because I return to it, sadly, and I judge others by this ungodly and unbiblical standard: spouse, kids, friends, church members, and on it goes.
Like every preacher or teacher, then, I’m not speaking from a lofty mountain-top. I’m in the trenches. I’m killing sin just like everyone else. I have to watch myself by the Spirit’s power (1 Timothy 4:16). Indeed, a big vision of God’s sanctifying grace does not squelch effort, watchfulness, and zeal; it inspires all such good work in us. But even as we do so, and even as we remember that all sin is awful, we must also continually return to this truth: God is patient with us functionalists. God forgives us, over and over again. He never stops forgiving us, in fact. (What a thought!)
This isn’t squishy antinomianism talking (a pox on it!); this is the witness of 2 Timothy 2:13. As Paul says, “if we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself.” Accordingly, as we’ve observed already, God does not ask us to re-justify ourselves when we falter. We cannot. When we falter, in love God calls us back to him and—through confession and repentance—restores us, fully and completely and gladly. Functionalism, meet your ongoing nemesis, the power and love of God.
Tenth, we must not forget that all this work is salvific liberation. Sin and the law alike do not breed liberation. The law is good, proceeding from the very moral perfection of God himself, but only in Christ is there full freedom. It is not freedom from holiness; it is freedom into holiness. I don’t have to pretend I’m not a sinner; I don’t have to downplay my failings; I don’t have to make excuses when I’m caught out; I don’t have to put on a religious charade to make people around me think I’m functionally sinless. Goodbye, all of that.
No, when you embrace grace-driven sanctification, you are liberated from looking good. You are set free from performing. You are sprung from the trap of re-saving yourself. You’re now able to live openly, honestly, and authentically as a Christian, and you’re joyfully empowered to point people not to your law-keeping as the standard of godliness, but to Christ. This liberation, by the way, is a massive part of our long, slow, plodding transformation. It takes a lifetime to develop character like this, so remember that. Embracing grace as a sanctifist is not a quick surrender experience to God, as in “higher living” theology of various kinds; it’s an eight-decade process, all of it driven by God.
Eleventh, we must look to God for our growth in godliness. Sanctification is an all-of-life affair. It bears down on all our thinking, desiring, speaking, living, and so on. But it is uppermost about loving God, knowing God, enjoying God, and becoming more like Christ through the agency of the Holy Spirit. In a word, sanctification is about God. So, preachers and teachers should talk much, much more about God’s power and work and grace in holiness than functional Catholics would.
The Spirit in particular has the vital role in our growth in godliness. We saw this in numerous texts listed above. In progressive sanctification, the Spirit applies all the benefits of Christ’s work to the believer. So, progressive sanctification always involves our full cooperation and zeal, but even that is perpetually powered by the grace of God mediated through the indwelling and sin-conquering Holy Spirit.
Conclusion: Preaching the Gracious and Powerful Work of the Spirit
Too many Reformed pulpits seem almost scared of the Spirit. Too many pulpits seem gripped by fear that a grace-driven approach to sanctification will unleash waves of worldliness in the congregation. Too many pulpits make God small in sanctification, and man big in sanctification. Too many pulpits seem wary of a big, massive, overarching, over-spilling vision of the majestic God and his mighty working. As I have observed, we Reformed people rightly talk much about God’s saving grace; we badly need a full-scale recovery of God’s sanctifying grace.
To put it directly, preachers must stop gripping the staff of the law with a white-knuckled grip. Preachers must instead unleash the grace of God in the church, and trust that God will do the work. Christ did not come to bring the ministry of law and burden-bearing; Christ came in grace and truth (John 1:14). The law came from Moses; Christ came to bring grace (John 1:17). In Christ, there is rest, truly infinite and eternal rest (Matthew 11:28-30). Honestly, we must ask ourselves: do our churches give off a sense of gospel rest? Or do they give off a sense of anxious toil, fearful failure, dour hopelessness, and angry burden-bearing?
Preachers must teach the people all the truth of God, including the “hard words” of the Scripture. But preachers do not have a staff in hand by which to hit the stupid and straying sheep, battering them and bruising them and upbraiding them. Woe to the preacher who lashes his sheep, scatters his sheep, and adds more weight to the heavy load of discouragement and anxiety many of them already bear. I tremble for such men; I tremble for all of us who slip into these patterns. God help us. God change us. God grow us.
God enable us to reject a ministry of lashing and embrace a ministry of grace. This is what we’re in business for, in reality. Preachers exist to minister grace and truth to the sheep, tenderly caring for them, nursing them back to health, kindly warning them of the dangers of sin, and warding off the wolves that afflict them. How needful such an approach is in our time. The sheep today are in many cases greatly disheartened, frightened, anxious, and looking inward. The world has gone mad, the culture has gone negative against the church, the support structures for the family are collapsing, and so pastors and teachers must labor with double effort—borne of the Spirit!—to encourage flagging hearts and nourish weary souls.
The church is not a whipping-post for bad Christians, nor a scourging-center for nominal believers. May it never be! Again, if we’ve strayed into this vision of the church, may God work in our hearts, and correct us, and help us, and re-center us. We all need such work, whether a pastor or not. May he take we who are by nature functionalists and make us joyful and unburdened sanctifists.
May this spirit, in turn, pervade and spread through the congregation. After all, the church, as Richard Sibbes put it beautifully, is not a condemnation call-center, but a place of tender binding, healing, and rest in Christ:
The church of Christ is a common hospital, wherein all are in some measure sick of some spiritual disease or other, so all have occasion to exercise the spirit of wisdom and meekness.
May we not approach the church, or the pulpit, in a mindset of functional Catholicism. May we approach church, the pulpit, and fellow believers as those loved by the Father, washed by the Son, and strengthened by the Spirit. May we see that we are all adored, and helped greatly, by our Trinitarian God.