Called to Be Saints: An Invitation to Christian Maturity

by Gordon T. Smith

Salvation means more than justification, and justification means more than a right standing with God. The gospel of Christ includes our transformation.

conversion is the act of entering into God’s justification of the sinner in Christ.

Justification is not merely forensic but effective; what is declared in justification is made experiential in sanctification.

And, further, our justification necessarily includes our appropriation of the gift of the Holy Spirit (see Acts 2:38), for the Spirit is the one through whom we enter into union with Christ.

Dallas Willard has made a cogent observation about evangelical Christians and churches: The current Evangelical understanding of salvation has no essential connection with a life morally transformed beyond the ordinary. Evangelicals are good at what they call “conversion.” They’re not good at what comes later because what is preached by them as the gospel has no necessary connection to character transformation.7

spiritual maturity is not to be equated with moral maturity, though spiritual maturity most assuredly includes the latter. Rather, spiritual formation is the cultivation of a dynamic faith in Christ, and moral reform and renewal is derivative of this union with Christ.

deny (set aside, put to death) the life of autonomy and independence from Christ.

Baptism speaks of a transfer of allegiance reflected in the obedience of faith (see Rom 6). Now our lives are lived under the reign of Christ.

This is central to our experience of God’s salvation. We are not merely justified by faith; the whole of our lives is one of growing in faith, in deeper dependence on God. Thus spiritual formation is the cultivation of union with Christ. And the leverage point in this formation is faith—faith being radical trust in the person and work of Christ, the faith by which we are drawn into his life.

We live in union with Christ through the grace of the Spirit as we live in dynamic communion with the church.

there is only one threat to holiness: pride—specifically the pride of self-autonomy and self-dependence.

the experience of conversion is not ultimately a matter of knowing or even affirming certain truths about Christ; it is rather the fruit of an immediate encounter with the one who invites us to be disciples.

And so evangelism is about fostering and cultivating the opportunities for a person to meet Jesus: to meet Christ Jesus in real time. In the end it is all about Jesus.

In mission, our commitment is to witness in word and deed to the reign of Christ.

You are welcome to join us in worship and in mission, but only if you can appreciate that it is not about you.

Spiritual formation is not ultimately about the pursuit of morality. Moral purity and orientation are important, but they are not what makes the Christian a Christian. As the rich young ruler of Luke 18 came to appreciate, the keeping of the law is not what counts in the end but rather responding fully to the call of “Come, follow me.”

Spiritual formation is all about learning to dwell in Christ. As we dwell in in union with him, he is formed—ever so incrementally, but surely—in us.

We cannot reduce holiness to morality, character or virtue; neither are these counterparts to sin. The essence of sin is not immorality; the essence of holiness is not morality. Thus the heart of spiritual formation is not moral formation. Rather, the essence of the Christian life is union with Christ fostered through a real-time encounter with him risen and ascended. Spiritual formation and all practices of the Christian life are necessarily structured around prayer and worship, the central practices by which our awareness of Christ and response to him is fostered.

Spiritual formation is the fostering of faith, a deeper trust and more radical dependence on Christ.

The huge danger is that we foster the idea that the Christian life is self-constructed as we do our very best to live by the golden rule.

All preaching, regardless of the text, is about fostering our capacity to see Jesus and trust him more deeply.

Faith obeys or it is no faith at all. We are not called so much to be like Jesus, imitating him, as we are to obey him. This is what it means to be a Christian disciple.

Christ “became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him” (Heb 5:9).

Jesus suffered and died not so that we would no longer suffer but so that our suffering would have meaning—redemptive purpose.

Suffering is integral to Christian discipleship, to character formation and thus to spiritual formation.

Christ himself learned obedience through suffering (Heb 5:8). And likewise we learn obedience through suffering.

Christianity is not a religion of the book, as one might perhaps speak of Islam; rather, the Christian faith is ultimately about a person.

This is perhaps more controversial than it seems, because certain Christian traditions (reform comes to mind) would argue that Christianity is very much a book religion. However, without a theology of encounter (something articulated well from a Pentecostal faith tradition but lacking in the reform tradition) our faith, becomes bound to and limited by a truncated understanding of sola Scriptura.

the spiritual identity of the Christian is one of union with Christ and that a full doctrine of sanctification would also speak of vocational holiness, the call to love others as we have been loved, and the ordering of the affections.

faith is informed by understanding, by a knowledge of God and the will of God.

Wisdom is both understanding and practice. The common expression “practical wisdom” is often used to capture this particular vision of human life: a wise person is one who understands the truth and lives the truth, not as two distinct acts per se but as two parts of a whole, for we do not truly understand until and unless we live this understanding.

To live in wisdom is to live theologically—in work, in relationships, in Christian community and in the world.

“Lead me in your truth, and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation” (Ps 25:5).

We learn as worshipers; our study is informed by our prayers; a congregation is first a worshiping community and then a teaching-learning community.

For many of us, our revivalistic heritage was marked by a deep skepticism about all things associating with the intellectual life and the work of study and scholarship.

we are not speaking here of religious versus nonreligious activities, but rather of cultivating a Christian perspective on, quite literally, everything.

through an engagement of mind and heart and will with the Christian canon, we are drawn into a way of thinking, into a vision that encounters the whole of reality through a Christian imagination.

First, a Christian mind is a way of seeing and thinking that is demarcated by the grand narrative of God in the world, and nothing so captures this as the mantra most commonly heard in Reformed circles: creation, fall, redemption.

the Christian mind is essentially a mind formed, informed and reformed by the sacred text.

there are three distinctive character marks of the mature person. These three come up with remarkable frequency: finance, sexuality and speech.

Sexuality. Speech. Finances. Each speaks of wisdom in community; each is about living truthfully and wisely in relation not only to God but to others.

The driving energy of the Christian life is union with Christ and the grace that comes through this union via the Spirit. Seeking moral formation can actually be a distraction if we are not careful.

Morality has the appearance of wisdom, Paul suggests, but it is a false wisdom leading to a false humility. True spirituality is a morality that is derivative of union with Christ. Thus the heart of the matter is not morality but the cultivation of this union. And therefore spiritual formation is never to be equated with moral formation.

the testimony of the Scriptures and the heritage of the church might suggest that we are not wise until and unless we know what it is to suffer with grace and patience, to be steadfast and generous even in the midst of the pain.

“In the Book of Job, to be a believer means sharing human suffering, especially that of the most destitute, enduring a spiritual struggle, and finally accepting the fact that God cannot be pigeonholed in human categories.”

the genius of the Christian gospel is that we see suffering as “slight momentary affliction” (2 Cor 4:17) in comparison with the eternal perspective. We do not suffer as those who have no hope (Rom 8:18-19).

to speak of a wise person is to affirm the capacity for making good choices. Wisdom is evident, in part, in the capacity to decide well.

This interior witness never comes at the expense of being immersed in the Scriptures and anchored in the life of the church; this discernment of the Spirit is never purely interior or subjective or unaccountable to the witness of the Scriptures or the need for accountability within Christian community.

Growth in wisdom is reflected in greater dependence on God, not less, as it is often thought. It is not that as we mature in wisdom we are able to live with less of this profound truth—it is that we “trust in the LORD” with our whole beings.

the Scriptures have no transforming power in themselves as texts but only as they are linked to the Spirit.

In the end we do not trust the Bible; rather we trust the God who is revealed through the Bible.