Deeper: Real Change for Real Sinners

by Dane C. Ortlund

Keep peeling away layer after layer, everything that makes you you. What do you find at the core? You are united to Christ. That is the most irreducible reality about you. Peel everything else away, and the solid, immovable truth about you is your union with a resurrected Christ. How could it be otherwise? After all, you did not engineer your union with Christ yourself. We read in 2 Timothy 1:8–9 of “God, who saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began.” We didn’t wake up one morning and go online to unionwithchrist.com and click yes. What is most deeply true of us is that we were secured in Christ before we had ever heard of Christ. Only in the relaxed safety of your eternally secured union with Christ can true growth blossom.

Sanctification is lifelong, gradual growth in grace. Justification, however, is not a process but an event, a moment in time, the verdict of legal acquittal once and for all. Why then are we thinking about justification in a book about sanctification? Here’s why: the process of sanctification is, in large part, fed by constant returning, ever more deeply, to the event of justification. This may sound odd at first. Aren’t we going backward if we seek to grow by remembering our initial justification? Not any more than a train passenger, when asked by the steward to see his ticket again, pulls out the ticket that initially got him onto the train. That ticket got him on but is also what is needed to keep him on the train. But let’s be more specific, bearing in mind that growth in Christ is a matter of transformation from the inside out, as opposed to merely externally oriented behavioral conformity. We could put the point of this chapter in three sentences: 1. Justification is outside-in, and we lose it if we make it inside-out. 2. Sanctification is inside-out, and we lose it if we make it outside-in. 3. And this inside-out sanctification is largely fed by daily appropriation of this outside-in justification.

We have to end this chapter on a note of hope. “It is the sin of upright persons sometimes,” says Flavel, “to exercise an unreasonable severity against themselves.”9 He goes on to reassure his readers that while they may look inside themselves and see all kinds of filth and plenty of unbelief and a variety of disordered loves, yet seeing also a spark of desire for God, a glimmer of longing for Christ, may put them at ease. Best of all, they should stop looking within themselves at all and look out to Christ. In any case, his point is that the struggle itself reflects life. If we were not regenerate, we simply wouldn’t care. The longing for Christ, the frustration at our falls, the desire to be fully yielded to God—these are the cries of life, even if immature life. God will not let you go. He will be sure to love you on into heaven. In the meantime, he is teaching you not to give up your mortification project. Your very efforts to fight your sin distress Satan. Fighting is winning. C. S. Lewis put it well in a January 1942 letter, and with this word of comfort we close this chapter: I know all about the despair of overcoming chronic temptations. It is not serious provided self-offended petulance, annoyance at breaking records, impatience etc doesn’t get the upper hand. No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep on picking ourselves up each time. We shall of course be very muddy and tattered children by the time we reach home. But the bathrooms are all ready, the tow...