Deeper: Real Change for Real Sinners

by Dane C. Ortlund

Growing in Christ is not centrally improving or adding or experiencing but deepening. Implicit in the notion of deepening is that you already have what you need. Christian growth is bringing what you do and say and even feel into line with what, in fact, you already are.

If conversion so changed us that we never sinned again, we would not need Christ’s intercessory work.

Here is the teaching of the Bible: If you are in Christ, your sins cause that stockpile to grow all the more. Where sins abound, his grace superabounds. It is in your pockets of deepest shame and regret that his heart dwells and won’t leave.

One reason some Christians remain shallow their whole lives is they do not allow themselves, ever more deeply throughout their lives, to pass through the painful corridor of honesty about who they really are.

The old Puritan Thomas Goodwin wrote that “Christ is love covered over with flesh.”4 It’s who he is.

But love by its very nature is not dependent on the loveliness of the beloved. If you felt yourself to be lovely, you could feel loved to a degree, but you could not be astonished with how loved you are. It’s precisely our messiness that makes Christ’s love so surprising, so startling, so arresting—and thereby so transforming.

the process of sanctification is, in large part, fed by constant returning, ever more deeply, to the event of justification.

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.

“Justification by sanctification is man’s way to heaven. . . . Sanctification by justification is God’s.”

An idol, after all, is not simply a matter of what we worship but, more deeply, what we trust (Ps. 115:4–8). Consequently, there is no breaking of commandments 2–10 without at the same time breaking commandment 1. To commit adultery is to break commandments 1 and 7, because it is to make sex an idol in which we trust to fulfill and complete

Do you want to grow in Christ? Never graduate beyond the gospel. Move ever deeper into the gospel. The freeness of your outside-in justification is a critical ingredient to fostering your inside-out sanctification.

You are restricting your growth if you do not move through life doing the painful, humiliating, liberating work of cheerfully bringing your failures out from the darkness of secrecy into the light of acknowledgment before a Christian brother or sister. In the darkness, your sins fester and grow in strength. In the light, they wither and die. Walking in the light, in other words, is honesty with God and others.

Christ was killed so that our own relative success or failure in killing sin is no part of the formula of our adoption into God’s family.

we do not need the Spirit to live a moral life, but we do need the Spirit to live a supernatural life. In other words, we don’t need the Spirit to be different on the outside; we do need the Spirit to be different on the inside. Yet again: we don’t need the Spirit to obey God; we do need the Spirit to enjoy obeying God. And that’s the only kind of real obedience anyway, since enjoying God is itself one of God’s commands (Deut. 28:47; Ps. 37:4; Phil. 4:4).