Chapter Fourteen: Already, Not Yet!
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Already, Not Yet!
As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”
1 PETER 1:14-16
God commands us to be holy. He said, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” So God has predestined us to be conformed to the image of His Son, and He has commanded us to be holy as He is holy. Conformity to the image of Christ and being holy as God is holy are essentially synonymous expressions. What God has purposed for us, He commands that we pursue.
This command is incumbent on all believers, not just a group of super-spiritual people or full-time Christian workers. It is for the high school student as well as the young adult in college or in the workplace. It includes the stay-at-home mom and the person in the professional and business world and, yes, even the retiree enjoying the leisure of later years. It applies to all believers. It allows no exceptions.
The New Testament is replete with calls to holiness. Consider the following Scriptures:
• Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God. (2 Corinthians 7:1)
• Put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. (Ephesians 4:24)
• God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness. (1 Thessalonians 4:7)
• They disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. (Hebrews 12:10)
• Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. (Hebrews 12:14)
• Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness. (2 Peter 3:11)
The truth is that all the moral imperatives in the Bible are calls to holiness, so we are to pursue holiness with all the vigor and intentionality the word pursue suggests.
AN OUTWARD FOCUS
At the same time, however, we must guard against looking inward and becoming preoccupied with our own spiritual transformation. On the evening of His resurrection day, Jesus said to His disciples, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you” (John 20:21). Though these words were spoken to His disciples, they are applicable to us today, both corporately as the body of Christ and individually. There is a sense in which Jesus is saying to each one of us, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” To be conformed to the image of Christ, then, involves not only transformation of our character but also involvement in Christ’s mission to the world. Just as the moral command to be holy as God is holy applies to all believers, so Jesus’ words “So send I you” apply to all of us without exception.
This obviously does not mean that every believer is to be a missionary or any other form of full-time vocational Christian work. It does mean that each of us has a role, either directly or indirectly. The Bible is clear that every Christian has received at least one spiritual gift (see 1 Peter 4:10-11; 1 Corinthians 12:4-11; Romans 12:4-8). A spiritual gift is an ability given and empowered by the Holy Spirit to enable a person to fulfill his or her function within the body of Christ. And the fact that all of us have received a gift means that all of us have a function to fulfill. As Paul said in Ephesians 2:10, “We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” To paraphrase and greatly condense Paul’s words in Ephesians 2:8-10, “We are not saved by works, but we are saved to works, to do the work God has prepared for us to do.”
Every believer has a role to play in carrying out Christ’s Great Commission to make disciples of all nations (see Matthew 28:18-20). Obviously, we are not all to go to other nations or cultures, but we can all partner with those who do go, through our prayer, encouragement, and financial support. For many of us, our primary work in the body will be behind the scenes, making it possible for those on the front lines of Christ’s mission to the world to be more effective. But whether our function in the body and in the fulfillment of the Great Commission is visible or invisible, all of us have a role to fulfill. And to be more conformed to Christ means we take our role just as seriously as we do our character transformation.
WORDS OF ENCOURAGEMENT
Having looked briefly at the importance of the outward missional focus that should be true of all believers, I want to return now to the main purpose of this book, which is the transformation of our character so that we become increasingly conformed to the image of Christ. And as I do this, I want to encourage you to persevere in this pursuit, even when you think you are not making much progress. The truth is that the more sincerely and diligently we pursue holiness, the more sin and character flaws we will see in our own lives. The reason for this is twofold.
First, the Holy Spirit does not show us all our sin at once. Rather, He gradually shows us from the Scriptures what it means to have Christlike character and enables us to see where we fall short of it. It is not (I hope) that we are sinning more; it is that we are becoming more aware of and more sensitive to sin that has been there all along.
Second, as long as we live, we experience the internal fighting that Paul described in Galatians 5:17: “The desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do.” More than 150 years ago, Scottish theologian George Smeaton wrote,
There [is] an internal conflict between flesh and spirit.… And the strange thing is that in this conflict, the powers and faculties of the Christian seem to be occupied at one time by the one and at another time by the other. The same intellect, will and affections come under different influences like two conflicting armies occupying the ground and in turn driven from the field. To the astonishment of the Christian himself, the mind and affections engaged in the exercises of holy love by the power of the Holy Spirit may all of a sudden be turned away by some root of sin or strange law of association in the mental economy to the very opposite. Thus, the conflict continues to the end. We may compare it — though no analogy can exactly portray it — to one in a state of convalescence where disease and health are struggling for the mastery, sometimes the one predominating and sometimes the other, till the disease is fully and forever expelled from the veins.
We should keep in mind that we live in what theologians call the “already, not yet” era between Christ’s ascension and His second coming. During this time, there is a continual tension between who we are “in Christ” and what we are in our daily experience. Through our union with Christ, we are already seated with Him in the heavenly places (see Ephesians 2:6), yet we still live in a sin-cursed world with all its difficulties and pain. We are already holy and blameless before God through our union with Christ (see Ephesians 1:4), but we still sin every day.
In dealing with our sin, I find it helpful to think of four areas:
• The guilt of sin
• The reign of sin
• The presence of sin (the flesh)
• The activity of sin
All four of these facets of sin are common to all unbelievers. They were true of each of us before we trusted in Christ as our Savior. We were under the guilt of sin and, as a consequence, we were under its reign. We could not please God. Paul said, “Those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Romans 8:8). We might have been nice, decent individuals, but even at our best, nothing we did while outside of Christ could please God.
When we trust in Christ as our Savior, we are, through His death, forgiven of our sin so that we are no longer considered guilty before God. He has forgiven us all our sin because Jesus bore that sin on the cross (see Colossians 2:13; 1 Peter 2:24). Having then been freed from the guilt of sin, we are, as a result, freed from its reign in our lives. As Paul put it in Romans 6:2, we have “died to sin” — not to its activity in our lives but to its absolute reign. Sin may wage its guerilla warfare against us, but it cannot reign in our lives. We have, to use Paul’s words, died to that reign.
So we no longer have a relationship to sin’s guilt and reign, but we still have the presence of the flesh to deal with. When we want to do right, evil (that is, the flesh) lies close at hand (see Romans 7:21). The fact that we still experience the presence and struggle of sin is part of the “already, not yet” tension of this life.
Because we still have the flesh waging war against us, we still experience the activity of sin every day. But we are called on to put it to death (see Colossians 3:5). We are to abstain from the passions of the flesh that war against our souls (see 1 Peter 2:11). People without Christ do not experience this warfare; they live comfortably under sin’s reign. But once we are delivered from that reign, the warfare with sin begins. I call this the discomfort of the justified state. On the one hand, we are justified. As we saw in chapter 4, we stand before God just as if we’d never sinned and just as if we had always obeyed. On the other hand, we see that, in our daily experience, we do sin; we often do not obey.
So what will keep us from becoming discouraged as we see further sin in our lives? What will motivate us to persevere in our battle with remaining sin, even on those days when we don’t seem to make any progress? It is the realization that in Christ we already stand holy and blameless before God.
If you commit yourself to the pursuit of Christlikeness, you will discover an increasing tension between your desire to know and do the will of God and your perceived progress in doing it. This increased tension can become discouraging and demotivating. The solution to this dilemma is to keep in mind that, in our standing before God, He sees us clothed in the perfect obedience of Christ. This standing never changes, regardless of whether we are having a good day or a bad day. In Him, we are always holy and blameless. In Him, we are always as perfectly righteous as He was in His sinless humanity.
This is the way we should resolve the tension between what we desire to be and what we see of ourselves in our daily experience. We should look more at our standing before God in Christ than we do at our actual experience, and that continual looking to who we are in Him will motivate us to become more like Him in our experience. To do this, of course, means we must daily embrace the gospel.
So to summarize this book, let me give you seven characteristics of a person who is pursuing holiness — a person who is becoming more conformed to the image of Christ. This person has:
1. A growing understanding of the holiness of God and its implications for us.
2. A growing sensitivity to remaining sinfulness and a concurrent realization of failure to more fully express the fruit of the Spirit in one’s life.
3. An earnest desire and a sincere effort to grow in Christlikeness, realizing that desire will always exceed fulfillment.
4. A clear understanding of the principle of dependent responsibility and how to apply that principle in one’s life.
5. A consistent application of the instruments of grace through the practice of the spiritual disciplines, which enables us to grow in Christlikeness.
6. A continual embracing of the gospel for the assurance of forgiveness of our sins and of our righteous standing before God so that we will be constrained by His love to live, not for ourselves but for Him.
7. A growing realization of one’s own spiritual inability and an increasing dependence on the Holy Spirit to work in us and enable us to work.
Even though the sixth characteristic is listed as one of seven, it should actually permeate all the previous five.
We cannot truly grow in our understanding of the infinite holiness of God and the exceeding sinfulness of our sin unless we view His holiness and our sin through the lens of the gospel. To view them apart from the gospel only produces a “woe is me” mindset instead of a joyous “Here am I, send me” attitude. And the earnest desire and sincere effort of the third characteristic (the “pressing on” of Paul in Philippians 3:12-14) can be maintained only through the motivation of the gospel. The same is true of the practice of the spiritual disciplines.
A growing sense of one’s own spiritual inability and an increasing dependence on the Holy Spirit should also permeate the first five characteristics. Only the Holy Spirit can truly give us a growing understanding of the holiness of God and an increased awareness of our own sinfulness. He does this primarily through His Word, but without His enlightening and convicting powers, our knowledge of the Scriptures will remain merely intellectual. We need His powerful action to drive home to our hearts an increasing experiential knowledge of these truths. In a similar manner, we are dependent on the Holy Spirit to enable us to effectively practice the spiritual disciplines and to see them as “instruments of grace” given for our benefit rather than mere duties to practice in order to earn God’s favor.
As long as we live in the “already, not yet” era, we will continue to be at war with the world, the Devil, and our own sinful flesh. Though the final victory in this warfare is assured, we do experience defeats and setbacks as we sin, so we must keep our eyes on Jesus and His sinless life and sin-bearing death through which we stand always before God clothed in the perfect righteousness of Christ. And we must continually look to the Holy Spirit to empower us in this warfare. The righteousness of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit are the two foundation stones upon which spiritual transformation is built.
Finally, we can look forward to the day when at death we enter into the presence of the Lord and be among “the spirits of the righteous made perfect” (Hebrews 12:23). Beyond that, “we know that when he appears [at the Second Coming] we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). And then John added, “And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure” (verse 3). May this be true of us!
FOR GROUP DISCUSSION
1. The more sincerely and diligently we pursue holiness, the more we will see our sins and character flaws. What are two reasons for this?
2. Four components of sin are listed here. How do unbelievers and believers experience these differently?
a. The guilt of sin
b. The reign of sin
c. The presence of sin (the flesh)
d. The activity of sin
3. What will keep us from becoming discouraged as we see more and more sin in our lives? What will motivate us to persevere in our battle with remaining sin, even on those days when we don’t seem to make any progress? Fill in the blank in this key sentence referring to “already, not yet”: “It is the realization that in Christ we already stand _______________ and _______________ before God.”