A Brief Statement

I hold that sanctification is the gracious work of God by which He sets His people apart to Himself and makes them holy, conforming them progressively to the image of His Son. It is at once definitive and progressive: definitive in that, at conversion, the believer is set apart to God and decisively broken from the reign — though not yet the presence — of sin; progressive in that, across the whole of the Christian life, the Spirit works in him a real and growing holiness. It is wholly God’s work and truly the believer’s labor — no contradiction, but a partnership: “work out your own salvation … for it is God who works in you” (Philippians 2:12–13). I therefore reject both the legalism that would make holiness an achievement of the flesh and the passivity that waits for God to do what He has commanded us to do.

Sanctification proceeds by two motions — the putting to death of sin (mortification) and the cultivation of new life (vivification) — wrought by the Holy Spirit through the appointed means of grace, and laid hold of by the disciplines of grace. It is never completed in this life; the believer will war with indwelling sin until glory, when the work is finished and he is made like Christ at last. And it must be carefully distinguished from justification: justification is a finished declaration that settles our standing; sanctification is an ongoing transformation that grows our likeness. The two are never to be confused, and never to be divided.

❖ ❖ ❖

A Detailed Exposition

What Sanctification Is

The word “sanctify” translates a family of Greek words built on hagios, “holy”: to sanctify (hagiazō) is to make holy or to set apart, and sanctification (hagiasmos) is both the act and the state of being made holy.¹ Two ideas live in the word: separation (being set apart from sin and unto God) and transformation (being actually made holy in character). The goal of the whole work is named by Paul: to be “conformed to the image of His Son” (Romans 8:29). It is vital here to distinguish sanctification from justification, which it always accompanies but is never the same as. Justification is a legal declaration, instantaneous and complete, in which God pronounces the believing sinner righteous on the ground of Christ’s imputed righteousness; it concerns our standing. Sanctification is a transforming work, gradual and lifelong, in which God makes us actually holy; it concerns our growth. To confuse them is to lose the gospel, turning our growth into the ground of our acceptance; to divide them is to imagine a justified person who is never changed. They are distinct, inseparable, and both the gift of grace (see my paper on Soteriology).²

Definitive Sanctification

Sanctification has a decisive, once-for-all aspect that we easily overlook. The New Testament can speak of believers as already “sanctified” in the past tense — “you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified” (1 Corinthians 6:11) — and as “saints” (literally “holy ones”) from the moment of their calling. At conversion the believer is set apart to God and, just as truly, is decisively delivered from the dominion of sin. This is the burden of Romans 6: the believer has died with Christ to sin and been raised to new life, so that he is “no longer enslaved to sin” and sin “will have no dominion over you” (Romans 6:6, 14). The reign of sin is broken at the root; the old master no longer rules. This decisive break — what has been called definitive sanctification — is the foundation on which all progress rests: we grow not in order to be freed from sin’s tyranny but because we already have been.³

Progressive Sanctification

Upon that foundation rises the lifelong work of progressive sanctification — the gradual, real growth in holiness that occupies the whole Christian life. “We all … are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18); “this is the will of God, your sanctification” (1 Thessalonians 4:3). The change is genuine: the believer increasingly hates sin, loves God, and bears the fruit of the Spirit.⁴ But it is not yet complete, and here I part company with every form of perfectionism. The most mature believer has not arrived — “not that I have already obtained this” (Philippians 3:12) — and “if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves” (1 John 1:8). Indwelling sin remains, and the Christian life is marked by a real warfare, “the desires of the flesh against the Spirit” (Galatians 5:17; Romans 7:14–25). The work will be finished only at glorification, when we shall see Him and “be like Him” (1 John 3:2; see my paper on Eschatology). Progress, not perfection, is the mark of the present life.⁵

The Engine: God Works, and We Work

How does this growth come about — by God’s working or by ours? The biblical answer is: by both, and the genius of a healthy doctrine of sanctification is to hold them together. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” Paul says, and in the same breath, “for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12–13). Our working and God’s working are not rivals dividing the labor between them; rather, we work because He works in us, our effort being the very form His grace takes. This steers between two ditches. On the one side lies legalism, the attempt to sanctify oneself by sheer effort of the flesh — which fails, for the flesh cannot produce holiness (Galatians 3:3). On the other lies passivity — the “let go and let God” counsel of the deeper-life teaching, which bids the believer cease striving and simply yield, as though holiness were received entirely as justification is.⁶ I honor the concern of that teaching to exalt grace and dependence, and I have learned from it; but I cannot follow it where it makes the believer passive, for Scripture everywhere commands strenuous effort: “make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue” (2 Peter 1:5), “I toil, struggling with all His energy that He powerfully works within me” (Colossians 1:29). The path is neither self-powered striving nor passive waiting, but dependent diligence — wholehearted effort that leans wholly upon the Spirit.

Mortification and Vivification

This Spirit-empowered effort moves in two directions, which the older theologians called mortification and vivification. Mortification is the putting to death of sin: “if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Romans 8:13); “put to death therefore what is earthly in you” (Colossians 3:5). It is active, daily, and relentless — Owen’s famous counsel, “be killing sin or it will be killing you,” catches the urgency exactly. We do the killing; but we do it “by the Spirit,” never by raw willpower.⁷ Vivification is the other half: the cultivation of the new life and its graces. The same passages that say “put off” also say “put on” — “put off your old self … and put on the new self” (Ephesians 4:22–24), “put on then … compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience” (Colossians 3:12–14). Sanctification is not merely the weeding of the garden but the planting of it; not only the saying of no to sin but a deeper yes to God. Both motions are the Spirit’s work, and both require our full engagement.⁸

The Role of the Holy Spirit

The agent of sanctification, from first to last, is the Holy Spirit. Scripture speaks of “sanctification by the Spirit” (2 Thessalonians 2:13; 1 Peter 1:2); it is He who indwells the believer, produces His fruit in him (Galatians 5:22–23), empowers the mortification of sin (Romans 8:13), and conforms him to Christ. Hence the governing command of the sanctified life: “walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh … if we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit” (Galatians 5:16, 25; see my paper on Pneumatology).⁹ A word here on a question my own tradition has debated. Some have read Paul’s rebuke of the “fleshly” Corinthians (1 Corinthians 3:1–3) as marking out two permanent classes of Christian — the “carnal” and the “spiritual.” I do not read it so. Paul is rebuking real believers for behaving carnally in a particular matter — their divisions — and calling them out of it, not consigning them to a settled lower tier. Carnality is a state into which any believer may lapse and from which he must be roused, not a category in which he may comfortably remain. For every true believer has the Spirit and is being sanctified by Him; a professed faith that yields no growth at all gives reason to doubt whether the root of life is there (see my papers on Eternal Security and Soteriology).¹⁰

The Means of Grace

The Spirit does not ordinarily work in a vacuum; He works through appointed channels, which the church has long called the means of grace. Chief among them is the Word of God: “Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth” (John 17:17), the “pure spiritual milk” by which we grow (1 Peter 2:2). There is prayer, the breath of the new life and the means of communion with God (see my paper on Prayer); there are the ordinances, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, which preach the gospel to us afresh and feed faith (see my paper on Sacramentology); and there is the fellowship of the church, for we are sanctified not as isolated individuals but as members of a body that builds itself up in love (Hebrews 10:24–25; Ephesians 4:11–16; see my paper on Ecclesiology).¹¹ To these must be added the providence of God, including suffering, which He uses to wean us from the world and train us in holiness: “He disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness,” and the discipline yields “the peaceful fruit of righteousness” (Hebrews 12:10–11; Romans 5:3–4; see my paper on Providence). God has ordained these means, and the believer who neglects them will not grow, however much he may wish to.¹²

The Spiritual Disciplines

If the means of grace are the channels God has appointed, the spiritual disciplines are the practices by which we deliberately place ourselves in their path — the ways we take up the Word, prayer, worship, and the rest, and make them habits of life. Paul urges them under the figure of athletic training: “train yourself for godliness” (1 Timothy 4:7, gymnazō, whence our “gymnasium”), for godliness, like fitness, is built by disciplined practice over time.¹³ The historic disciplines include the intake of Scripture (reading, study, memorization, meditation), prayer and fasting, worship, the keeping of the Lord’s Day, solitude and silence, service, giving, and the fellowship of the saints. Two cautions attend them. They are means, not merit: we do not earn God’s favor by them, nor are they ends in themselves, but servants of communion with God; pursued as a checklist, they harden into the very legalism they were meant to escape. And they must be governed by the Word: some streams of the modern spiritual-formation movement have imported contemplative and mystical practices of uncertain pedigree, and these should be tested by Scripture and not adopted merely because they are ancient or feel profound. Rightly used, the disciplines are not the enemy of grace but the appointed path of it.¹⁴

❖ ❖ ❖

Practical Implications

Ministry Emphasis: The Patient Pursuit of Holiness

First, I want to teach the blend, because both errors wound. To the anxious, striving soul I would say: your acceptance is settled in Christ, and you pursue holiness from that acceptance, not for it (see my papers on Soteriology and Eternal Security). To the passive soul, waiting for a holiness that drops from heaven, I would say: rise and work, for God is working in you. Effort is not the opposite of grace; earning is. Grace is what makes the effort possible, and fruitful.

Second, sanctification is slow, and I would minister patience. Growth in holiness is real but gradual and uneven, with setbacks along the way, and the believer who measures himself by his feelings or expects instant victory will despair. This matters especially for the broken, whom I long to serve: I will not crush a struggling saint with demands for a holiness he cannot yet show, nor read his slow progress as proof of no life. There is grace for failure and real hope for change, and the God who began the work does not abandon it half-done.

Third, holiness is not magic, and I would point people to the ordinary path. God sanctifies through means — the Word, prayer, the table, the people of God, and the disciplines that take them up. I would commend these not as boxes to tick but as the trysting-places where the Spirit meets His people; a Christian who will not read, pray, gather, and train should not be surprised at his own barrenness.

Finally, I would labor in hope, for the outcome is sure. “He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6). The believer’s growth, however halting, is itself a token of the life within and a pledge of the glory to come, when sanctification will be complete and we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. We pursue holiness, in the end, not to become acceptable but to become like the One who has already made us His own — and to behold His face.

Holiness is wholly God’s gift and truly our task — He works, and therefore we work; we work, because He works in us.

❖ ❖ ❖

Biblical, Exegetical, Theological, and Historical Notes

The vocabulary of sanctification is built on hagios (ἅγιος), “holy”: the verb hagiazō (ἁγιάζω), “to make holy, consecrate, set apart,” and the noun hagiasmos (ἁγιασμός), “sanctification” or “holiness” (Romans 6:19, 22; 1 Thessalonians 4:3–4; Hebrews 12:14). Believers are called hagioi, “saints” or “holy ones” (1 Corinthians 1:2). The word carries both separation (set apart from sin, unto God) and transformation (made actually holy).
Justification and sanctification must be distinguished without being separated. Justification is a forensic act, instantaneous and complete, declaring the believer righteous on the ground of Christ’s imputed righteousness (Romans 3:24, 28; 5:1); it changes our standing. Sanctification is a transformative work, progressive and lifelong, making the believer actually holy; it changes our state. To confuse them corrupts the gospel by basing acceptance on growth; to separate them imagines a faith that justifies but never sanctifies, which James denies (James 2:17). See my paper on Soteriology.
Alongside the progressive sense, Scripture speaks of a definitive sanctification — a decisive, past-tense setting-apart at conversion (“you were sanctified,” 1 Corinthians 6:11; “sanctified in Christ Jesus,” 1 Corinthians 1:2; Acts 26:18). With it comes a decisive break from sin’s dominion: the believer has died with Christ to sin and is “no longer enslaved” to it, for “sin will have no dominion over you” (Romans 6:6, 14, 17–18). The reign of sin is broken at conversion, though its presence remains to be fought. John Murray notably recovered this emphasis under the term “definitive sanctification.”
Progressive sanctification is the gradual growth in holiness over the Christian life: “being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18); “this is the will of God, your sanctification” (1 Thessalonians 4:3); “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord” (2 Peter 3:18). It is genuine and observable in increasing love for God, hatred of sin, and the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22–23).
Sanctification is incomplete in this life. Paul disclaims having “already obtained” or being “already perfect” (Philippians 3:12), and John warns that to claim sinlessness is self-deception (1 John 1:8). The Christian life is a real warfare between flesh and Spirit (Galatians 5:17; Romans 7:14–25). Entire sanctification or sinless perfection is therefore to be rejected; the work is completed only at glorification, when we shall be made like Christ (1 John 3:2; Romans 8:29–30; see my paper on Eschatology).
Philippians 2:12–13 holds together the believer’s effort (“work out your own salvation”) and God’s prior and enabling work (“for it is God who works in you”), the latter grounding the former (“for”). This excludes both legalism (sanctification by fleshly effort, Galatians 3:3) and passivity (the “let go and let God” counsel of the Keswick and Higher Life movements). I appreciate the latter’s exaltation of dependence and grace, but hold that it errs in making the believer passive, since Scripture commands strenuous, Spirit-empowered effort (2 Peter 1:5, “make every effort”; Colossians 1:29; 1 Corinthians 9:24–27; Hebrews 12:14). The biblical model is dependent diligence. See J. C. Ryle, Holiness, and J. I. Packer, Keep in Step with the Spirit.
Mortification (Latin mortificatio) is the Spirit-empowered putting to death of sin: “if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Romans 8:13); “put to death therefore what is earthly in you” (Colossians 3:5; Galatians 5:24). John Owen’s The Mortification of Sin remains the classic treatment, with its memorable charge, “Be killing sin or it will be killing you.” The killing is the believer’s act, performed “by the Spirit,” never by mere willpower.
Vivification (Latin vivificatio) is the complementary cultivation of new life and the Christian graces. The “put off” of sin is always paired with a “put on” of righteousness: “put off your old self … and put on the new self, created after the likeness of God” (Ephesians 4:22–24; Colossians 3:5–14). Calvin treated mortification and vivification together as the two parts of repentance and of the Christian life (Institutes III.3). Sanctification is thus both negative and positive — dying to sin and living to God (Romans 6:11).
Sanctification is the work of the Holy Spirit: “sanctification by the Spirit” (2 Thessalonians 2:13; 1 Peter 1:2). He indwells the believer (1 Corinthians 6:19), produces His fruit (Galatians 5:22–23), empowers mortification (Romans 8:13), and conforms us to Christ (2 Corinthians 3:18). The believer is to “walk by the Spirit” and “keep in step with the Spirit” (Galatians 5:16, 25), and to be “filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18). See my paper on Pneumatology.
Some, following the Chaferian and deeper-life tradition, have read 1 Corinthians 3:1–3 as defining two permanent classes of believer, the “carnal” (sarkikos, from sarx, σάρξ, “flesh”) and the “spiritual” (pneumatikos). I take the better reading to be that Paul rebukes genuine believers for behaving carnally in a specific matter (their factions), summoning them to repent of it — not assigning them to a fixed lower tier. Carnality is a temporary state any Christian may lapse into, not a settled category in which one may remain; every true believer has the Spirit and is being sanctified, and a professed faith wholly without growth gives ground to question its reality (1 John 2:3–4; 2 Corinthians 13:5). See my papers on Eternal Security and Soteriology.
The means of grace are the ordinary channels through which the Spirit sanctifies: pre-eminently the Word (“Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth,” John 17:17; 1 Peter 2:2; Psalm 119:9–11); prayer (see my paper on Prayer); the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper (see my paper on Sacramentology); and the fellowship of the church (Hebrews 10:24–25; Ephesians 4:11–16; see my paper on Ecclesiology). God works through means, so that the diligent use of them is the appointed path of growth.
God also sanctifies through His providence, and especially through suffering and discipline: “He disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness,” yielding “the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (Hebrews 12:10–11); “suffering produces endurance, and endurance character” (Romans 5:3–4; cf. James 1:2–4). See my paper on Providence. Trials are not interruptions of the sanctifying work but instruments of it.
The spiritual disciplines are the believer’s practices for taking up the means of grace and forming godly habits. Paul commends them under the metaphor of athletic training: “train yourself (gymnazō, γυμνάζω) for godliness” (1 Timothy 4:7; cf. 1 Corinthians 9:24–27). Like bodily training, godliness is cultivated by disciplined repetition over time. Donald Whitney’s Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life is a sound evangelical guide.
The historic disciplines include the intake of Scripture (reading, study, memorization, meditation — Psalm 1:2; Joshua 1:8), prayer, fasting (Matthew 6:16–18), worship, the Lord’s Day, solitude and silence, service, stewardship, and fellowship. Two cautions: (1) they are means, not merit — not works that earn favor nor ends in themselves, but servants of communion with God; pursued as a checklist they breed legalism. (2) They must be governed by Scripture: portions of the modern spiritual-formation movement (e.g., aspects of Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline) incorporate contemplative and mystical practices that should be weighed carefully against the Word rather than embraced for their antiquity or their feel.