Pastor’s Perspective
My great uncle and aunt in Knoxville received a visit from their minister one afternoon. He found them in the back yard sitting in those metal rocking chairs popular in the 1950's. When asked what they were doing, my great uncle responded: "We're just waiting for Jesus to come." That was a joke but underneath the humor was a distinction between justification and sanctification.
We become Christians through justification, sinners who are nevertheless accepted, loved, and forgiven by God through Christ Jesus. Sanctification is a defining Christian practice in which we respond to justification with thankful obedience to God's wishes in every part of our lives.
Sanctification is a process, a learned endeavor with help from the Holy Spirit. It means getting up out of the back yard rocking chair instead of waiting for Jesus to come or God to whisper some revelation to us. Sanctification is gratitude that knows no limits and may even imperil us. It does not allow us to be silent or other worldly when we see wrong happening. It does not owe allegiance to any flag or political philosophy or social custom either.
Martin Luther King's letter to white pastors from a jail in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 included this famous statement: Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Albert Camus, agnostic French freedom fighter in the 1940's, criticized Christians for hiding within religious abstraction rather than standing openly against the Holocaust. Gandhi famously said: Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. All three were talking about sanctification.
Allen