Disclaimer, if God keeps blowing my mind like He has been today, I’m not going to have any mind left. Now to the actual blog.
The Bible often talks about being “holy as God is holy” (1 Peter 1:14-16). As Christians, we call this “sanctification.” Basically, sanctification is a big fancy word meaning “to be made holy.” The process of being made holy starts when you trust that Jesus is the only way to have a relationship with God. He paid the penalty of sin, which is death. After Jesus died to pay the penalty, He kicked death’s butt and came back to life. This allowed us to be given new lives in which we can have a relationship with God. This relationship starts to change us, i.e. the process of sanctification.
I grew up in the church. I’ve known that sanctification was being made to look more like Jesus for pretty much my entire life. The cool thing about Jesus is that He can blow your mind and show you how you were wrong, no matter how long you’ve been a Christian or gone to church. Yes, sanctification is being made holy- like God. That is truth. However, I was wrong in what I thought that looked like. I thought too small. I had always thought being sanctified, being like God, would result in looking like the perfect human.
Looking like, even actually being, a perfect human seems difficult but semi-attainable. You might never actually arrive, because I mean we’re Christians, we could neeever be 100% perfect on earth (please note the intense sarcasm here and also the false humility in the allowances we have to make when we know what is supposed to be true about ourselves but may or may not actually believe it). You might never actually arrive, but you can get close, right?
Analogy time. I love mountains. I adore them. They are beautiful and can teach us so much. Think with me of a favorite mountain range or, for all of you beach bums and plain dwellers, think of the mountains you’ve seen in movies. Think of walking over each one of those mountains. Think of exploring each and every one – each and every crack, crevice, valley, peak, icy stream, rocky outcrop. How much time would that take?
I’ve seen mountains in eight countries and eleven states. There are so many of them. You could spend your entire life trying to explore all the mountains on this planet and not finish. God is so much bigger than all of them put together. Isaiah 40:12 says, “who has…weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance?” I feel small beneath just one mountain, but God is so huge He has weighed ALL of them in a scale.
Being sanctified means being made holy, God is holy, so being sanctified means being made like God. We think that being made to look like God results in looking like a perfect human, but God is nothing like humans. We are but small shadows of Him. God is infinitely huge, there are infinite facets to who He is. We can never reach infinity or else it would not be infinite. That being said, we can never “arrive” when it comes to sanctification. Because there is so much more to God than we know, there is so much more to sanctification, to what we can look like, than we know. We can never completely understand the realm of being holy because we can’t fully understand God- there is too much of Him, too many unexplored regions for us to learn all of even in an eternity.
Behold, these are but the outskirts of His ways, and how small a whisper we hear of him! But the thunder of His power, who can understand? Job 26:14
