Billy Joel once sang about going to extremes—too high or too low, with apparently very little interest in occupying the territory in between—and, strange as it may be to begin a discussion of sanctification with Billy Joel, I have come to believe that he describes something recognizable about the Christian life.
Call me a joker, call me a fool
Right at this moment I'm totally cool
Clear as a crystal, sharp as a knife
I feel like I'm in the prime of my life
Sometimes it feels like I'm going too fast
I don't know how long this feeling will last
Maybe it's only tonight
CHORUS
Darling I don't know why I go to extremes
Too high or too low there ain't no in-betweens
And if I stand or I fall
It's all or nothing at all
Darling I don't know why I go to extremes
“I Go to Extremes” Billy Joel
We are creatures of extremes.
Give us discipline and we can turn it into legalism; give us liberty and, with just a little time and ingenuity, we can turn that into license. We can make an idol out of obedience and then, having recognized the idol, run so hard in the opposite direction that we make an idol out of freedom. Somewhere between those two ditches lies the road on which Christians actually spend their lives, stumbling forward under the patient work of a God who seems considerably less hurried about our sanctification than we are.
It raises a question I have thought about many times: If I am a believer in Christ, why am I still here?
Why, upon conversion, did God not simply catapult me straight into heaven?
Obviously, there are several theological answers to that question, but part of the answer is sanctification—the long, mysterious and sometimes painful process by which those whom God has already justified are increasingly conformed to the image of Christ. We are not trying to become His children; in Christ, we are His children. We are not slowly accumulating enough righteousness to convince God to accept us; the righteousness we need has already been supplied by Another. Yet the God who declares His people righteous also refuses to leave them untouched, and so He begins the patient work of making us increasingly resemble what He has already declared us to be.
That distinction matters enormously.
The Road
Psalm 119 begins not with a description of a dramatic spiritual experience but with a road: “Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord.”
A way. A walk.
There is movement in those words, but there is also duration. Nobody walks a road instantaneously.
We live, however, in what might be called a “How-To America,” where almost every difficulty is assumed to have a technique, a program or a set of steps capable of solving it. Christians are hardly immune to this impulse. We have books, conferences, podcasts, devotionals, music, programs and personalities, many of which are genuinely useful, but none of which can substitute for the ordinary, sometimes unspectacular work of having our minds and consciences continually brought under the Word of God.
Scripture is not merely information we collect about God. It is one of the principal instruments through which God steers us down this road.
Ephesians 2:8–10 gives us perhaps the clearest set of guardrails:
For by grace you have been saved through faith...not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
Most Protestants know those verses well, but we have a habit of stopping before Paul finishes his sentence. Verse 10 follows immediately: we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
There is the road again.
We are not saved by our walking, but the saved are given somewhere to walk.
The order cannot be reversed without destroying the gospel. Christ alone, grace alone, faith alone—those great Reformation declarations remain as necessary now as they ever were. I should never imagine that God accepts me because of Christ and because I attend worship faithfully, study Scripture, participate in a men's group, give generously, behave morally or manage to avoid whatever sins happen to be particularly unpopular among Christians at the moment.
For justification, Christ plus nothing.
Yet grace does not merely forgive a man and leave him comfortably settled among the ruins. The Christ who justifies also sanctifies, and this is where the journey becomes both beautiful and difficult, because alongside the road are two remarkably inviting ditches.
The Ditch of Legalism
The ditch on one side is legalism, and it is particularly dangerous because the road into it often begins with something good.
A man begins taking holiness seriously. He becomes more disciplined, learns Scripture, abandons certain sins and develops convictions that perhaps he should have developed years earlier. His life really does begin to change.
Then, almost imperceptibly, his eyes move away from Christ and toward himself.
You are doing rather well.
And once I become impressed with my own progress, it does not take long before I begin inspecting everyone else's.
My convictions become standards; my standards acquire rules; my rules acquire exceptions and footnotes, and before long I have developed a rather sophisticated system for determining who is serious about Christ and who is not. Naturally, I tend to perform quite well under the system I designed.
Before long, I am trying to be everyone else's Holy Spirit.
I know this Pharisee rather well because I have played him many times.
Our culture makes the role particularly easy. We have constructed an enormous entertainment industry around criticism and opinion, and I have always enjoyed it. I used to be an O'Reilly junkie, and the attraction was not difficult to understand: somebody was wrong, somebody was right, and there was great satisfaction in watching the wrong person exposed.
The problem was that, over time, I began to love my arguments more than I loved people.
That realization is uncomfortable because legalism rarely announces itself as hatred. It usually arrives disguised as discernment, conviction or concern. In my own life, one of its clearest symptoms has been gossip and criticism—the strange ability to identify the ten percent that is wrong with another person while becoming almost incapable of seeing the ninety percent that is admirable.
I can call that discernment if I want.
Sometimes it is simply pride with a Bible verse attached to it.
Eventually, by grace, God pulls me out of that ditch. Unfortunately, sinners have an extraordinary capacity for overcorrection, and I have sometimes responded by crossing the entire road and landing in the ditch on the other side.
The Ditch of License
Christian liberty is a magnificent thing.
There is profound freedom in understanding that my standing before God does not rise and fall with yesterday's performance, that Christ's sacrifice was sufficient, and that I am not required to live beneath the crushing burden of continually trying to persuade God to keep loving me.
But just beyond liberty lies license, and the distance between them can be shorter than we imagine.
Paul understood the temptation perfectly. If grace abounds where sin increases, why not continue in sin? His response in Romans 6 is not a new legal code but an appeal to identity: How can we who died to sin still live in it?
License takes something gloriously true—I am forgiven—and employs it in the service of something terribly false—that therefore sin no longer matters.
I can walk deliberately into a situation, run toward a sin, eviscerate my conscience and afterward console myself with the words, “I am forgiven.”
The frightening thing is that the sentence itself is true.
The lie is in what I am using the truth to accomplish.
Grace was never given so that I could become comfortable with the very thing from which Christ came to rescue me. When Christian liberty becomes license, conscience gradually loses its sensitivity; what once troubled me becomes tolerable, what became tolerable becomes normal, and eventually my god begins to look suspiciously like my own comfort.
There is another irony here. The legalist does not love people well because he is too busy condemning them, but the person living in license may love them even less because he has ceased caring enough to tell the truth. Confrontation becomes uncomfortable. Moral clarity feels judgmental. Worse still, speaking honestly about another person's sin may expose something in me that I would prefer not to examine.
So I say nothing.
Legalism can make me confront everyone except myself; license can persuade me to confront no one, including myself.
Neither is love.
Somewhere Between the Ditches
And then, by God's grace, I find the road again.
This is where sanctification has become less theoretical for me, because the longer I live the Christian life, the less it resembles the clean upward trajectory I once imagined. There have been advances and retreats, seasons of remarkable clarity followed by stretches in which old sins appeared embarrassingly alive, moments when I thought I had learned something permanently only to discover that God apparently intended to teach it to me again.
Yet through all of it, there is Christ.
He directs me through His Word and by His Spirit, teaching me—slowly—to love Him more and myself less; to admire people rather than constantly evaluate them; to seek my own way less aggressively; to pour myself into relationships, particularly my wife and children; to laugh without guilt, grieve without despair, work without worshiping work, and occasionally become tired enough of this fallen world that heaven sounds less like an abstraction and more like home.
I still fall into the ditches.
God still pulls me out.
There are periods when sanctification feels like one step forward and two steps back, followed perhaps by three forward and five back, until I wonder whether there has been any movement at all. Then occasionally God allows the dust to settle long enough for me to look backward, and I discover that the road behind me is longer than I realized.
Certain sins that once seemed irresistible have lost some of their power. Things I once desperately wanted no longer appear quite so impressive. I have learned to distrust motives I once defended, forgive injuries I once rehearsed, appreciate people I once criticized and recognize temptations that years ago I would not even have identified as temptations.
None of this has happened as quickly as I would have preferred.
Perhaps that is part of the point.
The kingdom has been built in me and around me, often when I was barely aware that anything was happening and, in some cases, in spite of me rather than because of me. Looking backward, therefore, produces something very different from self-congratulation. If anything genuinely good has emerged from this long process, I know myself well enough by now to understand where the credit belongs.
Learning to Stay on the Road
There are practices that, over the years, have helped keep me between the ditches: devotion to Scripture and prayer; an unflinching commitment to worship even when I do not particularly feel like worshiping; continuing education; private fasting, sometimes from food and sometimes from the comforts and distractions that quietly begin owning too much of me; and also prudent feasting, because Christianity is not an exercise in perpetual deprivation and there are moments when the proper response to the King's generosity is simply to enjoy His gifts.
I need small-group accountability. I need to love my wife well. I need to keep pushing work down the priority list because, left unattended, work will climb back toward the top with remarkable speed. Most of all, I need to keep crying out for the Spirit of God because the older I become, the less confidence I have in my ability to manufacture holiness through determination.
Christ's language is better: abide in the vine.
Apart from Him, I can do nothing.
And perhaps another discipline belongs alongside all the others—patience.
We are accustomed to before-and-after pictures, thirty-day transformations and measurable results. Sanctification is generally less accommodating. God appears quite content to grow oak trees while I keep asking Him for squash.
Sanctification is measured in decades, not days.
At first that can sound discouraging because there is still so much road ahead and so much in me that needs to change. Increasingly, however, I find it comforting. God is not surprised that His work takes time. He knew what He was getting when He called me, and the slow pace of sanctification does not mean that He has abandoned the project.
So I continue walking—not in order to persuade Him to love me, but because in Christ He already does; not because my obedience will someday make me worthy, but because Christ is worthy; and not because I have finally discovered the technique by which a sinner can perfect himself, but because the God who began this work has promised to finish it.
I expect there are still many miles ahead, and, knowing myself, probably a few more trips into the ditches.
But there is grace there too.
And when the road finally ends, if I understand the gospel correctly, I will not arrive with an impressive account of how well I navigated it. I will arrive as a man who was carried, corrected, forgiven, disciplined, restored and kept by Christ.
Which leaves only one conclusion worth writing at the end of the story:
Soli Deo Gloria.
To God alone be the glory.
Song Link (click on title)
Verse 1 I thought the farther down this road, The easier it would get, That years of walking close to You Would leave me less regret. But light has ways of finding things The darkness used to spare, And the closer that I walk with You, The more I'm made aware. Pre-Chorus Not condemned and not afraid, Not trying to repay A debt You finished long ago— Still, You won't leave me this way. Chorus Though my sin is cast away, There's still a cross to bear, And every mile You lead me on, I'm painfully aware— Of pride beneath my righteousness, Of motives hiding there, But even more, how much I need The Savior waiting there. Grace has covered all I was, And your Word leads me there— Every mile, every step..... I'm painfully aware. Verse 2 There's a ditch on either side of me, And I've fallen into both; I've worn the robes of righteousness And called my judgment growth. Then I've taken grace for license, Like forgiveness meant You didn't care, Till Your Word brought me back onto the road, Painfully aware. Pre-Chorus One step forward, two steps back, Some days that's how it seems; Then the dust clears from the road behind, And I see what You have done in me. Chorus Though my sin is cast away, There's still a cross to bear, And every mile You lead me on, I'm painfully aware— Of pride beneath my righteousness, Of motives hiding there, But even more, how much I need The Savior waiting there. Grace has covered all I was, And your Word leads me there— Every mile, every step..... I'm painfully aware. Bridge Painfully aware I cannot make me holy. Painfully aware My heart still wanders slowly. Painfully aware The flesh still loves its throne. Painfully aware— I never walk alone. You lift me from the ditch again, Brush the dust away, Point my wandering feet toward home And put me on the way. Chorus Though my sin is cast away, There's still a cross to bear, And every mile You lead me on, I'm painfully aware— Of pride beneath my righteousness, Of motives hiding there, But even more, how much I need The Savior waiting there. Grace has covered all I was, And your Word leads me there— Every mile, every step..... I'm painfully aware. Outro Not painfully condemned, Not painfully afraid— Just painfully aware Of how much I need Your grace.
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