Human Need for Maturity

Question 8. Because we have imperfect brains, we're prone to mistakes. We have to mature over time. The rate of maturity varies with each person. We have a lack of knowledge. We're not in possession of all the facts and the necessary drive to make our maturity happen, because we are human. One afternoon I was splitting up kindling, cut my thumb and I cursed. When I did that, I had not premeditated in the morning to curse. When I lived really hard, tended bar and did sinful things, it was premeditated. I thought about drinking, who I was going to meet, or how I was going satisfy my desires. I didn't premeditate cutting my thumb or cursing because of the pain! To the Calvinists both are sin and the Wesleyan would say that my premeditated actions were sin. My curse was not, but a mistake in being human. What I did next was evidence, because I said to God, “I'm sorry that I cursed, forgive me.” 

Question 9. But I also said, “I want you to search my heart and my soul, and if you find anything that I did that was wrong or inappropriate in my motives, that there's something you want me to do or see or change, show me.”  Sanctification is this process of receiving God’s assistance, so that I can deal with the effects of my humanness, my imperfections, my background, my past tendencies to sin. God wants to assist me. He wants to help me with the fact that I swore. It's not that I deserve his help. It's that he has given me this gift of grace and of the Holy Spirit. As in James 1:4 He has called me to persevere. “Perseverance, must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” 

Question 10. God's requirement asks only that we make our best effort to mature with our current level of knowledge. Within this process of sanctification, we behave as God directs. In order to do this, God offers three things: divine wisdom, help, and divine insight. God provides insight through other Christians or the new realizations from scripture. He gives divine strength, so that the person is not pressed beyond their ability to endure.  I Corinthians 10:13 reads, “No temptation has seized you, except what is common to man. And God is faithful. He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, He will also provide a way out, so that you can stand up under it, under the difficulty.”

 So, this sanctification that God wants to work in man over time is through His grace, even though he has this imperfect brain that's prone to mistakes. That requires years to season to show evidence of a change in the person’s level of godliness. What's really important in a Christian’s life is maturity or transformed into Christ’s likeness. Not understanding that humanness, which is all goofed up, impacts how Christians behave. Labeling human problems as sin rather than the results of sin undermines the assessment of the presenting problem. People react to being immersed in sinful lives that result in fear or other emotions because of what's happened to them. Clients will explain, “I've sinned and I've been around sin, and it's got me all conditioned and fearful.  I had a bad childhood.” They're saying that with guilt or the burden of sin. 

Through salvation and the willingness to be transformed through the process of sanctification, the client has a realistic, practical means to change. The balance is asking Jesus to speak to my mind for the rest of the day, so that I accept your forgiveness and not labor under false guilt. I can be forgiven, but I also don't want to overlook a problem, if there's something I need to do to change. It's saying you're responsible for me Jesus, because you said you'd be faithful to finish this work. You'd be faithful to stick with me. I need your help. I have hit a limit. I don't understand myself in my deepest parts, but you do, and you've promised to help me. Philippians 3:12-15 adds support to this, “Not that I have already obtained all this or have been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ, Jesus took hold of. For me, brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do, forgetting what is behind and straining towards what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ, Jesus, all of us who are mature should take such a view of things.” Another passage is Hebrews 6:1, “Therefore, let us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on into maturity.” A third supporting scripture is Ephesians, 4:13, “Until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” 

Now let me clarify one thing. The Wesleyan Arminian perspective is not saying that the person can't sin. They're not saying that the person has lost their will. What they're saying here is that they can and will sin, but they will not do it out of a hardened heart or a deep willful disobedience. In other words, they have a sensitivity now to God, the Holy Spirit, that they've never had before because they're saved and they've submitted their will to God. So, this basic desire to sin, that we were born with, has been initially cleansed, not removed. We are now able to be submissive to God, work with God and are able to mature, which also then allows us to learn not rebel against the Holy Spirit. Instead, we listen and are submissive consistently, so that we can grow in faith and knowledge of the fullness of Christ. 

Question 11. In sanctification God provides, through His unconditional love, the mercy and the grace to do something for me I can't do for myself, which is to address this basic inborn problem and to initially cleanse it, so that the ongoing work of God within my mind and soul and will is facilitated (Corinthians 2:6-16). I'm empowered when I want to rebel, to stop and the call on God to say, “I've surrendered myself to you. Give me additional Grace, now I surrender myself again. Here is my need. Help me.” So instead of being held captive to repetitious desires, fears, emotions, I now have a means by which God has intervened into my mind and my soul and my will. I have an assurance that he's empowered me to overcome sin in my problem again, sin being a willful decision to break a known law of God so that I don't repeat my patterns, mistakes, and sin. I can stop doing those things. I can change. I can mature. This maturing is often called growing up in love, growing in grace, progressive maturity, Christian maturity. 

Question 12. God has designed or chosen to enable man to be set apart or sanctified also in his body, meaning that following the physical or earthly death of the body, God will allow the never dying soul of the Christian to journey instantly into the presence of Christ. And at God's timing, Jesus will recreate the earthly body, the old earthly body, into a perfect composition and to reunite soul, with the old body, which now has been made new and suitable for eternal life, which will then be spent with God, the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. The last step of man's sanctification is that he is recreated with a body that will never die, never age, never be ill, never wear out. Likewise, he is now given a perfect intellect. Misconceptions, doubts, and fears are removed, because now there's eternal life, and the never dying soul is united within this, this new package of body and mind. Eternal life begins: we've been glorified. Scriptural support for this will be I Corinthians, 15:50-52, “I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we will all be changed in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound. The dead will be raised imperishable, and we will all be changed.” Or Philippians 3:20-21, “But our citizenship is in heaven, and we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.” The glorious glorification, or ultimate sanctification. 

Question 13. Now let me review with you one more time. The first step of sanctification, according to the Wesleyan Arminian perspective, will be salvation. The first work of grace is the forgiveness of sins. The second step of sanctification will be that there is a submission of the will, or the initial cleansing of the desire to sin. Sin is breaking a known law of God, willfully doing that. The third step is the ongoing work of maturity through the grace of God. It's the maturity of spiritual concepts and the addressing the human nature. While the person does not willfully desire to sin, they still sin, and when they do, they ask for God forgiveness through the Holy Spirit. Seeking God’s help rather than being caught up in the human side of life: false guilt, being weak and passive, or demanding and overpowering.  The Holy Spirit helps the person see their problems, their difficulties, and also enables them to work them out, like my example of cutting my thumb. God showed me other things that were involved in my cursing that I needed to learn. Rather than being defeated and thinking, “I'm no good, I'm awful, I'm terrible. You hate me.” Because I've admitted I sinned, I asked for forgiveness, and I've given over to you the right to show me any other things that you want to show me or teach me. And then the fourth step is glorification, or it's the ultimate act of God's grace that transforms me, in total, into this new creation that is now suited for an eternal life in the presence of God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. So that's the ultimate act of sanctification, the whole or the or the final work of God in order to bring me into fellowship with Him in Heaven, forever and ever.

Question 14. Now, what we're going to do is look at the second concept, the Calvinistic concept, of sanctification.  List other terms more traditionally applied to this work of sanctification. Remember clients will have their own upbringing with various descriptions, like “The initial act of sanctification”, “The process of sanctification”, “Complete and final sanctification”. Seek to clarify their understanding of what they mean in their description while keeping in mind, they may or may not understand. Be gracious more that testing their understanding.

Question 15. The Calvinists break this down into three parts, the first one being the initial act of sanctification, the second being the process of sanctification, and the third being complete and final sanctification. There are some different differences here, in that the initial act of Sanctification means that the moment a person believes in Christ, he or she is sanctified. This is also called positional sanctification. It means that believers are called saints, irrespective of their spiritual attainments. For example, a client is saved, but has a very vicious temper, and he's been physically abusive to his wife. He kneels down in your office, and he prays a prayer of acceptance, asks for forgiveness from God, and when he stands up, he is a saint in the eyes of God. It doesn't matter if his wife is still sitting there with bruises, or she doesn't believe him, or he curses 10 minutes after he walks out of your office.

Question 16. Passages that support this view are: I Corinthians 1:2, and Ephesians 1:1, and Hebrews 10:10, and Jude 3:3, and 2 Thessalonians 2:13, and Hebrews 13:12. Righteousness and holiness is imputed to the believer because of his new relationship to Jesus. In positional sanctification, there is no second work of grace. Because of this positional relationship with Christ, the believer is encouraged to walk as is proper among the saints. Ephesians 5:3 discusses that.

Question 17. The person is seen as both saved and sanctified in one act. God has done the whole work of sanctification; forgiveness of their sins and enabled to be submissive to God. The person is able to work with Christ to be submissive and obedient to God. 

Clients can also distort this perspective. What you can hear the person say to you is, “I am saved and forgiven, and in God's eyes, I'm accepted and righteous. And because of that act of God through Christ given to me, then when I do sin, I ask God to forgive me, and I'm all right now.” Just like the Wesleyan who said, “I can't sin, I'm saved and sanctified,” a Calvinist can say, “Of course, I sin. I sin all the time, and I can't help it. In God's eyes, I'm righteous and pure. I'm forgiven. He's done the whole work. I'm all right with Him, and He knows that when I sin, then I can ask for forgiveness.” So, what's very important to this person is the idea of forgiveness. Because what forgiveness means is, one, I sin, and I can't help but two, I'm right with God, because He did this whole work in me.” It can become a pattern of sinning, repenting, and forgiveness. That was not what John Calvin intended any more than it was for John Wesley to say, if you're sanctified, you can't sin if you've had this second work of grace. You will encounter people that don't understand things, have bad teaching, or are purposely misrepresenting these things under the cloak of being a Christian, distorting their faith and sin. Or others may be insecure in their faith, uncertain if they are saved or will spend eternal life with God in heaven.

The idea behind this positional sanctification, this first work of grace, that John Calvin defined was intended to refer to the Convert as sanctified or set apart by God, and in God's eye, through the righteousness and holiness of Christ Jesus, which he imparted to The Convert at the instant of salvation than to be forgiven and righteous. The scriptures in Corinthians and Ephesians call the churches at Ephesus in Corinth collections of the saints, even though these people had only recently been converted and had previously been involved in extremely sinful practices. There is a new relationship to God. The person is new and forgiven (2 Corinthians 5:17); a place of comfort in their own minds. They have the promise from God that even though they were doing all these things, they now are pure, holy, set aside. When you see the client acting as if he has a license or liberty to repeatedly ask for forgiveness for the repeated sin, or declares he has no bad desires, then he is setting aside God's intention for redemption. 

Question 18. The process of sanctification for John Calvin paralleled the Wesleyan in many ways: it's a lifelong process. Calvin was saying, continue this redemption into your everyday life. Continue to experience the reality that you've been changed; you can learn, grow, and mature. So, first part the Convert is urged to continue to surrender himself in this process of salvation. Live out each day of your life in the second phase of sanctification instant by instant or situation by situation. The second part of this process allows the Holy Spirit to address the deeds of the body, obedience to the Word, the fruit of the Spirit and service. This is the Biblical admonition to continually surrender to Jesus the everyday events of the convert's life, Romans 6:13, 12:1. And the third step is that the believer’s whole dedication allows him to grow in the grace and knowledge of God, to increase in the person of Christ in a way that Jesus lives through the person, or to become more like the Lord. Let go of old behaviors, and to be transformed into this image of Christ (Romans 13:14). 

Copyright 1987, 1990, 1993 by Daniel D. Wilkinson. All rights reserved. For more information concerning this material, write to:
The Biblical Christian Counseling Ministries, Inc., 2730 Radcliffe Dr., Florissant, MO 63031.
Any reproduction of this material without the express written consent of the author is prohibited. Printed in the U.S.A..