My wrong beliefs must be pushed out. But how? I’m addicted to self-trust, even if it’s the ironic self-trust of self-doubt. How do I get myself out of that picture? How do I finally come round to the rest and joy that so many others have found in finally being transformed by a clear picture of their union with Christ?
Paul seemed to desire for the Colossians that which I need when he prayed that they would have “…the wealth that comes from the full assurance of understanding, resulting in a true knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ Himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” (Col 2:2b-3) It seems that God’s answer to my miserly understanding of His goodness and my unwieldy self-sufficiency is to know Christ more fully, a knowing which, Paul reminds the Colossians a few verses later, produces gratitude (v. 7). Knowing Christ more fully, and living a life of gratitude, must necessarily displace the pride that so easily rules me. Appreciation and arrogance can’t co-exist.
That appreciation must be centered on the truth of who Christ is and what He has done. I know myself well enough to know that some vaguely mustered-up sense of positive reception won’t stick. I need to read and hear and taste the truth about Christ’s work daily. Trust in His sufficiency must displace self-sufficiency. I can’t be content with a faith that has as its subject union with only “half a Christ,” as Lovelace put it. I must meditate on the fact that the same Christ who died to justify me is the Christ who sanctifies me, and that He is no less sufficient for the latter than for the former. It seems the great Dutch theologian Hermann Bavink had this idea in mind when he wrote:
“In order to understand the sanctification of the believers properly, one must see clearly that Christ is our sanctification in the same sense that He is our righteousness. He is a perfect and adequate Savior; He does not accomplish His work until He has caused us to share fully in eternal life and the heavenly blessedness. … But this sanctification which Christ has achieved for His church is not something which remains outside of us but something, rather, which is really shared with us.”[1]
God’s permanent pleasure in Christ, irrevocable and unshakable, is mine too, because of the sanctification that already rests finished in Christ. To know that truth and dwell in it richly shuts the mouth of every fear I have, and pushes out the pride and insecurity that says that my sanctification is simply about making me a better person in order to somehow make me worthy of God’s love. My response to God, if it is to be of gratitude and not servitude, must come from a right understanding of my union with Christ. Only when I rest in that truth will I stop seeing God’s love for me as being dependent on my worthiness, and respond in love to Him because He has already made me worthy – in Christ!
1Bavinck, Herman, Our Reasonable Faith: A Survey of Christian Doctrine, trans. Henry Zylstra (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1956), 473.
