Everyone believes that change is possible. We might resist it but even our resistance creates it’s own kind of change. We might embrace change. We all believe that change is possible. God teaches us that change is inevitable in the way that we age. Our bodies change. We will be changed people tomorrow. The question becomes: do we approach that change with any sort of intentionality or are we just letting change happen to us?
The heart of Christianity has to do with Jesus Christ dying on the cross for the sins of the world, being buried, and resurrecting from the dead. Not only that, Jesus ascended into heaven where he sits at the right hand of the Father currently ruling and reigning. This is the grounded reality that our hope rests upon. A concept that is closely related and could even be called a part of this salvation is justification. Justification has it’s history in legal terminology in which someone is declared righteous. Justification was the doctrine Luther noticed in Romans that set him free from a life of misery in religion. Because of the righteous life of Christ and his death of the cross, we have been justified if we believe and repent. In Christ, we are declared righteous so that when the Father sees us, he sees the righteousness of Christ. The righteousness of Christ ha been given, or imputed to us. We no longer stand condemned because of our sins. We stand righteous before God.
Not only this, but God has made us holy (1 Cor. 6:11). This is where we get the word sanctification, to be holy. In the Bible, we see that sanctification has several uses. One has to do with our positional sanctification. This means that we have been made holy before God. We are in some senses perfectly sanctified. And yet, many of us do not feel holy because we still experience the effects of sin and sin ourselves. This is where the other use of sanctification comes into play. We are to be holy (Heb. 12:14; 1 Pet. 1:15-16). For example, Wayne Grudem defines sanctification as “a progressive work of God and man that makes us more and more free from sin and like Christ in our actual lives” (Systematic Theology, 747). Meaning that we are justified once, declared righteous, and now our lives are to be about sanctification until the day when we are glorified. This is why you’ll often see salvation summarized as: justification - sanctification - glorification, in that order.
Now why does this matter? What does this have to do with change? The Bible calls us to be holy and to be sanctified. We have already been declared holy and righteous. We are to grow and mature. Which brings us back to change. We will change. The question is, in what manner? Do we have a vision for what it means to be sanctified? In the scheme of triperspectivalism, this sanctification is three-fold. We are to grow up into Christ our head in three capacities: head, heart, and hands. Providing these three biblical and theological categories allows us to see sanctification holistically. We can always grow in our intellect, our affections, and our lived life. We want to grow in those three areas in ways that honor God. If we are pursuing sanctification, we cannot settle for just one of the three. We must be educated in our head, our heart, and our hands. When we overly rely upon one aspect, or insist that one aspect is the primary starting point, we misrepresent God himself.