Re-Formation – Increasing Conformity to the Image of Christ
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"the divine agenda for the rest of my life on earth is my sanctification"
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by J.I. Packer 

Diseases and Delusions
I opened my eyes to find myself lying on my back in a strange bed. Because my head was raised, I could see into the semidarkness beyond the bed. My first thought was that I was in New York’s Grand Central railroad station at night. (I had recently seen a photo of the huge Grand Central hall at night, and thought I was recognizing that location.) Then I saw, sitting on the left-hand side of the bed, my mother. She was wearing the big flowered overalls and dusting-cap in which she used to clean the house. She did not speak, but smiled and gave me a cold drink through the spout of what looked like a small white teapot. Afterward they told me that I went straight back to sleep.

In fact, as I learned when I woke next, I was nowhere near Grand Central station. I was in the hospital in my English hometown, having had surgery for a depressed fracture of the skull, which was thought to have damaged my brain. What I saw was partly a delusion, for the ward did not really look like the Grand Central station of the photo either by day or by night. The person keeping vigil by my bed had been a nurse in uniform, wearing a frilly headdress, blue frock, and white apron. I saw what I saw (if I shut my eyes I can see it now), but I was not seeing what was there. My shocked and battered brain was playing tricks on me. Reality was different from what I thought it was.

All of that happened in 1933, when I was seven years old. Why do I now hark back to it? Because it illustrates two truths that I find I have to stress over and over again when talking to Christians today.

First Truth
We are all invalids in God’s hospital. In moral and spiritual terms we are all sick and damaged, diseased and deformed, scarred and sore, lame and lopsided, to a far, far greater extent than we realize. Under God’s care we are getting better, but we are not yet well. The modern Christian likes to dwell on present blessings rather than future prospects. Modern Christians egg each other on to testify that where once we were blind, deaf, and indeed dead so far as God was concerned, now through Christ we have been brought to life, radically transformed, and blessed with spiritual health. Thank God, there is real truth in that. But spiritual health means being holy and whole. To the extent that we fall short of being holy and whole, we are not fully healthy either.

We need to realize that the spiritual health we testify to is only partial and relative, a matter of being less sick and less incapacitated now than we were before. Measured by the absolute standard of spiritual health that we see in Jesus Christ, we are all of us no more, just as we are no less, than invalids in the process of being cured. The old saying that the Church is God’s hospital remains true. Our spiritual life is at best a fragile convalescence, easily disrupted. When there are tensions, strains, perversities, and disappointments in the Christian fellowship, it helps to remember that no Christian, and no church, ever has the clean bill of spiritual health that would match the total physical well-being for which today’s fitness seekers labor. To long for total spiritual well-being is right and natural, but to believe that one is anywhere near it is to be utterly self-deceived.

It is not always easy to grasp that one is ill. I remember how in the hospital in 1933 I was, so to speak, kept in cotton wool for several days by doctor’s orders, since nobody knew how much harm might have come to my brain. I also remember how hard it was to think of myself as a sick boy, since at no stage did I feel any ill effects at all. For slipping out of bed to wander round, and for standing on the bed to see how springy it was, I was tongue-lashed, I recall, by the nurse who upbraided me with Welsh eloquence for, in effect, putting my life at risk. After this I remained dutifully bedbound, according to instructions – but still without any conviction inside me that it needed to be that way. (Seven-year-olds can be as opinionated as any adult, and I certainly was.)

In the same way, Christians today can imagine themselves to be strong, healthy, and holy when, in fact, they are actually weak, sick, and sinful in ways that are noticeable not just to their heavenly Father, but also to their fellow believers. Pride and complacency, however, blind us to this reality. We decline to be told when we are slipping; thinking we stand, we set ourselves up to fall, and predictably, alas, we do fall.

In good hospitals, patients receive regular curative treatment as well as constant care, and the treatment determines in a direct way the form that the care will take. In God’s hospital the course of treatment that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the permanent medical staff (if I dare so speak), are giving to each of us with a view to our final restoration to the fullness of the divine image, is called sanctification. It is a process that includes on the one hand medication and diet (in the form of biblical instruction and admonition coming in various ways to the heart), and on the other hand tests and exercises (in the form of internal and external pressures, providentially ordered, to which we have to make active response). The process goes on as long as we are in this world, which is something that God decides in each case.

Like patients in any ordinary hospital, we are impatient for recovery. The question that forms the title of Lane Adams’ wonderful little book on God’s sanctifying therapy, How Come It’s Taking Me So Long to Get Better? is often our heart-cry to God.1 The truth is that God knows what He is doing, but sometimes, for reasons connected with the maturity and ministry that He has in view for us, He makes haste slowly. That is something we have to learn humbly to accept. We are in a hurry; He is not.

Second Truth
We are all prone to damaging delusions. On my first night in the hospital, the place was not where I thought it was, and the person by my bed was not whom I thought it was: I was in a state of delusion. The next day I felt well and could not think of myself as ill, but that was delusion too. In the same way believers are often deluded about Christian faith and living.

There are the delusions of direct theological error about God’s nature and character and ways and purposes. In liberal and modernist and process theology, to look no further, these abound.

There are the delusions of doubt and unbelief. Something horrible happens, and at once we conclude that God must have forgotten us or turned against us, or perhaps gone out of existence.

There are the delusions of self-confidence. We think we have finally licked some particular sin or weakness by which we were previously dragged down. We relax, and a sense of well-being, security, and triumph creeps over us. Then comes the double whammy of fresh external pressure and a renewed inner urge, and down we go again.

There are also the delusions that disrupt relationships. We misunderstand each other’s motives and purposes. We blame others for causing the tensions and generating the hostility, and are blind to our own part in provoking the difficulties.

There are delusions too, resulting from failure to distinguish things that differ – for example, equating the biblical gospel with Jesus-centered legalism, Jesus-centered lawlessness, Jesus-centered socialism, or Jesus-centered racism; equating secular psychological counseling with biblical pastoral direction; or equating inner passivity as a formula for holiness with the biblical call to disciplined moral effort in the power of the Holy Spirit.2 All such delusions spell disaster.

And then there are delusions about the Christian life – that it will ordinarily be easy, successful, healthy and wealthy, excitingly punctuated by miracles; that such acts as fornication and tax evasion will not matter as long as nobody finds out; that God always wants you to do what you feel like doing; and so on, and so on. Satan, the father of lies and a past master at deluding, labors constantly to mislead and muddle God’s people, so that humble self-suspicion, and the commonsensical hardheadedness that used to be called prudence, and the habit of testing by Scripture things hitherto taken for granted, become virtues of very great importance.

Throughout this book, I shall be appealing to Scripture constantly. It is the only safe way, for we are all as vulnerable to delusions about holiness as we are about anything else.

God’s Prescription for Us
The sort of physician I appreciate (and you, too, I expect) takes the patient into his or her confidence and explains his or her diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. Then he or she tells you what the prescribed medication is meant to do. You are put fully in the picture, and so you know where you are.

Not all physicians behave this way, but the best do – and so does the Great Physician of our souls, our Lord Jesus Christ. His therapeutic style, if I may express it this way, is communicative from first to last. The Bible, heard and read, preached and taught, interpreted and applied, is both the channel and the content of His communication. It is as if Jesus hands us the canonical Scriptures directly, telling us that they are the authoritative and all-sufficient source from which we must learn both what we are to do in order to be His followers and also what He has done, is doing, and will do to save us from the fatal sickness of sin. Think of your Bible, then, as Jesus Christ’s gift to you; think of it as a letter to you from your Lord. Think of your name, written in the front of it, as if Jesus Himself had written it there. Think of Jesus each time you read your Bible. Think of Him asking you, page by page and chapter by chapter, what you have just learned about the need, nature, method, and effect of the grace that He brings, and about the path of loyal discipleship that He calls you to tread. That is the way to profit from the Bible. Only when your reading of the written Word feeds into your relationship with the living Word (Jesus) does the Bible operate as the channel of light and life that God means it to be….

Why did we need salvation?
Why, because we were sinners! And, as such, lost! This has been said already, but the assertion needs now to be amplified.

We were sinners: sinners in practice, because we were sinners by nature. Sin is a universal, trans-cultural reality; an infection from which no human being anywhere, at any time, is exempt. What is it? Formally, it is what answer fourteen of the Westminster Shorter Catechism says it is: “Any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God.”

But it is also an energy, an obsession, an allergic reaction to God’s law, an irrational anti-God syndrome in our spiritual system that drives us to exalt ourselves and steels our hearts against devotion and obedience to our Maker. Pride, ingratitude and self-gratification are its basic expressions, leading sometimes to antisocial behavior and always, even in the nicest and most honorable people, to a lack of love for God at the motivational level. The religious practice of unregenerate mankind, whatever its form, may be and often is conscientious and laborious. It always proves, however, on analysis to be self-seeking and God-exploiting, rather than self-denying and God-glorifying, in its purpose.

Both Old Testament Hebrew and New Testament Greek have a wide range of words for “sin,” picturing its nonconformity to God in a variety of different ways:

• as rebellion against our rightful owner and ruler;
• as transgression of the bounds He set;
• as missing the mark He told us to aim at;
• as breaking the law He enacted;
• as defiling (dirtying, polluting) ourselves in His sight, so making ourselves unfit for His company;
• as embracing folly by shutting our ears to His wisdom; and
• as incurring guilt before His judgment seat.

New Life
The New Testament goes on to explain to us the newness of our life in Christ as a real and radical alteration of our personal being. It tells us that believers have been united to Christ, and are now “in” Him, having died (finished with their old life) and been raised (started off in a new life) with their Lord (Romans 6:3-11; Ephesians 2:4-10; Colossians 2:11-14). In Christ they enjoy a new status. They are:

• justified (pardoned and accepted);
• adopted (made God’s children and heirs); and
• cleansed (fitted for fellowship with their holy Creator).

Nor is that all. In Christ believers are also involved in a process of character change. The Holy Spirit (through whose agency faith was engendered in them) and Christ (through whom the new life was won for them, and became consciously real to them) now indwell them to transform them “into his [Christ’s] likeness with ever-increasing glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Christ and His Spirit empower them to put sinful habits to death and bring forth in them the new behavior patterns that constitute the Spirit’s “fruit” (see Romans 8:9-13; 2 Corinthians 3:18; Galatians 5:22-26). This, too, is momentous.

We who believe have to wake up to the fact that the ministry to us of the Father and the Son through the Spirit has turned us into different people from what we were by nature. Our present task is, as it is sometimes put, to be what we are – to live out what God has wrought in, expressing in action the new life (new vision, motivation, devotion, and sense of direction) that has now become ours. Or, as Paul puts it, “Live a life worthy of the calling you have received” (Ephesians 4:1). The thought is the same.

The hearts of saved persons will always affirm that their conversion, or new birth, or renewal (different people use different words at this point) was the work of God from first to last. All the searching and struggling that went into it will be felt to have been no less divinely orchestrated than were its final stages of conviction, commitment, and assurance. Ever since the fifth century, Western Christians have used Augustine’s term for God’s initiative of life-giving love within the soul, giving thanks for His prevenient grace: grace that moves in as a renovating force to make the spiritually blind see, the spiritually deaf hear, and the spiritually dumb speak. (“Prevenient” means “coming before” – coming to one, before one is spiritually alive, in order to impart life.)….

God’s Future Plan of Salvation
The lesson to be learned here is that our thinking about the future part of God’s saving plan must start where Binney starts: namely, with recognition that the triune God is light. This means that He is holy – pure and perfect, loving all good and hating all evil. Also, it means that He constantly searches out all that is in us, so that “everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account” (Hebrews 4:13). (The exposing of what would otherwise lie hidden in darkness is one of the thoughts that the biblical image of light regularly conveys: see John 3:19-21; Ephesians 5:11-14.) So no unholiness in us will go unnoticed.

The triune God who is light is also love – holy love (see 1 John 1:5; 4:8,16). What does this mean? It means that only what is actually holy and worthy can give God actual satisfaction. As the love that binds spouses in a good marriage is an evaluative love that appreciates the excellence of the loved one, so the love that binds Father, Son, and Spirit is an evaluative love whereby each delights in the holiness of the other two, and in the holiness of the holy angels. That love will not have full joy of us who are Christ’s until we are holy too. Nor can we fully love God, and fully enjoy Him as we love Him, while we know ourselves to be still in the grip of moral weaknesses and perversities. To know oneself, here and now, to be, in Luther’s phrase, simul justus et peccator – a justified sinner, right with God though sinning still – is a wonderful privilege. But the hope set before us is yet more wonderful, namely to be in the presence of God, seeing Him and fellowshipping with Him, as one who is a sinner no longer. What God plans for us in the present is to lead us toward this goal.

So the divine agenda for the rest of my life on earth is my sanctification. As has already been hinted, I have been raised from spiritual death and born again in Christ so that I might be changed into His moral likeness. “You were taught,” Paul tells me (for I, like all other Bible-readers, stand with the Ephesian Christians at this point), “with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self . . . to be made new . . . and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4:22-24; see also Colossians 3:9-10). The detailed moral directives in each of Paul’s letters show me that he means this in the most literal and down-to-earth sense.

Conformed to the Image of Christ
Increasing conformity to the image of Christ – to His righteousness and holiness, His love and humility, His self-denial and single-mindedness, His wisdom and prudence, His boldness and self-control, His faithfulness and strength under pressure – is the sum and substance of the “good works” for which Christians have been created (that is, re-created) in Christ (Ephesians 2:10). It is also the “good” for which in all things God works in the lives of those who love Him (Romans 8:28). The God in whose hands I am, willy-nilly, and whom I have in fact gladly and penitently put in charge of my life, is in the holiness business. Part of the answer to the question that life’s roller-coaster ride repeatedly raises, why has this happened to me? is always: it is moral training and discipline, planned by my heavenly Father to help me forward along the path of Christlike virtue (see Hebrews 12:5-11).

Many years ago a wise man explained to me that the Christian life – meaning, as we have just seen, the life of growth into Christlikeness – is like a three-legged stool, which can only stand if all three legs are in place. He spoke of the three legs as D, E and P – doctrine, experience and practice.

• Doctrine: This refers to the truth and wisdom that we may constantly receive from God through Bible study, Bible-based meditation (not the same thing, be it said), and the ministry of the biblical Word.

• Experience: This means the many-sided fellowship with God to which divine truth and wisdom lead when brought to bear on our lives: the faith, the penitence, the renewed sense of sin, the restored joy of salvation, the distress at our repeated failure to be for Christ all we wanted to be, the sorrow we feel at others’ need and misery as we pray for them, the delight we feel when others are blessed. It also includes the moments of strong assurance and longing for heaven, the learning of new lessons about God’s way through the pain and distress of suffering, the fear of proving oneself to be an unconverted hypocrite after all, the deeper awareness of God’s reality that a heart-to-heart exchange with another believer will impart, the vivid sense of Christ’s closeness that comes through corporate praise, particularly through serious sharing in the Lord’s Supper, and so forth.

• Practice: This involves setting oneself to obey the truth and follow the path of wisdom in one’s relationships, one’s day-to-day self-management, one’s family involvement, one’s church commitment, one’s role in the community, one’s wage-earning employment, and so on.

The teaching is true. A Christian who comes short in D, E or P is inescapably in trouble, one way or another. Where people are ignorant of God’s truth and wisdom, or have no conscience about giving it practical expression, or omit to seek God constantly in terms of it and deal with Him on the basis of it, there the Christian life has come to grief. The stool has fallen down. Distorted development is thwarting God’s plan for healthy spiritual growth.

Renewal of the Church
It seems clear that at least part of God’s purpose in movements of church renewal is always the recovering of D and/or E and/or P in individual lives. Such movements are not truly perceived and realistically assessed until this is seen. The Reformation movement, for instance, is often viewed as a technical theological conflict, rarefied and remote, expressing nothing nobler than nationalistic passion. But its leaders saw it, and vast numbers experienced it, as a grass roots revival of pure religion. More obvious examples are: the devotional revival embracing both Counter-Reformation Catholicism and Protestant Puritanism in the early seventeenth century; the British Methodist revival and New England’s Great Awakening in the mid-eighteenth century; and the so-called “holiness revival,” with its many mutations of Methodist motifs, that touched the entire Protestant world between 1850 and 1950. A current illustration is the ongoing Holy Spirit renewal of our own time.

What should one say of the worldwide charismatic movement of the past thirty years [written in 1992]? Laying aside matters of detail, I believe God has generated it in order to counter and correct the death-dealing fashions of thought which, starting with theologians and spreading everywhere, for the past century have done damage by demurring at the truth of the Trinity, diminishing the deity of Jesus Christ, and for practical purposes discounting the Holy Spirit altogether.

To deal with these theoretical errors, and the spiritual deadness to which they have given rise, God has raised up this movement of uninhibited and flamboyant Holy Spirit life, whereby the truth of the Trinity is vindicated (D), fellowship-union with the divine Christ through the Spirit as the focus of spiritual life is freshly explored (E), and the thought of Christianity as a supernatural life in the Spirit, singing, sharing, and serving, has again become respectable (P). Those who maintain the errors mentioned are thus comprehensively outflanked, not to say upstaged. How wise is the strategy of God!

[excerpt from Rediscovering Holiness, Chapter 2, (c) 1992 by J.I. Packer, first published by Vine Books, an imprint of Servant Publications in 1992. An updated version was published by Regal Books in 2009.]