Seven miles east of Wisdom, Montana. Summer 2023.
I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.
Ezekiel 36:26
I’d like to talk about salvation, sanctification, and a curious effect of the latter.
To be “saved” means of course that you’re now in God’s family, now a member of the Body of Christ. Your sins are forgiven — past and future — and your relationship with God is re-set.
Though some come to salvation via a lightning-bolt moment, others take a longer time, like someone awakening from sleep who becomes aware that they have for some time been awake.
Either way, salvation is a relatively quick thing, an event.
Sanctification is a process, one in which you are being made day-on-day more like Christ. It begins the moment you are saved, and it lasts the rest of your life.
Here’s the curious thing: At some point in this process, you’ll come to realize that the more you are in Christ, in the Spirit — and Christ and the Spirit in you — the more your heart will be broken by this world.
Like a patient with an ill-set bone, the good doctor must first re-break so that he might properly set.