Hope for When Sanctification Feels Slow

You Are In Process

The reality is that sanctification isn’t defined as necessary; it’s simply defined as a reality. If you have been justified, you are being sanctified. You’re in the process. The process may be slow, you may be making it slower, you may be entertaining sin in your life that slows you down, but every true believer will manifest sanctification. What I mean by that is this: if you have genuinely been regenerated and born again, it’s going to show up in your life. Ephesians 2 says this:

We have been saved by grace through faith . . . unto good works which God has before ordained that we should walk in them. (Eph. 2:8–10)

Sanctification

John MacArthur

Veteran pastor John MacArthur makes the case that Jesus’s passion for his people is sanctification and encourages pastors to revolve their ministry around the increasing sanctification of their members through preaching and discipleship.

That’s why John says, If you don’t love your neighbor, if you don’t love the Lord, if you don’t desire the fellowship of the saints, if you’re not dealing with sin in your life, you’re not a Christian.

Sanctification isn’t a necessity, it’s a reality.

Your New Reality

Sanctification isn’t a necessity, it’s a reality. By your obedience to the Lord, your time in the word, and your time in prayer using the means of grace, you decide the speed at which that sanctification takes place. But it is taking place if you are genuinely a regenerate person.

You can’t be born again and not manifest the evidence of that; this is who you are. If any man being in Christ is a new creation, all things pass away and new things come. You’re a new creation. So sanctification is as much a reality as glorification; it’s just the process that is affected by how obedient and willing we really are.

John MacArthur is the author of Sanctification: God’s Passion for His People.

John MacArthur is the pastor-teacher of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, where he has served since 1969. He is known around the world for his verse-by-verse expository preaching and his pulpit ministry via his daily radio program, Grace to You. He has also written or edited nearly four hundred books and study guides. MacArthur is chancellor emeritus of the Master’s Seminary and Master’s University. He and his wife, Patricia, live in Southern California and have four grown children.