Mark 4:26-28: The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear.
There’s a helpful post by Calvin Lane on the Covenant blog about justification and sanctification. Lane holds that though we often get confused about them, both justification and sanctification are wholly God’s gifts.
It happens that as I read Lane’s post, I was eating a delicious open-faced sandwich on sourdough bread that I’d baked, with a basil pesto that I made using basil that I’d grown, topped with tomatoes that I’d started by seed in the garage last January, and dabbed with dollops of homemade yogurt that I made yesterday – delicious.
Notice all the mentions of “I” in the previous sentence.
In that vein, it’s tempting to think of sanctification as something I do. Yes, it’s a grateful (and, as Lane amusingly notes, polite) response to the saving and wholly unmerited justification given to me by God in Jesus. But, while God has done the justifying for my sake, I’m inclined to think I do the sanctifying in response.
But, in fact, I no more accomplish sanctification than I “made” any part of my sandwich. True, I planted tomato seeds, but I didn’t “make” the tomato; I didn’t turn a bit of dried plant material into a living fruit-producing thing of beauty. I didn’t grow the wheat for the bread or produce the organisms in the sourdough starter or the yogurt. For that matter, neither did the grain farmer “grow” the wheat in the most basic sense. Like the tomato seeds, the wheat kernels germinated and the plants grew because God willed them to grow, not because the farmer did.
God invited me to participate in growing the tomatoes, baking the bread, making the yogurt, etc. And I loved all those things; it’s joyful participation. But I didn’t “do” any of it. Same with sanctification. I may be invited to participate, but the doing is all God.
Finally, if I’m ever tempted to think, “Yeah, but if you hadn’t watered the tomatoes, they wouldn’t have borne fruit,” I think of the neglected rose bush out by the AC compressor. It’s utterly neglected. Never watered, never fed, never pruned. Yet year after year, it produces the most gobsmackingly beautiful and fragrant roses. The rose sprouts and grows, I know not how. So it is with the Kingdom of God.