Regeneration is instantaneous, but sanctification takes time. The “developing” of the photographer's picture may illustrate God's process of sanctifying the regenerate soul. But it is development by new access of truth or light, while the photographer's picture is usually developed in the dark. This development cannot be accomplished in a moment. “We try in our religious lives to practise instantaneous photography. One minute for prayer will give us a vision of God, and we think that is enough. Our pictures are poor because our negatives are weak. We do not give God a long enough sitting to get a good likeness.”
Salvation is something past, something present, and something future; a past fact, justification; a present process, sanctification; a future consummation, redemption and glory. David, in Ps. 51:1, 2, prays not only that God will blot out his transgressions (justification), but that God will wash him thoroughly from his iniquity (sanctification). E. G. Robinson: “Sanctification consists negatively, in the removal of the penal consequences of sin from the moral nature; positively, in the progressive implanting and growth of a new principle of life.... The Christian church is a succession of copies of the character of Christ. Paul never says: ‘be ye imitators of me’ (1 Cor. 4:16), except when writing to those who had no copies of the New Testament or of the Gospels.”
Clarke, Christian Theology, 366—“Sanctification does not mean perfection reached, but the progress of the divine life toward perfection. Sanctification is the Christianizing of the Christian.” It is not simply deliverance from the penalty of sin, but the development of a divine life that conquers sin. A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 343—“Any man who thinks he is a Christian, and that he has accepted Christ for justification, when he did not at the same time accept him for sanctification, is miserably deluded in that very experience.”
This definition implies:
(a) That, although in regeneration the governing disposition of the soul is made holy, there still remain tendencies to evil which are unsubdued.
John 13:10—“He that is bathed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit [i. e., as a whole]”; Rom. 6:12—“Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey the lusts thereof”—sin dwells [pg 870]in a believer, but it reigns in an unbeliever (C. H. M.). Subordinate volitions in the Christian are not always determined in character by the fundamental choice; eddies in the stream sometimes run counter to the general course of the current.
This doctrine is the opposite of that expressed in the phrase: “the essential divinity of the human.” Not culture, but crucifixion, is what the Holy Spirit prescribes for the natural man. There are two natures in the Christian, as Paul shows in Romans 7. The one flourishes at the other's expense. The vine dresser has to cut the rank shoots from self, that all our force may be thrown into growing fruit. Deadwood must be cut out; living wood must be cut back (John 15:2). Sanctification is not a matter of course, which will go on whatever we do, or do not do. It requires a direct superintendence and surgery on the one hand, and, on the other hand a practical hatred of evil on our part that coöperates with the husbandry of God.
(b) That the existence in the believer of these two opposing principles gives rise to a conflict which lasts through life.
Gal. 5:17—“For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary the one to the other; that ye may not do the things that ye would”—not, as the A. V. had it, “so that ye cannot do the things that ye would”; the Spirit who dwells in believers is represented as enabling them successfully to resist those tendencies to evil which naturally exist within them; James 4:5(the marginal and better reading)—“That spirit which he made to dwell in us yearneth for us even unto jealous envy”—i. e., God's love, like all true love, longs to have its objects wholly for its own. The Christian is two men in one; but he is to “put away the old man” and “put on the new man” (Eph. 4:22, 23). Compare Ecclesiasticus 2:1—“My son, if thou dost set out to serve the Lord, prepare thy soul for temptation.”
1 Tim. 6:12—“fight the good fight of the faith”—ἀγωνίζου τὸν καλὸν ἀγῶνα τῆς πίστεως = the beautiful, honorable, glorious fight; since it has a noble helper, incentive, and reward. It is the commonest of all struggles, but the issue determines our destiny. An Indian received as a gift some tobacco in which he found a half dollar hidden. He brought it back next day, saying that good Indian had fought all night with bad Indian, one telling him to keep, the other telling him to return.