Counting the Cost: When Sanctification is Painful and Confusing
By: ALEX SHIPLEY on | Comments: 0Before continuing on with this article, I suggest you go and read C.S. Lewis’ book Mere Christianity, or at least for the purpose of this article flip to Book IV and read Chapter 9 titled “Counting the Cost”.
Most of us, when we were saved, did so because we recognized a need. We recognized we were sinners, feeling that weight of that sin in our hearts, and realized we needed a remedy, a great Healer, and that was and is Jesus. Once we’re saved we fully expect Him to fix us and to continuously fix us as we continuously fail. As we sin again and again, as we fall from time to time, we look to Him to pick us up, help us learn, and to fix us where we were broken. That is in fact what a healer does, right? They make you better.
Lewis doesn’t deny this aspect of Christianity or of God, but points out that Jesus said before we became Christians we were to, “count the cost, ” referring to Luke 14:28 which says, “For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?” (ESV).
But did we count the cost? Christianity isn’t about being fixed over and over again until we’re finally in paradise. If that’s the case then we will never learn, grow, serve, and desire God for anything more than a quick and temporary fix. He’s not Tylenol or, as Lewis puts it, when our tooth hurts we don’t just get something to numb the pain. We go to the dentist to solve the problem itself, not just to prevent something like that from happening again, but it actually looks and feels better. Being a Christian is about being made new, being made different, and being made more like our Father in Heaven. But did we understand what that process would look like when it began, what it would feel like, and what He would ultimately do in order to get us there? Probably not. And that’s why the pain and struggle of sanctification, the process of being made holy, is so confusing to us. We don’t understand what God is doing in our lives to make us like Him and why it sometimes comes with growing pains, struggles, and fear.
God is satisfied with nothing less than pure perfection. The Christian might say, “How can I be perfect when the Bible says that I can do no good apart from Him and that I am in fact a sinner? I will always fail. How can I be perfect when He says I can’t be?” Well Christian, you’re right. Lewis points out that it is not perfection completed by our own work or will that He expects, but rather because He is perfect, He is the only one who can work out and complete perfection in us. Even though our effort will get us nowhere on our own, God expects us to walk towards Him in faith and trust and He will carry us the rest of the way.
Lewis says, “This Helper [God], who will, in the long run, be satisfied with nothing less than absolute perfection, will also be delighted with the first feeble, stumbling effort you make tomorrow to do the simplest duty”.
He then presents an analogy of believers as a living house, which he attributes to a writer named George MacDonald. He writes:
“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”
Before becoming Christians, we were completely separated from Him. We were sinners and broken, just as we continue to be now, but before Him we had no hope. To use the living house analogy, the house was abandoned. No one was living inside able to peel away the bubbled, water damaged, wallpaper; dust off the cobwebs stretched from wall to wall and corner to corner; fix our damaged, leaky pipes, dripping with murky, brown, water; or repair the bones of the house that ache and groan with every gust of wind. And we couldn’t fix it on our own.
Then, when we were saved, God opened the door of our hearts and instead of grimacing at the horrific sight of it all or sighing at the amount of work that had to be done, He simply got to work. For most builders or house repairers, when the job is complete they pack up their tools, wipe the sweat from their foreheads, and with a satisfied feeling in their bellies they step outside never to return until the next problem arises. But God decides to lay up residence among the debris and keep working. Where others would say, “we have another job to go to” or “that’s just a waste of time”. He begins to design, add on, and make the space beautiful, not just livable or good enough.
Because, you see, He isn’t satisfied with fixing us up and leaving us where we are. He’s an architect who wants to build something magnificent. In other words, something from nothing. While He does remedy us He’s also sanctifying us for the purpose of holiness and godliness. To us, the process of kicking down walls to build on and redoing those scraped up floors is confusing and painful to us at the moment, as we’re unable to see what He’s doing or what He hopes to accomplish at the end of it all. We haven’t seen the blueprints and we probably wouldn’t understand them even if we could. This extra work isn’t what we asked for. But, He’s determined to make something better, changing and redecorating every space of our hearts to look more like Him.
In fact, instead of repairing our leaky pipes with a temporary fix or even replacing the pipes all together, He builds strong, enduring pipes and fills them with new water. No, not just new water - living water. He knows it’s not what we asked for, or even thought we needed, but it’s what He promised when we became His. And while the job is never complete while we’re here on earth, He’s so committed and in love with His own work, that as Lewis describes, God decides to dwell in us forever as He continues and completes His work.
Lewis ended the chapter with this,
“The command Be ye perfect is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. He said (in the Bible) that we were ‘gods’ and He is going to make good His words. If we let Him - for we can prevent Him, if we choose - He will make us the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now image, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful, but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what He said.”
So even when that pruning process is painful, trust that He’s doing it not just for your good, but for the good of the Kingdom. The process of sanctification, being made holier and more like Him, is painful and scary at times, but without His work we would not grow or come to love Him for who He is - The Healer. The Builder. The Vinedresser. The Architect. The King of Kings who dwells within our hearts equipping us for His work on earth and preparing us for a world we have not yet seen.
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Most of us, when we were saved, did so because we recognized a need. We recognized we were sinners, feeling that weight of that sin in our hearts, and realized we needed a remedy, a great Healer, and that was and is Jesus. Once we’re saved we fully expect Him to fix us and to continuously fix us as we continuously fail. As we sin again and again, as we fall from time to time, we look to Him to pick us up, help us learn, and to fix us where we were broken. That is in fact what a healer does, right? They make you better.
Lewis doesn’t deny this aspect of Christianity or of God, but points out that Jesus said before we became Christians we were to, “count the cost, ” referring to Luke 14:28 which says, “For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?” (ESV).
But did we count the cost? Christianity isn’t about being fixed over and over again until we’re finally in paradise. If that’s the case then we will never learn, grow, serve, and desire God for anything more than a quick and temporary fix. He’s not Tylenol or, as Lewis puts it, when our tooth hurts we don’t just get something to numb the pain. We go to the dentist to solve the problem itself, not just to prevent something like that from happening again, but it actually looks and feels better. Being a Christian is about being made new, being made different, and being made more like our Father in Heaven. But did we understand what that process would look like when it began, what it would feel like, and what He would ultimately do in order to get us there? Probably not. And that’s why the pain and struggle of sanctification, the process of being made holy, is so confusing to us. We don’t understand what God is doing in our lives to make us like Him and why it sometimes comes with growing pains, struggles, and fear.
God is satisfied with nothing less than pure perfection. The Christian might say, “How can I be perfect when the Bible says that I can do no good apart from Him and that I am in fact a sinner? I will always fail. How can I be perfect when He says I can’t be?” Well Christian, you’re right. Lewis points out that it is not perfection completed by our own work or will that He expects, but rather because He is perfect, He is the only one who can work out and complete perfection in us. Even though our effort will get us nowhere on our own, God expects us to walk towards Him in faith and trust and He will carry us the rest of the way.
Lewis says, “This Helper [God], who will, in the long run, be satisfied with nothing less than absolute perfection, will also be delighted with the first feeble, stumbling effort you make tomorrow to do the simplest duty”.
He then presents an analogy of believers as a living house, which he attributes to a writer named George MacDonald. He writes:
“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”
Before becoming Christians, we were completely separated from Him. We were sinners and broken, just as we continue to be now, but before Him we had no hope. To use the living house analogy, the house was abandoned. No one was living inside able to peel away the bubbled, water damaged, wallpaper; dust off the cobwebs stretched from wall to wall and corner to corner; fix our damaged, leaky pipes, dripping with murky, brown, water; or repair the bones of the house that ache and groan with every gust of wind. And we couldn’t fix it on our own.
Then, when we were saved, God opened the door of our hearts and instead of grimacing at the horrific sight of it all or sighing at the amount of work that had to be done, He simply got to work. For most builders or house repairers, when the job is complete they pack up their tools, wipe the sweat from their foreheads, and with a satisfied feeling in their bellies they step outside never to return until the next problem arises. But God decides to lay up residence among the debris and keep working. Where others would say, “we have another job to go to” or “that’s just a waste of time”. He begins to design, add on, and make the space beautiful, not just livable or good enough.
Because, you see, He isn’t satisfied with fixing us up and leaving us where we are. He’s an architect who wants to build something magnificent. In other words, something from nothing. While He does remedy us He’s also sanctifying us for the purpose of holiness and godliness. To us, the process of kicking down walls to build on and redoing those scraped up floors is confusing and painful to us at the moment, as we’re unable to see what He’s doing or what He hopes to accomplish at the end of it all. We haven’t seen the blueprints and we probably wouldn’t understand them even if we could. This extra work isn’t what we asked for. But, He’s determined to make something better, changing and redecorating every space of our hearts to look more like Him.
In fact, instead of repairing our leaky pipes with a temporary fix or even replacing the pipes all together, He builds strong, enduring pipes and fills them with new water. No, not just new water - living water. He knows it’s not what we asked for, or even thought we needed, but it’s what He promised when we became His. And while the job is never complete while we’re here on earth, He’s so committed and in love with His own work, that as Lewis describes, God decides to dwell in us forever as He continues and completes His work.
Lewis ended the chapter with this,
“The command Be ye perfect is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. He said (in the Bible) that we were ‘gods’ and He is going to make good His words. If we let Him - for we can prevent Him, if we choose - He will make us the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now image, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful, but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what He said.”
So even when that pruning process is painful, trust that He’s doing it not just for your good, but for the good of the Kingdom. The process of sanctification, being made holier and more like Him, is painful and scary at times, but without His work we would not grow or come to love Him for who He is - The Healer. The Builder. The Vinedresser. The Architect. The King of Kings who dwells within our hearts equipping us for His work on earth and preparing us for a world we have not yet seen.