Sanctification As Creative Work
The creative work of growing up in Christ.
I remember the first time I watched the video with Ira Glass’s famous words on The Gap. It was towards the end of high school, I was developing my love of creative pursuits. I was in theater. I had taken up photography. I loved playing music and public speaking. The only problem was that I wasn’t really good at any of them at the time.
Then I heard Ira Glass talk about The Gap.
The Gap between your taste and your work.
You started doing what you do because of your taste for it. You have good taste. You’ve seen what’s good and you know what it is. That’s what you want to make. But you’re not good enough at the craft to do it yet. The only way to close the gap between your taste and your work is to push through, consistently show up, keep doing work even when you aren’t seeing immediate results, and—as Ira famously said,—“Fight. Your Way. Through That. Okay?”
Now, consider sanctification. When we’re united with Christ, citizens of the Kingdom, adopted into the family of God, in fellowship with his Body, the vision we have for our lives and the world is nothing less than Christ himself. But in our yet-to-be-sanctified flesh, we find ourselves consistently falling short and frustrated that we haven’t arrived yet.
Is this all the peace/freedom/joy/endurance/patience/love/generosity there is? We ask ourselves this because we know what we should be like (Christ), but there are too many times it is painfully obvious we aren’t.
I think the two temptations here are the same two temptations of creative work:
Thinking Yes, this is all there is. I will never close this gap, giving up, and moving on to something else that allows for more immediate gratification.
Waiting for your “big break”. In creative work, it’s being chosen by the gatekeepers and your work being put in front of the masses. In sanctification, it’s waiting for a banking everything on a breakthrough of the Holy Spirit. Both of these things happen, but it’s not the norm for either.
What if the third way for the creative work of growing up in Christ is the same way as the creative work we do every day?
Of showing up consistently, setting our minds and intentions on the Way of Jesus, of “doing a huge body of work”, and trust what Seth Godin calls, The Practice. The practice of showing up generously day after day and saying to the Lord with our lives, “Here, I made this.” Not to be accepted by him, we already are. But trusting that he will take our attempts to “work out our salvation with fear and trembling” and use it to “work in you to will and to work according to his good purpose.”
John Mark Comer says about the spiritual disciplines, “We can't control what we desire, but we can control what habits we give our minds and bodies to and, in doing so, index our hearts away from the flesh and toward the Spirit. This is under our power and therefore a form of responsibility before God and our fellow humans.”
And Jon Tyson adds, “Formation happens day by day; distortion happens day by day.”
It’s showing up day in and day out in faithfulness to God that indexes our hearts towards Christlikeness.
And with God working in us, slowly over time in small ways, we’ll see the sanctification gap close in our lives as we become more like Christ.