What Is Sanctification and How Does It Actually Happen?
⏱ 13 min read
You have probably arrived at the word the way most thinking Christians do — quietly suspicious of it. Sanctification is one of those church-words that has been used so often, in so many contexts, by people who seemed to mean different things by it, that you are no longer entirely sure what is being claimed when the word appears in a sermon. Some teachers use it to mean the slow Christ-likeness that grows over a lifetime. Some use it to mean a second, decisive crisis-experience that elevates the believer into a higher class of Christian. Some use it to mean disciplined moral effort. Some use it to mean a thing the Holy Spirit does in you while you sit largely passive. You have heard all of these. None of them quite fit what scripture seems to describe, and so the word has gone slightly hollow in your usage.
This is a slow read of what John Owen, the seventeenth-century English Puritan, meant by sanctification — and how, in his hands, it actually happens. Owen’s most famous treatment of the question is The Mortification of Sin in Believers, but the deepest layer of his thinking on the subject lives in the related work Communion with God, and it is from there that the passages in this essay are drawn. If you want a daily page to walk alongside the reading, Bible Study Workbook for Women is the 140-day companion built for the woman who is doing exactly this kind of slow doctrinal work in the small hours of a week.
Owen’s answer to what is sanctification is not the answer most modern Christians have been given. It is gentler than the moralist answer and harder than the passive answer. It is also more practical than either. The reading below walks two of his passages slowly, and lets the answer surface as the passages do.
The first passage: what the Christian most often gets wrong
Owen begins not with a definition but with a diagnosis. Before he tells you what sanctification is, he tells you what the Christian’s relationship to God most often isn’t — and the diagnosis is what unlocks the rest. The passage is long. Read it slowly.
“‘They that know thee will put their trust in thee.’ Men cannot abide with God in spiritual meditations. He loseth soul’s company by their want of this insight into his love. They fix their thoughts only on his terrible majesty, severity, and greatness; and so their spirits are not endeared. Would a soul continually eye his everlasting tenderness and compassion, his thoughts of kindness that have been from of old, his present gracious acceptance, it could not bear an hour’s absence from him; whereas now, perhaps, it cannot watch with him one hour. Let, then, this be the saints’ first notion of the Father, — as one full of eternal, free love towards them: let their hearts and thoughts be filled with breaking through all discouragements that lie in the way.”
— John Owen, Communion with God
There are several things to notice here. The first is what Owen identifies as the failure: men cannot abide with God in spiritual meditations. The Christian sits down to be with God and cannot stay. Five minutes in, the mind wanders. Ten minutes in, the soul is restless. The Christian gets up. The hour has not been kept. And the question Owen asks of this very common experience is why.
His answer is not the modern answer. The modern answer would say because you are distracted, because the phone is too close, because you need a better technique, because the discipline is weak. Owen says nothing of the kind. He says the soul cannot abide with God because it has not seen God’s love clearly enough to want to. The thoughts of God in the Christian’s head are terrible majesty, severity, and greatness — God as judge, God as standard, God as the One she has disappointed. With God thought of that way, of course the soul cannot stay an hour. Who could? The soul would, by reflex, get up and go.
This is Owen’s diagnosis of why the Christian life does not progress — why sanctification, in the experience of most believers, feels stalled. The believer has the doctrine of justification correct. She knows she is forgiven. But the felt God she meets in her quiet times is still the severe God, the watching God, the God who is checking. And no soul grows holy in the presence of a God it cannot bear to sit with. The whole engine of sanctification, in Owen’s reading, runs on the soul’s abiding with God — and the abiding is impossible until the God being abided with is seen, truly, as the One full of eternal, free love.
This is the first thing Owen wants you to understand about how sanctification actually happens. It does not begin with effort against sin. It begins with a corrected vision of the God you are sitting with. If the God you are sitting with is the severe inspector, no amount of effort against sin will produce the slow Christ-likeness sanctification names. The soul will simply keep getting up at the end of the duty-hour and going back to its life. But if the God you are sitting with is the One full of eternal, free love, the eye of the soul rests on Him — and rest, in Owen’s framework, is the soil sanctification grows in.
The first move toward sanctification, then, is not a moral move at all. It is a contemplative one. It is the slow re-learning of who God actually is — the One whose thoughts of kindness have been from of old, whose present acceptance is gracious, whose love is everlasting — until the soul finds it cannot bear an hour’s absence from Him. That re-learning is not a lecture. It is the soul, daily, sitting with the texts in which God reveals Himself as that kind of God, and letting the picture slowly correct itself. (For the small daily form of that sitting, when you do not yet know how to begin, Learning the Bible as a Beginner is the slow, honest starting place that Owen’s abide with God posture is built on.)
The second passage: the felt sense the Spirit gives
Owen’s second move is harder, because it names something most modern Christians have been taught to be suspicious of. He insists that sanctification involves a felt dimension — a sensible, soul-deep persuasion of God’s love that the Holy Spirit imparts to the believer, not occasionally but as the ordinary working of grace. The passage:
“To give a poor sinful soul a comfortable persuasion, affecting it throughout, in all its faculties and affections, that God in Jesus Christ loves him, delights in him, is well pleased with him, hath thoughts of tenderness and kindness towards him; to give, I say, a soul an overflowing sense hereof, is an inexpressible mercy.”
— John Owen, Communion with God
Read that twice. Notice the verbs. Affecting it throughout, in all its faculties and affections. Owen is not talking about a doctrinal proposition the believer mentally agrees with. He is talking about a persuasion that reaches the will, the mind, the affections, the body — the whole person — and produces an overflowing sense of being loved by God. This is what the Holy Spirit does as part of sanctification. Not optional, not reserved for spiritual elites, not a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The ordinary working of grace in the maturing Christian, in Owen’s reading, includes this felt sense being given and renewed.
Modern Reformed Christians have often been suspicious of language like this, fearing it slides toward charismatic excess or experience-based theology. Owen — who was, by any honest reading, one of the most carefully doctrinal Christians who ever wrote — would have found the suspicion strange. He insists on the felt sense because scripture insists on it. The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given unto us (Romans 5:5). The Spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God (Romans 8:16). Owen takes those texts at face value. The Spirit’s work is not only legal (the imputation of righteousness) and not only volitional (the empowering of obedience). It is also experiential — the giving of a felt, settled persuasion of being loved by God that warms the soul and draws it into deeper communion.
This is the engine of sanctification Owen names: the felt love of God, given by the Spirit, draws the soul into abiding with God; the abiding produces the conformity to Christ that sanctification names; the conformity is then visible in the slow softening of the will, the slow re-ordering of the affections, the slow mortification of sin. The order matters. Sanctification does not begin with the mortification. It begins with the abiding. It begins with the felt love. The mortification comes downstream — and comes with relative ease, in Owen’s experience, because the soul that has been long in the presence of the One who loves it does not, in the end, want to keep its sins. The sins drop off the soul that has tasted that love, the way a coat drops off a body that has come indoors to a fire.
Pause for a moment. Let the chest soften. Let the shoulders lower by an inch — not by force, but by letting the small ongoing effort to hold them up stop. The body has been carrying the felt absence of this love longer than the mind has known how to ask for it. The lowering itself is a small movement of the soul toward the abiding Owen is describing. The Spirit is given to do the rest of the work, slowly, over years. Your part is the not-getting-up.
This is also why, in Owen’s framework, sanctification cannot be primarily a project of moral effort. The soul that tries to mortify sin without first being long in the felt love of God will not get far. It will succeed against the outer sins for a season and then either burn out or harden into a brittle, performative holiness that is its own kind of sin. The mortification has to be downstream of the abiding, and the abiding has to be downstream of the corrected vision of God as the One whose love is everlasting, free, full. Get that order wrong and the whole engine grinds.
How sanctification actually happens, in the week
If Owen is right, sanctification in the actual lived Christian life looks like this: a daily return of the soul to the felt presence of the God who loves it, in the texts where He reveals Himself as that God; a slow, repeated abiding in that presence beyond the point at which the soul wants to get up; the gradual softening of the will and the slow dropping-off of sins as the soul learns it has somewhere warmer to be than in the company of its old loves. It is not glamorous. It is not measurable in dramatic episodes. It is the long, patient work of the Spirit through the practice of being-with-God, repeated daily for decades, until the Christ-likeness it produces is visible to other people without ever having been the explicit project of the believer herself.
This is what makes a daily, structured contemplative practice so important — and so different from a moral self-improvement plan. The contemplative practice is the means by which the abiding is renewed each morning before the day’s distractions begin. It is not a duty performed to please God; it is the sitting in His presence Owen says is the engine of the whole life. The Bible Study Workbook for Women was built for this kind of slow daily abiding — one passage of scripture per page, space for the felt response, a 140-day rhythm that holds the practice without demanding more than a quiet morning can bring. The workbook is not the sanctifier. The Spirit is. The workbook is the chair the believer keeps coming back to in His presence, day after day, while the slow work happens. (For the wider scaffolding of how to begin reading scripture in this contemplative way when the practice is new to you, A Beginner Study Bible for Women is the unintimidating starter, and for the seasonal version of the deeper practice Lent Fasting Ideas Beyond Giving Up Chocolate walks fifteen older practices through the forty days.)
If sanctification is happening in you, it is unlikely to feel like sanctification while it is happening. It will feel, most days, like nothing in particular — a small quiet sitting with the texts, a small honest acknowledgment of the day’s failures, a small returning of the heart to the God who is full of eternal, free love. The work the Spirit is doing through those small daily abidings is, by design, mostly invisible to the believer doing them. The fruit is visible, slowly, to other people — the softer tongue, the slower temper, the quicker forgiveness, the small acts of love that have begun to happen without forethought. The believer is usually the last to notice. Owen would say that is the right shape of the thing. Sanctification that the believer is proud of is usually not the real kind. Sanctification that the believer barely notices, that the people around her have been quietly catching for years, is.
The role of the believer’s own work
A note on what your part is, lest the slow contemplative reading above tip into the passive direction Owen would also have refused.
Owen does not say the believer does nothing. He says the believer’s primary work — the work without which the other work cannot happen — is the daily abiding. The believer’s secondary work, downstream of the abiding, is the active resisting of sin in the moments it presents itself, the active obedience to the commands she knows, the active love of the neighbour in front of her. None of that is optional. Owen wrote a whole book on the mortification of sin in believers precisely because he believed the believer has real, daily work to do against the sin still in her. But all of that secondary work, in his framework, is sustained by the primary abiding. Cut the primary off, and the secondary either collapses or becomes Pharisaism. Keep the primary alive, and the secondary becomes nearly effortless over time — not because the believer has tried harder, but because the abiding has done the deep work the believer could not do for herself. (When the home-front life is also where the abiding has to hold — when the day is shaped around carrying others — A Prayer for My Husband’s Success and Protection at Work walks the quiet morning prayer the sanctified affection produces almost without trying.)
That is the slow answer to how sanctification actually happens. Not by trying harder. Not by sitting passively. By a particular kind of daily abiding with God-as-He-actually-is — full of eternal, free love — which the Spirit uses, over years and decades, to conform the soul slowly to Christ.
If you want the wider doctrinal companions to this essay, The Difference Between Justification and Sanctification walks the related Spurgeon reading that distinguishes the once-for-all legal change from the slow inward one, and How to Pursue Holiness Without Becoming a Pharisee walks the Jonathan Edwards diagnostic for the kind of holiness-pursuit that goes wrong without the abiding underneath it.
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A workbook for the slow abiding
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Same Owen posture — soul abiding with the God who is full of eternal, free love, the Spirit doing the slow inward work over months — held across a structured page that asks no more than a quiet morning can bring and offers a steady chair to keep coming back to.
Bible Study Workbook for Women
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women walks the Owen abiding with God practice across 140 days — one scripture per page, space for the felt response of the soul, built for the woman whose sanctification is happening slowly under the surface and who needs a daily chair to keep returning to.
