A few years ago, my wife and I discovered that we had termites in our house. We had just bought this house a short time earlier, and yes, as part of the purchase contract we had it inspected for termites. The inspector found no evidence of a problem at that time, so we bought it with confidence. Unfortunately, there were some uninvited guests moving in at the same time we did. We couldn't see them. No one knew they were there. But hidden away in the darkness, an army of termites was busy invading that house. I have learned a lot about termites since that time. It's actually sort of interesting. Termites live in a nest deep underground, like an ant colony. They come to the surface looking for wood and paper to eat. They can get in through the tiniest crack. There is enough wood in a house to keep them happily munching away for years before you ever notice them. So when we discovered the termites that May, we were bringing out into the open a problem which had been developing for who knows how long - a problem with deep roots. It's interesting how we found them. One evening I noticed what looked like a blob of dry mud on the ceiling of our entry hall. My children are very creative, and I thought they had figured out a way to track mud onto the ceiling. But when I went to sweep it down, I found it was more than mud. Some little creatures that looked like white ants came crawling out, upset that I had disturbed their home, and started replacing the mud. But it is not their home, it is mine. I had not invited termites to share it. There is a good side to the story, however. My pet termites have taught me some valuable lessons about sin and the grace of God.
The areas of sin in my life are very much like the termites in my house. The sin was there when I came to Christ, but it was hidden. I looked OK on the outside, and no one would have thought I had a problem with sin. Even I didn't recognize it. Just like my house passed its inspection a year ago, the people who knew me thought I was a pretty good person - and I suppose by outward standards I was. But deep down in my soul little bits of sin were there, gnawing away at me. One tiny termite doesn't eat very much. Unless you leave it alone for a while, and it invites friends. Then it will destroy your house. My "little" sins were acting just the same.
Now that I am over being upset about the termites, I am actually glad that we found them. If they had not broken to the surface, we would not have known to call the exterminator. They would have just kept eating away until our house fell completely apart. It's just the same with sin. One of the first ways God's Sanctifying Grace comes to us is by showing us our sin. The Holy Spirit shines a light in the darkness, gently pointing out the places where our lives are about to fall apart, eaten away by sin. Then, once we know where the sin is, we are able to rely on God's grace for forgiveness and cleansing.
This is incredibly good news. God wants to change us - to really make us new people. Of course, He loves us and accepts us as we are. We don't have to change anything or do anything before God loves us - He loves us just the way we are right now. But He loves us too much to leave us the way we are. He comes to us in the Holy Spirit to transform us and make us holy. It is not a matter of working and striving and trying to be better - God gives us grace to be changed. By grace, we can become holy people. Holiness may be a frightening idea to some of us. We picture all kinds of self denial, moving into a desert monastery, exchanging our comfortable life for one of suffering and certainly no more fun. Or maybe we have been turned off by someone who pretends to be "holier than thou". We want nothing to do with that kind of holiness.
Yes, we do. Holiness is what we were created for. The Bible says we are created in the image of God. Think about what that means. An image of something is like the reflection you see in a mirror. When you look at yourself in a mirror, the image or reflection looks just like you. (You may not like it, but there it is.) Your mirror image reflects your characteristics and imitates your actions. Human beings are created in the image of God, which means we are meant to reflect God's character and imitate God's actions. We were made to be holy, in the image of God's holiness. To go back to the illustration of my house: its purpose is to be a home for my family, not a nest for termites. In the same way, we were made to be a home for God's holy spirit. We were not built for sin. When we wander away from holiness, we become less than the full human beings God envisioned us to be. Sanctifying grace is God calling us to be whole again.
God does not give up on us when we wander away into sin. Isn't that good news! God longs for us to return to the holy image in which He created us. Salvation is more than just being forgiven for our sins. God wants to cleanse us from sin and give us the character of Christ. When our sins are forgiven, they are paid for, covered by the blood of Jesus. God looks at us as if we were as holy as Christ himself. Unrighteous though we are, while we are yet sinners, God treats us as righteous. Justification means we are legally forgiven for our sin - not because we deserve it, but because Christ's holiness is credited to our account.
Have you been to an amusement park where they have plywood figures of people with a hole cut out where the face should be? You stand behind
the plywood and put your face through the cut out. Then your friends can see you with a very different body. It makes a fun picture. It's the only way I will ever look like a weight lifter. When we are justified, we stand behind Jesus sort of like that. When God looks at us, He sees Jesus with our face. I like that, don't you? But there is more to salvation than being legally justified. Having been forgiven, we long to be changed. We want to look like Jesus, not simply because he has hidden our sins, but because we are actually becoming more like Him. In Romans 12:1-2, Paul talks about being transformed - transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:1-2). Or in 2 Corinthians 5, he says that when we come to Christ we are "a new creation, the old has gone and the new has come" (2 Cor 5:17). Justification is our new birth. But we don't want to remain helpless infants all our lives. Sanctification is how we grow up to become the holy people we are born again to become.
I remember when Denise and I were first married, I didn't know her very well. On our first Christmas together, I bought her a gift which I thought would be very practical and useful. She opened it and cried -- Not with joy. For Denise, Christmas does not mean practical and useful things. Maybe I should have known that, but I was young and foolish. Since that day, I have made it a point to study my wife. I pay attention to what she likes and doesn't like. After years of living together, I can come a lot closer to predicting how she will react and I am able to please her more often. My rough edges are being scraped off, and my marriage is going through the process of sanctification. Years of living with God and studying God's opinions about things should have much the same effect.
Remember the illustration of the image of God being like a mirror? The first mirrors were made of polished gold, so pure you could see yourself. The goldsmiths learned how to heat the gold until it melted. Then the impurities would start to float to the surface where they could be scraped away. When the goldsmith could look into the pot of melted gold and see his undistorted reflection, he knew it was pure. In Sanctification, God melts our sinful hearts, skims away the dross, and makes us pure in spirit. God wants to see his undistorted reflection in us. .
Is it possible to be completely sanctified and live without sin in this life? Some people think God's grace would be sufficient for that - and wouldn't it be wonderful! But can we really hope to experience a sinless life? For most of us it is sort of a hypothetical question. Until I get closer to perfection myself, it doesn't really matter whether it is theoretically possible -- I am not very close to proving it. But God is still working on me. I am closer to Christ today than I was a year ago. So, depending on God's power and following God's Holy Spirit, I am pressing on toward holiness. If I can be closer to Christ every day, that is enough.
How does God remove the sin from our lives? When we found our termites, we called some experts. Professional exterminators have a specific process for getting rid of termites. It is not easy. They have to drill holes in the foundation, treat around all the water pipes, and pump in gallons of chemicals. In our case, they even had to come back in six months and try again, then a third time a year later. For all that work, they calmly charge hundreds of dollars. Fortunately, getting rid of sin is not nearly that expensive - but it does require discipline. God has given us a way to get rid of our sin termites. First, we have to bring the sin into the open. Then we allow God's grace to go to work on it.
The first part of the process is something like drilling holes in the foundation. We have to open up more of our lives to the activity of grace. The sin in us, like the termites in a house, loves to stay hidden. Most of the time, our sin is something we do in the darkness, where no one can see. We cover it up. Like Adam and Eve in the garden, we try to hide our shame from God and each other. God gently reveals this hidden sin to us. It is a little embarrassing admit our sin, just as it was a little embarrassing for us to call the exterminator. Some of us found it hard to name our dying moment out loud yesterday. We are used to hiding those things. We could have tried to hide that blob of mud on our ceiling with paint and plaster. But then we could never be rid of our termites. It is the same with sin. To confess our sin means to open our hearts to God, inviting Him to see the whole ugly truth. That is the root meaning of the word "confess" in the Hebrew language - to open myself before God. So we let the exterminators probe and prod into every hidden corner, even deep into the foundations of our house. God must do the same in us. We cannot just plaster over our sin. We have to expose it to God’s grace. That is the beginning of our healing. The exterminator gave me an interesting illustration of this. He brought me a piece of wood that had been lying in the back yard. It was full of termites. Then he just lay it down on the sidewalk. I was worried about all those termites getting loose, but he assured me "The sunlight and fresh air will kill them." That is why it says in 1 John 1:9 "If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness." 1 John 1:9. Notice the last part: to cleanse us.
That work of God has to start deep within. Just as termites do their damage from the inside out, so the grace of God restores us from the inside out. It's interesting: the exterminators never sprayed the blob of mud on our ceiling where I first found termites. They ignored it. It was only a symptom. They struck at the hidden root, knowing the outer symptoms would take care of themselves. We don't get rid of sin by fighting against the sin itself. When we have opened ourselves to God, He begins to fills us with His Spirit deep inside. Then His power at work deep within us begins to change our outer personality as well.
Have you ever watched a flower blooming? You cannot pull the petals open from the outside. You have to wait for the life of the flower to unfold it, petal by petal, in God's time. So it is with our sanctification. We are like caterpillars turning into butterflies. If you take a fuzzy caterpillar worm, you cannot just glue wings on its back and expect it to be a butterfly. The whole creature must change from the inside out. So must we. We do not become holy by trying to act holy. The life of Jesus goes to work in us, making us whole and making us holy.
The exterminators who treated our house say that their insecticide is powerful enough to control all the termites in the house. The main nest of the colony will still be alive under the ground, but they will stay away from any wood that has been treated with the chemical. What is the parallel with our sanctification? God has an insecticide for sin. It is powerful enough to control all the termites of sin in our lives. God's great sin insecticide is love. God sends his own kind of love into our hearts. There is no room for sin in a heart full of God's love. This is how Paul says it in Romans 5:5, "God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit" Romans 5:5. That phrase "poured out" has the idea of a great waterfall of love, a rushing torrent which fills and overflows. We receive God's love in such an unlimited measure that we begin to reflect that same love in our relationships with others. We become little mirrors, reflecting Jesus' very own love in our everyday lives.
The exterminators have stopped the termite colony from doing further damage to our house. But their treatment does not include repairing the damage already done. The wood the termites have eaten is gone forever. I had to plaster and paint over the holes where their mud house had been - after the residents were gone. But that limitation of the termite control process does not limit God. What the termites of sin have eaten, the grace of God can restore! That is Amazing Grace! Do you think Sin has eaten away so much of your potential in Christ that you can never recover? Is sanctification too lofty a goal? No! There is no darkness too
dark for God's light. There is no wound too deep for God's healing. No sin, no brokenness is beyond God's reach. He can make it all whole by grace.
Even at the points where sin has ruined and wrecked your life - at that very point - God is ready to heal and restore and make you new. God has not given up on you. You can become what you were created to be in Christ. What glorious good news! What sin has destroyed, God will make even more beautiful than before.
That is exactly what the miracle of Grace is about. God has Justified us and given us new birth so that we are born into His family. Now God wants to sanctify us, letting us grow up until we look like our Elder Brother, Jesus. When this happens in us, it will be one more proof of God's power over Sin, one more occasion for us to worship him. Our sanctification is part of the victory Jesus won on the cross over every power of evil. God is in the business of making us holy, not for our glory but for his.
Copyright 1999 Steve Rogers Ministries