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Silence reigns.
No birds can be heard chirping.
All you can hear is the soft hum of the wind as it catches on the rough edges of the rocks. As the hiker looks around, he sees a high, massive rock face to his right, the end of which he cannot see. To his left is an endless, dark abyss. It is so black that it is impossible to guess its depth. Wisps of mist rise up from the abyss, creating an almost ghostly atmosphere. A narrow path is carved along the rugged rock face, leading steeply upwards. The stairs are so narrow that only one person can walk along them. There is no railing to the left. Anyone who slips or loses their balance will fall into the endless black depths.

But none of this worries the wanderer in the slightest. He had just defeated the dragon with God's help. What worse could be in store for him now?

What actually is sanctification?

Courageously and firmly, he continues on his way. A signpost lets him know where he currently is. The narrow path of sanctification lies ahead of him. The hiker thinks a little about the word „sanctification“. He has heard of „saints“ before. But these are not pious people who perform miracles and have a special position with God. No, according to his Bible, saints are all those who follow Jesus. This means emulating the example of Jesus and allowing the Holy Spirit to change your character. „Sanctification“ must therefore be the process of transforming one's own imperfect nature into the perfect image of God. God created man in his image. Sin has destroyed this beautiful image in man. God wants to restore it in every human being. In other words, he wants to remove ego, pride, envy, hatred, bitterness, worries, fears, bad habits and addictions from people's lives. Instead, he wants to use his characteristics. These are the fruits of the spirit that we receive in Galatians 5:22+23a„Love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, abstinence.“

The Holy Spirit wants to bring about this change in every person. No one can really change their heart from the ground up. We can get rid of a few bad habits on the outside and adopt good behavior. But the heart remains corrupt. Only God can renew it. Sanctification is not about changing habits, but about changing the heart.

Up and down

Highly motivated, the walker climbs the first uneven rocky steps of the path of sanctification. He wants nothing more than to become even more like his beloved Jesus. Yes, this path requires some effort and self-denial. But the hiker is certain that he can make it with God's help. The path leads him steeply upwards. He pushes himself close to the rock face to avoid slipping into the abyss of sin. He knows that one small misstep could cost him his life.

But suddenly something strange happens. The path should always lead steeply upwards. But now it does exactly the opposite: it goes downhill. After a while, it goes steeply uphill again. But it doesn't take long before it descends even more steeply into a dark depression. This is repeated a few more times.

After a while, the hiker is frustrated. At the beginning, the path didn't look that long, but now it feels endless. This constant downhill and the subsequent uphill takes an incredible amount of energy and time.

The wanderer begins to think about it. His wish and his goal is to reach the city in heaven. This means that his path must lead upwards, towards heaven. He had been at the bottom, in the abyss of sin, before he began his journey. He had been trapped there for many years. On his pilgrimage, he had already covered many meters of altitude, because the abyss of sin seemed to lie far below him. There was no way he wanted to go back there! But why did it always happen that the path led him a little way in that direction?

As he slowly struggles up the narrow path again, he thinks a little about the meaning of the ups and downs. Uphill means that he is on the right track. Uphill leads him ever closer to his goal, the heavenly Jerusalem. In order to be entitled to citizenship in the heavenly city, one's character must correspond to the character of the law of the heavenly government. Only those who acquire this character during their pilgrimage will be granted access to the heavenly city. The path of sanctification serves to develop this character.

The path is narrow and steep. It requires constant vigilance and prayer that one does not fall down and end up back in the old sinful life and thus in eternal death. You also have to keep close to the rock face that offers you support and protection. This rock is Jesus. Those who stay close to him and cling to him will make progress.

But unfortunately, no Christian's path is a straight line upwards. The sinful heart cannot be changed so quickly. Because we have all grown up in a broken world, we have not learned what it means to trust. We trust God in particular the least. How quickly we doubt his love for us and that he already has a solution for every problem. So it happens that we can't give up old habits from our old life so quickly or we fall off the wagon again and again. Again and again you stumble over your own pride or your cold heart. Time and again you hurt loved ones with an impatient word. You do all this and more, even though you don't really want to. You want to be completely with God and hand everything over to him. Every morning you ask for it in prayer, but at some point during the day there is another situation in which you fail. Once again you couldn't control yourself while eating, once again you got upset with other road users while driving. Once again you were annoyed by a stressful person. You were treated in a hurtful way or not appreciated by another person. Once again you have sacrificed yourself and what is the reward? Once again you've slipped out the wrong word, even though you didn't mean to.

This can sometimes be very frustrating. Time and time again you bring your weak points before God and time and time again you fail.

My own experience

That's what happened to me for many years. At the beginning of my life of faith, I had not yet understood the concept of justification and sanctification. It was very important to me to be baptized because my hope was that after baptism, all those sinful habits and desires in my heart would be gone. But unfortunately that was not the case. After my baptism, I struggled with food cravings, occult movies and music just as much as before. I wondered what had changed at all? After a while, I became more and more frustrated. I begged God in tears to set me free from these things. But nothing happened. Slowly I began to wonder if God wasn't strong enough to help me. Or was my faith not strong enough? My despair grew more and more. I got to the point where I said to God: „Either you help me now or I will give up my faith again!“

Just before I gave up in despair, God sent me to the Josiah Mission School in the Allgäu. I didn't want to go there. But because I was so desperate, I applied at the last minute and was accepted. I got to know a completely different God there. I learned what justification means. Until then, I believed that if I sinned, I would be completely lost again and would have to start all over again. To use our metaphor, I had understood that every time I sinned, I would fall back into the dark abyss of sin and have to start all over again. Of course, you never really made any progress that way. At mission school, I understood that I was freed from sin in God's eyes through justification. My guilt was forgiven and God had given me eternal life. I was saved. I could only fall back into the dark abyss of sin if I turned away from God completely.

From the cause and the symptoms

Nevertheless, sins keep cropping up in my life. It was a long process for me to understand that these sins are only the symptoms of a much deeper illness. So there is no point in fighting the symptoms if the cause is not resolved. On the contrary, the more you fight the symptoms, the more persistent they become. Only recently did I realize that our hearts are broken by sin. Each of us has these black spots in our hearts caused by this evil world. Often from our own family. We try to heal these black spots ourselves with all kinds of things. This can be the search for love, good food, money, music, movies and much more. But we can't heal the wounds of our heart with these things. Unfortunately, the opposite often happens. The more we chase after these things, the bigger these wounds in our hearts become. Even if we have decided to walk our path with Jesus and entrust him with the guidance of our lives, he does not immediately take away all our sins. He immediately frees us from very harmful sins such as addictions. But he leaves many other things in our hearts so that we can grow. This is where the process of sanctification begins. In God's eyes, we are already righteous and perfect because Jesus takes our place. God accepts his righteousness as ours. This is the incredible gift we receive from God. But as mentioned earlier, God wants to restore his character in us. He knows that only his life and being in us can bring true happiness and peace. So, little by little, he begins to heal our sinful heart. In order to make real progress on the path of sanctification, we must allow ourselves to be filled with the Holy Spirit every day. Our lives must be completely consecrated and surrendered to God. This includes an intense time of prayer in which we examine our hearts, let God purify them and surrender to Him, as well as time in the Word of God. Through Bible study, we get to know God even better. This enables us to recognize our own imperfections. The Bible acts like a mirror that shows us our imperfections. This can often be discouraging.

The inner dragon

At this point, let us briefly return to our hiker: Full of the certainty of victory he had Cave of the dragon behind him and began to walk the path of sanctification. But he had to make a terrible realization! Although he had been walking with God for so long, he kept falling back into old habits that he thought he had long since left behind. With the dragon, he was able to resist the urge to eat a pig roast. But when it came to not enjoying too much of a good thing, he failed. Time and again, he was unable to resist all the good food at the delicious potluck in the community and ate too much in quantity and all in a mess. The result was indisposition and overwrought nerves. This weakened him in his service to God. There were so many other things that the wanderer kept failing at. Slowly it dawned on him: fighting dragons in the cave was nothing compared to fighting his inner dragon.