Holy Siblings: The Sanctification of Our Attention (Quick Read)
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
Sanctification is the way Christ makes us holy. It is a gift from God. But it is not a gift given for our sake. We are made holy for the sake of other people. There is a fresh reality that comes from sanctification. Through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, we are turned from strangers into holy siblings.
Sanctification Changes How We See Things
The Salvation Army understands sanctification as the way God deals with our ongoing sin. However, being holy is about much more than sin management. It is about changing how we see reality.
Think of visiting the optician. You sit in the chair, and the optometrist tries one lens after another. With the wrong lens, everything blurs. With the right one, the world clicks into focus. The Holy Spirit is that lens. Through the Spirit, we begin to see the world as it truly is. A reality shaped around the cross of Jesus Christ.
Without the Spirit, we walk around with the wrong prescription. We think we can see clearly. But we miss what is actually important. We cannot see other people as God sees them.
The Salvation Army calls this entire sanctification. Doctrine Ten teaches sanctification and holiness. You can read about it here. It is the belief that God can so fully transform the human heart that love for God and neighbour becomes the governing force of a person’s life.
This is not simply a slow improvement scheme. Nor is it about growth in moral tightness. Holiness is a radical reorientation of our attention from the self to the other. We then have to learn how to act with that love. This is Discipelship. And Discipleship is the way we learn to love the world like Christ does.
When Sin Turns the Heart Inward
The problem with sin is more than rule-breaking. Sin has consequences here and now. Not divine punishment, physical ailments, or poverty. But rather the corruption of our attention.
Martin Luther described this as the heart being incurvatus in se. This is a Latin phrase meaning “curved in on itself.” It means we are essentially self-interested.
Luther used it to describe the human heart before receiving God’s grace. ‘Heart’ in this case does not mean the actual organ, but our attention and will.
Classically, the head did our thinking, our stomach did our feeling, and our heart did our deciding. When the heart is turned inwards, it means that our decision making faculty is fixed on us.
Sin is not simply a list of wrong actions. It is a structural distortion of the self. Who we are us altered because of it. This is part of what we mean when we talk about original sin. Sin is a condition in which the heart turns inward, making itself the centre of everything. And like any condition, sin needs healing, not condemnation.
Paul describes the same experience in his letter to the Romans:
“For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me… Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” — Romans 7:19–20, 24–25 (NRSV)
It is like being trapped inside a hall of mirrors. Whichever way we turn, we only see our own reflection staring back at us. We cannot break out of this on our own because we just turn back on ourselves. It is Christ alone who can set us free.
Sanctification Sets Us Free To Become Holy Siblings
Salvation saves us from the eternal consequences of our sin. But sanctification allows us to live without the impact of those consequences. Sanctification means we can step out of the hall of mirrors and into reality. Without this, we cannot become the holy siblings we are meant to be.
Sanctification breaks open the inward-turned heart. It means we can see the world as it truly is. Our vision is no longer shaped and distorted by our own self-interest. This is what we call epistemic Sanctification. It means that sanctification changes the way we know things. In this case, the world and the neighbour.
We begin to see other people not as objects of our desire, or competitors for our resources, but as free agents. People in their own right, with their own desires and dreams.
They are Children of God, loved by Jesus, and made in his image. People without whom we made less, because without them we miss out an opportunity to meet God, which means we miss out an opportunity to love and be loved.
Holy Siblings Gathered Together
Jesus tells us that where two or three are gathered in his name, he is there among them (Matthew 18:20). He also tells us that when we feed the hungry and serve people in need, we are doing it to him (Matthew 25:35–40). Other people are not just individuals. God loves them and identifies with them.
The stranger and the neighbour reveals something new about God. So my relationship with them is part of my relationship with God. I need the other to know God and to know myself. Because unless I can love the other, I cannot love God.
Sin separates us from each other, but holiness brings us back together.
There was a moment in my own life when I felt this. I have often struggled with empathy, and can sometimes find it difficult to relate to people. This time, I was particularly cross with someone who had been coming to the corps for support, but who had been rude to the volunteers, aggressive with other guests, and who kept on not turning up to appointments we arranged with the housing officer.
I was running out of patience with them when one day I was reading the Bible and it was the parable of the sheep that had gone missing. However, I knew then that Jesus was reminding me that whatever else might have been true about that person, they were a beloved child of God, and I needed to work to see Christ in them.
Through sanctification, we learn to see the other as beloved by God, and as a place where we can meet God. When my heart has been turned outwards in sanctification, I can stop thinking of myself, and start to love my neighbour as God has commanded.
The Future Breaking In
Let’s return to the optician metaphor. Think of sanctification as the Holy Spirit giving us the right pair of glasses. We can see more clearly than before. But we still take them off. We still struggle. We still see imperfectly. The correction is external, partial, and dependent on our cooperation with the Spirit.
Glorification, our resurrection into the New Creation, is something more. It is like laser eye surgery. The correction becomes permanent. The sight is healed from within, completely and forever. And the Spirit who will bring that final, permanent transformation is already at work in us now.
Paul calls the Holy Spirit the “firstfruits” of what is to come. It is the first instalment of our future inheritance, given to us now (Romans 8:23). Elsewhere he calls the Spirit a “deposit” or a guarantee, a down payment of the fullness still to be revealed (2 Corinthians 5:5).
In other words, the Spirit in us is not just a glimpse of the future. The Spirit living in us is the future already breaking into the present. It is the Holy Spirit that makes the Church as the foretaste of the new humanity which has begun in Christ.
The technical language for this is that sanctification is the pneumatological inauguration of our future reality.
Which means the Spirit is beginning now what will be completed in the future. The same Spirit who will one day make all things new is already, now, making us new. We are new creations, and as new creations, we see the world as it truly is.
When we begin to love our neighbours as holy siblings, we are not just being kind. We are enacting the Kingdom.
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REFLECTION SPACE — Seeing With New Eyes
Scripture: “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.” — 2 Corinthians 3:18 (NRSV)
A Prayer: Lord, help me to see the person in front of me as you see them. Beloved, made in your image, and full of your glory. Amen.
Prompt:
Is there someone in your life you have found it difficult to see as a holy sibling? What might it look like to allow the Spirit to transform that relationship and to see them as God sees them?
Holy Siblings
Sanctification turns us into holy siblings. That is the whole point of the Spirit breaking open the inward-turned heart. To turn us away from ourselves and toward our neighbour.
Paul writes:
“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptised into one body” (1 Corinthians 12:12–13, NRSV).
And again:
“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28, NRSV).
This is a description of what the Spirit does in sanctification. The same Spirit who dwells in me dwells in you. We are united not by preference or affinity, but by the shared presence of the living God.
We need the Holy Spirit to help us with this because empathy can take us only as far as ourselves. It gives us a window into another person’s feelings, but it still begins and ends in me.
Empathy is my imaginative appreciation of another’s perspective. The Spirit does something different.
It places the living God within us both, and so the connection between us is no longer built on my ability to understand you, but on the God we share.
Becoming holy changes the way we see the relationship between each other. We change from strangers and competitors to companions and siblings.
In the other, we see someone made in the image of God, beloved of God, and without whom we are each lessened.
Sanctification is the way God begins the promise of glory in our current reality. The future, when there will be peace and justice for all, begins in us now. We are invited, by the grace of the indwelling Spirit, to live now as the holy siblings we will one day fully be.
You may wish to take a moment to think of someone you will encounter this week. Someone you might ordinarily pass by. The Spirit who is making you holy is also making them holy. They are your siblings. And in them, you may find you encounter God.
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