We all want love, joy, and peace, but before those things grow in us, God has to do a deeper work in us.

It Takes a Long Time to Become Real

Velveteen Rabbits

In one of my favorite childhood books, The Velveteen Rabbit, the Rabbit asks a question that gets at something deep: What does it mean to become Real? The answer he gets is tender, but not exactly comforting. The Skin Horse tells him, “It takes a long time to become Real… Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off.” It is not the answer the Rabbit hoped for. If we are honest, it is probably not the answer we would want either.

What does it mean for you to become real? What does it take for you to become the kind of person God created and intended you to become?  Like the Velveteen Rabbit, I suspect we will not like the answer all that much. Deep down, most of us already know the answer. Real change is rarely instant. It is usually slow, it is often painful, and somehow, by the grace of God, it can also be beautiful.

This week, we are going to begin a fresh series looking at another one of our community’s values: transformative truth. When we say transformative truth, we mean that God’s truth does more than give us ideas to think about. It does more than help us win arguments or answer Bible questions. God’s truth is meant to change us. The gospel was never meant to remain in our minds as mere information or intellectual assent. It is meant to sink down into the heart and begin working its way outward into our lives. It is meant to make us different.

The Apostle Paul says that as people who follow Jesus, are filled with His Spirit, and made anew, we will produce fruit. In Galatians 5:22-23, he lists out each of the fruits:

“The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.”

Over the next few weeks, as we talk about this value, we’re going to unpack each of those “fruits.”

The Deeper Problem Is the Heart

However, before we discuss the fruit, we need to understand the process, or to put it into more churchy words, “we need to discuss what kind of work the Holy Spirit is doing in us.”  Theologians call this sanctification. Understanding how our sanctification works is absolutely crucial. Because if we skip this step, we will turn the fruit of the Spirit into a religious checklist. We will hear Paul saying, “Try harder. Be nicer. Get your act together.” That is not what sanctification is, and it is not what the gospel does.

Sadly, many of us have been taught, even if only subconsciously,  to think about Christian growth as the formula knowledge + human effort = transformation (and God’s love and acceptance). However, our deepest problem is not merely a lack of information or effort. The deepest problem is the heart. The great Dallas Willard said, “We live from our hearts.” And that “the greatest need you and I have…the greatest need of collective humanity—is renovation of our hearts” (Renovation of the Heart). My friend Ken Boa says something similar when he writes that “no outside-in program will rectify the human condition,” and that “Holiness is never achieved by acting ourselves into a new way of being” (Conformed to His Image). In other words, the answer is not mere behavior management. The answer is gracious, Spirit-driven transformation of the heart.

That is what sanctification is.

Sanctification is the gracious work of God by which He forms us into the likeness of Jesus from the inside out. Willard calls it “the Spirit-driven process of forming the inner world of the human self in such a way that it becomes like the inner being of Christ himself” (Renovation of the Heart).  Those are dense lines, but the meaning is simple: God is not just trying to get better behavior out of us. He is teaching us to become a different kind of person.

This is why sanctification is so closely tied to our value of transformative truth. God’s truth is not merely something to agree with. It is something the Holy Spirit uses to reshape our inner life. The gospel not only forgives us. It begins to reform us. It begins to reorder our loves, our desires, our reactions, and our habits. It begins to make us in daily life what we already are in Christ.

The Methodist theologian, Tom Oden, used to say that sanctification is the result of our daily walking on the path of repentance. It is about learning to walk in the way of Jesus as the way of experiencing His abundant life. We do not obey so that God will finally love us. We do not practice the way of Jesus to persuade Him to accept us. We begin with God’s grace, and the gospel, and with union with Christ. Then, because His life is now at work in us, we learn to walk with Him.

Learning to Walk in the Way of Jesus

St Augustine once brilliantly said, “Without God we cannot; without us, He will not.” That is wise and needed. Sanctification is not passive. We pray, repent, worship, confess, open ourselves to Scripture, and practice obedience. But none of that is a way of saving ourselves. It is the way we cooperate with the grace of God already at work within us.

That is also why Paul uses the image of fruit. Fruit is not taped onto a tree. It grows from life within. The fruit of the Spirit is not a collection of traits we try to glue onto our personality. It is what begins to grow when the life of Jesus is truly taking root in us. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control are not artificial decorations of a religious life. They are signs of a heart being made alive by the Spirit.

Willard is especially helpful here. He warns that “External manifestation of ‘Christlikeness’ is not, however, the focus of the process” (Renovation of the Heart).  If outward behavior becomes the main focus, we will end up with legalism, exhaustion, or hypocrisy. But when Christ is formed in us, something deeper happens. We do not merely act patient once in a while. We begin to become patient people. We do not merely perform kindness when it is convenient. We begin to want the good of others from the heart. That is what real transformation looks like.

Before There Is Fruit, There Must Be Life

And that brings us back to The Velveteen Rabbit. Becoming Real did not happen to the Rabbit through pretending. It did not happen through self-improvement. It happened slowly, through love, through a kind of change that reached all the way down into the heart. The sanctifying work of God in us is very similar. The Spirit of God takes the truth of God and works it into the heart of the believer until, over time, we become more real, not less. More whole. More alive. More like Jesus.

So as we begin this series on the fruit of the Spirit, this is where we must start: before there is fruit, there must be life. Before there is outward change, there must be inward renovation. Transformative truth is truth that does not stop at the mind, but by grace reaches the heart and begins to make us new. In the weeks ahead, we will look at each aspect of the fruit of the Spirit. But for now, we begin here: the Christian life is not about trying to look alive. It is about abiding in Christ until His life becomes more and more visible in us.

Fr. Chase