How the Incarnation Informs Sanctification at Home

Home workouts are the worst. I’ve been *trying* to exercise in this space for months now, and each day it’s a battle. Home is where I’m least motivated because it’s the most familiar.

But I’m learning that workouts aren’t the only thing that feel this way. God has called us to the work of sanctification — to growing in godliness, to letting him reform our character so that it better mirrors that of the Son of his affection. It’s an active-passive reality: we participate in the work he is doing by his Spirit. We’re not doing the work to earn his love or approval; we have that in Christ right now. We can’t change in our own power. And yet we’re invited into this work, to partner with God in our transformation. Every day. Every minute. Right now where you sit, God inviters you to the work of becoming more like him.

And home work is the hardest, isn’t it? I’m VERY GOOD at being transformed into a better Christian at church. I’m VERY GOOD at being transformed into a better neighbor when I’m doing community cleanup downtown. But here in my own home? Within the walls of this space? Man. That’s hard.

If you’re anything like me, you find this home work the hardest and least motivating. God wants to change that. He wants to call us deeper. He wants to make us more like him precisely through these closest relationships, in these most familiar spaces, in our particularly ordinary days — he wants to meet us right there and make us more like his Son.

God isn’t a hungry for a platform. He’s not waiting to show up on the stage of your life and show off his power. He doesn’t need your platform or influence or makeup done. The incarnation — that reality by which God stepped down into our ordinary earthiness – tells us that we when find ourselves in the most human of moments, Christ’s heart reaches out to us at that very spot. Because when we needed someone to rescue us in our most human of human moments, God became human. He met us right there. He didn’t come with a bang or fireworks. He came into an ordinary human family and changed everything we know of this world.

It’s a practice in audacious faith to believe that he’ll do that in your own home and mine today. God wants to show up in our living rooms, home offices, at our dining tables and THERE he will meet us and transform us. He will do the work at home. He will meet us where we are. Home work outs are what he’s been about since the beginning.