This ongoing aspect of salvation is vividly portrayed in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The clue is in the title: there must be ‘progress’ in the life of faith. Or, in the drama of the exodus for Israel, it is the journey out of bondage, through a wilderness that leads them to the Promised Land. A journey God used to teach them, reshape them and prepare them for the new world they would enter when they crossed the Jordan.

Every Christian can readily acknowledge, ‘I’m not what I used to be; but I am not yet what I will be!’ We are all very much a work in progress. This is reinforced by the verb tenses the Bible uses to refer to different aspects of salvation: we ‘have been saved’ (Eph 2.8), ‘…are being saved’ (1Co 15.2) and, ‘…shall be saved’ (Ro 5.9-10). The ‘already’ of our experience of redemption will always be nuanced by the ‘not yet’ of where it ultimately leads in the world to come. All of this to say that we need to grasp the ongoing dimension of God’s work in us as we find ourselves between conversion and completion.

This ongoing aspect of salvation is vividly portrayed in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The clue is in the title: there must be ‘progress’ in the life of faith. Or, in the drama of the exodus for Israel, it is the journey out of bondage, through a wilderness that leads them to the Promised Land. A journey God used to teach them, reshape them and prepare them for the new world they would enter when they crossed the Jordan. If we, as God’s people, are not progressing – not growing or continually being changed towards maturity in our Christian life – then there is something wrong.

Paul highlights the importance of this in several places in his letters. In his pivotal statement in Romans he tells his readers that, having begun to experience God’s grace in salvation, they are to ‘be transformed by the renewal of [their] mind’ (Ro 12.2). The fact he uses the passive voice in this statement indicates that God is the efficient cause of this transformation, though it entails our active compliance. But the fact he also uses the present tense for the verb highlights that it is something that continues throughout our Christian life, as long as we are in this world.

Elsewhere he makes the same point from a different angle, but with even greater force. He tells the Corinthians, ‘And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit’ (2Co 3.18). This second insight gives us an even more vivid appreciation of what the ‘in between’ of Christian experience entails and why we need to grasp what God is doing in our lives just now.

Once again, we see the present continuous element of this progress and growth in our renewal in the Christian life. It manifests itself in the first vital sign of new birth when we cry out to God for salvation and it continues through every age and stage that follows until the final whisper, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ And, once again, we see God’s agency at the heart of it all: it ‘comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.’

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