Real heart change is the work of God’s Spirit alone. Yes, the Spirit uses means, but by following the Reformers in recognizing that justification and sanctification exist as distinct but inseparable realities, both flowing from union with Christ, we can rest in the knowledge that our justification is secure and finished while vigorously pursuing Spirit-empowered sanctification.

Union with Christ

When the Puritan allegorist John Bunyan (1628–1688) finally discovered spiritual peace, he described the awakening as a dramatic release from bondage: “Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed; I was loosened from my afflictions and irons….[N]ow went I also home rejoicing, for the grace and love of God.” But even more significant than his striking imagery was the theological breakthrough that produced it:

I saw, with the eyes of my soul, Jesus Christ at God’s right hand; there, I say, was my righteousness….I also saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse; for my righteousness was Jesus Christ himself, “the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever,” Heb. xiii 8….Now Christ was all; all my righteousness, all my sanctification, and all my redemption. Further, the Lord did also lead me into the mystery of union with the Son of God; that I was joined to him, that I was flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone….If he and I were one, then his righteousness was mine, his merits mine, his victory also mine.¹

In this passage, Bunyan’s joy in God flows directly from recognizing that justification and sanctification are united but distinct salvific realities. His justification is secure because it is based on a righteousness that comes from outside himself, from Christ, and his “not guilty” verdict before God thus depends not on whether he has “a good frame of heart” or “a bad frame” from moment to moment. But rather than eliminating the need for inward moral renewal, such an insight carves out space for it: he goes “home rejoicing” in God and glorifying him from the secure position of freedom in Christ. This is the Reformation alignment of justification and sanctification. But notice also how, for Bunyan, these two aspects of salvation are held together by a common center point: union with Christ. The entire passage celebrates how union with Christ by his Spirit is the source of all spiritual good: “Christ was all; all my righteousness, all my sanctification, and all my redemption.” For Bunyan, union with Christ was the key to understanding salvation in all its facets, the sum and substance of our spiritual life—justification and sanctification each originating together from the one same union.

And Bunyan was not alone in this thinking. Whether we examine pioneering sixteenth-century Reformed theologians such as John Calvin and Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562), post-Reformation thinkers such as Jerome Zanchi (1516–1590) and Theodore Beza (1519–1605), or English divines such as William Perkins (1558–1602) and William Ames, the conclusion is the same: union with Christ is the controlling idea from which flows the entirety of our redemption.² Union played a central role in the theology of the English Puritans, for whom it has been described by one historian as “the existential nerve” of their piety.³ Likewise, among twentieth-century and contemporary Reformed theologians, union with Christ continues to function as the key to rightly aligning justification, sanctification, and the very idea of an authentically Christian spiritual life: “Union with Christ is really the central truth of the whole doctrine of salvation not only in its application but also in its once-for-all accomplishment in the finished work of Christ.”⁴

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