Sanctification is a process all believers go through in their ongoing efforts to become conformed to the Lord’s will. It’s an ongoing journey none will ever complete this side of heaven, and Bob Allen is keenly aware of it.
That wasn’t always the case. Allen, the senior pastor of Salem Avenue Baptist Church in Rolla, Missouri, grew up knowing many things about the Lord, but it was in the context of a Pentecostal/Charismatic tradition. Because of those teachings, he said his view of the gospel was incomplete and very different than he came to see it now.
“I sort of understood grace as something I only needed when I sinned,” he said. “Coming from that background, I thought you could lose your salvation, and it was up to me to get it right. I tried to be holy, but didn’t really understand how the gospel mattered to me in day-to-day life. Spiritual disciplines were a thing to do more to learn about God, rather than how we can be more like Him.”
‘More than just facts about God’
Allen came to faith in Jesus at 17-year-old, largely, he says, through the efforts of parachurch ministries.
“That’s when I realized I need to know more than just facts about God,” he said. “I needed to know Him and have that relationship with Him as my savior and Lord.”
But it wasn’t until his 30s when Allen was baptized and he began to fully see what he’d been missing in his previous idea of the gospel.
“That’s when I began to understand what conforming to the image of Christ looks like,” he said. “I began to see that that’s the goal of our discipleship and becoming holy. The Scriptures talks about being holy because the Lord our God is holy, but I didn’t understand what that meant. I wish I had known that when I was younger.”
God’s shaping
Allen said that realization of lost time and wasted year is part of what led him down a path of ministry.
“Simultaneously challenging and joyous, sanctification does not happen overnight; neither is it a process with a defined end point,” he said. “It is a lifelong pursuit. The beauty of God’s work in sanctification is that God shapes one’s life into something beyond expectation. By submitting to God’s plan, believers become more like Christ and so fulfill God’s purpose to glorify Himself on the earth.”
“I want people to know that sanctification is not something that we do,” he said. “It’s something the Holy Spirit works in us as we submit ourselves to God.”
As part of his own journey of sanctification and that desire to help others get started sooner than he did, Allen wrote and recently published a book on the subject, “The Blueprint of Grace: Seeing and Submitting to God’s Design for Sanctification.” Published by Wipf and Stock, it is available on Amazon.com.
“I wrote this book to help those who might be struggling in their faith and teetering on the edge of giving up hope that they could become who God wants them to become,” he said. “I think it also takes some of the confusion out of how we grow as Christians, so it will benefit anyone who wants to get a better understanding of God’s plan for Christians.”
Two parts
The book is written in two parts: a theological part and a practical part. The theological portion is Allen’s attempt to distill God’s design, man’s need, and then God’s provision of grace. The practical section builds on that foundation to help readers understand what being made holy by God’s work entails.
“I want people to come away hopeful that what they’re experiencing in their here-and-now life is not what God has for them in the long term,” he said. “Following Jesus is a lifelong pursuit which calls us daily to die to ourselves so that Christ can live in us. That’s a tough reality to face if you don’t know that it’s all worth.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Brian Koonce and originally published by the Pathway.
