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WHY DOESN’T GOD THOROUGHLY SANCTIFY US AND MAKE US UNABLE TO SIN WHEN HE SAVES US?

I am sure that every Christian wonders at one time or another, why this should be.  Why doesn't God sanctify us more thoroughly when He justifies us?  Surely, it makes sense that it would be a much better recommendation of the Gospel to the unbelieving world if the lives of Christians were always so obviously morally superior to the lives of unbelievers. 

It would have indeed been a much better recommendation of the Gospel if Christians were always kind, and always generous, and always loving, and always scrupulously honest, and always faithful and always humble.  We all know that God is going to make us perfect in a moment when we die, so why doesn't he do it now?

Godly men and women have actually thought about the answer to that question through the ages, and have suggested various reasons why the Lord might leave us sinful as He has obviously decided to do as long as we are in this world. It is worth noting that 

• It is our sin as Christians, not so much the sin we committed before we became Christians, that teaches us how much we owe to the love of God and the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ. 

We know that Christ came to save sinners, but its only when our noses are held in the disgusting smell of our sin that we realize what an astonishing thing His coming really was: that the Son of God should lower Himself so far, for our kind of people; who even after we have received the gift of His love, continue to be indifferent to Him and continue to break His commandments, and continue to live in a way that is unworthy of that grace and that gift!

It is also our sin that teaches us how much effort it is going to take to live a faithful Christian life.
Its actual combat that makes Christian soldiers, and much of that combat, we will all have to agree, is with the sin in our own hearts. Without our sin bearing down on us, how much would any of us pray, day after day? Without the confusion and the doubt and the spiritual distress that is churned up by our sin, how eagerly would we read the word of God?

• Sin gives us opportunities without number to practice God's forgiveness and to receive it from others and to show it to the world. 
  
• It is sin, our sin, that breaks the back of our love of this world and makes us willing to leave it and even eager to leave it.

Without our failures and our disappointments in ourselves, I think we would be far too happy to stay here.

• It is in our sin, that we learn to share in our Savior’s suffering. 

Christ's terrible struggle was with sin, not with His sin, but with our sin being upon Him, and with this struggle as he was bearing our sin, Christ learned and felt the power and the weight and the burden and the curse of sin.  And so, when we are feeling that weight and that curse and that burden, we are feeling as Christ felt. We are sharing in His suffering.  And I can go on and on. That is one of the poles. We Christians remain sinners as long as we live in this world. We are all inveterate sinners.

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