Every morning when I leave the house for my office, I find a spider web stretched across the driver’s side door of my car. Every morning, I wipe it away. And almost every morning, it comes back.
For a while, I treated it as a minor annoyance. Wipe away the web, get in the car, go on with my day. Then one morning I realized I had been dealing with the same thing over and over without ever seeing what was producing it. There is a spider somewhere. I just can’t see it.
There are mornings when the Christian life can feel a little like that. We recognize a sin. We repent. We ask God to help us change. Maybe we even begin to see progress, then sometimes when we least expect it, there it is again. The anger we thought we had under control. The pride we were sure we had outgrown. The temptation we thought had finally lost its power. The web is back.
I’ll be the first to admit, it can be pretty discouraging. But it can be even more discouraging when we misunderstand how sanctification works. When God saves us, He really changes us. Scripture doesn’t describe the Christian life as an endless cycle of sin with no transformation. Those who belong to Christ have been given the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit is actively conforming us to the image of Christ. Paul writes, “If by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Romans 8:13). That is the work of sanctification. By the power of the Spirit, we learn to recognize sin, confess it, turn from it, and put it to death. And it is a process.
Becoming more like Jesus rarely looks like a clean graph with a line moving steadily upward. There are seasons of obvious growth and seasons when growth is harder to see. There are victories followed by setbacks. There are sins that seem to lose their grip quickly and others we may fight for years.
I’m reminded of a story told to me by a pastoral mentor years ago. He shared that he had asked a 91-year-old man in his church, who had discipled him since he was young, for advice on how long it takes to beat a certain sin he was dealing with. The elderly brother responded, “I’m not sure, but I know it takes longer than 91 years.”
What my mentor learned in that moment is that the presence of the struggle doesn’t mean the Spirit is absent. In fact, I believe the struggle itself can remind us that something has changed, indeed. Before Christ, we could make peace with sin. Now we grieve it. We fight it. We bring it into the light. We do this because the Spirit is working on making us more like Jesus.
When the web comes back, we don’t have to pretend it isn’t there. We wipe it away. We confess our sin honestly. We make the apology that needs to be made. We flee the temptation. We establish the boundaries. We seek out accountability. We ask God to search our hearts and expose the desires that feed our sin. Then we keep walking with Christ.
Our confidence in that process does not rest in our ability to clean ourselves up. It rests in the finished work of Jesus and the continuing work of the Spirit. The same Paul who tells believers to put sin to death also reminds them, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). We fight sin as people who are already loved by God. We repent as people whose condemnation has already fallen on Christ. We pursue holiness because the Spirit of God now dwells within us. So we can take our sin seriously without being crushed by it.
And when progress feels painfully slow, we can remember another promise from Paul: “He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6). God has begun something in everyone who belongs to Christ and He intends to finish it.
Tomorrow morning I may walk outside and find another web on my car. And tomorrow morning, I’ll wipe it away again. As Christians we can do the same. His mercies are new every morning (Lamentations 3:22,23). So we can repent again. And we can return to Christ again. By the grace of God, we are not the same people we were when the fight began.
The spirit is at work.
And one day, the work will be complete.
Written by Josh Rollins