Hoekema Quote

"Above all, we should be encouraged by the conviction that our sanctification is ultimately not our achievement but God's gift, since Christ is our sanctification (1 Cor. 1:30)....The fact that the Christian finds himself in tension between what he already possesses in Christ and what he does not yet enjoy implies that he should see himself as an imperfect new person. Yet the emphasis should fall, not on the continued imperfection, but on the newness. To lay the emphasis on the imperfection instead of on the newness is to turn the New Testament upside down. As Oscar Cullmann puts it, for the Christian believer today the already outweighs the not yet" (Anthony A. Hoekema The Bible and the future Pg. 71).