"Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it." - 1st Thessalonians 5:23-24
Praise God that he is a dissatisfied savior. We love to emphasize that God loves us as we are, but seem obilvious to what God is ultimately up to, and praise God that he isn't finished with us. God loves us too much to leave us as we are, and this is the difficult part of love. We like the "love us as we are" part, but we usually don't like the "sanctify us completely" part. We like that we don't have to be fixed up before we approach God, but we struggle when he begins to dig around in the dark, cold, places in our hearts. And it is only to our disadvantage that our affections usually focus on only the first part of God's love, but we should be far more thankful for the second part of God's difficult redeeming call toward more.
God is solely focused on the restoration of all things, and this is a slow process. The patience of God in our sanctification is astounding. God is patient, understanding that a process as significant as sanctification is, cannot be turned into a one-time event, and so he waits and works within us. He slowly restores all aspects of our life, and the waiting for our hearts to change can be a long wait. We are naturally distracted by the temporary satisfactions we find around us, forgetting that we were ultimately created for so much more. The old hymn says it best,
"Prone to wander, Lord I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love. Here's my heart Lord, take and seal it. Seal it for thy courts above."
May God continue to sanctify us completely, may he sanctify the deep, hidden, and dark areas of our heart. And may we find hope in the fact that God is not done with us, but that he is working toward our restoration...toward the restoration of all things.