I've been trying to write with a pen and paper again. (Actually, it's not paper, it's a Supernote—an E Ink notebook. But tomato, potato.) It's going about as well as you'd expect for someone who's typed everything for the last twenty years. Every time I sit down to write, I catch myself gripping the pen like I'm trying to choke a confession out of it. My hand cramps up. My shoulders creep toward my ears. I'm concentrating so hard on writing that I can barely write. The harder I try, the worse it gets.

I think this is how a lot of us do Christianity.

We grip it. We white-knuckle our way through sanctification, squeezing the life out of our faith in the name of getting holier. Read more. Pray harder. Stop doing the bad things. Start doing the good things. Try, try, try. And we end up cramped and exhausted, wondering why the whole thing feels like a losing battle. A woman at the church I grew up in as a teen always told me I looked constipated. This is probably why.

But what if sanctification was never about trying harder? What if we've been gripping the pen wrong this entire time?

What Jesus Actually Prayed For

In John 17, we get to listen in on Jesus praying—not for the crowds, not for the world at large, but for his closest friends on the night before he dies. And what he prays for is wild. He doesn't ask that they'd behave better. He doesn't ask that they'd memorize more Scripture or get their act together. He prays that they would be in God the way he is in God.

"As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us" (v. 21).

Jesus is not praying for moral improvement. He's praying for union. He's asking the Father to pull his followers into the very life of the Trinity—into the divine dance that has been spinning since before the world existed. This isn't a prayer for better behavior. It's a prayer for union with the Divine.

A Word Most Protestants Have Never Heard

There's a word for this that too many of us haven't encountered: theosis. Also called divinization or (if you want to sound really Catholic) the beatific vision. It's the ancient Christian teaching that we are being drawn into the divine nature itself. Not that we become God—let's pump the brakes—but that we are being incorporated into God's own life, the same way bread and wine are incorporated into the body of Christ in Communion.

The Eastern Orthodox Church has kept this idea alive for two thousand years. But Western Christianity, especially Protestantism, largely lost the plot. We reduced salvation to a transaction—you were a sinner, Jesus paid the bill, now try to be good until you die. Sanctification became behavior modification. Theosis got traded in for a to-do list.

But the New Testament won't let us settle for that. Paul says in 1 Corinthians that we are sanctified—and the grammar matters here. It's a perfect tense verb with a middle aspect, meaning this is something that has already happened to you and that you are simultaneously participating in. It's not a future project. It's a present reality. Colossians says you are already seated in heavenly places. The pattern across the New Testament is that what is true of Jesus is true of us. We are sanctified. We are glorified. We are in Christ, and Christ is in us.

Sanctification isn't climbing a ladder toward a distant God. It's waking up to the fact that you're already in the room.

The Divine Dance

Back in John 17, Jesus describes his relationship with the Father in terms of mutual indwelling—"I in them and you in me" (v. 23). Theologians call this perichoresis, a Greek word that shares a root with choreography—it literally means something like "dancing around." The persons of the Trinity don't dominate each other. They don't compete. They give and receive and give again in an endless exchange of love and glory. And Jesus is praying that we'd get swept up in that dance.

This reframes what church, prayer, Communion—the whole Christian life—is actually for. You're not earning proximity to God. You're not racking up spiritual miles on a rewards card. You're learning to loosen your grip and let yourself be carried by a love that's already holding you. The Father gives everything to the Son. The Son gives it back. And somehow, impossibly, we're invited in.

Be Careful What You Wish For

There's a catch, though. Jesus says "the glory that you have given me I have given them" (v. 22), and in John's Gospel, glory doesn't mean what you think it means. Glory in John is not triumph or spectacle. Glory is revealed at the cross—in the self-giving, self-emptying love of God hanging on a Roman execution device. So when Jesus shares his glory with us, he's sharing that. The kind of love that gives itself away completely. The kind that looks, to the outside world, like losing.

So yes, you are being drawn into the divine life. But the divine life looks like love poured out. It looks like sacrifice. It looks like a God who would rather die than dominate.

Loosen Up

John 17 is the moment in Scripture where Jesus prays for us—not just the twelve, but everyone who would ever believe. And his prayer isn't that we'd try harder. It's that we'd be one with God and with each other, so completely that the world would take notice. "That the world may believe that you have sent me" (v. 21). Our unity with God and each other is the evangelism.

So maybe it's time to put down the scorecard. Loosen the grip. Let your shoulders drop from your ears. Don't give reason for church ladies to say you need to eat more fiber. Sanctification isn't something you achieve by clenching harder. It's something you receive by opening your hands—and finding out that God has been holding you the whole time.