What is sanctification?
Sanctification is the lifelong process of becoming holy in actual character, not merely in status. It is the restoration of original nature through daily obedience, purified love, and growth toward the maturity God intended from the beginning.
Sanctification means being made holy. In practice, it describes the process by which a person's actual character, habits, and heart are transformed to resemble God's own nature. It is distinct from forgiveness, which changes our standing, and it is the work of a lifetime rather than a moment.
Set Apart and Made New
The biblical vocabulary carries two senses. To be sanctified is to be set apart for God's purpose, and to be made genuinely holy in substance. Paul prays, "And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Thessalonians 5:23). Peter quotes the ancient command, "Be ye holy; for I am holy" (1 Peter 1:16). Neither passage treats holiness as a label. Both expect a real change in the person. As it is written, "Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord" (Hebrews 12:14).
Restoration of What Was Lost
Sanctification is the recovery of an original design. Human beings were created to grow to maturity, to become people in whom God could dwell, so that a person who has become fully one with God would have no desire to sin at all. The fall interrupted that growth and attached humanity to a false root, leaving us with a nature pulled in two directions.
Salvation reopens the path; sanctification is walking it. It is not the addition of something foreign to human nature but the restoration of the nature we were meant to have. This is why growth in holiness feels, at its best, less like suppression and more like becoming genuinely oneself. The scripture says, "Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new" (2 Corinthians 5:17).
Both God's Work and Ours
Scripture holds two truths together without embarrassment: "for it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure," and therefore "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12-13). God supplies grace, truth and the power of the Spirit. We supply the portion of responsibility that no one can fulfill for us: the actual choosing, day by day, of what is right.
The mechanism is ordinary. When we overcome hardship and still do good, something real is added to us; we feel elevated and strengthened. Repeated over years, those choices become character, and character becomes the substance of who we are eternally. Neglect them, and the reverse accumulates just as reliably.
Where Sanctification Concentrates
Holiness is not primarily religious performance. It shows up in the purification of love: fidelity in marriage, purity before it, honesty in friendship, unselfishness in family life. It shows up in the interior life, where resentment, comparison, and the sense of being deprived are dismantled before they can grow. It shows up in speech, which reveals the heart more accurately than any profession of belief.
It also extends outward. A sanctified person changes the atmosphere around them, and families formed this way become the basic units through which a restored world is actually built.
A Process With Stages, Not a Single Event
Growth is gradual by design. Paul speaks of being "changed into the same image from glory to glory" (2 Corinthians 3:18), a phrase describing stages rather than an instant. Expecting instant perfection produces either despair or pretense. Expecting steady growth produces patience with yourself and with others who are also mid-course. For "the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day" (Proverbs 4:18).
Living the Principle
Measure direction rather than distance. The question is not whether you have arrived but whether this year's habits are cleaner than last year's.
Attend to the small and private. Sanctification advances in the choices nobody witnesses, because those are the ones that reveal and shape the real self.
Keep the disciplines that feed growth: prayer that is honest, scripture read to be changed rather than to be informed, service that costs something, and regular self-examination without self-hatred.
Deal with the root feelings early. Envy and the sense of being loved less have wrecked more lives than dramatic sins; bring them into the light while they are still small.
Finally, do it in relationship. Holiness is formed in family and community, where our claims about love are tested daily. A person kind in public and harsh at home has not been sanctified, whatever else has happened. Let the transformation start there and it will reach everywhere else.
These answers explain the Bible in the light of the Divine Principle, the teachings of Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Read about the author, Sun Myung Moon.
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Sources and further reading
- The Holy Bible, King James Version — Scripture quoted and referenced throughout the answers.
- The Divine Principle (full text) — The complete text of the Divine Principle, the teaching of Reverend Sun Myung Moon that these answers explain.
- Unification texts library (tparents.org) — Large online library of Unification texts, sermons and collected speeches, including the Cheon Seong Gyeong.
- Short video lectures in English — Playlist of short English video lectures presenting these same principles.