Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is He who calls you, and He also will bring it to pass.

—1 Thessalonians 5:23-24

We live in a really, really broken world, and I don’t think anyone needed a news flash to figure that one out. There are broken countries, broken cities, broken companies, broken systems, broken people, and when you get down to the individual level, much of that brokenness revolves around identity. 

We are a culture full of people who are desperately searching for who they are. In that search, they may turn to different groups of people, habits, or careers in order to give themselves an identity and meaning, but it’s never enough because none of those things are the source of our purpose, and therefore, those things can never make us whole.

That is why these two verses are so remarkable—because they shine a light on the way to find the wholeness of identity that so many people are looking for.

The first time we see wholeness or completeness in these verses is the most surprising and easiest to miss because it gets lost in translation. It’s the word peace. The original word that is translated as peace literally means wholeness. The two concepts were much more closely connected in the Jewish culture than they are in ours, so it’s easy to miss, but Paul is referring to God as “the God of the kind of wholeness that brings with it peace”. 

It’s a mouthful, but I think it’s worth the extra words because it reminds us that God is not only the source of the peace that surpasses understanding, but He is also the source of the wholeness we are all searching for.

The next reference to wholeness or completeness comes in the very next phrase. Paul is praying that God will sanctify the church at Thessalonica entirely, that the sanctification will be complete. 

Of all the words in these verses, I think sanctification is likely to be the least popular among those who are not saved, but it’s the key to the wholeness so many people are looking for. Sanctification refers to the ongoing process of God slowly removing our sin so that we become more and more like Him. 

It sometimes looks like addicts who suddenly no longer have a desire for the thing they were addicted to, but more often it looks like a gentle nudge from the Spirit reminding us that responding to that coworker harshly is not the way to do it or like the inner conviction that we need to let go of things that are becoming idols to us. Most people who do not know Jesus would probably say that’s not being true to yourself, but that’s not what we see in these verses because the result of sanctification, once it’s complete when we stand in the presence of Jesus, is that our spirit and soul and body will be “preserved complete.” 

After sanctification is complete, what will be left is our whole self—our spirit, soul, and body that have been made perfectly whole and clean. 

It’s like an animal that is caught in an oil spill. It starts off soaked in oil, a black blob swimming through the stuff and suffocating in the fumes. Until someone saves it by plucking it out of the muck. Slowly that person begins wiping away the excess oil, and then he breaks out the Dawn and begins to work away at the layers of oil trapped in its feathers. 

That process—the wiping away of layers of muck—is like sanctification. The goal is not to strip the animal of its identity, but to slowly reveal its true identity by removing the layers of toxicity that are hiding it. It’s not until every ounce of oil is gone that we can really see the cute little duckling for all that it is. 

It’s easy to see how those around us who don’t know Jesus well might think being plucked out of the mire we’ve always been in could be equivalent to losing our identity. After all, the Bible does talk about dying to ourselves daily in order to follow Christ, so if the Christians in their lives don’t live in a way that makes it clear that there is joy in surrendering to the hand that’s ready to wash us clean, how will they know?

We have been given an amazing gift in that we have a Savior Who is eager to make us whole. As we go through this week and meet those who haven’t discovered the God of wholeness and peace, let’s make an intentional effort to show them the joy we’ve found in surrendering our identity to the One Who has known us since the foundation of the world. There is so much for them to discover, and who knows? We might just be the window they look through to find it.