Crockpot Sanctification

Crockpots can be an exercise in impatience! They take time and require maintaining a low, steady heat to cook. Pulling the top off of a crockpot to check progress just delays the prolonged process of cooking even more. Unfortunately, my doubts and impatience with the claims and promises of my crockpot tempt me to check under the lid often. I confess, I do not always trust my crockpot!


Crockpots can be similar to sanctification, the long, ongoing process whereby God changes us into the image of Christ starting at conversion and culminating in glory. Though faithfully steady, this course of change in both crockpots and sanctification can seem painfully sluggish. 2 Cointhians 2:18 ensures us that God is transforming us into the likeness of Christ from one degree (crockpot pun intended) of glory to the next. The indwelling Holy Spirit guarantees change in the child of God. Nevertheless, how often are we impatient with slow change in ourselves, our spouse, our children, or our friends? How often are we irritated by the transformation that is yet lacking? How frequently do we mistrust the claims and promises of our God concerning sanctification? Akin to checking a crockpot’s progress only an hour after the cooking has started, we have doubts about the process of transformation through sanctification as well. We are frustrated by the slow rate of change. We prefer quick results, microwave speed.

Emotions Reveal our Heart

Our impatience may seem righteous at first glance, and in fact could have been righteous at the start. The basis of our impatience may have began as a loving desire for those we love to be passionate about Christ, evidenced by holy words and deeds that reflect their zeal. Assuming our desires are righteous and motivated by love, what do you suppose the fruit of this “love of neighbor” would look like? Engaging encouragement? Unwearied support? The existence of impatience and irritation may indicate that our once loving desires may have gone off the tracks. These disordered emotions are useful gifts that enable us to understand our hearts.

Questions to Probe the Heart

Interrogating, self-directed questions may aid in exposing our true motives, false beliefs and misdirected trust.  Why am I impatient? Whom am I impatient with? How does this person’s growth or lack of growth affect me? Do they make me look bad? Am I comparing this person to someone else? If so, who? Am I afraid of the outcome of their faith? What do my fears suggest? According to my theology, who has the ultimate control over a person’s growth in holiness? What do I believe about the nature, efficacy and rate of sanctification?

Impatience with God

These questions and more like them help us to slow down and think clearly about what our emotions may be revealing  about our hearts. Frustration and impatience often reveal an anger over the lack of control that we have over any given situation. These disordered emotions may help us see that we are grasping for that control and not getting it. And who would we be wrestling with? If God has ultimate control, are we frustrated and impatient with Him? Do we doubt His wisdom and methods?  Assuming we could  take the reins, what exactly would we do differently?  Would transforming gospel grace be the principal means by which we would ensure transformation?  Would grace seem too slow? Too risky and unpredictable? Would we be tempted to revert back to a few good, firm laws with built-in consequences? Wouldn’t that be more effective and manageable? Laws give the illusion that we have taken back control.  Grace simmers away at crockpot speed while law turns the oven up to 450 degrees, forcing quick external changes on the outside yet remaining cold at the core.  

Judgementalism or Gracious Love

Notwithstanding the prideful stance of attempting to wrestle control away from God and possibly enacting a different method of change, there is yet another facet of the heart that may need exposure.  While love of neighbor encourages us to speak the truth in love as a means of growth and change, our impatience about another’s process may expose a prideful judgmentalism. When we look upon another in censorious judgment rather than in love and compassion, we are undoubtedly comparing them to someone else. Who might that be? Very often, we are comparing their growth to our own.

Our pride deceives and blinds us. We lose sight of the truest standard of holiness and acceptability before a Holy God, namely perfection. Stacking our performance up against the demand for perfection ought us leave us shaking at Mt. Sinai, like Moses of old who said, “I tremble with fear.” (Hebrews 12:18-21)  If we understood our own sin, brokenness, and failures to worship and live out faith as we ought, then we would inevitably look upon others with compassion that deeply identifies with weakness. We may begin to come alongside another not as a critic of their lack of progress, but as a supporter and encourager of their growth. Instead of only noticing the lack of change, we may begin to discern the movements and evidences of grace from God, who alone has the power to inflame a heart of worship.  There may still be a lament or a sadness over what is still lacking in ourselves and others, but it will likely be a lament of faith that trusts God to complete what He started.  


If we are failing to give grace, we are likely not apprehending our desperate need of grace for ourselves. We are more sinful than we understand. Yet, the wonder of the gospel reveals a Savior and Redeemer who gives grace!  Grace- unearned, unfathomable, never-running-out grace which covers all of our sin and grants us Christ’s very righteousness! Apprehending the enormity and the beauty of the grace of God toward sinners warms our hearts and gives way to our own rise of faith, obedience and worship. And this will, in turn, allow us to extend this grace to others in their process of change.

Elijah of old understood this struggle. Romans 11 :2-6 says that when Elijah “appealed to God against Israel, he said, ‘Lord, they have killed your prophets, they have demolished your altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life.’ What is God’s reply to him? ‘I have kept for myself seven thousand that have not bowed the knee to Baal.’ So too at the present time there is a remnant, chosen by grace. But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace.” Elijah was looking at the people of Israel with frustration over the outcome of faith in their lives. But God answers by saying that he has chosen his people by grace, and that grace has enabled them to not bow the knee to Baal in idolatry. Grace is bearing the fruit of faith, obedience and worship. Grace is producing worshippers. Elijah needed to trust in God for His work that He alone could produce in the lives of His people. Trust may cause our frustration to give way to praise. 

Trusting God and Our Call to Love

Trusting God and His grace does not negate our responsibility and privilege to love our neighbor with grace and truth. We may still need to speak the hard truth, but speaking truth with faith in God may alter our motives to that of authentic, others-focused love for the benefit and blessing of our neighbor, expressed in compassionate care and sympathetic graciousness instead of impatient judgment.  

Where is your trust?

Like a crockpot, grace powered sanctification slowly but very effectively transforms and permeates to our core, making tender and warming our hearts by mercy. It produces over time  a passionate zeal to become more like our Savior, who is full of grace and truth (John 1:14).  Grace does not leave us cold on the inside, or cold toward others.  Grace is powerful and effective.  Where are you placing your trust?