A pastor’s journey to sanctification inspires the book “The Blueprint of Grace”

Sanctification is a process that all believers go through in their ongoing efforts to conform to the will of the Lord. It is an ongoing journey that no one this side of heaven will ever complete, and Bob Allen is well aware of this.

It wasn’t always this way. Allen, the senior pastor of Salem Avenue Baptist Church in Rolla, Missouri, knew a lot about the Lord from a young age, but it was in the context of a Pentecostal/charismatic tradition. Because of those teachings, his view of the gospel is incomplete and very different from what it is today, he says.

“I understood grace as something I only needed when I sinned,” he said. “Coming from that background, I thought you could lose your salvation and it was up to me to make it right. I tried to be holy, but didn’t really understand what the gospel meant to me in everyday life. Spiritual discipline was more about learning about God than about how we can be more like Him.”

“More than just facts about God”

Allen came to faith in Jesus at age 17, largely, he says, through the efforts of church organizations.

“That’s when I realized I needed to know more than just facts about God,” he said. “I needed to know him and develop a relationship with him as my Savior and Lord.”

But it was not until he was in his thirties that Allen was baptized and began to fully understand what he had missed in his previous understanding of the gospel.

“That’s when I began to understand what it looks like to conform to the image of Christ,” he said. “I began to see that this is the goal of our discipleship and our sanctification. The Scriptures say we are to be holy because the Lord our God is holy, but I didn’t understand what that meant. I wish I had known that when I was younger.”

God’s design

Allen said that the realization that he had lost time and years was partly what led him to pursue the path of the priesthood.

“Sanctification is both challenging and joyful, it does not happen overnight; nor is it a process with a defined end point,” he said. “It is a lifelong pursuit. The beauty of God’s work of sanctification is that God shapes a person’s life into something beyond expectations. By submitting to God’s plan, believers become more like Christ and thus fulfill God’s purpose for His glory on earth.”

“I want people to know that sanctification is not something we do,” he said. “It is something the Holy Spirit does in us when we submit to God.”

As part of his own journey to sanctification and a desire to help others begin earlier than he did, Allen wrote and recently published a book on the subject: The Blueprint of Grace: Seeing and Submitting to God’s Design for Sanctification. It is published by Wipf and Stock and is available on Amazon.com.

“I wrote this book to help those who may be struggling with their faith and are on the verge of giving up hope that they can become what God wants them to be,” he said. “I think it also clears up some of the confusion about how we grow as Christians and will therefore be of use to anyone who wants to better understand God’s plan for Christians.”

Two parts

The book is in two parts: a theological part and a practical part. The theological part is Allen’s attempt to work out God’s plan, man’s needs, and then God’s gifts of grace. The practical part builds on this foundation to help readers understand what it means to be sanctified by God’s work.

“I want people to go home with the hope that what they are experiencing in their lives here and now is not what God has planned for them in the long term,” he said. “Following Jesus is a lifelong task that calls us daily to die to ourselves so that Christ can live in us. That is a hard reality to face if you don’t know that it is worth it.

EDITOR’S NOTE – This story was written by Brian Koonce and originally published by Pathway.