The Chase We Called Sanctification
Matthew McConaughey has been chasing himself for 30 years. I started at 15.
I was a freshman in high school, sitting on the floor of my student pastor’s living room, when he handed out copies of The Pursuit of Holiness. We were going to work through it chapter by chapter. I remember thinking it sounded like a plan. Like something I could execute.
I also remember not saying a word about the thing I was actually fighting. Not in that room. Not in any room. I was too scared to admit failure and be thought of as one.
So I built a system instead. I memorized verses, prayed harder, and would even stand up and leave the room when I felt temptation coming. When my system worked, I felt like a Christian. When it didn’t, which was most weeks, I was left with one question. I asked it alone, in the dark, again and again:
If I struggle this much, am I even saved?
It took me another decade to understand this. The book was right. Jerry Bridges wasn’t pushing willpower; he was writing about grace, about the Spirit doing what I couldn’t. But at fifteen, I was ashamed, and when you’re that age and ashamed, you don’t want grace. You want a technique. So I read a book about grace and turned it into a method, because the method was something I could control.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe after seeing it happen to others: this is how orthodox theology can create kids who think it’s all about earning their way. It doesn’t happen because they’re taught the wrong things. It happens because they’re taught the right things at an age when shame drowns out every word about grace and only lets them hear the parts about striving.
Bridges wrote a book insisting that the Spirit does what we cannot. I read a manual. Same pages. Different book entirely.
Nobody in that living room did anything wrong. That’s what makes it hard to talk about. No bad doctrine to point at, no false teacher, no obvious failure. Just a room full of teenagers reading a good book about grace while at least one of us silently converted it into a performance review.
I was in my living room in Nashville, mid-twenties, still failing, when I read Matt Chandler on recovering redemption. What finally cracked it open wasn’t a better technique. It was the idea that what I was fighting had roots — that the behavior was fruit of something older and deeper than my Tuesday-night resolve, and no amount of walking out of the room was ever going to reach it.
You had a room too.
Maybe it wasn’t a student pastor’s living room. Maybe it was a small group, a men’s retreat, a Bible study where everyone shared prayer requests for someone else and nobody said the true thing. But you know the room. You know what it costs to sit in it holding something you can’t put down and won’t put out loud.
And you know what we do in those rooms. We ask for a method. Give me the plan, the accountability app, the reading schedule, the thing I can do on Tuesday that will make Wednesday different. Because a method is dignified. A method means I’m working on it. Confession means I’m losing.
The church didn’t invent this. We just baptized it.
I thought I’d left this behind in high school, that it was something high school kids do. Then I watched a man win an Academy Award and preach it to forty million people.
They took it as gospel. So did I.
McConaughey’s speech is beautiful, and that’s what makes it risky. He thanks God first and truly means it. He talks about gratitude as if he knows it saved him. Then he shares who he’s chasing: himself, ten years in the future. He says that at thirty-five, he realized he’ll never catch up to that man, and that’s the point. The hero always stays ahead, so you keep running.
Forty million people heard that and felt encouraged.
I heard my fifteen-year-old self building a system.
We were made to become
Start with what’s true in the chase, because something is.
God did not make us finished. Adam was placed in a garden with work to do — cultivate it, keep it, name what was in it. The first man was given a trajectory, not a terminus. There was somewhere to go.
So the instinct McConaughey describes isn’t a lie. The restlessness, the feeling that you’re not yet who you should be, the urge to become someone further along than the person doing the dishes right now—that’s part of how we’re made. It’s not a flaw. It’s part of our design.
That’s exactly why the counterfeit is convincing. Counterfeits aren’t made from nothing. They start with something true, just twisted.
Then the destination moved
Here’s what Genesis 3 does to the chase. The serpent’s offer was not become nothing. It was become like God — on your own terms, by your own reach, on your own timeline. The temptation was never to stop becoming. It was to become without reference to the One who made becoming possible.
Kenneth Mathews puts his finger on the sales technique: the serpent spoke only about what she would gain and said nothing about what she would lose.1 That’s the whole pitch. Not a lie exactly — her eyes really were opened, she really did come to know good and evil, exactly as promised. He just never mentioned the invoice.
And what she got was not what the brochure said. Mathews again: they became like God in one way, and what they achieved was isolation and fear.
Isolation.
Read that word and then go back to a fifteen-year-old on a living room floor, holding something he will not say out loud in any room, for years.
The serpent’s offer always delivers. That’s what makes it so hard to argue with. You do become someone. You just become someone alone.
What changed after the fall wasn’t our desire to grow, but what we aim for. The self becomes both the runner and the finish line. And if the finish line moves at your pace, it isn’t really a finish line. It’s just a treadmill that looks appealing.
McConaughey said it himself, more honestly than most preachers: his hero is always ten years away, and he’ll never catch him. He called this freedom. Think about that. A man stands on the world’s biggest stage, holding the highest honor in his field, and says the thing he’s chasing can’t be caught—and that this is good news.
That isn’t freedom. It’s like Sisyphus, just with a Texas accent.
And it is precisely what I built at fifteen, with a verse list and a plan. The system was designed so that arrival was structurally impossible. Every failure proved I needed more system. Every success proved the system worked and had to be maintained. There was no exit. If I struggle this much, am I even saved? is the only question that framework can generate, and it has no answer inside the framework.
The hero already came, and he came from behind
Romans 8:29 says God predestined those he knew ahead of time to be shaped into the image of his Son. Look at the grammar. God is the subject of every verb in the list: foreknew, predestined, called, justified, glorified. You aren’t the one doing the shaping. You’re the one being shaped.
And notice what you’re being conformed to. The language reaches back to Genesis 1:27, humanity made in the image of God. We fall short of that glory, so we only arrive at what we were made to be when we’re conformed to the One who is himself the true image.2
Which means McConaughey is not wrong to chase. He’s chasing the right thing at the wrong image. The self ten years out is not the image you were made for. It never was. It’s just the only one visible from inside the treadmill.
This is what Chandler showed me in a Nashville living room, and it’s why a better method was never going to save me. The gospel isn’t about keeping on until things get better. The gospel is that the light was red for good, and Someone else stopped for me.
And the question I asked in the dark for years—if I struggle this much, am I even saved?—turns out to be about belonging, not performance. John says the Father poured out his love on us and called us his children. Gary Burge points out that this is an act of legitimation: a father names a child and makes a permanent claim on that child’s identity. That claim isn’t in the child’s hands.3
Which is the whole point. If my sonship depended on my Tuesday, I’d have lost it a thousand times by Wednesday.
The chase ends in a face
McConaughey’s arc has no ending, and he knows it. Ten years out, forever. The story can’t resolve, because the hero is the one telling it.
Scripture ends differently. When he appears, we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. Not because we caught him. Because he showed up. And the seeing is what does the work — we are changed by the sight of him the way a mirror doesn’t strain to reflect.
That’s the difference between a treadmill and a road. A road has a destination, and the destination has a face.
So here’s what I want to ask you, and I want you to answer it before you close this tab.
What’s your system?
Not your theology. Your system. The thing you actually reach for at 11 P.M. when the old pull comes back. The app, the streak, the reading plan, the rule you made for yourself in January that you’ve broken and remade four times since. Name it.
I’m not going to tell you to stop. Some of those are wise. Get the app. Leave the room. Bridges was right about the disciplines, and so is anyone who tells you to build guardrails.
But notice what happens in your chest when the system breaks. That’s the tell. If the failure sends you looking for a better system, you’re still chasing. If the failure sends you to a Father who already named you, you’ve been rescued from something that was never going to save you anyway.
The difference isn’t in the effort. Both people are trying. The difference is what the effort is for — whether you’re working to secure a verdict or working because the verdict came in.
And if you’re the one who left — who sat in a room like mine, did the plan, kept failing, and finally decided the whole thing was a con — I understand why. I’d only ask you to consider that you might not have walked away from Christianity. You might have walked away from a technique with Christian vocabulary stapled to it. Those aren’t the same, and only one of them ever claimed it could hold you.
We are not going to catch him.
Not the hero ten years out, and not the version of ourselves we keep promising the people who love us. That race was rigged from the start, and the mercy of the gospel is that it tells us so out loud instead of letting us run until our knees give.
What we get instead is both stranger and better. We have a Father who names us before we do anything, a Brother who already finished the race, and a Spirit who works in us in ways no reading plan ever could. We get to stop striving and start becoming, not because we finally found the right method, but because the outcome was decided before we ever sat down on that living room floor.
Keep livin’ is a decent slogan for a man who hasn’t been caught yet.
We have.
If this named something for you, share it. Somebody in your small group built the same system I did and hasn't said so out loud yet.
The Chase We Called Sanctification is part of Functional Gospels, a series on the counterfeit gospels we’ve handed the culture and the culture has handed back. Brené Brown and The Da Vinci Code are already up. Next week: Jon Meacham, public religion, and the Christian nation debate.
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Kenneth A. Mathews, Genesis 1–11, Christian Standard Commentary (Nashville: Holman Reference, 2022), 187.
David G. Peterson, Romans, Evangelical Biblical Theology Commentary (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2021), 333.
Gary M. Burge, Letters of John, NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 145.