It's not uncommon for Christians to have a wrong understanding of what sanctification looks like and how one grows in holiness. Marcus Serven points out that two extreme positions - the "Carnal Christian" and "Sinless Perfection" - both pervert the biblical teaching on sanctification.

There are several wrong views of sanctification. Just to put them historically, looking back to the 1980s at the Lordship controversy, what we see at that time was a bringing out of the whole concept that a person could somehow live as a carnal Christian, that they could have made a profession of faith at some point in the past, but that their current life doesn't even remotely connect with that profession. And what's wrong with that view is that Jesus himself said that there would be fruit that begins to make itself manifest as we abide in Christ. When we're connected to Christ that means we stay connected to Christ and that bears fruit in our life. There's a sense in which holiness grows in the Christian life.

So the whole carnal Christianity idea leads to antinomianism, no law, no sense of government, no sense of real Christian discipleship, and that would be a flawed understanding in theology or in Christian practice, that would be one view. Another view that's been out there for quite a long time, going back really to the mid-1800s and the Second Great Awakening, would be the idea of an instantaneous sanctification. That somehow if you just had a particular second experience or you were slain in the spirit or you had some other crisis point in your life, that that would lead to instantaneous sanctification and all of the manifestations of sin in your life would be gone, they would evaporate. And my response to that is, for any man who's telling me that, I'd like to talk to his wife or children to find out if that's true. And the reality is that if you did talk to the wife and children they would point out that no actually there wasn't a complete eradication of sinful impulses, sinful thoughts, words, tendencies and all of that.

The sober truth is that sanctification is progressive.