Daily Inspiration Quote by William Ames

Ames doesn’t dress sanctification up as mood music or moral self-improvement; he frames it as ontological renovation. “Real change” is a quietly polemical phrase in a 17th-century Protestant world suspicious of merely external religion. He’s drawing a hard line against performative piety: churchgoing, correct language, public virtue. None of that counts unless something in the person is actually altered.

The contrast between “sordidness” and “purity” does rhetorical work, too. “Sordidness” isn’t just wrongdoing; it carries grime, appetite, a sense of being lowered and contaminated. Ames is after the visceral disgust many Reformers leveraged to make sin feel less like a mistake and more like a deforming power. By setting it against “God’s image,” he also smuggles in a claim about human dignity: the problem with sin isn’t only that it breaks rules, but that it distorts what a human being is for.

Context matters. Ames writes in the Puritan and Reformed orbit, where salvation is by grace, not merit, yet the demand for visible holiness is intense. That tension sits beneath the sentence: sanctification is not a ladder you climb to earn God, but neither is it optional. The subtext is disciplinary and pastoral at once: if you want reassurance, look for transformation; if you want transformation, stop mistaking polish for rebirth. It’s a definition aimed as much at the anxious believer as at the complacent hypocrite.