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You Were Formed to Be Like Christ

May 15, 2005                                                                                        Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson

When I was growing up and we would take trips, my mother was always the one who sat in the right seat with the map. She would love to tell my father where to go. My mother, to her credit, actually loved maps and she really studied them. She liked to know where she was going to go and why. We all do. It’s part of being human. We love to know where we are going to go and why. One of the things that drives me nuts about being in the Army is that sometimes they will get you together in some truck or bus somewhere and you ask, “Well, where are we going.” And they say, “Oh, we’ll tell you later.” “Why are we going there?” “Well, you’ll find out when we get there.” I’ve learned a lot of patience in the Army. But we all like to know where we are going and why we are going there. And God has told us this. God has shared with us what He is going to do with us and where we are going.

Human beings are amazing creatures, the Bible says. It says that we are made in God’s image. We don’t know all of what that means, it’s so deep, but it means several things. It means that we are spiritual creatures, we are aware of existence outside of ourselves and that there is a power more than us, that there is a spiritual realm. We are intellectual creatures. We can think, we can reason, we can make choices. We are relational creatures; we can receive love and give love. We are moral creatures, we make moral decisions and we can be held accountable for those decisions. All of this is part of the image of God. Of course, the Bible tells us that human beings have fallen into sin and because of that this image that we have is stained. This image that we have is still there, every human being has it, but it is corrupted. I don’t know if you have ever gone into the attic, looking for something like your grandmother’s old linens. You open up the box and you bring out, say, a tablecloth and it is all stained and tattered. Maybe it has been there a long time or water got into the box or maybe mice lived there. But you can see its former glory, the handmade intricate pieces of things that have been sewn on or sewn together. And yet you are not able to put it back together. Such is the image of God in human beings; the glory is there but it is tattered and stained. But God did not give up on us. God has as His purpose – this is what I want to talk to you about today – His purpose for those, especially those who have come to believe in Jesus Chris, is to make us again like Himself…to restore that image and the process of that which we call discipleship or becoming mature in Christ. Where are we going? It’s to be like Jesus Christ. Why? Because God wants to remake and redeem and restore us to our former even greater glory than we had before. This is the subject of the scripture this morning, coming from Romans 8. I’m reading from Eugene Peterson’s “The Message” because I really think he expresses this so well. I want you to listen carefully to these words.

God knew what He was doing from the very beginning. He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love Him according to the same lines as the life of His Son. The Son stands first in the line of humanity to be restored. We see the original and intended shape of our lives there in Him. After God made that decision of what His children should be like, He followed it up by calling people by His name. And after He called them by His name, He set them on a solid basis with Himself and then after getting them established, He stayed with them to the end, gloriously completing what He had begun.

This is the word of the Lord.

There are three things that you need to get right so that your life will be successful. Three things that we all need to get right for things to work out. There are many other things, but three particular things. The first is that you need to come to believe and accept that you are a creature. That is, you are made. You had nothing to do with your being here. God, through the agency of your parents, had everything to do with you being here. You were made. You are a creature. And because of that, you do not belong to yourself. I know this sounds anti-American, and by the way I believe in being an American. But you do not belong to yourself. Being a Christian is not a democracy. God has made you. I had a professor one time who used to draw two circles on the board; on one side of the board he would draw this little tiny circle and he would say, “That’s you.” He would walk to the other side of the board and draw a great big circle and say, “That’s God.” Now we are made in the image of God, we are both circles. But we are a little circle and God is a big circle. He used to say, “This is the creator-created distinction (very big theological terms).” What he was really trying to say is that you were made. This may sound like basic stuff and it is but so often you and I rebel against this whole idea. If we ask ourselves how we live our lives, we live our lives as though we owned ourselves. We acknowledge God is up there, we know He is up there, but we live our lives largely in terms that we believe that they are our lives. But until we get the fact that our lives are not our own, we are going to be frustrated.

The second thing that we need to realize is that we need to be forgiven. You see, that rebelliousness leads to all manner of problems. It’s pretty easy to look out into the world and see something is not right. We can just look and read the paper or see it in our own lives. But it’s a little harder step to realize that what is not right has to do with us as individuals. We tend to look out into the world and say “What a terrible place, I wish somebody would do something about it.” But we are all sort of thinking that it is somebody else’s fault. GK Chesterton once said that we can look out into the world and see what is wrong with it and we see what is wrong with it is us. We all have a part to play in the evil of the world because we are basically rebellious and we need to be forgiven. Until we come to that place, we will find frustration.

And last, but not least, is that God has a plan. God has a wonderful plan, if you will, that He is going to take us from this place and remake us. I love what Eugene Peterson said in the scripture; he said – he is writing and paraphrasing the scripture – and he said that He followed up by calling people by name. After He called them by name He set them on a solid basis with Himself…that’s that forgiveness thing. But then after getting them established, He stayed with them until the end, gloriously completing what He had begun. He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love Him along the same lines as those of His son. That is what God’s purpose is. We each have different things that we do in our lives but we all have the same purpose. For those of us who has given our lives to Jesus Christ, God has the same purpose and that is to make you like Himself. We call this discipleship. We call this becoming mature in Christ. We call this growing up because God wants us to grow up in Him. That’s God’s purpose for you. If you get this it will explain a lot about what is going on in your life.

How is God doing this? Well, today is Pentecost Sunday. I really think Pentecost is the least understood day in the church. We’ve all heard the scripture or read it ourselves in Acts 2 how the Holy Spirit came down onto the disciples and there was fire and people were speaking in tongues and all kinds of wild things were going on. Presbyterians read this and we go, “Oh. Hmm. I’m not so sure about this Holy Spirit stuff, it seems kind of weird to me. That’s not decent in order is it?” But you know, those things did happen. But the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives is usually quiet, a still small voice. You see when we become Christians the Holy Spirit does move in. I like to use the image of the house, as I’ve used many times. God moves into our house but then He starts cleaning up. I love those shows out, “What Not to Wear.” I don’t know where they find these people really, how they find somebody who dresses like a sack of potatoes. This person loves the way they dress, they think they look great and are comfortable. The show goes on convincing them how to dress without looking like a sack of potatoes. It is kind of like Cinderella, it’s interesting. Or the other one, where they clean the house…they put all the stuff on the driveway and people come along and say, “Well, you can’t keep this or that.” And the people go, “No, I want that.” We are just like that, we can’t clean ourselves up and that is the job of the Holy Spirit. The NIV says, in this same passage, those He called He also justified (that means to be forgiven) and those He justified He also glorified. The glorification is not just all at once, it’s a process. Once we become Christians, God begins this slow lifetime-changing process where He begins to change and move us in His direction. That is the job of the Holy Spirit. And being sinners that we are, we like to keep our house dirty sometimes. We say, “Oh, I want to keep that.” And the Holy Spirit tells us to move it along. That’s what Pentecost is all about. It’s important for you to see that it’s God’s job to clean you up and to clean me up. But we have to cooperate.

In my Christian life, twenty odd years as a pastor, I have discovered that spiritual maturity often has nothing to do with age. It really doesn’t. There are people in their forties, fifties up to their eighties who are still spiritual babies because somewhere along the line they have said to the Holy Spirit, “You need to stay in my living room. You can’t go anywhere else in my house. There are no open doors for you. I like it the way I am.” And they are Christians, they know the Lord, but they are not interested in growing in Christ. We need to cooperate. We need to say yes. We need to desire to grow. We need to be disciples. We need to get ourselves involved in the way that God has told us that we do grow, learning the Word, the Bible. You know people tell me that there are two problems with the Bible; one is that it is not applicable to the modern life, it’s no longer relevant but on the other hand it is too hard to understand. I understand that. As modern people sometimes we read the Bible and ask what it is all about. I’m not saying we check our brains at the door when we read the Bible, but the Bible really is God’s word. You know what we discover…we discover that even though these words were written many years ago, they still are true. We put so much effort into our education; just think about it. I started school when I was five years old. First, kindergarten through twelfth grade…then I went to college. If somebody had told me I would be in college ten more years, I would have told them they were crazy. But it happened. I went to two universities, two seminaries, and I got a master’s degree later. I’m not sure when I’m going to grow up. And there is nothing wrong with that. We wear out cars taking our kids places to learn things. And there is nothing wrong with that. But we have a hard time getting them to Sunday school for twenty minutes. We have a hard time getting ourselves to Sunday school for twenty minutes. We’ll watch the Vikings for three hours and read the Bible…well, we won’t read the Bible. Now I know I’m stepping on toes but it is true. I know the Bible is hard to understand. When I went to seminary, I had been a Christian for three years. I didn’t understand much of what I was reading. But I read it anyway, because I had to, and it took me years to understand it. The Bible is like that. Sometimes it just takes the effort. We have to work at it. It is applicable and that’s why I’m here, to help you understand, to some degree. But it’s more than that. It’s dealing with one another in community. It’s learning how to apply what we read. We need to work at being mature disciples. It takes years.  It’s not an all at once thing. That is one of the things about our culture…we expect to get everything all at once. It just doesn’t happen that way. It is a long tough road. We need to cooperate.

There are three things that I want to tell you besides this that I think are tremendous implications of what I’m trying to say because this is very practical stuff. If you accept the fact that that is what God’s goal is for you, you need to realize some things. One is that God is much more interested in what you are than what you do. God is out to change you from the inside out. I think that is particularly hard for guys; we tend to identify our lives by what we do. “Well, what are you?” “I’m a carpenter.” We don’t really describe what we are. But God is much more interested in what we are inside than in what we do. And God is out to change us from the inside out.

God is also much more interested in your character than your comfort. I know that’s hard. You see, being who we are, we’re all interested in being comfortable. We’re all interested in making our lives as comfortable as possible to live as long as possible. But God is much more interested in your character than your comfort. And we wonder why bad things happen to us. Well first of all life is tough. But God will bring things into your life – not everything is this way – but sometimes God brings things into your life to mold you and to make you like Him. This life is not meant to be comfortable or pain-free.

And last but not least, God is much more interested in His plan for you than your plans for yourself. We all have plans, we all have things we want to do – there is nothing wrong with that. But God will short-circuit your plans to see that His plans work out. And His plan for you is to make you like Him. It’s not a bad thing, it’s a good thing! God’s plan is to make you like Himself…that’s the ultimate goal. And He is much more interested in that than yours. Have you ever sworn that you will never go somewhere and then you wind up there? I have, Minnesota for example – just kidding. But you are always glad that you got there…sometimes. God has a plan. I take comfort in that. If everything that I had planned for myself had worked out, I would be in terrible trouble. You know what I mean, don’t you? But because God is in control, as hard as it is sometimes, it works out. It’s good. I want you to get that. I want you to get those three things but that last thing particularly. God has a goal for you. To know where you are going helps a whole lot…it helps us understand a lot of things that happen in life, what God is doing in your life, why He does make you wait sometimes, why sometimes bad things happen – not because He is trying to punish you, but because it is part of His purpose – because God wants us to be like Him in the end. I want to encourage you to be a cooperator with God; cooperate with what He is doing in your life. Let God in, open doors in your house for Him, doors that maybe you have kept shut because you were too scared to let Him in or because you are too willful. Be a cooperator, let God into your life, and I think you’ll find that things will work out much better. Let us pray.