To the image of Christ

The process of spiritual formation is to conform us to the image of Christ. When the NT writers speak of "the image of Christ" they mean the fulfillment of the deepest dynamics of our being. We are created to be compassionate persons whose relationships are characterized by love and forgiveness, persons whose lives are a healing, liberating, transforming touch of God’s grace upon their world. When all of us are perfectly conformed to the image of Christ then we find our unique individuality.
The image of Christ is the fulfillment of the deepest longings of the human heart for wholeness.

The image of Christ is that which brings cleansing, healing, restoration, renewal, transformation and wholeness into the unclean, diseased, broken, imprisoned, dead incompleteness of our lives. It brings compassion in the place of indifference, forgiveness in the place of resentment, kindness in place of coldness, openness in place of protective defensiveness or manipulation, a life lived for God and not self. Again and again the NT emphasizes that this is the work God is seeking to do in us—to grow us up into Christlikeness: "We all with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness" (2 Cor. 3:18) "until we attain…to mature personhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" (Eph. 4:13), "seeing that we have put off the old nature with its practices and have put on the new nature, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator" (Col. 3:9-10).

Paul in Eph. 1:3-6 explores the depths of our relationship to the image of Christ.

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children, through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, which he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved."

This is a profound and powerful affirmation of the nature of our being. Its focus is found in the affirmation that chose us. The word chose translates a compound Greek term, which literally means "spoke forth." Paul is not saying that God chooses some and does not choose others. Paul is saying that every human being has been "spoken forth" by God before the foundation of the world. Paul is alluding to the Genesis account of God speaking forth creation. He is indicating that there was no surprise in heaven when any of us were conceived. God purposed us into being before the foundation of the world.

But Paul indicates that God did not just purpose into being. God purposes us into a particular kind of being—that we might be holy and blameless before God in love. We were created to be whole (holy) in the nature of our being and to be persons of complete integrity (blameless) in our doing. In fact, we are to find the fulfillment of our being in being like Christ. We all know that something has gone wrong with God’s plan for our wholeness. We have failed to achieve God’s purposes for us. This is why Paul adds; "he destined us for adoption as his children…" Even in our failure and incompleteness, in the bondage and brokenness that hinder our growth toward wholeness in Christ, it is still the good pleasure of God’s will that we should become his children.

The process of being conformed to the image of Christ takes place primarily at the points of our unlikeness to Christ’s image. God is present to us in the most destructive aspects of our cultural captivity. God is involved with us in the most imprisoning bondage of our brokenness. God meets us in those places of our lives that are most alienated from God. God is there, in grace, offering us the forgiveness, the cleansing, the liberation, the healing we need to begin the journey toward our wholeness and fulfillment in Christ.

But this can be uncomfortable, we would much rather have our spiritual formation focus on those places where we are pretty well along the way. How much of our devotional life and our worship are designed simply to affirm, for ourselves, others and perhaps even God, those areas of our lives that we think are already well along the way? Since the work of God’s formation is the process of conforming us to the image of Christ, obviously it’s going to take place at the points where we are not yet conformed to that image. Through some channel—Scripture, worship, a word of proclamation, the agency of a brother or sister in Christ, even the agency of an unbeliever—the Spirit of God may probe some area in which we are not conformed to the image of Christ. That probing will probably always be confrontational and it will always be a challenge.

Maybe the cross we bear, that Jesus frequently referenced, is the point of our unlikeness to the image of Christ, where we must die to self in order to be raised by God into wholeness of life in the image of Christ right there at that point. So the process of being conformed to the image of Christ takes place at the points of our unlikeness to Christ and the first step in confrontation.

The second step would then be consecration. We must come to the point of saying Yes to God at each point of unlikeness. We must give God permission to do the work God wants to do with us right there, because transformation will not be forced upon us. God will stand at those closed doors of our lives by which we have shut God out and imprisoned ourselves within, and the love of Gods’ grace will knock and knock and knock upon those doors. But God will not force open the doors. He watches to see the door move from within. There must be a consecration, a release of ourselves to God at each point of our unlikeness to Christ. When there is, the process of being conformed to the image of Christ begins.