For the sake of others

Everything that God has done, is doing and ever will do in our lives to conform us to the image of Christ is not so that we may someday be set in a display case in heaven as trophies of grace. All of God’s work to conform us to the image of Christ has as its sole purpose that we might become what God created us to be in relationship with God and with others. This is why Jesus summarized the whole law in the command to "love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength" and "love your neighbor as yourself" (Mk. 12:30-31) and why the NT writers regularly lift up love for neighbor as the essence of the Christian life (Rom. 13:9-10; I Cor.13; Gal. 5:14; Eph. 4:15-16, 5:2; Col. 3:14; I Thess 4:9-10; Jas. 2:8; I Pet. 1:22, 4:8; I Jn. 3:10-14, 17-18, 23, 4:7-8, 11-12, 19-21) to mention a few.

This image of Christ is the image of One who gave himself totally, completely, absolutely, unconditionally for others. This is the direction in which the Spirit of God moves us toward wholeness. If we forget this, we don’t have Christian spiritual formation. What we have is some kind of pathological formation that is very privatized and individualized, a spiritualized form of self-actualization. Although such forms of spirituality may be very appealing to look at on the outside, quite comfortable in their easy conformity to the values and dynamics of our culture, they are like a whitewashed tomb that has deadness on the inside if they are not life-giving, healing and redemptive for others.

Wherever there is something in our life that is not conformed to the image of Christ, there is a place where we are incapable of being all that God wants us to be with others; there is a place where our life with others is hindered and limited and restricted in it effectiveness and in its fullness; there is a place where our life will tend to become disruptive and even destructive to others. We can never be all that God wants us to be with others as long as that point of unlikeness to the image of Christ exists within us.

The points of our unlikeness to Christ are areas of our life where we are lord and not Christ—areas where our agenda, our will, our desire, our purposes rule. Wherever this is the case, our relationship with others will be controlled not by God’s will but by our own agenda. Our relationship with others at that point will become manipulative as we attempt to impose our agenda on them. If others do not readily succumb to our manipulations, we will tend to become abusive with them or break the relationship entirely.

If you want a good litmus test of your spiritual growth, simply examine the nature and quality of your relationships with others. Are you more loving, more compassionate, more patient, more understanding, more caring, more giving, more forgiving that you were a year ago? If you cannot answer these kinds of questions in the affirmative, and especially, if others cannot answer them in the affirmative about you, then you need to examine carefully the nature of your spiritual life and growth.

Jesus inseparably joined loving God with loving others, and John reminds us "the one who claims to be in the light and hates others is in the darkness still. The one who love others abides in the light and is not a cause of stumbling. But the one who hates others is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know the way, because darkness brings blindness of outlook" (I Jn. 2:9-10). Paul puts it in a different frame of reference when he writes to congregations of (1) their faith in the Lord Jesus and (2) the love they have for others (Gal. 5:6; Eph. 1:15; Col. 1:4; I Thess 1:3, 3:6, 5:8; 2 Tim 1:13; Philemon 4-5), and especially when he links growth in faith with increasing love for others "Your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing" (2 Thess 1:3).

Our relationships with others are not only the testing grounds of our spiritual life but also the places where our growth toward wholeness in Christ happens. There is a temptation to think that our spiritual growth takes place in the privacy of our personal relationship with God and then, once it is sufficiently developed, we can export it into our relationships with others and "be Christian" with them. But the process of being conformed to the image of Christ, takes place in the midst of our relationships with others, not apart from them. We learn to be Christ’s for others by seeking to be yielded and obedient to God in the midst of our relationships.

Our primary focus must be Trinitarian—God, self, others—if we are to grow into the image of Christ. Every relationship has the potential of becoming the place of transforming encounter with God, and every advance in the spiritual life has it necessary and immediate corollary in the transformation of our relationships with others.