Following the Way of Jesus - Vision Series

Become Like Jesus!

1 John 3:2 ESV

Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.

As a Church and followers of Jesus, we unite around 3 objectives - to BE WITH JESUS; to BECOME LIKE JESUS and to DO WHAT JESUS DID!

This is the second year of expanding on the statement with the them for this year being…

BECOME LIKE JESUS!

When we come to know Jesus through REGENERATION, we get to BE WITH JESUS!

When we grow to BECOME LIKE JESUS, we do this through SANCTIFICATION by the inner working of the Holy Spirit.

This is a part of our ‘spiritual formation’. Paul calls this a “transformation” in 2 Corinthians 3:18. “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.”

The greek word is metamorphioo which is transliterated into English as metamorphosis, which we know from nature describes the profound change in form from the caterpillar stage, to the pupa and from the pupa to the butterfly.

And then finally (for NEXT YEAR) we learn to DO WHAT JESUS DID! - There is an evident progress here, begining with BEING WITH JESUS, until “His Heart, Our Heart As disciples (literally students) of Jesus, our goal is to learn to be like him. We begin by trusting him to receive us as we are. But our confidence in him leads us toward the same kind of faith he had, a faith that made it possible for him to act as he did...The disciple is one who, intent upon becoming Christ-like and so dwelling in his “faith and practice,” systematically and progressively rearranges his affairs to that end.” ― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship

This change is sometimes referred to as SPIRITUAL FORMATION - Dallas Willard defines it in this way, ‘Spiritual formation in the Christian tradition is a process of increasingly being possessed and permeated by the character traits (of Jesus) as we walk in the easy yoke of discipleship with Jesus our teacher.’ (Why Bother With Discipleship?). So, this sermons is about the process of spiritual formation that leads to us BECOMING MORE AND MORE LIKE JESUS!

we are all being character formed - early influences of childhood we sound like mum or dad and as we grow up we sound like Horrid Henry or Perfect Peter until we go to school and sound like the cool or nerdy kids in class and so on…our peers, our culture, the Media they all shape us…

and this is so important for us as Christians to be shaped by Jesus _ and our church culture has to help us here but as Dallas WIllard says in The Great Omission - “The greatest issue facing the world today, with all its heartbreaking needs, is whether those who, by profession or culture, are identified as ‘Christians’ will become disciples – students, apprentices, practitioners – of Jesus Christ, steadily learning from him how to live the life of the Kingdom of the Heavens into every corner of human existence.” ― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship

1. We BECOME LIKE JESUS through following Him in discipleship.

“When Jesus said I am the way, he wasn't just saying the way to get forgiveness of sins. He says I am the way- the way I lived is the way you should live. He is the narrow way and He is inviting you and me to walk as He walked. His life was the perfect hallmark of selflessness.”― Prasanth Jonathan

We cannot separate being a Christian and being a disciple. They are the same thing in the NT.

The word Christian is only found in the New Testament on 3 occasions - and was actually used at least once by Felix, as a derogatory term to make fun of followers of Jesus. However, the word disciple is used over 250 times in the New Testament. Indeed it would be much more Biblical to call ourselves disciples of Jesus than to call ourselves, Christians.

Discipleship is part of our spiritual formation; our journey that every follower of Jesus is expected to go on. Not just pastors, church leaders, missionaries, or the very keen, but all of us, who want to become like Him - “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”(Matt 16:24).

“Discipleship is a life of learning from Jesus Christ how to live in the Kingdom of God now, as he himself did. If you want to be a person of grace, then, live a holy life of discipleship, because the only way you can do that is on a steady diet of grace. Works of the Kingdom live from grace.” ― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship

We are created in the image of God and as such we were created to reflect the glory of God. However, as we know, the FALL happened and we fail in this task of being image bearers to the glory of God for as Romans 3:23 tells us: “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

However, when we come to know Jesus through new birth, we discover that our sin has been dealt with on the cross. And in dealing with our sin, Jesus has not only assured us of a place in heaven but He has restored us to our original purpose of being image bearers of God’s glory! We are saved to bring glory to God!

So, when we imncreasingly BECOME LIKE JESUS, as we like Him, seek to do the will of God “on earth as it is in Heaven” we bring God glory by being obedient to His will and submitting to His way. Obedience enlarges our capacity to bring an ever-increasing measure of glory to God.

Paul says this in 2 Corinthians 3:18 “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.”

“The Spirit makes Christ present to us and draws us toward his likeness. It is as we thus behold the “glory of the Lord” that we are constantly “transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:18).” ― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship

And the challenge of this verse, is this, “What are we beholding? What has our attention? What are we prioritising in our lives?” If its Jesus, then we become like the One we behold! If we truly desire to become like Jesus then you we must behold Him.

This is not a one time thing or an occasional thing, this is an ongoing daily thing!

We behold Him as He breaks into our lives, and we encounter Him in those moments, that are so memorable - our conversion; a particular prayer meeting; our baptism; at communion, at a meeting where we felt we were the only one in the room!

We also behold Him in the daily pursuit of His presence combined with spiritual disciplines which gradually transform us into His likeness through disciplined worship, prayer, reading the Bible, contemplation, obedient living and christian service.

Our hymn writers captured this so beautifully. For example Bernard of Clairvaux in the 12th Century AD, in his hymn: Jesus the Very Thought of Thee!

1 Jesus, the very thought of thee with sweetness fills the breast; but sweeter far thy face to see, and in thy presence rest.

2 O hope of every contrite heart, O joy of all the meek, to those who fall, how kind thou art! How good to those who seek!

3 But what to those who find? Ah, this nor tongue nor pen can show; the love of Jesus, what it is, none but his loved ones know.

4 Jesus, our only joy be thou, as thou our prize wilt be; Jesus, be thou our glory now, and through eternity.

Watchanmn Nee said: “We must not pay attention just to reading and studying; rather, we should ask if we are open before the Lord. If we do not have an unveiled face, the glory of the Lord will not shine on us. If our heart is not open to God, God cannot give us any light.” ― Watchman Nee, How to Study the Bible & The Breaking of the Outer Man and the Release of the Spirit

Let me ilustrate what this looks like from a moving and inspirational story taken from a book called “The Life You’ve Always Wanted” by John Ortberg. It’s a true story. It’s called, “Mabel’s Story” and it tells the story of an old lady who lived in a “state-run convalescent hospital...large, understaffed, and overfilled with senile and helpless and lonely people who are waiting to die. On the brightest of days it seems dark inside and it smelled of sickness and stale urine. I went there once or twice a week for four years, but never wanted to go there, and I always left with a sense of relief. It is not the kind of place one gets used to.”

One particular day he met Mabel. “I saw an old woman strapped up in a wheelchair. Her face was an absolute horror. The empty stare and white pupils of her eyes told me that she was blind. The large hearing aid over one ear told me that she was almost deaf. One side of her face was being eaten by cancer. There was a discoloured and running sore covering part of one cheek, and it had pushed her nose to one side, dropped one eye, and distorted her jaw so that what should have been the corner of her mouth was the bottom of her mouth. As a consequence, she drooled constantly. I was told later that when new nurses arrived, the supervisor would send them to feed this woman, thinking that if they could stand this sight they could stand anything in the building. I also learned later that this woman was eighty-nine years old and that she had been here, bedridden, blind, nearly deaf, and alone, for twenty-five years. This was Mabel.

I don’t know why I spoke to her-she looked less likely to respond than most of the people I saw in that hallway. But I put a flower in her hand and said, ‘Here is a flower for you. Happy Mother’s Day.’ She held the flower up to her face and tried to smell it, and then she spoke. And much to my surprise, her words, although somewhat garbled because of her deformity, were obviously produced by a clear mind. She said, ‘Thank you. It’s lovely. But can I give it to someone else? I can’t see it, you know, I’m blind. I said, ‘Of course,’ and I pushed her in her chair back down the hallway to a place where I thought I could find some alert patients. I found one, and I stopped the chair. Mabel held out the flower and said, ‘Here, this is from Jesus.’

That was when it began to dawn on me that this was not an ordinary human being. Later I wheeled her back to her room and learned more about her history. She had grown up on a small farm that she managed with only her mother until her mother died. Then she ran the farm alone until 1950 when her blindness and sickness sent her to the convalescent hospital. For twenty-five years she got weaker and sicker, with constant headaches, backaches, and stomachaches, and then the cancer came too....”

Mabel and I became friends over the next few weeks...I would read to her from the Bible, and often when I would pause she would continue reciting the passage from memory, word-for-word. On other days I would take a book of hymns and sing with her, and she would know all the words of the old songs. For Mabel, these were not merely exercises in memory. She would often stop in mid-hymn and make a brief comment about lyrics she considered particularly relevant to her own situation. I never heard her speak of loneliness or pain except in the stress she placed on certain lines in certain hymns....”

“During one hectic week...I was frustrated because my mind seemed to be pulled in ten directions at once with all of the things that I had to think about. The question occurred to me “What does Mabel have to think about – hour after hour, day after day, week after week, not even able to know if it’s day or night? So I went to her and asked, ‘Mabel, what do you think about when you lay here?’ And she said, ‘I think about my Jesus.’ I sat there, and thought for a moment about the difficulty, for me, of thinking about Jesus for even five minutes, and I asked, ‘What do you think about Jesus?’ She replied slowly and deliberately as I wrote‘I think about how good he’s been to me. He’s been awfully good to me in my life, you know.… I’m one of those kind who’s mostly satisfied. … Lots of folks wouldn’t care much for what I think. Lots of folks would think I’m kind of old-fashioned. But I don’t care. I’d rather have Jesus. He’s all the world to me.’ And then Mabel began to sing an old hymn:

Jesus is all the world to me,

My life, my joy, my all.

He is my strength from day to day,

Without him I would fall.

When I am sad, to him I go,

No other one can cheer me so.

When I am sad He makes me glad.

He’s my friend.

This is not fiction. Incredible as it may seem, a human being really lived like this. I know. I knew her. How could she do it? Seconds ticked and minutes crawled, and so did days and weeks and months and years of pain without human company and without an explanation of why it was all happening – and she lay there and sang hymns. How could she do it? The answer, I think, is that Mabel had something that you and I don’t have much of. She had power. Lying there in the bed, unable to move, unable to see, unable to hear, unable to talk to anyone, she had incredible power.”

You and I can have that same power and His presence – if we will only surrender our lives to Jesus! - “When I understand that everything happening to me is to make me more Christlike, it resolves a great deal of anxiety.”― A.W. Tozer

2. We BECOME LIKE JESUS through the power of the Indwelling Spirit:

Let’s go back to 2 Corinthians 3:18 “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.”

Note that Paul is emphasizing here that spiritual transformation is a work of the Holy Spirit. It is as we behold “the glory of the Lord” that we are transformed “from the Lord who is the Spirit.”

a. Becoming like Jesus does not occur merely through information-transfer.

It's not just getting information into our heads, however good that information is. So we don’t just need to read the Bible and then we grow. The Bible is spiritual food but it must be applied to the heart to nourish our souls and that comes through the revelation and influence of the Spirit within us!

b. Becoming like Jesus does not come merely as the result of a passive spiritual download of grace.

The Bible taks about the “fruit of the Spirit” which implies the growth of “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” over time, in the soil of a renewed heart.

Nowhere are we commanded to pray for patience or love or joy, etc, we are commanded to BE PATIENT - BE LOVING - BE JOYFUL! The Holy Spirit does not infuse patience, love, joy etc into us; we learn these things as we discipline ourselves; mortify our sin and leave room for the Spirit to work in us.

c. Becoming like Jesus does not occur, merely as the result of disciplined self-effort and self-help behaviour modification.

If this was possible, we wouldn’t need saving at all, we would just need to try really hard and we could save ourselves but as Jesus reminded us in John 3:6 “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.”

Self-discipline is good and it is required but not to earn salvation nor to earn merit but because we want to remove anything that prevents us loving God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. We want to remove any barrier to our relationship with Jesus

Think about the various injunctions of the NT sumarising just one apssage of many, Colossians 3 - “Set your mind on things above, not on things that are of the earth ... mortify the parts of your life that are only of earth: immorality, impurity, passions, evil desire, and greed .... Also put aside anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive speech.... Do not lie to one another since you laid aside the old self with its practice and have put on the new self.... Put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving each other .... And beyond all these things put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity.” How do you do it? It takes effort and discipline.

And we learn to do this as we spend time with Jesus; follow His example of prayer and faithful obedience and self-denial and overcoming temptation.

We also learn it from Jesus’ followers like the Apostle Paul who said to the Philippians, “These things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me practice these things; and the God of peace shall be with you” (4:9).

And we learn it from Peter who said in 2 Peter 1 “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins. Therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election, for if you practice these qualities you will never fall. For in this way there will be richly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

All of this, happens because the grace of God teaches us to “say no to ungodliness and worldly lusts and live self-controlled, upright and godly lives”(Titus 2:11-14) and say yes to the “things that please the Lord”(Eph 5:10)- Grace is not just needed for salvation it is for our whole life as disciples of Jesus. “Grace is God acting in one’s life to accomplish what one cannot or will not do on one’s own. Grace is not opposed to effort, but to earning...The single most harmful obstacle to spiritual growth in Western Christianity today is a misunderstanding of grace that keeps it out of daily life and obedience.”(Dallas Willard : Spiritual Disciplines).

The truth is, as Augustine of Hippo said, “Without God we can’t. Without us, God won’t”!

Spiritual growth happens in cooperation with God as we “walk by the Spirit” and “keep in step with the Holy Spirit”(Gal 5:16,25). It is as a result of our beholding the glory of the Lord that the Holy Spirit transforms us from one degree of glory to another. One step at a time! It’s a journey.

It’s a moment by moment; day by day thing in which we cooperate with teh Holy Spirit and open ourselves up to knowing more of Jesus, that we become more and more like Him, growing in the “fruit of the Spirit “ in “love, joy, peace, patience, gkindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.”(Gal 5:22-23).

Now this will not be easy! It involves as Paul puts in in Galations 5:24, a CRUCIFYING of “the flesh with its passions and desires” BUT it would be impossible without the indwelling help of the Holy Spirit, enabling us and energising us to overcome those desires and passions!

The Holy Spirit regenerates us and then renews us so that we are able to live for God in righteousness and not for self in sin! - See Romans 8:1-14. It is a radical transformation from the inside out.

It is never mere, behaviour modification because that will never lead to spiritual transformation. We know this when we try and modify our behaviours to lose weight; change our bad habits; control our passions and desires. It doesn’t work in the natural and it definitely doesn’t work in the spiritual realm!

Ir is very definitely as Romans 6:13 “Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.”

Living for Jesus; not under the influence of sinful desire but by His “breaking the power of cancelled sin” in us and being set free to serve and honour Him our of a desire tobecome more like Him! (see Philippians 3:10-12, “that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.”).

Let me illustrate this by referring you to a great man of God named Thomas Chalmers(1780-1847).

Chalmers was a great man of God, lauded by men such as Wilberforce and Prime Minister Gladstone who said of him that he was “a man greatly lifted out of the region of mere flesh and blood” (Mark Noll, “Thomas Chalmers in North America,” 763). He was not simply a great preacher and Academic theologian, he was also a scientist and philosopher and his influence was such that at his funeral it is estimate that half the population of Edinburgh turned out to bid farewell to this godly man.

Anyhow, Chalmers’ preached a famous message on what he called, “The expulsive power of a new affection”. He referred in it to 1 John 2:15: “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” and he asked, “How shall the human heart be freed from its love for the world?” This “love” is not a duty one performs. It is a delight one prefers. It is an affection before it is a commitment.

He argues that there are two ways one might seek to remove this controlling affection from the heart. One is to show that the world is not worthy of our affection and will let us down in the end. The other is to show that God is vastly more worthy of the heart’s attachment, thus awakening a new and stronger affection that displaces the former affection for the world. Hence “the expulsive power of a new affection.” Chalmers states his purpose, “My purpose is to show that from the constitution of our nature, the former method is altogether incompetent and ineffectual and that the latter method will alone suffice for the rescue and recovery of the heart from the wrong affection that domineers over it.”

Chalmers goes on: “Such is the grasping tendency of the human heart, that it must have a something to lay hold of — and which, if wrested away without the substitution of another something in its place, would leave a void and a vacancy as painful to the mind, as hunger is to the natural system.” Chalmers thinks it is futile to try to suck sinful pleasures out of the human heart, if we do not put a better pleasure in their place and that pleasure must be created in the heart as the Holy Spirit removes from us the “heart of stone” and replaces it with a “heart of flesh”.

As Jesus puts it in Matthew 13:44: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then from his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” This man found the treasure of the kingdom which became his joy and affection and was more important than all that he previously owned because he had discovered something that produced a new affection that expelled all those old worldly affections.

It is the love of Jesus; the reign and dominion of Jesus in our life and the reality of the eternal world, created by the Spirit of God in our hearts, that expells the love of the world!

Spiritual transformation then, only occurs through the work of the Holy Spirit and the work of the Holy Spirit is to make us more and more like Jesus! - see John 14:15-21; 14:23-27;John 16:12-15.

And this spiritual transformation will result in glorification in the likeness of Jesus - Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure(1 John 3:2-3).

3. We BECOME LIKE JESUS, only if we want to!

We used to sing an old Hymn entitled More about Jesus and it went like this!

More about Jesus would I know, More of His grace to others show; More of His saving fulness see, More of His love who died for me. 

More about Jesus let me learn, More of His holy will discern; Spirit of God my teacher be, Showing the things of Christ to me.

More about Jesus; in His Word, Holding communion with my Lord; Hearing His voice in every line, Making each faithful saying mine.

More about Jesus; on His throne, Riches in glory all His own; More of His kingdom’s sure increase; More of His coming, Prince of Peace.

It’s a great hymn, but these are mere words unless we really want to BECOME LIKE JESUS for God will not force us to desire more of Jesus.

“If we throw ourselves open to God, He will reveal. The trouble comes when we have closed areas, locked and barred places in our hearts, where we think, with pride, that we are right.”― Watchman Nee, The Normal Christian Life

Our desire to become like Jesus cannot rest with a mere desire; it must motivate us to action.

Jesus continually calls us to FOLLOW HIM - to choose His way; to sacrifice our self-interests for His interests. To TAKE UP THE CROSS!

So, Paul calls us to determined effort to Ephesians 4:22-24 “To put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”

We must fix our eyes on Jesus(Heb 12:2).

We must have a mindset which is like His - Phil 2:5-11

We must as Paul puts it “seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.”(Col 3:1ff).

Conclusion:

Becoming like Jesus is a powerful and transformative - 2 Corinthians 3:18 “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.”

It is something that we should desire and seek for ourselves and for our churches for if we do we will not simply transform our own life of discipleship, what a difference it would make to our churches. As A.W. Tozer once observed: “Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other? They are of one accord by being tuned, not to each other, but to another standard to which each one must individually bow. So one hundred worshipers met together, each one looking away to Christ, are in heart nearer to each other than they could possibly be, were they to become 'unity' conscious and turn their eyes away from God to strive for closer fellowship.” ― A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine.

Churches tuned into Jesus would have a magnificent reviving impact on our Society - “In revival, God is not concerned about filling empty churches, He is concerned about filling empty hearts.”(Leonard Ravenhill)

and God help us, too many of us have become lukewarm in our faith and Jesus is knocking on the door of our hearts to “come in” and fellowship with us in a new and living way(Rev 3:20).

“A revival is the church falling in love with Jesus Christ all over again.” (Vance Havner).

As we seek to BECOME LIKE JESUS and as we seek to wealk with Him and talk with Him each and every day, then we will be transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.”