Onion Skin Garden: Being Made "Hallow"

"This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus."

Like Jesus. How can I ever be like Jesus? My sister and I had the privilege of sharing Christ with a man who sincerely claimed to be his follower. And a follower of Buddha. And a follower of Hinduism. And just about anything else that was "truth." When we told him scriptures, he'd get excited and say, "I know! I know!" We sat with this beautiful man for two hours - a divine appointment my mom would call it, unplanned by us, but uncannily arranged by God - as he told us of his 30 year search for truth, expounding on concepts so similar to the scriptures that one could easily be confused. And the basis of his truth was love. And who can argue against love? Once we knew how to "love", we would BE God, not just like him. That was the difference.

One of the marvels to me is how the Spirit of God leads and teaches us. It seems that suddenly I will hear a keyword repeated from a variety of sources and I just know that God is trying to teach me something. As I've wrestled with what it means to be "in Christ" (keyword) God has been driving home how this should affect me - how I should be "like Christ." To the man I mentioned above, being like Christ was to have his consciousness perfected in love (sounds good) and therefore become God (sounds like the foundational lie whispered in the Garden). It occurred to me that the more he described love, the more he portrayed love devoid of relationship. Empty. And suddenly I understood just one reason why perhaps God made me. you. a people.

Now the only way I can ever be like Jesus would seem first, that I have been justified by His atoning death - placed "in Him", and secondly, I am being sanctified as a result of the continuing work of the Holy Spirit within. The first is like the potter throwing a new lump of clay onto the wheel, purposing to fashion it, the second is his fashioning. Paul states, "But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you have come to obey from your heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness!" [Romans 6:17-18] To speak in plain language, Paul uses an example from everyday life in verse 19: "Just as you used to offer yourselves as slaves to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness (remember how a little leaven leavens the whole lump?), so now offer yourselves as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness." This infers a continuing sorrow over sin such that it drives us to repent when it ensnares us (and it does so easily). I love the way John Piper puts it: "...even though justifying faith does not produce perfection in this age, it always produces a new direction in this age. It dethrones sin, enthrones God, and makes war on sin in our own hearts and bodies." [Slaves to God, Sanctification, Eternal Life, Dec. 10, 2000].

C.S. Lewis says it this way in Mere Christianity, “When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right. This is common sense, really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: while you are making them you cannot see them. You can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.

“What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could ‘be like gods’—could set up on their own as if they had created themselves—be their own masters—invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

"God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”

Or to paraphrase Kevin DeYoung: "while the church is not a 'museum for good people' but a 'hospital for the broken,' it is indeed the purpose of a hospital to help sick people get better."

Like Martin Luther, my heart has been pierced of late over this very issue, as tolerance becomes the keyword of this generation even in the church. But should the church tolerate overt sin in the name of love? Should an individual tolerate sin in his/her own life in the name of loving oneself? Is it love to tolerate sin that threatens your very soul? Should we rest in being in a 'right position' if our position isn't righting? 496 years ago when Martin Luther stood up against the atrocities in the Catholic Church - his first thesis was just this struggle: "When our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, said, "Repent", He called for the entire life of believers to be one of repentance." Sin should bother us and motivate us to say, "help me, Lord!" Help me be like you. And we, as the Church, shouldn't be so quick to frown on our brothers who struggle with sin - we all do. We should be helping each other overcome! We should be part of that body that says, like Jesus: "In the world you shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world." That is love. Like King Louie in The Jungle Book we might sing, "I wanna be like you, I wanna walk like you, talk like you, too!"

The steady hand of the potter is upon me. This, my friends, will be a lifelong process - this sanctification - and if I am to truly love, then let me truly love you, God, and love my neighbor as myself. Fashion me. Make me. Mold me. Let me be like Jesus.

If you google a list of the character traits of Jesus Christ, you can find plenty. In fact, here's a list from the Blue Letter bible:

He was Obedient

He was Meek, Lowly

He was Guileless

He was Tempted

He was Oppressed

He was Despised

He was Rejected