Sometimes people like me (preachers who speak about God and spiritual things to other people on a regular basis) can talk so much about change and transformation that other people can think that’s the goal.
Transformation isn’t the goal. The goal is Jesus.
Paul wrote to the church in Corinth:
But we all, with unveiled faces, looking as in a mirror at the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3:18 NASB, emphasis mine)
Transformation is the process. It’s what is happening to us as we follow Jesus. So often we become who or what we look at, right? We were created to imitate. Paul wrote no less than six times for his readers to imitate him as he was imitating Jesus. It’s all about who we’re watching and who we’re following.
Jesus didn’t call the disciples by saying, “Become like me.” That would have created an unwarranted amount of anxiety as they filtered everything they did through a checklist of good or bad behaviors. “Am I more or less like Jesus today than I was yesterday? Do I really love Him? Am I really changing?”
He said, “Follow Me.” The only question they had to ask themselves was, “Am I with Jesus? Where is He going and am I still following?” Jesus knew that as they followed, they would imitate Him more and more. They would become like Jesus the more they walked with Jesus.
Occasionally, those changes are drastic, but I think most of them happen in much smaller, less pronounced ways. Some versions of the Bible translate Paul’s words to the Corinthians as being changed from “one degree of glory to the next.”
One degree at a time. Small, but steady, incremental change. You may wake up tomorrow and not see a difference. But if you’ll keep following Jesus, my guess is that you’ll wake up this time next year and see a big one.
His presence has a way of changing us. Make Him your goal, and you’ll be changed along the way.
