The following article is an excerpt from Walking with God by Michael Phillips.

More than fifty years ago I began asking God to do something in my life. The consequences of that prayer I did not foresee.

During the years since, I have watched many Christians become preoccupied with the externals and blessings of religious experience. They are encouraged by self-aggrandizing pastors and teachers to pray in the power of the flesh for temporal blessing rather than in the spirit of Christ for Godliness of character.

It is possible to pray for things of secondary significance, and then, interpreting events that may have nothing to do with the working of God’s Spirit as answers to those prayers, wrongly assume that God’s will has been accomplished. As a result of false teachings that take advantage of this immature lust for blessing, few ask what is God’s primary will for his people?

That supreme thing can be simply stated: That we become sons and daughters of God who are conformed to the image of Christ. Jesus was the Son of God, the “only begotten” Son. God’s design is that we also become sons and daughters, Jesus’ younger brothers and sisters, who are like him—who love like him, think as he thought, know God’s Fatherhood as he knew it, respond like him, resist the enemy like him, treat people as he would, trust our mutual Father as he did, deny ourselves as he did, and who daily pray with him in the garden, “Not my will, but yours be done.”

We will never be like him in his perfection, but we are to become like him in attitude, thought, and motive. This is God’s preeminent purpose in the humanity of his creation. Obviously this is a lifelong process. We don’t love or think or respond or trust God like Jesus did. But to turn us into the kind of people who can do so—with infinitesimal baby steps at first, then growing steadily more capable of it as our lives progress—is the whole point of Christianity.

There is nothing else the Christian life is about. We will never attain this high objective perfectly in this life. But it is toward this end that God is leading us, and toward this divine “center” of being that the prayer of Christlikeness aims us. Such a transformation into men and women that reflect the nature of Jesus Christ cannot be accomplished externally.

God wants more than mere believers. He wants more than people who can parrot back doctrinally correct spiritual phrases. What is in his heart to accomplish will not come about by outward manifestation. It happens inwardly, as we become people of a certain nature. He is involved in the enterprise of fashioning eternally noble, righteous sons and daughters.

– Excerpted from pages 29-31 of Walking with God by Michael Phillips