The following article is an excerpt from Make Me Like Jesus by Michael Phillips.
Those who set themselves to abide in Christ are given a calling higher than that of the angels. We must choose our obedience in the midst of fallen natures and wills that want their own way.
Difficult? Yes, indeed, it is. But it is our great privilege, our opportunity, our destiny. This was the truth I missed years ago when dreamily reflecting on “abiding in Christ” as an emotional ideal that would somehow be infused into me by God’s Spirit, causing me to begin walking an inch or two off the ground in constant harmony with God, filled with an unbroken spirit of prayer, loving everyone who crossed my path, self dead and buried, a radiance of purity and love shining from my face.
Jesus prayed for you and for me, that we would be drawn by obedience into oneness with himself, with his Father, and with one another.
I’m afraid something very like that is what I hoped would happen as I prayed, “God, make me more like Jesus.”
Welcome to the real world, Michael Phillips! No…it isn’t a halo-life, no glowing countenance as if I dwelt forever on the Mount of Transfiguration with Jesus and Moses and Elijah. It is a practical life, not an angelic one. I must choose to abide in Christ, exactly as Jesus says, by loving my brothers and sisters, by keeping his commandments, by doing his Father’s will as he revealed it. And continually choose it despite a self that, unfortunately, is not dead and buried at all.
If you keep my commandments, you will abide…
I am no more an angel than Jesus was. Neither are you. We are men and women. But unlike Jesus, we are weak, we are fallen, we are selfish, we are cowardly, we are timid, we are full of self-will. Yet in the midst of that humanity, we have been given the highest privilege of creation—to graft ourselves onto the vine of his life by laying down that self-will and entering into a life of abiding in his will.
The cross is a moment-by-moment way of life.
When Jesus prayed that we would be one with him, with the Father, and with one another, he was praying that we would be enabled—through our own willingness to take his garden-example as our own—to fall on our knees in the solitude of childship and say, “What, Father, would you have me do? You are my Father, I am your obedient child. Speak, and I will obey. My only will is to do your will,” even when to all feeling and appearance he is not there, still to proclaim in the midst of dark desolation, My God you are still my God! and then go forth and do his commands.
– Excerpted from pages 102-104 of Make Me Like Jesus by Michael Phillips
Continue Reading: Make Me Like Jesus by Michael Phillips
Are we willing to ask God to make us like Jesus? If status-quo spirituality is for you, do not read this book by best-selling author Michael Phillips. It is a dangerous book to the flesh. The journey toward Christlikeness may be painful and costly. Yet that journey leads to the ultimate purpose God intends for all his children: being made into the image of his son.