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

“God, make me like Jesus.” I call this the prayer of Christlikeness. It is not a prayer to be prayed nonchalantly. Counting the cost is imperative. There is a heavy price to Christlikeness. One who doesn’t mean business with God will only slow his spiritual progress by praying it casually. The words of the prayer seem simple enough. But the means by which it is answered are anything but simple.

It sets us on a course apart from the crowd, even the “spiritual” crowd. In quiet and subtle ways the pray-er of this prayer will find himself diverging from many former associations. A singular and uncommon journey has begun that cannot be fathomed by most in the religious multitude.

I was young when I began praying the prayer of Christlikeness. I was incapable of counting the cost. Where it would lead, I had no idea. There have been occasional moments since when I have faced such depths of discouragement, even despair, that I have come within a hair’s breadth of taking it back, of shouting, “God, forget it…I still believe, but I no longer want to pay the price of praying to become like Jesus. I no longer want to endure the road to the cross!”

At such times I have been conscious of standing before a cliff of spiritual decision, poised to jump, reminded of our Lord’s second and third temptations in Matthew 4. But each time I have stepped back and in tears of anguish have reaffirmed the prayer, though there have been times when it has been so difficult that my stomach physically ached to do so.

The prayer of Christlikeness is no prayer for the spiritually fainthearted. At such times, it has not been strength that has overcome the urge to recant. When I say this prayer is not for the spiritually fainthearted, I do not mean the strong and confident and self-assured.

I am not strong. It has been pure determination to see it through that has driven me back to my knees in tears, again to reaffirm—in my weakness, not my strength: “Father…whatever it takes…I am willing…create in me the heart of a true son…and make me like Jesus.” It is difficult to see much headway over the years. Sometimes it is very difficult to say the words. It is a quiet and lonely prayer, a sacrificial and humbling prayer, an invisible prayer, a prayer that scrapes at the sores and scabs of self, a prayer that exposes the ugliness of what I see when I look in the mirror.

Some may ask if it is presumptuous to pray the prayer of Christlikeness. Not if prayed in recognition of the human weakness implicit in the very words. My failure is implied by the prayer itself.

I pray it because I will never reach anything close to Christlikeness in this life. Paul wrote: “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me…I press on toward the goal…” (Philippians 3:12-14) That is what the prayer represents—pressing on toward the summit of God’s purpose.

– Excerpted from pages 32-34 of Walking with God by Michael Phillips