High Conformity

"Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God."  (Eph. 5:1-2)

A trap of the human conscience is to think that God wants us to be loving, gracious, generous, and all those other good things because He wants us to behave ourselves and get along with each other.  That would, in fact, be a wonderful by-product of our spiritual maturity, but it isn't the goal.  No, the goal is much deeper than that: It's to be like God.

As creatures designed to reflect His image, we've fallen tragically short of the goal.  God's restoration offered in the Cross of Jesus and the gift of His Spirit puts us back on the image-of-God track.  God wants us to be loving, gracious, generous, and all those other good things because He is all of those things.  Any good father would want to instill his values and his character into his children.  And our God is a very good Father.  He wants us to be like Him.

That's a different approach to maturity than many of us usually take.  We want to fulfill the requirements - at least the minimum - and get by with better-than-average growth.  We seek a Christianized form of self-improvement.  But God has so much more for us than self-improvement.  His greater desire for us is God-conformity.  We are being drawn by His Spirit into a new role - from servants to children.  Both must comply with the Father's wishes.  Only one can really inherit His genes and grow in His character.

Think about this: Have you approached the fruit of the Spirit as items on a list - a list that's primarily about you and your growth?  I know I certainly have before.  But we must look higher than that.  They are aspects of God's character that He is fully intent on having us share.  He is relentless in pursuit of His image being found in each of us.  He won't diverge from that goal.  Neither should we.

God wants us to love because He is love.  He wants us to be pure because He is pure.  He wants us to forgive because He has forgiven.  He wants us to give because He has given.  The list could go on.  And, in fact, it should.  Everything we do should be done with one question in mind: Does this look like my Father?

"...But the greatest of these is love."  (1 Cor. 13:13)  Nowhere in the New Testament is love defined simply as a common human emotion.  Biblical love is much more radical than that.  It extends farther than the world's love - to enemies and strangers; and it also goes deeper - to sacrificial offerings of adoration.  We love because God adamantly insists that we be like Him.  But if human experience isn't the template for biblical love, where do we go to take our cues?  Jesus is our example.

Jesus loved us and gave Himself as an offering.  He considered His own human feelings of no account; a higher consideration than self took Him to the Cross.  He defined love for His disciples as laying down one's life for a friend, and He gave them an object lesson they would never forget.  The visual illustration of this kind of love sticks with us as well.  It's the example Paul gives to the Ephesians: We are to love in the same way that Christ loved us.  Paul wrote to the Romans of the call to be a living sacrifice.  Using Jesus as our model is a reiteration of the same theme.

Think of Jesus' kind of love: He embraced cheaters and prostitutes.  He touched lepers and dead people.  He was sometimes very tender and sometimes very harsh.  He always told the truth, even when it hurt.  He loved sinners but hated sin.  He let people self-destruct - Pharisees, insincere seekers, Peter in his denial - never compromising principles for the sake of sentiment.  He was incredibly patient with hardheaded disciples.  And He bled.

Does that description of Jesus' love reflect the kind of love we show each other in the church and in the world?  Probably not.  We have a long way to go.  But there's no way we can worship this God without a desire to be like Him - especially in His love.

Paul frequently makes Jesus our prime example.  So much for attainable goals!  But a God worth worshiping would never settle for mediocrity anyway.  We must press on.  His love compels us.

"We are shaped and fashioned by what we love."  - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"He who is filled with love is filled with God Himself."  - Augustine