Added On or Built In…
03.30.25
(From Chapter Three of Invitation to a Journey- M. Robert Mulholland Jr.)
Often people have the idea that the image of Christ is something alien to human beings, something strange that God wants to add on to our life, something imposed on us from outside that doesn’t really fit us. In reality, however, the Image of Christ is the fulfillment of the deepest hungers of the human heart for wholeness.
The greatest thirst of our being is for fulfillment in Christ’s Image. The most profound yearning of the human spirit, which we try to fill with all sorts of inadequate substitutes, is the yearning for our completeness in the image of Christ.
The Image of Christ brings cleansing, healing, restoration, renewal, transformation and wholeness into the unclean, diseased, broken, imprisoned, dead incompleteness of our lives. It brings compassion in place of indifference, forgiveness in place of resentment. Kindness in place of coldness, openness in place of protective defensiveness or manipulation, a life lived for God and not self.
Again and again the New Testament emphasizes that this is the work God is seeking to do in us, to grow us up into Christlikeness.
“We all with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into His likeness.” (2 Corinthians 3:18)
“Until we all attain… to mature personhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” (Ephesians 4:13)
“Seeing that we have put off the old nature with its practices and have put on the new nature, which his being renewed in knowledge after the Image of its Creator.” (Colossians 3:9-10)
“Just as God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before Him in love.” (Ephesians 1:4)
This is a profound and powerful affirmation of the nature of our being. The word chose translates a compound Greek tern that literally means “spoke forth.” Paul is not saying God chooses some and does not choose others. Paul is saying that every human being has been “spoken forth” by God before the foundation of the world. But Paul indicates that God didn’t just purpose us into being. God purposes us into a particular kind of being, that we might be holy and blameless before God in love.
We were created to be whole (holy) in the nature of our being and to be persons of complete integrity (blameless) in our doing. In fact, we are to find the fulfillment of our being in being like Christ.
Our life, in all its particularity, is encompassed in all its details with every spiritual blessing of God’s order of wholeness and life.