9: The Transformation Track: What It Means to Follow Christ
9
THE TRANSFORMATION TRACK
What It Means to Follow Christ
A half-truth treated as the whole truth soon becomes a whole falsehood; so we who proclaim the good news of God’s grace must not settle for only half the story. But we do! While we celebrate the relational change that Christ brings—justification, forgiveness, and adoption in place of condemnation, wrath, and rejection—we pass over the real change, the change of outlook and character, that grace is supposed to work. When quizzed, we have to admit that we know very little about it. Spiritual disciplines, spiritual warfare, spiritual-mindedness, self-denial, self-examination, and mortification of sin are themes on which we are out of our depth. We know that sanctification is the umbrella label for this field of concern and that some in the past paid much attention to it, but that is as far as we get.
In his 1879 book Holiness, J. C. Ryle quoted largely from the Puritans of the seventeenth century, “an age when, I am obliged to say, experimental religion was more deeply studied and far better understood than it is now.”1 What Ryle would say were he here with us today hardly bears thinking about. It is high time we tried to fill in some of these blanks.
The place to start is by recognizing that sanctification means consecration and repentance lived out in the power of the Holy Spirit, and that transformation is the word for what happens when we set ourselves to do that. “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” wrote Paul to the Christians at Rome (Rom. 12:2); and to the Corinthians he declared that “we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18). A process of personal change that is the start of our promised glorification is what Paul is talking about, as is Peter when he speaks of Christians being sharers in “the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4). While our transformation into a state of bodily Christlikeness remains future (1 Cor. 15:51-53; Phil. 3:21), God’s work of changing us into moral Christlikeness is under way already. The new behavior patterns that Paul identifies as the fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—are its result (Gal. 5:22-23).
What are these qualities? They are the character profile of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ as we watch Him in action in the gospel stories. Now this character profile is being reproduced in Christians: Christ, to use Paul’s word, is being “formed” in them (Gal. 4:19). What that means is that acting out the nine virtues mentioned becomes their habit, and it is out of character for them as Christians to do anything else.
To be sure, living this way is not as easy as it might sound. Changing the self-serving habits natural to us into Christlike ways of acting and reacting means a reconstructing of our inner lives that, like any reconstruction job in this world, creates confusion by disrupting existing patterns and generates strains that otherwise would not be there. A blind, anti-God energy that Paul calls “the flesh” and “indwelling sin” pulls against the process in all sorts of ways, distracting, opposing, deceiving, and dragging us down, so that failure to be fully Christlike, despite our best intentions, is part of every believer’s personal story. Yet the sovereign Holy Spirit, the divine change agent, continues his work, and the sanctifying transformation goes forward despite the lapses into apathy, indifference, and downright wrongdoing.
We need to be clear that the heart is where the transformation begins. Heart here means, of course, not the pump that sends blood through the body, but the central core of the person out of which come the motives, purposes, attitudes, desires, and concerns that shape our living. The milestone that we call conversion or regeneration (with the Puritans I use these words as synonyms for that initial turning to God that is God turning us to himself) is, says Paul, an event literally of new creation (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15). In it God renovates our hearts by actually uniting us to Jesus Christ in his death and resurrection so that we start living a new life that is a sharing in his risen life. We all can and must say with Paul: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). And each of us must acknowledge that hereby our heart has been changed.
What does the change amount to? Why, this: that whereas previously our heart’s ruling desire was to please and enjoy ourselves in all we did, now our ruling desire is to please and enjoy God in all we do— to love, honor, obey, exalt, praise, adore, glorify, and delight in him. At its deepest motivational level, our heart is now, as Charles Wesley put it, a copy of our Savior’s, as his was when he walked on earth and as it is now while he reigns in glory. This regenerated, new-created, divinely energized heart, sustained by the Holy Spirit who now indwells it, is the direct source of the fruit of the Spirit in Christians’ lives.
In our temperament and our mental and emotional makeup, as in our personal history, we are all different. This fact, coupled with God’s discretionary variety of action (truly, he loves variation), means that conversion experiences, viewed psychologically as phases of thought and feeling, differ widely from person to person. But the heart transformation outlined above is essentially the same in every case. The Gospel, says Paul, calls on us to “be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph. 4:23-24). God works this in us as we come to Christ. So henceforth we live in him, with him, through him, and for him. “To me, to live is Christ” (Phil. 1:21). “Christ . . . is your life” (Col. 3:4).
If now you ask whether one is the same person after conversion as before, the answer is yes and no. Yes, because there is an ongoing personal identity; no, because transformation of the heart has radically redirected the life. C. S. Lewis has people say of the young Narnia visitant Eustace, whom Aslan undragoned (read all about it in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader), that you would hardly know he was the same boy; that is how converts to Christ get spoken of by reason of the huge motivational change that marks them.
To be sure, not all regenerate persons can tell you when and how they were converted. But where people show a heart for God, hostility to sin, and reverent loyalty to Jesus as mediator and master, you know what has happened to them. They are now truly in a converted condition.
Those thus changed are called to walk the road of further transformation. How do they do that? By being natural in living out what is now the driving desire of their hearts; by resolutely saying no each day to sin’s allurements; and by cultivating Jesus’ company—indeed, his friendship, for he calls his disciples friends (John 15:15). Being friends with the Son and the Father through the Spirit is in truth as good a description of holy living as I know.
More specifically, living in faith and hope furthers transformation. Faith weans us from all forms of self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and self-absorption. Faith is eyes that see, ears that hear, hands that embrace, and feet that move—all directed Christward for unifying communion. Faith trusts God’s promises in Scripture, God’s wisdom in events, and God’s Son as Savior and Shepherd always and everywhere. Faith begets hope, the certainty that the God of grace is leading us home to glory and that “our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all” (2 Cor. 4:17). Hope sustains confidence and drives out all forms of apathy and desperation. Living in faith and hope will bring our outlook increasingly into line with Christ’s own outlook when he was on earth.
Living in repentance and obedience furthers transformation. Repentance is the humbling honesty that turns with sorrow and shame from doing what one admits to be wrong to do henceforth what one knows to be right. Obedience is the conscientious endeavor to live by God’s revealed will for us, without making exceptions in our own favor. A Puritan, asked why he was so precise in his religion (Puritans were called “precisians” in those days), unforgettably replied, “O sir, I serve a precise God.” We need to remember that so do we. Repentance and obedience are less than abundant in our churches today—self-satisfaction and bonhomie having replaced them—but the desire of the renewed heart to please God will prompt Christians to practice both and to watch and pray very seriously against influences of whatever sort that would lead them to be neglectful here. Living in repentance and obedience will make us increasingly single-minded and quick to resist temptation, like Christ when he walked here on earth. (See on this Luke 4:1-13; 22:28; Heb. 4:15; 5:7-8.)
Living in dependence and expectation furthers transformation. The harder we lean on God, the more Christlike we are. Our life each day should be an endless sequence of four repeated steps—identifying what calls to be done, asking God to help us in it, tackling it in expectation of receiving the help we asked for and finding that this happens, and looking back with thanks to God for help given before moving on to the next task. This is how we should implement Paul’s admonition to “work out [put into action, New Living Translation] your salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12). Living in dependence and expectation keeps us looking to Jesus as our model and source of help, and increasingly we will become like what we look at.
Living in submission and steadiness furthers transformation. What we may call the baptismal pattern of going down into what feels like death, out of which God raises us to a new quality of life, recurs by divine appointment again and again in all our lives. Submitting to this process is part of the discipline of discipleship. At such times steady endurance of the pain and grief while they last is required, and by God’s help, as he responds to our prayers, steady endurance will be maintained. Jesus himself submissively endured in this way (Heb. 12:2-3; 1 Pet. 2:21-23), and the pain-and-grief element of experience, accepted as from God, will leave us more like Jesus than we were before.
Living in doxology and devotion furthers transformation. The temper of a Christian’s life should be a praising temper, and the goal of the Christian’s actions should always be that God will be praised as a result of them. This is what Paul means when he says, “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31). Glory here expresses the idea of praise for praiseworthiness. Paul’s thought is that everything we say and do should express the praise- worthiness of God one way or another. That is what doxology means. Doxological purpose is central to all true devotion: We pray and meditate and read and sing first and foremost to honor and exalt God. To pray, “Hallowed [magnified and revered as holy] be thy name,” and to mean it, induces Christlikeness at the deepest level, for honoring the Father was and is the focus of the Son’s life.
Living in fellowship and service furthers transformation also. There is nothing Christlike or godly about isolating oneself from other Christians, failing to share one’s story and life with them when doing so would help them. Strengthening the muscles of our love by seeking others’ good no matter what is a central activity in the consecrated life.
Growing into Christ’s likeness is a mysterious process, if only because all we see in ourselves throughout is weakness, inadequacy, and shortcomings of one sort or another. Seeking to graduate in the school of transformation is, however, the true Christian life. As we let Christ himself urge us by his Spirit into the paths sketched out above and confirm to our hearts the rightness of what we are doing as we follow him along them, we shall, as Calvin matter-of-factly put it, be making progress. Frankly, this is progress I long to make. Don’t you, too? May God help us all!