God's Plan for Us
For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren.
- Romans 8:29
When people spend a lot of time together, they start becoming like each other. If you are around a certain person a lot and he or she has a certain kind of laugh, you might find that, all of a sudden, you have that laugh too. You just sort of picked it up.
My wife sometimes will finish a sentence before I finish it. And almost all of the time, she remembers my stories better than I remember them. The funny thing is that she wasn't there when some of them happened, but she heard me tell the story. I might be relating a certain event, and she will say, "Oh no, Greg. You left out this, this, and this."
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I will say, "Were you there?"
"No," she says, "but you told me once, and I remember." And then I will realize that I actually did leave out some of the details she remembered.
The more you follow Jesus, the more you will become like Him. In the book of Acts, we read that the religious leaders, when they saw Peter and John's boldness, realized "they had been with Jesus" (Acts 4:13). It overflowed from their lives. We are to imitate Christ, but we become like Him through impartation-Christ living in us and through us.
The apostle Paul wrote, "I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me" (Galatians 2:20).
In the first century, the word "Christian" was a term of derision that meant "of the party of Christ." Does this describe you? Are you His follower? That is God's plan: to make us like Christ.
