In His Image

Introduction: Asking the Better Question

If you’ve ever said, “I just want to know God’s will for my life,” this book is for you. Now that you believe, you know your feelings deceive you and your self-serving logic betrays you. Without meaning to, you can begin to regard your relationship with God primarily as a means toward better decision-making — slipping into a conception of God as a cosmic Dear Abby. Because you do not trust your judgment, you ask him who you should marry or which job you should take.

These are not terrible questions; they demonstrate a desire to honor him. But they don’t get to the heart of what it means to follow God’s will. You need to ask a better question than “What should I do?”

The reason is this: God is always more concerned with the decision-maker than he is with the decision itself. He can use the outcome of any decision for his glory and for your good. For the believer wanting to know God’s will, the first question to pose is not “What should I do?” but “Who should I be?”

The two questions are not unrelated, but the order in which you ask them matters. If you focus on your actions without addressing your heart, you may end up merely as a better-behaved lover of self. What does it profit you to make the right choice if you’re still the wrong person? A lost person can make “good choices,” but only a person indwelt by the Holy Spirit can make one for the purpose of glorifying God. The hope of the gospel in sanctification is not simply that you would make better choices, but that you would become a better person.

God created humankind to bear his image, to be his representatives in our working and playing and worship. And he tells us plainly what he is doing with us — for those whom he foreknew, Paul writes, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son (Romans 8:29). God’s will is that the cracks in the image you bear be repaired so that you grow to look more and more like Christ. “Whoever says he abides in him,” 1 John adds, “ought to walk in the same way in which he walked.” This book shows itself to those whose deepest desire and dearest delight is to be remade — in his image.

Chapter 1: God Most Holy

Repetition is the mother of learning; what the Bible repeats reveals what it most wants you to learn. It plainly answers the question “Who should I be?” with “Be like Jesus Christ, who perfectly images God in human form.” God’s will for your life is that you conform to the image of Christ. The guiding question for every attribute becomes: “How should the knowledge that God is [blank] change the way I live?”

Before going further, Wilkin makes a distinction that will quietly govern the rest of the book — between two kinds of God’s attributes.

The trouble is that human beings created to bear God’s image aspire instead to become like God in the wrong ways. Rather than trust his omniscience, we desire it for ourselves; rather than rest in his immutability, we declare our own sin patterns unchangeable. Like Adam and Eve, we reject our God-given limits and crave the limitlessness reserved for him alone, listening to the Serpent’s lure: “You shall be like God.” But as those given a new heart, you must learn to crave different attributes — those that describe the abundant life Jesus came to give.

Of those communicable attributes, one rises above the rest: holiness. No other attribute is joined to the name of God with greater frequency. When angelic beings think about God, the one thing they repeat without ceasing is: holy, holy, holy.

The Bible presents holiness as both given to you and asked of you: “In Christ, you are made holy. Now be holy.” Listen to how Leviticus puts it:

Consecrate yourselves therefore, and be holy, for I am holy. You shall be holy to me, for I the Lord am holy and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine.

Leviticus 11:44; 20:26

You might be tempted to dismiss these instructions as a distant Old Testament command. But the New Testament echoes these words on the lips of Jesus himself in the Sermon on the Mount, and Peter repeats them: do not be conformed to who you were; be re-formed to who you should be. As Paul puts it: “For this is the will of God, your sanctification” (1 Thessalonians 4:3).

Simply put, God’s will for your life is that you be holy — that by the power of the Holy Spirit you strive for utter purity of character. Every story in every book of the Bible is chanting this call: be holy, for he is holy. Growing in holiness means growing in your hatred of sin, learning to think, speak, and act like Christ. For this is the will of God, our sanctification.

Chapter 2: God Most Loving

Of all God’s attributes, his love is perhaps the hardest to conceive apart from the lesser, human versions that shape our understanding. Part of the trouble is that our one English word for love does the work of four. Greek had a separate word for each.

• Eros — romantic love.
• Philia — brother-sisterly love shared between peers.
• Storge — a parent’s love for a child.
• Agape — the love of God.

It is the last of these that Wilkin defines as “a selfless, purposeful, outgoing attitude that desires to do good to the one loved.” Agape does not merely feel; it acts — two hundred fifty-nine times the Bible describes a love that acts. Hear it in Christ’s own instructions to his disciples:

But agape your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil.

Luke 6:35

Agape is patient and kind; it is not arrogant, irritable, or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, endures all things. Agape never ends.

What makes agape different is that it is offered free of need, originating in a God who has none — so it can be given freely, without the reciprocity earthly love demands. It is most purely expressed when given to those who can do nothing for you.

This is why Jesus, asked which commandment was greatest, fused two:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

Matthew 22:37–40

If you refrain from murder but not out of love for God and others, you have not practiced true holiness. As Paul writes: if you speak in the tongues of men and of angels, or have all faith so as to remove mountains, or give away all you have, but have not love, you are a noisy gong; you are nothing and gain nothing.

Unless you love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, you will love yourself and your neighbors inadequately. A deficit in your love of neighbor always points to a deficit in your love of God. When you hesitate to show agape because someone has hurt you, you reveal that you believe it is earned — yet God’s unconditional love prompts you to extend it freely, as you received it.

But it is possible to love the love of God too much — to emphasize it at the expense of his other attributes. Sin can cause you to love an inaccurate version of God, the basic definition of idolatry.

When you begin to follow Christ, you resolve to love your neighbor even if it costs you — your preferences, your time, your entitlement, your stereotypes. But in laying these aside, you learn the brokenness of the object of your love in a deeper way, and find increasing empathy.

So what is the will of God for your life? That you love as you have been loved. When faced with a decision, ask yourself: Which choice enables me to grow in agape for God and others?

Chapter 3: God Most Good

The evidence of God’s attributes is waiting in Scripture, like so many gems to be unearthed. You must excavate to Genesis 18 to find the first explicit mention of God’s justice, and to Genesis 24 for his love. But scarcely four verses into its opening chapter, the Bible places the brilliant diamond of God’s goodness in plain sight: “And God saw that the light was good” (Genesis 1:4). He sees it as good not by mere recognition but as a reflection of his own goodness. God is the source of all good and is himself wholly good.

The Bible’s first chapter goes on to reiterate this goodness in the rest of what he creates, until “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). Not only is God infinitely good, but he is immutably good. The psalmist writes no less than five times: “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good.”

God’s goodness is a light that radiates through all his other attributes. It is the reason his omnipotence, omniscience, and sovereignty are a comfort instead of a terror — the reason you can dare to believe he works all things together for good (Romans 8:28). Even in our rebellious state, his goodness endures: he gives daily bread and often more, though we are given to complaining for what we lack rather than contentment with what we possess.

Just as Christ radiates the goodness of God, so now should you. Be good. Be the person who seeks the welfare of others, who gives without counting the cost, who serves joyfully with no expectation of thanks. If you are, you’ll draw attention like a city on a hill at midnight in the desert. Goodness may be wearying, but it yields a harvest: “And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up” (Galatians 6:9).

What is the will of God for your life? That you would be good as he is good — that generosity would be your first impulse, that you would walk in the light as he is in the light. There is no darkness in him and no room for it in you.

Chapter 4: God Most Just

Those who do not cast themselves upon the perfect sacrifice of Christ spend their lives attempting to make atonement through their own good works, offered to a God of their own imagining. And though God disciplines in love, you may not immediately perceive it as loving.

You have no need to self-justify. You need only confess your sins. Self-justification reveals a lack of understanding of the forgiveness you received through the cross, which means the score is settled. The life of the believer who loves the justice of God will be marked not by scorekeeping, but by reverent obedience — a love of the moral law that reshapes your desires to reflect those of your heavenly Father. The immediate effect of apprehending God’s justice will be an inward-facing desire to obey; the long-term effect will be an outward-facing desire to do justice for others. As the prophet Micah names the trinity of requirements:

And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

Micah 6:8

Those who have any advantage must use it to benefit their neighbors, with open eyes and open hands for those still awaiting their daily bread. So what is the will of God for your life? That you be just as he is just — delighting in his law, extolling his good government, doing justice daily as children of your heavenly Father.

Chapter 5: God Most Merciful

Three words sit close together in the Christian vocabulary; Wilkin draws them apart so we can see what each one means.

• Justice — getting what you deserve.
• Mercy — not getting what you deserve.
• Grace — getting what you do not deserve.

Though many conceive of the God of the Old Testament as a God of towering justice and absent mercy, the Old Testament mentions his mercy more than four times as often as the New. Consider how 1 John 1:9 puts it: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” That reference to justice is what confounds: how can God’s forgiveness of your sins be just, rather than merely merciful? Through the cross, God’s justice and mercy meet. This is why Paul, having spent eleven chapters of Romans expounding what God has done in Christ, opens chapter twelve with the appeal:

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God — this is your true and proper worship.

Romans 12:1

You must never forget that Jesus instituted a table of mercy on the night he was betrayed, saying of the bread, “This is my body,” and of the wine, “This is my blood.” And so the will of God for your life sounds in his own words from the Sermon on the Plain: “Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:36).

Chapter 6: God Most Gracious

As the hymn writer John Newton put it: “‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved.” God in his sovereignty extends grace to you before you can even contemplate its possibility or its worth.

But there is a danger in seeing grace too narrowly. If grace is seen only as a free gift to cover your sins and not also as a means to growing in holiness, you will grow lax in your obedience. Grace both saves and sanctifies.

So what is the will of God for your life? That you may have life, and that you may have it abundantly. That you may show preference to others, even as it has been shown to you in Christ. And that you would walk the narrow path, daily assured by the grace you received at the cross and daily strengthened by the grace you receive for every step forward toward holiness.

Chapter 7: God Most Faithful

Trials bring you to your knees and remind you of your limits. They reorient you toward God. But trials are not the only difficulty God uses to train you in righteousness. God also uses temptation to shape you. James reminds us that God does not tempt us and is himself unable to be tempted (James 1:13).

Faithfulness, like a muscle, gains strength over repeated workouts. When you are faithful to God in smaller temptations, you build strength to face the bigger ones.

Use your abilities faithfully, to bring glory to the One who gave them. Guard your thoughts faithfully, centering them on what is true, honest, just, pure, and lovely. Use your words faithfully — to edify and encourage, to exhort and rebuke, to pray without ceasing. Are you known as faithful in your marriage, your business dealings, your parenting, your friendships? Ultimately, every act of faithfulness toward others is an act of faithfulness toward God himself.

So what is the will of God for your life? That you be faithful as he is faithful — faithful to him, faithful to others, faithful to the end. That which he wills, he also enables.

Chapter 8: God Most Patient

When God first declares his character to Moses, he describes himself as slow to anger (Exodus 34:6), a trait extolled in eight other Old Testament references. Patience, the Bible makes plain, is the path of wisdom.

The book of Proverbs returns to this thought again and again. “Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding,” it says, “but he who has a hasty temper exalts folly” (14:29). “Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city” (16:32). James puts the same idea in plainer terms:

My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires.

James 1:19–20

So what is the will of God for your life? That you would be patient as he is patient. He wills that you would follow the example of Christ’s patience and await the return of Christ patiently.

Chapter 9: God Most Truthful

Moral relativism — the idea that “what’s right for you may not be right for me” — is the product of finite minds, asserting that personal truth is the highest truth we can possess and that no higher, absolute truth exists. The classic illustration is the blind men and the elephant: each touches a different part and perceives a different animal — a wall, a serpent, a spear — and we are to conclude that all are correct, albeit partially so.

The Bible declares that God himself is the benchmark for truth, the definer of reality, and that his creatures are subject to his definitions. It too says people love darkness — but it speaks of light coming into that darkness, revealing truth to those who were once blind.

Christianity, like every belief system, answers the existential questions all humans face. Wilkin frames four:

• Origin — Where did I come from? Not a cosmic accident, but created by God.
• Purpose — Why am I here? To bring glory to God and to enjoy him forever.
• Problem — What’s wrong? Like Adam and Eve, we exchanged God’s truth for a lie and rebelled, rendering us spiritually dead.
• Solution — What fixes it? God sent his Son to redeem us from death to life.

The most compelling reason to believe the Bible’s claims is that it answers these questions more compellingly than any other belief system. Its description of sin is accurate; the solution it proposes transcends human effort; the purpose it gives for human existence, if embraced, causes people to live sacrificially.

But the prevailing cultural message offers a different answer: “live your truth.” It is the same old self-worshiping individualism with an updated turn of phrase. “Follow your heart,” “If it feels good, do it,” and Pilate’s “What is truth?” all say truth is in the eye of the beholder. But above all else, the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked (Jeremiah 17:9), creating a false reality in which your preferences take precedence over others’. Living your truth will inevitably prevent someone else from living theirs; it destroys your ability to live in community — predicated not on actualizing your preferences, but on laying them down for the good of others. The problem with living your truth is that your truth is a lie.

Instead, may God direct you into living his — the only truth there really is, the truth that rejects isolation and plunges you into the community a shared truth preserves. Even with spiritual eyes, you can become too fixated on one part of the elephant, loving one part to the detriment of the whole. The believer is charged to seek the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, requiring the full counsel of God’s Word.

What is the will of God for your life concerning truth? His will is that you know the truth (John 8:32), that you walk in the truth (3 John 1:4), that you speak the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15), and that you obey the truth (1 Peter 1:22).

Chapter 10: God Most Wise

Wilkin opens with a distinction — the difference between knowing and knowing what to do.

• Knowledge — possessing the facts.
• Wisdom — the ability to achieve the best ends with the facts.

Because God is not bound by time, he determines the end from the beginning, choosing perfect ends. It is possible, by contrast, to live a life of folly from start to finish — and because we are designed for community, folly affects more than the individual who chooses it. Paul puts the indictment plainly:

For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, “He catches the wise in their craftiness,” and again, “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.”

1 Corinthians 3:18–20

We deceive ourselves that in choosing self we have chosen rightly. We become wise in our own eyes, as Proverbs says, giving the appearance of wisdom but inwardly desiring the approval of others.

James tells the two kinds apart. Where there is bitter jealousy and selfish ambition, there will be disorder and every vile practice — that wisdom is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere (James 3:13–18). The contrast plays out in every direction: worldly wisdom self-promotes, boasts, and wields might, saying trials will crush you; godly wisdom elevates others, is slow to speak, and works in meekness, saying trials will mature you.

Simply put, any thought, word, or deed that compromises your ability to love God and neighbor is folly. Yet godly wisdom is yours for the asking: “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him” (James 1:5). Lack wisdom? Just ask. God will give it.

Wisdom is a mark of spiritual maturity. The mature are transformed by the renewing of their minds, “that by testing they may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2).

But the rest of Solomon’s story is a warning. The man who wrote that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10) traded the fear of the Lord for the fear of man, thereby trading wisdom for folly. There is no such thing as “once wise, always wise” for anyone but God; like patience, mercy, and grace, you must remain constantly aware of your need for a sustaining supply of wisdom.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells his disciples to “ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7–8). We read this and make a list of possessions we’d like from God, but Jesus has a better list in mind. His disciples, overwhelmed with the cost of following him, would have heard an invitation to request spiritual resources — patience, courage, compassion, wisdom — and the verb tense makes it ongoing: keep on asking, seeking, knocking. The Word gives you discernment into the area you need it most: your own heart. The most basic act of wisdom is repentance.

So what is the will of God for your life? If any of you lack wisdom, ask. For those who understand the destruction of a life of folly, no prayer request will be more urgent or ongoing than the one for wisdom.

Chapter 11: Engraved with His Image

By asking the better question of “Who should I be?” you find that the will of God for your life is not hidden. The Bible is filled with exhortations for how you can reflect your Creator as you become increasingly like Christ. But in suggesting that you are to become a better person, how do you avoid succumbing to something resembling a Christianized self-help program — a mind-set that accomplishes nothing more than behavior modification?

Make no mistake: the Bible teaches that behavior modification should absolutely follow salvation. But it occurs for a different reason than it does in the life of the unbeliever. The difference between self-help and sanctification is the motive of the heart.

The motive of sanctification is joy. Joy is both your motive and your reward. Jesus made this connection for his disciples: “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love… that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:10–11). Fullness of joy results when you seek to reflect your Maker. It is what you were created to do. It is the very will of God for your life.

As you grow in holiness, love, goodness, justice, mercy, grace, faith, patience, truth, and wisdom, you look increasingly like Christ, who looks exactly like God. God’s will for your life is that you be restored to mint condition.