And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified. What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us?    Romans 8:28-31

I’ve been reading through Romans again and continue to run across so many scriptures that I know have a depth that I can never fully plumb but even small nuggets that I haven’t noticed before enrich me.  One of those sections is the text I quoted above out of Romans 8, which must be in the top five chapters in all of scripture. I just wanted to dig around in it a little more to see what I could find.

One of the most well known and most often quoted scriptures is 8:28 in which we are told that in all things God works together for the good of those who love him. Many times we read that as a scripture promising that God will quickly deliver us from whatever dilemma or ordeal we are facing. However, the word translated as “works” means that God will work together with the circumstances to transform us rather than simply delivering us from the hardship.  God is the God of all comfort who comforts us in all our troubles (2 Cor.1:4).  Without trouble we will never know his comfort.  It is in the midst of hardship and challenges that we discover God and that discovery allows us to become like him.

The core of this text is God’s eternal intention to conform us to the image of Jesus Christ.  His motive for conforming us is love.  According to Merriam-Webster, conform means “to take on the same shape, outline, or contour. It is to make one thing like another; to be similar or identical; to be in harmony with another; or to be in agreement with.”  Ultimately, it is God’s desire to make us just like Jesus and to bring our thoughts, actions, and emotions into perfect alignment with his.  It is not that God wants to clone Jesus but that he wants us to have the same heart and mind as Jesus because in that alikeness is found perfect joy, peace, and love…even in the midst of chaos. It is Jesus sleeping in a boat while the storm rages around him.

Here is what we need to know.  God predestined us to be conformed.  It was his intention to make us like Jesus even before the creation of the world. He is committed to conforming us because he loves us and because he knows that everything we are searching for in life is found in Jesus or found in being like Jesus. The issue we run into is that we resist God’s work in our lives.  But if you read the text, God is committed to the process because he knows our best life and best eternity is at the end of the process.

Back in my teens and college days when I had time and the inclination, my friends and I spent a lot of weekends working on our old cars. We wanted them to look sharper and go faster and so we tinkered with them endlessly adjusting the timing, trying bigger jets in the carburetors, adding dual exhausts, etc. Occasionally, we would try our hand at bodywork.

In those days there was still some metal in car bodies and when there was a dent, you took special tools called body dollies that were pieces of heavy metal with differing shapes that you placed behind the fender or door and then hammered the dent against the dolly to conform to the curve or flat surface behind it. Some parts of the car were fairly pliable while others were very hard and stiff. The pliable pieces were shaped with a minimum of effort, a minimum of pain, and small hammers.  When the metal was stiff and stubborn, we didn’t give up on shaping that piece, we just got a bigger hammer.  God is like that.  If we are flexible and pliable when he puts his hand on us, then our shaping is not so difficult and takes a minimum of time.  However, if we push back, resist, and stiffen when he tries to conform us to the image of Jesus, he won’t give up, he may just get a bigger hammer. It’s our choice.

So why would we resist becoming like Jesus in the first place? Of course, our fallen nature (our natural man) opposes submitting to anything or anyone.  The natural man wants to be in charge and still believes that happiness, significance, peace and security can still be found in the natural realm and clings to that delusion. Satan, of course, is totally opposed to our becoming like Christ because each layer of conformity to Jesus weakens the devil’s hold on us. And so he lies to us and constantly beats the drum declaring that God is holding out on us and keeping the best stuff for himself.  That was his tactic in the Garden of Eden and still is. Satan kills, steals, and destroys and then points the finger at God whom he paints as a God who is out to get us, who takes away the people we love, who is angry and vindictive, or simply detached and uncaring.  Each of those lies becomes a barrier to becoming like Jesus and drawing close to God.

Being conformed to Jesus is being conformed to the Father and the Spirit because they are one.  Jesus said that if we have seen him we have seen the Father.  As we conform to Jesus we align ourselves with the Father more and more and as we align with Him all of heaven becomes available to us as it was to Jesus when he walked the earth. In the gospel of John we are told that in him (Jesus) was life and that life was the light of men (Jn.1:4). People were drawn to Jesus because they saw a quality of life in him that they had seen in no other.  As we become more like Jesus, that quality of life will form in us as well.  It is what Jesus called abundant life.

Ultimately, the wise man or woman embraces being conformed to the image of Jesus.  He or she doesn’t despise difficult circumstances because those are the very tools the Father uses to shape us into being like Jesus.  Paul finishes this little section with the declaration that God is for us!  He has no intention to hurt us but to bless us.  Those blessings have been in his heart since creation and they are deposited as we become more and more conformed.  Cooperating with God in the process seems by far to be the best choice.