Becoming Christlike: Do you want to know God more?

Ivan Radford reminds us that becoming more like Jesus requires surrender and desire.

What’s the greatest thing in your life? Your work? Your home? Your friends? Your family? Where does knowing Jesus rank in all those? Being a disciple is the most counterintuitive thing we can be – which is also why it’s the most important. We live in a world that is by default already shaping us. Jesus invites us to ‘not conform to the patterns of the world’ (Romans 12:2), but to choose the opposite: to be transformed by the Holy Spirit. 

We all know making that daily choice requires picking up our cross. But how many of us fully sacrifice our little priorities and ambitions, and put God above them? 

One of the great deceptions we can be lured into is thinking we have cracked our own discipleship, that we’ve put in enough work to earn it. But that leads us to fruitless self-glory, rather than putting God in his rightful place – because salvation and sanctification are only ours through God’s grace. Becoming more like Christ is only possible when we let him do the work in us. 

Paradoxically, that doesn’t mean doing nothing. Discipleship requires commitment and effort. John Mark Comer sums up this mystery elegantly in Practicing the Way: ‘You will never work harder for anything in your life than Christlike character, and nothing else will ever feel like such an unearned gift.’ 

Being transformed by God also doesn’t happen overnight: it’s a lifelong journey that involves starting over, and starting over. We stumble, we fall short, we hold on to things – but, as we return to God and surrender more, we gradually find ourselves becoming more like Jesus. 

Along the way, we can forget, as Henri Nouwen observes, that ‘being is more important than having’. We can define ourselves by our possessions – including our achievements, status and sense of control – and lose sight of the fact that our life and salvation are gifts from God to share.

AW Tozer in The Pursuit of God warns: ‘Self is the opaque veil that hides the face of God from us.’ That includes being self-satisfied, not longing for more of Jesus. If we focus on comparing our lives and fulfilment with people around us, instead of looking to Jesus, we fall back into conforming to the patterns of the world – we forget to thirst, as the deer pants for water, for more of our infinite God. 

How, then, do we draw deeper? We might want some clever formula to solve it ourselves, but the answer is simpler than that: discipleship is nothing more, and nothing less, than living in relationship with God, the very Creator of the universe. Our heart’s desire to know Jesus more is something that God grows within us as we grow in him – but we have to long for it, to take us past theoretical knowledge and into wholehearted relationship. As Paul put it in just five words: ‘I want to know Christ’ (Philippians 3:10). 

How you keep your relationship alive will be personal to you, but it won’t surprise you that studying God’s word and praying – making space to speak and listen to God – will be central. You might begin and end each day with thanks, follow a Bible course, repeat a Scripture verse, subscribe to a podcast, share in a WhatsApp group, read daily devotions or use a Bible app’s notifications to draw your focus back to God. 

We can be tempted to over-complicate all this and distract ourselves, but Brother Lawrence discovered the beauty of simply being in relationship with God in each small gesture, writing: ‘We ought not to be weary of doing little things for the love of God.’ That’s not to distort discipleship into busyness, but to avoid separating God from daily life – to slow down and be aware of God’s presence. Because when you intentionally offer up to God all your thoughts, words and deeds – small, big, light, dark – you will start to see a change. You will, remarkably, start to see God in them. 

But whatever rule of life you employ, you cannot become more Christlike without letting go of everything else. There are many songs that capture this challenge, but Mark Pendergrass’s 1977 hymn perhaps nails it best with its joyful declaration: ‘The greatest thing in all my life is knowing you.’ And its simple, powerful prayer of longing: ‘I want to know you more.’ 

What would happen if you prayed that every day?