Think about your actions this last week: In what way were your actions like Jesus would have acted in your place? In what ways were your actions totally different than Jesus would have acted in your place.

The important thing for you to understand is that wherever you are in the scale of sinful behavior vs. righteous behavior: (whether you came into this room with no real relationship with God whatsoever or whether you’ve been a believer for several years) God’s plan for you in this life is that you will use this lifetime to (#1) change from a sinful lifestyle modeled after the evil one’s plan for your life to (#2) a righteous lifestyle modeled after God’s plan for your life.

Let me assure you of something we often only think of at funerals:

So often I meet people who are proud of their sinfulness; they’re just expressing their individuality and if they ever want God’s opinion about their lives they will ask, until then God can butt out! Oddly, whenever someone reaches the end of this life or when ever someone we love hangs poised to cross into eternity…..I find that all of a sudden everybody get very, very focused on what this life was supposed to have been about anyway. ( even if only for a few days before they return to their old was)

I stated in part one of this series last week that the first step toward becoming like Jesus is to focus your mind on Him as the model you are imitating.

This approach of focusing on what we are moving toward should not surprise us…we have all heard it before.

When the Delray Little League team got to their World Series this week; when one of them walked up to the plate what advise was ringing in his ears that he had heard thousands of times???

Keep your eye on the ball!

That’s not just a cute saying…any of you that have played any kind of sports know that as soon as you lose focus, the game, for you, is over!

Life is like that… when you are on your way to some life goal, the only way you will ever arrive there is if you manage to push out all the things that could distract you and fix your eye on the goal you are striving toward.

When I was a boy in Ohio, I used to mow almost every yard on my street. They weren’t ¼ acre lots like those in this town. They were one or two acres and I prided my self on how straight the rows were. I didn’t take me long to figure out how to make a straight first row. I would find a tree on the other side of the yard and never averting my eyes walk straight toward it. I would never look down, I would never look to one side, until I reached the tree. When I reached the tree I would look back and the mowed line would be amazingly straight.

You may have heard the story of the farmhand who plowed the field and the rows were so crooked. The farmer asked why; Didn’t I tell you to fix your eye on some point on the other side of the field to get a straight row? I did, said the boy, I had my eye on that cow grazing in the next field.

Many of our spiritual walks end up that way: We don’t have our eyes fixed on the goal, we have them all over the place, fixed on moving targets, and when we look back we have been all over the place, sometimes even going round and round in the same circle.

Many here have known the experience of being close to God, having wonderful communion with him, seeing the sinfulness begin to fall away, and new behaviors start to emerge and then life begins to squeeze us and God seems more and more distant, temptation grows more and more strong… I can tell you exactly what happened with the most absolute certainty.

God did not leave you….You got distracted from God!

Not only does a focused gaze lower our level of distraction but It is a principle of human life that we actually begin to take on the characteristics of those we focus on.

What I am today is very much the product of some very distinct people who influenced my life. Many of my actions and reactions are simply a reworking of the actions of people that greatly influenced my life; both positively and negatively. How many of us married people have had our mate say at some point; You’re acting just like your Mom or Dad…and it’s usually not meant as a compliment. Most of us, at some point, watch behaviors in our parents and vow that we will never act like that, we will never yell at our children or our spouse, will never be impatient like our father was, we will always take time with our children when they need our attention: and then low and behold, 20 years later we shake our heads and discover we are acting just like the people we said we would never imitate.

After many, many years of counseling people, I do not believe that out behavior is just a matter of the transfer of genes. (We act like our parents because of genetics. there are other people in my past that I act like today as well and I have no genetic connection with them.)

What is the strongest link between you and the people in your past that have most influenced your present behavior? The time you spent with them, focusing on their behavior, both positive and negative.

How many children do you know who despised some addictive behavior in their parents only to fall into the same trap some years later.

I say all of that to reach this point: This human tendency to replicate what we most focus on is not a freak of nature. Neither is it something human being have unconsciously developed to mold our societies as some sociologists might tell you:

It is God given! If used rightly it is the tool on this earth that will most enable you to become like your Creator! Spiritual growth in this life is about learning where that fixed point is on the other side of life and while you may start your life wondering in circles around the field, as you grow in Christ you can become more and more focused on the goal on the other side and the path behind you will become straighter and straighter. As the path behind you becomes straighter your momentum will increase; you are not wasting time now wondering around in circles.

There is absolutely no doubt what God’s plan for you in this life is:

(Romans 8:29) 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. (NIV)

If I could put a perfect replica of all that Christ is in a frame here and put a spiritual mirror in front of you how similar would the two of you be?

(1 Corinthians 15:47-49) The first man was of the dust of the earth, the second man from heaven. As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the man from heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so shall we bear the likeness of the man from heaven.

(Colossians 3:9-10) Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. (NIV)

First of all what does the phrase, “with unveiled faces” mean??? Do you have an “unveiled face”? it’s a requirement for you to claim this promise as your own. We understand what that means by reading the verses that come before verse 18:

If you are a believer (expand), your face is “unveiled” and you are one who is starting to “reflect the Lord’s glory”

Beholding as in a glass….(katoptrizomenoi) …"We all reflecting as mirrors the glory of the Lord."

The effect of gazing into the glory of Jesus is that we are drawn like a moth to a flame to the power of the one who’s image we were created in. There is this built in pull to return to the state mankind was in before his rebellion against his Creator

“ the idea is, that by placing ourselves within the light of the gospel-- by contemplating the glory that shines there--we become changed into the likeness of the same glory. By contemplating the face of our blessed Redeemer, we are changed into something of the same image. It is a law of our nature that we are molded by the persons with whom we associate, and by the objects which we contemplate. We become like those with whom we have interaction, and to the objects with which we are familiar. We absorb the opinions, we copy the habits, we imitate the manners, we fall into the customs of those with whom we have daily conversation.

From glory to glory….from one degree of glory to another. Believers all reflect the same image of Christ more or less but:

The more one gazes, the more one reflects, and the more one reflects the more one transforms, and the more one transforms the greater the momentum of that transformation becomes.

THE SILVERSMITH

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