Abstract: This article is composed of selected sections from Andrew Murray’s book, “Like Christ: Developing the character of Jesus in your life.” The book was written towards the end of the 19th century in Wellington, Western Cape. An edited version of the complete book was published in 1981 by Whitaker House in Springdale, Pennsylvania.
1. Like Christ…. because we abide in Him
2. Like Christ…. he Himself calls us
3. Like Christ…. as one that serves
4. Like Christ…. our Head
5. Like Christ…. in suffering wrong
6. Like Christ…. crucified with Him
7. Like Christ…. in His self-sacrifice
8. Like Christ…. not of the world
9. Like Christ…. in His heavenly mission
10. Like Christ…. in His love
11. Like Christ…. in His praying
12. Like Christ…. in His use of Scripture
13. Like Christ…. in forgiving
14. Like Christ…. in His humility
15. Like Christ…. in the likeness of His death
16. Like Christ…. in the likeness of His resurrection
17. Like Christ…. led by the Spirit
“Let us make man in Our image, after Our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). In these words of the Council of Creation, with which the Bible history of man opens, we have the revelation of the eternal purpose to which man owes his existence – the glorious, eternal future to which he is destined. God proposes to make a Godlike creature, a being who will be His very image and likeness, the visible manifestation of the glory of the Invisible One.
To have a being, at once created and yet Godlike, was indeed a task worthy if infinite wisdom. It is the nature and glory of God that He is absolutely independent of all else, having life in Himself, owing His existence to none but Himself alone. If man is to be Godlike, he must bear His image and likeness in this, too – he must become what he is to be of his own free choice. He must make himself. On the other hand, it is the nature and glory of man to be dependent, to owe everything to the blessed Creator. How can the contradiction be reconciled – a being at once dependent and yet self-determined, created and yet Godlike. In man, the mystery is solved. As man, God gives him life, but endows him with the wonderful power of a free will. It is only in the process of a personal and voluntary appropriation that anything so high and holy as likeness to God can really become his very own.
When sin entered and man fell from his high destiny, God did not give up His purpose. Of His revelation is Israel, the central thought was: “Be ye holy; for I am holy” (Lev. 11:44). Likeness to God in that which constitutes His highest perfection is to be Israel’s hope. Redemption had no higher ideal than creation had revealed. It could only take up and work out the eternal purpose.
It was with this in mind that the Father sent to the world the Son who was the express image of His person. In Him, the Godlikeness to which we had been created, and which we personally had to appropriate and make our own, was revealed in human form. In looking upon Him, the desire after our long lost likeness to God was to be awakened. To accomplish the renewal of our image, there was a twofold work that Christ had to do. The one was to reveal in His life the likeness of God so that we might know what a life in that likeness was, and understand what it was we had to expect and accept from Him as our Redeemer. When He had done this, and shown us the likeness of the life of God in human form, He died that He might win for us, and impart to us, His own life as the life of the likeness of God, that in its power we might live in the likeness of what we had seen in Him.
And when He ascended to heaven, it was to give us, in the Holy Spirit, the power of that life He had first set before us and than won to impart to us. The one depends on the other. For what as our Example He had in His life revealed, He as our Redeemer by His death purchased the power. His earthly life showed the path. His heavenly life gives the power in which we are to walk. What God has joined together no man may separate. Whoever does not stand in the full faith of the redemption, does not have the strength to follow the Example. And, whoever does not seek conformity to the image as the great object of the redemption, cannot fully enter into its power. Christ lived on earth that He might show forth the image of God in His life. He lives in heaven that we may show forth the image of God in our lives.
The church of Christ has not always maintained the proper relationship of these two truths. In the Protestant churches, the truth of God’s pardoning and quickening grace took its rightful place. However, the danger of one-sidedness was in most cases not avoided. The doctrine that Christ lived on earth, not only to die for our redemption, but to show us how we were to live, did not receive sufficient prominence. While no evangelical church will deny that Christ is our Example, the absolute necessity of following the example of His life is not preached with the same distinctness as that of trusting the atonement of His death. Great pains are taken, and that most justly, to lead men to accept the merits of His death. What is not right, is that equally great pains are not taken to lead men to accept the following in His footsteps as the one mark and test of true discipleship.
It is hardly necessary to point out what influence the way this truth is presented will exercise in the life of the church. If atonement and pardon are everything, and the life in His likeness something secondary, it follows as a matter of course that the chief attention will be directed to the former. With the attaining of pardon and peace, there will be a tendency to rest content. If, on the other hand, conformity to the image of God’s Son is the chief object, and the atonement the means to secure this end as the fulfilment of God’s purpose in creation, then, in all the preaching of repentance and pardon, the true aim will always be kept in the foreground. Faith in Jesus and conformity to His character will be regarded as inseparable. Such a church will produce true followers of the Lord.
In this respect, Protestant churches still need to go on to perfection. Only then will the church put on her beautiful garments, and truly shine in the light of God’s glory – when these two truths are held in that wondrous unity in which they appear in the life of Christ Himself. In all He suffered for us, He left us an example that we should follow in His footsteps. As the banner of the cross is lifted high, the atonement of the cross and the fellowship of the cross must equally be preached as the condition of true discipleship.
It is remarkable how distinctly this comes out in the teaching of the blessed Master Himself. In fact, in speaking of the cross, He gives its fellowship more prominence than its atonement. How often He told the disciples that they must bear it with Him and like Him. Only thus could they be disciples, and share in the blessings His cross-bearing was to win. It is not only I who must die, He said, but you, too. The cross, the spirit of daily self-sacrifice, is to be the badge of our allegiance to Christ.
That Christ bore the cross for us is not all. It is only the beginning of His work. It opens the way to the full exhibition of what the cross can do as we are taken up into a lifelong fellowship with Him, the Crucified One. And, in our daily life, we experience and prove what it is to be crucified to the world. And yet, how many earnest and eloquent sermons have been preached on glorifying in the cross of Christ, in which Christ’s dying on the cross for us has been expounded, but our dying with Him, in which Paul so gloried, has been forgotten!
The main reason why the conformity to Jesus is so little seen, and in fact so little sought after among a large majority of Christians, is undoubtedly to be found in erroneous views as to our weakness, and what we may expect divine grace to work in us. Men have such strong faith in the power of sin, and so little faith in the power of grace, that they at once dismiss the thought of our being expected to be just as loving, just as forgiving, and just as devoted to the Father’s glory as Jesus was. They think of it as an ideal far beyond our reach – beautiful indeed, but never to be realised. According to them, God cannot expect us to be or do what is so entirely beyond our power. They confidently point to their own failure in earnest attempts to curb temper and to live wholly for God as proof that it cannot be done.
It is only by the persistent preaching of Christ our Example, in all the fullness and glory of this blessed truth, that such unbelief can be overcome. Believers must be taught that God does not reap where He has not sown, that the fruit and the root are in perfect harmony. God expects us to strive and think and act exactly like Christ, because the life that is in us is exactly the same as that which was in Him. We have a life like His within us. What could be more natural than that the outward life should be like His, too? Christ living in us is the root and strength of Christ’s acting and speaking through us, shining out from us so as to be seen by the world.