A Noble Motive

“You shall be like God,” the serpent promised them that morning as he enticed them to eat what God had forbidden. What a devastating temptation! One could want worse things than to be like God. Hadn’t God already made them in his image? Wasn’t his desire to invite them into a relationship with him that would make them like him? Isn’t the desire to be like God the highest ideal of the Christian life?
That such a noble motive could be used for such evil should be a warning to us. Foe here sin is clearly unmasked. We often view sin as evil action alone and miss the nature of sin itself. At its root, sin is simply grabbing for ourselves what God has not given to us. In this realm, our best intentions can draw us into much bondage as our most indulgent desires.
Adam and Eve’s sin was not what they wanted, but how they went about getting it. Would they trust God to make them like him, or would they reach out and take it for themselves?”

The above is taken from He Loves Me, by Wayne Jacobsen.
Wayne ends each chapter with something for your personal journey. It’s this last part here I want to include: “Ask God to show you how to embrace a relationship with him in his way and not your own.”

What I want to put forth here is this. It was in taking from the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil that Adam thought he discovered a short cut in becoming ‘like God.’ Are we trying to by-pass the process the embracing of His will being done in our lives His way, or are we too like Adam trying to be like God through our self-help knowledge avoiding the wonderful but painful application of the cross that is needed in our inner most being?
Though Jesus was God’s son, yet he was made perfect through that which he suffered. He learned obedience through that which he suffered.

In choosing to NOT trust in our Father to fully process us so that we become ‘as’ Christ, the unfortunate remaining option is to have a form of godliness, but having NO power.”
There are NO short cuts!

Rich