What You Were Made to Carry

Let me tell you what the image of God actually is. People have spent enormous effort trying to locate it — is it reason? Is it creativity? Is it the capacity for moral judgment? All of these are in the neighborhood. None of them is the thing.

Look at the One whose image you bear. At the very bottom of Him, underneath the power and the wisdom and the holiness, there is this:

"The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love."

— 1 John 4:8 (NET)

God is love the way the sun is fire. Not a thing He does. A thing He is. And so the truest part of His image in you is not your cleverness and not your strength. It is your capacity to carry love — because a likeness is meant to look like the One it came from.

Now I have to give you a word, and I am going to be careful with it, because it is the hinge of the whole thing.

There are things about God that He cannot give away. He cannot make you capable of holding the universe together. He cannot make you omniscient, or omnipresent, or the source of your own existence. These belong to Him alone, and a made thing can never receive them. The ancient teachers had a name for these: the things God cannot share.

But there are other things. His goodness. His mercy. His wisdom. His patience. His kindness. His love. These He can pour into a child of clay, and that child can carry them, can grow full of them, can begin to glow with them the way cold iron glows when you hold it long enough in the fire. The iron does not become fire. It never stops being iron. But leave it in the flame and it takes the fire's heat and the fire's light into itself until you can barely tell, looking at it, where the iron ends and the fire begins.

That is what you are for. Not to become God — that was the serpent's lie in the garden, and it leads only to death. To become so full of the love of God that it pours through you into a world that is starving for it.

The ancient word for this is theosis. Not apotheosis — not the creature seizing divinity, which is what the fallen sons attempted and what the serpent promised. Theosis: participation in the divine life by grace, never by nature. The creature filled. The iron glowing. The child of dust shining with a light that belongs to Someone else and is given freely.

You may have been given a different word for this process. The Protestant tradition speaks of sanctification — becoming more holy, sinning less, growing in virtue and obedience, putting the flesh to death. At its best, in the hands of its most careful teachers, sanctification is understood as God's own work by the Spirit, not the believer's achievement by effort. That is the right intention, and the behavioral seriousness it names is real and belongs in the life.

But a frame carries a gravitational pull regardless of what its best teachers intended, and the pull of sanctification language tends in a particular direction. The question it most naturally generates is: how am I doing? Am I improving? The gaze moves inward to examine the state of the soul and upward toward the standard being reached for. Those are honest questions. But when they become the organizing questions of the Christian life, sin-management becomes the organizing activity — because if the measure is moral progress, the natural instrument of measurement is the sin record. The frame produces this even when the theology behind it does not intend it, because the frame is what most people are actually living inside, not the theology. And the person living inside that frame, however Spirit-intending the doctrine, often ends up exhausted at a wheel that does not seem to stop turning.

Theosis asks a different question. Not: how holy am I becoming? But: how near am I? Am I remaining in the fire long enough for the heat to get into me? The gaze moves outward and toward God rather than inward and toward the self. And the moral transformation follows — it cannot help but follow, the way the iron cannot help but heat when it remains in the flame — but it follows as fruit rather than as goal. You do not produce it. You stay near enough to the One who is love, and He produces it through you.

This is the directional difference, and it is not small. The person aiming at holiness is looking at the target. The person abiding in Christ is looking at the One in whom they abide, and the holiness arrives as a consequence of the looking. Both people may end up more holy than they were. But only one of them has understood the mechanism. And the person who has understood the mechanism is freed from the self-monitoring anxiety that the other carries — because the question is no longer am I improving but am I near, and the answer to the second question is available every morning, in poverty of spirit, at the foot of the vine.

This is not mystical language for the spiritually advanced. This is what God said He was doing when He made the thing from clay and breathed His own life into it. This is what Paul is describing when he says:

"... because those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that his Son would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters."

— Romans 8:29 (NET)

And this:

"And we all, with unveiled faces reflecting the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, which is from the Lord, who is the Spirit."

— 2 Corinthians 3:18 (NET)

From one degree of glory to another. This is not an accident of grace. It is the stated destination of every person in Christ. Not the destination of the spiritually elite. Not the ceiling achievable by the unusually devoted. The stated, intended, non-negotiable trajectory of everyone the Father has called.