Between the chairs

I’ve always been disturbed when I compare the Christianity of the New Testament with what I’ve experienced. Like the boy who revealed the nakedness of the emperor in the children’s story, I want to shout to my fellow believers, “We’re missing out on the main point! We humans have been offered a privilege that must amaze the angels – the presence of God in our human bodies. But most of us don’t even know that it’s an option.”

But then, when I look at my own life, I lose my courage. I haven't yet attained what I'm looking for.

At a recent church retreat, one of our youth pastors placed two chairs on the stage. He suggested that one chair represents who we were before our conversion. The other chair represents who we are when Christ has been fully formed in us. Then he stood between the chairs and spoke about our position of leaving one chair but not yet being in the other chair. He read Philippians 3:12-14 where Paul admits, "I don't mean to say that I have already achieved these things or that I have already reached perfection. But I press on to possess that perfection for which Christ Jesus first possessed me. No, dear brothers and sisters, I have not acheived it, but I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us."

The Bible teaches that this miracle of grace will occur at the resurrection of our bodies. Christ’s prayer will be answered in the end. But the Bible teaches that we can experience it on earth now. But, like Paul, we reach for it, hoping to grasp it before we are taken home to heaven.

“But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ--the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.

“I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.” (Philippians 3:7-11)

The formation of Christ in the believer is a process that never is fully completed here on earth. We never achieve the “perfection” that Jesus achieved when He said, “If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.” (John 14:7) We never perfectly reflect the divine glory to this world. But we can say, as Paul said to the Corinthians (11:1), “Be imitators of me, just as I also am of Christ.”