We can grow in the likeness of God by embracing the WAY of Jesus. God has given us the potential to do this. It seems, however, that this only happens when we first admire the man Jesus and decide that we want to live like He did. So we must ask ourselves this pertinent question: Do I truly admire the Person called Jesus and I do I really want to be like Him? We will never embrace His way of thinking and behaving if we don’t admire who we think He was when He was here on earth. It would seem very difficult not to admire how He lived and died. His was a life that spoke of nobility and dignity. I really can’t think of any person not admiring Who He showed Himself to be.

Once we can truly say that we admire how Jesus lived, then we are ready to imitate Him. If we embrace the WAY of Jesus, we assert that we want to imitate how He lived and died. We have the power to imitate Him because God’s Spirit resides within us, only waiting for us to call upon Him to assist us.

Something truly happens to us when we decide to imitate Jesus. When we do, we begin to identify with Him. He truly becomes our hero and our model. We then recognize our connectedness to Him. Indeed Jesus, as truly man, is connected to us insofar as all humans share in the same human nature and life. We are joined to Jesus as either brother or sister. We begin to realize that He faced life challenges that are similar to those that we must face. We also know how He responded and, because we are the temples of God’s Spirit, we know that we can live with the same nobility and dignity that He did.

When we begin to truly identify with Jesus, we begin to understand the meaning and purpose of life. Indeed this earthly life is given to us just as it was given to Him to allow for spiritually grow and the development of a deeper union with God.

While I suspect there are many things that stop us from truly imitating Jesus and identifying with Him, I believe that most of the barriers and blocks that keep us from making an effort to accomplish this task rests with our own misguided notions of who we think we are and our misguided notions of Who we think Jesus IS.

Through the centuries I think that a lot of misinformation was given us with regard who we are in God’s kingdom. In order to grow in His likeness, we must begin to see ourselves as His children, to whom He has given the potential to grow in His likeness. As Peter said first: God became man so that man might   become God!