Quest for Christ-Likeness

Excerpt from The Aim of Dr Luke by John Piper

In the past month or so I have been spending much of my personal devotional time meditating on the words of Jesus and the way he acted. The result has been that I love this man with a newly felt longing. I long for his single-minded devotion to his Father's will to rub off on me. I long to share his profound understanding of the human heart and his ability to see through all the outer layers of our lives and into our heart. I long to have his way with words—words that always laid bare a person's real loves. I long, like Mary, to sit at his feet and drink in the living water of his teaching, until it so satisfies my heart that I can be as free as he was from the love of money and from the love of the praise of men and from anxiety about tomorrow. I have come away from the gospels hungry to be holy, to be real and authentic, not to play church or play religion, and not to fritter away my short life with nonessentials. And all these longings and this hunger have driven me to prayer that God would work me over and not allow me to creep along so slowly in my quest for Christ-likeness. Out of this meditation and prayer has emerged the desire to study and preach from one of the gospels.