Our merciful God became like us so that through His gospel, He might make us like Him once again.

He became the sacrifice that we couldn’t make ourselves so that we could be restored through Him, once again, to fellowship. To be returned to His image and likeness, providing us access to that face-to-face, Edenic closeness that we were once made for.

This is the whole point of meeting Jesus.

To encounter Him, hear His gospel, and respond to it, being born again.

This is what Paul means when he writes, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17). All through Jesus.

I want to have you read the following verses of Scripture that Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:17–21, just to let this fully sink into your heart right now.

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation, that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God. For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Corinthians 5:17–21).

This is the power of meeting Jesus!

When you meet Jesus, who is the image of God, God manifest in the flesh, you are meeting, through Him, all that God is!

Through Jesus, we have access to God who is our Father, through His Holy Spirit. This is why meeting Jesus is so much more than a coffee date with a friend or a casual lunch hangout with a co-worker. It’s not like meeting a new friend or anyone else in the community.

It’s so much bigger than that.

Meeting Jesus is meeting our Creator, who has become our Savior. The same one who made the world that you and I live within. The same one who fashioned the stars in the sky that we often marvel at. The same one who dwells among the galaxies in the cosmos. He has made Himself accessible to you and me.

I still can’t get over that. I hope you don’t either.

But meeting Jesus always leads somewhere, as Jesus is always calling us deeper into the river, closer into relationship, and further along His way and His path. As He, who is the light and guide along the path, invites us just another step closer, and just a little bit deeper.

This is why those who meet Jesus and receive His invitation to “follow Him” must choose to accept His invitation. Because meeting Jesus, while it is monumental and deeply significant, it’s just a toe dip into the water of all that He has available for us.

We can even look to people in the Scriptures, such as a man many refer to as the rich young ruler, who met Jesus, but because he was unwilling to follow Jesus in the specific ways that Jesus was requiring of him, he lost out on the opportunity. Not because Jesus withheld it, but because he chose to not follow (Mark 10:22).

Those who meet Jesus and receive the opportunity to experience the transforming power of His gospel by being born again and becoming new creations in Christ have the opportunity to be restored into the image of God that they were created in, by following Jesus and, as we discussed in Chapter 2, becoming like Him.

This invitation that Jesus gives us to follow Him includes three key ingredients that we all must make sure to carefully observe.

To unearth these three ingredients, we must turn to Luke’s account of Jesus’ invitation to follow Him, found in Luke 9:23, where Jesus tells us what we must do if we are indeed to “come after Him” and be His disciples.

“Then He said to them all, ‘If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me’” (Luke 9:23).

Truly, if we are going to follow Him, we must follow this recipe.

If not, while we may be following something or someone, maybe something that someone heard from someone, it may not truly be Him. As we learned earlier in the book, if we don’t follow Jesus, Jesus’ way, we may be in danger of following religious patterns produced through a game of spiritual telephone, instead of truly following Jesus Himself.

So therefore, if we want to live the life Jesus is inviting us to live, we must carefully follow His recipe.

Have you ever baked a cake?

Often, the difference between being pleased with what you pull out of the oven and not is whether or not you followed the recipe.

What you put in is what you get out.

If you set out to bake a chocolate cake, but in preparing the cake for the oven, you leave out the single key ingredient of chocolate, then when you go to retrieve your cake from the oven, you will be sadly disappointed to realize that all you have made is just a yellow cake.

Just as every ingredient matters in baking a proper cake, so does it, in even greater measure, matter that we include all  the ingredients of following Jesus in our journey of attempting to do so.

The ingredients?

  1. Deny yourself.
  2. Take up your cross daily.
  3. Follow Him.

Those are the ingredients if we want to pull out the right cake, which ultimately is to become like Him.

When we keep this in mind, the first ingredient of this recipe that Jesus gives us makes all the more sense.

If I am going to become like Him, I have to cease my attempts to be like me.

I have to deny myself as Jesus said. And in this denial of myself and my personal image and likeness, I prepare myself to take on His.

Skipping over this key step, as so many often do, is one of the main reasons why people are disappointed in the cake that they pull out of the oven after having tried to become disciples of Jesus.

Why?

We set out to bake His flavor of cake, but we didn’t take out ours.

If we want to look like, be like, and live like Jesus, if we want the finished version of the proverbial cake of our lives to taste of the flavor of Christ, then we mustn’t ignore the vital step of removing ourselves from the recipe.

That’s the first ingredient. But let’s look at the last one.

We must “follow” Him.

But this means following Him. Not a version of Him that we think He is satisfied with. Not a model of Him that we heard about from someone else, who heard about it from someone else, who also heard about it from someone else.

We must follow Him according to the way that He has detailed to us in the Scriptures, whereby we also see His disciples live out this very same way in real time.

True following leads to becoming. And this is where, as we discussed in Chapter 2, real Christianity finds its footing.

You may have noticed that I skipped over the middle ingredient, which is to take up our cross. This was not on accident. I did so on purpose, as it is my personal opinion that this particular ingredient, is key to linking our attempts of self-denial, to the possibility of truly becoming like Jesus as His followers.

Without this central ingredient of taking up our cross… while there can be self-denial, there will be no becoming like Jesus. Why? Because we didn’t take up our cross.

But what does that even mean?

The cross, as we have learned, is the mechanism by which Jesus was executed. It was two pieces of wood, fixed together, perpendicular to one another. On this cross, the executor would lay down the subject that was to be executed, affixing the person to the structure of the cross, and then lifting the cross up off the ground for him to hang from and be tortured until their eventual death.

Sounds brutal? It was. The cross was brutal. There is no way around that.

And can I be honest? This was by design. I must break it to you that the cross didn’t stop being brutal. I know that now, in the current mainstream Christian context, the cross has become a symbol of triumphant victory in much of the world. And it is. There is no denying that. Jesus conquered death at the place of its own power. He used an instrument of death to secure life. All of this is absolutely, unequivocally true.

But the cross is still the cross. An instrument of execution.

Many who became subject to the cross as a means of execution would, by the end of their execution, be in such bad physical shape that they would be hardly unrecognizable.

This is exactly what happened to Jesus.

In the Book of Isaiah, the prophet issues a prophecy about Jesus and the sacrifice that He was to make one day to redeem all of humanity back into fellowship with God. In this prophecy, he makes a very interesting statement that I want to key in on here together for the next few moments.

“His visage was marred more than any man” (Isaiah 52:14).

Let’s break this down briefly.

That word visage means “appearance or form.” That is Jesus’ image. And the word marred means “to ruin, to destroy, or to disfigure.” That is what happened to Jesus’ image on the cross.

This prophetic writing from Isaiah is pointing to a moment where the Messiah would be subjected to some type of process that would completely ruin His image.

Just like would happen in the Old Testament with the sacrificial animal on the Day of Atonement, Jesus Himself became the dismembered living sacrifice for us all.

In doing so, He allowed His image to be marred (literally “ruined”) on the cross, so that you and I could once again have access to God… just like Adam did all the way back in Eden.

But this attempt at restoration of fellowship would be null and void if there was no true pathway of restoration for humanity to get back into the “image” and “likeness” of God.

I’ll explain.

As we learned earlier in this book, if man isn’t like God, he can’t be close. Remember, this was the premise of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden in the first place. They were no longer holy as He was holy. They were no longer pure as He was pure. And therefore, their lack of purity and holiness, among He who is purity and holiness, created a situation where He could no longer share space with them. As He cannot purely exist with what is not like Him.

The Bible says it this way:

“What fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness? And what communion has light with darkness? And what accord has Christ with Belial? Or what part has a believer with an unbeliever? And what agreement has the temple of God with idols?” (2 Corinthians 6:14–16).

Paul goes on to also say…

“For you are the temple of the living God. As God has said: ‘I will dwell in them and walk among them. I will be their God, and they shall be My people. Therefore, come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord. Do not touch what is unclean, and I will receive you. I will be a Father to you, and you shall be My sons and daughters, says the LORD Almighty.’ Therefore, having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God” (2 Corinthians 6:16–18, 7:1).

In these verses, we see highlighted the themes of God’s desire to have fellowship with us as His children, but in order to do so, we must first come out of what is not like Him.

But where we could no longer become like Him ourselves, He became like us.

When we could not atone for our wrongdoings and our sins, He became the perfect atonement for it all. When we could not find a suitable sacrifice to completely pay for the penalty of our own sins, He became the perfect sacrifice, taking the penalty of our sins upon Himself.

This cross became the altar where the spotless Lamb of God was slain, becoming the final suitable sacrifice, the sacrificial Lamb of God, slain for the foundation of the world, which takes away the sins of the world.

All of this, so that we could have access once again to God, having a pathway back to His image and likeness.

But how?

By following His recipe.

Denying ourselves, taking up our cross daily, and following Him.

We can make a lot of sense out of the first and the last ingredients of the recipe. But often, it’s the middle one that really trips us up.

“Take up your cross daily.”

Why is this one so hard?

Because while there is some pain in self-denial, there’s a lot of pain on the cross in the middle.

There was pain in Gethsemane when Jesus fully submitted to the cross that He knew was soon to happen. Even so much so that the Bible tells us that He sweat great drops of blood, as His body, under extreme stress, experiences hematidrosis, a rare physical phenomenon that occurs when the blood vessels which supply the sweat glands, rupture under extreme physical or emotional stress, allowing blood to exit along with sweat.

But the real pain was coming on the cross.

To deny myself, I must recognize that my image isn’t like His, and thereby reject it.

To follow Him, and thus become like Him, I must take up my cross. I must allow, just like He did, my own visage (image) to be marred beyond recognition (literally ruined). Then and only, can His image be formed in me.

Jesus doesn’t compete with our image. He doesn’t want to share space with it. He wants to ruin it. Not in some sadistic way. But out of mercy. So that He may form His perfect and holy image in us… that we have fellowship with Him, once again.

Jesus sacrificed His image on the cross, to give it to us. And thereby, I must also sacrifice my image on my own proverbial cross, to truly receive His.

This often missing link is a central key to the return of God’s people to true fellowship with Him through Christ, who is the image of God, uniting us to Him in holiness, through restoring us once again to His image and His likeness.

This taking up our cross is the dismembering of our image to an unrecognizable, irreparable form.

It is exactly what Paul meant when he wrote in Galatians 2:20, “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”

Oftentimes, those who meet Jesus and then, in turn, walk away from Him after their initial encounter with Him and His gospel, returning to their old way, old image, and old nature, is rooted in somehow missing the key of the work of the cross in their lives. The often missing ingredient.

If we are to follow Jesus, all roads lead to Him, but all by way of the cross.

Skipping the cross means that though you may have denied yourself at one time, you did not allow the cross to ruin the image that you denied. And thereby, very easily, we can then return back to the form of old selves that existed before Jesus’ good news had great effect in our lives.

My friend, if we are going to truly live this full and abundant life with Jesus, we must first allow the work of the cross in our life to have its full effect. And then, as Jesus says, we must visit this cross daily, allowing our image to remain ruined so that His image can truly be formed in us.

Paul understood this when he wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:31 these three words: “I die daily”

At the cross, Jesus let His image be ruined so that through Him, we may once again be remade into the same image that the first Adam was made in… who was made in the image of the second Adam that was to come… Jesus.

We must allow our visage to be marred daily on our own cross as we embrace the voluntary self-destruction of our own image… which is often the missing link to truly having His image formed in us once again.

Then, and only then, can we “be holy,” as He is holy. Coming out from likeness and sameness with the world to instead walk in sameness with His difference. Holy as He is Holy. And thereby, once again, walking in the daily, close, intimate, face-to-face fellowship that is available with our God.

My friend, don’t skip the cross.

Reflection Questions: