G.K. Beale has written a wonderful book with a wonderful title: We Become What We Worship. His idea picked up from a variety of places throughout the Scriptures, but most explicitly in Psalm 115 and Psalm 135, is that transformation happens in the context of worship - and that our vocation of image-bearers is part and parcel of what it means to be human. In other words, you will always image what you worship. If you worship the triune God you will reflect his image, you will become like him. If you worship other gods, then you will reflect them. The secular gods will produce secular Christians. Which explains a whole bunch of what's happening to the church in our day.

Paul develops this idea a bit further in 2 Corinthians 3 and 4. There he links this becoming to beholding. In 2 Corinthians 3:18, he says, "And we all with unveiled face, beholding (or reflecting) the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness..." He goes on chapter 4 to link this "glory of the Lord" explicitly to the "face of Jesus Christ." His point is not simply that we become like what we worship, but that we become like what we look at.

Much of pastoral work is meant to be ruthlessly practical. How do we live Christianly in the world? It is about practice and life and relationships and living Godly lives under the reign of God in the world. The bible speaks in the most earthy ways imaginable to almost every human relationship and institution and when it doesn't speak directly to a thing, it lays out principles and ideas that are applicable. It is authoritative to everything it addresses, and it addresses everything.

But there is another, vital, non-negotiable aspect to pastoral work and to the life of the Christian that is easily lost or buried under the deluge of practical questions. We are called to behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. I don't think this means some sort of abstract existential "beholding." When Paul describes this process he is explicitly talking about the reading of the Scriptures in 2 Corinthians. We behold Jesus by actually looking at how the text of Scripture describes Jesus. Be it through the law and his fulfillment of it. Be it through the types that give us the meaning of his coming or even more clearly through the actual descriptions of his work and person given to us in the gospels. There is enormous value in simply looking at Jesus and discovering who he is - as he actually is. The Spirit of God takes this seeing and transforms us into Jesus' likeness. This will involve denying our imaginings of what we think Jesus is like, or who we think Jesus is like and coming to terms with the actual contours of who he really is, in the bible. We will be confronted with a Jesus who did things and said things that seem remarkably unChristlike. He was at times harsh, at times gentle - and often gentle when we expect him to be harsh and vice versa. But we will not be served if we come to the gospels with our own pre-packaged understanding of who Jesus is or what Christlikeness means. We must come as children to discover and to see who he really is.

As we head into the final weeks leading up to Good Friday and Easter, may we be compelled to go to the Scriptures and behold the One we worship again. May the stories of Jesus' final weeks surprise us and shock us. May we be fascinated again at his words and actions, scandalized by his authority and his demands, and stunned by his grace.

May God open your eyes to behold marvelous things in his word.