Photographers who have been around awhile remember when all pictures had to go through a negative stage before becoming a true color photograph.
Instant pictures of any quality were a misnomer. We had to get our hands on the negative and develop our picture from it. If we stopped at the negative stage and passed it around for our friends to enjoy, people would turn up their noses.
No one wanted to admire a negative.
Why, then, in our Christian walk, are we content to stop at the negative stage? We have another level to go if we want to become beautiful in Christ. We have to change from being human to more than human—like Christ, in effect.
How do we develop ourselves into the image of Christ?
Stage 1:
Hebrews 11:6 tells us we need to soak ourselves in faith.
Stage 2:
James 5:14 names prayer as the oil of change.
Stage 3:
Galatians 3:13 orders Christ’s redemption to bring us to living color.
When we look to the foundation stones of the Early Church, we see these transformations all the time. There were no instamatic cameras available then, and digital? Nah, not even in the concept stage. The negatives of people’s lives were changed one person at a time. Take this example from Acts 16:1-5:
“Paul came also to Derbe and to Lystra. A disciple was there, named Timothy, the son of a Jewish woman who was a believer, but his father was a Greek. He was well spoken of by the brothers at Lystra and Iconium. Paul wanted Timothy to accompany him, and he took him and circumcised him because of the Jews who were in those places, for they all knew that his father was a Greek. As they went on their way through the cities, they delivered to them for observance the decisions that had been reached by the apostles and elders who were in Jerusalem. So the churches were strengthened in the faith, and they increased in numbers daily.”
Three things happened in this passage.
1. Timothy (a Greek) made his faith clear for those he would minister to (the Jews).
2. Paul and Timothy presented the prayerful guidelines of the Jerusalem apostles.
3. The congregations became more and more like Christ.
In effect, with faith, prayer, and the redemptive message of salvation, a dim and confusing negative was developed into a full-color image of Christ.
We see this summed up pretty well in 1 John 3:3:
“And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.”
That purifying process is us changing from our negative state (being fully human) into a true color photograph (being fully a child of God).
Let’s get the developing fluid out, and let’s jump in. Then and only then we will become beautiful for the world to gaze upon, and they will want to join us in our walk with God.
When we develop in Christ, we start to look just like him.
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