Waking Up to Perfection!

Psalm 17:15
As for me, I will see Your face in righteousness;
I shall be satisfied when I awake in Your likeness.

One of these days, I will awake to the awareness that nothing more needs to be done in my life to make me better than I am. After all, you can't improve on perfection. One of these days, I will have arrived at the full measure of the stature of Jesus Christ, I will have attained completion in Him, and there will be no work left to be done in my life. One of these days, I will be like Him.

Unfortunately, that day was not today. Tomorrow doesn't look so good either.

David prayed with the expectation that one day he would live up to the purpose for which mankind was created. The King James Version says God made us in His image and after His likeness. The CLS paraphrase says He made us to look like Him and to be like Him.

Every face is different, they say. It's true enough that I look a lot like my dad, but when I stand next to mom I look a lot like her too. My dad favored his mom in some ways, his dad in others. Mom takes attributes from both of her parents. But every person on the face of the planet looks basically the same--two arms, two legs, ten fingers, ten toes, a belly button, two eyes, two ears, a nose and a pie-hole. Inside, we're built the same too--lungs, liver, stomach, kidneys, intestines, heart. God made us to look like Him in that God has a body which served as a pattern for our bodies. His body is God incarnate, God the flesh, otherwise known as Jesus the Christ. When God met face to face with people in the Old Testament, it was the second person in the triune Godhead coming down to our level. We don't really know what the Father looks like, for no man has seen His face and lived. But we know what Jesus looks like--He looks like us.

But more than being made to look like Him, God truly made us to be like Him. He wanted us to have his attributes and characteristics. He wanted us to take on His nature. My body is shaped after the pattern of His body; my spirit needs to be conformed to the pattern of His Spirit. The characteristics of God and of Christ are summed up in passages like the fruit of the Spirit--love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. God is the fulfillment of all those things, and He wants them to be fulfilled in us.

One of these days, I will wake up and I will be the very model of the likeness of God. I will be the perfect personification of all his attritbutes. I will have produced fruit worthy of my calling. Of course, I fully recognize that my awakening may come after this body has fallen asleep permanently. Completion may only arrive after I have cast off this mortal flesh and exchanged it for immortality. But it is still my hope, as it was the expectation of the Psalmist, that one day, I will be just like Him, and on that day, I will wake up satisfied!