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Intrinsic needs. Holiness. Mission.

Ask happy couples what they love about their spouses and you are almost guaranteed to hear this response: He [or she] has made me a better person. We instinctively recognize a need to become someone more profound than we are—someone good, someone loving, someone courageous.

I have two young daughters, and they like all things “princess.” They love Cinderella, Jasmine, Belle, Snow White, Fairy Tale Barbie, and so on. Most importantly, however, they believe that they are princesses. They want to grow up some day and marry a handsome prince and live in a castle like Cinderella’s. I love this about my girls. They seem to have an innate sense that they can be persons of significance when they grow up.

I can remember some of my own dreams when I was a child. Like many boys, I was interested in sports and guns. I can remember believing as an elementary school child that I would grow up to be a Hall of Fame football player or a heroic soldier who would risk it all for the sake of my comrades. I devoured books on sports legends and war heroes. Even today, I love to watch films that portray heroic undertakings.
I don’t want to limit males and females to these sorts of stereotypical dreams, but aren’t we all born with these sorts of longings–longings to become someone great or significant? Yet what happens as we mature? How many adult women still believe that they are persons of great worth and value – heroines? How many men still believe that they can live heroic lives? But nonetheless, we remain dogged by these longings, don’t we?

When we look back on Genesis 1:26-31, we can recognize the crucial role that humanity was to play in God’s world. As we have seen, God crafted men and women for participation in God’s plans for His Creation. Yet, if we are to participate in God’s mission, we have to live and breathe the part. This has implications for our character. In the Scriptures, character is defined in relationship to God’s character. The biblical words for God’s character are holy and holiness. The biblical mandate for holiness in found in both Testaments and is summarized in Leviticus 19:2, “Be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy” (cf. 1 Peter 1:15-16). Holiness at its core means to reflect God’s own character in our lives. We were created for this very purpose. We were crafted to reflect God’s character tangibly to the rest of God’s creation. The pervasive presence of sin in our world has caused the loss of any innate holiness in our lives, but I believe that our longing for significance and our desire to become something better than we are represents a dim embedded memory of God’s true intentions for humanity.

Every girl and boy who believes that he or she is special and significant is not far from the truth. Through faith in Jesus Christ and the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit, God can work in us, transform us, and mold us into people who reflect individually and corporately the character of God. We instinctively recognize that we are not all that we can be and long to be made into the sort of persons whom God dreamed about when he crafted us.

What would it be like to become the person of God’s dreams? This question is vital for living the life that we were created to live. Mission apart from character is not God’s mission. Also, a fixation on character development apart from full engagement with God’s mission is not the holiness that God desires. God crafted us to be engaged fully in the world. To equate reflecting God’s character with withdrawing from the world that God both created and is working to redeem misses the missional component of holiness. God made us to reflect God’s character not as an end in itself but so that all Creation might be drawn to the Creator through our lives.

What do you think? Does this resonate with your personal experience?

© 2007 Brian D. Russell
All rights reserved.

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