John G. Lake was one of the greatest men of God in his century. In his article, Christ Liveth in Me,1 he states: “Christ has a purpose in you. Christ’s purpose in you is to reveal Himself to you, through you and in you.” He goes on to say: “God’s highest is to bring out all the qualities of God in your soul, to bring out all the individuality that is in your life, not to submerge or destroy, but to change it, to energize it, to enlarge it, until all your individuality and personality and being are of the nature and substance and quality of God.”
God’s purpose in us is to bring our way of thinking and our attitudes into harmony with His will.
In his book, New Creation Realities,2 E.W. Kenyon writes, “As you study the Pauline Revelation you become convinced that the ultimate of every one of those epistles is the building of the Jesus life in the individual. His plan for building Himself into us is striking. We must learn to act in His stead. There must be the conscious training of our spirits to be His actual representatives.”
This is the goal God has set before us. We are His ambassadors here on earth to present the world with an accurate representation of our God—this God of love Who replaces man’s sins with His own righteousness, Who substitutes health and healing where there was sickness and disease, Who gives peace of mind where there has been depression, and Who forgives where there is guilt.
The world has not seen this God. They have only seen God through the clouded eye of religion—and religion could not possibly portray Him accurately.
We see in God’s Word that the Son of God saves men from their sin and changes their nature by His power so that they become like Him. He fills them with His Spirit, speaks through them so they would reveal Jesus, just as Jesus revealed the Father to the world in which He lived.
Notice Ephesians 4:13 from the Moffatt’s translation: “…till we should all attain the unity of the faith and knowledge of God’s Son; reaching maturity, reaching the full measure of development which belongs to the fullness of Christ.”
Now notice the footnotes on this verse from The Worrell New Testament: “This is the highest ideal set forth in the Gospel, as that to which God would have His children aspire. We can scarcely imagine what this means! Can it mean less than this—that God wishes to repeat the character and life of His Son in His people? While this is an Ideal for all, it is approximated only by individuals, each appropriating for himself the wonderful provisions of grace in Christ Jesus.”3
We must reach out for this ideal because it is only as we mature that we can reflect the character of the Son of God.
1 The Complete Collection of His Life Teachings, John G. Lake (Tulsa: Albury Publishing, 1999), p. 352.
2 New Creation Realities, E. W. Kenyon, (Lynwood: Kenyon’s Gospel Publishing Society, 1945, 1964), p. 72.
3 The Worrell New Testament, by A. S. Worrell. (Springfield: Gospel Publishing House).
