God’s goal for you is Christlikeness. He is unwavering in His commitment to shape you into the image of Christ. He won’t stop until He has accomplished His purposes in you. That’s something worth staking your life on.

For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers…
—Romans 8:29

Today’s devotional thought is not really focused on predestination, even if that’s the first thing my students want to talk about when they encounter Romans 8:29. Suffice it to say that predestination is important to me; I gladly dive deep—at least as deep as I can—into this doctrine with my students. But an analysis of predestination isn’t my purpose today. My aim is to think about the goal of predestination–becoming conformed to the image of Christ.

Romans 8:29 explains that God not only knew ahead of time, but also purposed that those he justified would be “conformed to the image of his Son.” God, expressing lavish, undeserved love, decided not only to call, justify, and glorify us (Rom 8:30), he planned to shape us into the likeness of Christ—to make us like Christ.

Travel with me in your thoughts to eternity past. God has just announced his decision to create a world filled with people. He didn’t have to. As Father, Son, and Holy Spirit he was perfectly happy without humans around. But he also knew that creating people would be good, which is what he joyfully exclaimed after each day of creation. But unlike all the other things he had made during the first five days of creation, he molded humans into something more like himself than anything else he had created. “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion…’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:26-27).

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