The Slow Work of God

I want to begin with a conversation I had recently. I asked a simple question, and the answer told me everything about where the church has gone wrong: why should anyone be a Christian? Why persuade our neighbors, our children, our colleagues to become Christians?

The answer came quickly and with sincere conviction: “Because you get to know God. You’re no longer lost. You find meaning and purpose. And ultimately, you get to spend eternity with God in heaven.”

Every single thing that person said is true. But I want to suggest something that requires uncomfortable rethinking: it is the wrong answer to the question I asked.

The benefits are not the purpose

Imagine someone gets hired at General Motors, and you ask them why they work there. They say, “It’s fantastic — a 401k, health insurance, paid time off, regular raises. A wonderful place to work.” Is any of that untrue? Not a word. But that is not why General Motors hired them. The purpose of working at GM is to make cars. The benefits are the grace notes of employment; they are not the melody.

Heaven, meaning, forgiveness — all real, all wonderful. But they are the benefits of the employment, not the purpose. The reason to be a Christian is that there is no other route for a human being to fulfill the purpose for which God created them.

Genesis 1:26–28 is your job description: “Let us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness.” You are a God-carrier, designed so that right after someone meets you, they say, “There is a God. I just met Him.” Heaven is not a bonus. It is the destination of a species becoming what it was designed to be.

The Christianity most people know

Before we talk about how transformation happens, we have to be honest: most of what passes for Christianity today is far from what Jesus had in mind. Dallas Willard called it “the gospel of sin management” — a transaction that keeps your sins accounted for while leaving you the same person. Willard was right. We have called behaving correctly discipleship, and produced something indistinguishable, at the level of character, from the Pharisees.

Unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 5:20 (NKJV)

Understand how terrifying that is. The Pharisees fasted twice a week, tithed the mint in their herb gardens — they counted mint leaves — prayed at set hours, memorized the Torah. And Jesus said: if that is the ceiling of your ambition, you will not see the kingdom of God. Their righteousness was compliance rather than character — rules standing in for a heart that had not been changed.

Picture two people who give generously. Person A gives because “give, and it will be given to you” — they have done the math; they want the return. Person B gives because they are a giver. They give the way God gives, because God is generous at the core of His being. The first needs rules to stay obedient. The second has love — and love imposes its own laws. That is behavior modification versus character transformation.

Do you really want to be like God?

So let me ask you a question, and sit with it. Not “do you want to go to heaven” — that is easier. Do you want to be like God? Thoughtful the way God is thoughtful? Slow to anger — exceedingly slow, abounding in lovingkindness? Free from the need to be praised or seen? Free from jealousy, bitterness, and the craving for revenge?

If you do, that is not spiritual arrogance. It is the restoration of the original design. The desire to be like God is not pride — it is homecoming.

Heaven is not just a place

We have reduced heaven to a destination. Heaven is a real place — but we have so emphasized its location that we have missed its nature. Heaven is a state of being. Wherever God is fully at home, that becomes heaven. And God is working across redemptive history — slowly, persistently, graciously — to make you the kind of person in whom He can be fully at home.

The kingdom of God is within you.

Luke 17:21 (NKJV)

If you and your spouse are genuinely becoming like God — other-centered, slow to anger, forgiving — your marriage will become heaven. A church full of such people becomes a little corner of heaven in its city.

But now something that may disturb you. What if you made it to heaven — genuinely — but as the person you are right now, in your most unguarded moments? Would you enjoy it?

Suppose you never stole, never fell into immorality — but you still crave recognition, resent those who don’t credit you, and feel a private satisfaction when someone who wronged you suffers. Heaven will be hell for you: there is no applause for the ego there, and those hungers will never be fed. Or suppose you carry a settled hatred — even a reasonable one. You will want to rage and have no one to rage at.

The long, slow, patient work of God is the total eradication of evil from His creation. This is not a cruel God consigning people to hell — it is a holy God completing a work some refused to cooperate with.

Who the promises are for

The promises of 2 Peter 1 are not general promises to the human race. They are addressed to a disciple. The word Jesus used — mathetes — means a learner, a student. But in the ancient world a disciple structured his whole life around the teacher, because he wanted the teacher’s character, not just his content.

Willard defined it this way: a disciple is a person for whom the most important thing in the world is to be like Christ — to have His faith, His peace, His love, His power. Not one of the important things. The most important thing. Either it is, or it is not — a question of fact, not feeling. And when we draw on promises not addressed to us, we are “writing checks on someone else’s account.”

So here is the first step. Sit down this week, alone before God, and ask with ruthless honesty: what am I actually organizing my life around? Write it down. If the answer is not “to be like Christ,” decide — not a feeling, a decision — to change the center of your life’s gravity. Grace is not opposed to effort; it is opposed to earning.

The ladder: how God builds a person

But also for this very reason, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control, to self-control perseverance, to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love.

2 Peter 1:5–7 (NKJV)

This is not decoration. It is the anatomy of transformation — a chain, each link welded to the next. And Peter opens with spoudē, “all diligence”: urgent, earnest effort. Not passive waiting, but deliberate cooperation with God’s work.

Virtue. Peter is not saying “try harder to be good.” He is saying: actively do what Jesus commands, because His commands are the gymnasium equipment of the soul. When you initiate reconciliation — even when you are right and it costs you pride — the act kills something in you: the demand for recognition. This is training versus trying: you do not play a concerto by gritting your teeth; you train with scales until the complex thing becomes natural. Choose one command of Jesus you have been avoiding and practice it this week as a spiritual exercise.

Knowledge. Not mere information — lived, tested knowledge of God. Ours is the most information-rich and most genuinely ignorant era in history, because the algorithms feed us whatever confirms what we think and inflames what we despise. This is why I deleted my social media accounts — not legalism, not fear, but because Facebook and Instagram were poisoning the soil of my mind, and my mind is how God talks to me. None of us can afford that.

And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Romans 12:2 (NKJV)

So conduct a media audit. Write down every source that regularly occupies your mind and ask of each one: does this make me more like God, or less? Some decisions will be deletions; some will simply be limits. And feed on at least one source of genuine, truth-expanding knowledge every week.

Self-control. Not primarily restraint, but the integrity of the self — directed from the inside, not driven from the outside. The opposite of self-control is reactivity, the weathervane life. Our culture says follow your feelings and calls it freedom. Genuine freedom is the trained ability to direct yourself toward what you, the deep and considered self, actually want. Name your most reactive pattern — anger, fear, the phone you cannot put down — and build one small counter-habit, like a ten-second pause before responding in heat.

Perseverance. The word is hypomonē — staying power. And let me be honest: the long walk is long, not because God is inefficient, but because the transformation is too deep to rush. We become like Christ across thousands of ordinary moments and ten thousand small decisions. So the enemy’s most effective weapon is not temptation — it is discouragement; he only needs to convince you that you are not making progress. Find at least one person committed to the same walk and keep asking each other how you are becoming like Christ. Perseverance almost never happens alone.

He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.

Philippians 1:6 (NKJV)

Godliness, brotherly kindness, love. Godliness comes after virtue, knowledge, self-control, and perseverance. It is the destination that becomes visible after years of walking — acting like God because you have become like God. And the chain ends in relationship: brotherly kindness before love, because God does not call you to love the world in the abstract while being unkind to your actual neighbor. Love is not the beginning of the journey; it is the evidence the journey has been taken.

The reward, the warning, and the welcome

Peter says that if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful. Barren is internal sterility — form without function. Unfruitful is activity without result. And notice: not just if you have them, but if they abound — ever-growing. The result is a life so full of God that it overflows into everything it touches.

But the warning is sobering: the person who lacks these things is “shortsighted, even to blindness,” having forgotten what he was saved for. Peter is not saying such a person is unsaved — he is saying their salvation has been rendered functionally meaningless. The tragedy is not that they lost their salvation. It is that they never discovered what their salvation was for.

Therefore, brethren, be even more diligent to make your call and election sure, for if you do these things you will never stumble; for so an entrance will be supplied to you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

2 Peter 1:10–11 (NKJV)

An abundant entrance. Not a barely-made-it entrance — a welcome, a homecoming. The person who has climbed this ladder will not arrive in that kingdom as a stranger. They will arrive as someone who has been practicing for that place their whole life: this is what I have always been becoming. This is home.

So why should anyone be a Christian? Not because of the benefits, real and wonderful as they are, but because there is no other path to the restoration of the image of God in a human soul. This is the slow work of God, and today He is inviting you to take the next step. Take one this week, quietly, before Him.