Transformed

Man was originally made in the image of God, but by sin he has defaced that image, and now we who are born into this world are fashioned, not in the heavenly image of God, but in the earthy image of the fallen Adam. “We have borne,” says the Apostle, in the first Epistle to the Corinthians, “the image of the earthy.” The Lord in boundless grace has resolved that a company whom no man can number, called here “many brethren,” shall be restored to his image, in the particular form in which his Eternal Son displays it. To this end Jesus Christ came into the world and bore our image, that we, through his grace, might bear his image. He became a partaker of our infirmities and sicknesses that we might be partakers of the divine nature in all its excellence and purity. Now, therefore, the one thing to which the Lord is working us through his Spirit, both by providence and by grace, is the likeness of the Lord from heaven. He is evermore transforming the chosen, removing that defilement of sin, and moulding them after the perfect model of his Son, Jesus Christ, the second Adam, who is the firstborn amongst the “many brethren.”

From a sermon by Charles Haddon Spurgeon entitled "Glorious Predestination," delivered March 24, 1872. Image by BriYYZ under Creative Commons License.