Do you like to study words?

Transform appears in only three verses of the ESV. The first is about the mind: “be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2, ESV). The second is about the image: beholding the glory of the Lord, we “are being transformed into the same image” (2 Corinthians 3:18, ESV). The third is about the body: Christ “will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body.” (Philippians 3:21, ESV) In all three the change runs God’s way: toward His will and the Lord’s image, and at last into a body like His Son’s. When Scripture warns about the other direction, it reaches for a different word: “Do not be conformed to this world” (Romans 12:2, ESV).

So the word is narrow, but change is happening to all of us. There are no days where I am not transformed. Much of what shapes us is not something we decided on; it happens to a body living under the sun, where “time and chance happen to them all.” (Ecclesiastes 9:11, ESV) Either way, something is being made of us, and Philippians 3 gives only two ends.

Philippians 3 walks the whole road, and it starts where all of us start. Before we choose anything, we are formed, as the psalmist says: “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.” (Psalm 139:13, ESV) Paul’s own list begins with something done to him as an infant: “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin” (Philippians 3:5, ESV). Nobody eight days old chooses a tribe. Then the list turns to what he made of it: “as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church” (Philippians 3:5–6, ESV). Received formation becomes, through repeated choices, a way of living, and Paul’s way of living was aimed squarely at Christ’s people. Paul calls all of it “reason for confidence in the flesh” (Philippians 3:4, ESV). It is physical life, real and partly received, but it is not the life Paul is pressing toward.

Then he met the One he was persecuting (Acts 9:5), and soon after he rose and was baptized (Acts 9:18). Everything he had counted as gain changed columns. “Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” (Philippians 3:8, ESV) Everything. That is the response the encounter asks for. Some desires took me away from God, but God gave those desires back in a different form. It was being creative — being a producer. That production was worldly. Now I am a product of what is eternal and eclipses that worldly production. It costs me everything because to embrace it I must die to myself. Paul has a phrase for it: “becoming like him in his death” (Philippians 3:10, ESV). Before the body is ever made like Christ’s glory, the self is made like Christ’s death. Romans names where that death begins. Spiritual life, as distinct from the physical life we were formed with, begins at the waters of baptism, where we are baptized into His death and raised through faith (Romans 6:3; Colossians 2:12) so that “we too might walk in newness of life.” (Romans 6:4, ESV)

And it does not finish in a day. “Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on” (Philippians 3:12, ESV). This is where character is built, slowly, and where we are tempted to turn it into a list we can check off. Transformation is not a checklist. It is a change and shift in the direction of every impulse we are given to own inside of the body. Paul expects God Himself to keep correcting the way we think: “if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you” (Philippians 3:15, ESV). That is close kin to the renewal of the mind Romans 12:2 calls for, and it goes on as long as we do.

Paul’s call to the church is plain: “Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us.” (Philippians 3:17, ESV) And he will not let us read the chapter as if only one road runs through it. “For many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things.” (Philippians 3:18–19, ESV) Whatever repeatedly holds attention eventually shapes worship. They are being changed too, only in the other direction. Their appetite has become their god, and the text names where that road ends. Paul says this with tears, not with a pointed finger. He tells it to the church as a warning, and none of us is past needing it. Is the direction of my impulses toward the cross, or away from it?

Then one small word turns the chapter.

“But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.” (Philippians 3:20–21, ESV)

Here the one doing the transforming is Christ. In Romans we are told to be transformed by the renewal of the mind; here the body is changed by Christ, with a power that subjects all things to Himself. We cannot raise ourselves. We await Him, and we wait as people pressing on. And what He changes is the body itself. The body whose appetites the enemies of the cross serve, and that we are tempted either to indulge or to despise, is the very body He has promised to transform.

He can be trusted with our bodies, because He took a body Himself. Christ was “in the form of God” (Philippians 2:6, ESV), and He took “the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:7, ESV). That was not a transformation. He did not stop being who He is: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” (Hebrews 13:8, ESV) What is transformed is us, into His image, and the reason is love. God, “being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us,” made us alive with Christ (Ephesians 2:4–5, ESV). The One who took the form of a servant is the One who will change our lowly body.

The chapter holds both ends of a life. On the other road the end is destruction. On this one it is a glorious body like His. We are all being changed into something. The question the text leaves us is into whose image.