Jesus appears to be imaging how God works when he says in another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast which a woman took and mixed in sixty pounds of meal until it had leavened the whole batch” (MEV Matt. 13:33). Have you ever tried to watch bread rise? The yeast works so slowly and so pervasively that it is impossible to perceive the change by staring at the bread dough. But, when we return in twenty minutes or an hour, the yeast has totally changed the character of the bread. This interior change in our very nature is what God wants. Because it is Christ’s spirit in us that God loves, it is that Christ spirit, and more and more of that spirit, that God wants to flourish and rise in our hearts. His plan for our perfection and completion is that we become Christlike—that we mature from the created child to the begotten child. For, as Lewis writes in “The Three Personal God,” “The whole purpose for which we exist is to be taken into the life of God.” In that sense, Christ’s resurrection becomes our resurrection—a permanent rising of an irreversible individuality. (Power of Yielding 185)
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