Becoming By Beholding

In Philippians 3, Paul does something surprising. After narrating his own pursuit of Christ — the status surrendered, the losses counted as gain — he doesn’t simply say “go and do likewise.” He says, watch me. Watch the ones who are walking the same way. Join together in imitating.

The Greek word Paul uses here, symmimētēs, appears nowhere else in ancient literature. He had to invent it, because nothing else captured what he meant. It isn’t just “be an imitator.” It’s a word that holds togetherness at the center — a community of people actively embodying a pattern together, in proximity to one another. Formation, Paul insists, is not a private discipline. It is a communal one.

This matters because we are not primarily thinking things. We are wanting things. Our loves and desires are being shaped constantly — by the rhythms we keep, the feeds we scroll, the things we reach for when life gets hard. All of it is quietly writing our loves, training our desires, pointing our souls in a direction. The question was never whether we are being formed. The question is by whom, and toward what.

Paul’s grief deepens as he names those whose lives tell a different story — people whose loves have been fully reordered around comfort, appetite, and self. Not through one dramatic decision, but through a thousand small liturgies, until the eternal had no purchase left. It is a portrait Paul cannot speak without weeping.

But then he lifts our eyes. Our citizenship is in heaven. We hold something no emperor can issue and no earthly power can revoke. The King is returning — not to take us away from the world, but to remake it. And that changes how we hold everything else. It loosens our grip. It lengthens our view.

So we press into the community around us. We fix our eyes on those whose loves are already ordered around Christ — people who pray like they mean it, give without fanfare, suffer with grace. We allow proximity to do what information alone cannot: reorder our desires. And we become, slowly and together, by beholding.