What does it look like when ordinary people start to resemble Jesus? The New Testament says believers are being "transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory" (2 Corinthians 3:18). That sounds lofty. In practice, it usually looks like a boy polishing a scrap of mirror, a woman setting two extra plates, or a man spending his ticket home on pastries for strangers.
These five stories about Christlikeness, retold in our own words, show that likeness in action. One is a documented piece of wartime history, one is a personal story told by a peace builder on Crete, one is an eighteenth-century parable, one is a missionary's anecdote and one is a well-loved legend. Each ends with a takeaway you can use in a sermon, a small group or your own prayer.
Stories in this post:
- Le Chambon: The Village That Hid Thousands
- Reflecting Light Into Dark Places: Alexander Papaderos and the Broken Mirror
- The Three Rings: A Parable From Nathan the Wise
- "But I Do": Oswald Golter and Unconditional Love
- Painting Judas and Jesus: The Legend of Leonardo's Model
Le Chambon: The Village That Hid Thousands
People sometimes say there are two things no one can stare at for long without losing their mind: the glory of God and the full depth of human evil. Philip Hallie, a philosophy professor at Wesleyan University and a veteran of the Second World War, spent years staring at the second. He was researching Nazi cruelty, and in particular the medical experiments carried out on Jewish children in the camps.
The work hollowed him out. Hallie later described the same pattern of the strong crushing the weak repeating itself page after page, until he swung between bitter anger and a numb boredom at yet another account of persecution. He said his study of evil had become a kind of prison, and that he had dug himself, in his words, "into Hell."
Then, while sorting through material on cruelty and resistance, he came across a short article about a small Protestant town in the mountains of southern France. He was reading it with cool academic detachment, trying to classify it, when about halfway down the third page he felt something odd on his face. He reached up to brush away what he took for a speck of dust. It was tears. Not a drop or two; his whole cheek was wet. Hallie later called those tears an instinctive act of moral praise.
The town was Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. During the occupation, its people and the surrounding plateau sheltered Jews and other refugees, many of them children. Because rescue was secret, estimates of how many were sheltered in the area range from several hundred to as many as five thousand, and in 1990 Yad Vashem honoured the town collectively as Righteous Among the Nations. Hallie told the story in his book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (1979). One of his readers summed it up in a line he came to agree with: the Holocaust was the storm, and Le Chambon was the rainbow.
The Chambonnais were Huguenots, descendants of French Protestants who had been persecuted for generations after the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685. They knew in their bones what it meant to be hunted. They were led by their pastor, André Trocmé, and his wife Magda, both of whom are honoured as Righteous Among the Nations. What struck Hallie most, though, was not their heroics. It was how plain and practical their faith was. Many people in France chose to believe the official silence about where the trains were going. The people of Le Chambon simply did what they believed Christ would expect of them. Their neighbours were in danger, so they hid them.
One evening sums the whole story up. Church members had invited the Trocmés to dinner and, knowing the couple tended to forget such invitations, sent their daughter round to remind them. When the girl walked into the Trocmés' dining room, she found police officers arresting her pastor. The news ran through the village in minutes.
Magda Trocmé did something that astonished her friends. She invited the two policemen to sit down and eat with the family. Later people asked her how she could possibly share a meal with men who had come to take her husband away, perhaps to his death. How could she be so forgiving? Her answer was almost impatient. It was dinnertime, she said. The men were standing in her kitchen, everyone was hungry and the food was ready. Why use big words like "forgiving" or "decent" for that?
That was the spirit of the whole village. When Hallie later met the rescuers and praised them, they brushed it off. They told him they had only done what needed doing, and that helping these people was the most natural thing in the world. Hallie decided that an outsider's praise sat on them like a slightly uncomfortable wreath placed on their heads by a kind but foreign hand.
Takeaway: Christlikeness rarely feels heroic to the person living it. Jesus said, "whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me" (Matthew 25:40). The people of Le Chambon did not think they were being like Christ. They thought they were being neighbours.
Source: Os Guinness, The Call, citing Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (Harper & Row, 1979).
Reflecting Light Into Dark Places: Alexander Papaderos and the Broken Mirror
In May 1941, German paratroopers dropped onto the island of Crete. Near the airfield at Maleme, local people met them with whatever they had: kitchen knives, farm tools, scythes. The reprisals that followed the Battle of Crete were brutal. In some villages, the men were lined up and shot.
Today, on the hillside above that same airstrip, stands an institute dedicated to peace and reconciliation. It was founded by a Cretan named Alexander Papaderos. He was a small boy when the war came. His village was destroyed, and he was held in a camp. When the war ended, he became convinced that his people would never truly heal unless they let go of the hatred the war had planted. So he built a place for dialogue and understanding at the very spot that symbolised so much pain.
The writer Robert Fulghum tells of attending a seminar there. At the end of the last session, Papaderos asked if there were any questions. Half joking, Fulghum asked him, "What is the meaning of life?" A few people laughed nervously. It was the kind of question you are not supposed to ask out loud. But Papaderos took it seriously.
He opened his wallet and took out a small, round mirror, about the size of a coin. Then he told its story. During the war, as a boy, he had come across a wrecked German motorcycle by the roadside. Its mirror had shattered, and he picked up the pieces. He tried to fit them back together and could not, so he kept the largest piece and rubbed its edges on a stone until it was smooth and round. It became his toy. He loved catching the sun with it and throwing the light into holes and dark corners where sunlight never reached.
As he grew into a man, he kept the mirror, and it slowly became a picture of what he wanted his life to be. He explained that he was only a fragment of a mirror whose full design he could not see. But with the piece he had, he could reflect light into the dark places of the world, including the dark places in people's hearts, and perhaps change some things in some people. Maybe others would see it and do the same. That, he said, was the meaning of his life.
Takeaway: We are not the light. We are fragments that catch it. Jesus told his followers, "You are the light of the world... let your light shine before others" (Matthew 5:14 to 16). Christlikeness is less about being impressive and more about being angled toward the Light so it can reach someone else's darkness.
Source: Robert Fulghum, It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It (Villard, 1989).
The Three Rings: A Parable From Nathan the Wise
This is a parable from a 1779 play by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, not a historical event. It is often used to talk about how faith is proved by the way we live.
In Nathan the Wise, a play by the German writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the Muslim sultan Saladin summons a Jewish merchant famous for his wisdom. Saladin puts a trap of a question to him: you have studied the great faiths, so tell me, which is the true one, Judaism, Islam or Christianity?
Nathan is cornered. If he names his own faith, he insults the most powerful man in the land. If he names Islam, he betrays his own convictions. So he asks permission to answer with a story.
Once there was a man who owned a priceless opal ring. It shimmered with a hundred colours, but its real power was hidden: whoever wore it with trust became beloved by God and by other people. The ring passed down the family from each father to his favourite child for generations. Eventually it reached a father who loved his three children equally and could not bear to choose between them. So he quietly had two perfect copies made. Before he died, he gave a ring to each child in private, and each one believed they held the original.
Instead of peace, the rings brought war into the family. Each child claimed to have the true ring and therefore the right to inherit. They had the rings examined, but no one could tell them apart.
Saladin interrupts at this point. Surely, he says, you are not claiming these three faiths are identical? There are real differences between them. Nathan agrees that there are. But he points out that each rests on trust and on the testimony of one's ancestors, and asks Saladin to let him finish, because the story is nearly over.
The quarrel ends up before a judge. Everyone waits for him to declare which ring is genuine. The judge says that if the true ring makes its wearer loved by God and by others, then none of them seems to have it, because their rings have produced only resentment and strife. Perhaps the real ring was lost. Or perhaps their father had grown tired of one ring ruling the family. Either way, his ruling is a charge rather than a verdict: let each of you prove your ring is genuine by living as someone loved by God and by people would live.
Takeaway: Christians believe truth matters and that Jesus is "the way and the truth and the life" (John 14:6). Lessing's parable still lands a sharp point: the world judges our faith by its fruit. Jesus said the same thing first: "By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another" (John 13:35).
Source: Adapted from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan der Weise (1779).
"But I Do": Oswald Golter and Unconditional Love
This story is told in many sermons, usually from the preacher Fred Craddock. We have not been able to confirm the details independently, so it is given here as it is usually told.
Oswald Golter (the name is sometimes spelled Goulter) served as a missionary in northern China in the 1940s. After roughly ten years, he set out for home. His ship called at a port in India, and while he waited for passage onward, he came across a group of refugees living in a warehouse on the docks. Nobody wanted them. No country would take them, and so they were simply stuck there, in limbo, on the pier.
It was nearly Christmas. Golter went to visit them, wished them a merry Christmas and asked what they would like for Christmas.
They were polite but blunt. "We're not Christians," they told him. "We don't believe in Christmas."
"I know," Golter said. "But what would you like for Christmas?"
After a little coaxing, they described some German pastries they missed and were especially fond of. So Oswald Golter went and cashed in his ticket home. With the money, he bought basket after basket of those pastries, carried them down to the warehouse, handed them out and wished the refugees a merry Christmas.
Years later he told the story to a class. One student could not make sense of it. "But why did you do that for them?" the student asked. "They weren't Christians. They don't even believe in Jesus."
Golter answered, "I know. But I do."
Takeaway: Golter's kindness did not depend on what the refugees believed. It flowed from what he believed. That is the shape of Christ's own love: "while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). Christlikeness gives first and asks questions later.
Source: Traditional sermon story, commonly credited to Fred Craddock.
Painting Judas and Jesus: The Legend of Leonardo's Model
This is a legend, not history. There is no record of Leonardo using the same model for Jesus and Judas, and he worked on The Last Supper for about three years (roughly 1495 to 1498), not seven. We retell it because it is widely used as a parable.
The story goes that when Leonardo da Vinci set out to paint The Last Supper in Milan, he painted each figure from a living model, and he chose the model for Jesus first.
Leonardo is said to have looked at hundreds of young men, searching for a face that showed innocence and gentleness, one untouched by the marks that a hard and careless life leaves behind. After weeks of searching, he found a young man of about nineteen, and for months he painted him as Christ.
Over the following years, the painter found models for the apostles one by one. He left Judas Iscariot until last. For Judas he wanted the opposite of his Jesus: a face hardened by greed and deceit, the face of a man who could sell his closest friend for thirty pieces of silver.
The search went on and on, and nothing fitted. At last, the story says, word reached Leonardo of a prisoner in a dungeon in Rome, condemned to death for a life of violent crime. Leonardo travelled to see him. The man was brought up from his cell into the daylight: dark, unkempt, his long matted hair hanging over a face that seemed to sum up ruin. Leonardo knew he had found his Judas. With special permission, the prisoner was taken to Milan, and for months he sat before the painter each day while Leonardo transferred that face onto the wall.
When the last brushstroke was done, Leonardo told the guards they could take the prisoner away. As they led him out, the man suddenly broke free, threw himself down before Leonardo and cried out, "Do you not know who I am?"
Leonardo studied him carefully, as he had every day for months. "No," he said. "I never saw you before you were brought to me from Rome."
The prisoner lifted his eyes and cried, "O God, have I fallen so far?" Then he turned back to the painter. "Look at me again," he said. "I am the same man you painted years ago as Christ."
Takeaway: The legend is not true, but it tells a truth. Every person carries the capacity to grow into the likeness of Christ or into the likeness of Judas, and the direction is set by thousands of small daily choices. Paul's encouragement is that "if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come" (2 Corinthians 5:17). No face is ever beyond God's repainting.
Source: Traditional legend; author unknown.
Final thoughts
A village that set out plates for police officers. A boy with a scrap of mirror. A judge who tells three heirs to prove their ring by how they live. A missionary who spent his fare on pastries. A legend about the faces we grow into. Taken together, these stories about Christlikeness say that we become like Jesus in ordinary places, at dinner tables and on docks, one decision at a time.
Which of these pictures of Christ would someone see in you this week?
More stories you may like:
- Best Stories About Kindness and Compassion
- Best Stories About Servanthood
- Stories About Discipleship and Evangelism
These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.