I heard about a man traveling through the Smokey Mountains who went into one of those old country stores. In the back of the store were some guys sitting around an old pot-bellied stove, leaning back in their wicker bottom chairs. They spent all day there, just whittling and spitting and talking and carrying on. These guys whittled beautiful replicas of different kinds of dogs and put them out for the tourists to buy. This visitor went over to a man who had carved a beautiful replica of an Irish Setter and said to him, “Wow! How in the world can you take a block of wood and carve out such a beautiful replica of a dog?”

The old mountain man spit on the stove, looked at him and said, “Well, it’s pretty easy. I just cut away everything that doesn’t look like a dog.”

That is what God is doing in our lives. He is continually shaping us, changing us, and cutting away anything that doesn’t look like Jesus. He wants us to be Christ-like. “Those God foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of His Son” (Romans 8:29).