“For if we have been planted together in the likeness of His Death, we should be also in the likeness of His resurrection, that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of His Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.”—Rom. 6:5, 4.

On the likeness of His death there follows necessarily the likeness of His resurrection. To speak alone of the likeness of His death, of bearing the cross, and of self-denial, gives a one-sided view of following Christ. It is only the power of His resurrection that gives us strength to go on from that likeness of His death as what we receive at once by faith, to that conformity to His death which comes as the growth of the inner life. Being dead with Christ refers more to the death of the old life to sin and the world which we abandon; risen with Christ refers to the new life through which the Holy Spirit expels the old. To the Christian who earnestly desires to walk as Christ did, the knowledge of this likeness of His resurrection is indispensable. Let us see if we do not here get the answer to the question as to where we shall find strength to live in the world as Christ did.

We have already seen how our Lord’s life before His death was a life of weakness. As our Surety, sin had great power over Him It had also power over His disciples, so that He could not give them the Holy Spirit, or do for them what He wished. But with the resurrection all was changed. Raised by the Almighty power of God, His resurrection life was full of the power of eternity. He had not only conquered death and sin for Himself but for His disciples, so that He could from the first day make them partakers of His Spirit, of His joy, and of His heavenly power.

When the Lord Jesus now makes us partakers of His life, then it is not the life that He had before His death, but the resurrection life that He won through death. A life in which sin is already made an end of and put away, a life that has already conquered hell and the devil, the world and the flesh, a life of Divine power in human nature, This is the life that likeness to His resurrection gives us: “In that He liveth, He liveth unto God. Ye also likewise, reckon yourselves alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Oh that through the Holy Spirit God might reveal to us the glory of the life in the likeness of Christ’s resurrection! In it we find the secret of power for a life of conformity to Him.

To most Christians this is a mystery, and therefore their life is full of sin and weakness and defeat. They believe in Christ’s resurrection as the sufficient proof of their justification. They think that He had to rise again, to continue His work in heaven as Mediator. But that He rose again, in order that His glorious resurrection life might now be the very power of their daily life, of this they have no idea. Hence their hopelessness when they hear of following Jesus fully, and being, perfectly conformed to His image. They cannot imagine how it can be required of a sinner, that he should in all things act as Christ would have done. They do not know Christ in the power of His resurrection, or the mighty power with which His life now works in those, who are willing to count all things but loss for His sake (Phil. 3:8; Eph. 1:19, 20). Come, all ye who are weary of a life unlike Jesus, and long to walk always in His footsteps, who begin to see that there is in the Scriptures a better life for you than you have hitherto known, come and let me try to show you the unspeakable treasure that is yours, in your likeness to Christ in His resurrection. Let me ask three questions.

The first is: Are you ready to surrender your life to the rule of Jesus and His resurrection life? I doubt not that the contemplation of Christ’s example has convinced you of sin in more than one point. In seeking your own will and leory instead of God’s, in ambition and pride and selfishness and want of love towards man, you have seen how far you are from the obedience and humility and love of Jesus. And now it is the question, whether in view of all these things, in which you have acknowledged sin, you are willing to say: If Jesus will take possession of my life, then I resign all right or wish ever in the least to have or to do my own will. I give my life with all I have and am entirely to Him, always to do what He through His Word and Spirit commands me. If He will live and rule in me, I promise unbounded and hearty obedience.

For such a surrender faith is needed; therefore the second question is: Are you prepared to believe that Jesus will take possession of the life entrusted to Him, and that He will rule and keep it? When the believer entrusts his entire spiritual and temporal life completely to Christ, then he learns to understand aright Paul’s words: “I am dead; I live no more: Christ liveth in me.” Dead with Christ and risen again, the living Christ in His resurrection life takes possession of and rules my new life. The resurrection life is not a thing that I may have if I can undertake to keep it: No, just this is what I cannot do. But blessed be God! JESUS CHRIST himself is the resurrection and the life, is the resurrection life. He Himself will from day to day and hour to hour see to it and ensure that I live as oil who is risen with Him. He does it through that Holy Spirit who is the Spirit of His risen life. The Holy Spirit is in us, and will, if we trust Jesus for it, maintain within us every moment the presence and power of the risen Lord. We need not fear, that we never can succeed in leading such a holy life as becomes those who are temples of the living God. We are indeed not able. But it is not required of us. The living Jesus, who is the resurrection, has shown His power over all our enemies; He Himself, who so loves us, He will work it in us. He gives us the Holy Spirit as our power, and He will perform His work in us with Divine faithfulness, if we will only trust Him; Christ Himself is our life.

And now comes the third question: are you ready to use this resurrection life for the purpose for which God gave it Him, and gives it to you, as a power of blessing to the lost? All desires after the resurrection life will fail, if we are only seeking our own perfection and happiness. God raised up and exalted Jesus to give repentance and remission of sins. He ever lives to pray for sinners. Yield yourself to receive His resurrection life with the same aim. Give yourself wholly to working and praying for the perishing: then will you become a fit vessel and instrument in which the resurrection life can dwell and work out its glorious purposes.

Brother! thy calling is to live like Christ. To this end thou hast already been made one with Him in the likeness of His resurrection. The only question is now, whether thou art desirous after the full experience of His resurrection life, whether thou art willing to surrender thy whole life that He Himself may manifest resurrection power in every part of it. I pray thee, do not draw back. Offer thyself unreservedly to Him, with all thy weakness and unfaithfulness. Believe that as His resurrection was a wonder above all thought and expectation, so He as the Risen One will still work in thee exceeding abundantly above all thou couldst think or desire.

What a difference there was in the life of the disciples before Jesus’ death and after His resurrection! Then all was weakness and fear, self and sin: with the resurrection all was power and joy, life and love, and glory. Just as great will the change be, when a believer, who has known Jesus’ resurrection only as the ground of his justification, but has not known of the likeness of His resurrection, discovers how the Risen One will Himself be his life, and in very deed take on Himself the responsibility for the whole of that life. Oh, brother, who hast not yet experienced this, who art troubled and weary because thou art called to walk like Christ, and canst not do it, come and taste the blessedness of giving thy whole life to the Risen Saviour in the assurance that He will live it for thee.

O Lord! my soul adores Thee as the Prince of life! On the cross Thou didst conquer each one of my enemies, the devil, the flesh, the world, and sin. As Conquerer thou didst rise to manifest and maintain the power of Thy risen life in Thy people. Thou hast made them one with Thyself in the likeness of Thy resurrection; now Thou wilt live in them, and show forth in their earthly life the power of Thy heavenly life.

Praised be Thy name for this wonderful grace. Blessed Lord, I come at Thy invitation to offer and surrender to Thee my life, with all it implies. Too long have I striven in my own strength to live like Thee, and not succeeded. The more I sought to walk like Thee, the deeper was my disappointment. I have heard of Thy disciples who tell how blessed it is to cast all care and responsibility for their life on Thee. Lord, I am risen with Thee, one with Thee in the likeness of Thy resurrection; come and take me entirely for Thy own, and be Thou my life.

Above all, I beseech Thee, O my Risen Lord, reveal Thyself to me, as Thou didst to Thy first disciples, in the power of Thy resurrection. It was not enough that after Thy resurrection Thou didst appear to Thy disciples; they knew Thee not till Thou didst make Thyself known. Lord Jesus! I do believe in Thee; be pleased, O be pleased to make thyself known to me as my Life. It is Thy work; Thou alone canst do it. I trust Thee for it. And so shall my resurrection life be, like Thine own, a continual source of light and blessing to all who are needing Thee. Amen.

Note.

I add here an extract from Marshall On Sanctification, in which the reality of our being partakers with Jesus of the very nature in which He lived and died and rose again, is very clearly put.

I have often regretted that the somewhat antiquated style of this writer, and the introduction of questions not of immediate interest to the soul seeking the path of holiness, prevents his book from being as well known as it deserves to be. It is on all hands acknowledged to be the one standard work on the subject. It has been given him by God’s Spirit with wonderful simplicity to set forth the great truth that holiness is a new life, a new nature, prepared for us in Christ Jesus, and that therefore every step in the pathway of holiness, whether in the use of the means of grace or in obeying God’s commands, must be one of faith. I have thought that an abridgment of the work in which all that is essential is provided in the author’s own words, would supply a real want, and might be a blessing to many. I have prepared such an abridgment, which has been issued by the publishers of the present work, under the title of The Highway of Holiness.

“The end of Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection was to prepare and form an holy nature and frame for us in Himself, to be communicated to us by union and fellowship with Him; and not to enable us to produce in ourselves the first original of such an holy nature by our own endeavours.

“1. By His incarnation there was a man created in a new holy frame, after the holiness of the first Adam’s frame had been marred and abolished by the first transgression; and this new frame was far more excellent than ever the first Adam’s was, because man was really joined to God by a close, inseparable union of the divine and human nature in one person—Christ; so that these natures had communion each with other in their actings, and Christ was able to act in His human nature by power proper to the divine nature, wherein He was one God with the Father.

“Why was it that Christ set up the fallen nature of man in such a wonderful frame of holiness, in bringing it to live and act by communion with God living and acting in it? One great end was, that He might this excellent frame to His seed that should by His Spirit be born of Him and be in Him as the quickening Spirit; that, as we have borne the image the earthly man, so we might also bear the image of the heavenly (1 Cor. 15:45, 49), in holiness here and in glory hereafter. Thus He was born Emmanuel, God with us; because the fulness of the Godhead with all holiness did first dwell in Him bodily, even in His human nature, that we might be filled with that fulness in Him (Matt. 1:23; Col. 2:9, 10). Thus He came down from heaven as living bread, that, as He liveth by the Father, so those that eat Him may live by Him (John 6:51, 57); by the same life of God in them that was first in Him.

“2. By His death He freed Himself from the guilt of our sins imputed to Him, and from all that innocent weakness of human nature which He had borne for a time for our sakes. And, by freeing Himself, He prepared a freedom for us from our whole natural condition; which is both weak as His was, and also polluted with our guilt and sinful corruption. Thus the corrupt natural state which is called in Scripture the “old man” was crucified together with Christ, that the body of sin might be destroyed. And it is destroyed in us, not by any wounds which we ourselves can give it, but by our partaking of that freedom from , and death unto it, that is already wrought out for us by the death of Christ; as is signified by our baptism, wherein we are buried with Christ by the application of His death to us (Rom. 6:2, 3, 4, 10, 11).

“God “sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, for sin (or “by a sacrifice for sin,” as in the margin) condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit” (Rom. 8:3, 4). Observe here, that though Christ died that we might be justified by the righteousness of God and of faith, not by our own righteousness, which is of the law (Rom. 10:4–6; Phil. 3:9), yet He died also, that the righteousness of the law and by walking after His Spririt, as those that are in Christ (Rom. 8:4). He is resembled in His death to a corn of wheat dying in the earth that it may propagate its own nature by bringing forth much fruit (John 12:24): to the passover that was slain, that a feast might be kept upon it; and to br broken that it may be nourishment to those that eat it (1 Cor. 5:7, 8, and 11:24); to the rock smitten that water might gush out of it for us to drink (1 Cor. 10:4).

“He died that He might make of Jew and Gentile one new man in Himself (Eph. 2:15); and that He might see His seed, i.e. such as derive their holy nature from Him. (Isa. 53:10). Let these Scriptures be well observed, and they will sufficiently evidence that Christ died, not that we might be able to form an holy nature in ourselves, but that we might receive one nady prepared and formed in Christ for us, by union and fellowship with Him.

“3. By His resurrection He took possession of spiritual life for us, as now fully procured for us, and made to be our right and property by the merit of His death, and therefore we are said to be quickened together with Christ. His resurrection was our resurrection to the life of holiness, as as fall was our fall into spiritual death. And we are not ourselves the first makers and formers of our new holy nature, any more than of our original corruption, but both are formed ready for us to partake of them. And, by union with Christ, we partake of that spiritual life that He took possession of for us at His resurrection, and thereby we are enabled to bring forth the fruit of it; as the Scripture showeth by the similitude of a marriage union, Rom. 7:4: ‘We are married to Him that is raised from the dead that we might bring forth fruit unto God.’ ”

“That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings being made conformable to His death.”—Phil. 3:10.

We know that the death of Christ was the death of the cross. We know that that death of the cross is His chief glory. Without that death He would not be the Christ. The distinguishing characteristic, the one mark by which He is separated here in earth and in heaven, from all other persons, both in the Divine Being and in God’s universe, is this one: He is the Crucified Son of God. Of all the articles of conformity, this must necessarily be the chief and most glorious one—conformity to His death.

This is what made it so attractive to Paul. What were Christ’s glory and blessedness must be his glory too: he knows that the most intimate likeness to Christ is conformity to His death. What that death had been to Christ it would be to him as he grew conformed to it.

Christ’s death on the cross had been the end of sin. During His life it could tempt Him: when He died on the cross, He died to sin; it could no more reach Him. Conformity to Christ’s death is the power to keep us from the power of sin. As I by the grace of the Holy Spirit am kept in my position as crucified with Christ, and live out my crucifixion life as the Crucified One lives it in me, I am kept from sinning.

Christ’s death on the cross was to the Father a sweet-smelling sacrifice, infinitely pleasing. Oh, if I want to dwell in the favour and love of the Father, and be His delight, I am sure there is nothing gives such deep and perfect access to it as being conformable to Christ’s death. There is nothing in the universe to the Father so beautiful, so holy, so heavenly, so wonderful as this sight, the Crucified Jesus. And the closer I can get to Him, and the liker, the more conformed to His death I can become, the more surely shall I enter into the very bosom of His love.

Christ’s death on the cross was the entrance to the power of the resurrection life, the unchanging life of eternity. In our spiritual life we often have to mourn the breaks, and failures, and intervals that prove to us that there is still something wanting that prevents the resurrection life asserting its full power. The secret is here: there is still some subtle self-life that has not yet been brought into the perfect conformity of Christ’s death. We can be sure of it, nothing is needed but a fuller entrance into the fellowship of the cross to make us to the full partakers of the resurrection joy.

Above all, it was Christ’s death on the cross that made Him the life of the world, gave Him the power to bless and to save (John 12:24, 25). In the conformity to Christ’s death there is an end of self: we give up ourselves to live and die for others: we are full of the faith that our surrender of ourselves to bear the sin of others is accepted of the Father. Out of this death we rise, with the power to love and to bless.

And now, what is this conformity to the death of the cross that brings such blessings, and wherein does it consist? We see it in Jesus. The cross means entire self-abnegation. The cross means the death of self,—the utter surrender of our own will and our life to be lost in the will of God, to let God’s will do with us what it pleases. This was what the cross meant to Jesus. It cost Him a terrible struggle before He could give Himself up to it. When He was sore amazed and very heavy, and His soul exceeding sorrowful unto death, it was because His whole being shrank back from that cross and its curse. Three times he had to pray before He could fully say, “yet not my will, but Thine be done.” But He did say it. And His giving Himself up to the cross is to say: Let me do anything, rather than that God’s will should not be done. I give up everything, only God’s will must be done.

And this is being made conformable to Christ’s death, that we so give away ourselves and our whole life, with its power of willing and acting, to God, that we learn to be and work, and do nothing but what God reveals to us as His will. And such a life is called conformity to the death of Christ, not only because it is somewhat similar to His, but because it is Himself by His Holy Spirit just repeating and acting over again in us the life that animated Him in His crucifixion. Were it not for this, the very thought of such conformity would be akin to blasphemy.

But now it is not so. In the power of the Holy Spirit, as the Spirit of the Crucified Jesus, the believer knows that the blessed resurrection life has its power and its glory from its being a crucifixion life, begotten from the cross. He yields himself to it, he believes that it has possession of him. Realizing that he himself has not the power to think or do anything that is good or holy: nay, that the power of the flesh asserts itself and defiles everything that is in him, he yields and holds every power of his being as far as his disposal of them goes in the place of crucifixion and condemnation. And so he yields and holds every power of his being, every faculty of body, soul, and spirit, at the disposal of Jesus. The distrust and denial of self in everything, the trust of Jesus in everything, mark his life. The very spirit of the cross breathes through his whole being.

And so far is it from being, as might appear, a matter of painful strain and weary effort thus to maintain the crucifixion position, to one who knows Christ in the power of His resurrection—for Paul puts this first—and so is made conformed to His death, it is rest and strength and victory. Because it is not the dead cross, not self’s self-denial, not a work in his own strength, that he has to do with, but the living Jesus, in whom the crucifixion is an accomplished thing, already passed into the life of resurrection. “I have been crucified with Christ: Christ liveth in me;” this it is that gives the courage and the desire for an ever-growing, ever deeper entrance into most perfect conformity with His death.

And how is this blessed conformity to be attained? Paul will give us the answer. “What things were gain to me, these I counted loss for Christ. Yea, doubtless, I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Jesus Christ my Lord, that I may know Him, being made conformed to His death.” The pearl is of great price; but oh I it is worth the purchase. Let us give up all, yes, all, to be admitted by Jesus to a place with Him on the cross

And if it appear hard to give up all, and then as our reward only have a whole lifetime on the cross, oh let us listen again to Paul as he tells us what made him so willingly give up all, and so intently choose the cross. It was Jesus—Christ Jesus, my Lord. The cross was the place where he could get into fullest union with his Lord. To know Him, to win Him, to be found in Him, to be made like to Him—this was the burning passion that made it easy to cast away all, that gave the cross such mighty attractive power. Anything to come nearer to Jesus. All for Jesus, was his motto. It contains the twofold answer to the question, How to attain this conformity to Christ’s death? The one is, Cast out all. The other, And let Jesus come in. ALL for JESUS.

Yes, it is only knowing Jesus that can make the conformity to His death at all possible. But let the soul win Him, and be found in Him, and know Him in the power of the resurrection, and it becomes more than possible, a blessed reality. Therefore, beloved follower of Jesus, look to Him, look to Him, the Crucified One. Gaze on Him until thy soul has learnt to say: O my Lord, I must be like Thee. Gaze until thou hast seen how He Himself, the Crucified One, in His ever present omnipotence, draws nigh to live in thee and breathe through thy being His crucifixion life. It was through the Eternal Spirit that He offered Himself unto God; that Spirit brings and imparts all that that death on the cross is, and means, and effected, to thee as thy life. By that Holy Spirit Jesus Himself maintains in each soul, who can trust Him for it, the power of the cross as an abiding death to sin and self, and a never-ceasing source of resurrection life and power. Therefore, once again, look to Him, the Living Crucified Jesus.

But remember, above all, that while thou hast to seek the best and the highest with all thy might, the full blessing comes not as the fruit of thy efforts, but unsought, a free gift to whom it is given from above. It is as it pleases the Lord Jesus to reveal Himself, that we are made conformable to His death. Therefore, seek and get it FROM HIMSELF.

O Lord, such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain to it. To know Thee in the power of Thy resurrection, and to be made conformable to Thy death: these are of the things which are hid from the wise and prudent, and are revealed unto babes, unto those elect souls alone to whom it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom.

O my Lord! I see more than ever what utter folly it is to think of likeness to Thee as an attainment through my effort. I cast myself on Thy mercy: look upon me according to the greatness of Thy loving-kindness; and of Thy free favour reveal Thyself to me. If Thou wilt be pleased to come forth from Thy heavenly dwelling-place, and to draw nigh to me, and to prepare me, and take me up into the full fellowship of Thy life and death, O my Lord, then will I live and die for Thee, and the souls Thou hast died to save.

Blessed Saviour! I know Thou art willing. Thy love to each of Thy redeemed ones is infinite. O teach me, draw me to give up all for Thee, and take eternal possession of me for Thyself. And oh! let some measure of conformity to Thy death, in its self-sacrifice for the perishing, be the mark of my life. Amen.

“Whosoever will be great among you, let him be your servant; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your slave: even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many.”—Matt. 20:26, 27, 28.

“Hereby know we love, because He laid down His life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.”—1 John 3:16.

In speaking of the likeness of Christ’s death, and of being made conformable to it, of bearing the cross and being crucified with Him, there is one danger to which even the earnest believer is exposed, and that is of seeking after these blessings for his own sake, or, as he thinks, for the glory of God in His own personal perfection. The error would be a fatal one; he would never attain the close conformity to Jesus’ death he hoped for; for he would be leaving out just that which is the essential element in the death of Jesus, and in the self-sacrifice it inculcates; that characteristic is its absolute unselfishness, its reference to others. To be made conformable to Christ’s death implies a dying to self, a losing sight of self altogether in giving up and laying down our life for others. To the question, how far we are to go in living for, in loving, in serving, in saving men, the Scriptures do not hesitate to give the unequivocal answer: We are to go as far as Jesus’ even to the laying down of our life. We are to consider this so entirely as the object for which we are redeemed, and are left in the world, the one object for which we live, that the laying down of the life in death follows as a matter of course. Like Christ, the only thing that keeps us in this world is to be the glory of God in the salvation of sinners. Scripture does not hesitate to say that it is in His path of suffering, as He goes to work out atonement and redemption, that we are to follow Him.

Compare Matt. 20:28 with Eph. 5:2, 25, 26; Phil. 2:5–8; 1 Pet. 2:21–23, and note how distinctly it is in connection with His redemptive work that Christ is set before us as our example: the giving His life away for others is its special significance.
How clearly this comes out in the words of the Master Himself: “Whoever will be chief among, you, let him be your bond-servant, As the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many.” The highest in glory will be he who was lowest in service, and likest to the Master in His giving His life a ransom. And so again, a few days later, after having spoken of His own death in the words: “The hour is come that the Son of man should be glorified. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit;” He at once applied to His disciples what He had said by repeating what they had already heard spoken to themselves, “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.” The corn of wheat dying to rise again, losing its life to regain it multiplied manifold, is clearly set forth as the emblem not only of the Master but of each one of His followers. Loving life, refusing to die, means remaining alone in selfishness: losing life to bring forth much fruit in others is the only way to keep it for ourselves. There is no way to find our life but as Jesus did, in giving it up for the salvation of others. Herein is the Father, herein shall we be glorified. The deepest underlying thought of conformity to Christ’s death is, giving our life to God for saving others. Without this, the longing, for conformity to that death is in danger of being a refined selfishness.

How remarkable the exhibition we have in the Apostle Paul of this spirit, and how instructive the words in which the Holy Spirit in him expressed to us its meaning! To the Corinthians he says: “Always bearing about the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body. For we which live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh. So then death worketh in us, but life in you.” “Though -Ye was crucified through weakness, YET HE LIVETH by the power of God. For we also are weak in Him, but we shall LIVE WITH HIM BY THE POWER OF GOD TOWARD YOU” (2 Cor. 4:10–12; 13:4). “I now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for His body’s sake, which is the Church” (Col. 1:24). These passages teach us how the vicarious element of the suffering that Christ bore in His body on the tree, to a certain extent still characterizes the sufferings of His body the Church. Believers who give themselves up to bear the burden of the sins of men before the Lord, who suffer reproach and shame, weariness and pain, in the effort to win souls, are filling up that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in their flesh. The power and the fellowship of His suffering and death work in them, the power of Christ’s life through them in those for whom they labour in love. There is no doubt that in the fellowship of His sufferings, and the conformity to His death in Phil. 3. Paul had in view not only the inner spiritual, but also the external bodily participations in the suffering of Christ.

And so it must be with each of us in some measure. Self-sacrifice not merely for the sake of our own sanctification, but for the salvation of our fellow-men, is what brings us into true fellowship with the Christ who gave Himself for us.

The practical application of these thoughts is very simple. Let us first of all try and see the truth the Holy Spirit seeks to teach us. As the most essential thing in likeness to Christ is likeness to His death, so the most essential thing in likeness to His death is the giving up our life to win others to God. It is a death in which all thought of saving self is lost in that of saving others. Let us pray for the light of the Holy Ghost to show us this, until we learn to feel that we are in the world just as Christ was, to give up self, to love and serve, to live and die, “EVEN AS the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many.” Oh that God would give His people to know their calling; that they do not belong to themselves, but to God and to their fellow-men; that, even as Christ, they are only to live to be a blessing to the world.

Then let us believe in the grace that is waiting to make our experience of this truth a reality. Let us believe that God accepts of our giving up of our whole life for His glory in the saving of others. Let us believe that conformity to the death of Jesus in this, its very life-principle, is what the Holy Ghost will work out in us. Let us above all believe in Jesus: it is He Himself who will take up every soul that in full surrender yields itself to Him, into the full fellowship of His death, of His dying, in love to bring forth much fruit. Yes, let us believe, and believing seek from above, as the work end the gift of Jesus, likeness to Jesus in this too.

And let us at once begin and act this faith. let us put it into practice. Looking upon ourselves now as wholly given up, just like Christ, to live and die for God in our fellow-men, let us with new zeal exercise the ministry of love in winning souls. As we wait for Christ to work out His likeness, as we trust the Holy Spirit to give His mind in us more perfectly, let us, in faith begin at once to act as followers of Him who only lived and died to be a blessing to others. Let our love open the way to the work it has to do by the kindness, and gentleness, and helpfulness, with which it shines out on all whom we meet in daily life. Let it give itself to the work of intercession, and look up to God to use us as one of His instruments in the answering of those prayers. Let us speak and work for Jesus as those who have a mission and a power from on high which make us sure of a blessing. Let us make soul-winning our object. Let us band ourselves with the great army of reapers the Lord is sending out into His harvest. And ere we thought of it, we shall find that giving our life to win others for God is the most blessed way of dying to self, of being even as the Son of man was, a servant and a Saviour of the lost.

O most wonderful and inconceivably blessed likeness to Christ! He gave Himself to men, but could not really reach them, until, giving Himself a sacrifice to God for them, the seed-corn died, the life was poured out; then the blessing flowed forth in mighty power. I may seek to love and serve men; I can only really influence and bless them as I yield myself unto God and give up my life into His hands for them; as I lose myself as an offering on the altar, I become in His spirit and power in very deed a blessing. My spirit given into His hands, He can use and bless me.

O most blessed God! dost Thou in very deed ask me to come and give myself, my very life, wholly, even unto the death, to Thee for my fellowmen? If I have heard the words of the Master aright, Thou dost indeed seek nothing less.

O God I wilt Thou indeed have me? Wilt Thou in very deed in Christ permit me, like Him, as a member of His body, to live and die for those around me? to lay myself, I say it in deep reverence, beside Him on the altar of death, crucified with Him, and be a living sacrifice to Thee for men I Lord! I do praise Thee for this most wonderful grace. And now I come, Lord God! and give myself. Oh for the grace of Thy Holy Spirit to make the transaction definite and real! Lord! here I am, given up to Thee, to live only for those whom Thou art seeking to save.

Blessed Jesus! come Thyself, and breathe Thine own mind and love within me. Take possession of me, my thoughts to think, my heart to feel, my powers to work, my life to live, as given away to God for men. Write it in my heart: it is done, I am given away to God, He has taken me. Keep Thou me each day as in His hands, expecting and assured that He will use me. On Thy giving up Thyself followed the life in power, the outbreaking of the blessing in fulness and power. It will be so in Thy people too. Glory be to Thy name. Amen.

“Behold, thy King cometh, meek.”—Matt. 21:5.

“Learn of me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and ye shall find rest for your soul.”—Matt. 11:29.

It is on His way to the cross that we find the first of these two words written of our Lord Jesus. It is in His sufferings that the meekness of Jesus is specially manifested. Follower of Jesus! who art so ready to take Thy place under the shadow of His cross, there to behold the Lamb slain for thy sins, is it not a precious thought, that there is one part of His work, as the suffering Lamb of God, in which Thou mayest bear His image and be like Him every day? thou canst be meek and gentle even as He was.

Meekness is the opposite of all that is hard or bitter or sharp. It has reference to the disposition which animates us towards our inferiors. “With meekness,” ministers must instruct those that oppose themselves, teach and bring back the erring (Gal. 6:1; 2 Tim. 2:25). It expresses our disposition towards superiors: we must “receive the word with meekness” (Jas. 1:21); if the wife is to be in subjection to her husband, it must be in a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price (1 Pet. 3). As one of the fruits of the Spirit, meekness ought to characterize all our daily intercourse with fellow-Christians, and extend to all with whom we have to do (Eph. 4:2; Gal. 5:22; Col. 3:12; Tit. 3:2). It is mentioned in Scripture along with humility, because that is the inward disposition concerning oneself, out of which meekness towards others springs.

There is perhaps none of the lovely virtues which adorn the image of God’s Son, which is more seldom seen in those who ought to be examples. There are many servants of Jesus, in whom much love to souls, much service for the salvation of others, and much zeal for God’s will, are visible, and yet who continually come short in this. How often, when offence comes unexpectedly, whether at home or abroad, they are carried away by temper and anger, and have to confess that they have lost the perfect rest of soul in God! There is no virtue, perhaps, for which some have prayed more earnestly: they feel they would give anything, if in their intercourse with partner, or children, or servants, in company or in business, they could always keep their temper perfectly, and exhibit the meekness and gentleness of Christ. Unspeakable is the grief and disappointment experienced by those who have learnt to long for it, and yet have not discovered where the secret of meekness lies.

The self-command needed for this seems to some so impossible, that they seek comfort in the belief that this blessing belongs to a certain natural temperament, and is too contrary to their character for them ever to expect it. To satisfy themselves they find all sorts of excuses. They do not mean it so ill: though the tongue or the temper be sharp, there is still love in their hearts: it would not be good to be too gentle: evil would be strengthened by it. And thus the call to entire conformity to the holy gentleness of the Lamb of God is robbed of all its power. And the world is strengthened in its belief, that Christians are after all not very much different from other people, because, though they do indeed say, they do not show, that Christ changes the heart and life after His own image. And the soul suffers itself, and causes unspeakable harm in Christ’s Church, through its unfaithfulness in appropriating this blessing of salvation: the bearing the image and likeness of God.

This grace is of great price in the sight of God. In the Old Testament there are many glorious promises for the meek, which were by Jesus gathered up into this one, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (see Ps. 25:9; 76:9; Prov. 3:34: Jer. 2:3). In the, New Testament, its praise consists in this, that it is His meekness that gives its supernatural incomparable beauty to the image of our Lord. A meek spirit is of great price in God’s sight; it is the choicest ornament of the Beloved Son. The Father could surely offer no higher inducement to His children, to seek it above all things.

For every one who longs to possess this spirit, Christ’s word is full of comfort and encouragement: “Learn of me that I am meek.” And what will it profit us to learn that He is meek? Will not just the experience of His meekness make the discovery of our want of it all the more painful? What we ask, Lord, is that Thou shouldest teach us how we may be meek. The answer is again: “Learn of me, that I AM MEEK.”

We are in danger of seeking meekness and the other graces of our Lord Jesus as gifts of which we must be conscious, before we practice them. This is not the path of faith. “Moses knew not that his face shone,” he had only seen the glory of God. The soul that seeks to be meek, must learn that Jesus is meek. We must take time to gaze on His meekness, until the heart has received the full impression: He only is meek: with Him alone can meekness be found. When we begin to realize this, we next fix our hearts upon the truth: This meek One is Jesus the Saviour. All He is, all He has, is for His redeemed ones; His meekness is to be communicated to us. But He does not impart it, by giving, as it were from Himself, something of it away to us. No I we must learn that He alone is meek, and that only when He enters and takes possession of heart and life, He brings His meekness with Him. It is with the meekness of Jesus that we can be meek.

We know how little He succeeded in making His disciples meek and lowly while on earth. It was because He had not yet obtained the new life, and could not yet bestow, through His resurrection, the Holy Spirit. But now He can do it. He has been exalted to the power of God from thence to reign in our hearts, to conquer every enemy, and continue in us His own holy life. Jesus was our visible Example on earth, that we might see in Him what like the hidden life is that He would give us from heaven, that He Himself would be within us.

“Learn of me, for I am meek and lowly of heart:” without ceasing the word sounds in our ears as our Lord’s answer to all the sad complaints of His redeemed ones, as to the difficulty of restraining temper. O my brother! why is Jesus, your Jesus, your life, and your strength, why is He the meek and lowly One, if it be not to impart to you, to whom He so wholly belongs, His own meekness?

Therefore, only believe! Believe that Jesus is able to fill your heart with His own spirit of meekness. Believe that Jesus Himself will, through His own Spirit, accomplish in you the work that you have in vain endeavoured to do. “BEHOLD! THY KING COMETH TO THEE, MEEK.” Welcome Him to dwell in your heart. Expect Him to reveal Himself to you. Everything depends on this. Learn of Him that He is meek and lowly of heart, and you shall find rest to your soul.

Precious Saviour, grant me now, under the overshadowing of Thy Holy Spirit, to draw near unto Thee, and to appropriate Thy heavenly meekness as my life. Lord, Thou hast not shown me Thy meekness as a Moses who demands but does not give Thou art Jesus who savest from all sin, giving in its stead Thy heavenly holiness. Lord, I claim Thy meekness as a part of the salvation that Thou hast given me. I cannot do without it. How can I glorify Thee if I do not possess it? Lord, I will learn from Thee that Thou art meek. Blessed Lord, teach me. And teach me that Thou art always with me, always in me as my life. Abiding in Thee, with Thee abiding in me, I have Thee the meek One to help me and make me like thyself O holy meekness! Thou art not come down to earth only for a short visit, then to disappear again in the heavens. Thou art come to seek a home. I offer Thee my heart; come and dwell in it.

Thou blessed Lamb of God, my Saviour and Helper, I count on Thee. Thou wilt make Thy meekness to dwell in me. Through Thy indwelling Thou dost conform me to Thy image. O come, and as an act of Thy rich free grace even now, as I wait on Thee, reveal Thyself as my King, meek, and coming in to take possession of me for Thyself.

“Precious, gentle, holy Jesus,
Blessed Bridegroom of my heart,
In Thy secret inner chamber,
Thou wilt show me what Thou art. Amen.”

“Even as the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: abide in my love. If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in His love.”—John 15:9, 10.

Our blessed Lord not only said, “Abide in me,” but also, “Abide in my love.” Of the abiding in Him, the principal part is the entering into and dwelling and being rooted in that wonderful love with which He loves us and gives Himself to us. “Love seeketh not its own;” it always goes out of itself to live and be at one with the beloved; it ever opens itself and stretches its arms wide to receive and hold fast the object of its desire: Christ’s love longs to possess us. The abiding, in Christ is an intensely personal relationship, the losing ourselves in the fellowship of an Infinite Love, finding, our life in the experience of being loved by Him, being nowhere at home but in His love.

To reveal this life in His love to us in all its Divine beauty and blessedness, Jesus tells us that this love of His to us in which we are to abide is just the same as the Fathers love to Him in which He abides. Surely, if anything were needed to make the abiding in His love more wonderful and attractive, this ought to do so. “EVEN AS the Father loved me, so have I loved you: abide in my love.” Our life may be Christ-like, unspeakably blessed in the consciousness of an In te Love embracing and delighting in us.

We know how this was the secret of Christ’s wonderful life, and His strength in prospect of death. At His baptism the voice was heard, the Divine message which the Spirit brought and unceasingly maintained in living power, “This is my BELOVED Son, in whom I am well pleased.” More than once we read: “The Father loveth the Son” (John 3:35; 5:20). Christ speaks of it as His highest blessedness: “That the world may know that Thou hast loved them, even as Thou had loved me; Thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world;” “That the love wherewith Thou lovedst me may be in them.” Just as we day by day walk and live in the light of the sun shining around us, so Jesus just lived in the light of the glory of the Father’s love shining on Him all the day. It was as THE BELOVED OF GOD that He was able to do God’s will, and finish His work. He dwelt in the love of the Father.

And just so we are THE BELOVED OF JESUS. EVEN AS the Father loved Him, He loves us. And what we need is just to take time, and, shutting our eyes to all around us, to worship and to wait until we see the Infinite Love of God in all its power and glory streaming forth upon us through the heart of Jesus, seeking to make itself known, and to get complete possession of us, offering itself to us as our home and resting-place. Oh, if the Christian would but take time to let the wondrous thought fill him, “I AM THE BELOVED OF THE LORD, Jesus loves me every moment, just as the Father loved Him,” how the faith would grow, that one who is loved as Christ was, must walk as He walked!

But there is a second point in the comparison. Not only is the Love we are to abide in like that in which He abode, but the way to our abiding is the same as His. As Son, Christ was in the Father’s love when He came into the world; but it was only through obedience He could secure its continued enjoyment, could abide in it. Nor was this an obedience that cost Him nothing; no, but it was in giving up His own will, and learning obedience by what He suffered, in becoming obedient unto the death, even the death of the cross, that He kept the Father’s commandments and abode in His love. “Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life. This commandment have I received of my Father.” “The Father hath not left me alone; for I do always those things that please Him.” And having thus given us Ms example, and proved how surely the path of obedience takes us up into the presence and love and glory of God, He invites us to follow Him. “If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love, EVEN AS I kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in His love.”

Christ-like obedience is the way to a Christ-like enjoyment of Love Divine. How it secures our boldness of access into God’s presence! “Let us love in deed and in truth, hereby shall we assure our hearts before Him.” “Beloved! if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence towards God; and whatsoever we ask, we receive of Him, because we keep His commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in His sight.” How it gives us boldness before men, and lifts us above their approval or contempt, because we move at God’s bidding, and feel that we have but to obey orders! And what boldness too in the face of difficulty or danger we are doing God’s will, and dare leave to Him all responsibility as to failure or success. The heart filled with the thought of direct and entire obedience to God alone, rises above the world into the will of God, into the place where God’s love rests on him: like Christ, he has his abode in the love of God.

Let us seek to learn from Christ what it means to have this spirit of obedience ruling our life. It implies the spirit of dependence; the confession that we have neither the right nor the desire in anything to do our own will It involves teachableness of spirit. Conscious of the blinding influence of tradition, and prejudice, and habit, it takes its law not from men but from God Himself. Conscious of how little the most careful study of the Word can reveal God’s will in its spiritual power, it seeks to be led, and for this end to be entirely under the rule of the Holy Spirit. It knows that its views of truth and duty are very partial and deficient, and counts on being led by God Himself to deeper insight and higher attainment.

It has marked God’s word, “If thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of the Lord thy God, and wilt do that which is right in His sight,” and understood that it is only when the commands do not come from conscience, or memory, or the book, but from the living voice of the Lord heard speaking through the Spirit, that the obedience will be possible and acceptable. It sees that it is only as a following out of the Father’s personal directions, and as a service rendered to Himself, that obedience has its full value and brings its full blessing. Its great care is to live on the altar, given up to God; to keep eye and ear open to God for every indication of His blessed will. It is not content with doing right for its own sake: it brings everything in personal relation to God Himself, doing it as unto the Lord. It wants every hour and every step in life to be a fellowship with God. It longs in little things and daily life to be consciously obeying the Father, because this is the only way to be prepared for higher work. Its one desire is the glory of God in the triumph of His will: its one means for obtaining that desire, with all its heart and strength to be working out that will each moment of the day. And its one but sufficient reward is this, it knows that through the will of God lies the road, opened up by Christ Himself, deeper into the love of God: “If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love.”

Oh this blessed Christ-like obedience, leading to a Christ-like abiding in the Divine Love! To attain it we must just study Christ more. He emptied Himself, and humbled Himself, and became obedient. May He empty us and humble us too! He learned obedience in the school of God, and being made perfect, became the author of eternal salvation to all that obey Him. We must yield ourselves to be taught obedience by Him! We just need to listen to what He has told us how He did nothing of Himself, but only what He saw and heard from the Father; how entire dependence and continual waiting on the Father was the root of implicit obedience, and this again the secret of ever-growing knowledge of the Father’s deeper secrets. (John 5:19, 20. See Fifteenth Day.) God’s love and man’s obedience there are as the lock and key fitting into each other. It is God’s grace that has fitted the key to the lock, it is man who uses the key to unlock the treasures of love.

In the light of Christ’s example and words, what new meaning comes to God’s words spoken to His people from of old! “In blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thee, became thou hast obeyed my voice.” “If ye will indeed obey my voice, ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me.” “The Lord shall greatly bless thee, if thou only carefully hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all these commandments.” Love and obedience indeed become the two great factors in the wonderful intercourse between God and man. The Love of God, giving Himself and all He has to man; the obedience of the believer in that Love, giving himself and all he has to God.

We have heard a good deal in these later years of full surrender and entire consecration, and thousands praise God for all the blessing He has given them through these words. Only let us beware that we be not led too much, in connection with them, to seek for a blessed experience to be enjoyed, or a state to be maintained, while the simple downright doing of God’s will to which they point is overlooked. Let us take hold and use this word which God loves to use: obedience. “To obey is better than sacrifice:” self-sacrifice is nothing without, is nothing but, obedience. It was the meek and lowly obedience of Christ, as of a servant and a son, that made His sacrifice such a sweet-smelling savour: it is humble, childlike obedience, first hearkening gently to the Father’s voice, and then doing that which is right in His sight, that will bring us the witness that we please Him.

Dear reader! shall not this be our life? so simple, and sublime: obeying Jesus, and abiding in His Love.

O my God! what shall I say to the wonderful interchange between the life of heaven and the life of earth Thou hast set before me? Thy Son, our blessed Lord, has shown and proved to us how it is possible on this earth of ours, and how unspeakably blessed, for a man to live with the love of God always surrounding him, by just yielding himself to obey Thy voice and will. And because He is ours, our Head and our Life, we know that we can indeed in our measure live and walk as we see Him do; our souls every moment abiding and rejoicing in Thy Divine Love, because Thou acceptest our feeble keeping of Thy commandments for His sake. O my God, it is indeed too wonderful, that we are called to this Christ-like dwelling in love through the Christ-like obedience Thy Spirit works!

Blessed Jesus! how can I praise Thee for coming and bringing such a life on earth and making me a sharer in it. O my Lord I can only yield myself afresh to Thee to keep Thy commandments, as Thou didst keep the Father’s. Lord! only impart to me the secret of Thine own blessed obedience; the open ear, the watchful eye, the meek and lowly heart; the childlike giving up of all as the beloved Son to the beloved Father. Saviour! fill my heart with Thy love; in the faith and experience of that love I will do it too. Yes, Lord, this only be my life: keeping Thy commandments, and abiding in Thy love. Amen.

“And Jesus being full of the Holy Spirit, returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness.”—Luke 4:1.

“Be filled with the Spirit.”—Eph. 5:18.

“For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.”—Rom. 8:14.

From His very birth the Lord Jesus had the Spirit dwelling in Him But there were times whom he needed special communications of the Spirit from the Father. Thus it was with His baptism The descent of the Holy Spirit on Him, the baptism of the Spirit, given in the baptism with water, was a real transaction: He was filled with the Spirit He returned from the Jordan full of the Holy Spirit, and experienced more manifestly than ever the leading of the Spirit. In the wilderness He wrestled and conquered, not in His own Divine power, but as a man who was strengthened and led by the Holy Spirit. In this also “He was in all things made like unto His brethren.”

The other side of the truth also holds good: the brethren are in all things made like unto Him. They are called to live like Him. This is not demanded from them without their having the same power. This power is the Holy Spirit dwelling in us, whom we have of God. Even as Jesus was filled with the Spirit, and then led by the Spirit, so must we be also filled with the Spirit and be led by the Spirit.

More than once, in our meditations on the different traits of Christ’s character, it has seemed to us almost impossible to be like Him. We have lived so little for it: we feel so little able to live thus. Let us take courage in the thought: Jesus Himself could only live thus through the Spirit. It was after He was filled with the Spirit that He was led forth by that Spirit to the place of conflict and of victory. And this blessing is ours as surely as it was His: we may be filled with the Spirit; we may be led by the Spirit. Jesus, who was Himself baptized with the Spirit, to set us an example how to live, has ascended into heaven to baptize us into the likeness with Himself. He who would live like Jesus must begin here: He must be baptized with the Spirit. What God demands from His children He first gives. He demands entire likeness to Christ because He will give us, as He did Jesus, the fulness of the Spirit. We must be filled with the Spirit.

We have here the reason why the teaching of the imitation and likeness to Christ has so little prominence in the Church of Christ. Men sought it in their own strength, with the help of some workings of the Holy Spirit: they did not understand that nothing less was needed than being filled with the Spirit. No wonder that they thought that real conformity to Christ could not be expected of us, because they had mistaken thoughts about being filled with the Spirit. It was thought to be the privilege of a few, and not the calling and duty of every child of God. It was not sufficiently realized that “Be ye filled with the Spirit,” is a command to every Christian. Only when the Church first gives the baptism of the Spirit, and Jesus, as the Saviour who baptizes with the Spirit each one who believes in Him, their right place, only then will likeness to Christ be sought after and attained. People will then understand and acknowledge: to be like Christ we must be led by the same Spirit, and to be led by the Spirit as He was, we must be filled with the Spirit. Nothing less than the fulness of the Spirit is absolutely necessary to live a truly Christian, Christ-like life.

The way to arrive at it is simple. It is Jesus who baptizes with the Spirit: he who comes to Him desiring it will get it. All that He requires of us is, the surrender of faith to receive what He gives

The surrender of faith. What He asks is, whether we are indeed in earnest to follow in His footsteps, and for this to be baptized of the Spirit. Do not let there be any hesitation as to our answer. First, look back on all the glorious promises of His love and of His Spirit, in which the blessed privilege is set forth: EVEN AS I, YE ALSO. Remember that it was of this likeness to Himself in everything He said to the Father: “The glory which Thou gavest me have I given them.” Think how the love of Christ and the true desire to please Him, how the glory of God and the needs of the world, plead with us not through our sloth to despise this heavenly birthright of being Christ-like. Acknowledge the sacred right of ownership Christ has in you, His blood-bought ones: and let nothing prevent your answering: “Yes, dear Lord, as fax as is allowed to a child of dust, I will be like Thee. I am entirely Thine; I must, I will, in all things bear Thy image. It is for this I ask to be filled with the Spirit.”

The surrender of faith: only this; but nothing less than this He demands. Let us give what He asks. If we yield ourselves to be like Him, in all things, let it be in the quiet trust that He accepts, and at once begins in secret to make the Spirit work more mightily in us. Let us believe it although we do not at once experience it. To be filled with the Holy Spirit, we must wait on our Lord in faith. We can depend upon it that His love desires to give us more than we know. Let our surrender be made in this assurance.

And let this surrender of faith be entire. The fundamental law of following, Christ is this: “He who loses his life shall find it.” The Holy Spirit comes to take away the old life, and to give in its place the life of Christ in you. Renounce the old life of self-working and self-watching, and believe that, as the air you breathe renews your life every moment, so naturally and continually the Holy Spirit will renew your life. In the work of the Holy Spirit in you there are no breaks or interruptions: you are in the Spirit as your vital air: the Spirit is in you as your life-breath: through the Spirit God works in you both to will and to do according to His good pleasure. Oh, Christian, have a deep reverence for the work of the Spirit who dwells within you. Believe in God’s power, which works in you through the Spirit, to conform you to Christ’s life and image moment by moment. Be occupied with Jesus and His life, that life which is at the same time your example and your strength, in the full assurance that the Holy Spirit knows in deep quiet to fulfil His office of communicating Jesus to you. Remember that the fulness of the Spirit is yours in Jesus, a real gift which you accept and hold in faith, even when there is not such feeling as you could wish, and on which you count to work in you all you need. The feeling may be weakness and fear and much trembling, and yet the speaking, and working, and living in demonstration of the Spirit and of power (1 Cor. 2:3, 4). Live in the faith that the fulness of the Spirit is yours, and that you will not be disappointed if, looking unto Jesus, you rejoice every day in the blessed trust that the care of your spiritual life is in the hands of the Holy Spirit the Comforter. Thus, with the loving presence of Jesus in you, the living likeness to Jesus will be seen on you; the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus dwelling within, the likeness of the life of Christ Jesus will shine around.

And if it do not appear that in thus believing and obeying your desires are fulfilled, remember that it is in the fellowship with the members of Christ’s body, and in the full surrender to Christ’s server in the world, that the full power of the Spirit is made manifest. It was when Jesus gave Himself to enter into full fellowship with men around Him, and like them to be baptized with water, that He was baptized with the Holy Ghost. And it was when He had given Himself in His second baptism of suffering, a sacrifice for us, that He received the Holy Spirit to give to us. Seek fellowship with God’s children, who will with thee plead and believe for the baptism of the Spirit: the disciples received the Spirit not singly, but when they were with one accord in one place. Band thyself with God’s children around thee to work for souls; the Spirit is the power from on high to fit for that work: the promise will be fulfilled to the believing g servants, who want Him not for their enjoyment, but for that work. Christ was filled with the Spirit that He might be fitted to work and live and die for us. Give thyself to such a Christ-like living and dying for men, and thou mayest depend upon it, a Christ-like baptism of the Spirit, a Christ-like fulness of the Spirit, will be thy portion.

Blessed Lord I how wondrously Thou hast provided for our growing likeness to Thyself, in giving us Thine own Holy Spirit. Thou hast told us that it is His work to reveal Thee, to give us Thy Real Presence within us. It is by Him that all Thou hast won for us, all the life and holiness and strength we see in Thee, is brought over and imparted and made our very own. He takes of Thine, and shows it to us, and makes it ours. Blessed Jesus! we do thank Thee for the gift of the Holy Spirit.

And now, we beseech Thee, fill us, oh fill us full, with Thy Holy Ghost! Lord! nothing less is sufficient. We cannot be led like Thee, we cannot fight and conquer like Thee, we cannot love and serve like Thee, we cannot live and die like Thee, unless like Thee we are full of the Holy Ghost. Blessed, blessed be Thy name I Thou hast commanded, Thou hast promised it; it may, it can, it shall be.

Holy Saviour! draw Thy disciples together to wait and plead for this. Let their eyes be opened to see the wondrous unfulfilled promises of floods of the Holy Spirit. Let their hearts be drawn to give themselves, like Thee, to live and die for men. And we know it will be Thy delight to fulfil Thine office, as He that baptizeth with the Holy Ghost and with fire. Glory be to Thy Name. Amen.

“Even as I live by the Father, so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me.”—John 6:57.

Every contemplation of a walk in the footsteps of Christ, and in His likeness, reveals anew the need of fixing the eye on the deep living union between the Forerunner and His followers. Like Christ: the longer we meditate on the word, the more we realize how impossible it is without that other: In Christ. The outward likeness can only be the manifestation of a living inward union. To do the same works as Christ, I must have the same life. The more earnestly I take Him for my example, the more I am driven to Him as my Head. Only an inner life essentially like His, can lead us to a visible walk like His.

What a blessed word we have here, to assure us that His life on earth and ours are really like each other: “Even as I live by the Father, so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me.” If you desire to understand your life in Christ, what He will be for you and how He will work in you, you have only to contemplate what the Father was for, and how He worked in Him. Christ’s life in and through the Father is the image and the measure of what your life in and through the Son may be. Let us meditate on this.

As Christ’s life was a life hidden in God in heaven, so must ours be. When He emptied Himself of His Divine glory, He laid aside the free use of His Divine attributes. He needed thus as a man to live by faith; He needed to wait on the Father for such communications of wisdom and power, as it pleased the Father to impart to Him. He was entirely dependent on the Father; His life was hid in God. Not in virtue of His own independent Godhead, but through the operations of the Holy Spirit, He spoke and acted as the Father from time to time taught Him.

Exactly so, believer, must your life be hid with Christ in God. Let this encourage you. Christ calls you to a life of faith and dependence, because it is the life He Himself led. He has tried it and proved its blessedness; He is willing now to live over again His life in you, to teach you also to live in no other way. He knew that the Father was His life, and that He lived through the Father, and that the Father supplied His need moment by moment. And now He assures you that as He lived through the Father, even so you shall live through Him. Take this assurance in faith. Let your heart be filled with the thought of the blessedness of this fulness of life, which is prepared for you in Christ, and will be abundantly supplied as you need it. Do not think any more of your spiritual life, as something that you must watch over and nourish with care and anxiety. Rejoice every day that you need not live on your own strength, but in your Lord Jesus, even as He lived through His Father.

Even as Christ’s life was a life of Divine power, although a life of dependence, so ours will also be. He never repented having laid aside His glory, to live before God as a man upon earth. The Father never disappointed His confidence, He gave Him all He needed to accomplish His work. Christ experienced that blessed as it was to be like God in heaven, and to dwell in the enjoyment of Divine perfection, it was no less blessed to live in the relation of entire dependence on earth, and to receive everything day by day from His hands.

Believer, if you will have it so, your life can be the same. The Divine power of the Lord Jesus will work in and through us. Do not think that your earthly circumstances make a holy life to God’s glory impossible. It was just to manifest, in the midst of earthly surroundings which were even more difficult, the Divine life, that Christ came and lived on earth. As He lived so blessed an earthly life through the Father, so may ye also live your earthly life through Him. Only cultivate large expectations of what the Lord will do for you. Let it be your sole desire to attain to an entire union with Him. It is impossible to say what the Lord Jesus would do for a soul who is truly willing to live as entirely through Him as He through the Father. Because just as He lived through the Father, and the Father made that life with all its work so glorious, so will you experience in all your work how entirely He has undertaken to work all in you.

As the life of Christ was the manifestation of His real union with the Father, so ours also. Christ says “Even as the Father has sent me, and I live by the Father.” When the Father desired to manifest Himself on earth in His love, He could entrust that work to no one less than His beloved Son, who was one with Him. It was because He was Son that the Father sent Him: it was because the Father had sent Him that it could not be otherwise, but He must care for His life. In the union upon which the mission rested, rested the blessed certainty that Jesus would live on earth through the Father.

“Even so,” Christ said, “He that eateth me, liveth by me.” He had said before, “He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth in me, and I in Him.” In death He had given His flesh and blood for the life of the world; through faith the soul partakes of the power of His death and resurrection, and receives its right to His life, as He had a right to His Father’s life. In the words, “Whosoever eateth Me,” is expressed the intimate union and unbroken communion with the Lord Jesus, which is the power of a life in Him. The one great work for the soul, who truly longs to live entirely and only by Christ, is to eat Him, daily to feed on Him, to make Him his own. [*See Note.]

To attain this, seek continually to have your heart filled with a believing and lively assurance that all Christ’s fulness of life is truly yours. Rejoice in the contemplation of His humanity in heaven, and the wonderful provision God has made through the Holy Spirit for the communication of this life of your Head in heaven, to flow unbroken and unhindered down upon you. Thank God unceasingly for the redemption in which He opened the way to the life of God, and for the wonderful life now provided for you in the Son. Offer yourself unreservedly to Him with an open heart and consecrated life that seeks His service alone. In such trust and consecration of faith, in the outpouring of love and cultivation of communion, with His words abiding in you, let Jesus be your daily food. He who eateth me shall live by me: even as the Father has sent me, and I live by the Father.

Beloved Christian! what think you? Does not the imitation of Christ begin to seem possible in the light of this promise? He who lives through Christ can also live like Him. Therefore let this wonderful life of Christ on earth through the Father be the object of our adoring contemplation, until our whole heart understands and accepts the word, “Even so, He who eateth me shall live through me.” Then we shall dismiss all care and anxiety, because the same Christ who set us the example works in us from heaven that life which can live out the example. And our life will become a continual song: To Him who lives in us, in order that we may live like Him, be the love and praise of our hearts. Amen.

O my God I how shall I thank Thee for this wonderful grace! Thy Son became man to teach us the blessedness of a life of human dependence on the Father; He lived through the Father. It has been given us to see in Him how the Divine life can live and work, and conquer on earth. And now He is ascended into heaven, and has all power to let that life work in us, we are called to live even as He did on earth: we live through Him. O God, praised be Thy name for this unspeakable grace.

Lord, my God, hear the prayer that I now offer to Thee. If it may be, show me more, much more of Christ’s life through the Father. I need to know it, O my God, if I am to live as He did! Oh, give me the spirit of wisdom in the knowledge of Him. Then shall I know what I may expect from Him, what I can do through Him, It will then no longer be a struggle and an effort to live according to Thy will, and His example. Because I shall then know that this blessed life on earth is now mine, according to the word, “Even as I through the Father, so ye through me.” Then shall I daily feed upon Christ in the joyful experience: I live through Him. O my Father! grant this in full measure for His name’s sake. Amen.

Note.

Though the words of our Lord Jesus in the sixth of John were not spoken directly of the Lord’s Supper, they are yet applicable to it, because they set forth that spiritual blessing of which the Holy Supper is the communication in a visible form. In eating the bread and drinking the wine, our spiritual life is not only strengthened because therein the pardon of our sins is signified and sealed to us, but because the Holy Spirit does indeed make us partakers of the very body and blood of our Lord Jesus as a spiritual reality. So one of our Reformed Church Catechisms, the Heidelberg (Qu. 78), puts it, “What is it then to eat the broken body and drink the shed blood of Christ” “It is not only to embrace with a believing heart the sufferings and death of Christ, and so to obtain the pardon of sin and life eternal; but moreover also that we are united to His sacred body by the Holy Ghost, who dwells both in Christ and in us, so that we, though Christ be in heaven and we on earth, are nevertheless flesh of His flesh and bones of His bones.”

It is known that there are in our Protestant Churches three views of the Lord’s Supper. On the one hand, the Lutheran with its consubstantiation, teaching that the body of our Lord is so present in the bread, that even an unbeliever eats no longer only bread, but the body of the Lord. On the other the Zwinglian view, according to which the effect of the Sacrament is a very impressive exhibition of the truth that the death of Christ is to us what wine and bread are to the body, and a very expressive confession of our faith in this truth, and so of our interest in the blessings of that death. As the Holy Spirit in the Word speaks to us through the ear, so in the Sacrament through the eye. Midway between these views is that of Calvin, who strongly urges that there is in it a mysterious blessing, not well to be expressed in words; that it is not enough to speak of the life which the Spirit gives to our spirit through faith but that there is a real communication by the Holy Spirit of the very flesh and blood of Jesus in heaven to our very body, so that in virtue of this we are called members of His body, and have His body in us as the seed of the spiritual body of the resurrection. While avoiding, on the one hand, the sacramentarian view of a change in the bread, it seeks to hold fast, on the other, the reality of a spiritual substantial participation of the very body and blood of our Lord Jesus.

This is not the place to enter on this more fully. But I am persuaded that, when a more scriptural view prevails as to the relation between body and spirit, it will not be thought strange to believe that without anything like a real presence in the bread itself. we are indeed fed with the very body and blood of our Lord Jesus. The body of our Lord is now a spiritual body, transfigured and glorified into the spirit-life of the heavenly world, the spirit and the body in perfect, unity and harmony, so that now the Holy Spirit can freely dispense and communicate that body as He will. Our body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which dwelleth in us; our bodies are members of Christ; our mortal board are even now being quickened and prepared by the indwelling Spirit for the resurrection (Rom. 8:11): why should it be thought strange that “by the Holy Spirit the communion” of the body of Christ, so distinctly promised, should be, not an Old Testament symbol or shadow, but a blessed heavenly reality?

Calvin’s words are as follows: “I am not satisfied with the view of those who, while acknowledging that we have some kind of communion with Christ, only make us partakers of the Spirit, omitting all mention of flesh and blood.” “In His humanity also the fulness of life resides, so that every one who communicates in His flesh and blood, at the same time enjoys the participation of life”. The flesh of Christ is like a perennial fountain which transfuses into us the life flowing forth from the Godhead into itself. The communion of the flesh and blood of Christ is necessary to all who aspire to the Christian life. Hence these expressions: “The Church is ‘the body of Christ.’ ” “Our bodies are ‘the members of Christ.’ ” “We are members of His body, of His flesh and His bones.” “What our mind does not comprehend, let faith receive, that the Spirit unites things separated by space. That sacred communion of flesh and blood by which Christ transfuses His life into us, just as if it penetrated our bones and marrow, He testifies and seals in the Supper, not by representing a vain or empty sign, but by these exerting an efficacy of the Spirit by which He fulfils what He promises.” “I willingly admit anything which helps to express the true and substantial communication of the body and blood of the Lord, as exhibited to believers under the sacred symbols of the Supper, understanding that they are not received by the imagination or the intellect merely, but are enjoyed in reality as the food of eternal life.” “We say that Christ descends to us, as well by the external symbol as by His Spirit, that He may truly quicken our souls by the substance of His flesh and blood.” “Such is the corporeal presence which the sacrament requires, and which we say is here displayed in such power and efficacy, that it not only gives our minds undoubted assurance of heavenly life, but also secures the immortality of our flesh.” – Calvin’s Institutes 4. 17, § 7, 9, 10, 19, 24.

To the soul who seeks fully to live by Christ as He did by the Father, the sacrament is a real spiritual blessing, something more than what faith in the word gives. Let all the praying and believing and living in which we seek to realize the wonderful blessing of living just as Christ did by the Father, ever culminate in our communion of the body and blood at the Lord’s table. And let us go forth from each such celebration with new confidence, that what has been given and confirmed on the great day of the feast, will by Jesus Himself be maintained in power in the daily life through the more ordinary channels of His grace—the blessed fellowship with Himself in the word and prayer.

“Father, the hour is come; glorify Thy Son, that Thy Son also may glorify Thee. I have glorified Thee on the earth.”—John 17:1, 4.

“Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be my disciples.”—John 15:8.

The glory of an object is, that in its sort its intrinsic worth and excellence answers perfectly to all that is expected of it. That excellence or perfection may be so hidden or unknown, that the object has no glory to those who behold it. To glorify is to remove every hindrance, and so to reveal the full worth and perfection of the object, that its glory is seen and acknowledged by all.

The highest perfection of God, and the deepest mystery of Godhead, is His holiness. In it righteousness and love are united. As the Holy One He hates and condemns sin. As the Holy One He also frees the inner from its power, and raises Him to communion with Himself His name is, “The Holy One of Israel, thy Redeemer.” The song of redemption is: “Great is the Holy One of Israel in the midst of thee.” To the Blessed Spirit, whose special work it is to maintain the fellowship of God with man, the title of Holy in the New Testament belongs more than to the Father or the Son. It is this holiness, judging sin and saving sinners, which is the glory of God. For this reason the two words are often found together. So in the song of Moses: “Who is like Thee, glorious in holiness?” So in the song of the Seraphim: “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory.” And so in the song of the Lamb: “Who shall not glorify Thy Name? for Thou only art Holy.” As has been well said: “God’s glory is His manifested holiness; God’s holiness is His hidden glory.”

When Jesus came to earth, it was that He might glorify the Father, that He might again show forth in its true light and beauty that glory which sin had so entirely hid from man. Man himself had been created in the image of God, that God might lay of His glory upon him, to be shown forth in him-that God might be glorified in him. The Holy Ghost says, “Man is the image and glory of God.” Jesus came to restore man to his high destiny: He laid aside the glory which He had with the Father, and came in our weakness and humiliation, that He might teach us how to glorify the Father on earth. God’s glory is perfect and infinite: man cannot contribute any new glory to God, above what He has: he can only serve as a glass in which the glory of God is reflected. God’s holiness is His glory: as the holiness of God is seen in him, God is glorified; His glory as God is shown forth.

Jesus glorified God by obeying Him. In giving His commandments to Israel, God continually said, “Be ye holy, for I am holy:” in keeping them they would be transformed into a life of harmony with Him, they would enter into fellowship with Him as the Holy One. In His conflict with sin and Satan, in His sacrifice of His own will, in His waiting for the Father’s teaching, in His unquestioning obedience to the Word, Christ showed that He counted nothing worth living for, but that men might understand what a blessed thing it is to let this holy God really BE GOD, His will alone acknowledged and obeyed. Because He alone is holy, His will alone should be done, and so His glory be shown in us.

Jesus glorified God by confessing Him. He not only in His teaching made known the message God had given Him, and showed us who the Father is. There is something far more striking. He continually spoke of His own personal relation to the Father. He did not trust to the silent influence of His holy life; He wanted men distinctly to understand what the root and aim of that life was. Time after time He told them that He came as a servant sent from the Father, that He depended upon Him and owed everything to Him, that He only sought the Fathers honour, and that all His happiness was to please the Father, to secure His love and favour.

Jesus glorified God by giving Himself for the work of His redeeming love. God’s glory is His holiness, and God’s holiness is His redeeming love: love that triumphs over sin by conquering the sin and rescuing the sinner. Jesus not only told of the Father being, the Righteous One, whose condemnation must rest on sin, and the Loving One who saves every one who turns from his sin, but He gave Himself to be a sacrifice to that righteousness, a servant to that love, even unto the death. It was not only in acts of obedience, or words of confession, that He glorified God, but in giving Himself to magnify the holiness of God, to vindicate at once His law and His love by His atonement. He gave Himself, His whole life and being, HIMSELF wholly, to show how the Father loved, and longed to bless, how the Father must condemn the sin, and yet would save the sinner. He counted nothing too great a sacrifice, He lived and died only for this, that the glory of the Father, the glory of His holiness, of His redeeming love, might break through the dark veil of sin and flesh, and shine into the hearts of the children of men. As He Himself expressed it in the last week of His life, when the approaching anguish began to press in upon Him: “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say—Father, save me from this hour? But for this came I unto the world: FATHER. GLORIFY THY NAME.” And the assurance came that the sacrifice was well-pleasing and accepted, in the answer: “I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.”

It was thus Jesus as man was prepared to have part in the glory of God: He sought it in the humiliation on earth; He found it on the throne of heaven. And so He is become our forerunner, leading many children to glory: He shows us that the sure way to the glory of God in heaven is to live only for the glory of God on earth. Yes, this is the glory of a life on earth: glorifying God here, we are prepared to be glorified with Him for ever.

Beloved Christian! is it not a wonderful calling, blessed beyond all conception, like Christ to live only to glorify God, to let God’s glory shine out in every part of our life? let us take time to take in the wondrous thought: our daily life, down to its most ordinary acts, may be transparent with the glory of God. Oh! let us study this trait as one that makes the wondrous image of our Jesus specially attractive to us: He glorified the Father. Let us listen to Him as He points us to the high aim, that your Father in heaven may be glorified, and as He shows us the way, Herein is my Father glorified. Let us remember how He told us that, when in heaven He answers our prayer, this would still be His object, and let in every breathing of prayer and faith it be our object too: “That the Father may be glorified in the Son.” Let our whole life, like Christ’s, be animated by this as its ruling principle, growing stronger until in a holy enthusiasm our watchword has become: ALL, ALL TO THE GLORY OF GOD. And let our faith hold fast the confidence that in the fulness of the Spirit there is the sure provision for our desire being fulfilled: “Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, which is in you?—therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit.”

If we want to know the way, let us again study Jesus. He obeyed the Father. Let simple downright obedience mark our whole life. Let an humble, childlike waiting for direction, a soldier-like looking for orders, a Christ-like dependence on the Father’s showing us His way, be our daily attitude. Let everything be done to the Lord, according to His will, for His glory, in direct relationship to Himself. Let God’s glory shine out in the holiness of our life.

He confessed the Father: He did not hesitate to speak often of His personal relationship and intercourse, just as a little child would do of an earthly parent. It is not enough that we live right before men: how can they understand, if there be no interpreter? They need, not as a matter of preaching,, but as a personal testimony, to hear that what we are and do is became we love the Father, and are living for Him. The witness of the life and the words must go together. (See note.)

And He gave Himself to the Father’s work. So He glorified Him He showed sinners that God has a right to have us wholly and only for Himself, that God’s glory alone is worth living and dying for, and that as we give ourselves to this, God will roost wonderfully use and bless us in leading others to see and confess His glory too. It was that men might glorify the Father in heaven, might find their blessedness also in knowing and serving this glorious God, that Jesus lived, and that we must live too. Oh I let us give ourselves to God for men; let us plead, and work, and Eve, and die, that men, our fellowmen, may see that God is glorious in holiness, that the whole earth may be filled with His glory.

Believer! “the Spirit of God and of glory, the spirit of holiness, rests upon you.” Jesus delights to do in you His beloved work of glorifying the Father. Fear not to say: O my Father, in Thy Son, like Thy Son, I will only live to glorify Thee.

O my God! I do pray Thee, show me Thy glory! I feel deeply how utterly impossible it is, by any resolution or effort of mine, to lift myself up or bind myself to live for Thy glory alone. But if Thou wilt reveal unto me Thy glory, if Thou wilt make all Thy goodness pass before me, and show me how glorious Thou art, how there is no glory but Thine; if, O my Father! Thou wilt let Thy glory shine into my heart, and take possession of my inmost being, I never will be able to do anything but glorify Thee, but live to make known what a glorious holy God Thou art.

Lord Jesus! who didst come to earth to glorify the Father in our sight, and ascend to heaven leaving us to do it now in Thy name and stead, oh! give us by Thy Holy Spirit a sight of how Thou didst it. Teach us the meaning of Thy obedience to the Father, Thine acknowledgment that, at any cost, His will must be done. Teach us to mark Thy confession of the Father, and how Thou didst in personal testimony tell men of what He was to Thee, and what Thou didst feel for Him, and let our lips too tell out what we taste of the love of the Father, that men may glorify Him. And above all, oh I teach us that it is in saving sinners that redeeming love has its triumph and its joy, that it is in holiness casting out sin that God has His highest glory. And do Thou so take possession of our whole hearts that we may love and labour, live and die, for this one thing, “That every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, TO THE GLORY OF GOD THE FATHER.”

O my Father, let the whole earth, let my heart, be filled with Thy glory. Amen.

Note

“Let us begin by considering what was the groundwork of the whole beauty and harmony of our blessed Saviour’s character. Love to the Father was the ruling motive of His life. It so pervaded His nature as to find expression, directly or indirectly, in every word as well as every action. It will be well if we try to realize something of the perfect simplicity with which that love was so continually shown forth in daily life.

“We especially need to remind ourselves of how entirely this was the case, because, in these days of artificial manners, and of false shame, we are so frequently tempted to conceal our true motives, and to think it a disgrace if we are led into any sign of betraying our deepest religious feelings. We conceal them from those who would not understand them, lest perchance they should scorn our judgment, and wound our self-respect; and we too frequently even hide them from those who me of like mind with ourselves, lest they too might think us lacking in good taste. Self fears the slightest rebuke, the merest breath of disapproval So long as our love to God is weak enough to allow of its being hidden, self will carefully hide it, rather than run the least risk of being considered deficient in discretion.

“Of true discretion, which is quite a different thing, we shall find abundant examples in our Master’s life. But that false discretion, which strives to divert notice, not from ourselves, but from the deepest principles of our conduct, and in order to save our own selfish feelings from being wounded, finds no counterpart whatever in the life of our Lord. In His earthly nature, as man, Christ loved the Lord His God with all His heart and with all His strength. And this all-pervading, love could not but assert itself continually. Our lord simply and unhesitatingly referred to it as a simple fact, whenever the slightest occasion for doing so arose. It was His avowed object that the world should know that He loved the Father. He frequently and emphatically alluded to His personal connection with the Father as the means by which He lived: it was His consciousness of that union which gave Him unfailing support.

“Jesus Christ made known the Father’s love; He was sent that He might reveal the deep blessedness of belonging wholly to God. Even so are we sent, each one of us into the world, in order that we may make the Saviour known to those around us. Through our own intimate and personal connection with Himself, we are each one of us to reveal the Son, even as He revealed the Father. And this we can only do by acting as He did, by continually proving how all-sufficient is the sense of union with Himself.” – From a chapter on the example left us by Christ, in a little book containing many precious thoughts, Steps on the Upward Path; or, Holiness unto the Lord. By A. M. James. Religious Tract Society.

“We know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is. And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as He is pure.”—1 John 3:2, 3.

“And I appoint unto you a kingdom, even as my Father hath appointed unto me.”—Luke 22:29.

God’s glory is His holiness. To glorify God is to to yield ourselves that God in us may show forth His glory. It is only by yielding ourselves to be holy, to let His holiness fill our life, that His glory can shine forth from us. The one work of Christ was to glorify the Father, to reveal what a glorious Holy God He is. Our one work is, like Christ’s, so by our obedience, and testimony, and life, to make known our God as “glorious in holiness,” that He may be glorified in heaven and earth.

When the Lord Jesus had glorified the Father on earth, the Father glorified Him with Himself in heaven. This was rot only His just reward; it was a necessity in the very nature of things. There is no other place for a life given up to the glory of God, as Christ’s was, than in that glory. The law holds good for us too: a heart that yearns and thirsts for the glory of God, that is ready to live and die for it, becomes prepared and fitted to live in it. Living to God’s glory on earth is the gate to living in Gods glory in heaven. If with Christ we glorify the Father, the Father will with Christ glorify us too. Yes, we shall be like Him in His glory.

We shall be like Him in His spiritual glory, the glory of His holiness. In the union of the two words in the name of the Holy Spirit, we see that what is HOLY and what is SPIRITUAL stand in the closest connection with each other. When Jesus as man had glorified God by revealing, and honouring, and giving Himself up to His holiness, he was as man taken up into and made partaker of the Divine glory.

And so it will be with us. If here on earth we have given ourselves to have God’s glory take possession of us, and God’s holiness, God’s Holy Spirit, dwell and shine in us, then our human nature with all our faculties, created in the likeness of God, shall have poured into and transfused through it, in a way that passes all conception, the purity and the holiness and the life, the very brightness of the glory of God.

We shall be like Him in His glorified body. It has been well said: Embodiment is the end of the ways of God. The creation of man was to be God’s masterpiece. There had previously been spirits without bodies, and animated bodies without spirits, but in man there was to be a spirit in a body lifting up and spiritualizing the body into its own heavenly purity and perfection. Man as a whole is God’s image, his body as much as his spirit. In Jesus a human body—O mystery of mysteries!—is set upon the throne of God, is found a worthy partner and container of the Divine glory. Our bodies are going to be the objects of the most astonishing miracle of Divine transforming power: “He will fashion our vile body like unto His glorious body, according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself.” The glory of God as seen in our bodies, made like Christ’s glorious body, will be something almost more wonderful than in our spirits. We are “waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.”

We shall be like Him in His place of honour. Every object must have a fit place for its glory to be seen. Christ’s place is the central one in the universe: the throne of God. He spake to His disciples, “Where I am, there shall my servant be. If any man serve me, him will my Father honour.” “I appoint you a kingdom, EVEN AS my Father hath appointed me; that ye may eat and drink at my table, and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” To the Church at Thyatira He says: “He that overcometh and keepeth my words unto the end, to him will I give power over the nations, EVEN As I received of my Father.” And to the Church at Laodicca: “To him that overcometh will I grant to sit on my throne, EVEN AS I overcame, and am set down with my Father on His throne.” Higher and closer it cannot be: I EVEN As we have borne the image of the earthly, we also of the heavenly: The likeness will be complete and perfect.

Such Divine God-given glimpses into the future reveal to us, more than all our thinking, what intense truth, what Divine meaning there is in God’s creative word: “Let us make man in Oar image, after Our likeness.” To show forth the likeness of the Invisible, to be partaker of the Divine Nature, to share with God His rule of the universe, is man’s destiny. His place is indeed one of unspeakable glory. Standing between two eternities, the eternal purpose in which we were predestinated to be conformed to the image of the first-born Son, and the eternal realization of that purpose when we shall be like Him in His glory, we hear the voice from every side: O ye image-bearers of God! on the way to share the glory of God and of Christ. live a God-like, live a Christ-like life!

“I shall be satisfied when I awake with THY LIKENESS,” so the Psalmist sung of old. Nothing can satisfy the soul but God’s image, because for that it was created. And this not as something external to it, only seen but not possessed; it is as partaker of that likeness that we shall be satisfied. Blessed they who here long for it with insatiable hunger; they shall be filled. This, the very likeness of God, this will be the glory, streaming down on them from God Himself, streaming through their whole being, streaming, out from them through the universe. “When Christ who is our life shall be manifested, we also shall be manifested with Him in glory.”

Beloved fellow-Christians! nothing can be made manifest in that day that has not a real existence here in this life. If the glory of God is not our life here, it cannot be hereafter. It is impossible; him alone who glorifies God here, can God glorify hereafter. “Man is the image and glory of God.” It is as you bear the image of God here, as you live in the likeness of Jesus, who is the brightness of His glory, and the express image of His person, that you will be fitted for the glory to come. If we are to be as the image of the heavenly, the Christ in glory, we must first bear the image of the earthly, the Christ in humiliation.

Child of God! Christ is the uncreated image of God. Man is His created image. On the throne in the glory the two will be eternally one. You know what Christ did, how He drew near, how He sacrificed all, to restore us to the possession of that image. Oh, shall we not at length yield ourselves to this wonderful love, to this glory inconceivable, and give our life wholly to manifest the likeness and the glory of Christ Shall we not, like Him, make the Father’s glory our aim and hope, living to His glory here, as the way to live in His glory there.

The Father’s glory: it is in this that Christ’s glory and ours have their common origin. Let the Father be to us what He was to Him, and the Father’s glory will be ours as it is His. All the traits of the life of Christ converge to this as their centre. He was Son; He lived as Son; God was to Him FATHER. As Son He sought the Father’s glory; as Son He found it. Oh! let this be our conformity to the image of the Son, that THE FATHER is the all in all of our life; the Father’s glory must be our everlasting home.

Beloved brethren! who have accompanied me thus far in these meditations on the image of our Lord, and the Christ-like life in which it is to be reflected, the time is now come for us to part let us do so with the word, “WE SHALL BE LIKE HIM, for we shall see Him as He is. He who hath this hope in Him purifieth Himself, EVEN AS He is pure.” LIKE CHRIST! let us pray for each other, and for all God’s children, that in ever-growing measure this may be the one aim of our faith, the one desire of our heart, the one joy of our life. Oh, what will it be when we meet in the glory, when we see Him as He is, and see each other all like Him!

Ever blessed and most glorious God I what thanks shall we render Thee for the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, and for the light of Thy glory which shines upon us in Him! And what thanks shall we render Thee, that in Jesus we have seen the image not only of Thine, but of our glory, the pledge of what we are to be with Thee through eternity!

O God! forgive us, forgive us for Jesus’ blood’s sake, that we have so little believed this, that we have so little lived this And we beseech Thee that Thou wouldst reveal to all who have had fellowship with each other in these meditations, what THE GLORY is in which they are to live eternally, in which they can be living, even now, as they glorify Thee. O Father! awaken us and all Thy children to see and feel what Thy purpose with us is. We are indeed to spend eternity in Thy glory: Thy glory is to be around us, and on us, and in us; we are to be like Thy Son in His glory. Father! we beseech Thee, oh visit Thy Church! Let Thy Holy Spirit, the Spirit of glory, work mightily in her; and let this be her one desire, the one mark by which she is known: the glory of God resting upon her.

Our Father! grant it for Jesus’ sake. Amen

“Let as make man IN OUR IMAGE; AFTER OUR LIKENESS:” in these words of the Council of Creation, with which the Bible history of man opens, we have the revelation of the Eternal purpose to which man owes his existence, of the glorious eternal future to which he is destined. God proposes to make a GODLIKE CREATURE, a being who shall be His very image and likeness, the visible manifestation of the glory of the Invisible One.

To have a being, at once created and yet Godlike, was indeed a task worthy of Infinite Wisdom. It is the nature and glory of God that He is absolutely independent of all else, having life in Himself, owing His existence to none but Himself alone. If man is to be Godlike, he must bear His image and likeness in this too, that he must become what he is to be, of his own free choice; he must make himself. It is the nature and glory of the creature to be dependent, to owe everything to the Blessed Creator. How can the contradiction be reconciled?—a being at once dependent and yet self-determined, created and yet Godlike. In man the mystery is solved. As a creature God gives him life, but endows him with the wonderful power of a free will; it is only in the process of a personal and voluntary appropriation that anything so high and holy as likeness to God can really become his very own.

When sin entered, and man fell from his high destiny, God did not give up His purpose. Of His revelation in Israel the central thought was: “Be ye holy, as I am holy.” Likeness to God in that which constitutes His highest perfection is to be Israel’s hope. Redemption had no higher ideal than Creation had revealed; it could only take up and work out the Eternal purpose.

It was with this in view that the Father sent to the earth the Son who was the express Image of His person. In Him the God-likeness to which we had been created, and which we had personally to appropriate and make our own, was revealed in human form: He came to show to us at once the Image of God and our own image. In looking upon Him, the desire after our long-lost likeness to God was to be awakened, and that hope and faith begotten which gave us courage to yield ourselves to be renewed after that Image. To accomplish this, there was a twofold work He had to do. The one was to reveal in His life the likeness of God, so that we might know what a life in that likeness was, and understand what it was we had to expect and accept from Him as our Redeemer. When He had done this, and shown us the likeness of the life of God in human form, He died that He might win for us, and impart to us, His own life as the life of the likeness of God, that in its power we might live in the likeness of what we had seen in Him. And when He ascended to heaven, it was to give us in the Holy Spirit the power of that life He had first set before us and then won to impart to us.

It is easy to we how dose the connection is between these two parts of the work of our Lord, and how the one depends upon the other. For what as our Example He had in His life revealed, He as our Redeemer by His death purchased the power. His earthly life showed the path, His heavenly life gives the power, in which we are to walk. What God hath joined together no man may separate. Whoever does not stand in the full faith of the Redemption, has not the strength to follow the Example. And whoever does not seek conformity to the Image as the great object of the Redemption, cannot fully enter into its power. Christ lived on earth that He might show forth the image of God in His life: He lives in heaven that we may show forth the image of God in our lives.

The Church of Christ has not always maintained the due relation of these two truths. In the Catholic Church the former of the two was placed in the foreground, and the following of Christ’s example pressed with great earnestness. As the fruit of this, she can point to no small number of saints who, notwithstanding many errors, with admirable devotion sought literally and entirely to bear the Master’s image. But to the great loss of earnest souls, the other half of the truth was neglected, that only they who in the power of Christ’s death receive His life within them, are able to imitate His life as set before them.

The Protestant Churches owe their origin to the revival of the second truth. The truth of God’s pardoning and quickening grace took its true place to the great comfort and joy of thousands of anxious souls. And yet here the danger of one-sidedness was not entirely avoided. The doctrine that Christ lived on earth, not only to die for our redemption, but to show us how we were to live, did not receive sufficient prominence. While no orthodox Church will deny that Christ is our Example, the absolute necessity of following the example of His life is not preached with the same distinctness as that of trusting the atonement of His death. Great pains are taken, and that most justly, to lead men to accept the merits of His death. As great pains are not taken, and this is what is not right to lead men to accept the imitation of His life as the one mark and test of true discipleship.

It is hardly necessary to point out what influence the mode of presenting this truth will exercise in the life of the Church. If atonement and pardon be everything, and the life in His likeness something secondary, that is to follow as a matter of course, the chief attention will be directed to the former. Pardon an peace will be the great objects of desire; with these attained, there will be a tendency to rest content. If, on the other hand, conformity to the image of God’s Son be the chief object, and the atonement the means to secure this end, as the fulfilment of God’s purpose in creation, then in all the preaching of repentance and pardon, the true aim will ever be kept in the foreground; faith in Jesus and conformity to character will be regarded as inseparable. Such a Church will produce real followers of the Lord.

In this respect the Protestant Churches need still to go on unto perfection. Then only will the Church put on her beautiful garments, and truly shine in the light of God’s glory, when these two truths are held in that wondrous unity in which they appear in the life of Christ Himself. In all He suffered for us, He left us an example that we should follow in His footsteps. As the banner of the cross is lifted high, the atonement of the cross and the fellowship of the cross must equally be preached as the condition of true discipleship.

It is remarkable how distinctly this comes out in the teaching of the blessed Master himself. In fact, in speaking of the cross, He gives its fellowship more prominence than its atonement. How often He told the disciples that they must bear it with Him and like Him; only thus could they be disciples, and share in the blessings His crossbearing was to win. When Peter rebuked Him as He spoke of His being crucified, He did not argue as to the need of the cross in the salvation of men, but simply insisted on its being borne, because to Him as to us the death of self is the only path to the life of God. The disciple must be as the Master. He spoke of it as the instrument of self-sacrifice, the mark and the means of giving up our own life to the death, the only path for the entrance upon the new Divine life He came to bring. It is not only I who must die, He said, but you too; the cross, the spirit of daily self-sacrifice, is to be the badge of your allegiance to me. How well Peter learnt the lesson we see in his Epistle, Both the remarkable passages in which he speaks of the Saviour suffering for us—(“Christ suffered for us; who bare our sins upon the tree;” “He suffered, the just for the unjust”)—are brought in almost incidentally in connection with our suffering like Him. He tells us that as we gaze upon the Crucified One, we are not only to think of the cross as the path in which Christ found His way to glory, but as that in which each of us is to follow Him.

The same thought comes out with great prominence in the writing of the Apostle Paul. To take one Epistle, that to the Galatians; we find four passages in which the power of the cross is set forth. In one we have one of the most striking expressions of the blessed truth of substitution and atonement: “Being made a curse for us, as it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.” This is indeed one of the foundation-stones on which the faith of the Church and the Christian rests. But a house needs more than foundation-stones. And so we find that no less than three times in the Epistle the fellowship of the cross, as a personal experience, is spoken of as the secret of the Christian life. “I have been crucified with Christ.” “They that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its affections and lusts.” “God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.” That Christ bore the cross for us is not all; it is but the beginning of His work. It does but open the way to the full exhibition of what the cross can do as we are taken up into a lifelong, fellowship with Him the Crucified One, and in our daily life we experience and prove what it is to be crucified to the world. And yet how many earnest and eloquent sermons have been preached on glorying in the cross of Christ, in which Christ’s dying on the cross for us has been expounded, but our dying with Him, in which Paul so gloried, has been forgotten!

The Church does indeed need to have this second truth sounded out as clearly as the first. Christians need to understand that bearing the cross does not in the first place refer to the trials which we call crosses, but to that daily giving up of life, of dying to self, which must mark us as much as it did Jesus, which we need in times of prosperity almost more than in adversity, and without which the fulness of the blessing of the cross cannot be disclosed to us. It is the cross, not only as exhibited on Calvary, but as gloried in on account of its crucifying us, its spirit breathing through all our life and actions, that will be to the Christian and the Church as it was to Christ, the path to victory and to glory, the power of God for the salvation of men.

The Redemption of the cross consists of two parts—Christ bearing the cross, Christ’s crucifixion for us, as our atonement, the opening up of the way of life; our crucifixion, our bearing the cross with Christ, as our sanctification, our walking in the path of conformity to His blessed likeness. Christ the Surety and Christ the Example must equally be preached.

But it will not be sufficient that these two truths be set forth as separate doctrines; they can exercise their full power only as their inner unity is found in the deeper truth of Christ our Head. As we see how union with the Lord Jesus is the root in which the power of both the Surety and the Example has its life, and how the one Saviour makes us partakers both of the atonement and the fellowship of His cross, we shall understand how wonderful their harmony is, and how indispensable both are to the welfare of the Church. We shall see that as it is Jesus who opened up the way to heaven as much by the footsteps He left us to tread in as by the atonement He gave us to trust in, so it is the same Jesus who gives us pardon through His blood, and conformity to Himself through His Spirit. And we shall understand how for both faith is the only possible path. The life-power of this atonement comes through faith alone; the life-power of the example no less so. Our Evangelical Protestantism cannot fulfil its mission until the grand central truth of salvation by faith alone has been fully applied, not only to justification, but to sanctification too, that is, to the conformity to the likeness of Jesus.

The preacher who desires in this matter to lead his people in the path of entire conformity to the Saviour’s likeness, will find a very wide field indeed opened up to him. The Christ-like life is like a tree, in which we distinguish the fruit, the root, and the stem that connects the two. As in individual effort, so in the public ministry, THE FRUIT will probably first attract attention. The words of Christ, “Do ye even as I have done,” and the frequent exhortations in the Epistles to love, and forgive, and forbear, even as Christ did, lead first to a comparison of the actual life of Christians with His, and to the unfolding and setting up of that only rule and standard of conduct which the Saviour’s example is meant to supply. The need will be awakened of taking time and looking distinctly at each of the traits of that wonderful Portrait, so that some clear and exact impressions be obtained from it of what God actually would have us be. Believers must be brought to feel that the life of Christ is in very deed the law of their life, and that complete conformity to His example is what God expects of them. There may be a difference in measure between the sun shining in the heavens and a lamp lighting our home here on earth; still the light is the same in its nature, and in its little sphere the lamp may be doing its work as beautifully as “the sun itself”. The conscience of the Church must be educated to understand that the humility and self-denial of Jesus, His entire devotion to His Father’s work and will, His ready obedience, His self-sacrificing love and kindly beneficence, are nothing more than what each believer is to consider it his simple duty as well as his privilege to exhibit too. There is not, as so many think, one standard for Christ and another for His people. No; as branches of the vine, as members of the body, as partakers of the same spirit, we may and therefore must bear the image of the Elder Brother.

The great reason why this conformity to Jesus is so little seen, and in fact so little sought after among a large majority of Christians, is undoubtedly to be found in erroneous views as to our impotence and what we may expect Divine grace to work in us. Men have such strong faith in the power of sin, and so little faith in the power of grace, that they at once dismiss the thought of our being expected to be just as loving, and just as forgiving, and just as devoted to the Father’s glory as Jesus was, as an ideal far beyond our reach; beautiful indeed, but never to be realized. God cannot expect us to be or do what is so entirely beyond our power. They confidently point to their own failure in earnest attempts to curb temper and to live wholly for God, as the proof that the thing cannot be.

It is only by the persistent preaching of Christ our Example, in all the fulness and glory of this blessed truth, that such unbelief can be overcome. Believers must be taught that God does not reap where He has not sown, that the fruit and THE ROOT are in perfect harmony. God expects us to strive to speak and think and act exactly like Christ, because the life that is in us is exactly, the same as that which was in Him. We have a life like His within us; what more natural than that the outward life should be like His too? Christ living in us is the root and strength of Christ’s acting and speaking through us, shining out from us so as to be seen by the world.

It is specially the preaching of Christ our Example, to be received by faith alone, that will be needed to lead God’s people on to what their Lord would have them be. The prevailing idea is that we have to believe in Jesus as our Atonement and our Saviour, and then, under the influence of the strong motives of gratitude and consistency, to strive to imitate His example. But motives cannot supply the strength; the sense of impotence remains; we are brought again under the law: we ought to, but cannot. These souls must be taught what it means to believe in Christ their Example. That is, to claim by faith His Example, His Holy Life, as part of the salvation He has prepared for them. They must be taught to believe that this Example is not a something, not even a some one outside of them, but the living Lord Himself, their very Life, who will work in them what He first gave them to see in His earthly life. They must learn to believe that if they will submit themselves to Him, He will manifest Himself in them and their life-walk in a way passing all their thoughts; to believe that the Example of Jesus and the conformity to Him is a part of that Eternal Life which came down from heaven, and is freely given to every one that believeth. It is because we are one with Christ, and abide in Him, because we have in us the same Divine life He had, that we are expected to walk like Him.

The full insight into this truth, and the final acceptance of it, is no easy matter. Christians have become so accustomed to a life of continual stumbling and unfaithfulness, that the very thought of their being able with at least such a measure of resemblance as the world must recognise, to show forth the likeness of Christ, has become stranre to them. The preaching that will conquer their unbelief, and lead God’s people to victory, must be ted by a joyous and triumphant faith. For it is only to faith, a faith larger and deeper than Christians ordinarily think needful for salvation, that the power of Christ’s example taking possession of the whole life will be given. But when Christ in His fulness, Christ as the Law and the Life of the believer, is preached, this deeper faith, penetrating, to the very root of our oneness of life with Him, will come, and with it the power to manifest that life.

The growth of this faith may in different cases vary much. To some it may come in the course of quiet persevering waiting upon God. To others it may come as a sudden revelation, after seasons of effort, of struggling and failure; just one full sight of what Jesus as the Example really is, Himself being and giving all He claims. To some it may come in solitude where there is none to help but the living God Himself alone. To others it will be given, as it has been so often, in the communion of the saints, where amid the enthusiasm and love which the fellowship of the Spirit creates, hearts are melted, decision is strengthened, and faith is stirred to grasp what Jesus offers when He reveals and gives Himself to make us like Himself. But, in whatever way it come, it will come when Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit is preached as God’s revelation of what His children are to be. And believers will be led, in the deep consciousness of utter sinfulness and impotence, to yield themselves and their life as never before into the hands of an Almighty Saviour, and to realize in their experience the beautiful harmony between the apparently contradictory words: “In me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing;” and, “I can do all things through Christ, who strengtheneth me.”

But root and fruit are ever connected by a STEM, with its branches and leaves. In the life of Christ this was so too. The connection between His hidden life rooted in God, and that life manifesting itself in the fruit of holy words and works, was maintained by His life of conscious and continual personal fellowship with the Father. In His waiting on the Father, to see and hear what He had to make known, in His yielding Himself to the leadings of the Spirit, in His submission to the teachings of the Word which He came to fulfil, in His watching unto prayer, and in His whole life of dependence and faith, Christ became our Example. He had so truly been made like unto us in all things, become one with us in the weakness of the flesh, that it was only thus that the life of the Father could be kept flowing freely into Him and manifesting itself in the works He did. And just so it will be with us. Our union to Jesus, and His life in us, will most certainly secure a life like His. This not, however, in the way of an absolute necessity, as a blind force in nature works out its end; but in the way of an intelligent, willing, loving cooperations continual coming and receiving from Him in the surrender of faith and prayer, a continual appropriating and exercising of what we receive in watchful obedience and earnest effort, a continual working because we know He works in us. The faith in the vitality and the energy of the life in which we are eternally rooted win not lead to sloth or carelessness, but, as with Christ, rouse our energies to their highest power. It is the faith in the glorious possibilities that open up to us in Christ our life, that will lead to the cultivation of all that constitutes true personal fellowship and waiting upon God.

It is in these three points of similarity that the Christ-like life must be known; our life like Christ’s hidden in God, maintained like His in fellowship with God, will in its external manifestation be like His too, a life for God. As believers rise to apprehend the truth, we are indeed like Christ in the life we have in God through Him; we can be like Christ in the keeping up and strengthening of that life in fellowship with God; we shall be like Christ in the fruits which such a life must bear; the name of followers of Christ, the imitation of Christ, will not be a profession but a reality, and the world will know that the Father has indeed loved us as He loved the Son.

I venture to suggest to all ministers and Christians who may read this, the inquiry whether, in the teaching and the thought of the Church, we have sufficiently lifted up Christ as the Divine Model and Pattern, in likeness to whom alone we can be restored to the Image of God in which we were created. The more clearly the teachers of the Church realize the eternal ground on which a truth rests, its essential importance to other truths for securing their complete and healthy development, and the share it has in leading into the full enjoyment of that wonderful salvation God has prepared for us, the better will they be able to guide God’s people into the blessed possession of that glorious life of high privilege and holy practice which will prepare them for becoming such a blessing to the world as God meant them to be. It is the one thing that the world needs in these latter daysmen and women of Christ-like lives, who prove that they are in the world as He was in the world, that the one object of their existence is nothing other than what was Christ’s object—the glorifying of the Father and the saving of men.

One word more. Let us above all beware lest in the preaching and seeking of Christ-likeness that secret but deadly selfishness creeps in, which leads men to seek it for the sake of getting for themselves as much as is to be bad, and because they would fain be as eminent in grace and as high in the favour of God as may be. God is love: the image of God is God-like love. When Jesus said to His disciples: “Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect,” He told them that perfection was loving and blessing the unworthy. His very names tell us that all the other traits of Christ-likeness must be subordinate to this one: seeking the will and glory of God in loving and saving men. He is Christ the Anointed: the Lord hath anointed Him—for whom I for the broken—hearted and the captive; for them that are bound and them that mourn. He is Jesus; living and dying to save the lost. There may be a great deal of Christian work with little of true holiness or of the spirit of Christ. But there can be no large measure of real Christ-like holiness without a distinct giving up oneself to make the salvation of ers for the glory of God the object of our life. He gave HIMSELF FOR US, that He might claim US FOR HIMSELF, a peculiar people, zealous of good works. HIMSELF FOR US, and US FOR HIMSELF: an entire exchange, a perfect union, a complete identity in interest and purpose. HIMSELF FOR US as Saviour, US FOR HIMSELF still as Saviour; like Him and for Him to continue on earth the work He began. Whether we preach the Christ-like life in its deep inner springs, where it has its origin in our oneness with Him in God, or in its growth and maintenance by a life of faith and prayer, of dependence and fellowship with the Father, or in its fruits of humility and holiness and love, let us ever keep this in the foreground. The one chief mark and glory of the Christ is that He lived and died and lives again for this one thing alone: THE WILL AND THE GLORY OF THE GOD OF LOVE IN THE SALVATION OF SINNERS. And to be Christ-like means simply this: to seek the life and favour and Spirit of God only, that we may be entirely given up to to same object: THE WILL AND THE GLORY OF THE GOD OF LOVE IN THE SALVATION OF SINNERS.

THE END.