We cannot create that image
We choose to be transformed to His image, but we cannot create that image by our own morality or struggles after righteousness. We must be created anew in His likeness by His own Spirit, and stamped with His resemblance by His heavenly seal impressed directly upon our hearts from His hand. He thereby becomes to us our holiness, for Christ is made unto us our sanctification; we are made the righteousness of God in Him. We turn from the sin; choose to be holy; God fills our proffered hand with His own spotless righteousness.
Our faith is the filling of His Spirit and the imparting of the faith of God. We choose to trust and He makes that choice good by enabling us to believe and continue in the faith grounded and settled, and so living by the faith of the Son of God. Our love is but a purpose on our part, the power is His; for when we choose to love He multiplies that love within us and imparts to us His own Spirit and nature which is love. All our struggles will not work up one bit of genuine love to God, but He will breathe His own perfect love into any heart that chooses to make Him the one object of affection.
We cannot love our enemies but we can choose to love them, and God will make us to love them. Often we have known consecrated characters placed in circumstances where they were obliged to come in contact with uncongenial companions whom they could not love. Choosing, however, at His bidding to act in the spirit of love, God has so inbreathed His very heart, that without a struggle they could adjust themselves to this relationship and meet the uncongenial associate or enemy with quietness, tenderness and a holy desire for his highest good.
God manifested in us
The power to glorify God is nothing more nor less than simply to let God Himself be manifested in us and so glorify Himself; then others will see Him reflected through us.
Sanctification is thus God's own life in the spirit that is yielded up to Him to be His indwelling place and the instrument of His power and will. So also is it true of our spiritual senses of which we have spoken. They are sanctified when they become the organs of God's operation; when our spiritual eyes are opened by His touch; when our spiritual taste, and touch, and smell are made alive by His own quickening life within us.
Now, beloved, have you ever learned this wonderful secret of regenerated spirit and God's Spirit, the Guest and Occupant of that consecrated abode? Let me explain this somewhat lofty conception by a simple illustration.
Let a common leather case represent the body. Within it is a silver casket, which stands for the soul. We touch a spring and it opens and discloses and exquisite golden locket, which we shall consider as the symbol of the spirit or higher nature, and within that golden locket is a place all set with precious gems for a single picture.
Is it empty in your spirit, or is it filled with some other face, or is it dedicated to and occupied by your blessed Lord? Is it His shrine and His home and has He accepted it and made it the seat of His glorious abode and throne of His blessed kingdom of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit?
Are thee some who read these lines who have not yet even learned the meaning of their own spirit and do not know whether it has yet been quickened from the dead and prepared to be the seat of Christ's indwelling? All that they know of life consists in the physical organism, their mental faculties and their human affections. They have a keen, quick, human life, all aglow with emotion and mental activity, but the spirit sadly is so dead and cold that it has not even caught the grasp of these higher thoughts that we have been contemplating.
~A. B. Simpson~
(continued with # 13)
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