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As Our Example Christ Is All And In All, January 21
In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
John 1:4
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The ethics inculcated by the gospel acknowledge no standard but the perfection
of God’s mind, God’s will. God requires from His creatures conformity to His
will. Imperfection of character is sin, and sin is the transgression of the law. All
righteous attributes of character dwell in God as a perfect, harmonious whole.
Everyone who receives Christ as his personal Saviour is privileged to possess
these attributes. This is the science of holiness.
How glorious are the possibilities set before the fallen race! Through His Son,
God has revealed the excellency to which man is capable of attaining. Through
the merits of Christ, man is lifted from his depraved state, purified, and made
more precious than the golden wedge of Ophir. It is possible for him to become a
companion of the angels in glory, and to reflect the image of Jesus Christ, shining
even in the bright splendor of the eternal throne. It is his privilege to have faith
that through the power of Christ he shall be made immortal. Yet how seldom he
realizes to what heights he could attain if he would allow God to direct his every
step!
God permits every human being to exercise his individuality. He desires no
one to submerge his mind in the mind of a fellow mortal. Those who desire to
be transformed in mind and character are not to look to men, but to the divine
Example. God gives the invitation, “Let
this mind
be in you, which was also in
Christ Jesus.” By conversion and transformation, men are to receive the mind of
Christ. Every one is to stand before God with an individual faith, an individual
experience, knowing for himself that Christ is formed within, the hope of glory.
For us to imitate the example of any man—even one whom we might regard as
nearly perfect in character—would be to put our trust in a defective human being,
one who is unable to impart a jot or tittle of perfection.
As our Example, we have One who is all and in all, the chiefest among ten
thousand, One whose excellency is beyond comparison. He graciously adapted
His life for universal imitation. United in Christ were wealth and poverty; majesty
and abasement; unlimited power and meekness and lowliness which in every soul
who receives Him will be reflected. In Him, through the qualities and powers of
the human mind, the wisdom of the greatest Teacher the world has ever known
was revealed.
Before the world, God is developing us as living witnesses to what men
and women may become through the grace of Christ.—
The Signs of the Times,
September 3, 1902
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