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A Christlike Character, February 18
For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.
Colossians 3:3
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Jesus is the perfect pattern. Instead of trying to please self and have
our own way, let us seek to reflect His image. He was kind and courteous,
compassionate and tender. Are we like Him in these respects? Do we seek to
make our lives fragrant with good works? What we need is the simplicity of
Christ. I fear that in many cases a hard, unfeeling spirit, that is entirely unlike
that of the divine Pattern, has taken possession of the heart. This cast-iron
principle, which has been cherished by so many, and which has even been
thought a virtue, must all be removed, that we may love one another as Christ
has loved us.
It is not enough that we merely profess the faith; something more than
a nominal assent is wanted. There must be a real knowledge, a genuine
experience in the principles of the truth as it is in Jesus. The Holy Spirit
must work within, bringing these principles into the strong light of distinct
consciousness, that we may know their power and make them a living reality.
The mind must yield obedience to the royal law of liberty, the law which the
Spirit of God impresses upon the heart, and makes plain to the understanding.
The expulsion of sin must be the act of the soul itself, in calling into exercise
its noblest powers. The only freedom a finite will can enjoy consists in
coming into harmony with the will of God, complying with the conditions
that make man a partaker of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption
that is in the world through lust....
The human character is depraved, deformed by sin, and terribly unlike that
of the first man as he came from the hands of the Creator. Jesus proposes to
take man’s deformity and sin, and to give him, in return, beauty and excellence
in his own character. He engages to renovate the soul through the truth. Error
cannot do this work of regeneration; therefore we must have spiritual eyesight
to discern between truth and falsehood, that we fall not into the snare of the
enemy.—
The Review and Herald, November 24, 1885
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