How to become like Christ | Page 3

for this exercise. And how utterly useless is it to offer any other
method of sanctification to thousands of our fellow-citizens. How can many of our
fellow-citizens secrete themselves for prayer? If you ask them to go and pray as you pray
in your comfortable home, if you ask them to read the Bible before they go out at five or
six o'clock in the morning, do you expect that your word will be followed? Why, the
thing is impossible. But ask a man to carry Christ with him in his mind, that is a thing he
can do; and if he does it once, if only once the man sees Christ before him, realises that
this living Person is with him, and remembers the character of Christ as it is written for us
in the Gospels, that man knows that he has made a step in advance, knows that he is the
better for it, knows that he does reflect, for a little, even though it be but for a little, the
very image of the Lord Jesus Christ; and other people know it also.
Now, if that is so, there are obviously three things that we must do. We must in the first
place, learn to associate with Christ. I say that even one reflection does something, but we
need to reflect Christ constantly, continually, if we are to become like Him. When you
pass away from before a mirror the reflection also .goes. In the case of Moses the
reflection stayed for a little, and that is perhaps a truer figure of what happens to the
Christian who sets Christ before him and reflects him. But very often as soon as Christ is

not consciously remembered you fall back to other remembrances and reflect other things.
You go out in the morning with your associates, and they carry you away; you have not
as yet sufficiently impressed upon yourself the image of Christ. Therefore we must learn
to carry Christ with us always, as a constant Companion. Some one may say that is
impossible. No one will say it is impossible who is living in absence from anyone he
loves. What happens when we are living separated from some one we love? This happens:
that his image is continually in our minds. At the most unexpected times that image rises,
and especially, if we are proposing to ourselves to do what that person would not approve.
At once his image rises to rebuke us and to hold us back. So that it is not only possible to
carry with us the image of Christ: it is absolutely certain that we shall carry that image
with us if only we give Him that love and reverence which is due from every human
being. Who has done for us what Christ has done? Who commands our reverence as He
does? If once He gets hold of our affection, it is impossible that He should not live
constantly in our hearts. And if we say that persons deeply immersed in business cannot
carry Christ with them thus, remember what He Himself says: "If any man love Me, he
will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and we will come unto him." So that
He is most present with the busiest and with those who strive as best they can to keep His
commandments.
But we must not only associate with Christ and make Him our constant company: we
must, in the second place, set ourselves square with Christ. You know that if you look
into a mirror obliquely, if a mirror is not set square with you, you do not see yourself, but
what is at the opposite angle, something that is pleasant or something that is disagreeable
to you; it matters not--you cannot see yourself. And unless we as mirrors set ourselves
perfectly square with Christ, we do not reflect Him, but perhaps things that are in His
sight monstrous. And, in point of fact, that is what happens with most of us, because it is
here that we are chiefly tried. All persons brought up within the Christian Church pay
some attention to Christ. We too well understand His excellence and we too well
understand the advantages of being Christian men not to pay some attention to Christ.
But that will not make us conform to His image. In order to be conformed to the image of
Christ we must be wholly His. Suppose you enter a studio where a sculptor is working,
will he hand you his hammer and chisel to finish the most difficult piece of his work or to
do any part of it? Assuredly not. It is his own idea that he is working out, and none but
his own hand can