love God’s holy character?  If so, you are a new creature, and are ready for the vision of God, face to face.  For you, to know God even as you are known by Him will not be a terror, but a glory and a joy.  You are in sympathy with Him.  You have been reconciled to Him by the blood of atonement, and brought into harmony with Him by the washing of regeneration.  For you, as a believer in Christ, and a new man in Christ Jesus, all is well.  The more you see of God, the more you desire to see of Him; and the more you know of Him, the more you long to know.

But if this is not your experience, then all is ill with you.  We say experience.  You must feel in this manner toward God, or you cannot endure the vision which is surely to break upon you after death.  You must love this holiness without which no man can see the Lord.  You may approve of it, you may praise it in other men, but if there is no affectionate going out of your own heart toward, the holy God, you are not in right relations to Him.  You have the carnal mind, and that is enmity, and enmity is misery.

Look these facts in the eye, and act accordingly.  “Make the tree good, and his fruit good,” says Christ.  Begin at the beginning.  Aim at nothing less than a change of disposition and affections.  Ask for nothing less, seek for nothing less.  If you become inwardly holy as God is holy; if you become a friend of God, reconciled to Him by the blood of Christ; then your nature will be like God’s nature, your character like God’s character.  Then, when you shall know God even as you are known by Him, and shall see Him as He is, the knowledge and the vision will be everlasting joy.

[Footnote 1: 

  “She has seen the mystery hid,
  Under Egypt’s pyramid;
  By those eyelids pale and close,
  Now she knows what Rhamses knows.” 
  ELIZABETH BROWNING:  On the Death of a Child.]

THE FUTURE STATE A SELF-CONSCIOUS STATE.

1 COR. xiii. 12.—­“Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

In the preceding discourse, we found in these words the principal characteristic of our future existence.  The world beyond the tomb is a world of clear and conscious knowledge.  When, at death, I shall leave this region of time and sense and enter eternity, my knowledge, the apostle Paul tells me instead of being diminished or extinguished by the dissolution, of the body, will not only be continued to me, but will be even greater and clearer than before.  He assures me that the kind and style of my cognition will be like that of God himself.  I am to know as I am known.  My intelligence will coincide with that of Deity.