Look into any family, and what do you see?  You see the boy, not imitating consciously, but taking on, his father’s looks and attitudes and ways; and as the boy grows up these become his own looks and attitudes and ways.  He has reflected his father from one degree of proficiency unto another, from one intimacy, from one day’s observation of his father to another, until he is the image of the old man over again.

“Similarly,” says Paul, “live with Christ; learn to carry His image with you, learn to adore Him, learn to love Him, and infallibly, whether you will or not, by this simple method you will become, Christ over again; you will become conformed, as God means you to become conformed, to the image of His Son.”

This has been tested by the experience of thousands; and it has been found to be a true method.  Every one who spends but two minutes in the morning in the observation of Christ, every one who will be at the pains to let the image of Christ rise before him and to remember the purity, the unworldliness, the heavenliness, the godliness of Jesus Christ, that man is the better 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