And this character of Christ that is our ideal is not assumed by Him for the nonce.  He did not change His nature when He came to this earth; He did not put on this character to set us an example.  The things that He did, He did because it was His nature to do them.  He came to this world because His love would not let Him stay away from us.  It was His nature that brought Him here, and it is His nature to be what He is, and so his character is to become our nature; it is to be so wrought in us that we cannot give it up.  It is our eternal character, and therefore any amount of pains is worth spending on the achievement of it.

The second point of perfectness lies here.  You know that in painting a likeness or cutting out a bust one feature often may be almost finished while the rest are scarcely touched, but in standing before a mirror the whole comes out at once.  Now we often in the Christian life deal with ourselves as if we were painters and sculptors, not as if we were mirrors:  we hammer and chisel away at ourselves to bring out some resemblance to Christ in some particulars, thinking that we can do it piecemeal; we might as well try to feed up our body piecemeal; we might as well try to make our eye bright without giving our cheek colour and our hands strength.  The body is a whole, and we must feed the whole and nourish the whole if any one part of it is to be vigorous.

So it is with character.  The character is a whole, and you can only deal with your character as a whole.  What has resulted when we have tried the other process?  Sometimes we set ourselves to subdue a sin or cultivate a grace.  Well, candidly say what has come of this.  Judging from my own experience, I would say that this comes of it:  that in three or four days you forget what sin it was that you were trying to subdue.  The temptation is away, and the sin is not there, and you forget all about it.  That is the very snare of sin.  Or you become a little better in a point that you were trying to cultivate.  In that grace you are a shade improved.  But that only brings out more astoundingly your frightful shortcoming in other particulars.  Now, adopting Paul’s method, this happens:  Christ acts on our character just as a person acts upon a mirror.  The whole image is reflected at once.  How is it that society moulds a man?  How can you tell in what class in society a man has been brought up?  Not by one thing, not by his accent, not by his bearing, not by his conduct, but the whole man.  And why?  Because a man does not consciously imitate this or that feature of the society in which he is brought up, does not do it consciously at all; he is merely reflecting it as a mirror, and society acts on him as a whole, and makes him the man he is.  “Just so,” says Paul.  “Live with Christ, and He will make you the man that you are destined to be.”