Dear friends, surely this message—­’Behold and be like’—­ought to be very joyful and enlightening to many of us, who are wearied with painful struggles after isolated pieces of goodness, that elude our grasp.  You have been trying, and trying, and trying half your lifetime to cure faults and make yourselves better and stronger.  Try this other plan.  Let love draw you, instead of duty driving you.  Let fellowship with Christ elevate you, instead of seeking to struggle up the steeps on hands and knees.  Live in sight of your Lord, and catch His Spirit.  The man who travels with his face northwards has it grey and cold.  Let him turn to the warm south, where the midday sun dwells, and his face will glow with the brightness that he sees.  ‘Looking unto Jesus’ is the sovereign cure for all our ills and sins.  It is the one condition of running with patience ’the race that is set before us.’  Efforts after self-improvement which do not rest on it will not go deep enough, nor end in victory.  But from that gaze will flow into our lives a power which will at once reveal the true goal, and brace every sinew for the struggle to reach it.  Therefore, let us cease from self, and fix our eyes on our Saviour till His image imprints itself on our whole nature.

Such transformation, it must be remembered, comes gradually.  The language of the text regards it as a lifelong process.  ’We are changed’; that is a continuous operation.  ‘From glory to glory’; that is a course which has well-marked transitions and degrees.  Be not impatient if it be slow.  It will take a lifetime.  Do not fancy that it is finished with you.  Life is not long enough for it.  Do not be complacent over the partial transformation which you have felt.  There is but a fragment of the great image yet reproduced in your soul, a faint outline dimly traced, with many a feature wrongly drawn, with many a line still needed, before it can be called even approximately complete.  See to it that you neither turn away your gaze, nor relax your efforts till all that you have beheld in Him is repeated in you.

Likeness to Christ is the aim of all religion.  To it conversion is introductory; doctrines, devout emotion, worship and ceremonies, churches and organisations are valuable as auxiliary.  Let that wondrous issue of God’s mercy be the purpose of our lives, and the end as well as the test of all the things which we call our Christianity.  Prize and use them as helps towards it, and remember that they are helps only in proportion as they show us that Saviour, the image of whom is our perfection, the beholding of whom is our transformation.

III.  Notice, lastly, that the life of contemplation finally becomes a life of complete assimilation.