While in the order of our experience Jesus comes first, as we follow Him, He makes Himself always second.  He points us from Himself to the Father, like Himself and greater; “My Father is greater than I.”  There is a remoteness, as well as a nearness, in God; it is His “greaterness” which gives worth to His likeness.  To use a philosophical phrase, only the transcendent God can be truly immanent.  We prize Immanuel—­God with us, because through Him we climb to God above us.  Jesus is the Way; but no one wishes to remain forever en route; he arrives; and home is the Father.  Jesus is the image of the invisible God; but the image on the retina of our eye is not something on which we dwell; we see through it the person with whom we are face to face.  We know God our Father in His Son.  Every aspect of Jesus’ character unveils for us an aspect of the character of the Lord of heaven and earth.  Every experience through which Jesus passed in His life with men suggests to us an experience through which our Father is passing with us His children.  The cross on Calvary is a picture of the age-long and present sacrifice of our God as He suffers with and for us.  The open grave is for us the symbol of His unconquerable love, stronger than the world and sin and death.  God’s embodiment of Himself in this Son, made in all points like ourselves, attests the essential kinship between Him and us—­God’s humanity and our potential divinity.

Do we know God in the Spirit?  His incarnation in Jesus evidences His “incarnability,” and His eagerness to have His fulness dwell in every son who will receive Him.  To know God in the Spirit is so to follow Jesus that we share His sonship with the Father and have Him abiding in us, working through us His works, manifesting Himself in our mortal lives.

Our Father is the great public Spirit of the universe, the most responsible and responsive Being in existence.  The needs of all are claims on His service, their sins are burdens of guilt on His conscience, their joys and woes enlist His sympathy.  He has His life in the lives of His children.  The Spirit is God’s Life in men, God living in them.  To possess His will to serve, His sense of obligation, His interest and compassion, is to have the Holy Spirit dwelling and regnant in us.  It was so that the Father’s Spirit possessed Jesus and made His abode in Him; and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and of the Son in the Christian community.

And what a difference it makes whether we feel that the responsibilities our consciences force us to assume, the sympathies in which our hearts go out, the interests we are impelled to take, the resolves and longings and purposes within us, are just our own, or are God’s inspirations!  If they are simply ours, who knows what will come of them?  If they are His, we can yield to them assured that it is God who worketh in us to will and to do of His good pleasure.