We have all seen people who were never appreciated.  Those who were near to them by blood and kindred always thought them strange and visionary.  What a sad thing if Christ’s bride does not appreciate His aims for the world, His sorrow over perishing souls, His heart-ache over dying men!  “The fellowship of His sufferings”—­ what can it mean?  It means that we mourn over the sin in the world which makes Christ weep; sob over the evil that makes Him hang His fair head and groan.  It means that ever and always we shall look at things from the Christ standpoint.

The sheep and the shepherd.

“My sheep know [recognize] my voice,” says the Shepherd.  He states the principle that “sheep” always hear when He speaks.  “Lambs” may be at times mistaken as to the voices that cry in the soul, but Christians whose experience entitles them to the designation, “sheep,” do not err as to the speaker.  Watch a good shepherd collect his flock at evening.  Every sheep knows him.  It is getting dark, and the quiet animals are busily feeding in the fragrant clover, but the tender cadences of the voice of their guide and protector pierce their delicate ears and enter their gentle hearts, and the white flock comes bounding toward the shepherd.  A sportsman in golf suit and plaid cap and with a fine baritone voice may call earnestly, but “a stranger will they not follow.”  The shepherd holds the key to their confidence, and no one else can unlock the door to their love.

Christ has the key.

Christ has the key to our hearts.  He stands in the dusk of evening in the falling dew and sends His sweet voice out across the billowing fields of clover, and all His sheep leap toward “the Good Shepherd.”

The cow and the sunset.

Sanctification brings out the power of appreciation in the soul.  What God does for you fills your soul with gratitude, and you can get blessed any time of day or night by simply reflecting on the mercies and lovingkindnesses of the Lord.  The natural human heart does not appreciate God, and sees nothing especially lovely in Him.  A cow and the man who owns the cow may stand side by side and look at the same sunset.  The cow sees a big splotch of crimson and gold; the other sees one of God’s sky-paintings, and is inspired to holy living and self-denial and fidelity to the Master.  You must have a “sunset nature” to appreciate a sunset, and you must be sanctified wholly to see in Christ a beauty and loveliness which no Murillo and no Raphael and no Del Sarto have yet put on canvas.

The lovely Christ.

O the lovely Christ!  How the heart aches to go to Him!  We get so homesick for Jesus.  People are so dull and uninteresting and vapid and stupid—­so precisely like ourselves—­we get weary of the world and its emptiness, and yearn to fly away to be with the spotless Christ and live in that