'That ye may be the sons of light.'
Faith and obedience turn a man into the likeness of that in which he
trusts. If we trust Jesus we open our hearts to Him; and if we open our
hearts to Him He will come in. If you are in a darkened room, what have
you to do in order to have it filled with glad sunshine? Open the
shutters and pull up the blinds, and the light will do all the rest. If
you trust the light, it will rush in and fill every crevice and cranny
of your hearts. Faith and obedience will mould us, by their natural
effect, into the resemblance of that on which we lean. As one of the
old German mystics said, 'What thou lovest, that thou dost become.' And
it is blessedly true. The same principle makes Christians like Christ,
and makes idolaters like their gods. 'They that make them are like unto
them; so is every one that trusteth in them,' says one of the Psalms.
'They followed after vanity and are become vain,' says the chronicler
of Israel's defections. 'We with unveiled faces beholding'—or
mirroring—'the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image.'
Trust the light and you become 'sons of the light.'
And so, dear friends, all of us may hope that by degrees, as the reward
of faith and of walking, we still may bear the image of the heavenly,
even here on earth. While as yet we only believe in the light, we may
participate in its transforming power, like some far-off planet on the
utmost bounds of some solar system, that receives faint and small
supplies of light and warmth, through a thick atmosphere of vapour, and
across immeasurable spaces. But we have the assurance that we shall be
carried nearer our centre, and then, like the planets that are closer
to the sun than our earth is, we shall feel the fuller power of the
heat, and be saturated with the glory of the light. 'We shall see Him
as He is'; and then we too 'shall blaze forth like the sun in the
kingdom of our Father.'