God’s Way of Making Us

God’s usual way of transforming us into the divine beauty, is through friendship with Jesus Christ. Even in close and continued human association life becomes like life. If two friends live together in love, year after year, they grow alike. Even in most casual fellowship, we get from others and give to others. Every brief contact leaves its mark. “I am part of all I ever met,” says a thoughtful writer. When association is long maintained, this influence of life upon life is broadened and deepened.

Friendship with Christ is the essential thing in cultivating godly character. Not only is He our teacher—it is not enough that He shall set the lessons for us; but He brings down the divine life and imparts it to us. John lay upon the Master’s bosom, and in this close friendship grew into the Master’s likeness. It is thus that we all must live, if we would get the beauty of Christ upon our lives. We never shall grow like Him, if we stay habitually far away from Him. If a Christian lives distant from Christ, he soon grows earthly and loses the spiritual loveliness out of his life. But if he abides near his Master, in adoring love, in close companionship, then the glory of Christ enters his life and transforms him. Looking at Christ, intently, with devout, reverent heart, beholding Him not merely in a brief glance now and then, but continuously, the brightness of that blessed face prints itself upon his life!

One of Hawthorne’s short stories tells of the great Stone Face. The rocks on a mountain were so grouped that, looked at from a certain point, there was the appearance of a human face. There was a tradition among the people that someday there would come to the valley a man with the same gracious features which this stone face bore, a man who would have the noble character and personality represented by these features.

A boy, Ernest, listened one evening to this tradition from his mother’s lips, and the tradition sank into the boy’s heart and stayed there. He would look up at the noble stone face and wonder when the man would come who should fulfill the old prophecy. Three times a man came who the people thought might be the man of the stone face, but each time they were disappointed. Through days and years, while the boy grew to manhood, and the man into old age, he continued to look at the stone face, pondering its noble beauty and unconsciously growing himself all the while into the beauty which his soul had idealized in that image on the mountain. He grew into wisdom and strength, and became a friend of the people and their teacher. By and by a poet, listening one day to Ernest’s words as he spoke to his neighbors, discovered the resemblance and exclaimed, “Why, Ernest himself is like the great stone face!” Looking at that benign face all the years, pondering its features, he had been transformed into its image.

Those who look intently at the face of Christ,

entering into the spirit of His life,
walking in daily fellowship with Him,
bearing His cross,
loving Him and doing His will—

take His image upon their own lives, grow like Him, until neighbors and friends begin to see the resemblance and say, “Why, they are like Jesus Christ!”