And, because, in this unity of purpose with the Father, the Christ of Glory stooped to the infancy and childhood of Nazareth, yielding Himself completely to the bonds and limits inseparable from the life and conditions of a little child, and thinking no humiliation of our nature too deep for His love to tread, _so He will condescend to the lowest depths of weakness and want revealed in your heart and life_. He will meet you where you are. He will deal with you just where you are weakest and worst. This is indeed the key-note of all that God has to show you. It is your own link in the long chain of patient and ever-new revelations of God to man. For what is the history of man, what is the story the Bible has to tell, what is the testimony of all time, but that God has ever been speaking to man, appearing to man, opening now his eyes, and now his understanding, and now his heart, and making an everlastingly new revelation to the soul that God in him is his sole hope of glory. And His Christmas-message to-day is still the same. To you, if you are willing, Christ will come as really, as sensibly, as wonderfully--nay, a thousand times more so--as He came to Mary and to Bethlehem. In truth, a second coming; but in many and wonderful ways like unto the first. I. The childhood of Jesus was attended by remarkable recognitions of His Divinity. At His birth, at His dedication, in Herod's instant resolve to kill Him, in the Temple with the fathers, by many clear tokens men confessed and acknowledged that He was the Son of God. If He is being formed in you there will be equally definite and not very dissimilar signs of recognition. First, before all else, you will know, with Mary, that the new life entrusted to you is Divine; that God has entered into your heart to make all things new. It is just the absence of this assurance which stamps so much of the Christianity of the present day as--in effect--a religion without God. Its professors have no certainty. They seek, but they do not find; they ask, but they do not receive; they have no sure foundation in the sanction of their own consciousness to the indwelling Person; they have no revelation; they have, in short, no God. How far--even as the east is from the west--is this from the glorious confidence with which Mary sang, and in which you can join, if, indeed, your Christ is come: "My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced _in God my Saviour_." Salvation is of the Lord, and so is the assurance of it. Where there is the life of God, there will be His witness, even in the heart of the weakest and slowest servant of all His household. If you are not clear about this first evidence of your Lord's coming, let me counsel you that there is something wrong. _If Christ be formed in you, you will assuredly know it beyond the power of men or devils to make you doubt_.