Yes, it is so indeed. All our interests in life, the highest and the
lowest alike, abandoned, merged, forgotten in God's love, will come
back to us with a distinctness, an intensity, a force, unknown and
unsuspected before. Each several outline and each particular hue will
stand out in the light of His grace. Thus we are bidden to lose our
souls only that we may find them again; we are charged to give up
houses, and brethren, and sisters, and father, and mother, and wife,
and children, and lands--all that is lovely and precious in our
eyes--to give up all to God, only that we may receive them back from
Him a hundredfold, even now in this present time. Our affections, our
friendships, our hopes, our business and our pleasure, our
intellectual pursuits and our artistic tastes--all our cherished
opportunities and all our fondest aims must be brought into the
sanctuary and bathed in the glory of His Presence, that we may take
them to us again, baptized and regenerate, purer, higher, more real,
more abiding far than before.
III. And thus the vision of love melts into the vision of glory. So we
reach the third and final stage in our progress. This is the crowning
promise of the Apocalyptic vision, "They shall see His face." The
vision is only inchoate now; we catch only glimpses at rare intervals,
revealed in the lives of God's saints and heroes, revealed above all
in the record of the written Word and in the Incarnation of the Divine
Son. But then no veil of the flesh shall dim the vision; no
imperfection of the mirror shall blur the image; for we shall see Him
face to face--shall see Him as He is--the perfect truth, the perfect
righteousness, the perfect purity, the perfect love, the perfect
light. And we shall gaze with unblenching eye, and our visage shall be
changed. Not now with transient gleams of radiance, as on the lawgiver
of old, shall the light be reflected from us; but resting upon us with
its own ineffable glory, the awful effluence--
"Shall flood our being round, and take our lives
Into itself."
Of this final goal of our aspirations--of this crowning mystery of our
being--the mind is helpless to conceive, and the tongue refuses to
tell. Silent contemplation, and wondering awe, and fervent
thanksgiving alone befit the theme. Even the inspired lips of an
Apostle are hushed before it. "Beloved, now are we the sons of God,
and it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that, when He
shall appear, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is"--we
shall see Him as He is.
THE HEAVENLY TEACHER.[7]
"He shall take of Mine, and shall show it unto you."--ST. JOHN xvi.
15.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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