BEHOLDING KING JESUS IN HIS GLORIOUS BEAUTY!

There is one word in the Bible which in itself forms a complete library, and that word is Christ, the uncreated Word. And when the redeemed and regenerated child of God, brought from the Adam-darkness of a state of nature into a state of grace, is savingly acquainted with this divine Word, he is then made "wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus" [II Timothy 3:15]. And as the Lord the Spirit leads him on, in daily acts of faith, by living upon, walking with, and rejoicing in the glorious person and the finished salvation of the Lord Jesus Christ, he is brought also to what the apostle calls, "all riches of the full assurance of understanding, to the acknowledgment of the mystery of God and of the Father and of Christ in Whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge" [Colossians 2:2-3]. And what tends to endear this science to the awakened soul yet more is that in learning to know Christ, we learn at the same time to know ourselves.

For in exact proportion as He is exalted in our view and His glory is more and more manifested to our spiritual apprehension, we sink in our own esteem, and get out of love with ourselves. In the contemplation of His holiness, acting as a mirror, we contrast with it our deformity. We feel as Job felt, and say as he said, under the deepest sense of soul humiliation, after the Lord had answered him out of the whirlwind; "I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee: wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes" [Job 42:5-6]. And such will be the self-loathing of every truly regenerated child of God, under similar circumstances. There cannot but be solemn and awful apprehensions of our own fallen and sinful nature, when the spiritual eye is enlightened to see "the King in His beauty" [Isaiah 33:17].


–preacher Robert Hawker (1753 – 1827 A.D.)


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