member that the persons to whom the Apostle is speaking are no
strangers to the Saviour. They have been professing Christians from of
old. They have made very considerable progress in the Divine life; they
are near Jesus Christ; and yet Peter says to them, 'You can get nearer
if you try,' and it is your one task and one hope, the condition of all
blessedness, peace, and joy in your religious life that you should
perpetually be making the effort to come closer, and to keep closer, to
the Lord, by whom you say that you live.

What is it to come to Him? The context explains the figurative
expression, in the very next verse or two, by another and simpler word,
which strips away the figure and gives us the plain fact--'in Whom
believing.' The act of the soul by which I, with all my weakness and
sin, cast myself on Jesus Christ, and grapple Him to my heart, and bind
myself with His strength and righteousness--that is what the Apostle
means here. Or, to put it into other words, this 'coming,' which is here
laid as the basis of everything, of all Christian prosperity and
progress for the individual and for the community, is the movement
towards Christ of the whole spiritual nature of a man--thoughts, loves,
wishes, purposes, desires, hopes, will. And we come near to Him when day
by day we realise His nearness to us, when our thoughts are often
occupied with Him, bring His peace and Himself to bear as a motive upon
our conduct, let our love reach out its tendrils towards, and grasp, and
twine round Him, bow our wills to His commandment, and in everything
obey Him. The distance between heaven and earth does part us, but the
distance between a thoughtless mind, an unrenewed heart, a rebellious
will, and Him, sets between Him and us a greater gulf, and we have to
bridge that by continual honest efforts to keep our wayward thoughts
true to Him and near Him, and to regulate our affections that they may
not, like runaway stars, carry us far from the path, and to bow our
stubborn and self-regulating wills beneath His supreme commandment, and
so to make all things a means of coming nearer the Lord with whom is our
true home.

Christian men, there are none of us so close to Him but that we may be
nearer, and the secret of our daily Christian life is all wrapped up in
that one word which is scarcely to be called a figure, 'coming' unto
Him. That nearness is what we are to make daily efforts after, and that
nearness is capable of indefini