te increase. We know not how close to His
heart we can lay our aching heads. We know not how near to His fulness
we may bring our emptiness. We have never yet reached the point beyond
which no closer union is possible. There has always been a film--and,
alas! sometimes a gulf--between Him and us, His professing servants. Let
us see to it that the conscious distance diminishes every day, and that
we feel ourselves more and more constantly near the Lord and intertwined
with Him.

II. Those who come near Christ will become like Christ.

'To Whom coming, as unto a living stone, ye also as living stones.' Note
the verbal identity of the expressions with which Peter describes the
Master and His servants. Christ is the Stone--that is Peter's
interpretation of 'on this _rock_ will I build My Church.' There is a
reference, too, no doubt, to the many Old Testament prophecies which
are all gathered up in that saying of our Lord's. Probably both Jesus
and Peter had in mind Isaiah's 'stone of stumbling,' which was also a
'sure corner-stone, and a tried foundation.' And words in the context
which I have not taken for consideration, 'disallowed indeed of men, but
chosen of God and precious,' plainly rest upon the 118th Psalm, which
speaks of 'the stone which the builders rejected' becoming 'the head of
the corner.'

But, says Peter, He is not only the foundation Stone, the corner Stone,
but a _living_ Stone, and he does not only use that word to show us that
he is indulging in a metaphor, and that we are to think of a person and
not of a thing, but in the sense that Christ is eminently and
emphatically the living One, the Source of life.

But, when he turns to the disciples, he speaks to them in exactly the
same language. They, too, are 'living stones,' because they come to the
'Stone' that is 'living.' Take away the metaphor, and what does this
identity of description come to? Just this, that if we draw near to
Jesus Christ, life from Him will pass into our hearts and minds, which
life will show itself in kindred fashion to what it wore in Jesus
Christ, and will shape us into the likeness of Him _from_ whom we draw
our life, because _to_ Him we have come. I may remind you that there is
scarcely a single name by which the New Testament calls Jesus Christ
which Jesus Christ does not share with us His younger brethren. By that
Son we 'receive the adoption of sons.' Is He the Light of the world? We
are lights of the world. And if you