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Him. The divine and the human natures are similar, and the fact of the
Incarnation, on the one hand, and of the man's glorification by
possession of the divine nature on the other, equally rest upon that
fundamental resemblance between the divine nature and the human nature
which God has made in His own image. If that which in each of us is
unlike God is cleared away, as it can be cleared away, through faith in
that dear Lord, then the likeness as a matter of course, comes into
force.

The law of all elevation is that whosoever desires to lift must stoop;
and the end of all stooping is to lift the lowly to the place from which
the love hath bent itself. And this is at once the law for the
Incarnation of the Christ, and for the elevation of the Christian. 'We
shall be like Him for we shall see Him as He is.' And the great love,
the stooping, forgiving, self-communicating love, doth not reach its
ultimate issue, nor effect fully the purposes to which it ever is
tending, unless and until all who have received it are 'changed from
glory to glory even into the image of the Lord.' We do not understand
Jesus, His cradle, or His Cross, unless on the one hand we see in them
His emptying Himself that He might fill us, and, on the other hand, see,
as the only result which warrants them and satisfies Him, our complete
conformity to His image, and our participation in that glory which He
has at the right hand of God. That is the prospect for humanity, and it
is possible for each of us.

I do not dwell upon other aspects of this great self-emptying of our
Lord's, such as the revelation in it to us of the very heart of God, and
of the divinest thing in the divine nature, which is love, or such as
the sympathy which is made possible thereby to Him, and which is not
only the pity of a God, but the compassion of a Brother. Nor do I touch
upon many other aspects which are full of strengthening and teaching.
That grand thought that Jesus has shared our human poverty that we may
share His divine riches is the very apex of the New Testament teaching,
and of the Christian hope. We have within us, notwithstanding all our
transgressions, what the old divines used to call a 'deiform nature,'
capable of being lifted up into the participation of divinity, capable
of being cleansed from all the spots and stains which make us so unlike
Him in whose likeness we were made.

Brethren, let us not forget that this stooping, and pardoning, and
self-