have some sense for and love of them.
They that are pure in heart, they shall see God; they who love
righteousness, who seek with lowliness for purity and goodness, they
will find in Christ a God they can see and trust.

The lessons of the Incarnation are obvious. First, from it we are to
take our idea of God. Sometimes we feel as if in attributing to God all
good we were dealing merely with fancies of our own which could not be
justified by fact. In the Incarnation we see what God has actually done.
Here we have, not a fancy, not a hope, not a vague expectation, not a
promise, but accomplished fact, as solid and unchangeable as our own
past life. This God whom we have often shunned, and felt to be in our
way and an obstacle, whom we have suspected of tyranny and thought
little of injuring and disobeying, has through compassion and sympathy
with us broken through all impossibilities, and contrived to take the
sinner's place. He, the ever blessed God, accountable for no evil and
sole cause of all good, accepted the whole of our condition, lived as a
creature, Himself bare our sicknesses, all that is hardest in life, all
that is bitterest and loneliest in death, in His own experience
combining all the agonies of sinning and suffering men, and all the
ineffable sorrows wherewith God looks upon sin and suffering. All this
He did, not for the sake of showing us how much better a thing the
Divine nature is than the human, but because His nature impelled Him to
do it; because He could not bear to be solitary in His blessedness, to
know in Himself the joy of holiness and love while His creatures were
missing this joy and making themselves incapable of all good.

Our first thought of God, then, must ever be that which the Incarnation
suggests: that the God with whom alone and in all things we have to do
is not One who is alienated from us, or who has no sympathy with us, or
who is absorbed in interests very different from ours, and to which we
must be sacrificed; but that He is One who sacrifices Himself for us,
who makes all things but justice and right bend to serve us, who
forgives our misapprehensions, our coldness, our unspeakable folly, and
makes common cause with us in all that concerns our welfare. As while on
earth He endured the contradiction of sinners, and waited till they came
to a better mind, so does He still, with Divine patience, wait till we
recognise Him as our Friend, and humbly own Him as our God. He waits