A change comes. You want
a change. You must have it. This longing is the beginning of the deeper
change. You can never be content again with being the man you have been.

It has always been so. It always will be so. For this is the natural
thing. In the dawning twilight of Eden God looked into the face of the
man he had fashioned. He drew very close to him, close enough to breathe
his own breath into his face. And the man looked out into God's face,
and took on God's likeness. So he became his own real self, as
originally planned.

But while man was yet young, sin looked him in the face. And the man
looked at sin with an evil longing look. And in that look he took in
some of what he saw. He was marred. The God image was hurt. He was not
the same man. And he knew it. He felt it. His eyes were never the same
after that exchange of looks with sin.

But God helped him. He didn't go away. He came closer for the sake of
the sin-hurt eyes. And whenever man has looked into that wondrous
God-face, even though seeing dimly and indistinctly, something within
him makes a great bound. He recognizes the original of his own natural
self. And he catches fire at the sight. A holy discontent springs up
within.

"Couldst thou in vision see
Thyself the man God meant,
Thou never more couldst be
The man thou art--content."

But you have to see Jesus as He was in His humanity to see yourself the
man God meant. And you have to see Jesus as He is now to see the God who
meant you to be like Himself.

It has always been so. This has been God's simple method with men He
would use. He has wooed and then wooed more, and a bit longer, gently,
persistently, up and away and apart until at last the man's eyes were
trained away from the lower glare enough to see the real things.

Then in some vision of the night, whose darkness helped hold back the
lower earth lights, God has looked a man in the face once again. Or,
perhaps in open day there came to him that which he could not describe.
But in his inner spirit he knew there was One with him whom yet his
outer eyes could not see, but who _could_ not be more real if his outer
eyes did see.

And in that presence there was a mingling of exquisite tenderness and of
limitless power that was overawing. Inconceivable purity and yet such an
unspeakable graciousness seemed blended in this presence. And the man
seeing was melted in his innermost being with the sense of tenderness,
and bowed in