Every true Christian should desire to be Christlike in character. It is not enough to be honest and upright and true and just. In Christ these strong qualities were marked. But he was also gentle and kind and good and longsuffering, and if we would be like our Master we must have these traits of character also in us. When we pray that the beauty of the Lord our God may be upon us, we must ask for these finer features of his beauty as well as for the more rugged ones. The world needs to find strength in us — it needs to find truth and faithfulness and justice — but it needs love and tenderness as well. And these are among the fruits of the Spirit-filled life.
“Alice is not pretty,” said one of her friends, trying to define her character, “and I never heard anybody call her brilliant. But you couldn’t put her anywhere — in the poorest, narrowest place — without finding in a little while that things had begun to grow about her. She could make a home in the desert, and not only would it be a home, with all the warm, welcoming feeling of one, but there would be fine, invisible lines stretching out from it to the world in every direction. I cannot imagine her in so bare a place that she could not find joy in it; nor in so lonely a place that the sorrowing and troubled would not find their way to her door. She has a gift for living — that’s the secret.”
That is the way the Spirit works in the heart in which he dwells. He opens a well of heavenly love there and its waters make the life a garden of God. The beauty in us changes us from glory to glory, until all the grace and beauty of Christ are in us. Not to admit this heavenly Guest is to be without God. To have him in our hearts is to be children of God.
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