Whatever we have to do in this world—common occupation, business, anything—the great object is to represent Christ. If my soul is knit to Him—“my soul follows hard after You”—I shall measure all my path as to how far I can do justice to Christ. There may be a hundred wrong ways, but I must take care to get into the right one. Whether I have made much or little progress as a Christian, I must have Christ as my object. Christ will be reflected all down the path; then every step onward will be brighter and brighter. It is not going fast on the road that is the great point, but going always in it, and the faster the better too: “I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”

We must have our hearts set upon Christ: though, in one sense, not nearer Christ at the end than at the beginning; in another, we are a great deal nearer. The fact of our resurrection is not nearer, but we are nearer in the moral effect of the expectation. Of the Church it is said, that He might cleanse it by “the washing of water.” In one sense it is perfectly clean, but in another it is getting cleaner through the application, by the Spirit, of the Word to the individual members of Christ’s body, and so producing, in the whole, moral likeness to the image of Christ. So the outward fact of resurrection is, and may still be future, but it is the power of the truth of resurrection wrought in his heart that Paul desired.