For all this, our earthly existence is not a life, which we would desire to be perpetual. It is as a traveler's pilgrimage, a sailor's voyage, a soldier's warfare; and we look forward to its end with joyful expectation.

• His glory was veiled in flesh.


• His Deity was concealed in infirmity.


• His power was hidden under sorrow and weakness.


• His riches were buried under poverty and shame. The world knew him not, for he was made flesh.

• The son is treated as a servant while under age.


• The heir is kept a pensioner till his majority.


• The prince serves as a soldier before he reaches the throne.

• There are none to appreciate us, and it would be as though kings showed their royalty at a wake, or wise men discoursed philosophy before fools.


• A warring and waiting condition like the present would not be a fit opportunity for unveiling.

• The ebb-tide reveals the secrets of the sea, but many of our rivers no gallant ship can then sail.


• To everything there is a season, and this is not the time of glory.

• He will be manifest upon this earth in person.


• He will be manifest in perfect happiness.


• He will be manifest in highest glory.


• He will appear surely, and so we speak of it as a date for our own manifesting: "when he shall appear."

• Sinless, incorruptible, painless, spiritual, clothed with beauty and power, and yet most real and true.

• Perfect, holy, instructed, developed, strengthened, active, delivered from temptation, conflict, and suffering.

• Kings, priests, conquerors, judges, sons of God.

• The sight will be ravishing.


• The sight will be transforming and transfiguring.


• The sight will be abiding, and a source of bliss for ever.

God showed power in making us creatures, but love in making us sons. Plato gave God thanks that he had made him a man, and not a beast; but what cause have they to adore God's love, who hath made them children! The apostle puts an ecce to it, Behold! — Thomas Watson

And here, reader, wonder not if I be at a loss, and if my apprehensions receive but little of that which is in my expressions. If to the beloved disciple that durst speak and inquire into Christ's secrets, and was filled with his revelations, and saw the New Jerusalem in her glory, and had seen Christ, Moses, and Elias in part of theirs, if it did not appear to him what we shall be, but only in general, that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, no wonder if I know little. — Richard Baxter, in "The Saint's Everlasting Rest"

Such divine, God-given glimpses into the future reveal to us more than all our thinking. What intense truth, what divine meaning there is in God's creative word: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness? To show forth the likeness of the Invisible, to be partaker of the divine nature, to share with God his rule of the universe, is man's destiny. His place is indeed one of unspeakable glory. Standing between two eternities, the eternal purpose in which we were predestined to be conformed to the image of the first-born Son, and the eternal realization of that purpose when we shall be like him in his glory. We hear the voice from every side: O ye image-bearers of God! on the way to share the glory of God and of Christ, live a Godlike, live a Christlike life! — Andrew Murray

A converted blind man once said, "Jesus Christ will be the first person I shall ever see, for my eyes will be opened in heaven."

"You are going to be with Jesus, and to see him as he is," said a friend to Rowland Hill on his deathbed. "Yes," replied Mr. Hill with emphasis, "and I shall be like him; that is the crowning point."

To see him as he is, and in himself, is reserved till we shall have better eyes: these eyes we have are carnal and corruptible, and cannot see God till they have put on incorruption. — Sir Richard Baker

• Perfect, Glorious, Conqueror over sin, death and hell.

• His grosser sins. From evil company, etc.


• His secret sins, neglects, imaginings, desires, murmurings, etc.


• His besetting sins of heart, temper, body, relationship, etc.


• His relative sins in the family, the shop, the church, etc.


• His sins arising out of his nationality, education, profession, etc.


• His sins of word, thought, action, and omission.

• By getting a clear notion of what purity really is. By keeping a tender conscience, and bewailing his faults.


• By having an eye to God and his continual presence.


• By making others his beacons or examples.


• By hearing rebukes for himself, and laying them to heart.


• By asking the Lord to search him, and practicing self-examination.


• By distinctly and vigorously fighting with every known sin.

3.He sets before him Jesus as his model. "He purifieth himself, even as HE is pure:"

• Hence he does not cultivate one grace only.


• Hence he is never afraid of being too precise.


• Hence he is simple, natural, and unconstrained.


• Hence he is evermore aspiring after more and more holiness.

• Some defile themselves willfully.


• Some take things as they are.


• Some believe that they need no purifying.


• Some talk about purity, but never strive after it.


• Some glory in that which is a mere counterfeit of it.

(1) The Workman. "Every one that hath this hope in him," every one that looks to be like the Lord Jesus in the Kingdom of Glory is the man that must set about this task. (2) The work is a work to be wrought by himself. He is a part of the Lord's husbandry, and he must take pains as it were to plow his own ground, to weed his own corn, he must purify himself; this is his present and personal work. (3) the pattern by which he must be directed is the Lord Jesus: his purity. Take him for a pattern and instance; look unto him that is the author and finisher of our faith; as you have seen him do, so do you; as he is pure, so labor you to express in your lives the virtue of him who hath redeemed you. — Richard Sibbes

Then thou comportest with thy hopes of salvation when thou laborest to be as holy in thy conversation as thou art high in thy expectation This the apostle urgeth from the evident fitness of the thing (2 Pet. 3:11) "What manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness, looking for and hastening unto the coming of the day of God?" Certainly, it becomes such to be holy, even to admiration, who look for such a blessed day; we hope then to be like the angels in glory, and therefore should, if possible, live now like angels in holiness. Every believing soul is Christ's spouse. The day of conversion is the day of espousals, wherein she is betrothed by faith to Christ, and, as such, lives in hopes for the marriage-day, when he shall come and fetch her home to his father's house, as Isaac did Rebekah to his mother's tent, there to dwell with him, and live in his sweet embraces of love, world without end. Now, would the bride have the bridegroom find her in sluttery and vile raiment? No, surely: "Can a bride forget her attire (Jer. 2:32)? Was it ever known that a bride forgot to have her wedding clothes made against the marriage-day, or to put them on when she looks for her bridegroom's coming? Holiness is the raiment of needlework in which, Christian, thou art to be brought to thy King and husband (Ps. 45:14). Wherefore is the wedding-day put off so long, but because this garment is so long a-making? When this is once wrought, and thou art ready dressed, then that joyful day comes. Remember how the Holy Spirit wordeth it in the Book of Revelation, "The marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready" (Rev. 19:7). — William Gurnall

A good hope, through grace, animates and gives life to action, and purifies as it goes; like the Highland stream that dashes from the rock, and purifies itself as it pursues its course to the ocean. — G. Salter

The Christian needs Christ in his redemption as the object of Faith, for salvation; Christ himself the object of Love, for devotion and service; and Christ in his coming glory, the object of Hope, for separation from the world. — W. Haslarn

The biographer of Hewitson says of him: "He not only believed in the speedy appearing, but loved it, waited for it, watched for it. So mighty a motive power did it become, that he ever used to speak of it afterwards as bringing with it a kind of second conversion." — A. J. Gordon, D.D.

• It commences with painful sensations.


• It leads to a sad discovery of our natural weakness.


• It is made manifest by personal faith in Jesus.


• It operates on the man by repentance and purification.


• It is continued by perseverance in sanctification.


• It is completed in joy, infinite, eternal.

Just as in his gospel he rescues the word logos from antichristian uses, so in this Epistle he rescues the word "know," and aims at making his "little children" Gnostics in the divine sense. Knowledge is excellent, but the path to it is not through intellectual speculation, however keen and subtle, but through faith in Jesus Christ and subjection to him, according to those most Johannine words in the Gospel of Matthew: "Neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him." — Dr. Culross

The Christian apologist never further misses the mark than when he refuses the testimony of the Agnostic to himself. When the Agnostic tells me he is blind and deal dumb, torpid, and dead to the spiritual world, I must believe him. Jesus tells me that. Paul tells me that. Science tells me that. He knows nothing of this outermost circle; and we are compelled to trust his sincerity as readily when he deplores it as if, being a man without an ear, he professed to know nothing of a musical world, or being without taste, of a world of art. The nescience of the Agnostic philosophy is the proof from experience that to be carnally minded is death. — Professor Henry Drummond

The world always loves to believe that it is impossible to know that we are converted. If you ask them, they will say, "I am not sure; I cannot tell," but the whole Bible declares we may receive, and know that we have received, the forgiveness of sins. — R. M. McCheyne

In the writings of Paul, "Faith in the Lord Jesus, and love to all the saints;' constitute a well-understood and oft-recurring sequence. It is a straitening about that upper spring of faith that makes the streams of love fail in their channels. — W. Arnot

Yes, brethren in Christ have all one common Father, one common likeness, one object of faith, love, and adoration, one blessed hope, one present employment, alike in trials, alike in prayer. They lean upon the same hand, appear daily before the same mercy-seat, feed at the same table. How much all these things link them together, not in profession only, but in heart! Hence this is a decisive test: "We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren." — D. Katterns

In the early days of Christianity, when it triumphed over the old heathenism of the Roman world, it founded a new society bound together by this holy mutual love. The catacombs of Rome bear remarkable testimony to this gracious brotherhood. There were laid the bodies of members of the highest Roman aristocracy, some even of the family of the Caesars, side by side with the remains of obscure slaves and laborers. And in the case of the earliest graves the inscriptions are without a single allusion to the position in society of him who was buried there: they did not trouble themselves whether he had been a consul or a slave, a tribune of the legion or a common soldier, a patrician or an artisan. It sufficed that they knew him to have been a believer in Christ, a man who feared God. They cared not to perpetuate in death the vain distinctions of the world; they had mastered the glorious teaching of the Lord, "One is your master, even Christ, and all ye are brethren." — E. De Pressense