It is happy and encouraging to the soul to ever consider in living faith and recollection that it is
the very same Jesus who was here on earth that is now in heaven, and whom we are to know
throughout eternity. When we keep this in memory, every passage of His life here will be
introduced afresh to us, and we shall feel and own that we have in the gospels a more wonderful
portion on which to meditate than we had ever realized.

In the days of His sojourn among us everything was a reality to Him; all was living and personal.
He did more than touch the surface. When He healed a wound or removed a sorrow, He in a way
felt it. "Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses" (Matthew 8:17). Not only were His
joys real, His sorrows real, His fears and disappointments, and the like, real, but He entered into
every occasion in all its character. He knew the unuttered language of that needy soul that touched
Him in the crowd, and felt that touch in all its meaning. He understood the hasty step of
Zacchaeus as he climbed the sycamore tree, and the thoughtfulness of Nathanael as he sat under
the fig tree. He knew the love as well as the self-confidence which drew Peter from the ship to
the water.

Surely, then, as we read the wondrous story of Christ as He walked here below, and as we bear
in mind that this same person is now in heaven, our affections ought to be drawn out after
Himself. How edifying it would be if we could be acquainting ourselves more really with a living,
personal Jesus! In these times of ours, beloved, there may be a tendency to forget His Person or
Himself in the common testimony that is now borne so extensively to His work. The region of
doctrine may be surveyed as with a measuring line and a level, instead of being eyed, with an
admiring, worshiping heart, as the place of the glories of the Son of God. And yet it is this He
prizes in us. He has made us personally His objects; and He looks for us to make Him ours.

I ask myself, Is not this, in a sense, the very topmost stone? Is not this personal desire of Christ
toward us chief in the ways of His grace? Election, predestination, pardon, adoption, glory, and
the kingdom_are they not only crowned by this desire of Christ toward us, this making of us an
object to Himself? Surely it crowns all; surely it is the topmost stone; lying above and beyond all;
fuller and richer and higher than any. Adoption and glory (that is, welcome into the family and
participation in the kingdom) would be defective were there not also this mystery_the Son of God
has found in us an object of desire. It assumes all the other works and counsels in the history of
grace, and is thus beyond them all.

The Spirit delights to tell of the work of Christ, and to bear it in its preciousness and sufficiency
to the heart and conscience. But still the work of the Lord Jesus Christ may be the great subject,
where He Himself is but a faint object; and the soul will thus be a great loser.