78 The Fundamentals His work will be accompanied by substitutes for Christ and His work. The importance, therefore, o'f the presence and work of the Holy Spirit should be estimated according to that far-reaching and all-touching word of Christ, “He shall glorify Me” (John 16:13-15). To glorify Christ is to manifest Him as supremely excel lent ; to blind the eyes of men to that glory is the purpose of the god of this world; therefore, which spirit is at work in a man or in a church can easily be told. 7. In conclusion, the sum of all His mission is to per fect in saints the good work He began, and He molds it all according to this reality of a high and holy sonship: He estab lishes the saints in and for Christ. (2 Cor. 1:21.) Accord ing to this reality their life and walk partake of thoughts and desires, hopes and objects, unworldly and heavenly. Born of God and from above, knowing whence they came and whither they are going, they live and move and have their being in a world not realized by flesh and blood. Their life is hid with Christ in God; their work of faith is wrought out in the unseen abode of the Spirit; their labor of love is prompted by a loyal obedience to their Lord, who is absent in “a far country” to which both He and they belong; their sufferings are not their own but His, who, from out of the Glory could ask, “Why persecutest thou Me?” Their worship is of the Father “in spirit and in truth” before the mercy seat, “in the light which no man can approach unto;” their peace is “the peace of God,” which can never be dis turbed by any fear or trouble which eternal ages might dis close; their joy is “joy in the Lord,” its spring is in God and ever deepening in its perpetual flow; their hope is the coming of the Son of God from heaven and the vision of the King in His beauty amidst the unspeakable splendors of His Father’s house ; and through all the way, “thorn and flower,” by which they are journeying to the heavenly country; it is the good Spirit who is leading them. (Isa. 63:7-14.)
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