A Christlike Character

A Christlike Character

For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. Colossians 3:3.

Jesus is the perfect pattern. Instead of trying to please self and have our own way, let us seek to reflect His image. He was kind and courteous, compassionate and tender. Are we like Him in these respects? Do we seek to make our lives fragrant with good works? What we need is the simplicity of Christ. I fear that in many cases a hard, unfeeling spirit, that is entirely unlike that of the divine Pattern, has taken possession of the heart. This cast-iron principle, which has been cherished by so many, and which has even been thought a virtue, must all be removed, that we may love one another as Christ has loved us.

It is not enough that we merely profess the faith; something more than a nominal assent is wanted. There must be a real knowledge, a genuine experience in the principles of the truth as it is in Jesus. The Holy Spirit must work within, bringing these principles into the strong light of distinct consciousness, that we may know their power and make them a living reality. The mind must yield obedience to the royal law of liberty, the law which the Spirit of God impresses upon the heart, and makes plain to the understanding. The expulsion of sin must be the act of the soul itself, in calling into exercise its noblest powers. The only freedom a finite will can enjoy consists in coming into harmony with the will of God, complying with the conditions that make man a partaker of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust....

The human character is depraved, deformed by sin, and terribly unlike that of the first man as he came from the hands of the Creator. Jesus proposes to take man’s deformity and sin, and to give him, in return, beauty and excellence in his own character. He engages to renovate the soul through the truth. Error cannot do this work of regeneration; therefore we must have spiritual eyesight to discern between truth and falsehood, that we fall not into the snare of the enemy.—The Review and Herald, November 24, 1885.

This devotional is taken from Ye Shall Receive Power by Ellen G. White.