The New Life

Children of God.
your want and necessity. Through the Spirit you
become still poorer in spirit, and you see still more
how you have need of Jesus for everything everjmoment
: this leads to a ceaseless, ever-active taking
of Him as your all ^
Your first receiving consisted in nothing but the
appropriation by faith of what you could not yet see
or feel. The same faith must be continually exercised
in saying : all that I see in Jesus is for me : I
take it as mine, although I do not yet experience it.
The love of God is a communicating, a ceaseless outstreaming
of His light of life over the soul, a very
powerful and veritable giving of Jesus: our life is
nothing but a continuous blessed apprehension and
reception of Him.^
And this is the way to live as children of God : as
many as receive Him, to them gives He the power to
become children of God. This holds true, not only
of conversion and regeneration, but of every day of
my life. If to walk in all things as a child of God,
and to exhibit the image of my Father, is indispensable,
I must take Jesus the only-begotten Son : it is
To have Jesus
He that makes me a child of God.
Himself, to have the heart and life full of Him, is
the way to live as a child of God. I go to the word
and learn there all the characteristics of a child of
God ^ ; and after each one of them I write : this Jesus
^Matt. V. 3
;
2 Cor. iii. lo, 13, 16, vi. 10; Eph. iv. 14, 15; Col.
ii. 6.
2 John i. 16 ; Col. ii. 9, 10, iii. 3.
3 1 Matt. V. 9, 16, 44, 45 ; Rom. viii. 14 ; Eph. i. 4, 5, v. i, 2 ; Philii.
15 ; Heb. ii. 10 ; i Pet. i. 14, 17 ; i John iii. i, 10, v. i, 3.
45