In connection with Christ as our substitute, what a thought is His divine glory! What! the Man before whom every knee shall bow—the Man before whom all shall stand in the day of judgment—that Man my Substitute! There is no place in the dust low enough, no word adequate to express what I feel, that such a man should have taken my place and borne my judgment! He, as the substitute, is my wellspring of life, and I am an adopted son in Him. I am also His servant, and I may share His sufferings as the Servant. Ours may seem a very insignificant path of service, but He may have the thought of its being just the path in which we may share His sufferings.
If you go through the world as a child of God, and mark the sorrows of Christ with the thought of sharing them in some small measure, you will see if they do not in this aspect also become very precious to you, showing that what His life was down here, yours is to be. Are we to expect better fare, a smoother path, than our blessed Lord? If the thousandth part of His sorrows came on one of us, we could not bear it; it would destroy us. But we can in our little measure follow after and taste of His cup of sorrow.
Is it not enough to wring my heart when I see Christ the Son of God becoming Son of man to bear all that He bore down here? And then He went back to God. Can I see Him here and see Him there, and not fall down and worship? Oh, what a revelation of God in that Nazarene! Can I know Christ and not know God? Impossible! And that Christ is my life, and the keeper of it. He is my anointed Savior. I belong to Him. Is it in the sheep to keep itself? No, but in the Shepherd.
Mark the inseparability of believers and Christ in the mind of God; when He leaves His Father's throne, His people are to be set with Him on His throne, and they are to be owned as He Himself is. God's thought is to express His delight in that Christ who has bought a people with His own blood; the Father's house is prepared for them, and they are welcome there, even as Christ is. On earth the disciples went wherever Christ went. When He comes to take us home, we shall be forever with Him; and it will be as the saved ones brought near to God by His own blood.
When I see Christ coming out of glory, bearing my sin in His own body, and going back again to glory, and going on for nineteen hundred years waiting and gathering poor sinners into the Father's house, there is something exquisitely beautiful! My heart is stolen away by everything Christ does. Is there no beauty in the walk of Him who did all for you? Don't you want to be like Him? Have you not a model before you that attracts the whole heart? How we should long to resemble this Christ, and to have His mind! I have a Christ in heaven, and I desire to meet that Christ's thoughts in everything, and to be one with Him in the world where He was rejected and crucified.