How could Christ be in company with such a creature as the woman of Samaria? As a Savior, beautifully, because she knew herself to be a poor worthless creature; and it was the worthless and the lost that He came to save.
As a Christian, I have to know the Lord Jesus Christ in heaven, and to walk worthy of Him during the night, as a bird of the day and not of the night. The light of Christ's eye is coming right down upon me; if there is one corner of my heart covered over, I am uncomfortable under it; I could not sit in the Father's house and have His eye meet one corner of my heart not brought out. I do not want one corner of it to be covered by the thinnest veil possible. It is a solemn but blessed thing to the soul to have the eye of God coming right down into it. It is a very blessed thing that the One who has washed you in His own blood, and has undertaken to conduct you to heaven, has an eye that sees down into all the recesses of the heart; and it can detect the least budding of evil. When you have been doing what you thought good, He may have seen evil lurking, and Satan near you; and He has discovered it to you and enabled you to judge it in the light, so that it will not have to be judged hereafter. He will go through all hereafter if we do not do it now. He will talk to His people about their walk, and the effect will be perfect blessed confidence between your soul and the Lord. If I commit any sin now, the discovery of it in the light is attended with conflict and agony; then He will tell me how He met me and probed me, that I might have every thought brought out.
It is a solemn and blessed thought that God expects you to walk as one in His presence. A person's life may be perfectly blameless; yet that person may have to say, Ah! but I want more of the power of Christ's life. He is the Head—it is not the question of a spot or blemish here and there, but I want more of the volume of the life of Christ and of His affections to be displayed in me, so that I may be practically witnessing down here for, Him up there.
Nothing should satisfy us but the power and testimony which tells that Christ our Head is at God's right hand. What a difference between the testimony of one who, like Paul, has Christ in his heart, and counts everything else but dung and dross, who puts his foot wherever Christ left a footprint, to follow hard after Him, and the testimony of a man who is living after this world's course—who is on the foundation, but who is building on it wood, hay, stubble, instead of gold, silver, precious stones. Immense difference between Abraham and Lot, in this life and in the next too, though Lot will be perfectly saved. How beautiful! I shall exclaim, when I see one like Paul manifested in the golden city—one who when down here could say, "To me to live is Christ." Ah, there will be a recompense for works which are the fruit of grace and faith.