This Book will greatly help seekers after Holiness, because it meets us on the threshold of our life in Christ and leads us along a luminous path of Scriptural teaching, to the full measure of the believer’s identification with his Risen Lord. “The candidates for sanctification are those who have the first-fruits of sanctification in the initial work of grace.” They are then shown that the secret of holiness is the imparted holiness of Jesus Christ. “What a marvellous thing sanctification is. The perfections of Jesus—ours by the sheer gift of God.”
As Chapter II nourishes the heart by leading us to implicit trust in Jesus; so Chapter III feeds the mind with deepest Scriptural truth. It might be described as Spiritualised Theology. And the Chapter on “in Heavenly Places” is an unveiling of the glory and strength and security of the most intimate relationship we can know with our Risen Lord. “Jesus Christ can create in us the image of God even as it was in Himself.” What an arresting sentence is this—“In illustrating the spiritual life, our tendency is to catch the tricks of the world, to watch the energy of the business man, and to apply these methods to God’s work. Jesus Christ tells us to take the lessons of our lives from the things men never look at. “Consider the lilies”†: “Behold the fowls of the air.”† How often do we look at clouds, or grass, at sparrows, or flowers? Why, we have no time to look at them, we are in the rush of things—it is absurd to sit dreaming about sparrows and trees and clouds! Thank God when He raises us to the heavenly places, He manifests in us the very mind that was in Christ Jesus, unhasting and unresting, calm, steady and strong.”
And the last Chapter insists on the possession of the Light, and shows its marvellous ministry in illuminating through His saints the darkness around. “Have we let God raise us up to the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, and are we learning to walk in the light as God is in the light?”
