aracter.

I. I begin, first, with a word or two about the direction which
Christian growth ought to take.

Now those of you who use the Revised Version will see in it a very
slight, but very valuable alteration. It reads there: 'Grow in the grace
and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour.' The effect of that alteration
being to bring out more clearly that whilst the direction of the growth
is twofold, the process is one. And to bring out more clearly, also,
that both the grace and the knowledge have connection with Jesus Christ.

He is the Giver and the Author of the grace. He is the Object of the
knowledge. The one is more moral and spiritual; the other, if we may so
say, more intellectual; but both are realised by one act of progress,
and both inhere in, and refer to, and are occupied with, and are derived
from, Jesus Christ Himself.

Let us look a little more closely at this double direction, this
bifurcation, as it were, of Christian growth. The tree, like some of our
forest trees, in its normal progress, diverges into two main branches at
a short distance upwards from the root.

First, we have growth in the 'grace' of Christ. Grace, of course, means,
first, the undeserved love and favour which God in Jesus Christ bears to
us sinful and inferior creatures; and then it means the consequence of
that love and favour in the manifold spiritual endowments which in us
become 'graces,' beauties, and excellences of Christian character. So
then, if you are a Christian, you ought to be continually realising a
deeper and more blessed consciousness of Christ's love and favour as
yours. You ought to be, if I may so say, nestling every day nearer and
nearer to His heart, and getting more and more sure, and more and more
happily sure, of more and more of His mercy and love to you.

And if you are a Christian you ought not only thus to be realising
daily, with increasing certitude and power, the fact of His love, but
you ought to be drinking in and deriving more and more every day of the
consequences of that love, of the spiritual gifts of which His hands are
full. There is open for each of us in Him an inexhaustible store of
abundance. And if our Christian life is real and vigorous there ought to
be in us a daily increasing capacity, and therefore a daily increasing
possession of the gifts of His grace. There ought to be, in other words,
also a daily progressive transformation into His likeness. It is 'the
grace of our Lord Jesus