We have here the beginning and the ripening of an experience brought close together. Let us think of the young Christian and the old Christian, the same man in his first apprehension and in his ripened knowledge of Christ. Our subject is the nature and method of the growth of Christian character. One general and obvious law is that every healthy growth creates the conditions of new growth, and makes new growth possible. This is the method of Christian growth. There is a continued reaction between Christ and the soul; every new openness is fed with a new love that opens it still more.
I. As every Christian becomes more and more a Christian, there must be a larger and larger absorption of truth or doctrine into life.
II. There will be a growing variety in the Christian character as Christians grow older.
III. The willingness to recognise and welcome individual differences of thought, and feeling, and action increases, too, as Christians grow riper.
IV. Another characteristic of the growing spiritual experience is its ever-increasing independence.
V. Another sign of the growth of Christian character is to be found in the growing transfiguration of duty.
VI. The profoundest and most reliable sign of maturing spiritual life is the deepening personal intimacy with Him who is the Christian's Life, the Lord Jesus Christ. This growing personal intimacy will have these effects upon us: (1) It must give us a more infinite view of life in general, or, in other words, must make us more unworldly. (2) It will give us more hopefulness. (3) With the growing hopefulness comes a growing courage. (4) It gives that true and perfect poise of soul which grows more and more beautiful as we get tired one after another of the fantastic and one-sided types of character which the world admires.
Phillips Brooks, The Candle of the Lord,p. 39.
References: Deuteronomy 33:16. G. Matheson, Moments on the Mount,p. 256; W. M. Taylor, Contrary Winds,p. 200. Deuteronomy 33:18; Deuteronomy 33:19. F. Whitfield, The Blessings of the Tribes,p. 117. Deuteronomy 33:19. J. Reid Howatt, The Churchette,p. 257. Deuteronomy 33:20-25. F. Whitfield, The Blessings of the Tribes,pp. 117, 137, 161, 173, 185.