MarieP
Puritan Board Senior
Larry Bray posted this quote from Thomas Brooks on Facebook:
The whole passage is more than well-worth your reading and meditation!:
p.170-1. The Complete Works of Thomas Brooks
"A Christian's whole life should be nothing but a visible representation of Christ."
The whole passage is more than well-worth your reading and meditation!:
Oh that we would daily propound to ourselves this noble pattern for our imitation, and make it our business, our work, our heaven, to write after this blessed copy that Christ hath set us, viz., to be much with God alone. Certainly Christianity is nothing else but an imitation of the divine nature, a reducing of a mans self to the image of God, in which he was created ' in righteousness and true holiness.' A Christian's whole life should be nothing but a visible representation of Christ. The heathens had this notion amongst them, as Lactantius reports, that the way to honour their gods was to be like them. Sure I am that the highest way of honouring Christ is to be like to Christ: 1 John ii. 6, ' He that saith he abideth in him, ought himself also to walk even as he walked.' Oh that this blessed Scripture might always lie warm upon our hearts. Christ is the sun, and all the watches of our lives should be set by the dial of his motion. Christ is a pattern of patterns; his example should be to us instead of a thousand examples. It is not only oun' liberty, but our duty and glory, to follow Christ in all his moral virtues absolutely. Other patterns be imperfect and defective, but Christ is a perfect pattern; and of all his children, they are the happiest that come nearest to this perfect pattern. Heliogabalus loved his children the better for resembling him in sin. But Christ loves his children the more for resembling him in sanctity. I have read of some springs that change the colour of the cattle that drink of them into the colour of their own waters, as Du Bartas sings : " Cerona, Xanth, and Cephisus do make The thirsty flocks, that of their waters take, Black, red, and white; and near the crimson deep, The Arabian fountain maketh crimson sheep." Certainly, Jesus Christ is such a fountain, in which whosoever bathes, and of which whosoever drinks, shall be changed into the same likeness, 2 Cor. iii. 18.
p.170-1. The Complete Works of Thomas Brooks
