Is Christ looking on you or me, saying, " There is a poor thing as unlike Me as Saul of Tarsus was, but through grace he has learned to cast away his own righteousness as filthy rags, and become a debtor to God, to have all his sins washed away in My blood; and he is identified with Me by the Spirit of life flowing down to him, and I shall soon come down to change and conform him to My own glorious body." It is not enough to the Lord Jesus that His blood has freed our consciences from guilt and saved us, but He must have us with Himself, our bodies fashioned like His own. Whose counsel and plan was to give power, that a poor sinner, kept here for a time in continual weakness, should come forth in the end, having a glorious body, conformed to the image of God's dear Son? Oh, it is a plan altogether above man! There is an answer in Christ's body for all the weakness in ours.
Nothing so sets the heart at liberty as seeing the Lord, in resurrection, our Fore-runner in heaven. How could He take us up there if He had not washed and quickened us?
If there is a portion so blessed for me, it is because I am to bring glory to Christ: He is to have ten thousand times ten thousand and thousands of mirrors to reflect His glory. When He appears, all will be told out that was shut up and hid with Him in God.
He knows where every separate little heap of dust rests-the dust of a Peter and of a Paul,-all to be raised in a moment and made glorious bodies like unto His own. Then it will come out 'in a volume, the whole sum and substance of the gospel of the glory shut up in Him.