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 "The thief came to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I am come that they may have life, and may have it abundantly."

One great purpose of the Incarnation was to show what we are in our deepest being in the purpose of God, and what we are capable of. Our Lord did not come to parade before men the exceptional life to which they could never attain. He came, as He Himself said, to show them what it had been His Father's will that they should all be. "As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you." "I go unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God." What Jesus Christ was in the fullness of His unlimited life was the revealing of what God has in His will for every one of us. The amplitudes that we see in Him, the subsidence of all the petty boundaries, the unhampered outgoing of His free spirit in the area of His Father, God,—all that is just a picture of what God meant the life of each one of us to be. That is why they called Him the Son of Man, because He was the picture of what God had meant that His son, man, might be.

And Christ came, not only to show the possibilities of such being, of what men could do and what they could be made, but to be Himself that expression of power in them competent to effect such a result, the tide of the boundless life flowing through all the channels that they could offer