Because we are made by God, we are His servants. But He wishes us to become His children. His adopted children, When through our first parents, sin entered the world, the whole human family lost this glorious privilege of sonship. To restore it, the Father sent His only son to become our Brother and to make good our folly.

Christ is the eternal Son of the Father, “by whom all things were made.” Hence, He “knows the clay of which we are made.” He knows that words instruct, but example inspires. He knows human limitations and knows human psychology; knows that even the most carefully worded instruction is often misunderstood. But give the craftsman a model to copy, even if it is the Taj Mahal, and you may get a perfect job.

And so Jesus lived a fully human life from his birth to His death to give a living model or pattern of what every life must be like in thought, desire, word and deed in order to achieve the fullest measure of Christlikeness. This will be for each of us the fullest measure of self-realization.

Christ’s hidden life is of great importance for each of us, for to be acceptable to our Maker who made us in His own image and likeness, our life must be godly, God-like. In human terms that means Christ-like. For all eternity after our death, our capacity for sharing in the divine life will depend on the degree of Christ-likeness we shall have acquired in our present life of growth and preparation. This is in brief the Christian philosophy of life.

This at once shows how important it is to know what the mortal life of Jesus was like. Jesus Himself on the very night before He died said: “I have given you an example that as I have done you also should do.”

Since Christ was sent by the Father precisely to be the Saviour to a world not of saints but of sinners, every moment of His life, from His birth to His death, He was constantly faithful to His ` Mission ’ to be the Saviour. This is highlighted by the one and only recorded saying of thirty years, when as a lad of twelve He reminded His mother, “Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” And so the boy Jesus lived with His foster-father Joseph, and His mother to spend all these years in teaching not only the common man but the eminent saint as well that all, yes all, can do what He afterwards told them they must do – namely, the Father’s will.

For this was the solemn promise He made to the Father:-“Behold, I have come to do Your will.” And this is what He did every moment in His hidden life, in His public life, and in His suffering and death. For this is the test and proof of the love that is “the whole law.” Jesus insisted, “He that does the will of the Father in heaven, he it is that truly loves God.”

And because this was the Father’s wish, Jesus spent His most extraordinary life in a most ordinary manner. He was obedient to His parents, as He asks every other son and daughter to be. He fitted Himself to be the breadwinner to His family, since the great mass of His brothers and sisters are workers. He too lived by the labour of His lands. But always , always he was “doing the will of Him that sent Me.” For this is the very heart of Christ-likeness.