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I. THIS BEAUTY OF THE LORD OUR GOD WAS ORIGINALLY UPON US, — was the primitive endowment of mankind, our highest and divinest excellence, described by our Creator Himself His own "image."

1. Wisdom and knowledge.

2. Moral purity.

3. Vigour of moral purpose, or rectitude of will.

4. Supreme felicity in the Divine favour.

5. Immortal life.

II. THIS BEAUTY, OR MORAL PERFECTION, HAS BEEN LOST.

1. By the fall, or the incipient act of human disobedience against God, moral evil has contaminated the whole of our nature. Sin entered, and in its train soon followed ignorance, error, weakness, guilt, misery and death.

2. The moral beauty of our original nature is utterly lost. If there exist any traces of man's former beauty, they resemble such only as are left behind in the fragments of an edifice, or a city, which a conflagration has destroyed, or an earthquake shaken into ruins.

3. Our moral beauty, so far as relates to ourselves, is irrecoverably lost.

III. WHAT GROUND THERE IS FOR HOPING THAT THIS BEAUTY OF THE LORD OUR GOD MAY YET BE RESTORED TO US.

1. We now see this beauty actually restored, in the person of the Son of God in our nature. He is called the second man, the Lord from heaven, — the restorer of the ruins of the first Adam, — by the renovation of the moral nature of all who are in Him, — upon the principle of assimilation to His own moral beauty.

2. The ministry, or dispensation of the Spirit, furnishes another firm support to the hopes of those who are desirous of attaining to the beauty of the Lord their God. The souls whom the Spirit of God renews and adorns after the image of Jesus Christ, shall retain the freshness and the perfection of their new and spiritual beauty for ever; and neither grow old nor grow weary in the felicities of their heavenly state.

3. The promises of the Divine Word are also replete with assurances of the restoration of our fallen nature.

4. The Mediator, Jesus Christ, is now glorified at His Father's right hand in our nature; and has received all power in heaven and on earth, — power directly official and mediatorial, for the purpose of completing those objects that brought Him into our world corporeally.

5. Our hope, if not founded upon the experience of the saints of God, is yet confirmed and illustrated by it; for what we read concerning those in distant ages, and what we have witnessed in our own days, — of the knowledge, holiness, obedience, spirituality, joy and triumph of the Lord's people, that we know is attainable still. And since the attainment of a renewed mind depends upon no gifts of nature, no mysteries of art, no advantages of birth, no endowments of education, no privileges of station or rank, but entirely upon Divine grace, every anxious, humble, wrestling heart may indulge the joyous hope of receiving the blessing.

IV. WHAT MEANS MIGHT BE USED BY US TO PROMOTE THIS DESIRABLE AND GLORIOUS CONSUMMATION, THE ATTAINMENT OF MORAL PERFECTION, FELICITY, AND IMMORTALITY.

1. The text sets before you by example, the important, all-important exercise and means of prayer.

2. There must be diligent attention to the Word of God, and faith in it. This is the celestial mirror both of truth and beauty; the very exact, identical reflection or image of all that we are required both to be and to do; not a broken fragment, as the heathens fabled in their classic story of the natural mirror of truth, first given perfect into the hand of man, but afterwards dashed to the ground, and pieces only of which can now be gathered up and fitted together with much skill and infinite labour by the wisest of the sons of men; but that mirror of truth which we possess is perfect and entire, — the mirror of the Divine mind, most pure, perfect, and unsullied. Into this law of liberty we must daily look, not as "a natural man beholding his face in a glass," but coming thereto and continuing therein, that we may be changed, and till we are "changed, into the same image, from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord."

(G. Bedford, D.D.)

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KJV: And let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.

WEB: Let the favor of the Lord our God be on us; establish the work of our hands for us; yes, establish the work of our hands.