Bible Commentaries
John 14

Verse 1

The Secret of the Untroubled Heart

Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.— John 14:1.

1. There is one chapter in the biography of distinguished persons—in the biography of great geniuses, or of eminent saints or seers—which has for us special interest, the chapter entitled “Closing Days.” We are curious to learn how the great man bore himself, or what fell from his lips, during those days, in the shadow of the approaching end; to see something of the thoughts which then occupied his mind, or to hear something of his latest words. What of his behaviour, his expression, we ask, in his latest hours? The favourite pursuit—was its influence upon him then exemplified? The ruling passion—was it strong with him in death? Geoffrey Chaucer died making a ballad; Waller, reciting verses from his beloved Virgil; Haller, the famous physician, fingering his pulse and murmuring, when he found it almost gone, “Yes, the artery ceases to beat”; John Keats, whispering low in reply to a friend who inquired how he felt, “Better, better. I feel the daisies growing over me.” “Let me hear once more,” sighed Mozart, “those notes, so long my solace and delight.” Rousseau, when dying, bade his attendants place him before the open window, that he might take a final look at his garden, and bid adieu to Nature.

In this scene we have the beating of Christ’s heart and the vision of His soul. Here He is, we may say, in His habitual considerateness and sympathy, in the quick, tender considerateness and sympathy that characterized Him all through His course, from the moment when, at the beginning of His ministry, He was filled with compassion for the multitude because they were as sheep without a shepherd, to the moment when, in the night of His betrayal, He pleaded, “If ye seek me, let these go their way.”

2. Night had fallen with Oriental swiftness upon Jerusalem; and there, in the guest-chamber of a friend’s house, Jesus was partaking of the Passover Supper with His disciples. Not with all of them. Judas had gone on his mission of darkness. The shadow of some boding treachery had fallen on these men and chilled their hearts. “One of you shall betray me.” In the intense quiet that had followed those words, they had looked at one another and doubted one another; they had searched their own hearts and almost doubted themselves. Only one of them had been free from doubt, and he had something worse—he knew. But he had gone; and after his departure the cup of foreboding was filled to the brim by Jesus Himself. Quietly, but with an awful intensity of meaning, He told them that He too was going away—going where they could not follow Him then. Not by any dusty Syrian highway was He going from them.

No farewell in history approaches this in bitterness. Before another sun had set Jesus was lying low in death. His disciples were orphaned. No wonder that they were troubled. Their universe seemed shaken. Every ambition, every hope, was taken from them. Failure appeared to be written on their Lord’s mission and on their own. Such trouble is not mere sorrow. That may be hard to bear, but this is the collapse of all plans of service, all visions of future good and blessing. The sky was falling; all the lights in the firmament were being put out. Their life had become like a heaving sea, and even Jesus seemed powerless to quiet it. Their Master bids them conquer that passion of anxiety, of fear, of bitter disappointment. They are not to yield to it, for yielding means despair; it is paralysis for every hope of influence and usefulness. There is a glorious picture in St. John’s Apocalypse: God “shall wipe away every tear from their eyes.” That is a golden promise. Here is something still more suggestive. The disciples are themselves to dry up the fountain of tears; they are to quiet their own heaving breasts. Trouble has come, but Jesus bids them master it.

3. How does He comfort them? Not by commonplace ethics or moralizings, but by drawing aside the veil that conceals the spiritual world, and revealing to them entirely new conceptions concerning the Father Himself, the future life, and their own relations to it. He, their Lord, is the Lord of life, and He will prepare for them a place in the glorious world which He Himself is about to enter. He does not so much teach truths as reveal facts about the future life. He “brings life and immortality to light.” He is to depart, they are to remain. More remains concealed than even He can reveal to them. They can only trust Him, their loving Lord, and wait for the heavenly life of which He assures them. His chief urgency is that they should implicitly trust in Him—trust Him even as they trusted God Himself: “Ye believe in God, believe also in me.”

My last lesson was the fullest revelation of the master (James Prince Lee). I was staying with him for a day or two at Mauldeth, a short time before his death. We were alone. After dinner I turned the conversation from work at Manchester to work at Birmingham. He was glad, I think, to go back to the old days. He spoke with proud delight of his favourite classical authors, as if they were still his familiar companions. He poured out quotation after quotation as we used to hear them at school, and dwelt on that finest single line, as he said, in Latin literature, “Virtutem videant intabescantque relicta.” Graver, sadder subjects followed; memories of failures and disappointments. Then came a long silence. It was growing dark. Suddenly he turned to me and said, “Ah, Westcott, fear not, only believe.” In those four words—no more was spoken—there was a true interpretation of life as the teacher saw it, and as he prepared his scholars to see it: Work to be done, work to be done in the face of formidable difficulties, work to be done in faith on God. 1 [Note: Life and Letters of Brooke Foss Westcott, i. 28.]

I

Faith in God

“Ye believe in God.”

“As ye believe in God, so believe in me.” This seems to be the true relation of the two clauses of our Lord’s command. The words of the original are capable of a fourfold interpretation, but this seems to be the simplest, and most consistent with the moral and spiritual truth of our Lord’s teaching.

He would not call them to believe in God as they believed in Himself, for that would really be setting forth His created manifestation as more trustworthy than the Divine reality.

Neither would He bid them practise a double faith, believing in God and believing in Himself. Such a command would imply the insufficiency of believing in God. We are not to believe in God as an abstract object, and in Christ as a collateral object; not in God as an eternal object, and in Christ as a distinct object more available as being within the reach of our natural senses.

We are to believe in God with a supreme all-absorbing faith, and because we do so, we are to believe in Christ as the manifestation of His eternal love, not separate, collateral, instrumental, but identical, co-essential, indissolubly one with Himself. The belief which we have in God will be the measure of our true belief in Christ. As God is independent of all outward circumstance, so are we to believe in Christ with an entire independence of all outward circumstance. The events of the world do not shake our belief in God. Neither must they shake our belief in Christ.

1. Faith in God implies an act of the will.—Faith in God is a moral act; it is not an emotion, an impression, the result of considerations which act upon a man from without; it is an act in which he exercises moral choice. To have faith we must will to have it. This is not to say that there can be a true faith apart from reasonable grounds of faith. But these grounds may exist, they may be apparent, and yet faith may be absent, because the temper and spirit of the man make him reluctant to exert his will, or because he misconceives the nature of the act. Men confound faith and opinion; even in opinion a man’s moral habits and tendencies count for a great deal; and we often predict what a man’s opinions will be from what we know of his character. But in the formation of opinion the will has no direct function except to compel the intellect to investigate the facts by which opinion should be determined. In faith the case is wholly different. When the facts which should command faith are present and seen, faith may be withheld. Faith is an act of the will; and if we suppose that we shall come to believe in God and in Christ as the result of external forces which compel belief, we shall not believe at all. And when faith, resting on adequate grounds, is assaulted by doubt, the doubt must be met by a resolute decision.

No man can ever estimate the power of the will. It is a part of the Divine nature, all of a piece with the power of creation. We speak of God’s fiat. “ Fiat lux et lux erat” (Let light be and light was). Man has his fiat. The achievements of history have been the choices, the determinations, the creations of the human will. 1 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 1.]

2. Belief in God precedes belief in Christ.—Manifestly, everybody must believe in God before he can believe in Jesus Christ in any deep sense; for to say that “Jesus is the Son of God” already implies a belief in God. This was clearly true of the Christian converts from among the Jews, who were already worshippers of Jehovah; and it was true also, though to a less extent, of the Greeks, as St. Paul recognized in his famous speech at Athens; and it remains true of the converts from heathendom to-day. In the mind of all men there is some recognition of a Creator Spirit, with whom they are led to identify the Spirit of Jesus. And so the progress of belief is logically from the first article of the Creed to the second, from belief in God the Father and Creator to belief in Him whom the Father sent. At the same time, the belief in Jesus at once reacts upon the belief in God. The heathen convert, though he may employ the same word for God as before, has very different thoughts about Him; he is taught to believe that the holiness and loving-kindness of Jesus are the holiness and loving-kindness of the Creator God; and even the pious Jew gained a new insight into what these great qualities meant—the mercy and truth which he had always held to be the attributes of Jehovah. The two beliefs therefore go together. First, I learn to believe in God the Father, who has made me, and all the world; secondly, in God the Son, who has redeemed me, and all mankind.

It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that modern Christians have inverted the order of the text. They believe in Christ, and therefore they believe in God. Indeed, this would seem to be the inevitable order of discipleship. Christ calls men to Himself. “Come unto me,” “Follow me,” and in obedience to His summons men come also to God; but Christian Apologetic is concerned not with disciples, as such, but with those who are not disciples, but, at most, friendly inquirers. Therefore the order of reason is the order of Apologetic. First Theism, then Christianity. “Ye believe in God, believe also in me.” Every Theist is to that extent Christian, that is to say, Christianity is the logical inference from his Theistic belief. A Christianity which violates Theism is a contradiction in terms. 1 [Note: H. Hensley Henson, The Value of the Bible, 143.]

II

Faith in Christ

“Believe also in me.”

Christ makes for Himself the most majestic claim. “Believe in Me,” He says, “as you believe in God, and so you will believe in God in a richer and fuller form.” “Ye believe in God—as all your Jewish ancestors believed in Him—add to that faith all the things I have shown you and taught you. Believe in God, as He has spoken to you with My lips, and dwelt with you in My fellowship with you, and loved you with My heart. You know I have dwelt with you and loved you. Do you know why? It is that you may know that God is love. It is that you may come to know that beyond the darkness of the hour and the loneliness of the years—alike in the starlight and in the storm—there is but one thing: the breath, the light, the end of being; and that thing is the love wherewith God loves you.”

There is a clear claim put forward by Christ that His disciples shall repose in Him the same absolute, unquestioning, unlimited faith that they repose in God. It is not merely that Jesus claims absolute infallibility for His teaching concerning God and man, though this is necessarily included; and, if there were no clear assertion beyond this, we should still be driven to seek a deeper explanation of it. Even if we had nothing to direct us beyond our Saviour’s repeated assertions that the words He spoke were without any exception or qualification the words of God, that not the slightest taint of imperfection marked His presentation of eternal truth, that His union with God was so perfect that He could say: The Father loveth the Son, and showeth Him all things that Himself doeth;—even if there were nothing more than this we should find it utterly impossible to explain Jesus Christ by any principles of human development, or by any conceivable communication of the Divine Spirit to one who was a son of Adam and nothing more. Nowhere except out of the very bosom of the Father could He come who was the effulgence of the Father’s glory, and the express image of His person.

Is not Christendom built on the “also” of Christ’s supper table? Luther has remarked that in this fourteenth chapter “we have the great articles of Christian doctrine in most impressive exhibition, and fundamentally established as in hardly another place of Scripture.” This is true. Sometimes we turn with a sigh from the elaborate confessions of later ages to the confession summed up in the short saying of the Lord. Less than this there may not be, more than this there need not be, in the faith of a Christian. The “also” must stand out in bold relief, rightly apprehended and firmly grasped; but when it is so grasped the mind holds the essential Christian verity. It is the plus in respect of which the faith of the Christian Church is apart from and more than every mere theistic religion—a plus that is not an addition only, but a new faith. For the trust in God, which is “also “with trust in Christ, is not the same as the trust which is without. 1 [Note: J. M. Laing.]

1. Christ is the Revealer of God.—Jesus Christ is the Divine Revealer of God. Without Christ there is no real knowledge of God in the depth of His love, the tenderness of His nature or the lustrousness of His holiness; there is no certitude; the God that we see outside of Jesus Christ is sometimes doubt, sometimes hope, sometimes fear, always far-off and vague, an abstraction rather than a person, “a stream of tendency” without us, that which is unnameable, and the like. Jesus Christ has showed us a Father, has brought a God to our hearts whom we can love, whom we can know really though not fully, of whom we can be sure with a certitude which is as deep as the certitude of our own personal being; He has brought to us a God before whom we do not need to crouch far off, He has brought to us a God whom we can trust. Very significant is it that Christianity alone puts the very heart of religion in the act of trust. Other religions put it in dread, worship, service, and the like. Jesus Christ alone says that the bond between men and God is that blessed one of trust. And He says so because He alone brings us a God whom it is not ridiculous to tell men to trust.

To those who can receive this heavenly vision all human life is altered. We have dimly seen the heart of God, and we are no longer scared by the strangeness of His vesture or by the rough voice with which He sometimes seems to speak to us in the course of the world. We believe that His very nature and property is to forgive and pity, that the central core of His ethical being is love, that He withdraws Himself from us at times, only in order to increase our hunger and thirst for His presence, that though for a small moment He may forsake us, yet with everlasting kindness will He have mercy upon us. And thus by His sublime anthropomorphism Jesus assuages for His followers all the worst terrors and sorrows that Nature brings upon us. Through Him we have learnt that love, and even self-sacrificing love, is no local and transient product, but something at the very root of the universe, as it were, “the lamb slain from the foundation of the world,” a partial manifestation of that which was in the beginning with God, of the very soul of God. The God disclosed to us by Christ is not one who regards the terrible drama of human suffering from afar, but one who Himself shares our strife and bears our woes. Christ gave us the conception of a God who actually leads struggling souls on personally, and is not content with merely pointing out the road to them.

St. Philip and other anxious and sorrowing spirits need no longer go about groping for guidance and crying mournfully, “Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us.” Jesus has already shown us the Father. Those who have really seen Him have seen the Father so far as it is possible or necessary that we should see Him in this life. God has fulfilled to man that old gladdening promise, “I will make all my goodness pass before thee.”

Christ is the ladder between God and man. In His humanity He touches the earth; in His Divinity He touches the heaven, and on Jesus Christ as a ladder God comes down from heaven to earth and makes Himself known to man; on Jesus Christ as a ladder man climbs up from earth to heaven and is joined to God. Wonderful is the comprehensiveness of this short creed which Jesus Christ taught us: “Believe in God,”—that solves all the problems of creation; “Believe in me”—that solves all the problems of redemption. 1 [Note: A. T. Pierson, The Hopes of the Gospel, 130.]

2. Christ is Himself Divine.—Not only is Jesus Christ the Revealer of God, but He Himself is God. Light shines through a window, but the light and the glass that makes it visible have nothing in common with one another. The Godhead shines through Christ, but He is not a mere transparent medium. It is Himself that He is showing us when He is showing us God. “He that hath seen me hath seen”—not the light that streams through Me—but “hath seen,” in Me, “the Father.” And because He is Himself Divine and the Divine Revealer, therefore the faith that grasps Him is inseparably one with the faith that grasps God. Men could look upon a Moses, an Isaiah, or a Paul, and in them recognize the irradiation of the divinity that imparted itself through them, but the medium was forgotten in proportion as that which it revealed was beheld. You cannot forget Christ in order to see God more clearly; to behold Him is to behold God.

This was reached at a very early stage of Christian thought by a writer of inspired insight who seized his pen and, without argument or explanation, wrote: the Word was God. The critical penetrativeness of that writer is too little recognized. He overleapt centuries of controversy. He saw at the first glance, what all history has abundantly demonstrated, that all intermediate compromises, such as the Arian, were neither historically nor logically tenable, and that, therefore, the issue was clean and clear between mere humanity and very Deity. With that issue before him, he wrote, not so much the best or highest but the only description of Jesus that he could write. As a Christian, he could not describe Christ as mere man; nor can we. As a thinker he could not describe Him as an intermediate divinity; nor can we. If then he was to write at all he could write but one thing, and if we are to say at all what Christ is, we can say but that one thing too. It is saved from being quite incredible only by being quite inevitable. 2 [Note: P. C. Simpson, The Fact of Christ, 111.]

3. All imperfect revelation of God is prophetic of, and leads up towards, the perfect revelation in Jesus Christ.—The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews gives that truth in a very striking fashion. He compares all other means of knowing God to fragmentary syllables of a great word, of which one was given to one man and another to another. God “spoke at sundry times and in manifold portions to the fathers by the prophets”; but the whole word is articulately uttered by the Son, in whom He has “spoken unto us in these last times.” The imperfect revelation, by means of those who were merely mediums for the revelation, leads up to Him who is Himself the Revelation, the Revealer, and the Revealed. And in like manner, all the imperfect faith that, laying hold of other fragmentary means of knowing God, has tremulously tried to trust Him, finds its climax and consummate flower in the full-blossomed faith that lays hold upon Jesus Christ. The unconscious prophecies of heathendom; the trust that select souls up and down the world have put in One whom they dimly apprehended; the faith of the Old Testament saints; the rudimentary beginnings of a knowledge of God and of a trust in Him which are found in men to-day, and amongst us, outside of the circle of Christianity—all these things are as manifestly incomplete as a building reared half its height, and waiting for the corner-stone to be brought forth, the full revelation of God in Jesus Christ, and the intelligent and full acceptance of Him and faith in Him.

As ideas, the central points of Christian faith—such as a trust in the Divine Fatherhood and a hope beyond the grave—are not altogether new. Many earnest and noble souls have stretched out their minds towards them. What, then, was lacking for faith? Just that, after all, there were but ideas, speculations, yearnings; and our thoughts on these matters are not the sure measure of what really is. Before the stern unyielding facts of life and especially before life’s final fact of death, how easily such thoughts falter and fail.

Man is of dust: ethereal hopes are his,

Which, when they should sustain themselves aloft,

Want due consistence; like a pillar of smoke,

That with majestic energy from earth

Rises; but, having reached the thinner air,

Melts, and dissolves, and is no longer seen.

Who will assure us, in face of “the thinner air” that is the breath of death, that these hopes and speculations are the sure “pillar of cloud” leading us truly to a promised land, and are not but a “pillar of smoke” from the fires of human fancy? A faith thus founded will always be cherishable by certain temperaments—and it is largely a matter of temperament—but it will never really grip the mass of men, simply because it is a mere edifice of conceptions insecurely founded on the bed-rock of fact. But it is just this that Christian faith possesses. Its basis is not the ideas of Jesus but the fact. It brings, not a new doctrine merely, but new data. It comes not with the theory of a fatherly God, but with a phenomenon, in history and experience, which means that. Now all this is precisely what faith needs. Faith—as indeed may be said of all truth—is like Antaeus in Greek legend, who was invincible when touching mother-earth; and the mother-earth of faith is fact—the fact of Christ.

It was as if God had a revelation to make to the world, a word to teach it, His own name; and He taught it as we teach a little child, letter by letter. To one nation came a message by Buddha, to another by Zoroaster, to another by Confucius, to another by Moses, until at last the full Word was revealed, the Word that was made flesh and dwelt with us.… No truth can be taught until the world is prepared for it.… To me it seems I can read my Bible with a greater reverence and interest now I see in it a continuous record of a continuous revelation, wherein God appears ever growingly more tender, more merciful, where the false human ideas of Him as held by Abraham, Joshua and Saul are softened down in the tenderness of Isaiah, and finally in the life of our Lord Jesus. 1 [Note: Quintin Hogg, 307.]

4. Without faith in Christ, faith in God is incomplete.—Without faith in Christ such faith in God as is possible is feeble, incomplete, and will not last long. Historically a pure Theism is all but impotent. There is only one example of it on a large scale in the world, and that is a kind of bastard Christianity—Mohammedanism; and we all know what value that has as a religion. There are many among us who claim to be very advanced thinkers, and who call themselves Theists, and not Christians. That is a phase that will not last. There is little substance in it. The God whom men know outside of Jesus Christ is a poor, nebulous thing; an idea, not a reality. He, or rather It, is a film of cloud shaped into a vague form, through which you can see the stars. It has little power to restrain. It has less to inspire and impel. It has still less to comfort; it has least of all to satisfy the heart. You will have to get something more substantial than the far-off God of an unchristian Theism if you mean to sway the world and to satisfy men’s hearts.

Mr. Fujimoto was led to tell us some of his early difficulties in the Dôshisha University at Kyoto. He had been baptized, but had adopted extreme views on Higher Criticism. He could acknowledge the one God and Father, but beyond that he could not see. Various “holiness” and other meetings were held, but he found no comfort in them. Mr. Barclay Buxton tried hard to help him, but still he had no real light. One day having been pressed hard to attend one of these meetings, he said to himself, “No, I am going instead into the country alone to fight it out with myself and God!” He went and spent four hours in agonizing prayer to the God and Father for further light, if such light was really to be had. It was about 1.30 p.m. (halfway through the four hours) that a moment came which he says he shall always distinctly remember. He seemed to hear a voice saying in the concluding words of St. John 14:1, “Believe also in me.” He instantly took out his Testament and read straight through the chapter and on to the end of chapter 16, and he returned from that four hours a believer in our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 [Note: Bishop Ingham, From Japan to Jerusalem, 48.]

III

The Secret of a Quiet Heart

“Let not your heart be troubled.”

The word used here by our Saviour and translated “be troubled” does not signify any kind of sadness or sorrow; nor are we to understand that it is either desirable or possible to banish all sadness and sorrow from the mind of any son of man under the conditions that prevail upon this earth. The word used by Jesus signifies to be agitated, perplexed, and thrown into confusion. It is the description of a life thrown as it were off its centre, and tossed hither and thither by the force of perplexing and adverse circumstances.

It is the antithesis of that state which Christ described as peace, the rocky strength that is not exempt from sorrow, but remains unshaken by it. For we must remember that Jesus Christ Himself, though He spoke of giving His peace to His disciples, was “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.”

“Troubled” is the best English equivalent we can give for the Greek; but, as generally employed, its force is fainter. The original verb—used often of the agitation of waters, the heaving and surging of the sea—aptly represents the deeper agitations of the soul, painful to strong natures, dangerous to the weak. Thrice it is used of our Lord Himself in some access of vehement emotion. So He shared the experiences which in us He would comfort and control. Such a condition needs control, tending as it does to confusion of judgment and suspension of faith. “Let not your heart be troubled” was then not only a word of sympathetic kindness, but a needful counsel; and it is so still, falling with composing power on many an agitated mind. 1 [Note: T. D. Bernard, The Central Teaching of Jesus Christ, 125.]

I happened to read, one immediately after the other, the lives of two women written by themselves; the one was Sarah Bernhardt’s, the other Marianne Farningham’s. I gathered little in the way of help from Sarah Bernhardt’s. She is a woman with a kind heart. That at least can be said of her. At the siege of Paris she got all her friends safely out of the city, but remained herself, and turned her house into a hospital where she nursed the wounded soldiers. But in looking for any guiding principle of her life, it seemed to be chiefly this—that whatever she was thwarted in, whatever she was asked or recommended not to do, that was the very thing she would set herself to do with all the somewhat hysterical energy of her nature.

It was refreshing to turn to Marianne Farningham’s. In quoting what have been the two mottoes of her life, she says, “We change our mottoes as we proceed through life. Mine is now ‘Let not your heart be troubled,’ but through all my working years my favourite was ‘I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.’ ” One can understand why she changed her motto in later life, from a remark she made in reply to an Address presented to her—“The beauty of getting old is that not so much is expected of one, and one has time to sit and think.” In her strenuous years she had the earlier motto. For the “doing” we need Christ’s strength, for the “thinking” we need Christ’s comfort. The evening of her days had come, when the hands had to be folded from much labour, and she had to face the approaching night. We are so helpless, so ignorant, in view of the great unseen realities which each day’s journey is bringing us nearer to, We need hope and comfort, and Christ’s words are specially suited to such conditions and such times. 1 [Note: John S. Maver.]

1. Christ does not offer exemption from sorrow.—It has been a mistake of most of the remedies proposed for a troubled heart that they have aimed at eliminating sorrow from the earth. In this they have aimed, not only at what is impossible, but at what is, as a primary aim, undesirable also. Ancient Epicureanism, for example, sought to banish sorrow as far as possible by avoiding excess of pleasurable excitement, by making the tenor of life so even that extravagant excesses in pleasure should not occur to plunge men into consequent excess of pain. Modern Epicureanism, a more wretched fallacy still, adopts as its watchword: “A short life and a merry one; let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” It endeavours by the constant inoculation of pleasure in its most feverish form to exclude the possibility of pain, and to drive life’s pulse at its hottest pace, let the end come when it will. Stoicism sought to remove sorrow by the destruction of feeling, to create men who should not be flesh and blood, but iron and brass. It tried to crush and destroy the emotional side of life by such tremendous acts of self-conquest, or rather of self-mutilation, as to make man a monster—a “reason” with an iron will and no heart. And Buddhism, with all its beauty, has at the very centre of it a feminine anguish to be released from sorrow, and knows no way to cure earth’s heart-break except in an unmanly longing for extinction, in giving up the life, not in the Christian way so as to find it again, but in such a way that it disappears altogether into the great abyss of the Infinite.

Securely cabined in the ship below,

Through darkness and through storm I cross the sea,

A pathless wilderness of waves to me:

But yet I do not fear, because I know

That he who guides the good ship o’er that waste

Sees in the stars her shining pathway traced.

Blindfold I walk this life’s bewildering maze;

Up flinty steep, through frozen mountain pass,

Through thorn-set barren and through deep morass;

But strong in faith I tread the uneven ways,

And bare my head unshrinking to the blast,

Because my Father’s arm is round me cast;

And if the way seems rough, I only clasp

The hand that leads me with a firmer grasp. 1 [Note: Anne Charlotte Lynch Botta.]

2. The world cannot give us heartsease.—The worldling says “Come with me, and we will go where there is the lilt of merry music and the twinkle of dancing feet. Once at the feast, you will forget your sadness.” We know how little this man’s advice is worth. We have heard and, it may be, yielded to this plea for a little diversion; and we know that a troubled heart cannot be sung and danced and fooled out of its grieving. The world’s music may get into your feet; but only the music of heaven, of the Divine promises, can get into a troubled heart. In this world of problem and passion, and fear and distress, where the shadow of separation veils from us much that once was ours and lies soft and silent upon all that we do now possess, there is but one way to the quiet heart. It lies, not in the wisdom that would know all, or in the folly that would forget all, but in the faith that trusts the love of God the Father in the face of Jesus Christ—the faith that leads a man, in all the trouble of his days, to shelter his soul in the promise, yes, and in the silence of the Infinite Mercy. “Ye believe in God, believe also in me.”

Some think that the secret of peace is in the vision of science. There is a tendency to approach every experience of life along the line of the intellect. Faith in some quarters is depreciated. But, however men may slight it, they learn soon or late that they cannot live without it. These scientists, with their delicate instruments and their subtle treatises can say a great many things to us, but they cannot say all we need to hear. During the last fifteen years I have read many of their books. I honour them, and the service they have wrought; but I have missed one note in them all—the note of comfort. There is one thing they cannot in all their wisdom say to us: “Let not your heart be troubled.” They cannot say that. They can teach us to talk wisely, but they cannot help us to live quietly. They do not give any help in the day of a troubled heart. In that day I do not want to be reasoned with, I want to be comforted. I do not want learning, I want love. I do not want man, I want God. I do not want science, I want faith. 2 [Note: P. C. Ainsworth, A Thornless World, 90.]

3. Jesus unfolds the secret.—He says that personal faith will keep the heart at peace. We may not be able to rule the storm, but we can keep the storm from ruling us. Christ tells of the man who built his house upon a rock; and flood and tempest came and beat upon the house, but it fell not, for it was founded upon a rock. God has not taught us how to rule tempests, but He has taught us how to build houses that will defy these tempests. He has not given us lordship over life’s stressful weather, but He has given us the lordship of our hearts. If we trust we may be quiet. Trust is always tranquillity. To cast a burden off myself on others’ shoulders is always a rest. But trust in Jesus Christ brings infinitude on my side. Submission is repose. When we cease to kick against the pricks they cease to prick and wound us. Trust opens the heart, like the windows of the Ark tossing upon the black and fatal flood, for the entrance of the peaceful dove with the olive branch in its mouth. Trust brings Christ to my side in all His tenderness and greatness and sweetness. If I trust, “all is right that seems most wrong.” If I trust, conscience is quiet. If I trust, life becomes “a solemn scorn of ills.” If I trust, inward unrest is changed into tranquillity, and mad passions are cast out from him that sits “clothed and in his right mind” at the feet of Jesus.

There is a beautiful figure employed in the Apocalypse to denote the calmness of the soul which arises from the consciousness of God’s presence. Before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal. The idea conveyed to our minds by this emblem is that of a sea, not of glass, but like glass, a sea the glassy surface of whose waters is ruffled by not so much as a passing breeze, and whose crystal depths are lit up with sunshine, a sea smooth and clear as crystal. The beauty of the emblem is that it combines the most restless, unstable thing in nature with the idea of perfect repose and tranquillity. The sea in its restlessness is a true likeness of the human heart. Every breath of wind disturbs the one, every breath of adversity troubles the other. But there is something which can bring perfect repose to the soul—the presence of God. This is the truth which is taught by this sublime image of the sea like glass before the throne. It represents the calm of a soul which dwells in the presence of God. We think of heaven as calm because it is out of reach of the storms of earth, but this is not the idea conveyed by the vision. The heaven which it reveals is a heaven on earth. The scene of the Apocalypse is laid, not in some far-off sphere, some fabled Elysium, but here on earth. Heaven is within the good man’s heart. The sea which is before the throne is smooth and clear as crystal, not because it is remote from earthly storms, but because the Spirit of God moves upon the face of the waters.

I knew a man, since gone to his rest, who carried on an active service for his Master in the busiest of all cities, and who selected for himself a telegraphic address which might stand at the head of his notepaper. What do you think this busy man’s address was? It was this:—“Undisturbed, London.” And it always found him at home—that is to say, in God—so far as I could judge of his dwelling-place in the days when I knew him, before he had run out his leasehold in the Church militant and taken up his freehold in the Church triumphant. Such an one, living at such an address, verifies the truth of the Scripture which says of the good man that—

He shall not be afraid of evil tidings;

His heart is fixed, trusting in the Lord. 1 [Note: J. Rendel Harris, Aaron’s Breastplate, 44.]

Oh! the bells rang out for Easter, rang strong and sweet and shrill,

And the organ’s rolling thunder pealed through the long church aisle,

And the children fluttered with flowers, and I sat mute and still,

I who had clean forgotten both how to pray and to smile.

And I murmured in fierce rebellion: “There is nought that endures below,

Nought but the lamentations that are rent from souls in pain”;

And the joy of the Easter music, it struck on my ears like a blow,

For I knew that my day was over, I could never be glad again!

And then—how it happened I know not—there was One in my sight who stood,

And lo! on His brow was the thorn-print, in His hands were the nails’ rough scars,

And the shadow that lay before Him was the shade of the holy rood,

But the glow in His eyes was deeper than the light of the morning stars.

“Daughter,” He said, “have comfort! Arise! keep Easter-tide!

I, for thy sins who suffered and died on the cruel tree,

I, who was dead, am living; no evil shall e’er betide

Those who, beyond or waiting, are pledged unto life with Me.”

Now I wake to a holier Easter, happier than of old,

And again my voice is lifted in Te Deums sweet and strong;

I send it to join the anthem in the wonderful city of gold,

Where the hymns of the ransomed for ever are timed to the Easter song.

And I can he glad with the gladness that is born of a perfect peace;

On the strength of the Strong I am resting; I know that His will is best,

And who that has found that secret from darkness has won release,

And even in sorrow’s exile may lift up her eyes and be blessed.

The Secret of the Untroubled Heart

Literature

Ainsworth (P. C.), A Thornless World, 84.

Alexander (S. A.), The Mind of Christ, 28.

Allon (H.), The Indwelling Christ, 321.

Archer-Hind (T. H.), Some Scripture Problems, 1.

Banks (L. A.), Christ and His Friends, 334.

Benson (R. M.), The Final Passover, ii. (pt. i.), 235.

Bernard (T. D.), The Central Teaching of Jesus Christ, 123.

Craufurd (A. H.), The Religion of H. G. Wells, 133.

Dowen (L. T.), Christus Consolator, 1.

Fotheringham (D. R.), The Writing on the Sky, 51.

Harris (J. R.), Aaron’s Breastplate, 25.

Henson (H. H.), The Value of the Bible, 130.

Holland (H. S.), Pleas and Claims, 18.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John ix.–xiv., 253.

Matheson (G.), Times of Retirement, 114.

Muir (P. M.), Modern Substitutes for Christianity, 127.

Owen (J. W.), Some Australian Sermons, 2.

Pierson (A. T.), The Hopes of the Gospel, 121.

Purves (P. C.), The Divine Cure for Heart Trouble, 1.

Robertson (J.), Sermons and Expositions, 275.

Smith (D.), The Pilgrim’s Hospice, 97.

Smith (H. A.), Things New and Old, 91.

Telford (J.), The Story of the Upper Room, 77.

Thomas (J.), Sermons: Myrtle Street Pulpit, ii. 61.

Tipple (S. A.), Days of Old, 123.

Wilberforce (B.), The Hope that is in Me, 65.

Wilson (J. M.), The Origins and Aims of the Four Gospels, 130.

Cambridge Review, vii., Supplement No. 155 (Billing).

Christian Age, xlv. 146 (Abbott).

Christian World Pulpit, ix. 40 (Roberts); xii. 200 (Beecher); xxix. 10 (Davies); lxi. 348 (Hall); lxvi. 310 (Johnson); lxvii. 380 (Scholes); lxxix. 406 (Henson).

Churchman’s Pulpit: Trinity Sunday: ix. 400 (Mulchahey).

Verse 2

The Reliability of the Redeemer

If it were not so, I would have told you.— John 14:2.

One of the most striking traits of the teaching of Jesus is its reticence concerning many things which one would like to know. Through all Christian history people have gone to the Gospels for answers to questions which seemed to them of the highest importance, and concerning which churches have quarrelled, and they have been met by silence. It is the same with the first disciples of Jesus. They bring Him their questions about His own fate, and He answers, “Let not your heart be troubled: I go to prepare a place for you.” They ask Him whither He is going, and He replies, “In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you,” as though it were not necessary that He should tell them more.

I have wondered most of my life why Christ spoke these words at the time He did. They seem unsatisfactorily explained, whether connected with the first clause of the phrase or with the last clause. Dr. Marcus Dods comments: “Had there been no such place and no possibility of preparing it, He necessarily would have told them, because the very purpose of His leaving was to prepare a place for them.” Somehow this does not find me. Neither is Dr. John Ker, also a writer of genuine insight, much more satisfactory. He says: “There might be some misgivings in their minds, and these words are thrown in to quiet them. Had you been deceiving yourselves with falsehood, I should have felt bound to undeceive you.” It is along these tracks that most of the explanations run.

But should we not rather say that Christ spoke these words with a smile? “If it were not so, I would have told you. You know My way by this time. It has been My wont to check and thwart and dash your hopes. Things you desired, things you believed, things you dreamt of mightily—I have told you over and over again that they were not so. Now you are right at last. You thought that there were many mansions in the Father’s house. You clung to that faith when the rest went. I knew it all the time, and I never said a word to contradict you, because it was a true and sure hope, truer and surer and sweeter than you knew. If it had not been so, I would have told you; but it is so. This time you may let your hearts go free; beyond death there are no disappointments.” 1 [Note: W. Robertson Nicoll, The Lamp of Sacrifice, 155.]

Still on the lips of all we question,

The finger of God’s silence lies;

Will the lost hands in ours be folded?

Will the shut eyelids ever rise?

Oh, friend, no proof beyond this yearning,

This outreach of our hearts we need;

God will not mock the hope He giveth,

No love He prompts shall vainly plead.

Then let us stretch our hands in darkness,

And call our loved ones o’er and o’er;

Some day their arms will close about us,

And the old voices speak once more.

There are many matters in the short parenthetical sentence, and they all make for strength. Let us touch four things—Christ’s Knowledge, His Tenderness, His Confirmation of our Human Instincts, and His Encouragement.

1. Christ’s knowledge.—The text is a simple parenthesis in the midst of one of His greatest teachings, but it seems more than the most elaborate argument. He is speaking about the future life as the hope and consolation of those whom death bereaves, and He affirms concerning it some very definite things—things which are a clear addition to human knowledge about it. And the manner of His affirmation is as remarkable as its matter. He calmly assumes His own certain knowledge. He is not an inquirer about the unseen world. He does not, like Plato, rest His teachings upon reasonings and probabilities. He speaks with absolute certainty. Clearly He believed Himself to have certain knowledge.

We have in this testimony of Jesus our surest guarantee of the existence of the heavenly world. Others have guessed, hoped, dreamed, speculated, poetized about heaven: Jesus knows. For He has come down from heaven. The world into which our dead pass one by one, the veil closing instantly behind them without a sign or token sent back to tell us how they fare, the world into which our prayers are sent evoking no audible response—He has dwelt in that world, ruled over it, and is the Master of its secrets; and He calls it paradise, He calls it My Father’s house. “I speak unto you,” He says, “the things that I have seen with the Father.… We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen.” So He declared to Nicodemus, referring to heavenly as well as to earthly things. How these quiet words of Jesus reassure us, bewildered with the haze of our modern doubt!

Away down in the darkness, in the heart of the great steamer, the engineer stands. He never sees how the vessel moves. He does not know where she is going. It is not his duty to know. It is his only to answer every signal, to start his engine, to quicken or slow its motion, to reverse it, just as he is directed by the one whose part it is to see. He has nothing whatever to do with the vessel’s course. He sees not an inch of the sea.

It is not our part to guide our life in this world, amid its tangled affairs. It is ours just to do our duty, our Master’s bidding. Christ’s hand is on the helm. He sees all the future. He pilots us. Let us learn to thank God that we cannot know the future, that we need not know it. Christ knows it, and it is better to go on in the dark with Him, letting Him lead, than to go alone in the light, and choose our own path. 1 [Note: J. R. Miller, Glimpses through Life’s Windows, 85.]

Who knows? God knows: and what He knows

Is well and best.

The darkness hideth not from Him, but glows

Clear as the morning or the evening rose

Of east or west.

Wherefore man’s strength is to sit still:

Not wasting care

To antedate to-morrow’s good or ill;

Yet watching meekly, watching with goodwill,

Watching to prayer.

Some rising or some setting ray

From east or west,

If not to-day, why then another day

Will light each dove upon the homeward way

Safe to her nest. 2 [Note: C. G. Rossetti, Poems, 138.]

2. Christ’s tenderness.—“If it were not so, I would have told you.” It is a parenthesis of singular significance and emphasis, full of human considerateness and tenderness. It is a measure of the greatness of the revelation which He was making to them. He would not trifle with this great human hope of immortality. Had there been no such satisfaction for it He would have told them. It was impossible for Him to deceive them with a false or uncertain hope, or to permit them to be deceived. He came to teach them about spiritual realities, and this was one of them.

Somewhere in the East Tennessee mountains a craggy bluff of limestone rises sheer from the plain, some five hundred feet in height. At its base lies the peaceful valley stretching away into the distance. A storm gathers on the horizon. The clouds fly rapidly together, the lightning leaps, there is one terrific thunder-clap. The bluff echoes the roar of the storm. Down on the side of the bluff a stunted bush is growing from the scanty soil that has drifted into a fissure of rock. On the bush a bird sits and swings and sings. The bluff echoes the song of the bird. At the base of the cliff a little child has fallen on the stones and is crying over the hurt of the fall. The bluff echoes the child’s cry. Yonder in the cabin door a woman sits at her work, and as she works, the words of an old hymn float out on the open air. The bluff echoes the woman’s hymn. Christ is like the echoing bluff. He catches every note that issues from human hearts, and in responding He joins the strength of the rock to a tenderness that beats swift and helpful sympathy for every sob and song that trembles in the air about Him.

3. Christ’s confirmation of human instincts.—There are some beliefs embedded in the native soil of our hearts; they grow there of themselves, and we need no proof of their existence or reality. One of these is the hope of immortality. No savage so barbarous, no religion so material, as to be without its hope and its paradise, and its realms of the blessed, where there is rest and peace after the toil and battle of life. And Jesus in adding, “If it were not so, I would have told you,” seems to guarantee to us as correct interpreters of God’s mind to men these deep instincts of human nature. He who ever told His disciples the truth, who kept back nothing that was for their good though He should pain and shame them thereby, would surely have told them if these hopes of future blessedness were doomed to disappointment. It is impossible that Christ should deceive.

The unspeakable value of these words of the Lord Jesus is that they vindicate a native and ineradicable instinct of the soul. They set His seal on the sanctified use of the imagination in religion. They proclaim the soul to be a freedman of the universe, with a right to exercise its faculties in picturing to itself an authentic ideal. “In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you.” As though He had said, I know you have your dreams of God, of heaven, of a perfect life beyond the tumults of time and the river of death. You think of Him as the Father, the Holy One and the Good, too wise to err, too good to be unkind; whose love is as the salt sea, “washing in pure ablution round earth’s human shores,” whose mercy is infinite as the sky; whose will for all is eternal life;—you dream of a state where that holy will is ideally done, and where the spirits of just men made perfect serve Him day and night in blessedness. And these dreams are true; “If it were not so, I would have told you.” 1 [Note: E. Griffith-Jones, Faith and Verification, 220.]

4. Christ’s encouragement.—Life for many of us is grey and dim. Let the glory of eternity break through the clouds. We are wanting, many of us—how many!—in decision, in earnestness, in elastic energy: let us find vigour where a thousand saints have found it—at the fountain of immortal strength. Life is full of disappointments; the horizons narrow with the advancing years: let the sadness sometimes forget itself in the anticipation of eternal joy, and the poverty in the anticipation of eternal wealth. The hopes that look for fulfilment within these mortal years often fail, but the great hope is beyond the reach of vicissitude and peril; and while we are learning with sorrow the narrowing limits of our mortal strength, let us exult in the ages which are to bring a perpetual expansion to all our powers and to all our joys. Half a gospel will never give any man the whole of the Christian redemption. In the gospel of Christ, life and immortality have been brought to light, and a universal spirit that should distinguish the children of God, a magnanimous superiority to the vicissitudes of this earthly life, the courage to attempt great duties, and the fortitude to bear without complaint great sorrows—these come not merely from the pathetic memories of the past, from the incarnation of Christ, from His sorrows, from His death, but from the endless ages of righteousness, of wisdom, of peace, of joy, and of glory, that Christ has promised us in the home of God.

He has brought life and immortality to light. Trusting Him, we can think of our bereavements calmly, and look forward joyfully to the hour of our departure. For those who believe in Christ, death is not annihilation but victory, not separation but reunion; it is not the soul’s extinction, but its birth into a brighter, purer, larger life. It means “ease after toil, port after stormy seas,” home after changeful, perilous journeyings, the frail tents of the wilderness exchanged for the shining gates and undecaying walls of the city of God. 1 [Note: G. G. Findlay, The Things Above, 210.]

As it were better, youth

Should strive, through acts uncouth,

Toward making, than repose on aught found made;

So, better, age, exempt

From strife, should know, than tempt

Further. Thou waited’st age: wait death nor be afraid! 2 [Note: Browning, Rabbi ben Ezra.]

The Reliability of the Redeemer

Literature

Allon (H.), The Indwelling Christ, 321.

Burrell (D. J.), The Golden Passional, 151.

Cobern (C. M.), The Stars and the Book, 123.

Dale (R. W.), Christ and the Future Life, 33.

Dawson (W. J.), The Church of To-morrow, 105.

Fairweather (D.), Bound in the Spirit, 151.

Findlay (G. G.), The Things Above, 188.

Griffith-Jones (E.), Faith and Verification, 219.

Matheson (G.), Rests by the River, 222.

Matheson (G.), Searchings in the Silence, 210.

Morrison (G. H.), in Great Texts of the New Testament, 83.

Nicoll (W. R.), The Lamp of Sacrifice, 155.

Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 150.

Raleigh (A.), Quiet Resting-Places, 387.

Shedd (W. G. T.), Sermons to the Spiritual Man, 167.

Sunday Magazine, 1880, p. 307 (Butler).

Verses 2-3

The Preparation and the Reception

I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.— John 14:2-3.

One does not wonder that the disciples were troubled when told that their Master was about to die. There is no anguish so sharp and desolating as that which bereavement causes. He who had been to them infinitely more than friend or brother, whom they had loved with a love having all the reverence of worship and all the intensity of passion, whose life had been their ideal of goodness, whose love had been their blessedness, whose Divine teaching and working had been their glory—He was about to be taken from them; they are to be bereaved of more than affection ever lost before. Never had sorrow so great an occasion. The grief of bereavement is measured by the greatness of possession. Only those who had known Him could know what it was to lose the man Christ Jesus. Therefore “sorrow had filled their hearts,” the depth of which was attested alike by the vehemence of St. Peter and the tenderness of St. John. His comfort for them was, trust in Him as the immortal Christ, who would go to prepare a place for them, and come again to receive them to Himself.

I

The Preparation

“I go to prepare a place for you.”

These words are so simple that a child or an unlettered peasant might understand them. Christ has gone to prepare a place for us in the house of His Father; what more need we know? This is enough to give us the exhilarating hope and joy which are necessary for righteousness; this is enough to invigorate the faith which is agitated by the mysteries that environ us; this is enough to sustain the fortitude which is likely to give way under the recurring shocks of earthly trouble.

1. The Going.—It is not so much the going as the preparation that is in His mind. Yet what a way was that by which He had to go. It was the way of Gethsemane, and the judgment-hall, and Calvary; it was the way of the cross and of the grave; the way of the resurrection and the ascending on high. It was thus He opened the Kingdom of heaven to all believers, and thus He rendered possible for us life in the Father’s house.

(1) He goes because He first came. Christ came into this world not as a native but as a visitor, a messenger from another sphere. “I go my way,” He cries, “to him that sent me.” He returns to His rightful place, as a voyager setting sail to his native shore, as a son wending his way joyfully homewards when the task on which he set out is finished. What poets and philosophers have sometimes imagined concerning man, that he has descended by the passage of birth from some diviner realm of which he brings dim recollections with him, that

Trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home,—

this was true in a sense deeper and grander than they had imagined, in the case of the Son of Man, our Lord Jesus Christ. He came from the bosom of the Father.

Nothing is more evident from the narrative of the Gospels than that Jesus made this claim; nothing is more certain than the fact itself, if His words are in any wise true. Listen to Him: “I came out from the Father, and am come into the world; again I leave the world, and go to the Father.” Language cannot be plainer or more positive than this. The gates of birth and of death alike are transparent to Jesus Christ; through both He sees His Father’s heaven.

(2) He goes because for our sakes He must go. It was necessary to part, necessary to leave them behind; nothing else would have snapped the chain which held them to this visible life which they knew, and in which they had known their Master; nothing but losing Him, and knowing why they had lost Him—that He had gone to prepare their place, the place where at last they should be with Him, and where He was with the Father for over. He went up on high: and then with tears and with great joy they understood the lesson that to give Him up was not to lose Him. Then they knew that to have Him out of sight was to have Him none the less. Then they knew that they parted with Him on earth to have One whom they had followed and conversed with, on the throne of heaven. Then they perceived that though their work and their sufferings might be for a while on earth, they themselves belonged to where their Master was gone; the place prepared for them was nothing less than the unutterable and never-changing glory into which He was withdrawn.

Wherever He would have His disciples go, He goes first Himself, and through the door which He has opened He draws them by His love. That is the whole philosophy of Christian culture. And that is the meaning of the Incarnation. God entered into human life; made Himself one with it as He only could have done with a nature that was originally one with His own. He became man as He could not have become brute or stone. Then in that human nature He outwent humanity. He opened yet unopened gates of human possibility. He showed what man might be, how great, how godlike! And by the love and oneness He has always been claiming man for the greatness whose possibility He showed. 1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, The Mystery of Iniquity, 179.]

2. The Preparation.—“If I go,” He said. But “go” is a cold word. It tells of parting. There is a sigh of desolation in it, like the moaning of the wintry wind as it sweeps through the leafless branches of the trees in the dead of night. It was a word which filled the heart of the disciples with sorrow. They thought it the coldest word that they had ever heard from Him. It seemed to hang like an icicle upon the lips of the Christ. Only the satisfaction that He was going to prepare a place for them made the word bearable. “I go to prepare” are His words. To go, then, does not mean to forget. Christ’s exaltation is an exaltation to service. No trouble will be too great for Him in our interests. “Prepare.” God believes in preparation. He did not place man on earth without having first prepared the earth for him; and as the ages move we are more and more impressed with the extent of the preparation. From this we can understand better the meaning of the word “prepare” as applied to heaven. And, more, we can see better why our Lord should speak of “ abiding places.” A home which takes so long in preparing must not be a transient one. In the Divine economy there is always a sublime relation between the means and the end.

When a guest is coming to the house, the hostess prepares. The rooms are there, the furniture is there, but the thoughtful, tender-hearted woman has something to do beyond making them ready. She prepares for the guest. This, she says to herself, is his favourite flower, his favourite book, and that little touch of kindness makes the welcome perfect. It may not be much that she is able to do, but the little means that she would fain do all. So Christ prepares for Peter, prepares for John, prepares for Thomas. He knows what they like, and He does not forget. So He prepares for His people through the generations till the end arrives. 1 [Note: W. Robertson Nicoll, The Lamp of Sacrifice, 169.]

I remember how once travelling in Syria the guide upon whom we wholly depended disappeared. By and by he came back to us as we rode along and told us where he had been: that in the village which we were approaching, and where we were to spend the night, his family lived; that he had ridden on to see that they were ready to receive him and to prepare quarters in their house for us, the travellers under his charge, and now came back to conduct us thither; and by and by he brought us where he belonged, and where through him provision had been made and a welcome was waiting for us. 2 [Note: Phillips Brooks, The Mystery of Iniquity, 173.]

(1) There are two remarkable things about this statement. The first is that the master should prepare for the servant. This upsets the ordinary course of procedure. You are expecting to entertain some chosen friends. All your appointments are made; you have sent before your face servants in whom you have confidence, and have told them to do as you have commanded, that all things may be in readiness for the invited guests. This is customary; this is considered right. But Jesus Christ says to His servants,—such poor, incomplete, and blundering servants, too,—“I, your Lord and Master, go to prepare a place for you.” This is quite in keeping with the method which Jesus Christ adopted in His ministry. This is no exceptional instance of condescension, self-ignoring, self-humiliation. He took a towel, girded Himself, and washed His disciples’ feet and dried them, and having finished this lowly exhibition, He said, “If I, then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye ought also to wash one another’s feet.” I have given you an example. So His whole life was a humiliation.

Suppose we had a near relative and friend who had long been away in far-distant lands. At length he determined to return home, and settle down quietly after his long, and tiresome, and wandering life. He wrote to us to provide a house for him, to prepare it, to furnish it completely, and even to lay out the grounds, all ready for his arrival and immediate occupation. That preparation would cost us very grave anxieties. How carefully we should endeavour to recall his old disposition, his old fancies and partialities! We should provide everything that we imagined could be pleasing to him. We should be all the while thinking about him. And yet, when we had it all ready, if a mutual friend should come to look over the house and grounds, he would see a great many signs of our own peculiar taste, our own individual preferences. We could not help making the house a little expression of ourselves, and a little expression of our friend. So it must be with the Lord Jesus. He is preparing a place for us, and He is thinking of us; of our real wants, and of our varied wishes. But all the while He is impressing His own character upon it; He is filling it with indications of His own likings and sympathies. And the exceeding charm of our Heaven will be to us this: it will be so largely, and so evidently, Christ’s Heaven, but at the same time it will be so manifestly our own Heaven—Christ’s preparation, but prepared for us. 1 [Note: R. T. Light for Life’s Eventide, 27.]

(2) The second remarkable thing about the text is that the Divine being, God the Son, should ever have occasion to “prepare” anything. To prepare may signify to get ready, to put things in order, to look after arrangements, appointments, and the like, so as to have all things in due proportion and relation, that the eye may be pleased, that the ear may be satisfied, and that all our desires may be met and fulfilled. Jesus Christ talks in the text as if there were a good deal of work for Him to do somewhere, and He must make haste and get it done. Go to prepare? Can He who fills infinitude and breathes eternity have anything to do in the way of arranging and ordering and getting things ready for His servants. He accommodates Himself to our modes of thinking. He does not always “throw the infinite at us.” He often steps out of His tabernacle of glory and talks our own speech,—makes a child of Himself that He may be understood in this little rickety nursery of a world. He knows we are all in the cradle still, that the mightiest speaker among us is only a lisping babbler, and that He must continually break up His words, in order that He may convey the very dimmest hint of His unutterable meaning!

There are some things which only the Master can do. Will you go and prepare summer for us? You might try. You have seen half a hundred summers: now you go and try to make the fifty-first! Come! You are an artificer: you have the organ of form largely developed; you have an eye for beauty; you can buy oils and paints and colours and canvas and brushes of all kinds. Why don’t you go and prepare summer for us? The great Master, looking down upon this little under-world of His—this basement-storey of His great building—says, “I am going to prepare the summer for you.” And He makes no noise, He makes no mistakes in His colours, never gets things into discord. He continually renews the face of the earth, and not a man in all the busy, boastful world can do it! If the servant cannot prepare the summer, how could he prepare heaven? If the saint exhausts himself when he lights a candle, how could he fill the great heavens with the morning that should never melt into sunset? 1 [Note: J. Parker.]

II

The Reception

“I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.”

“If I go, I come again” (He uses the present tense, not the future), “that where I am, there ye may be also.” There is the Father’s house, there is the place prepared, and there is the coming of the Christ to take us to our place. He will not leave His disciples to find their own way; He will come again and receive them to Himself, that they may abide with Him for ever. The going was preparatory. It was with a view to returning, and the returning, again, is with a view to the final reunion of all with Himself. “If I go, I come again.”

1. The Coming.—There are many comings of Christ to the world, and to the individual. The words no doubt refer to the Second Advent, but the promise must not be limited to that one coming which is the consummation of all comings. In many ways and times Christ has come and is coming. From the day He ascended to His Father, He has been continuously coming, manifesting Himself as the risen Lord and the life-giving Spirit to the Church and the world. The signs of His advent are everywhere around us. Christ has come again already, and come to dwell. His is an abiding presence. “Lo,” He said, “I am with you all the days, even unto the consummation of the age.” Especially is there one coming of Christ to us which we all await with mingled feelings of awe and fear and hope. May we not say that death is for each individual a true coming of Christ, that through it Christ’s words, “I receive you unto myself,” have a true fulfilment?

When our Lord departed, to confirm our assurance He returned again for a little while, with the keys of death and the grave hung at His girdle; He “shewed himself alive after his passion,” Master of both worlds, “Lord of both the dead and the living,” and moving as He would this side or that the veil. By the resurrection of Jesus Christ we know that there is an exit from the grave, and that our holy dead live unto God. Paradise is no fable then; the celestial hills gleaming beyond the dark river are no cloudland born of our wishes and our fancies. When Jesus speaks of His Father’s house, He does not invite us to a castle in the air, to some palace in the fairyland of childhood, but to that which is the most certain and solid as it is the most glorious of realities. It is this world that is unsubstantial, that is the realm of dreams and shadows. “The things which are seen are temporal: but the things which are not seen are eternal.” The earth beneath our feet is but a little flying dust, the everlasting mountains fade and dissolve as the morning mists that cover them; we look for “a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.”

He will come again!

Sometime He will surely stand once more

On the earth which His own hand hath made—

Only never as before,

Weary, lonely, and in pain,

As the Lamb on whom our sin was laid—

Stretching out His hands in vain,

All the day,

To a people gone astray.

He will come again!

O, the word

Which our joyful ears have heard

Cannot fail, nor pass away.

He hath spoken! It shall be!

Our expectant eyes shall see

Him for whom we watch and wait,

Coming soon to claim

All whose trust is in His name—

For the hour is growing late;

Time wears on,

And the little while is almost gone.

He will come again!

In the hope our hearts grow strong—

Strong to bear the watching and the strain

Of the time between—

Strong to bear His cross—to undertake,

For His sake,

All the burdens of the day—

All the roughness of the way—

Reaching out toward the things unseen—

Finding not our rest below—

Counting all the joys of earth,

All things here,

Sometime dear,

Of but little worth,

Since we know

That at His appearing we shall see

All the glory, and the light—

Hidden now from human sight—

Of the risen One,

And, beholding, in His likeness be,

While eternal ages run. 1 [Note: E. H. Divall, A Believer’s Rest, 68.]

2. The Reception.—One of the best tests of the truth and reality and vigour of our Christian life lies in this, that when we anticipate the great life to come, however far speculation may endeavour to trace its course in the province of that mysterious land, we return to this thought, which satisfies completely all the deepest and best desires of our hearts,—that where Christ is, we are to be also. But there is a personal delight in these words of Christ’s: His joy would be incomplete if we were not with Him in the Father’s house. It would diminish our gladness, our anticipation of supreme bliss, if we did not know that our presence with Him would heighten His own happiness. He is not so absorbed in the splendours of His Eternal Throne, or in the great tasks which belong to Him as the Lord of the heaven and the earth, as to be indifferent to the affection that binds Him to us and to God. Nor is He so absorbed even in the blessedness of His eternal fellowship with the Father. If on the one side of His nature He is eternally one with God, on the other side of His nature He is eternally one with us; and fellowship with us, in the perfection of our righteousness and the perfection of our blessedness, is as necessary to the heavenly glory of Christ as His fellowship with the Father Himself. The joy that was set before Him when He endured the Cross, despising the shame, was this,—that He might redeem us from sin; and knowing as only He knows the blessedness of living in the eternal love of God, He wanted us in our measure to know that blessedness likewise.

Heaven is the Father’s house, where we shall be young again, the ideal home life here revived and sanctified, where friend will meet with friend, where the many mansions will extend their ample hospitality to people of every kindred and tongue and nation; yet even this is not the chief feature of that life to come. Its chief feature is the fellowship not of friend with friend, but of all with Christ—“That where I am, there ye may be also.” The Father’s house is not a perfect place to Christ until He gathers into its mansions all those for whom He died. Not until He has His loved ones beside Him where He is, and has made them what He is, will He be satisfied. That is heaven,—to be with Christ, to see Him as He is, to be as He is. “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.”

The Tannese called Heaven by the name Aneai; and we afterwards discovered that this was the name of the highest and most beautifully situated village on the island. Their best bit of Earth was to them the symbol and type of Heaven; their Canaan, too, was a kind of prophecy of another country, even a heavenly Canaan. The fact that they had an Aneai, a promised land, opened their minds naturally to our idea of the promised land of the future, the Aneai of the Gospel hope and faith. 1 [Note: John G. Paton, i. 121.]

I used to think of heaven and its golden streets and pearly gates, and it was the place I thought of; but as I grew older and my loved ones passed on before, my thoughts of heaven changed altogether. I no longer think of the place, but of the great company I shall meet there, of my Poly. boys who have gone home, of the mother who loves me none the less because her love has been made perfect in her Saviour’s presence. I believe that when our opening eyes first pierce the mysteries of that land beyond the river, our first feeling will be a deep inward sensation of being at home; the surroundings that are so often antagonistic to our better nature will be gone: there will be no more sea. 2 [Note: Quintin Hogg, 309.]

Let not thy heart be troubled; in the vast spaces there is a home for thee. The Son of Man has gone before; there is a region prepared for humanity. There is a spot in this stupendous universe where human nature dwells. That spot is thy one comfort, thy one glory. No other glory would make up for it. There may be golden streets and pearly gates and sapphire thrones. There may be rivers clear as crystal, and trees rich in foliage, and flowers full of bloom. There may be suns that never set, and hands that never weary, and lives that never die. But about these many things thy heart is not troubled. One thing is needful, without which all were vain—the sympathy of a brother’s soul. Content mayest thou be to have no revealing of the many lights in the upper chamber, since thou hast been allowed to gaze on one glimmering light of love—“I go to prepare a place for you.” 3 [Note: G. Matheson, Searchings in the Silence, 212.]

Dr. Story, speaking of his last interview with Mrs. Oliphant, then on her death-bed, says: Her voice was still strong with its old, familiar tone; her wonderful eyes were as lambent as ever; and her mind was as calm and clear as a summer’s sea. “I am dying,” she said, “I do not think I can last through the night.” Thinking of the “Little Pilgrim” and the “Seen and the Unseen,” and the many touching efforts her eager imagination had made to lift the impenetrable veil, I said, “The world to which you are going is a familiar world to you.” “I have no thoughts,” she replied, “not even of my boys; but only of my Saviour waiting to receive me, and of my Father.” 1 [Note: Memoir of Robert Herbert Story, 288.]

The city’s shining towers we may not see

With our dim earthly vision;

For Death, the silent warder, keeps the key

That opes the gates Elysian.

But sometimes, when adown the western sky

A fiery sunset lingers,

Its golden gates swing inward noiselessly,

Unlocked by unseen fingers.

And while they stand a moment half ajar,

Gleams from the inner glory

Stream brightly through the azure vault afar,

And half reveal the story.

O land unknown! O land of love Divine!

Father, all-wise, eternal!

O guide these wandering, way-worn feet of mine

Into those pastures vernal! 2 [Note: Nancy Priest Wakefield.]

The Preparation and the Reception

Literature

Alford (H.), Quebec Chapel Sermons, i. 365.

Allon (H.), The Indwelling Christ, 321.

Brooks (P.), The Mystery of Iniquity, 171.

Church (R. W.), Village Sermons, iii. 176.

Dale (R. W.), Christ and the Future Life, 33.

Fairweather (D.), Bound in the Spirit, 151.

Findlay (G. G.), The Tilings Above, 188.

Ingram (A. F. W.), The Mysteries of God, 135.

Lewis (F. W.), The Unseen Life, 119.

MacColl (M.), Life Here and Hereafter, 71.

Matheson (G.), Searchings in the Silence, 210.

Moody (D. L.), Heaven, 61.

Mozley (J. B.), Sermons Parochial and Occasional, 268.

Nicoll (W. R.), The Lamp of Sacrifice, 155.

Parker (J.), Studies in Texts, v. 86.

Parkhurst (C. H.), A Little Lower than the Angels, 214.

Parkhurst (C. H.), The Pattern in the Mount, 227.

Smith (D.), The Pilgrim’s Hospice, 97.

Christian World Pulpit, xxix. 10 (Davies).

Verse 6

The Way, the Truth, the Life

Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, and the truth, and the life.— John 14:6.

1. The words of Christ immediately preceding the text seem to have been obscure and puzzling to the Apostles. Apparently they were not yet persuaded that their Master was shortly to die; and, accordingly, when He spoke of going to His Father’s house, it did not occur to them that He meant passing into the spiritual world. His assuring words, “that where I am, there ye may be also,” therefore fell short. And when He sees their bewilderment written on their faces, He tentatively, half interrogatively, adds, “And whither I go, ye know the way.” Unless they knew where He was going, there was even less consolation in the promise that He would come for them after He had gone and prepared a place for them. And when He thus challenges them candidly to say whether they understood where He was going, and where He would one day take them also, Thomas at once replies, “Lord, we know not whither thou goest; how know we the way?” This interruption by Thomas gives occasion for the great declaration, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”

2. Some people find it hard to trace the connexion between way, and truth, and life; and that difficulty was well expressed by Maldonatus in the pithy saying, “If Christ had been less liberal in explanation, we had less labour in exposition.” The three terms, way, truth, and life, are not co-ordinate, as Luther and Calvin hold, i.e. beginning, middle, end; neither do they express a single notion, as Augustine’s vera via vitae; nor does Reuss seem to express quite accurately their relation when he combines them, by defining the way as the means of arriving at truth and life. The phrase may be interpreted, according to Lightfoot and others, as a Hebraism equivalent to “the true and living way”; but it is better to take the two latter phrases as explanations of the former. Jesus means to say: “I am the means of coming to the Father, because I am the truth and the life.”

I

Christ the Person

“I am.”

The distinguishing feature and the chief glory of this wonderful declaration of Christ lies in its personal element. The special force of the utterance lies not in the words, “the way, and the truth, and the life,” but in Christ’s resolving their whole meaning into Himself. “No man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” It is this presentation of a Person, as concentrating within Himself all that can be embraced in the all-comprehensive words, “the way, and the truth, and the life,” that constitutes the grand peculiarity and the chief wonder of the text.

1. Man’s need is satisfied only by a person. If anything is obvious in our everyday experience, and in the history, both secular and religious, of mankind, it is that in the formation of character, in great social changes, in shaping the destiny of our race, the great factor is not abstract truth, system, or form, but living, thinking, willing beings—mind acting on mind, heart on heart, life on life. This is human nature—on the one hand, an obvious and universal susceptibility to the influence of the person; and, on the other, such influence at all times and in all directions at work, moulding character and gradually determining the great changes that mark our history. Take home life. What is moulding the natures there, and day after day shaping the future man and woman? Is it the acknowledged regulations of the house, the teachings out of book, or lip, or is it the teacher—the verbal lessons of the mother, or the mother herself? Take school life. This moulding, this gradual ripening is going on with obvious reality there; and what is doing it? The books, the maps, the desks, the forms, the cane? No. It is the teacher and the companions that are training and stamping the future man. Take a wider view of life, and the same lesson is as clearly taught. Who can calculate the personal influence of Confucius, of Zoroaster, or Mohammed? What may be fairly traced, in the Christian era, to the spirit and life of Paul, of Augustine, of Calvin, of Luther, of Wesley? In politics, what is well done or worth doing without a leader in whom the party fully trusts? In war, who can exaggerate the potency of the captain? What would have been our recollections of Waterloo in the absence of Wellington?

In general the progress of mankind has not been gradual, but sudden, like the burst of summer in some ice-bound clime. Still less has it been a common effort of the whole human race. If we take away two nations from the history of the world; if we imagine further that the six greatest among the sons of men were blotted out, or had never been, the peoples of the earth would still be “sitting in darkness and the shadow of death.” The two nations were among the fewest of all people: scarcely in their most flourishing period together amounting to a hundredth part of the human race. The golden age of either of them can hardly be said to extend over two or three centuries. The nations themselves were not good for much; but single men among them have been the teachers, not only of their own, but of all ages and countries. If the Greek philosophers had never existed, is it too much to say that the very nature of the human mind would have been different? We can hardly tell when or how the sciences would have come into being; many elements of religion as well as of law would have been wanting; the history of nations would have changed. So mighty has been the influence of two or three men in thought and speculation—the world has gone after them. 1 [Note: J. H. Jowett, Sermons on Faith and Doctrine, 284.]

The intense devotion which the Vaishnavas feel for Rama is merely another proof that, East and West alike, the greatest moulding force is a great personality. In the former days of the British Raj great personalities, especially in the army, had free play. They remained long years in the country, and won not only the loyalty, but, as in Nicholson’s and Sir Henry Lawrence’s case, the devotion of the natives. The almost universal complaint now is that natives are not brought sufficiently into personal relations to their rulers, but are governed too much by red tape and machinery. The importance which the natives attach to personality was seen, as Sir Bampfylde Fuller points out in his Studies in Indian Life and Sentiment, in the great loyalty felt by millions of natives towards Queen Victoria, of whom most of them knew nothing more than the name. But she was a Person, and embodied the idea of the British Raj in a way that appealed strongly to them. They recognized gratefully her sympathy shown in comparatively trivial acts, such as her learning Hindustani in order the better to understand her Indian subjects. 1 [Note: C. Field, The Charm of India, ix.]

2. Christ supplies man’s need of a leader. He is a person. His teaching is unique, because of the personal authority which He claims for Himself. Other teachers have been content to obliterate themselves that they may magnify the truths they come to teach, but Jesus speaks of Himself. He tells us who He is and why He is come. He puts Himself before His teaching. He did not only preach the gospel; He was the gospel. In this thing Jesus sets His religion over against all other religions. Buddhism, as has often been pointed out, is the religion of a method; Mohammedanism is the religion of a book; Christianity is the religion of a person. It is Jesus. Whosoever enters it, enters Him; whosoever would learn its lessons, learns Him; whosoever would feed upon its nourishment, eats His body and drinks His blood. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”

Plato is not Platonism; Platonism might have been taught though its author had never lived. Mohammed is not Islam; the Koran itself would warn us against any Buch confusion between the teacher of its doctrine and the substance of the doctrine itself. But Christ Himself is Christianity; His teaching is inextricably bound up with His Person; and it is not merely because He taught what He did, but because He is what He is, that through Him we can come to the Father. 2 [Note: Canon Liddon.]

3. Christ would not be so great a person if He were not more than man. It is by reason of His Divinity that He is Perfect Man. By Him things were said which were never before and never have been since ascribed to any other being on earth—things which it is impossible to reconcile with any theory short of His perfect humanity and essential Deity. No wonder those who heard Him were astonished at His teaching, struck by the authority with which He spoke. None among their prophets, not even the greatest, Moses or Elijah or the Baptist, had ever dared to say, “I am,” as Jesus so often did. “I am the light of the world”; “I am the bread of life”; “I am the good shepherd”; “I am the door” of the fold; “I am the resurrection and the life”; “I am the true vine.” What did He mean as He spoke thus? There is only one explanation. It certainly was not in a spirit of self-assertion, for He was “meek and lowly in heart.” He, in coming to earth, “made himself of no reputation”; He came not to be a master but to be a servant. Why was it, then? It was because He was a Divine as well as a human Teacher.

In very truth the claims of Christ are more eloquent of what He is than any assertions that can be made about Him. Wonderful to tell, it is His very greatness that is our security. If He were less than He is, we might be afraid of Him.

But greatness which is infinite makes room

For all things in its lap to lie:

We should be crushed by a magnificence

Short of infinity! 1 [Note: A. W. Robinson, The Voice of Joy and Health, 45.]

4. Every word in the text is emphatic and remarkable. It is not, “I teach the way; I declare what is true; I reveal or announce the life to come.” Not that; but “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. I am all this, in a sense quite distinct from My prophetic teaching. I, personally, am the way to God. I am Myself embodied truth. I have in Myself the source and springs of immortal life.” That by “the way” He means “the way to God” is clear from the relation of the last clause of the verse to the first. “I am the way;—no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” Jesus does not simply assert, then, that He reveals and opens this way to the eye of the reason by an authoritative message; that He sets it forth in His discourses: that, by word and speech, in sermon and parable, He makes known to man in what way he may approach God, have communion with Him, enjoy His favour and friendship, and be ultimately admitted to His presence and glory in the upper world. It is not that, or that only, that He does. All this He may do, but there is something else and something more. He does not merely teach the way, He is the way. He not only says what is true, He Himself is the truth. He does not merely utter, in the Divine name, the promise of eternal life, He is the life.

In his Jottings from the Pacific (p. 83), Mr. Gill speaks of a native preacher in Rarotonga who referred to the custom at a great wedding for the bride to walk to her new home over the prostrate bodies of her husband’s clan, whilst the bridegroom made a similar progress over his wife’s people. Then came the application: “Tread boldly, brethren, on the prostrate body of Jesus: for He is our only way to the Father. Trust your entire weight with all your burdens on Him; He will not wince or cry. Only thus shall we safely arrive at the home of the redeemed.”

A beautiful story is told of Agassiz. When he was a boy his family lived on the edge of a lake in Switzerland. One day the father was on the other side of the lake, and Louis and a younger brother set out on the ice to join him. The mother watched the boys from her window. They got along well till they came to a wide crack in the ice. The taller boy leaped over easily, but the other hesitated. “The little fellow will fall in,” the mother said, “and drown.” But as she watched a moment she saw Louis, the older boy, get down on the ice, lay himself across the crack, his hands on one side and his feet on the other, and make a bridge of his body. Then the little fellow climbed over him in safety to the other side, and both the boys ran on to find their father. 1 [Note: J. R. Miller Our New Edens 27.]

II

Christ the Way

“I am the way.”

1. The necessity of a way.—(1) To be taught the way to God is man’s supreme need. We instinctively use the figure, even though we know that it is but a figure. Moral distance is naturally represented by spacial distance. The sinner is pictured not only by Christ but by himself as in a far country; and though God be not far from any of us, men feel after Him, like the blind who have lost their way, if haply they may find Him. To reach God is the confessed goal of human life. To know the way to Him is our chief necessity. So testifies the history of all religions that have ever held sway over humanity. So testify the longings and felt needs of every thoughtful heart. God is necessary for our happiness. Life is unfinished until it is in harmony with God. Only in God can we be satisfied and saved. And so the cry of all earnest, awakened souls the world over is for God.

Livingstone, who waded waist-deep through pestilential marshes for weeks, to die at last in a miserable hut by the lake shore; the traveller, who has to cut his way for hundreds of miles through tangled forest and jungle at the rate of half a mile a day; the emigrant, who has to cross the trackless alkali plain, and who may perish midway; the military commander, who has to carry his forces over mountains, some sections of which are almost perpendicular,—know how a well-engineered path is the first condition of successful movement. 1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Imperfect Angel, 248.]

You remember the character of Calista in one of Cardinal Newman’s finest tales, the story that contains the wonderful picture of the locust plague in northern Africa, and her cry, “Oh, that I could find Him! On the right hand and on the left I grope and touch Him not. Why dost Thou fight against me, O First and only Fair?” And you remember the same longing expressed in one of Matthew Arnold’s essays, in which he quotes—Mr. Hutton says he could not have been the first to use them—the words of Israel: “Thou, O Eternal, are the thing that I long for. Thou art my hope, even from my youth.” And you remember the passionate expressions of this longing in the Psalms: “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God.” “O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee; my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee, in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is.” And nothing appeals to us quite so much, I think, as we read the lives of good men as those great experiences in which they have entered at last into the fulness of the consciousness of God. 2 [Note: R. E. Speer, The Master of the Heart, 211.]

(2) If, then, man is so desirous of coming to God, what stands in his way? He is estranged by sin from filial fellowship with the Father. A few false and fatal steps have served to separate him from the fountain of eternal good. Every proud, unaided effort he may make to return only increases the intervening distance. Man and his Divine Father are lost to each other, moving in diametrically opposite planes. The Father mourns the alienated trust, love, and service of His rebellious child. The child no longer feels the rest, strength, rapturous awe once realized in the manifested presence of the Father. All the restlessness of ambition and all the disappointment that lurks in achieved success, all the fever that burns in the gold-hunt, and all the sickness of heart that leads man, after he has exhausted the last ambition on his programme, to lie down and long to die, are the inarticulate cries of this bitter orphanhood. Sin hides the Father’s face.

In the innermost part of the tabernacle—the Holy of Holies—the visible symbol of God’s presence rested between the cherubim, and over the mercy-seat. This part of the tabernacle was divided from all the other parts by a thick and curiously-wrought veil. Through that veil, none might pass but the high priest, and he, only once a year, and with blood. The Holy Ghost this signifying, that sinful man may not approach a holy God.

2. Christ is the way from man to the Father.—The great difficulty is—How is sin to be put away? Many attempts have been made to remove it, but there is no way of escaping from the guilt of sin except by Jesus Christ. Some have hoped for pardon from future good conduct, but the payment of a future debt can by no means discharge a past debt, so that even the perfect future obedience of man could not touch his past sins. Self-righteousness, therefore, even if it could reach perfection, would not be “the way.” Some hope much from the mercy of God, but the law knows nothing of clearing the sinner of guilt by a sovereign act of mercy—that cannot be done; for then God’s justice would be impugned, His law would be virtually annulled. He will by no means clear the guilty. Every transgression must have its just recompense of reward, so that the absolute mercy of God as such is not the way out of the guilt of sin, for that mercy is blocked up by avenging justice, and over the face of that star of hope called absolute mercy there passes an eclipsing shadow, because God is righteous as well as gracious. There is no way by which a sinner can escape from the guilt of sin but that which is revealed in Jesus Christ.

In proclaiming Himself “the way,” Christ pronounced Himself able to effect the most real union between parties and conditions as separate as heaven and earth, sin and holiness, the poor creature I know myself to be and the infinite and eternal God who is so high I cannot know Him. 1 [Note: Marcus Dods.]

Thou art the way.

Hadst Thou been nothing but the goal,

I cannot say

If Thou hadst ever met my soul.

I cannot see—

I, child of process—if there lies

An end for me,

Full of repose, full of replies.

I’ll not reproach

The way that goes, my feet that stir.

Access, approach,

Art Thou, time, way and wayfarer. 2 [Note: Alice Meynell, in The Mount of Vision, 31.]

(1) Christ is the way for all.—Unless there be a road which the many can travel, unless Christianity can in a very real sense be made easy and popular, it fails of its purpose. If the treasures of its truth are at the disposal of only the wise and the clever, they need hardly have been revealed at all: there must be a way into the heart of them open to all, so that even the wayfaring man need not err therein, so that even the simplest need not despair of attainment.

A road is an essentially democratic thing: all ranks and kinds meet and jostle there; there are few explorers, few excavators, few mountaineers, few aeronauts, but there are many wayfarers, and the road is for them all. 3 [Note: J. M. E. Ross, The Self-Portraiture of Jesus, 189.]

Astronomers tell us that, inconceivably vast as is the distance of some of the fixed stars, there is no point in the universe to which the influence and attraction of our sun does not extend. Christ’s mediating and restoring influence overflows every circle of conscious life, and touches the last extreme of degradation. 4 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Imperfect Angel, 249.]

(2) Christ is the way now and for all time.—The mind of man always seeks in the distance what the word of God presents close at hand. Thus Martha relegated to the far future the hope of her brother’s resurrection, and Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life.” So here, Thomas claims that he does not know the way although it is there before his eyes, and Jesus has to explain to him: “I am the way.” But Christ was not the way only to Thomas and the other disciples. As is often the case with the words of Christ, we can hear beneath them a more general truth than the disciples recognized. Jesus was the present way for the disciples, and He is the way for us for all time. All that Christ said to the Apostles on the eve of His Passion He has said and still says to men in every great crisis of history. The trial to which the first disciples were exposed was peculiar in its form rather than in its essential character. It was the trial which belongs to every period of transition. It was the trial which presses and will press most heavily upon our generation. And if we in our turn would face it, and come out victors from the contest, it can only be by listening with absolute devotion to the revelation of Christ which makes clear to us that there is a purpose running through all the ages and broadening upwards to the threshold of a Father’s home; that there is an abiding reality underneath the shifting phenomena of the world which cannot be lost: that there is a law of coherence, of progress, of growth uniting in a harmonious whole movements, efforts, energies which appear to us to be broken, discordant, conflicting: it can only be by claiming for our own direct instruction, as charged with a new meaning and reaching to new realms, the words with which Christ answered the appeal of St. Thomas: “ I am the way.”

It is a way that never has been broken up, and never will be. All the fioods of all His people’s sins have never made a swamp or bog-hole in this blessed way; all the earthquakes and upheavals of our rebellious natures have never made a gap or chasm in this glorious way. Straight from the very gates of hell, where the sinner is by nature, right up to the hilltops of heaven, this glorious causeway runs in one unbroken line, and will for ever and for ever, till every elect one shall be gathered safe into the eternal home. 1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]

(3) Christ is the only way.—“I am the way.” The saying has a negative as well as a positive aspect, an excluding as well as an assertive force; yet there is nothing arbitrary in this assertion, nor is it a warning against presumption. Christ is not announcing conditions on which a man shall be allowed to approach the Father, and threatening with rejection those who fail to observe them. He does not declare that no man may, but simply that no man does, come to the Father unless it be through Him. He is not a kind of angel standing at the gate of the Garden of Eden with a flaming sword, saying, “You cannot come to the Father and the happiness of heaven unless you come in just the way I point out.” We are mistaken if we interpret this text in any such narrow and exclusive way as this. Christ does not say, “You must not come unless you come by Me.” He says that, in point of fact, no man does come except by Him. It is the broad and general declaration that there is no coming to the Fatherhood except as men come through the knowledge of the Son; that men have not come to a knowledge of the Father unless they have come through the revelation made by Jesus Christ His Son.

A pupil applies for admission to the Packer Institute, and asks to study logarithms. And the President answers, “You must begin with arithmetic.” “But I don’t like arithmetic; I don’t want to study arithmetic; I want to study logarithms.” “You cannot study logarithms unless you first study arithmetic.” The pupil says, “I think that is very mean. I think it is a narrow and bigoted rule that I cannot study logarithms unless I first study arithmetic.” The President replies, “There is no other road. It is not possible for you to come to an understanding of logarithms unless you take the only way men ever will enter into that knowledge—namely, the way of arithmetic.” 1 [Note: Lyman Abbott.]

I am the way!

Lo, as of old, one Voice is ever speaking;

Yet, all the day,

Still earnest souls another way are seeking.

Who, save the Son,

Our condemnation in His body bearing—

With us made one—

Our likeness in His Father’s presence wearing—

O who, save He,

Could lead us safely through the night of sadness,

With Him to be,

Through an eternity of rest and gladness?

Lord, we have heard:

Thou art the Way, and in Thyself confiding,

We trust Thy Word;

We trust ourselves in all things to Thy guiding. 1 [Note: E. H. Divall, A Believer’s Rest, 14.]

(4) Christ is the way and the end.—Here a question arises, which has often been asked: How can Christ be the way? The way is the means to an end. When the end is gained, the means may be discarded. In common material things this is so. What we desire is the end; we choose the means solely with a view to the end; there is no significance or value in the means except as introductory to the end. But in higher things we cannot thus sharply distinguish means and the end: the search after truth has a worth in itself, the way to life is itself life; the way and the end are one.

Here in Cambridge we are scholars all; teachers or learners; or rather teachers and learners at once. Learning is no doubt a mean—a mean whereby we may be enabled to serve God and our country in Church and State. Yet learning is not only a mean even to this high end, much less to those low grovelling ends which, by a corruption of language unknown to our founders, are called the rewards or prizes of knowledge. No single result is the satisfying fruit of labour, but the labour itself, steadily moving onward day by day, and proving itself not to be in vain, is the best proof that God’s blessing is upon us. The work of education is the end and the reward: and that teacher and that student will labour restlessly and slavishly, not with a free and hearty enthusiam, who do not lose themselves and all distant ends in the engrossing enjoyment of the work itself. 2 [Note: J. E. B. Mayor, Sermons, 9.]

III

Christ the Truth

“I am the truth.”

1. Were these words merely equivalent to “I speak the truth,” it would be much to know this of One who tells us things of so measureless a consequence to ourselves. The faith of the disciples was being strained by what He had just been saying to them. Here was a man in most respects like themselves: a man who became hungry and sleepy, a man who was to be arrested and executed by the rulers, assuring them that He was going to prepare for them everlasting habitations, and that He would return to take them to these habitations. He saw that they found it hard to believe this. Who does not find it hard to believe all that our Lord tells us of our future? Think how much we trust simply to His word. If He is not true, then the whole of Christendom has framed its life on a false issue, and is met at death by blank disappointment. Christ has aroused in our minds by His promises and statements a group of ideas and expectations which nothing but His word could have persuaded us to entertain. Nothing is more remarkable about our Lord than the calmness and assurance with which He utters the most astounding statements. The ablest and most enlightened men have their hesitations, their periods of agonizing doubt, their suspense of judgment, their laboured inquiries, their mental conflicts. With Jesus there is nothing of this. From first to last He sees with perfect clearness to the utmost bound of human thought, knows with absolute certainty whatever is essential for us to know. His is not the assurance of ignorance, nor is it the dogmatism of traditional teaching or the evasive assurance of a superficial and reckless mind. It is plainly the assurance of One who stands in the full noon of truth and speaks what He knows. For every question which our most anxious and trying experiences dictate He has the ready and sufficient answer. But more than this is contained in His words. He says not merely “I speak the truth,” but “I am the truth.”

2. Our Lord has declared that He is Himself the truth. We are to discover in Him all we can learn of the ultimate nature of things Divine and human, all we can need to know of the mystery of the universe and the meaning of our lives.

(1) Christ is the truth about man.—“I am the truth,” said Christ. Our attitude in respect of that saying of His is determined by our belief as to His person. It is revealed in Scripture, and accepted by the Church, that God in becoming man took upon Him the nature of humanity at large, that He united to Himself not the personality of a favoured individual, but the nature of the race. Thus He represents in Himself all men, past, present, and to come, with their gifts and their achievements no less than their troubles and their tears.

He shows us what man is, and what man may be. We measure ourselves over against Him, and for the first time we realize ourselves. We hold ourselves aloof from Him, and our ideals seem glorious, and our attainment passable, and our sins venial. We measure ourselves against Christ, and we abhor ourselves in dust and ashes. We stand up face to face with Him who is the truth about man, and for the first time we understand what we are—all the misery and the flaw of our lives, all the shame and the loathsomeness of our shortcomings. And we look up into His face once again, and we see there not alone what we are, but what we may be. We hear Him speaking of Himself as the Son of Man; we hear Him telling us that the Father sent Him to show what in the Father’s mind we are, and that we may hide ourselves in Him. Jesus Christ is to us the truth about ourselves as we are and as we may be.

Christ’s unique power as a teacher of morals lies in the fact that He embodied in His own life His whole teaching. Did He teach the love of God and man? His life expressed just that; for His whole career was nothing but the utterance of love to God and to man. Did He teach the duty of personal, sincere, absolute righteousness? Did He teach humility and meekness and purity? Did He say, “As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise”? Did He say, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you”? All this was pictured in His own condition and character for the admiration and imitation of mankind. He could say, “I am the truth.” 1 [Note: G. T. Purves, The Sinless Christ, 129.]

Though Goethe’s history be known but imperfectly, the Faust, with what there is of teaching in it, will live. Though Dante’s sad life-path be never followed, we can still tremble at the Inferno, or drink hope from the Purgatorio, and from the Paradiso consolation. Though dim to our minds the life-struggle of Shakespeare, we shall still weep and wonder at Portia, at Hamlet, at Lear. The message—such as it is—comes, though the messenger be withdrawn into shadow. Not so with Christ. He is absolute truth. 2 [Note: W. J. Knox Little, Sunlight and Shadow, 28.]

And so the Word had breath, and wrought

With human hands the creed of creeds

In loveliness of perfect deeds,

More strong than all poetic thought. 1 [Note: “In Memoriam.”]

(2) Christ is the revelation of God.—He was God manifest in the flesh. It is common to say that Christ was the great Revealer of God, who, by His inestimable instructions, has made us acquainted with the Divine character and will. Now this is true, but it is not the whole truth, nor yet indeed the chiefest and most blessed portion of the truth. He was not only the Revealer of God, but He was Himself the revelation of God. Not merely did He say things about God which are written in a Book, not merely did He inspire His servants to write in that Book still other things which they came to understand only after He had left them, by the illuminating influence of His Holy Spirit, but He was the Book Himself.

He is the Truth in reference to the Divine nature. That Truth, then, is not a mere matter of words. It is not only His speech that teaches us, but Himself that shows us God. His whole life and character, His personality, is the true representation within human conditions of the Invisible God; and when He says, “I am the way, and the truth,” He is saying substantially the same thing as the great prologue of this Gospel says when it calls Him the Word, and the Light of men, and as St. Paul says when he names Him “the image of the invisible God.”

This is the function of the Son of Man, to give men their Heavenly Father, the Father whom He knew, the God with whom He lived in communion, in the personal relations of Spirit with spirit. To preach theologies would have been no new thing; to preach theologies in the belief that through them we are making acquaintance with realities is an occupation and an illusion of which the world never wearies; but to have the living God mirrored in a human soul, as face answers to face in a glass, this was not the old work of announcing abstract truths about God, it was to reveal God Himself. We have no means of knowing God except by knowing His image in our own nature. The knowledge of God was lost to the world, because the image of God had been lost out of the soul. Christ, through obedience to the inward promptings, kept the mirror pure, without flaw or soil, and so manifested the Father in the Son. There is no other mirror, to which we have access, in which He can spiritually be seen as He is. Other mirrors, as those of outward Nature, are dead mirrors, which have to convey their symbols to a living soul there to be interpreted. How could we know God if we saw Him only in the reflection of a soul that is itself unclean, clouded, distorted? If there had been no unsoiled mirror, we could have known God under no adequate living type. “If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also.” “We all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” 1 [Note: J. H. Thom, Laws of Life after the Mind of Christ, 13.]

IV

Christ the Life

“I am the life.”

The phrase, “I am the life,” points to all Christ’s work upon us as a life-giving Spirit, a Quickener and an Inspirer. Dead men cannot walk a road. It is no use making a path if it starts from a cemetery. Christ taught that men apart from Him are dead, and that the only life that they can have by which they can be knit to God is the Divine life which was in Himself, and of which He is the source and the principle for the whole world.

Thou art the Life!

All ways without Thee paths that end in death;

All life without Thee with death harvest rife;

All truths dry bones, disjoined, and void of breath:

Thou art our Life! 2 [Note: E. R. Charles.]

1. Christ is the life of the body.—We may take Christ’s words first of all in their most literal meaning.

(1) “I am the life.”—It is a tremendous claim for any man at any time to make, and He who makes it here is about to die. But as the Apostles listen, startling deeds of His come back to their recollection—His healing of the sick, His restoring of the dying, and His raising of the dead.

It is a plain fact of history,—true as the decrees of truth are true,—that everything which ever came into the presence and contact of Christ, when He was upon the earth, lived. No corpse was ever under the influence of that high touch, but it took again its vital power. When He met the dead body upon the road, when He was in the same room with the dead child, when He stood at the mouth of the grave of a dead man—and those are the only recorded occasions of His intercourse with death—death retired and life came back.

See the poor woman in the crowd, who has spent all her living on seeking health, and has spent that living in vain. She comes behind the great Teacher, in the crowd secretly, saying, “If I do but touch his garment I shall be made whole.” She had tried every other resource, gone to every other professed healer, had been filled with disappointment, and she was about to give up in despair; and in that critical hour of her experience, she touched the Saviour and was healed. 1 [Note: J. Parker.]

Around Bethesda’s healing wave,

Waiting to hear the rustling wing

Which spoke the angel nigh, who gave

Its virtues to the holy spring,—

With earnest, fixed solicitude,

Were seen the afflicted multitude.

Among them there was one whose eye

Had often seen the waters stirred;

Whose heart had often heaved the sigh—

The bitter sigh of hope deferred;

Beholding, while he suffered on,

The healing virtue giv’n and gone.

No pow’r had he; no friendly aid

To him the timely succour brought;

But while his coming he delayed,

Another won the boon he sought;

Until the Saviour’s love was shown,

Which healed him by a word alone. 2 [Note: B. Barton.]

(2) Christ is also the life, from the fact of His own resurrection. When Christ says: “lam the life,” He does not mean, “I lived the perfect life on earth”; He means, “I, through the very fact of My death, am the life for evermore, and as a symbol of this, witness My death and resurrection.” Never was one born into the world like Him. Other men are born to live, to act, to do; He was born to die. But the death which cast its shadow over the Eleven and over Himself should itself be swallowed up in life. Standing there beneath the shadow of His cross, before the open grave over which the stone was to be rolled to hide His burial, Jesus Christ, the frailest life in the world, declared to men, “I am the life.”

For three-and-thirty years, a living seed,

A lonely germ, dropt on our waste world’s side,

Thy death and rising Thou didst calmly bide:

Sore companied by many a clinging weed

Sprung from the fallow soil of evil and need;

Hither and thither tossed, by friends denied;

Pitied of goodness dull, and scorned of pride;

Until at length was done the awful deed,

And Thou didst lie outworn in stony bower

Three days asleep—oh, slumber godlike-brief

For Man of sorrows and acquaint with grief!

Life-seed Thou diedst, that Death might lose his power,

And Thou, with rooted stem and shadowy leaf,

Rise, of humanity the crimson flower. 1 [Note: George MacDonald, Poetical Works, i. 257.]

2. Christ is the spiritual life.—He did not only say, “I am the living One,” as if He meant to affirm His own immortality. That was indeed true, but it was clearly not His only idea in this place. But Jesus said, “I am the life,” the life, that is, of renewed souls, the power which alone can make humanity truly live, the moral and spiritual vital force of the Kingdom of heaven.

(1) Christ is the life now. The eternal life of the spirit is not altogether a future blessing, which we are to get from Christ hereafter, but a present blessing too, which we are to look for from Christ now. It is Jesus Christ who brings us into connexion with this source of life eternal—He bears it in His own person. In Him we receive a new spirit; in Him our motive to live for righteousness is continually renewed; we are conscious that in Him we touch what is undying and never fails to renew spiritual life in us. Whatever we need to give us true and everlasting life we have in Christ. Whatever we need to enable us to come to the Father, whatever we shall need between this present stage of experience and our final stage, we have in Him. The more, then, we use Christ, the more life we have. The more we are with Him and the more we partake of His Spirit, the fuller does our own life become. It is not by imitating successful men that we become influential for good, but by living with Christ. It is not by adopting the habits and methods of saints that we become strong and useful, but by accepting Christ and His Spirit. Nothing can take the place of Christ. Nothing can take His words and say to us, “I am the life.” If we wish for life, if we see that we are doing little good and desire energy to overtake the good that needs to be done, it is to Him we must go. If we feel as if all our efforts were vain, and as if we could not bear up any longer against our circumstances or against our wicked nature, we can receive fresh vigour and hopefulness only from Christ.

O ancient streams, O far-descended woods

Full of the fluttering of melodious souls;

O hills and valleys that adorn yourselves

In solemn jubilation; winds and clouds,

Ocean and land in stormy nuptials clasp’d,

And all exuberant creatures that acclaim

The Earth’s divine renewal: lo, I too

With yours would mingle somewhat of glad song.

I too have come through wintry terrors—yea

Through tempest and through cataclysm of soul

Have come, and am deliver’d. Me the Spring,

Me also dimly with new life hath touch’d,

And with regenerate hope, the salt of life;

And I would dedicate these thankful tears

To whatsoever power beneficent,

Veil’d though his countenance, undivulged his thought,

Hath led me from the haunted darkness forth

Into the gracious air and vernal morn,

And suffers me to know my spirit a note

Of this great chorus, one with bird and stream

And voiceful mountain. 1 [Note: William Watson.]

(2) Christ is the life for ever. Not only is He the life in us now, but through Him and in Him we never die. Our souls rise up in war against the thought of ending, and as they struggle with their limitations and their chains, the great Deliverer comes, as He came that night to the little group shocked with the sorrow of His departure, and says to us, “I am the life.”

The man who is sailing under trustworthy captainship, and in company with genial friends, out of one zone into another, is scarcely conscious of the lines of demarcation over which the ship glides. Throughout the months of summer, darkness is unknown in the latitudes of the far north. The rising and the setting suns blend their light without the handbreadth of a shadow between. 1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Imperfect Angel, 255.]

I lift mine eyes to see: earth vanisheth.

I lift up wistful eyes and bend my knee:

Trembling, bowed down, and face to face with Death,

I lift mine eyes to see.

Lo what I see is Death that shadows me:

Yet whilst I, seeing, draw a shuddering breath,

Death like a mist grows rare perceptibly.

Beyond the darkness light, beyond the scathe

Healing, beyond the Cross a palm-branch tree,

Beyond Death Life, on evidence of faith;

I lift mine eyes to see. 2 [Note: C. G. Rossetti, Poems, 193.]

The Way, the Truth, the Life

Literature

Bernard (J. H.), From Faith to Faith, 63.

Bigg (C.), The Spirit of Christ in Common Life, 11.

Brown (A. G.), In the Valley of Decision, 115.

Brown (J. B.), Idolatries, 136.

Brown (J. B.), The Divine Mystery of Peace, 21.

Burrell (D. J.), The Religion of the Future, 97.

Chadwick (W. E.), Christ and Everyday Life, 154.

Dale (R. W.), Christ and the Future Life, 111.

Dods (M.), Footsteps in the Path of Life, 4.

Forsyth (P. T.), Missions in State and Church, 197.

Fürst (A.), Christ the Way, 1.

Gibson (J. M.), The Glory of Life on Earth, 69.

Illingworth (J. R.), Sermons in a College Chapel, 60.

Illingworth (J. R.), University and Cathedral Sermons, 21.

Liddon (H. P.), Advent in St. Paul’s, 587.

Little (W. J. Knox), Sunlight and Shadow, 1.

Lorimer (G. C.), The Modern Crisis in Religion, 204.

Macdonnell (D. J.), Life and Work, 45.

Maclaren (A.), Creed and Conduct, 283.

Macnicol (D. C.), Some Memoirs and Memorials, 84.

Mayor (J. E. B.), Twelve Cambridge Sermons, 3.

Paget (E. C.), Silence, 96.

Paget (F.), Christ the Way, 1.

Pearson (J. B.), Disciples in Doubt, 30.

Purves (G. T.), The Sinless Christ, 121.

Ragg (L.), Christ and our Ideals, 51.

Ridgeway (C. J.), The King and His Kingdom, 112.

Ross (J. M. E.), The Self-Portraiture of Jesus, 181.

Sinclair (W.), Christ and our Times, 137.

Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 174.

Speer (R. E.), The Master of the Heart, 206.

Telford (J.), The Story of the Upper Room, 98.

Thomas (J.), Sermons: Myrtle Street Pulpit, i. 151.

Verses 15-17

The Giving of the Comforter

If ye love me, ye will keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth: whom the world cannot receive; for it beholdeth him not, neither knoweth him; ye know him: for he abideth with you, and shall be in you.— John 14:15-17.

1. There is no such profoundly moving scene in all history as this last evening of our Lord before His death. We need not, and we may not, add one touch to the simple narrative of St. John; in his words the scene stands out in its absolute simplicity. As we read these last chapters of his Gospel we seem to be admitted to the very scene itself; to the sorrow, the bewilderment, the helplessness of the Twelve; to the far-reaching Divine mind and infinite loveliness of the Master.

We stand before some great picture and strive to read the mind of the artist, and one of us will see one subtle meaning and another another; or we contemplate the many-sided aspect of nature, and each of us reads into it some reflex of his own mind; and so it is with a great historic scene like this; according to our spirituality, to our insight, and devotion, and purity, and truth, will be the lessons we shall draw from it. This Scripture is of no private interpretation; it is wider and larger than any of our little formulas in which we may try to bind it. It is the task of a life to interpret all that is involved in this farewell address of Christ.

2. The disciples were in something like a panic over the announcement made to them by Christ that He was going away. At the bare word the world seemed to become a blank for these men. All the sunshine of life seemed to suffer immediate and total eclipse. For Jesus was everything to them. In a sense they had nothing in the world but Jesus. He was more than their best friend. He was their all in all. For Him they had sacrificed fathers and mothers and home and friends and business and every earthly prospect. And now He was going! In response to His call they had embarked upon a new life. They had taken up their cross and followed Him. It was not an easy life; it was a hard life, a toilsome life, a sacrificial life. Already they had been called upon to suffer trial and persecution for His Name’s sake. But with Jesus at their side they had never faltered. With His presence to cheer and strengthen them, they had bravely held on their way. But now He was going. The whole edifice of their life seemed to fall crashing in ruins about their ears. And then to these panic-stricken disciples Jesus explained what His departure meant. He had been as God to them. In Him God had touched the very springs of their life and entered into their souls. His going did not mean that God would forsake them. If He went, they would not be left desolate; God would send them another Advocate, another Helper, who would be to them all that Jesus Himself had been and more; who would bring them just the same sense of God’s nearness and presence; who would inspire and help them just as effectively as Jesus Himself had done.

3. The subject, then, is the giving of the Comforter, and the passage divides itself easily into two parts:—

I. On what Conditions the Comforter is given.

II. For what Purposes the Comforter is given.

I

On what Conditions the Comforter is given

There are two conditions expressly named that have to be fulfilled before the Comforter comes. The first condition is that the disciples must he obedient. “If ye love me, ye will keep my commandments, and …” The other is that Jesus prays the Father to give them the Comforter: “And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you.” From these two conditions there flow two results: first, that the Comforter is a gift—“he will give you another Comforter”; and second, that He is given to the disciples who are obedient, and not to the disobedient “world.”

i. Obedience

“If ye love me, ye will keep my commandments.”

1. Before the promises there is a proviso. It is premised that there is a state of heart and a character of life to which they belong. As the works and the gifts of power were made dependent on faith and prayer, so the experiences now foretold presuppose the life of love and duty. This appropriation is laid down to begin with, and is insisted on more largely as the promises unfold.

The preferable reading, “If ye love me, ye will keep my commandments,” gives the future instead of the imperative of the Authorized Version, rather describing a process than imposing a condition; but the meaning is the same—namely, that these are promises which belong only to him who loves and obeys. 1 [Note: T. D. Bernard, The Central Teaching of Jesus Christ, 159.]

2. In “If ye love me” we hear a confiding rather than a doubtful tone. The love is supposed, as elsewhere it is expressly recognized. But it proves true love only in one way, “If ye love me, ye will keep my commandments”; and again, “He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me.” There is a voice of Divine authority in the phrase, “my commandments.” They claim obedience, but the obedience of love; and love will render it. Love is the spring of action, and is in its nature free; but it is not left to its own impulses; it acknowledges authority; it is placed under rule, and includes the element of obligation.

The connexion between love and commandment dwelt on the mind of St. John, and reappears more than once in his Epistle. It is not according to the tendencies of human nature, as we all know, and as St. Paul has set forth in the seventh chapter of his Epistle to the Romans in recording his experience of the law and its effects. It is, in fact, distinctive of Christian duty and of the morality of the Gospel. In Christ the claims of authority and the affections of the heart agree in one. Here, as ever, the teaching of Jesus fixes our minds on the practical side of religion—on doing what we know, on living and walking by His words. 2 [Note: Ibid.]

3. Obedience is the one test of sincerity, the one mode of retaining the warmth of love. “He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me.” The Bible says very little of what we call religion; but very much of God, and of Christ, and of love. Christ does not say, “If ye love me, then ye will meet often to worship me”; He does say, “ye will keep my commandments”; and the chief and summary of all the commandments are the love of God and the love of our neighbour. The true worship of God is obedience and love. It is an idolatrous notion that God is pleased with mere worship. Just as thousands of burnt-offerings and ten thousands of rivers of oil availed nothing without the love and obedience of the worshipper, so not all our gifts or our services are precious to Him except in so far as they are the offering of our love and obedience, and as they help us in our daily life.

God cannot, will not, does not, bless those who are living in disobedience. But only set out in the path of obedience, and at once, before one stone is laid upon another, God is eager, as it were, to pour out His blessing. “From this day will I bless you.” 1 [Note: Hudson Taylor’s Sayings, 43.]

4. But do we not need the Spirit to make us obedient; do we not long for the Spirit’s power, just because we mourn so much the disobedience there still is, and desire to be otherwise? And yet Christ claims obedience as the condition of the Father’s giving and our receiving the Spirit. The answer is that Christ Jesus had come to prepare the way for the Spirit’s coming. Or rather, His outward coming in the flesh was the preparation for His inward coming in the Spirit to fulfil the promise of a Divine indwelling. The outward coming appealed to the soul, with its mind and feeling, and affected these. It was only as Christ in His outward coming was accepted, as He was loved and obeyed, that the inward and more intimate revelation would be given. Personal attachment to Jesus, the personal acceptance of Him as Lord and Master to love and obey, was the disciples’ preparation for the baptism of the Spirit.

It is as we prove our love to Jesus in a tender listening to the voice of conscience, and a faithful effort to keep His commands, that the heart will be prepared for the fulness of the Spirit. Our attainments may fall short of our aims, we may have to mourn that what we would we do not—if the Master sees the whole-hearted surrender to His will, and the faithful obedience to what we already have of the leadings of His Spirit, we may be sure that the full gift will not be withheld. 1 [Note: A. Murray, The Spirit of Christ, 72.]

ii. Prayer

“And I will pray the Father.”

1. There are two telephones across the abyss that separates the ascended Christ from us. One of them is contained in His words, “If ye shall ask anything in my name, I will do it”; the other is contained in these words, “If ye keep my commandments, I will ask.” Love on this side of the great cleft sets love on the other side of it in motion in a twofold fashion. If we ask, He does; if we do, He asks. His action is the answer to our prayers and His prayers are the answer to our obedient action.

2. “I will ask” seems a strange drop from the lofty claims with which we have become familiar in the earlier verses of this chapter. “Believe in God, believe also in me”; “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father”; “If ye shall ask anything in my name I will do it”; “Keep my commandments.” All these distinctly express, or necessarily imply, Divine nature, prerogatives, and authority. But here the voice that spake the perfect revelation of God, and gave utterance authoritatively to the perfect law of life, softens and lowers its tones in petition; and Jesus Christ joins the ranks of the suppliants. Now common sense tells us that apparently diverse views lying so close together in one continuous stream of speech cannot have seemed to the utterer of them to be contradictory; and there is no explanation which does justice to these two sides of Christ’s consciousness—the one all Divine and authoritative and lofty, and the other all lowly and identifying Himself with petitioners and suppliants everywhere—except the belief that He is “God manifest in the flesh.” The bare humanistic view which emphasizes such utterances as these does not know what to do with the other ones, and cannot manage to unite these two images into a stereoscopic solid. That is reserved for the faith which believes in the Manhood and in the Deity of our Lord and Saviour.

In all utterances of Jesus Christ which express the lowest humiliation and completest identification of Himself with humanity, there is ever present some touch of obscured glory, some all but suppressed flash of brightness which will not be wholly concealed. Note two things in this great utterance; one, Christ’s quiet assumption that all through the ages, and to-day, nineteen centuries after He died, He knows, at the moment of their being done, His servants’ deeds. “Keep my commandments, and, knowing that you keep them, I will then and there pray for you.” He claims in the lowly words an altogether supernatural, abnormal, Divine cognizance of all the acts of men down the ages and across the gulf between earth and heaven. 1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

3. Christ’s prayer is the expression of the eternal Will respecting those for whom He prays. There is no thought of the Son for man that is not the thought of the Father. There is no dissonance of feeling, no discordance of desire, no conflict of will. The promise that Christ will pray is the assurance that the thing He asks for will be given. It is the utterance of that which is in the heart of God.

We are not to think of Christ’s advocacy in heaven as if it were of the nature of supplication on our behalf. It is much more than that, although it is to be feared that the modern ideas which have usurped the ground which the word “intercession” covers have nearly evacuated the word of its fuller and more glorious signification. The word used by Christ in this very verse implies that His Personal mediation is an “appeal” of a higher kind than we understand by prayer. So, again, in John 17:9; John 17:15; John 17:20. And notice that this word is used by Him before His glorification. He never uses of Himself the word “ask” which He so often uses when He bids us pray. We have to ask in His Name, and the ground of our reliance when we so pray is His universal intervention for His Church, the result of His sacrificial “appeal.” He intervenes in heaven ( Romans 8:34; Hebrews 7:25), personally, presenting His merits as our High Priest on behalf of all His members who come unto God through Him. The other Paraclete intervenes on earth ( Romans 8:27), not by intermediate advocacy, but by the elevating power of Divine inspiration, lifting us up to speak with God our Father in the fulness of Christ’s merits, by the living fellowship wherein He unites us with Him. 2 [Note: R. M. Benson, The Final Passover, ii. (pt. i.) 359.]

4. As our Saviour prayed to the Father for them, so now they would pray for themselves by the grace of the Advocate. Much of our Saviour’s work among men was teaching them to help themselves. He taught them to pray, not simply by putting a form of words into their mouths, but by leading them into the presence of the Father, by instructing and encouraging them to maintain a humble boldness in that presence, and by assuring them that their prayers offered in His name would have as much power as His own prayers offered by Himself.

The disciples seem to have made the mistake of thinking that they must always have His intercession to lean upon. They were thankful for it, but it was becoming a hindrance to their own devotions; as all help becomes a hindrance the moment it discourages personal effort instead of drawing it forth. The mother’s finger is useful to the little child learning to walk, as long as it is needed to impart courage and give steadiness; but as soon as it tempts to idleness and thoughtlessness, it must be withdrawn. And so any religious help is good as long as our ignorance, or coldness, or want of faith requires a kind of external support, but that should only be preparatory to our walking, working, and praying by virtue of an inner impulse. Our Lord was the advocate outside His disciples, praying for them sometimes while they slept, reading their wants and interpreting them to God, doing for them what they must do for themselves if they are to become strong men. And the time for the withdrawal of His aid was at hand; and instead of it was to be substituted the advocacy of the Holy Ghost in their hearts; through His grace they would be enabled to plead for themselves as earnestly and successfully as Christ had done for them; which would be a clear spiritual gain. “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father. And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask anything in my name, I will do it.”

iii. The Gift

“He will give.”

1. The Father sent His Son into the world. He does not send His Spirit into the world, but He gives Him to the faithful.

The word “giving” is larger than the word “sending.” Although the latter is also used respecting the Holy Ghost whom the Father gives, yet the more adequate word is that which Jesus uses here. The mission would not imply any covenanted circle of recipients. A mission may be towards enemies. When we were enemies God sent His Son, that we might be reconciled by His death ( Romans 5:10). The Son was not given to all mankind. He was “sent” to them. God sent His Son ( John 8:16). God “commissioned” Him ( 1 John 4:10). God sent His Son into the world. He gave Him not to the world, but for the world as a sacrifice ( John 3:16). The Spirit is “given” to the faithful, to dwell in them. A gift implies a permanent bestowal. The Presence of the Holy Ghost with the Church is a permanent bestowal. He is not to be withdrawn. This is “the gift of God,” respecting which our Lord spoke to the woman of Samaria. Similarly our Lord says of His flesh, “The bread which I will give is my flesh, for the life of the world” ( John 6:51). This promised gift of Christ’s flesh is by the power of His Spirit. So the gift of the Spirit of life is prior and preparatory to the gift of the food of life.

2. The Spirit is the gift of the Father, because the Father is the Fountain of all Godhead. The Manhood of Christ is represented by our Lord as setting before the Father the necessities of the case, the human needs of His brethren, those whom the Father has given to Him. The Father, as the Source of all Divine life, gives the Spirit; not a created agency, but an essential communication of the indivisible Godhead which is in the Father. The gift of God must be worthy of God, and therefore cannot be less than God.

3. This gift had never yet been given. The Holy Ghost had indeed been sent from God to the prophets by whom He spoke, but He had not been given to the prophets. He was not given to any one previously; much less could there be any “ministration of the Spirit” by human agency in a covenanted society such as it would be when Christ was glorified as the Head of the Body, the Church. The Father’s gift would be a continuous presence pledged to that society which Christ had called out of the world.

Twice have I erred: a distant God

Was what I could not bear;

Sorrows and cares were at my side;

I longed to have Him there.

But God is never so far off

As even to be near;

He is within: our spirit is

The home He holds most dear. 1 [Note: F. W. Faber.]

iv. The World

“Whom the world cannot receive.”

1. The world cannot receive the Spirit of truth, because it lives content with the superficial knowledge of things around. It does not contemplate God so as to gain a loving familiarity with Divine truth. Instead of looking at the phenomenal from the standpoint of Divine faith, so as to see in outward things the operation of Divine relationships, it is content with registering them as they appear to the outward senses. The contemplation of God’s moral government will go a long way towards solving many of the difficulties which we find in creation. If we refuse to accept that amount of Divine truth which has come down to us by the primitive traditions of our race, and has been developed by the teaching of prophets and the contemplations of the faithful in subsequent ages, we are not in a position to receive the Spirit of truth. Nature becomes to us what a geometrical figure would be to those who disregarded the elementary problems of geometry necessary for its elucidation.

If the movements of a planet can prove the existence of another planet by whose proximity it is affected, how much more ought the varied operations of nature to lead a thoughtful mind, which has a love of truth, to recognize the creative mind by which all the functions of the universe are regulated and maintained in unity! If, on the contrary, the interest which superficial occurrences excite becomes so absorbing as to make men give up the deeper devotional acknowledgment of that which is hidden, then they are rejecting the eternal truth, however assiduously they may seek to record and illustrate those data which constitute our science—so shallow after all, although to us so seemingly profound. They unfit themselves for the reception of the Eternal Spirit of truth. 1 [Note: R. M. Benson, The Final Passover, ii. (pt. i.) 368.]

2. The Lord does not say that the world cannot receive many good things, for it does receive them; nor does He say that it cannot appreciate them, for it is alive to their excellence. Many of the world’s people see and appreciate the beautiful; and beauty is a good, whether in nature, art, or literature. They see the value of honour and probity in all the affairs of the present life, and they denounce falsehood and overreaching; but they do not know the Holy Spirit. They have no consciousness of His working, for they are unyielding. There may be movements of the Spirit of truth towards something better in not a few of their minds, but they are resisted; the Spirit is not discerned or recognized; and thus neglected and insulted He withdraws.

I once stood far up on the Becca di Nona in Piedmont, the valley in which the old Roman city of Aosta lies being below, and on the other side, not far off, two great peaks of the mountains, part of the Alpine range. There were two clouds, about equal in size, floating and abiding above the two peaks, whose course I watched. The one cloud kept in a compact mass together, seemingly repelled by the hardness and non-receptivity of the granite peak beneath it. The other, after a little while, apparently drawn and attracted by its peak beneath, gradually opened out its fleecy beauties and gracefully descended, bathing the happy mountain peak in its exquisite softness and beauty. So, thought I, is it with the influences of the blessed Spirit. They are near us, ready to descend upon us in their sweetest blessings; but the world is as the granite peak which did not attract the cloud, while the humble, God-fearing soul does not repel, and the Divine Spirit descends and fills it with His grace. 2 [Note: H. Wilkes, The Bright and Morning Star, 125.]

3. The two reasons which our Lord gives for the fact that the world does not receive the Spirit are (1) that the world beholds Him not, and (2) that it knows Him not.

(1) “It beholdeth him not.”—This is the real secret of men’s laughter at the idea of the existence of the Holy Ghost—they see Him not. Tell the worldling, “I have the Holy Ghost within me.” He says, “I cannot see it.” He wants it to be something tangible: a thing he can recognize with his senses.

Have you ever heard the argument used by a good old Christian against an infidel doctor? The doctor said there was no soul, and he asked, “Did you ever see a soul?” “No,” said the Christian. “Did you ever hear a soul?” “No.” “Did you ever smell a soul?” “No.” “Did you ever taste a soul?” “No.” “Did you ever feel a soul?” “Yes,” said the man—“I feel I have one within me.” “Well,” said the doctor, “there are four senses against one: you have only one on your side.” “Very well,” said the Christian, “Did you ever see a pain?” “No.” “Did you ever hear a pain?” “No.” “Did you ever smell a pain?” “No.” “Did you ever taste a pain?” “No.” “Did you ever feel a pain?” “Yes.” “And that is quite enough, I suppose, to prove there is a pain?” “Yes.” So the worldling says there is no Holy Ghost because he cannot see Him. Well, but we feel Him. You say that is fanaticism, and that we never felt Him. Suppose you tell me that honey is bitter, I reply, “No, I am sure you cannot have tasted it; taste it, and try.” So with the Holy Ghost; if you did but feel His influence, you would no longer say there is no Holy Spirit, because you cannot see Him. Are there not many things, even in nature, which we cannot see? Did you ever see the wind? No; but you know there is wind, when you behold the hurricane tossing the waves about and rending down the habitations of men; or when in the soft evening zephyr it kisses the flowers, and makes dewdrops hang in pearly coronets around the rose. Did you ever see electricity? No; but you know there is such a thing, for it travels along the wires for thousands of miles, and carries our messages. So you must believe there is a Holy Ghost working in us, both to will and to do, even though He is beyond our senses. 1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]

(2) The other reason why worldly men do not receive the Holy Spirit is because they do not know Him. If they knew Him by heart-felt experience, and if they recognized His agency in the soul; if they had ever been touched by Him; if they had been made to tremble under a sense of sin; if they had had their hearts melted; they would never have doubted the existence of the Holy Ghost.

No explanation is of any value in matters which do not grow out of experience. Until a deaf man hears music, it is wasted breath to describe it, and there is no proof of colour to the blind. When Jesus spoke to the disciples the words recorded in the fourteenth chapter of John, He offered them truth for experience without explanation. He promised them manifestation of Himself. He knew that the one who should enter into this experience would never be perplexed by Divine reticence in explanation, or by the imperfection of human philosophy. 1 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 17.]

II

For what Purposes the Comforter is given

The first purpose is to comfort. But as He is spoken of as the Spirit of truth, a special form of the comfort is the leading of the disciples into the truth. A third purpose is that He may abide for ever.

i. The Comforter

The true Christian has three Comforters, and each of them is Divine. God the Father is styled by St. Paul, in his Second Epistle to the Corinthians, “the God of all comfort; who comforteth us in all our tribulation.” God the Son, in the words of the text, speaks of Himself as one Comforter; and St. Paul tells us that “our consolation” or comfort “aboundeth by Christ.” God the Holy Ghost is specifically named by Jesus Christ in several instances as “the Comforter,” and His peculiar office as such is fully unfolded in the last discourse of our Lord to His disciples before His crucifixion. Thus each person of the ever-blessed Trinity is a Comforter, Divine in character, infinite in fulness, eternal in duration. There is, then, no true comfort or consolation that the heart can desire which may not be found in God the Father as the God of all comfort; in God the Son as the Paraclete with the Father; and in God the Holy Ghost as “the Comforter” who proceedeth from the Father and the Son.

1. The word “ Comforter.”—The word translated “Comforter” is found only in the writings of St. John. You look in vain for it in all other portions of Scripture. We have it four times in the Gospel according to St. John, as coming from the lips of Jesus. We find it once in the First Epistle of St. John ( John 2:1). In the Gospel, where the word is used by Christ and is applied to the third person of the Trinity, it is translated Comforter; in the Epistle, where it is applied to Jesus, it is translated Advocate. In both instances the word is the same; it is the Divine Paraclete.

It was the custom in the ancient tribunals for the parties to appear in court attended by one or more of their most influential friends, who were called in Greek paracletes, in Latin advocatus. These paracletes, or advocates, gave their friends—not from fee or reward, but from love and interest—the advantage of their personal presence and the aid of their judicious counsel. They thus advised them what to do, what to say, spoke for them, acted on their behalf, made the cause of their friends their cause, stood by them and for them in the trials, difficulties, and dangers of their situation. In this sense our Lord is said by St. John to be our Paraclete—where he says, “We have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous”—One in heaven before God, who appears there on our behalf, patronizes our cause, urges our plea, ever living to “make intercession for us.”

While on earth, our Lord had counselled, advised, spoken for, and on behalf of, His disciples. They had looked to Him for aid, succour, comfort, truth, grace; and thus, ever at their side, He had been to them a Paraclete, or Advocate. He had most thoroughly identified Himself with them, had taught them to pray, to preach, to live, to work miracles, and the mysteries of the Kingdom. But He was now to leave them. His bodily form was to be removed. Yet, with a sweetness of compassion peculiarly touching, He says, “I will not leave you comfortless,” orphans, undefended, unadvocated, unsustained. “It is expedient for you that I go away: and I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever.” 1 [Note: W. B. Stevens.]

Many are the emergencies of human life, and many are the forms of help which they require, and all are included in this great comprehensive name. If we wish to distinguish, we may range them in two divisions, the advocacy of our cause before others, the support of companionship to ourselves. When we think of the one office, we speak of an advocate; when of the other, of a comforter. But the same person will fulfil either office as need requires; and both are included in the word “Paraclete.” Therefore the choice of the English equivalent in any particular case may be dictated by the nature of the occasion and the general feeling of the situation. If so, the Revisers have done well in retaining the old rendering “the Comforter” in the four passages in which “Paraclete” here occurs, as they were plainly right in retaining that of “Advocate” in the only other passage where it is found ( 1 John 2:1). The situation presented in the Gospel more naturally suggests the first rendering, while that contemplated in the Epistle certainly prescribes the second. 1 [Note: T. D. Bernard.]

2. “ Another Comforter.”—The word “another” signifies that Jesus Himself was an advocate, helper, paraclete, comforter. But it does not mean that He was now to be superseded, or that, going out of sight, He was also to be out of mind. Scarred with wounds and enthroned as the Head of the Church, He was to be more in His people’s minds and hearts, better represented in their lives, than hitherto. For—let us be clear about this—Jesus, and He alone, is our life; it was He and He alone who bore our stripes and carried our death down into His grave, transfiguring our departure, with whatever distress and humiliation may attend it, into a promotion and home-going. “He that hath the Son hath life.” If we can say with a true and thankful heart, “I am Thine own, O Christ”; “My beloved is mine, and I am his”; “To me to live is Christ,”—then we possess the everlasting Life, and will never see Death.

Although Jesus spoke of another Comforter, two facts are clear—the one, that He would continue, and more fully than ever, to be the life of the believing soul and the believing Church; and the other, that the Holy Spirit would be the vehicle of that life, uniting Christ and the soul, and so bringing it to pass that the Church should not so much mourn an absent Lord as rejoice in a present Spirit.

God forbid that our thoughts should for one moment be turned away from the Lord Jesus Christ Himself as the Incarnate Head of His ransomed Church. It is as His executive that the Holy Spirit acts, and in Him there is nothing approaching to either abdication or desertion. There is no such thing as abdication; for we are told that God “hath put all things under his feet, and gave him to be the head over all things to the church.” Nor is there desertion, for in the self-same chapter in which He gives the promise of another Paraclete He gives also the promise of His own presence in the words, “I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you” ( John 14:18); and in the assurance given to those that love Him, He says ( John 14:23), “My Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” It may be asked, How is such language consistent with those other words of His, in which He said, “It is expedient for you that I go away; for if I go not away the Comforter will not come unto you”? But the answer is simple. As the localized incarnate Son of man, He is gone away, and is now where Stephen saw Him, at the right hand of God; but as the eternal Person of the undivided Trinity, He is omnipresent and ever acting; nor is it within the capacity of finite beings like ourselves to put any limit on His Divine action. 1 [Note: E. Hoare, Great Principles of Divine Truth, 234.]

3. How does the Comforter comfort?—We know by the fruits of His comfort. To the disciples everything about the working of that Divine Comforter was wrapt in mystery except the fruits. How He made His temple in man, how He imparted His light and His truth to His creatures, how He strengthened the vacillating, and spoke without words to the inward ear, and raised the fallen, and won back the wanderer, none could trace, none could know. The wind bloweth where it listeth: the ways of the Spirit are unsearchable. It is vain to imagine how that Heavenly Person associates Himself with our spirit, becomes to us the source of light and strength, and of the desire of good, making His work our work too, overshadowing, protecting, guarding our souls, giving us thoughts above our own thoughts, surprising us into an earnestness so unlike our common selves. Why should we expect to be conscious of His Presence? Why should we expect, such as we are, to recognize and discern clearly what is of God? But the effects of His Presence were soon recognized in the world, and have never ceased to be recognized since. They were seen in those two contrasted lists in the Epistle to the Galatians, of the works of the flesh and the fruits of the Spirit—of what the moral world had been and was, without Him, and of that new phenomenon and substantial fact of character which had shown itself beyond denial since He had come.

(1) Let us take the word “comfort” first in its modern sense, a sense covered by the Greek word, though not its chief meaning. Then we may say that He comforts us in our sorrow, providing consolation and affording relief.

When I think over the troubles of which I have heard even this week, I know that this is a world that needs comfort. One boy of brilliant promise lies struck down by sudden illness in a nursing-home; another man in the prime of life, doing a brilliant work, has a sickness on him to-day which I fear will never leave him, or, if it leaves him, will take away all power of work. There are two young women lately married; one is a widow after eight months, and the other after three. Another woman has her child born dead. And as these sorrows roll on me, at the centre of this great diocese—and I rejoice that people should pour their troubles on to me, inadequate as I feel myself to help them—I look up to heaven and I say, “If there were not a Comforter sent from heaven, where should we be?” And it was because our Saviour knew this that during that sad Holy Week, before He left, He made us this beautiful promise: “It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send Him unto you. I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter besides Me, another Comforter who shall abide with you for ever; there shall be with you the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.” 1 [Note: Bishop A. F. W. Ingram, A Mission of the Spirit, 192.]

(2) But the Spirit’s function is not merely, or chiefly, to soothe sorrow and wipe away the tear. The word really does not suggest so much the quiet room as the battle-field. It is an energetic, forceful, militant word. It implies conflict and struggle, and for the conflict and the struggle the Spirit is a fortifier—He lifts men above fear; He reinforces them; He gives them triumph in battle—and that is exactly what the Spirit proved to be to these first disciples.

We borrowed the term from a language, the makers of which set great store by these things. “Only be thou strong and very courageous,” was the Lord’s message to Joshua, the leader of the host of Israel. “As I was with Moses, so will I be with thee.” Confortare is the rendering of the first phrase in the Vulgate Version of the Old Testament, and in the Septuagint it reads literally, “Be strong and play the man.” In Isaiah 41:10 our noble Authorized Version gives us, “Fear thou not, for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee.” Confortare is once again the equivalent for this promise of strength. We observe, therefore, that the word which our fathers considered the best English equivalent of the Greek, “Paraclete,” is one with a history, in which sweetness and strength are united. There is a sympathy which enervates and a sympathy which braces, a love which weakens and a love which inspires. In our Lord’s promise of the Comforter it is Divine sympathy and love of the latter kind that are suggested.

Did not the Apostle pray on behalf of his Ephesian friends that they might be strengthened with might by God’s Spirit in the inner man? Did not our Lord give His disciples to expect that they should “be endued with power from on high”? Did He not associate this expectation with the promise of the Spirit? I think we may feel the idea of this strengthening to be an ingredient in the meaning of the word comfort as employed in the New Testament; as, for instance, when we are told that the Church in Judæa, Galilee, Samaria, had rest, and, “walking in the fear of the Lord, and in the comfort of the Holy Ghost, was multiplied.” And I should say this element of strengthening entered more or less into the meaning intended to be conveyed by the word comfort or Comforter in various places in our Prayer-Book: in the prayer at Confirmation, “Strengthen them … with the Holy Ghost the Comforter,” and in the invitation, “Draw near with faith, and take this holy Sacrament to your comfort.” In truest comfort, in God-given comfort—and of this the New Testament speaks—there is power; it may prove to be an essential element or condition of real power. 1 [Note: J. W. Bishop, The Christian Year and the Christian Life, 247.]

Just over a century ago Robert Morrison set sail for China; it seemed a quixotic business. “Do you think,” said the captain of the ship in which he sailed, “that you are going to convert China?” “No,” replied Morrison, “but I believe that God will.” 2 [Note: J. D. Jones, Things Most Surely Believed, 141.]

ii. The Spirit of Truth

1. Three times in these verses is the Spirit called the Spirit of truth. And, in the original, each time the title occurs, it is the Spirit of the truth. This must be taken to mean the truth which is in Jesus, the truth which is Christ Himself, which was incarnate in Him. For shortly before giving forth this promise of the Spirit He had proclaimed Himself to be “the way, and the truth, and the life.” “I am … the truth:” “the Spirit is the truth.” “He shall [both] teach you all things, and [more especially] bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you.” “He shall bear witness of me.” “He shall guide you into all the truth.” “He shall glorify me: for he shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you.” The Spirit for whose coming, for whose replenishing or baptism, foretold by the Baptist, the disciples would have still a little while to wait, would make clear to them something of the meaning of Jesus’ earthly life, and of His teaching concerning God and man and duty, so that they might make it clear to others.

He is the “Spirit of truth,” not as if He brought new truth. To suppose that He does so, opens the door to all manner of fanaticism; but the truth, the revelation of which is all summed and finished in the Person and work of Jesus Christ, is the weapon by which the Divine Spirit works all His conquests, the staff on which He makes us lean and be strong. He is the Spirit by whom the truth passes into our personal possession, by no mere imperfect form of outward teaching, which is always confused and insufficient, but by the inward teaching that deals with our hearts and our spirits.

The method used by the Spirit of truth is not driving or forcing, but “leading,” “guiding,” by winning ways and by persistently pointing to the truth and commendingly interpreting it. When we gaze upon a picture we may for ourselves see much that is beautiful and attractive in its mode of exhibiting colour, form, and expression. But to understand the inner meaning of the picture and appreciate its main purpose and idea, we may need some skilled interpreter to open our eyes to its most vital and inherent excellencies. The Holy Spirit is such a guide to the Saviour and such an interpreter and revealer of the true grace and glory of Jesus Christ in His purpose and mission into this world. 1 [Note: A. H. Drysdale, Christ Invisible our Gain, 186.]

2. Christ is the Truth. The Comforter, the Holy Ghost, is the Spirit of truth. He is the Spirit of truth in two ways. He is communicated from Jesus, who is the Truth, and He is the living power of the Triune Energy, by which Jesus Himself is the Truth. In Him the Son of God is begotten eternally as the Image of the Father. By Him the Son of God was conceived in the womb according to the fulness of the Divine purpose. The truth of Christ’s Godhead in the unity of the Holy Ghost necessitated the truth of His Manhood assumed by the power of the Holy Ghost.

3. The Spirit of truth, communicated to the Church, is the living Presence, in wisdom, power, and love, of that Divine energy which formed the worlds. They were formed for the habitation of God purposing to become incarnate. The Spirit of the Incarnate God fits the Church as the Body of Christ, to exercise dominion over all the creation which He has framed with a fitness for this final occupation. There is nothing superfluous, so as to be beyond the eventual purposes of God for His Church. There is nothing wanting, so that the Church of God, the Body of Christ, may feel within herself a Divine capacity for which the created universe gave no practical scope.

The truth of the creature is not separable from the truth of the Creator. Creation is true to itself, while it is true to the mind of the Creator. The first laws of creation are the impress of the Eternal Mind. If they were not so, they would be purely accidental and mutable. Doubtless there are harmonies in creation far deeper and grander than we can trace out. Harmonies of sight and sound, of number and weight, of mechanical power and chemical combination, of microscopic delicacy and astronomical magnificence, of universal distribution and temporal sequence, may be the objects of our guess-work at present, but at the best we can know them now only as one standing on the shore can know the waves whose ripple washes over the sand, all ignorant of the vast ocean far away. But all the universe is true, because the worlds of matter and spirit are the projection of the infinite intelligence of Him who is in His own true essence the law of beauty and truth to which all His creatures must be conformed. 1 [Note: R. M. Benson, The Final Passover, ii. (pt. i.) 364.]

4. How does the Spirit of truth operate?

(1) He enlightens our mind that we may know Christ Jesus.—He opens the eyes to the true meaning and aims of Christ’s words and work by furnishing insight into them, and enabling us to realize not only their true inwardness, but their vital importance—giving an attractiveness to them and a fascinating interest in them to our yearning and wondering heart and mind.

We can see the process of enlightenment going on in the New Testament. Take the one matter of the universality of the Kingdom. When Christ left the disciples, they were as narrow in their notions as any Jews in the land; they saw no place for Gentiles in the Kingdom: but see how gradually the Spirit led them to an understanding of Christ’s purpose. First of all, the Samaritans receive the word. Then, at the impulse of the Spirit, Philip preaches to the Ethiopian eunuch and baptizes him. Then, at the direct and imperious bidding of the Spirit, Peter goes to Cornelius, the Roman centurion, and baptizes him. And then, finally, the Spirit thrusts forth Barnabas and Saul into the work of evangelizing the world, and so the truth is gradually brought home to the disciples and Apostles that they shall come from the North and the South and the East and the West, and sit down in the Kingdom of God.

When Jesus says of this Spirit that “he shall guide you into all truth,” He does not mean that the Holy Ghost will guide us into natural truth, or scientific truth, or metaphysical truth; but into those great central truths—the atoning death, the justifying righteousness of Jesus Christ; those poles on which turn as on an axle the whole round scheme of redemption and grace. As it was by this Spirit of truth that the prophecies concerning Christ were uttered which fill the Old Testament; as it was by the Spirit of truth that Jesus was conceived by the Virgin Mary; as it was by this Spirit of truth that He was anointed for His ministry after His baptism: so is it declared that His office is to take of the things of Christ and show them unto men.

Nor is it a new revelation which the Spirit gives, but rather a more perfect understanding of that which has already been given in Christ. Here, then, is the test by which to try all that claims the authority of spiritual truth. Does it “glorify” Christ? Does it lead us into a fuller knowledge of Him “in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden”? “Whosoever goeth onward,” says St. John, in a remarkable passage, for which English readers are indebted to the Revised Version, “and abideth not in the teaching of Christ, hath not God.” In other words, no true progress is possible except as we abide in Christ.

I sometimes sit at my study window on a bright morning, and combine with my work the pleasure of looking at my share of God’s beautiful world. It is a wonderful blend of landscape and marine, colour and form: trees and flowers in the foreground, dark roofs and tiled chimneys beyond, and behind all the grey and azure of the mighty sea. Not simply once, but many times, do I lift my eyes to it, yet the picture is always the same. Floating clouds overhead may modify the light and shadow, but they do not change the permanent features in the least. And yet I know the picture is not out there: it is within me; it is not the eye but the mind that sees. The effect of the landscape is being impressed upon my consciousness, by the light of day—itself invisible. And every ray of light contains the perfect picture. I may look up a thousand times—it will always be there, while the light can fall upon the eye. And you may come with me and view the same picture. If you have eyes to see you shall have the perfect picture too. And a million persons may, if they choose, stand and gaze. The whole scene is theirs, as much as yours or mine. There is but one scene and one sun, but every ray of the energies of the latter reveals the whole of the former to every eye that is turned upon it. So it is with the work of the Divine Spirit, the other Paraclete. He reveals the Christ to those who seek Him, writes His name, and forms His likeness within the human soul. The living Christ, the indwelling Christ, becomes a rich personal spiritual experience in the power of the Holy Ghost. 1 [Note: R. J. Campbell.]

(2) He encourages us to appropriate Christ.—We feel entitled, without being chargeable with any vain confidence, to appropriate and apply to ourselves such words of personal conviction as, “The Lord is my Shepherd,” “Thou knowest that I love thee,” or, “I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him.” The very sting of death is extracted, and its terrors no longer keep the soul in thrall. So the dying saint, falling back at last as at first into the arms of a glorified Redeemer, breathes out his soul in fidelity, meekness, and hope, saying in fearless triumph, “Into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

The immortal Bengel died in 1752. One of his friends was travelling, and spent all night at Bengel’s house. The great commentator was very busy with his Bible, and worked till nearly midnight. But the friend still waited. He knew the rich Christian character of the scholar, and wished to hear his evening prayer. At length the books were put on one side; Bengel arose, and knelt down beside his chair. He had been studying the words of Christ, and he knew that the blessed Master was near him all the time. So now there was no lengthened agony of supplication. Sweetly and simply the words of the scholar rose to heaven, “Lord Jesus, things are just the same between us,” and then he laid himself down to rest. Perfect peace! perfect confidence! For he had appropriated Christ as his personal Saviour, and he knew Christ was his. 1 [Note: J. A. Clapperton, Culture of the Christian Heart, 36.]

(3) He enables us to overcome sin and grow in true holiness.—Our Lord prays, “Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.” Men of science have at length discovered what is the character of the world so far as it consists of animated things. “It is a struggle for existence;” it is “the survival of the fittest.” So it is with the Christian life. The old man conquered, but not thoroughly subdued, contends with the new life which has been superinduced. It is a contest between the lower principles of man’s nature and the higher, quickened and sanctified by the Spirit of God. It is a struggle between the animal man and the spiritual man; between pleasure and duty; between selfishness and benevolence; between appetite and conscience; between lust and reason; between love of ease and zeal for good; between cowardice and courage; between deceit and candour; between selfishness and love; between the fear of man and the fear of God; between earth and heaven. But they that be with us are far stronger than they that can be against us. The believer is not perfect in this world, but he is going on towards perfection in obedience to the command, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” “He which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.”

The connexion between justification and sanctification is not merely human gratitude for Divine grace as the motive of a new life; it is not only a conscious personal communion with a Divine Saviour and Lord, a communion that must be potent in conforming man to His moral perfection; but it is a habitation and operation in man of God by His Spirit, the very life of God become the life of Man_1:2 [Note: A. E. Garvie, Studies of Paul and his Gospel, 190.]

(4) He gives strength for witness and for service.—The Holy Spirit who comes to give fulness to the work of Jesus must communicate new power proportionate to the new revelation. The new kingdom is to be marked by profounder spiritual life, by a clearer vision of eternal things, by a more vivid consciousness of sin, by mightier energies of holiness, by a diviner dynamic of spiritual love. In the might of inward spiritual force men and women are to occupy the heavenly places with Christ. To this end they must be endued with new power, with a vaster momentum of spiritual energy.

There need be no hesitation in affirming that the communication of inward spiritual power is the fundamental office of the Holy Spirit of the New Covenant. It is through this new influx of spiritual power that the new illumination is given. “The spiritual man judgeth all things, but he himself is judged of no man.” At Pentecost and throughout the records of the Apostolic Church, the ministry of the Holy Spirit is fundamentally the giving of holy power. The keynote of the Spirit’s presence is given by our Saviour in such words as these: “Tarry ye in the city, until ye be clothed with power from on high.” “But ye shall receive power, when the Holy Ghost is come upon you.” This is the new spiritual power demanded by the new revelation. For, in view of the reception of this power, the Lord continued: “And ye shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judæa and Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.”

“Ye shall receive the power of the Holy Ghost coming on you, and ye shall be witnesses unto me.” The copula links together the power and the witness-bearing. Few facts of history are more convincing, as to the need of the Holy Ghost’s power for Christian service, than that these first disciples, who had lived in our Lord’s immediate society for three years and more, were yet not equipped by that long intimacy of fellowship and observation for the great task which He intended them to carry out. No. They had to tarry in the city of Jerusalem till they had been “endued with power from on high”; until they had received Him who was designated by the great title: “the promise of the Father.” From this we may learn that a distinct gift, other than personal knowledge of Christ, and experience of His wonderful ways, confidence in His grace and power, remembrance of His words and works, and much besides, which these men possessed, is needed if we are to bear an effective witness for our loved and trusted Master. 1 [Note: R. C. Joynt, Liturgy and Life, 208.]

iii. The Abiding

1. The Comforter is to abide with us for ever. He is the instrument whereby the glory of Christ is communicated to His members, and so His Presence with the Church is coextensive in duration with the glory of Christ the Head. The ministry of humiliation was to cease. The ministry of righteousness was to be an eternal glory.

2. The Presence, the ever-continued assistance of the Holy Ghost, unearthly as it is, is yet a thing of the immediate present—of the present shaping and improvement of life, of present growth in depth and reality, and elevation of character. If ever we rise above what is of the earth, earthy; above what is of time, transitory; above what is of this world, fugitive, unsatisfying, corruptible—it is to Him that we shall owe it.

3. Two phrases, significant in variety, are used to describe the relation of the Spirit of truth to believers. First, that relation is spoken of as a Fellowship—“He abideth with you”; and next, it is represented as an Indwelling—“and shall be in you.”

Webster once said: “The greatest thought that ever entered my mind was that of my personal responsibility to a personal God.” A great thought truly, and yet a greater is beneath it: my personal relation to a personal God. 1 [Note: Bishop A. Pearson, The Claims of the Faith, 24.]

(1) Fellowship.—“He abideth with you.” While Jesus was with His disciples below, the Holy Ghost dwelt with them in His person. They saw in Him the presence of the Divine Spirit. His mighty works, His wonderful words, His perfect holiness and charity and self-denial and truth, all these things, daily witnessed by them and profoundly reverenced, were results of the Spirit given to Him not by measure. Though He was very God, yet He acted below within the limits (as it were) of a perfectly inspired humanity. It was of the essence of His humiliation, that He lived and acted, spoke and wrought, during His earthly sojourn, as though He were only a Man full of the Holy Ghost. Thus, when He dwelt with them, the Holy Spirit dwelt with them; dwelt with them in a sense and with a fulness never realized in the case of any others. And the Spirit who was in Jesus kept them also in the truth by virtue of a controlling influence put forth upon them from Him. “While I was with them in the world, I kept them in thy name.”

This fellowship of the Spirit is ours also. The Comforter dwells with us in Church ordinances. Every time that we meet for worship there is a coexistence with us of the Holy Ghost. And He dwells with us in the haunts of common life. He dwells with us in Christian lives; in the daily sight and hearing of the conduct and language, of the acts and the words, of true Christian people

(2) Indwelling.—“And shall be in you.” It would be esteemed a rare privilege to have a great and truly noble person dwell with us, a Paul, a Chrysostom, an Augustine; to have such an one as our perpetual monitor, and adviser, and exemplar; to have him show us how to act, how to speak, how to live; to have the benefit of his oversight, his wisdom, his favour. But then the person thus favoured might never fully copy the devotion of an Augustine, the eloquence of a Chrysostom, or the holiness of a Paul. How different, however, would the case be if there were a process by which the spirit of those great men, in its wholeness could be infused into the minds and hearts of others, so that instead of dwelling with an Augustine, Augustine should by his spirit dwell in them; instead of living with a Chrysostom, Chrysostom should live his life in them; instead of copying a Paul beside us, Paul should dwell in us as the abiding spirit. What a difference there would be! The indwelling spirit of an Augustine would make a second Augustine; the infused spirit of a Chrysostom would make another golden-mouthed preacher; and a Paul living in us would reproduce the spirit and the deeds of the great Apostle in our own life and work. The Comforter, as the Spirit of truth, not only dwells with us as a guest, but dwells in us as the inner controlling, shaping, enlightening, sanctifying Spirit, evolving out of Himself through the functions and faculties of our being, the fruits and graces of a holy life, and the beautiful character of a true Christian.

The artist who paints a picture, or chisels a statue, impresses a certain amount of his own genius on flat canvas or cold marble. It is not a beauty developed from within, working outward; but something put upon the passive canvas or marble, by an outside process that never goes beneath the surface, never imparts life within. But the artist power of the Holy Ghost is seen in that, taking up His abode in the heart, He renews and sanctifies that heart, and the outward life is but the development of the inward grace. 1 [Note: W. B. Stevens.]

To all the world mine eyes are blind;

Their drop serene is—night,

With stores of snow piled up the wind

An awful airy height.

And yet ’tis but a mote in the eye:

The simple faithful stars

Beyond are shining, careless high,

Nor heed our storms and jars.

And when o’er storm and jar I climb—

Beyond life’s atmosphere,

I shall behold the lord of time

And space—of world and year.

Oh vain, far quest!—not thus my heart

Shall ever find its goal!

I turn me home—and there thou art,

My Father, in my soul! 2 [Note: George MacDonald.]

The Old Testament is full of the thought of the presence of God with His people. With very few exceptions—which are found chiefly in the Psalms—it is always “with.” “My presence shall go with thee.” “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee.” This thought—and it is a very grand and comforting one—characterizes the whole of the ancient dispensation. Neither is it forgotten in the New. “Lo! I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” But the new and determining feature of the Second Testament is the “ in,” the “ in you.” “I am in you.” “Christ in you.” “The Holy Ghost which is in you.” “God is in you of a truth.” “I will dwell in them, and walk in them.” 3 [Note: James Vaughan.]

The Giving of the Comforter

Literature

Aitken (J.), The Abiding Law, 11.

Benson (R. M.), The Final Passover, ii. (pt. i.) 353.

Bernard (T. D.), The Central Teaching of Jesus Christ, 157.

Bishop (J.), The Christian Year in Relation to the Christian Life, 243.

Bourdillon (F.), Short Sermons, 189.

Brown (J. B.), The Divine Mystery of Peace, 65.

Butler (W. J.), Sermons for Working Men, 289.

Church (R. W.), Cathedral and University Sermons, 182.

Dick (G. H.), The Yoke and the Anointing, 160.

Drysdale (A. H.), Christ Invisible our Gain, 175.

Hoare (E.), Great Principles of Divine Truth, 218.

Ingram (A. F. W.), A Mission of the Spirit, 190.

Jackson (G.), The Teaching of Jesus, 65.

Jerdan (C.), For the Lambs of the Flock, 346.

Jones (J. D.), Things most surely believed, 126.

Joynt (R. C.), Liturgy and Life, 204.

McCosh (J.), Gospel Sermons, 150.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John ix.–xiv., 320.

Murray (A.), The Spirit of Christ, 60.

Pearson (A.), The Claims of the Faith, 14.

Russell (A.), The Light that lighteth Every Man, 138.

Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 339.

Spurgeon (C. H.), New Park Street Pulpit, i. 4.

Stevens (W. B.), Sermons, 28.

Thomas (J.), The Mysteries of Grace, 192.

Vaughan (C. J.), Doncaster Sermons, 463.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), New Ser. xiii. No. 1005.

Wilson (J. M.), Sermons preached at Clifton College Chapel, i. 165.

Christian World Pulpit, ix. 332 (W. Roberts); lxi. 294 (R. J. Campbell).

Verse 23

Where He Delights to Dwell

If a man love me, he will keep my word: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.— John 14:23.

1. The Judas, in reply to whose question our Lord spoke these words, held but a low place among the Apostles. In all the lists he is one of the last of the groups of four into which they are divided, and which were evidently arranged according to their spiritual nearness to the Master. His question is exactly one which a listener, with some dim, confused glimmer of Christ’s meaning, might be expected to ask. He grasps at His last words about manifesting Himself to certain persons; he rightly feels that he and his brethren possess the qualification of love. He rightly understands that our Lord contemplates no public showing of Himself, and that disappoints him. It was only a day or two ago that Jesus seemed to them to have begun to do what they had always wanted Him to do—manifest Himself to the world. And now, as he thinks, something unknown to them must have happened in order to make Him change His course, and go back to the old plan of a secret communication. And so he says, “Lord! what has come to pass to induce you to abandon and falter upon the course on which we entered when you rode into Jerusalem with the shouting crowd?”

Notice how, in His reply, our Lord subtly and significantly alters the form of the statement which He has already made. He had formerly said, “If ye love me, ye will keep my commandments,” but now He casts it into a purely impersonal form, and says, “ If a man,” anybody, not you only, but anybody—“if a man love me, he,” anybody, “will keep my word.” And why the change? Probably in order to strike full and square against that complacent assumption of Judas that it was “to us and not to the world” that the showing was to take place. Our Lord, by the studiously impersonal form into which He casts the promise, proclaims its universality, and says to His ignorant questioner, “Do not suppose that you Apostles have the monopoly. You may not even have a share in My self-manifestation. Anybody may have it. And there is no ‘world,’ as you suppose, to which I do not show Myself. Anybody may have the vision if he observes the conditions.”

2. “He will keep my word.” That is more than a “commandment,” is it not? It includes all His sayings, and it includes them all as in one vital unity and organic whole. We are not to go picking and choosing among them; they are one. And it includes this other thought, that every word of Christ, be it revelation of the deep things of God, or be it a promise of the great shower of blessings which, out of His full hand, He will drop upon our heads, enshrines within itself a commandment. He utters no revelations simply that we may know. He utters no comforting words simply that our sore hearts may be healed. In all His utterances there is a practical bearing; and every word of His teaching, every word of His sweet, whispered assurances of love and favour to the waiting heart, has in it the imperativeness of His manifested will, has a direct bearing upon duty. All His words are gathered into one word, and all the variety of His sayings is, in their unity, the law of our lives.

Here we have laid down for all time in precise language the condition of Divine manifestation, and the realization of Divine and quickening power as the reward of fulfilling that condition.

I

The Condition is Loving Obedience

He that longs for more satisfying knowledge of spiritual realities, he that thirsts for certainty and to see God as if face to face, must expect no sudden or magical revelation, but must be content with the true spiritual education which proceeds by loving and living. To the disciples the method might seem slow; to us also it often seems slow; but it is the method which nature requires. Our knowledge of God and our belief that in Christ we have a hold of ultimate truth and are living among eternal verities, grow with our love and service for Christ. It may take us a lifetime—it will take us a lifetime—to learn to love Him as we ought; but others have learned and we also may learn, and there is no possible experience so precious to us.

Obedience is the very pulse of spiritual life. 1 [Note: Rainy, Life, i. 131.]

This universe is governed by laws. At the bottom of everything here there is a law. Things are in this way and not that; we call that a law or condition. All departments have their own laws. By submission to them, you make them your own. Obey the laws of the body: such laws as say, Be temperate and chaste; or of the mind: such laws as say, Fix the attention; strengthen by exercise; and then their prizes are yours—health, strength, pliability of muscle, tenaciousness of memory, nimbleness of imagination, etc. Obey the laws of your spiritual being, and it has its prizes too. For instance, the condition or law of a peaceful life is submission to the law of meekness: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” The condition of the beatific vision is a pure heart and life: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” To the impure, God is simply invisible. The condition annexed to a sense of God’s presence—in other words, that without which a sense of God’s presence cannot be—is obedience to the laws of love: “If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.” The condition of spiritual wisdom and certainty in truth is obedience to the will of God, surrender of private will. 2 [Note: F. W. Robertson, Sermons, ii. 101.]

1. The source of true obedience is love.—Love and obedience have always been the condition on which the enjoyment of the Divine Presence depended. The sum of the Ten Commandments is, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and strength and mind, and thy neighbour as thyself.” And these words, of course, mean the same thing. They take us back, like the commandments, to His Father’s authority, and they bring into force all those declarations of the Old Testament in which the keeping of the commandments is laid down as the condition of fellowship. “If ye walk in my statutes … I will be your God, and ye shall be my people.” Now it is love, and now it is obedience, that is named as the condition of union and communion with the Most High. The reason is at once apparent. True obedience can spring only from love. “He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me.” Love is the hidden fountain; obedience is the visible stream. In its truest and highest forms Christianity is a religion of principles. It works from the centre outwards to the circumference. Its language is not “Do this,” and “Forbear from that,” but “Love, and thou fulfillest the law.”

That is exactly what distinguishes and lifts the morality of the Gospel above all other systems. The worst man in the world knows a great deal more of his duty than the best man does. It is not for want of knowledge that men go to the devil, but it is for want of power to live their knowledge. And what morality fails to do, with its clearest utterances of human duty, Christ comes and does. The one is like the useless proclamations posted up in some rebellious district, where there is no army to back them, and the king’s authority from whom they come is flouted. The other gets itself obeyed. Such is the difference between the powerless morality of the world and the commandment of Jesus Christ. Here is the road plain and straight. What matters that, if there is no force to draw the cart along it? There might as well be no road at all. Here stand all your looms, polished and in perfect order, but there is no steam in the boilers; and so there is no motion, and nothing woven. What we want is not law but power. And what the Gospel gives us, and stands alone in giving us, is not merely the knowledge of the will of God and the clear revelation of what we ought to be, but it is the power to become it. Love does that, and love alone. That strong force brought into action in our hearts will drive out from thence all rivals, all false and low things. The true way to cleanse the Augean stables, as the old myth has it, was to turn the river into them. It would have been endless work to wheel out the filth in wheelbarrows loaded by spades: turn the stream in, and it will sweep away all the foulness. When the Ark comes into the Temple, Dagon lies, a mutilated stump, upon the threshold. When Christ comes into my heart, then all the obscene and twilight-loving shapes that lurked there, and defiled it, will vanish like ghosts at cock-crowing before His calm and pure presence. He, and He alone, entering my heart by the portals of my love, will coerce my evil and stimulate my good. And if I love Him, I shall keep His commandments. 1 [Note: A. Maclaren, Holy of Holies, 72.]

When the sun rises in the east, the sunflower opens towards its rays, and turns ever eagerly towards the sun, even until its setting in the west; and at night it closes and hides its colours and awaits the return of the sun. Even so will we open our hearts by obedience towards the illumination of the grace of God, and humbly and eagerly will we follow that grace so long as we feel the warmth of love. And when the light of grace ceases to awaken fresh emotions, and we feel the warmth of love but little, or feel it not at all, then it is night, when we shall close our heart to all that may tempt it; and so shall we shut up within ourselves the golden colour of love, awaiting a new dawn, with its new brightness and its fresh emotions; and thus shall we preserve innocence always in its pristine splendour. 1 [Note: M. Maeterlinck, Ruysbroeck and the Mystics, 50.]

2. The outcome of true love is obedience.—There is no love worth calling love which does not obey. All the emotional and the mystic, and the so-called higher parts of Christian experience, have to be content to submit to this plain test—Do they help us to live as Christ would have us, and that because He would have us? Love to Him which does not keep His commandments is either spurious or dangerously feeble. The true sign of its presence in the heart and the noblest of its operations is to be found not in high-pitched expressions of fervid emotion, or even in the sacred joys of solitary communion, but in its making us, while in the rough struggle of daily life, and surrounded by trivial tasks, live near Him, and by Him, and for Him, and like Him.

So the test of love is obedience; and the more overmastering the love, the more will the obedience—not as reluctant, but as eager, not as a yoke or a burden, but as a passion and a life—dominate the whole self. It may be true that obedience which is not love is valueless. It is certainly true that love which does not express itself, perforce, in obedience, is not love. To the natural self the obedience of Christ seems burdensome. It is only experience of obedience that gives the lie to the instincts of the natural self. It is only experience that makes the religious man realize at last that Christ’s yoke is easy, and His burden is light—not indeed because it dispenses with self-denial, but because self-denial itself, as the necessary expression of desire towards God, finds in its own very suffering a gladness which is greater and deeper than the pain.

We must begin to love Christ before we can keep His word. Christ is the lawgiver of God’s world, and before we can obey His laws we must be on terms of amity with Himself. This implies that we know Him to be at peace with us; for, as we are made, we cannot love where we dread. God’s friendship must come before God’s service. Now, the very opposite of this is frequently taught—that there is to be service before there can be friendship, and that peace can be purchased only by obedience. We need not so much consult the Bible to see the falsehood of this as look into our own hearts, where we may feel the impossibility of doing anything that will bear the look of service in a spiritual sense until the heart is in it. 1 [Note: John Ker.]

God’s will is—the bud of the rose for your hair,

The ring for your hand and the pearl for your breast;

God’s will is—the mirror that makes you look fair.

No wonder you whisper: “God’s will is the best.”

But what if God’s will were the famine, the flood?—

And were God’s will the coffin shut down in your face?—

And were God’s will the worm in the fold of the bud,

Instead of the picture, the light, and the lace?

Were God’s will the arrow that flieth by night,

Were God’s will the pestilence walking by day,

The clod in the valley, the rock on the height—

I fancy “God’s will” would be harder to say.

God’s will is—your own will? What honour have you

For having your own will, awake or asleep?

Who praises the lily for keeping the dew,

When the dew is so sweet for the lily to keep?

God’s will unto me is not music or wine,

With helpless reproaching, with desolate tears,

God’s will I resist, for God’s will is divine;

And I—shall be dust to the end of my years.

God’s will is—not mine. Yet one night I shall lie

Very still at His feet, where the stars may not shine.

“Lo! I am well pleased,” I shall hear from the sky;

Because—it is God’s will I do, and not mine. 2 [Note: Sarah M. B. Piatt.]

II

The Reward is Divine Manifestation

Revelation on the part of God presupposes a certain disposition on the part of man. Love to Christ—love to the Son of God, who has brought Himself within the range of human affection—brings to the believer the love of His Father. Then follows that inward, abiding, transforming fellowship in which the Christian sees God more clearly as he reflects His likeness a little less dimly. There is brought to pass that twofold fulness of the spiritual life which unites two worlds: Christ lives in the believer and the believer lives in Christ.

God has not set up an arbitrary test of manifestation, He has taken the common course of our life, and given it applications to Himself. I might challenge the worshipper of Nature to say whether his god does not demand precisely the same condition of manifestation. The mountain is saying, If any man love me, I will manifest myself unto him; the sun holds the same language, so does the sea, so does every leaf oi the forest. 1 [Note: J. Parker.]

Christ will come unto thee, and shew thee His own consolation, if thou prepare for Him a worthy mansion within thee.

All His glory and beauty is from within, and there He delighteth Himself.

The inward man He often visiteth; and hath with him sweet discourses, pleasant solace, much peace, familiarity exceeding wonderful.

O faithful soul, make ready thy heart for this Bridegroom, that He may vouchsafe to come unto thee, and to dwell within thee.

For thus saith He, “If a man love me, he will keep my words: and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” 2 [Note: Thomas à Kempis, Of the Imitation of Christ, bk. ii. ch. i.]

1. The manifestation is in union with the Father.—Jesus shows Himself to the obedient heart in indissoluble union with the Father. Look at the majesty, and, except upon one hypothesis, the insane presumption, of such words as these: “If a man love me, my Father will love him:” as if identifying love to Himself with love to the Father. And look at that wondrous union, the consciousness of which speaks in “ We will come.” “ We will come,” together, hand in hand, if one may so say; or rather, His coming is the Father’s coming. Just as in heaven, so closely are they represented as united that there is but one throne “for God and the Lamb”; so on earth, so closely are they represented as united that there is but one coming of the Father in the Son.

This is the only belief, as it seems to me, that will keep this generation from despair and moral suicide. The question for this generation is, Is it possible for men to know God? Science, both of material things and of inward experiences, is more and more unanimous in its proclamation; “Behold! we know not anything;” and the only attitude to take before that great black vault above us is to say, “We know nothing.” The world has learned half of a great verse of the Gospel: “No man hath seen God at any time;” nor can see Him. If the world is not to go mad, if hearts are not to be tortured into despair, if morality and enthusiasm and poetry and everything higher and nobler than the knowledge of material phenomena and their sequences is not to perish from the earth, the world must learn the next half of the verse, and say, “The only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” Christ shows Himself in indissoluble union with the Father. 1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

2. The manifestation is abiding.—That coming is a permanent residence: “We will make our abode with him.” Very beautiful is it to notice that our Lord here employs that same sweet and significant word with which He began this wonderful series of encouragements, when He said, “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” Yonder they dwell for ever with God; here God in Christ for ever dwells with the loving heart. It is a permanent abode so long as the conditions are fulfilled, but only so long. If self-will, rising in the Christian heart from its torpor and apparent death, reasserts itself and shakes off Christ’s yoke, Christ’s presence vanishes.

In the last hours of the Holy City there was heard by the trembling priests, amidst the midnight darkness, the motion of departing Deity, and a great voice said: “Let us depart hence;” and to-morrow the shrine was empty, and the day after it was in flames. Brethren, if you would keep the Christ in whom is God, remember that He cannot be kept but by the act of loving obedience. 1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

“We will make our abode with him,” i.e. will be at home, as is possible where there is reciprocity of love. Where there is reciprocity of love there is what we call friendship. Lazarus was a friend of Jesus, who loved all, but had His friendships when on earth, and so He has now. 2 [Note: R. W. Corbet, Letters from a Mystic of the Present Day, 171.]

Where He Delights to Dwell

Literature

Bonar (H.), God’s Way of Holiness, 153.

Bourdillon (F.), Short Sermons, 109, 119.

Griffiths (W.), Onward and Upward, 65.

Humberstone (W. J.), The Cure of Care, 109.

McClelland (T. C.), The Mind of Christ, 167.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John ix.–xiv., 350.

Meyer (F. B.), The Soul’s Pure Intention, 35.

Miller (J.), Sermons Literary and Scientific, ii. 336.

Moberly (R. C), Christ our Life, 52.

Pope (W. B.), Discourses on the Lordship of the Incarnate Redeemer, 223.

Robertson (A. T.), The Teaching of Jesus: God the Father, 117.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, l. (1904) No. 2895.

Telford (J.), The Story of the Upper Room, 128.

Watson (J.), The Inspiration of our Faith, 179.

Westcott (B. F.), Peterborough Sermons, 39.

Whately (R.), Sermons on the Principal Christian Festivals, 107.

Christian World Pulpit, viii. 148 (Beecher); xii. 298 (Gallaway); li. 244 (Black).

Keswick Week, 1905, p. 87 (Sloan).

Verse 27

Christ’s Gift of Peace

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be fearful.— John 14:27.

Christ is making His parting bequest to His disciples. He would fain leave them free from care and distress; but He has none of those worldly possessions which men usually lay up for their children and those dependent on them. Houses, lands, clothes, money—He has none. He cannot even secure for those who are to carry on His work an exemption from persecution. He does not leave them, as some initiators have done, stable though new institutions, an empire of recent origin but already firmly established. “Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.” But He does give them that which all other bequests aim at producing: “Peace I leave with you.”

These words, touching at all times, were unspeakably affecting in the circumstances of the Speaker and hearers. We know not but they did more to comfort the dispirited “little ones” than all that had been said before. There is a pathos and a music in the very sound of them, apart from their sense, which are wonderfully soothing. We can imagine, indeed, that as they were spoken, the poor disciples were overtaken with a fit of tenderness, and burst into tears. That, however, would do them good. Sorrow is healed by weeping; the sympathy which melts the heart at the same time comforts it. This touching sympathetic farewell is more than a good wish; it is a promise—a promise made by One who knows that the blessing promised is within reach. It is like the cheering word spoken by David to brothers in affliction: “Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord.” 1 [Note: A. B. Bruce, The Training of the Twelve, 396.]

I

The Source of Peace

Here we are directed to the true Source of peace. Jesus claims that He is the real fountainhead, the author and depositary, of peace.

1. Jesus defines the peace which He was leaving to the disciples as that peace which He had Himself enjoyed: “ My peace I give unto you,”—as one hands over a possession he has himself tested, the shield or helmet that has served him in battle. “That which has protected Me in a thousand fights I make over to you.” The peace which Christ desires His disciples to enjoy is that which characterized Himself; the same serenity in danger, the same equanimity in troublous circumstances, the same freedom from anxiety about results, the same speedy recovery of composure after something had for a moment ruffled the calm surface of His demeanour. This is what He makes over to His people; this is what He makes possible to all who serve Him.

One can give to another only what one has owned oneself, and as soon as Jesus makes His will and leaves peace to the Twelve, it comes to our mind that He has endowed them with the chiefest good, and has given what, beyond all men that ever lived, He Himself enjoyed. He had neither houses nor lands. One other thing He did not have, unrest. He had shame and suffering. One other thing He did have—rest. With evident fitness and intense conviction He could face a crowd of harassed, overdriven, hopeless people, heavy laden in soul and body, and offer them rest. Never had any one seen Jesus disturbed in soul, save in grief for a friend’s death, or in pity for a doomed city, or for some other reason outside Himself. If a multitude would make Him a King, He was not exalted; if they cried, “Crucify him,” He was not cast down. It mattered nothing to Him what was said of Him, or done with Him; and through accumulated hardships, disappointments, injustices, cruelties, Jesus preserved His high serenity. Whatever storms beat on the outer coast of His life, His soul was anchored in the fair haven of peace. 1 [Note: J. Watson, The Upper Room, 96.]

Two painters each painted a picture to illustrate his conception of rest. The first chose for his scene a still lone lake among the far-off mountains. The second threw on his canvas a thundering waterfall, with a fragile birch tree bending over the foam; at the fork of a branch, almost wet with the cataract’s spray, a robin sat on its nest. The first was only stagnation; the last was rest. For in rest there are always two elements—tranquillity and energy; silence and turbulence; creation and destruction; fearlessness and fearfulness. Thus it was in Christ. 1 [Note: Henry Drummond, Pax Vobiscum, 263.]

2. How did Jesus come by this peace? By unfaltering obedience to the Father’s will, and by utter self-sacrifice. His peace was the fruit of a hard-won victory.

Whatever were His peculiar natural aids of spiritual genius and sensibility, Christ attained His greatness by His own faithfulness to the occasions and intimations which the Father gave Him. If we lose hold of this, we lose the whole value of the Christian life and doctrine. The secret means by which the Almighty Spirit prepares His instruments, the mode and the extent of His intercourse with the soul of Christ—of these we offer no explanation or theory; but the character that grew up under this culture can never by a healthy religion be separated from the personal will of Christ, or be otherwise regarded than as the result of a voluntary faithfulness to the grace of God. Even when a forced flower is made to exhibit summer’s bloom on winter’s bosom, the blossoming is due not to culture only but to the nature on which it was exerted, which here offers no resistance but yields up all its hidden glories to the hand that tends it; surrounded with a special atmosphere, and in special circumstances, the fitness within, the genial nature, repaid the care and burst into beauty. And so with Christ,—if the Father was the Husbandman the Son was the spiritual Vine; if the culture was of God, the harmonious development of all that was in that rich and blessed nature was through the willing obedience that offered no resistance to the heavenly tending; if the influences were of God’s holy grace, the answering faithfulness was of God’s holy Child. And the true distinction of Him who, by reason of a perfect obedience, is as the only Son of God, was that through a holy will the spiritual influences of the Father did produce their righteous fruit; that no Divine soliciting was rejected because it involved Him in awful duties; that to Him the only true life, life eternal, was life in and with God. 1 [Note: J. H. Thom, Laws of Life after the Mind of Christ, 175.]

Lord, I had chosen another lot,

But then I had not chosen well;

Thy choice and only Thine is good:

No different lot, search heaven or hell,

Had blessed me, fully understood;

None other, which Thou orderest not. 2 [Note: C. G. Rossetti, Poems, 123.]

II

The Bestowal of Peace

Christ here shares with His people His peculiar secret. He makes a bequest, He bestows a gift.

1. “Not as the world giveth”—not the peace of ease, but of struggle; not of self-content, but of self-sacrifice; not of yielding to evil, but of conflict with it; not of accommodation to the world, but by the subjugation of it. And so He adds, “I have overcome the world.” It is a strange paradox, this peace of conflict; it is the peace of an Imperial Spirit which by its own victory rises above human circumstances.

In one of her shorter poems Mrs. Browning asks the question, “What is the best thing in the world?” Various answers are suggested, but the only one which the poetess regards as final and conclusive is this: “Something out of it, I think.” Yes, the best thing in the world is something outside the world, something which the world does not contain, and which it cannot give. 3 [Note: J. Law Wilson, Helpful Words for Daily Life, 62.]

When we look abroad upon the sea, or the silent hills as they sleep in the tranquil folds of the evening light, and say, How peaceful they are! we mean not merely that the wind is down or the air is still, but that Nature rests in her inner central depths. It is such an inward reality—quiet within the soul, a restful life beneath all other life—that Christ gives to them that are His. It is something deeper than sense, or intellect, or passion, or all the shows of that life which we can see, or hear, or touch. It is no mere harmony of natural powers—although it is also this; but it is a positive spiritual endowment—a gift from the Divine—something which at once settles and stays the spirit on a foundation that cannot be moved, though the earth be removed, and the waters roar and be troubled. 1 [Note: J. Tulloch, Some Facts of Religion and of Life, 56.]

2. Christ gives His peace by bringing us to the same source whence He had it Himself—by bringing us to God, by making us one with God, and so bringing us into harmony with the true law of the Spirit’s life, which is to live, not by the perishing things of earth, but by the unseen and the eternal. As the physician brings peace to the body by bringing it into harmony with the law of its life, with the conditions of health; as the teacher gives intellectual peace by revealing to the mind the truth that it seeks after, so that it can apprehend it and rest upon it—so Christ gives us peace of spirit by bringing us into harmony with God’s will.

We are purposed for union with our Lord. The Scriptures resound with this teaching from end to end. Every call in its pages is a call to a rectified communion with our Maker. That union has been broken, and broken by nothing but sin. And if peace is to be regained, the union must be restored. But that union must not be a mere cuticle relationship; not one of words or of ritual, or created by the flimsy ligaments of sects. It must be the union of mind with mind, God’s thought rising into our thought as the sap of the vine into the receptive branch. It must be the union of conscience with conscience, our moral sense scrupulously reflecting the judgments of the Lord, as a clock in direct connexion with Greenwich registers the royal time. It must be the union of will with will, my will lifted like a sail while the breath of the Lord blows upon it, moving my life in the appointed way. It must be the union of heart with heart, God and man Bharing common sorrows and common joys. This is peace: man’s life moving in God’s life in frictionless communion. 2 [Note: J. H. Jowett, in the British Congregationalist, Aug. 6, 1908, p. 122.]

3. Christ’s peace reaches the heart and conscience. There is only one way for a man to be at peace with himself through and through, and that is that he should put the guidance of his life into the hands of Jesus Christ, and let Him do with it as He will. There is one power, and only one, that can draw after it all the multitudinous heaped waters of the weltering ocean, and that is the quiet, silver moon in the heavens that pulls the tidal wave, into which melt and merge all currents and small breakers, and rolls it round the whole earth. And so Christ, shining down, lambent and gentle, but changeless, from the darkest of our skies, will draw, in one great surge of harmonized motion, all the otherwise contradictory currents of our stormy souls. “My peace I give unto you.”

The peace of a quiet conscience, as the great dramatist has told us, is far above all earthly dignities. For the honours of earth may be thick upon a man, and yet he may never know one hour’s happiness. But with the conscience at rest, and its light shining like a very candle of the Lord, the believer’s life is well balanced. He knows no fear of God save filial and holy fear, no fear of man, no fear of the future, and no fear of hell. Where it dwells, the peace of God shuts out all fear. 1 [Note: W. J. Armitage, The Fruit of the Spirit, 32.]

It is told of Dante that after many wanderings he reached a monastery and stood before the door. Thrice they asked him, “What wouldest thou?” and he broke the silence at last with the one word, “ Peace.” 2 [Note: F. E. Ridgeway, Calls to Service, 220.]

In the inn of Bethlehem there were many going to and fro, and much hurry and disquietude, while caravans were unlading or making up their complement of passengers, and the divan presented a spectacle of many costumes, and resounded with wrangling, and barter, and merriment. But in a stable hard by there was a tender joy too deep for words, and a stillness of adoration which seemed to shut out the outer world.… The soul of man is a noisy hostelry, full of turmoil and disquietude, and giving entertainment to every vain and passing thought which seeks admittance there. But when Christ comes, and takes up His abode in the heart, He reduces it to order and peace; and though it may move amid the excitements and confusions of life, yet hath it an inner stillness which they cannot disturb or destroy; for the King of Peace is there, and peace is the purchase of His cross, and the last legacy of His love, and His ancient promise to His people. 3 [Note: E. M. Goulburn.]

How shall I quiet my heart? How shall I keep it still?

How shall I hush its tremulous start at tidings of good or ill?

How shall I gather and hold contentment and peace and rest,

Wrapping their sweetness, fold on fold, over my troubled breast?

The Spirit of God is still, and gentle and mild and sweet,

What time His omnipotent, glorious will guideth the worlds at His feet;

Controlling all lesser things, this turbulent heart of mine,

He keepeth us under His folded wings in a peace serene—divine.

So shall I quiet my heart, so shall I keep it still,

So shall I hush its tremulous start at tidings of good or ill;

So shall I silence my soul with a peacefulness deep and broad,

So shall I gather Divine control in the infinite quiet of God.

4. Christ’s peace reconciles us to our brother man. Man will not be at peace with man because he is ready to drift with every stream. That is the false peace, the peace of the Vicar of Bray! Peace can never be gained by the surrender of sacred conviction. But a man has gone a long way towards the attainment of peace with his brother when he is willing to think of himself as only a part, and not the whole, of the human race. He has gone a long way towards union when he consistently thinks of himself as a soloist, and not a chorus. There will then be in his life a delicate considerateness, and he will be willing to fit in with other people with courtesy and grace.

Peace, then, was made. “I bury the hatchet,” said Callières, “in a deep hole, and over the hole I place a great rock, and over the rock I turn a river, that the hatchet may never be dug up again.” 1 [Note: F. Parkman, “Count Frontenac,” Works, viii. 465.]

III

The Potency of Peace

Christ bids His disciples realize the potency of their new possession. The citadel of their soul is now invulnerable. “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be fearful.”

1. This peace becomes the antidote to all dismay and despondency.—In the slow sad experience of life a Christian is in no wise exempt from losses and failures. It may be that he will realize that the argosy of his earthly hopes and plans has suffered shipwreck: yet the Lord is faithful who has promised, not “I will give thee success,” but “I will give thee rest.” Or he may find himself bereft and desolate and haunted with the dread of bleak, solitary years to come. Time, the subtle thief of youth, will rob him of most treasures at last, except that peace which the world can neither give nor take away. As we gaze down the shadowy avenue of our own future, who would not quail to think of those dark possibilities which it conceals, if he could not hear the Voice which says, “My peace I give unto you: let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid”?

One of the greatest proofs of the blessed and eternal character of Christianity is that it applies to, and satisfies, the very deepest want and craving of our nature. The deepest want of man is not a desire for happiness, but a craving for peace; not a wish for the gratification of every desire, but a craving for the repose of acquiescence in the will of God; and it is this that Christianity promises. 1 [Note: F. W. Robertson, Sermons, iii. 138.]

What rest is to the body, peace is to the mind. Peace internal, peace external, peace eternal, peace with men, peace with God, peace with oneself. “Seek God,” says Fénelon, “within yourself, and you will assuredly find Him, and with Him peace and joy. One word from Christ calmed the troubled sea. One glance from Him to us can do the same within us now.” 2 [Note: Lord Avebury, Peace and Happiness, 356.]

Peace is what all desire, but all do not care for the things that pertain unto true peace.

My peace is with the humble and gentle of heart; in much patience shall thy peace be.

If thou wilt hear me and follow my voice, thou shalt be able to enjoy much peace.

What then shall I do, Lord?

In every matter look to thyself, as to what thou sayest; and direct thy whole attention unto this, to please me alone, and neither to desire nor to seek any thing besides me.

But of the words or deeds of others, judge nothing rashly; neither do thou entangle thyself with things not entrusted unto thee. Thus it may come to pass that thou mayest be little or seldom disturbed.

But never to feel any disturbance at all, nor to suffer any trouble of mind or body, belongs not to this life, but to the state of eternal rest. 1 [Note: Thomas à Kempis, Of the Imitation of Christ, bk. iii. ch. xxv.]

2. It is a peace superior to outward circumstances.—The world has tried hard to put an end to the Christian’s peace, and it has never been able to accomplish that. The whole might of our enemies cannot take it away. Poverty cannot destroy it; the Christian in his rags can have peace with God. Sickness cannot mar it; lying on his bed, the saint is joyful in the midst of the fires. Persecution cannot ruin it, for persecution cannot separate the believer from Christ, and while he is one with Christ his soul is full of peace. “Put your hand here,” said the martyr to his executioner, when he was led to the stake, “put your hand here, and now put your hand on your own heart, and feel which beats the hardest, and which is the most troubled.” The executioner was struck with awe, when he found the Christian man as calm as though he were going to a wedding feast, while he himself was all agitation at having to perform so desperate a deed.

No harm can come to the least of the little ones who believe in Christ, and are faithful and true to Him. At the centre of the wild cyclone, which bears devastation and ruin in its awful sweep, there is a spot which is so quiet that a leaf is scarcely stirred, where a little child might sleep undisturbed. So in the heart of this world’s most terrific storms and convulsions there is a place of perfect security. It is the place of duty and trust. “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee.” 2 [Note: J. R. Miller, Glimpses through Life’s Windows, 132.]

When winds are raging o’er the upper ocean,

And billows wild contend with angry roar,

’Tis said, far down beneath the wild commotion,

That perfect stillness reigneth evermore.

Far, far beneath, the noise of tempest dieth,

And silver waves chime ever peacefully;

And no rude storm, how fierce soe’er it flieth,

Disturbs the Sabbath of that deeper sea.

So, in the heart that knows Thy love, O Saviour,

There is a temple, sacred evermore,

And all the tumult of life’s angry voices

Dies in hushed silence at its peaceful door.

Far, far away, the roar of passion dieth,

And loving thoughts rise calm and peacefully;

And no rude storm, how fierce soe’er it flieth,

Disturbs the soul that dwells, O Lord, in Thee.

O rest of rests! O peace serene, eternal!

Thou ever livest, and Thou changest never;

And in the secret of Thy presence dwelleth

Fulness of joy, for ever and for ever! 1 [Note: Harriet Beecher Stowe.]

3. It is a peace that keeps the heart pure and fresh.

A tourist writes of a spring as sweet as any that ever gushed from sunny hillside, which one day he found by the sea, when the tides had ebbed away. Taking the cup, he tasted the water, and it was sweet. Soon the sea came again, and poured its bitter surf over the little spring, hiding it out of sight.

Like a fair star, thick buried in a cloud,

Or life in the grave’s gloom,

The well, enwrapped in a deep watery shroud,

Sank to its tomb.

When the tide ebbed away, the tourist stood once more by the spring to see if the brackish waves had left their bitterness in its waters; but they were sweet as ever.

While waves of bitterness rolled o’er its head,

Its heart had folded deep

Within itself, and quiet fancies led,

As in a sleep;

Till, when the ocean loosed his heavy chain

And gave it back to-day,

Calmly it turned to its own life again,

And gentle way.

So does Christ’s peace refresh the poisoned heart and jaded spirit.

If sin be in the heart,

The fairest sky is foul, and sad the summer weather,

The eye no longer sees the lambs at play together,

The dull ear cannot hear the birds that sing so sweetly,

And all the joy of God’s good earth is gone completely,

If sin be in the heart.

If peace be in the heart,

The wildest winter storm is full of solemn beauty,

The midnight lightning flash but shows the path of duty,

Each living creature tells some new and joyous story,

The very trees and stones all catch a ray of glory,

If peace be in the heart. 1 [Note: Charles Francis Richardson.]

Christ’s Gift of Peace

Literature

Aitchison (J.), The Children’s Own, 37.

Armitage (W. J.), The Fruit of the Spirit, 29.

Benson (R. M.), The Final Passover, ii. (pt. i.) 418.

Bernard (T. D.), The Central Teaching of Jesus Christ, 184.

Darlow (T. H.), The Upward Calling, 49

Knight (G. H.), Divine Upliftings, 51.

Landels (W.), Until the Day Break, 93.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John ix.–xiv., 372.

Meyer (F. B.), Present Tenses, 9.

Nicoll (W. R.), Sunday Evening, 249.

Parker (J.), City Temple Pulpit, iii. 2.

Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 128.

Smith (G. S.), Victory over Sin and Death, 65.

Spurgeon (C. H.), New Park Street Pulpit, vi., No. 300.

Thom (J. H.), Laws of Life after the Mind of Christ, ii. 172.

Thomas (J.), Sermons: Myrtle Street Pulpit, iv. 221.

Tulloch (J.), Some Facts of Religion and of Life, 48.

Vaughan (J. S.), Earth to Heaven, 94.

Watson (J.), The Upper Room, 92.

British Congregationalist, Aug. 6, 1908, p. 122 (Jowett).

Christian World Pulpit, xlvii. 94 (Cameron Lees); lxxix. 76 (Macfarland).

Homiletic Review, i. 305 (Metcalf).