Bible Commentaries
John 17

Verse 3

Life in the Knowledge of God

And this is life eternal, that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.— John 17:3.

1. The prayer of Christ from which this text is taken is in some respects the most precious relic of the past. We have here the words which Christ addressed to God in the critical hour of His life—the words in which He uttered the deepest feeling and thought of His Spirit, clarified and concentrated by the prospect of death. Even among the prayers of Christ this stands by itself as that in which He gathered up the retrospect of His past and surveyed the future of His Church; in which, as if already dying, He solemnly presented to the Father Himself, His work, and His people. Recognizing the grandeur of the occasion, we may be disposed to agree with Melanchthon, who, when giving his last lecture, shortly before his death, said: “There is no voice which has ever been heard, either in heaven or in earth, more exalted, more holy, more fruitful, more sublime, than this prayer offered up by the Son of God Himself.” 1 [Note: Marcus Dods, The Gospel of St. John, 247.]

2. The essence of eternal life is here defined and represented as consisting in the knowledge of the only true God, and of Jesus Christ His messenger, knowledge being taken comprehensively as including faith, love, and worship, and the emphasis lying on the objects of such knowledge. The Christian religion is described in opposition to paganism on the one hand, with its many gods, and to Judaism on the other, which, believing in the one true God, rejected the claims of Jesus to be the Christ. It is further so described as to exclude by anticipation Arian and Socinian views of the Person of Christ. The names of God and of Jesus are put on a level as objects of religious regard, whereby an importance is assigned to the latter incompatible with the dogma that Jesus is a mere man.

3. It may seem strange that, in addressing His Father, Jesus should deem it needful to explain wherein eternal life consists; and some, to get rid of the difficulty, have supposed that the sentence is an explanatory reflection interwoven into the prayer by the Evangelist. Yet the words were perfectly appropriate in the mouth of Jesus Himself. The first clause is a confession by the man Jesus of His own faith in God His Father as the supreme object of knowledge; and the whole sentence is really an argument in support of the prayer, Glorify Thy Son. The force of the declaration lies in what it implies respecting the existing ignorance of men concerning the Father and His Son. It is as if Jesus said: Father, Thou knowest that eternal life consists in knowing Thee and Me. Look around, then, and see how few possess such knowledge. The heathen world knoweth Thee not—it worships idols; the Jewish world is equally ignorant of Thee in spirit and in truth; for while boasting of knowing Thee, it rejects Me. The whole world is overspread with a dark veil of ignorance and superstition. Take Me out of it, therefore, not because I am weary of its sin and darkness, but that I may become to it a sun. Hitherto My efforts to illuminate the darkness have met with small success. Grant Me a position from which I can send forth light over all the earth.

I

Life Eternal

1. What is the meaning of “eternal”? The answer of the ordinary man would be, “Something that lasts for ever.” With him eternity would simply mean endless time; it would mean duration, or permanence, or endless succession, or unalterability; it would mean adding so much time together that you could add no more. And so the sort of metaphors that people have used to express eternity have been the metaphors of the circle or the sand on the seashore. We have all been told that if we tried to count the sand on the seashore we should never reach the idea of eternity. Now, that sort of language is eminently misleading. “Time shall be no more.” That “phantom of succession of time” is wholly inapplicable to the life of God. With God there is no time—no past, no future; all is the everlasting now. It is only in consequence of our present limitations, only in consequence of that great condition of time under which we live, that we are unable to think of God as living out of time, and that we are compelled to think of Him as living only in endless time. The life eternal is the real life; it is the life that is life indeed.

The Greek word bios and the Greek word zoe both mean “life” and are translated by “life”; but they are words of entirely different significance in the Greek. The first word signifies chiefly animal life—the brief space of time, the brief space of life through which we have to pass; bare existence is the word used, for example, in such passages as “What is your life? It is even as a vapour.” But the other word zoe belongs to an entirely different and higher conception. In the New Testament, it is used almost, if not entirely, for the inherent principle of life which is involved in the very being of God Himself, so that the first word means conscious existence; the second word means the sort of life of which God is capable, and we have it in all such passages as “should not perish, but have eternal life.” “I am the resurrection and the life,” saith the Lord. “I am the bread of life.” 1 [Note: Archbishop W. Alexander.]

Even so is man: No matter how well he may know the law governing his animal personality, and the laws governing matter, these laws do not give him the least indications as to how he is to act with that piece of bread which he has in his hands—whether to give it to his wife, a stranger, his dog, or eat it himself; whether to defend this piece, or give it to him who asks for it. But the life of man consists only in the solution of these and similar questions. 2 [Note: Tolstoy, Works, xvi. 281.]

2. There would be little worth or significance in the mere endless prolongation of life, apart from the question of the kind of life that is to be lived for ever. The life that Christ promises us is of an order altogether higher than the life of ordinary experience. It is a life that lifts us up to a new region above the cares and meannesses of this world, that makes us indifferent to most of the ends and ideals for which the mass of men live, and at least independent of the pleasures to which they are so wedded. Eternal life, in fact, is spiritual life. When the spirit, the highest part of our nature, is called forth unto full activity and matured to its full stature, and when it subdues and regulates the whole man, then we have entered on this new plane of existence.

3. This spiritual life may be ours here and now. It is an error to connect the thought of eternal life exclusively with the future. If we are of God’s elect, we are now living this eternal life. At this very moment the eternal life of God is throbbing in our hearts. Every act of prayer and communion with God, every effort after righteousness and truth, every enterprise of love and mercy, is a manifestation of this life. The gift of eternal life is a present possession, not merely a future expectation. We have all been baptized into this life, we have all been made partakers of this life, we are all exhorted to show forth this life.

Too often is eternal life regarded as the reward of a life of active virtue, as the far-off hope which stimulates the fainting heart to “patient continuance in well-doing”; too often is it supposed that only when the battle is over and the victory won shall we pass beneath the dark gateway of death into the bright peace of the heavenly Kingdom. But, on the other hand, the herald of Christ came with the cry, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand,” a cry which Christ Himself confirmed by proclaiming to His hearers, “The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you.” Eternal life, then, is not set before the world as the prize of patient purity, the reward of long-continued well-doing, or the stimulus to incite men to a life of holiness. It is not a glory which only after death will crown the successful endeavours of the faithful; it is the purity, the well-doing, the holiness itself. It is the knowledge of God and Christ, with all the spiritual virtues which attend it—knowledge which, if the rational nature of man be no delusion, may be ours now; virtues which, if the life of Christ have any significance, if His blessed example and exhortations have any meaning for us, may adorn our present earthly life. 1 [Note: A. Semple, Scotch Sermons (1880), 333.]

II

Eternal Life as Knowledge of God in Christ

1. It is knowledge.—Knowledge is a word of more than one meaning, and that knowledge of God which is eternal life has very little in common with that knowledge of Him which is called theology. For there is a difference, and that a fundamental difference, between knowing a thing and knowing about it; there is a difference, and that a fundamental difference, between the knowledge which we gain from books and that which comes through feeling.

Those who “know God” most worthily are not the intellectually powerful, but the spiritually sensitive, and very often such are found among the “poor of this world.” To them is given the higher vision. The husband knows his wife, not by keen intellectual estimates of her character, but by the insight of a close and intimate fellowship. In this way the mother knows her child, and adjusts all her relations by the knowledge. The friend could not tell us why he loves his friend, or recount those elements of character which he admires. Heart knows heart, and love knits bonds. And the innermost secret is that we must feel God, and by the feeling gain our knowledge of Him. 1 [Note: R. T., Light for Life’s Even-tide, 79.]

The mere knowing of the understanding is never life, but only the instrument or tool of life. That which my understanding, my logical faculty, knows is, so far, outside of me. I may build my life on it. But of it I cannot build my life. I know that twelve times twelve are a hundred and forty-four, that London lies nearly two hundred miles from Liverpool, and that June is likely to bring warm days and December cold. And on each of those bits of knowledge I build up now and again fragments of my life. They are useful to me in my planning and contriving; but they are not life. But I know the remorse that is the fruit of sin, the pleading of the Holy Spirit in my conscience, the look of love in my friend’s eyes, the bliss of the summer sunshine, the chill pain of a great bereavement; and that knowing is itself of the very texture of my life. If you could take this strange abstract thing, my life, and divide it up into its several elements, you would find it all made up of knowings such as these. They are of its essence. For these knowings in me are not information given me by others, not inferences reached by syllogism, not even convictions grasped by closest reasoning, but immediate realizations, instant experiences. And so these are not the furniture of life, but life itself. And if the eternal life consists in knowing certain objects, then the knowing must be of this immediate kind, facts of the soul, realizations woven into the very structure of the self. 2 [Note: R. C. Armstrong, Memoir and Sermons, 253.]

Comrades, I said, who to the West

Have through a thousand dangers pressed,

Let not the little space

Remaining to our race

Run out before our senses find

Experience of the world behind

The courses of the Sun,

Where people there are none.

Consider what hath been your lot:

Not for brute life were ye begot:

But that ye might pursue

Virtue and knowledge too. 1 [Note: Dante, Inferno, xxvi. (trans. by Shadwell).]

2. It is knowledge of God.—The one thing needful for men, the great cry of our nature, in which all other cries are swallowed up, is for knowledge—the knowledge of God. To know the true God has been the deep desire of living souls through all time. Wearied by the changes of a fleeting world, finding no repose in the best that the finite can give, men of earnest minds long to know the Eternal that they may rest in Him. An old mystic has said: “God is an unutterable sigh of the human soul.” With greater truth we may reverse the saying, and affirm that the human soul is a never-ending sigh after God. In its deepest recesses there lives or slumbers inextinguishable longing after Him, and the more we consider the nature of that longing, the more we discover that what it aims at is not a mere intellectual apprehension of God, but a personal relationship to Him. It is essentially of a practical nature. It is an impulse to draw nigh to God, to place ourselves in personal fellowship with Him from the conviction that He hath made these hearts of ours for Himself, and they are altogether restless till they find their rest in Him. And thus the cry of the earnest has always been that of the disciple: “Shew us the Father and it sufficeth us.” The dream that has haunted the earnest of the world has ever been this—to live the blessed life man must know the true God, and Christ proclaims that dream to be a fact.

What does knowing God mean? It does not mean knowing Him by name, knowing about Him, knowing Him as a stranger and foreigner, whose speech and ways we have not been accustomed to; it means knowing Him in the sense in which we know a father, or mother, or friend, whom we love and value above every one else; whose ways and thoughts we are thoroughly acquainted with; and who, we feel, knows us thoroughly, feels with us, cares for us, and longs for our being happy. 1 [Note: R. W. Church, Village Sermons, 143.]

3. It is knowledge of God in Christ.—The great want of humanity is the knowledge of God. This want is met by Jesus Christ whom God has sent. Christ has power over all that He might give eternal life. It is He that gives eternal life: it is He that gives the knowledge of the only true God which is eternal life. There is nothing that tends to life in the knowledge you have apart from Him. For the knowledge of the true God and for eternal life we are utterly and entirely dependent on Jesus Christ. Christ came to give us this knowledge, and how did He give it? Not simply by telling us certain truths or teaching certain doctrines about God, but by living among us, as God-man in the flesh breathing our cerulean air, and speaking our human speech, loving us with a human heart, and healing and helping us with human hands, and then telling us that he who had seen Him had seen the Father. This is eternal life, that we should see the glory of God—the love of God—in the face of Jesus Christ.

The latest taken away of those who made the happiness of my Oxford life was Robert Gandell, who ended his days at Wells, of which cathedral he was Canon:—but who was chiefly known at Oxford (where he had passed all his time), first, as Michel Fellow of Queen’s; then, as Tutor of Magdalen Hall and Fellow of Hertford College; but especially as Hebrew Lecturer, and Professor of Syriac and Arabic. I have never known a man who with severe recondite learning combined in a more exquisite degree that peculiar Theological instinct without which an English Hebraist is no better than,—in fact is scarcely as good as,—a learned Jew. 2 [Note: J. W. Burgon, Lives of Twelve Good Men, i. p. xxii.]

“Jesus Christ whom thou didst send.” He is the key to the difficulty which we all must feel more or less when we speak of knowing God. For us men in this human life the knowledge of the Father is the knowledge of the Son, the knowledge of God is the knowledge of Jesus Christ. We have before us in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ the satisfaction of this need of a divinity which is, if not nearer, at least more apparent, to our human life, and more possible for mortal men to approach. We have before us in the Gospels the picture of God clothed with humanity—treading the streets of an earthly city, living that very life of struggle which seems at first sight to be at the very opposite pole of existence from God. Again and again, through the prison bars of that humanity, there flashed forth the light of the divinity that was in Him; but His life was a human life—a life like yours and mine; a life which felt pain and disappointment and temptation, and a life consequently which, though at far distance, it is possible for us to know and to imitate. 1 [Note: E. Hatch, Memoirs, 187.]

4. What is it to know Christ? Is it to trust Him? Not simply that, if we trust only in something He did long ago. Is it to love Him? Not simply that, if we love Him only as He stands far back in the past, for the redemption He achieved then. What is it to know Him? It is to have Him pressing Himself, with all the power that ever was in Him still in Him, upon our hearts to-day. It is to be conscious that He is for ever taking my life afresh and impressing Himself upon it afresh. It is to hear Him calling to me, not down the centuries from long ago, but from here—close at my side, with a voice that is newly lifted to-day, an invitation that is newly given to-day. It is not to be inspired by what He was, but to feel His power now coming straight from the living heart of Him to me. It is to experience, not the reflex influence of what He did far back in the history of mankind, but the direct influence of what He does. It is to discern, amid the figures which crowd the canvas of our life, that One Figure moving ceaselessly to and fro. The Real Presence, if you like. To know Christ in this sense—that every moment He comes with a new ministry to snatch me out of my littleness into His greatness—that is eternal life. To know Christ in this sense—that He gives the secret of life newly to me ever and ever again—that is eternal life. To know Christ in this sense—that He repeats to-day every blessing He bestowed in other days, changing the form of it to meet the changing need, answering to every hour’s requirement with grace newly-born out of His great and loving heart—to know Him so is to take life from Him now, is eternal life. 2 [Note: H. W. Clark, Meanings and Methods of the Spiritual Life, 21.]

Knowing Christ makes us live as God lives, so far as that can be for us. Knowing Christ makes us live as God lives—that is the miracle—sets us into worlds where limitations and sorrows and dyings cease to have any meaning. Know Christ, and the wearinesses and weaknesses by which an unceasing cry is wrung out from the world cannot touch your true life to harm it any more than they can touch God’s; for Christ gives you eternal life. Know Christ, and you cannot die any more than God can die; for Christ gives you eternal life. There is nothing partial about the blessing Christ bestows. Eternal life is a thing others dare not speak of; but He gives that because He Himself possesses it, and, in giving that, gives all. One may look on this trial of humanity and another may look on that; one voice may speak a word to make this struggle lighter, and another may possess some secret to strengthen the soul in that conflict—Christ, when we know Him, does not patch and mend life so, but just lifts us away out of all these things into the eternal worlds, so that trial and struggle and conflict are to us no more than they are to Himself, to God. One has the secret that will make life worthier, he thinks; and another speaks the word to make life happier, he thinks: Christ bids us just know Him, and all is done. 1 [Note: H. W. Clark, Meanings and Methods of the Spiritual Life, 24.]

(1) Knowledge of Christ implies obedience.—“To know Jesus”—what does it mean? Here is a guiding word from the Apostle John: “He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar.” Then how many of us know Him? “He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not.…” Then knowledge implies obedience. There can be no knowledge of Christ without obedience. Without obedience we may have a few ideas about Him, but we do not know Him. If we are destitute of obedience, then that which we assume to be knowledge is no knowledge at all, and we must give it another name. Obedience is essential. What is obedience? Confining our inquiry strictly to the human plane, what is essentially implied in obedience? When one man obeys another it is implied that he subjects his will to the will of the other, and works in harmony with its demands. The oarsmen in our university boats have to subject their wills to the will of the strokesman, whose stroke determines and controls the rest. The oarsmen have but one will. That is obedience, a will attuned to the will of another, and without that attuning of the will no knowledge of Christ can ever be gained.

And once when he was walking with Francis and came to a cross-way where one could go to Florence, to Siena or to Arezzo, and Brother Masseo asked, “Father, which way shall we take?” Francis answered him, “The way God wishes.” But Brother Masseo asked further, “How shall we know God’s will?” And Francis answered: “That I will now show you. In the name of holy obedience I order you to start turning round and round in the road here, as the children do, and not to stop until I tell you to.” Then Brother Masseo began to whirl round and round as children do, and he became so giddy that he often fell down; but as Francis said nothing to him, he got up again and continued. At last as he was turning round with great vigour, Francis said, “Stop and do not move!” And he stood still, and Francis asked him, “How is your face turned?” Brother Masseo answered, “Towards Siena!” Then said Francis, “It is God’s will that we shall go to Siena to-day.” 1 [Note: J. Jörgensen, St. Francis of Assisi, 110.]

(2) Knowledge of Christ means love.—“He that loveth not knoweth not God.” Then how many of us know Him? No love: no knowledge! May we not slightly alter the former word of the Apostle, and read it thus—“He that saith, I know Him, and loveth not, is a liar.” It would be just as reasonable for a man without eyes to claim that he sees the stars as for a man without love to claim that he knows the Lord. Without love we cannot know Christ. What is love? It is indefinable, as indefinable as fragrance or light. Our descriptive words are at the best only vague and remote. Though we cannot define a sentiment, we can sometimes suggest it by its effects, and this will suffice for our immediate purpose. Love is “good will toward men.” Observe, good will toward men, not merely good wish; willing good, not only wishing it! To wish a thing and to will it, may be two quite different things. Wishing may be only a sweet and transient sentiment; willing implies effort, active and persistent work. Wishing dreams; willing creates. Love is good will, the willing of good toward all men, the effort to think the best of all men, and to help them on to the best. That is love.

The path of the intellect is not the path that brings the soul into that Sacred Presence which it seeks. He is reached by another means altogether. What is it? Let the soul take to itself the “wings of love,” and the distance between it and Him will be covered in a moment. The mountain will become a plain, and He who seemed to be afar off will be found to be nigh at hand. Or, to use the figure which Browning employs, love is the single “leap” that gains Him, which leap the mere intellectual faculty is powerless to take. 1 [Note: J. Flew, Studies in Browning, 145.]

(3) Knowledge of Christ is likeness.—Knowledge necessitates likeness. Have we not abundant proof of its truth? Two unlikes cannot know each other. Two men who are morally unlike each other may live together, and neither can possibly know the contents of the other’s life. How would you describe pain to a man who has never experienced it? He cannot know it. He cannot even imagine it. Pain is known only by the pain-ridden. Knowledge implies likeness. The principle has a wide application. To know we must be. To know music, we must be musical. To know art, we must be artistic. To know Christ, we must be Christlike. “This is life, … to know Jesus.” To know Jesus is to share His life! His life is eternal. Life eternal is just Christ-life. This is life eternal, to have life like Christ, to know Him in spirit and in truth.

All grows, says Doubt, all falls, decays and dies;

There is no second life for flower or tree:

O suffering soul, be humble and be wise,

Nor dream new worlds have any need of thee!

And yet, cries Hope, the world is deep and wide;

And the full circle of our life expands,

Broadening and brightening, on an endless tide

That ebbs and flows between these mystic lands.

Not endless life, but endless love I crave,

The gladness and the calm of holier springs,

The hope that makes men resolute and brave,

The joyful life in the great life of things.

The soul that loves and works will need no praise;

But, fed with sunlight and with morning breath,

Will make our common days eternal days,

And fearless greet the mild and gracious death. 2 [Note: W. M. W. Call.]

Life in the Knowledge of God

Literature

Allen (T.), Children of the Resurrection, 72.

Armstrong (R. A.), Memoir and Sermons, 248.

Barry (A.), Sermons preached at Westminster Abbey, 3, 71.

Church (R. W.), Village Sermons, i. 140.

Clark (H. W.), Meanings and Methods of the Spiritual Life, 14.

Crump (W. W.), A Buried Sphinx, 1.

Eyton (R.), The Apostles’ Creed, 195.

How (W. W.), The Knowledge of God, 3.

Jowett (J. H.), Thirsting for the Springs, 114.

Kingsley (C.), Sermons for the Times, 14.

Lambert (B.), Memoir, Sermons, and Lectures, 129.

Lonsdale (J.), Sermons, 162.

Lyttelton (A. T.), College and University Sermons, 1.

M c Leod (M. J.), The Unsearchable Riches, 93.

Pearce (J.), The Alabaster Box, 70.

Sandford (C. W.), Counsel to English Churchmen Abroad, 194.

Sinclair (W. M.), Christ and our Times, 91.

Swann (N. E. E.), New Lights on the Old Faith, 159.

Walpole (G. H. S.), Vital Religion, 1.

Christian World Pulpit, xxxiii. 21 (Brooks); xxxviii. 291 (Leitch); lxviii. 259 (Horne); lxxiii. 153 (Horne); lxxx. 81 (Alexander).

Churchman’s Pulpit: Easter Day and Season, xi. 314.

Scotch Sermons (1880), 324 (Semple), 365 (Stevenson).

Treasury (New York), xiv. 759 (Scudder).

Verse 19

The Master’s Consecration

And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they themselves also may be sanctified in truth.— John 17:19.

The richest, fullest life our earth has ever known was the life of Jesus Christ. No one ever had within himself such complete satisfactions, such assured convictions, and such settled peace as He. Rich and full as His life was to Himself, it was the richest, fullest life to others that has ever blessed humanity. Wherever He went He was the source of helpfulness. Even the hem of His garment had power in it, and from His lips, His hands, His heart went out an unceasing, abounding inspiration to the souls of men. Jesus Christ was a great fountain whose waters of comfort welled up like a flood within His own heart, and then flowed forth full-volumed to cheer the world. His life had more in it and gave more from it than any other life since time began. What was the secret of it? He sanctified Himself.

When Augustine Thierry, after withdrawing himself from the world, and devoting himself to study, that he might investigate the origin, causes and effects of the successive German invasions, spent six years in poring with the pertinacity of a Benedictine monk over worm-eaten manuscripts, and deciphering and comparing black-letter texts, at last completed his magnificent History of the Conquest, he found he had lost his eyesight. The most precious of his senses had been sacrificed to his zeal in literary research. The beauties of nature and the records of scholarship were thenceforth shut out from him; and yet did he think the sacrifice too great? In a letter, written to a friend long afterward, he said: “Were I to begin my life over again, I would choose the road that had led me to where I now am. Blind and afflicted, without hope and without leisure, I can safely offer this testimony, the sincerity of which, coming from a man in my condition, cannot be called in question. There is something in the world worth more than pleasure, more than fortune, more than health itself. I mean devotion, self-dedication to a great end.” There is a higher end than scientific research, and to that end Jesus Christ dedicated Himself.

In the instructive and profound book on The Religion of the Semites, Dr. Robertson Smith quotes, as containing the deepest conception of the Atonement, these words of our Lord, uttered as He knelt in prayer by the altar of the supreme sacrifice: “For their sakes I consecrate myself, that they themselves also may be consecrated in truth.” Besson writes in his spiritual letters, “It is in His passion that the Saviour shows Himself, like the sun at midday, in all the ardour of His love.” And in the shadow of the cross, He who had schooled Himself daily to the repression of feeling spoke the secret of His life and death. He interpreted His whole work as a consecration in the power of love. On the Cross He consecrated Himself as the atoning sacrifice—the absolute oblation for the sins of the whole world. Here is the first aspect of the Cross; its witness to the deep necessity of expiation, to the completeness of Christ’s offering for sin. But this doctrine may be stated with a narrow correctness which leaves a world of unknown feeling behind. Before the death of Christ came His life, and that was a long self-sacrifice. It was willingly surrendered hour by hour till all the years were full. Then it was completed—consummated in death. 1 [Note: W. Robertson Nicoll, Ten-Minute Sermons, 235.]

I

The Act of Consecration

The word “sanctify” is used in the Bible with two distinct significations. The original meaning of the word is to consecrate, to dedicate, to set apart to God and to God’s service; and this is its ordinary meaning in the Old Testament. We commonly intend by it, to make holy: sanctity and holiness are the same; sanctification is the growing completeness of the Christian character, the hallowing of the personal life: in this sense the word is often used in the New Testament. Sanctification, in brief, may describe either the purpose or the process of the Christian life.

It is not hard to trace the connexion between these two meanings of the word; to see how the first meaning passes naturally and necessarily into the other. Perfect consecration would be complete and absolute holiness. No purity would be wanting to the motive, no elevation to the character, of one who should be devoted to the Lord his God, with “all his heart, and all his soul, and all his mind, and all his strength.” We must lay aside any thought of a native holiness, in man or angel, apart from conformity to God’s character and obedience to His will. God alone is holy, in and of Himself; the source of our sanctity, like the spring of our life, is in God. The charm and energy of the personal holiness even of Christ lay in His constant devotion to His Father’s will.

This is at once our Lord’s life-purpose, and an ideal for us. “I sanctify myself.” I am set apart, consecrated, devoted to Thee and to mankind. Consecrated in thought, word and deed: devoted in motive and in action. I am near Thee in my daily life, in my going out and coming in, in my trials as in my triumphs, in my death as in my life. I am like Thee, revealing Thy character; having Thy image stamped on me.

1. He concealed His greatness and glory.—The natural dignities of the Son of God had to be hidden from us. John, the beloved disciple, he who knew the Lord more intimately than any other, he who saw most clearly into the depths of that soul, who leaned upon the bosom of the Lord, tells us that he beheld the glory of the Son of God, His face like unto the sun in its strength, His eyes like unto flames of fire;—and John fell at His feet as dead. Thus was it on the Mount of Transfiguration, when for a moment the innate glory of the Son of God shone through the veil that hid it, and His robes were white and glistering, and again His face was like the sun, and again His eyes were like unto flames of fire, and the disciples, blinded and bewildered by such splendour, hid themselves, afraid, and shrank from that excess of light. Think of Him, then, for our sakes setting apart His glory that He might become our Blessed Brother and Friend, and that all might draw near to Him and be at home with Him; sitting down with lowly fishermen, welcoming the outcast, gathering to Himself the little children, drawing around Him all the sad and needy of the earth.

Out of this comes the other great temptation that assails Him. “If Thou art the Son of God, if Thou art not bound by these laws of humanity, if Thou canst dismay and bewilder Thine enemies by the manifestations of Thy glory, put forth Thy power, assert Thine authority.” Think of Him as He stands with outstretched hand rebuking Peter there in the shadow of Gethsemane, in that night, the full moon of the Passover high in the heavens, about Him the rough crowd gathered with swords and staves! Judas has betrayed his Lord with a kiss, and the soldiers step forward to lay their hands upon the Saviour, when Peter draws his sword to fight for the Lord. “Thinkest thou,” said Jesus, “that I cannot now pray to my Father and he will presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?” But He sanctified Himself, setting Himself apart for our sakes.

Think, again, how it met Him on the Cross. From out the crowd that gathered about the city walls, there rings the fierce derision, “If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross.” Others have suffered perhaps as cruel a martyrdom, others have hung in anguish, mocked and derided; but of all that ever went forth to die, He alone could say, “I lay down my life. No man taketh it from me.” This is the glory and triumph of Christ that, conscious of a power which could have achieved so sublime and instant a triumph over all His foes,—His cross transformed into a throne, about Him all His holy angels, and He seated amidst the terrors of judgment summoning these His murderers to His feet,—for our sakes He Bet Himself apart and hung upon His cross and sunk until there came the final cry, “It is finished.”

Is humiliation easy? Was it easy for Christ to humble Himself? Is it easy for us? “There are certain animals,” says George Eliot, “to which tenacity of position is a law of life—they can never flourish again, after a single wrench: and there are certain human beings to whom predominance is a law of life—they can only sustain humiliation so long as they can refuse to believe in it, and, in their own conception, predominate still.” 1 [Note: George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss.]

Manin, the last doge of Venice, was compelled to swear allegiance to Austria in the name of his compatriots. With a broken heart he made ready for the ceremony, but as he stepped forward at the appointed time to pronounce the fatal words, his strength and his faculties gave way together. He fell senseless at the feet of his foes, and died not long afterward. 2 [Note: W. M. Sloane, Napoleon Bonaparte, ii. 24.]

2. He made an absolute surrender of Himself.—There are times when Egoism can reach its best development only by what would be called a complete surrender of itself to the help of others. There is a tradition that one who desired to produce a fine kind of pottery always failed until he threw himself into the fire that was baking his work, and lo, the effort was now a success, the pottery came forth as he had desired. Egoism submerged in Altruism became perfected Egoism and perfected Altruism at once. So Christ reached an hour in His life when He could not be the most that He ought to be unless He actually laid down His life for others. He would have been a renegade to His own high ideas of nobility of character if He had not been willing to die for mankind. Egoism for its own development needed a prodigal Altruism. The fulness of His own life demanded an outpouring of that life.

I heard sometime since of an oculist who was very fond of cricket. But he had given it up, much as he enjoyed it, for he found that it affected the delicacy of his touch; and for the sake of those whom he sought to relieve he sanctified himself and set himself apart. That is what we want—that there shall come into our lives a force that prompts us always to be at our best and readiest for service, our fullest and richest to help, a tree that is always in leaf and always in bloom and always laden with its fruit, like the orange tree, where the beauty of the blossom meets with its fragrance the mellow glory of the fruit. 1 [Note: Mark Guy Pearse.]

There are two great pictures, each of them by a famous artist. One picture represents a woman in a hospital. The woman is a princess, fair and beautiful to look upon, but the hospital is most loathsome, because it is the home of a number of dying lepers, and this fair and beautiful woman is represented as wiping the face of a dying leper. That picture is a symbol of the dignity and the beauty of social service. But there hangs by its side another picture by another great artist. It represents a woman in her oratory. She is in the attitude of prayer. Beside her stands an angel. She is looking over the open pages of the Holy Bible, which are illuminated. And the legend tells us that while she knelt there in that place of prayer, seven times she was interrupted. Seven times there came a call at her door, a demand upon her love, upon her charity—a sevenfold recognition of the needs of her brother man. And seven times, with a patience and with a moral beauty beyond all description, she goes to the door, relieves these cases of necessity, and returns to her knees, to her attitude of prayer. This is a picture of the supreme dignity and the great worth of personal sanctification. 1 [Note: O. W. Whittaker.]

II

The Aim of Consecration

“I sanctify myself,”—that is the starting-point of redemption. “For their sakes,”—that is the end, the common good, the social welfare. The beginning is individual, the aim is social. The way to make a good world is, first of all, to be good oneself. First character, then charity; first life, then love;—that was the way of Jesus Christ. He does not stand in history as the great organizer or reformer of the social world. He stands primarily as the witness of the capacity for social service offered to each human soul. The Kingdom of God, which is the end of endeavour, is to come through the personal sanctification of individuals for the sake of others. The Christian paradox is the paradox of the solar system. An isolated soul, like an isolated planet, means instability and chaos. The stability of each part is found in its steady orbit round the larger centre, and the integrity of the whole vast order hangs on the adjustment of each single part. That is what is known in the world of nature as the law of attraction, and what Jesus calls in the spiritual world the Kingdom of God.

The mother consecrates herself for her infant. She devotes herself in self-forgetting love. The motive is strong, the strongest we know—mother-love. This emotion throbbing in the mother-heart finds expression in a thousand acts of loving care; but the child grows up and needs a mother’s care less; still the care subsists. Some mythical relation arising out of motherhood seems to grow up in the mother’s heart which delights in self-giving. The average mother has it, without any special gifts of intellect. The exceptional mother controls this natural emotion by foresight and educated taste. It is only the unnatural mother that has it not. And yet, though it is common, it is never learned from the outside. It springs up instinctively in answer to the infant’s need. It is spontaneous and almost unthinking, and yet it is the most beautiful love in life, for it gives all and asks nothing. What a lyric life becomes to the mother in her joy! Her thoughts run to poetry and her horizon is filled with her helpless child. It is all the world to her. Something of this mother-love there must be in all consecration. We must love some one, some community, some race, in self-abandoning, self-effacing love before we can consecrate ourselves for their sakes. This is one standard of our capacity for such an enterprise. Can we love others better than ourselves so as to serve them? Otherwise the service will at the moment of pressure seem to us less important and less demanding than our own comfort and we shall throw it up in petulance or despair. 1 [Note: Alexander Tomory, 66.]

Dante, writing his poetry, never forgot Beatrice. He perfected that poetry in thought, in word, in spirit, in movement, hoping that it would receive public recognition and bring him honour. But he perfected it and sought recognition and honour because burning in his soul was love for his idealized Beatrice, at whose shrine and to whose praise he intended to offer all the recognition and honour that he might possibly win. Beatrice was a vision beckoning him on to industry and skill. In a far holier, higher way Christ had His beckoning vision. It was the whole world that beckoned Him to endeavour and development. Perhaps from that hill behind Nazareth He watched the ships of all nations going up and down the Mediterranean, and the world with all its kingdoms stood out before His thought. Certain it is that when the hour of temptation came to Him, and all the kingdoms of the world were made to pass before Him, He recognized them, and they appealed to Him because He had thought of them so often, so lovingly, so devotedly. Yes, the supreme vision of Christ was “others.” Never at any period of His life was He without it. He unrolled the scroll of the Scriptures, and what He read was that He should open the door to the imprisoned, should bind up the broken-hearted, and should give deliverance to the enslaved. He used saw and hammer in the shop, making box, wheel, or door, and His eyes, His thought, His being, could not stop with them; His vision was peering far out into all the earth, and He was seeing thousands upon thousands of hearts appealing to Him for help. 2 [Note: James G. K. McClure, Loyalty, 214.]

1. For us, as for Christ, sanctification is separation for use.—It is in this sense that our Lord immediately goes on to say, “For their sakes I sanctify myself, that they themselves also may be sanctified in truth.” To sanctify is to set apart. “The Lord hath set apart him that is godly for himself” ( Psalms 4:3). In this sense the vessels of the Temple and of the Tabernacle were sanctified when they were set apart for a holy use. In this thought of separation the idea of the intrinsic character of the person or thing sanctified does not come into view in the first instance. Our Lord Himself, being perfectly holy, needed no moral renovation, but He did need to be set apart, to be devoted to the performance of the Father’s will. “For their sakes I sanctify myself,” that is, I set myself apart to do always the things that please Him. He came upon earth as a servant. “I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me” ( John 6:38). He came as separated unto God, not in any spirit of Pharisaism, but in the spirit of whole-hearted devotion. He came to do but one thing—“My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work” ( John 4:34), and this high aim is certainly, by virtue of his calling, also set before every Christian.

In the wonderful system of the telephone the whole complex communication depends at each point on the little film of metal which we call a transmitter. Take that little disk out of the mechanism, and it becomes insignificant and purposeless: but set the transmitter where it belongs, in the wonderful mechanism of the greater system, and each word that is spoken into it is repeated miles and miles away. So stands the individual in the vast system of the providence of God. He is a transmitter. Taken by himself, what can be more insignificant than he? Yet, at each point the whole system depends on the transmissive power of the individual life. It takes its place in the great order, saying to itself, “For their sakes I sanctify myself”; and then, by the miracle of the Divine method, each vibration of the insignificant but sanctified life reaches the needs which are waiting for its message far away. 1 [Note: F. G. Peabody, Sunday Evenings in the College Chapel, 250.]

2. The next element is purification.—It follows almost without saying that if you set apart a person or a thing to the service of an absolutely holy God, anything that defiles that person or thing renders it unfit for God’s use, and hence, though the first meaning of the word is separation, it speedily “acquires,” as Archbishop Trench in his work on the New Testament synonyms points out, “a moral significance”; thus the thought of purification is added to the fundamental idea of separation. If I want to separate a cup to God’s service, and that cup is polluted, I must not only set it apart for God’s use, I must separate it from the pollution that is in it. Thus separation involves the idea of the removal of a defilement which is inconsistent with holy use. If I am to he separated to God, and sanctified for God’s service, it is not enough that I should be set apart without any reference to my intrinsic character. The character itself must be purified from the defilement which makes it unfit to be used in a holy service. “If a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified, and meet for the master’s use, and prepared unto every good work” ( 2 Timothy 2:21). Thus we see that the deeper thought of the moral and spiritual renovation follows close upon the first great meaning of separation, and in fact springs out of it.

Henry Drummond never said a truer thing than when he declared that what God wanted was not more of us, but a better brand. We need the perfecting of holiness for the perfecting alike of our usefulness and of our happiness. According to the Divine ordination, holiness and happiness are evermore inseparable. This is the secret of the bliss of heaven. And in proportion as holiness is cherished in the heart and practised in the life, will the new Jerusalem come down from God out of heaven.

The men of grace have found

Glory begun below,

Celestial fruits on earthly ground

From faith and hope may grow. 1 [Note: P. S. Honson, The Four Faces, 226.]

3. Transformation.—The purification is followed by a gradual transformation into the image of Christ. “Sanctify them in the truth.” “The truth” is not only the element in which we are to live, but the element into which we are to be transformed. The purposed end of the truth is not that we may find wisdom, but that we may gain holiness. That is to be the Christian distinctiveness; we are to be clothed in the garb of truth, and the world is to recognize, by our moral garments, that we are the kinsmen of the Lord. And in order that we may attain to this spiritual beauty, it is needful that we take our individual powers and deliberately separate them and dedicate them unto the truth. We must have a consecration service, and devote our reason to the truth. And we must have a consecration service, and devote our affections and our will. And the powers of the second rank must not be allowed to remain in assumed inferiority or defilement. Our imaginations must be devoted to the truth, and so must our language, and so must our humour. Every faculty and function in our life must be set apart to the clean, beautiful, beautifying truth, as revealed to us in our Saviour by His promised Spirit.

A Connecticut farmer came to a well-known clergyman, saying that the people in his neighbourhood had built a new meeting-house, and that they wanted this clergyman to come and dedicate it. The clergyman, accustomed to participate in dedicatory services where different clergymen took different parts of the service, inquired:

“What part do you want me to take in the dedication?”

The farmer, thinking that this question applied to the part of the building to be included in the dedication, replied:

“ Why, the whole thing! Take it all in, from underpinning to steeple.”

That man wanted the building to be wholly sanctified as a temple of God, and that all at once. “Know ye not that ye are a temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” 1 [Note: H. Clay Trumbull, Our Misunderstood Bible, 115.]

(1) We reach our best by devoting ourselves to the interests of others.—I am my best, not simply for myself, but for the world. Is there anything in all the teachings that man has had from his fellow-man, all that has come down to him from the lips of God, that is nobler, that is more far-reaching than this, that I am to be my best not simply for my own sake, but for the sake of that world which, by being my best, I shall make more complete, I shall, according to my ability, renew and recreate in the image of God? That is the law of my existence. And the man that makes that the law of his existence neglects neither himself nor his fellow-men; he neither becomes the self-absorbed student and cultivator of his own life upon the one hand, nor does he become, abandoning himself, simply the wasting benefactor of his brethren upon the other. I watch the workman build upon the building which by and by is to soar into the skies, to toss its pinnacles up to the heaven, and I see him looking up and wondering where those pinnacles are to be, thinking how high they are to be, measuring the feet, wondering how they are to be built, and all the time he is cramming a rotten stone into the building just where he has set to work. Let him forget the pinnacles, if he will, or hold only the floating image of them in his imagination for his inspiration; but the thing that he must do is to put a brave, strong soul, an honest and substantial life into the building just where he is now at work.

David Livingstone longed for knowledge and for purity of soul. He sought to be an astronomer, and a chemist, and a botanist, and a geographer. He surveyed lands and built houses and steered boats. He laboured to know languages and obtain power among barbarians. How glad he was of recognition in England, and how he valued everything that men called success! But why did he value them? That he might heal that open sore of the world, Africa; that he might be able to call attention to Africa, and bring beneficent aid to Africa, and sanctify Africa. The more he sanctified himself, yes, the larger man he became in his possession of truth, power, and purity, the more Africa lay upon his heart and the deeper in his soul rang the needs of the dark continent. When, with the early daylight, his servants coming into his room found him dead upon his knees beside his bed, they saw the perfected sanctification of Livingstone expressed in his actually dying for others. 1 [Note: James G. K. McClure, Loyalty, 223.]

(2) We remain at our worst by dedicating ourselves to self.—A man may dedicate himself to a hundred things, but there is one thing to which he must not dedicate or re-dedicate self. He must be sure that he is not dedicating self to self. If he dedicates self to self he will not so soon awake, as we are sometimes told a man will, to bitter disappointment. For the more remarkable the powers are which he once dedicates to self, the more remarkable will he make the self to which they are dedicated, the more apparently worthy of the dedication will he become both to himself and to others. We do not see self-admiration diminish with years, with disappointments, or with knowledge of the world. It may, indeed, continue along with such high gifts and noble qualities that it seems the one fault in the man. But it is fatal.

It was to Croesus that Solon said, in the midst of all Croesus’s wealth and power and wisdom (and powerful and wise Croesus was as well as wealthy), “Count no man happy before he dies.” And it was the same Croesus who on his own funeral pyre, having lost children and kingdom and home, called out the single word “Solon! Solon!” and thus declared that Solon was right, and that happiness could not be secured by things selfish. Christ Himself could not have been happy even in being spotless, except as He used His spotlessness for the benefit of others.

(3) The spring of all our activities must be devotion to Christ.—“For their sakes,” said Jesus. “For His sake,” say we. That is our inspiration. The life of complete surrender is in Him and in Him alone. To know Him, to commune with Him, to rest in His love, to have and hold it as our own—that is the secret of the surrendered life.

Just to give up, and trust

All to a Fate unknown,

Plodding along life’s road in the dust,

Bounded by walls of stone;

Never to have a heart at peace;

Never to see when care will cease;

Just to be still when sorrows fall—

This is the bitterest lesson of all.

Just to give up, and rest

All on a Love secure,

Out of a world that’s hard at the best,

Looking to heaven as sure;

Ever to hope, through cloud and fear,

In darkest night, that the dawn is near;

Just to wait at the Master’s feet—

Surely, now, the bitter is sweet. 1 [Note: Henry van Dyke.]

III

The Instrument of Consecration

1. The Truth is the great sanctifier. There is no ray of truth that ever came from the Father of lights that does not hallow the heart on which it falls. It is not make-believes that will give you sanctity. There is a falsetto character about all piety resting upon make-believes. But Truth—every ray of it, is blessing. See God, the infinite Father, the Alpha and Omega of whose being is Love, love so infinite and inconceivable that it embraces every individual soul of man, with a desire to save and bless it; see Him in the graciousness of His providence, in the majesty of His rule, and every attribute you behold engages your love, quickens your trust, brings you near, makes you wish to serve Him, makes you His and like Him. The truth in God sanctifies. The truth in Christ, in His work, love, patience, humanity, Godhead, intercession, the everlasting purpose of His heart, is all of it quickening. The truth in man is a sanctifying thing. Fear no truth. All nervousness that dreads inquiry, all apprehensiveness of the result of modern investigations, is unbelief and mistake. Nothing that is true will displace a quickening influence for good without giving a more quickening influence still. “Sanctify them through thy truth.” Every error of life springs from an error of thought. A lie is the root of all evil—some misconception or misunderstanding. Truth of providence, truth of the rewards of goodness, truth of grace, truth of immortality, truth of God and man—every ray of it is quickening.

In the truth, and not simply through the truth. The Truth is, as it were, the atmosphere, the element, in which believers are immersed and by which they are sustained: and we must think of the Truth in the widest sense in which we can conceive of it. Such Truth, which Christ is, and which Christ reveals, is everywhere about us: it corresponds with the whole range of present experience: it is realized in a personal communion with its Source. Its function is not simply to support but to transfigure. Its issue is not knowledge but holiness. 1 [Note: B. F. Westcott, The Incarnation and Common Life, 176.]

2. “Thy word is truth.”—This leads us directly to the Bible and the Bible tends to make men saints, because it describes the lives and experiences of many who have lived near to God, and who have cared intensely for men. And we take fire by the things we read; as it has been said, “If you read Shakespeare, after a while you think Shakespeare and you talk Shakespeare.”

“Thy word is truth.” Thy word, written and unwritten, Thy word in the Bible, in nature, in history, in experience. We dare not limit either the time or the manner of His utterance. Forms of thought, the organization of the State, the relations of the sciences vary, and He meets our changing position with appropriate teaching. His message comes to each age and to each people as it came at Pentecost, in their own language. It comes to us through the struggles of the nations and the movements of society, through every fact that marks one least step in the method of creation or in the history of man. It is this message, given to us in our language, that we have to welcome and to interpret now. Only so will our personal consecration be perfected: only so will our social office be fulfilled. 1 [Note: B. F. Westcott, The Incarnation and Common Life, 187.]

(1) The Word has a discovering and enlightening power. It is a mirror in which we see reflected our failures and sins; it is a searchlight discerning the very thoughts and intents of the heart.

A late postmaster in London gave a poor Roman Catholic woman a Testament. The priest visiting her on her dying bed found it beneath her pillow as she passed away, and took it with him, intending to destroy it. But it was found beneath his pillow likewise when he died, not long after. 2 [Note: Homiletic Review, xxi. 158.]

(2) It has a cleansing and purifying power. We are very much influenced by what we read.

We are informed that the wretched man who took the life of President Carnot lived an apparently harmless, decent life for a good many years, until he came into contact with anarchist publications, which so saturated his mind with evil thoughts, schemes, and ideas that at length he was capable of the awful crime he committed. He was defiled, ruined, and destroyed by the word of falsehood which he read. It has again and again been shown in courts of justice that thieves and robbers have had the thoughts of such a life put into their heads by the tales of highwaymen and the like which are sown broadcast in print. The same principle holds true conversely, and it holds good with regard to the Word of God. The Bible has a sanctifying influence: it is a holy book—it sets before us holy examples, it exhorts us to a holy course of life, it furnishes us with holy doctrines, it points us to a holy Saviour. 3 [Note: E. Moore, Christ in Possession, 74.]

(3) The Word has a nourishing and strengthening power. We are told that as new-born babes we are to desire the sincere milk of the Word that we may grow thereby. And the Apostle says, “I commend you to God, and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up” ( Acts 20:32). There is a vital link between the written word and the Living Word, and when the word of God dwells in us, Christ comes and dwells in us too. The secret of sanctification is an indwelling Saviour.

No distant Lord have I

Loving afar to be;

Made flesh for me, He cannot rest

Until He rests in me.

Brother in joy and pain,

Bone of my bone was He,

Now,—intimacy closer still,

He dwells Himself in me.

I need not journey far

This dearest friend to see,

Companionship is always mine,

He makes His home with me. 1 [Note: Maltbie D. Babcock.]

The Master’s Consecration

Literature

Benson (E. W.), in Sermon Year Book, ii. 209.

Bernard (T. D.), The Central Teaching of Jesus Christ, 367.

Brooks (P.), Addresses, 11.

Carter (T. T.), The Spirit of Watchfulness, 239.

Darlow (T. H.), Via Sacra, 157.

Hoare (J. G.), Life in St. John’s Gospel, 62.

Hopkins (E. H.), The Law of Liberty in the Spiritual Life, 397.

Ingram (A. F. W.), The Mysteries of God, 246.

Keble (J.), Sermons Academical and Occasional, 251.

Knight (G. H.), Divine Upliftings, 75.

Lang (W. C. G.), in A Lent in London, 186.

Lyttelton (A. T.), College and University Sermons, 50.

Mackennal (A.), The Life of Christian Consecration, 17.

McClure (J. G. K), Loyalty, 205.

Moberly (R. C.), Problems and Principles 397.

Nicoll (W. R.), Ten-Minute Sermons, 235.

Peabody (F. G.), Jesus Christ and the Social Question, 76.

Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 81.

Peabody (F. G.), Sunday Evenings in the College Chapel, 233.

Pearse (M. G.), The Gentleness of Jesus, 89.

Rainsford (M.), The Lord’s Prayer for Believers, 343, 356, 364, 378.

Skrine (J. H.), Sermons to Pastors and Masters, 58.

Stone (D.), The Discipline of Faith, 41.

Temple (F.), Five of his Latest Utterances, 7.

Tomory (A.), Memorials, 63.

Trumbull (H. C.), Our Misunderstood Bible, 108.

Watts-Ditchfield (J. E), Here and Hereafter, 27.

Welldon (J. E. C.), The Fire upon the Altar, 69.

Welldon (J. E. C.), The Gospel in a Great City, 114.

Williams (C. D.), A Valid Christianity for To-day, 201.

Examiner, June 1904, p. 584 (Jowett).

Verse 25

Environment and Character

I pray not that thou shouldest take them from the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil one.— John 17:15.

1. The last words of Christ to His disciples, clustered round Him in that solemn hour when He took leave of them before He died, were words of prayer. It was a prayer, as reported to us, which threw into pregnant words the meaning of His whole work, but it was also steeped in the tender thought which fills the heart of one who parts from those he has long loved. As He prayed for those around Him, who were to spread among men the good news of God, commending them to His Father’s care, every word was touched with the human tenderness of separation. “Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one”—one in love, one in that will of God which is the bond of love. Keep them from the world, not from the outward world, but from the evil of the world. With that prayer, Christ defines the position of His followers in their life among men, and the meaning of it is our subject.

2. This does not mean that Christ wished His followers never to die—always to be in the world. It is appointed for us all to die. But our Lord did not wish His followers to die before their time. “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” All, indeed, do not reach this fulness of years; and Christians as well as others are cut off by illness and accidents. Death claims all ages for his own. Many also die from loyalty to duty and to love. Blessings dearer than life may be in danger; evils worse than death may be threatened to our country and ourselves. Now Christians, like others, may have to fight even to the death for national life and liberty. And loyalty to love and loyalty to duty may bring an early death on the followers of Christ as well as on others. They may see dear ones sinking into a watery grave, or surrounded by consuming fires, and they may risk and sacrifice their lives in seeking to rescue them from death.

When Jesus’ followers give up their lives either in loyalty to duty or in loyalty to love, they give them up in accordance with the will of God; but Jesus knew there was a real danger that Christians would be taken out of the world when they should continue to live in it, and it was not His wish that this should be. The danger arose both from the hatred of Christ’s enemies and from the mistaken beliefs and actings of Christ’s followers themselves.

I

The Sphere

The world was to be their sphere. “I pray not that thou shouldest take from the world.”

What is Christ’s meaning for the term “world”? It is this passing scene of time, with its transient pleasures and sorrows, pursuits and loves; and the mass of men that live for these alone. There is the world of men, of business, of politics, of labour for wealth and fame—the storm of life in which we sail. Pray, men say, to be taken out of that; out into the deserts or the quietude of our retired rooms; in solitary meditation to live the life of God. I do not pray, said Christ, that you should be removed from that—only from its evil.

1. Christ could not ask that they might be taken out of the world, for that was the scene of their witnessing and labour. However keenly they might wish to escape from its hate and opposition, it was necessary for themselves, for the world, and for their Master, that they should stay as the salt and leaven of human society. But He prays that God would “keep them from the evil one.” Divine grace is to surround these simple souls so that Satan’s fingers may not defile their lives. They also must learn to say, “He hath nothing in me.” This is a great thing to ask, but it is the path to victory. “The problem of the necessity of living in the midst of earthly influences and yet of escaping from their evil is difficult with an exceeding difficulty. Yet it is not without solution. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego in the court of Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel in the court of Darius, are the likenesses “of the small transfigured band whom the world cannot tame.”

Some devout men in spite of the prayer of Jesus, thought it best to renounce the world, and lived in dens and caves of the earth. The Pillar Hermits of Syria lived long years on the tops of pillars set up in the open air. The earliest and most famous of this class of solitaries, whose example the others followed as well as they could, was Simeon, a Syrian monk. In his boyhood Simeon had been a shepherd. He spent nine years of his youth in a Syrian monastery, without ever moving outside the walls of his narrow cell. After this he became dissatisfied with the convent, as giving him too few means of self-denial, and presently invented the new form of penitence which has become associated with his name. He withdrew about the year 423 a.d. to a mountain near Antioch, and fixed his abode upon the top of a pillar which he caused to be erected for himself. The height of it was at first six cubits, but this was gradually increased to thirty-six, or nearly sixty feet. The diameter of the top was only four feet; but it was surrounded with a railing which secured the poor man from falling off, and allowed him the relief of leaning against it. Here Simeon spent the last thirty or more years of his life. He clothed himself with the skins of beasts, and wore also an iron collar round his neck. He preached twice a day to the crowds that gathered at the foot of the column to witness his persevering devotions. Simeon died on his pillar at the age of seventy-two, and was buried with great solemnity at Antioch.

Lord Tennyson has a poem about him with the title, “Saint Simeon Stylites,” that is “Saint Simeon of the Pillar.” It consists of a solemn prayer to God and address to the people by the hermit on the last day of his life. The words which the poet puts into his mouth show a curious mixture of deep penitence for sin and great spiritual pride in his long career of penance. Here are some of them,—

Bethink Thee, Lord, while Thou and all the saints

Enjoy themselves in heaven, and men on earth

House in the shade of comfortable roofs,

Sit with their wives by fires, eat wholesome food,

And wear warm clothes, and even beasts have stalls,

I, ’tween the spring and downfall of the light,

Bow down one thousand and two hundred times,

To Christ, the Virgin Mother, and the saints;

Or in the night, after a little sleep,

I wake: the chill stars sparkle; I am wet

With drenching dews, or stiff with crackling frost.

I wear an undress’d goatskin on my back;

A grazing iron collar grinds my neck;

And in my weak, lean arms I lift the cross,

And strive and wrestle with Thee till I die:

O mercy, mercy! wash away my sin. 1 [Note: C. Jerdan, For the Lambs of the Flock, 122.]

(1) We are in the world for our own sake. We are placed here to be trained for another and a higher life. A certain time and certain trials upon this earth are necessary to develop us into the likeness of God’s character.

The aloe takes a hundred years to make a flower, the primrose a few spring days; some trees reach maturity in half a century, others weave their strength of folded fibres out of the rain, and wind, and sunshine of a thousand years. Each has its own period. It is so, also, with us, the planting of the Lord. A few trials, a few years, and some of us flower into all the perfection we can attain on earth. Many long years’ bitter and protracted trials are the lot of others, before a single blossom can spring upon their lives; but—and it is a law which ought to console us—in proportion to the length of time and the greatness of the trial is the fitness of the character for work, and the greatness also of the work that it has to do. The primrose is beautiful and cheers the heart of the passing traveller, and rejoices the Maying children who weave it in a wreath for their queen—and that is useful and lovely work and has its place. But the oak shelters a thousand herds, and plants a forest; and builds the bulwark of the coast, and the fleets that unite the nations. We have no right to be impatient if God is making us into the heart of oak, which will, when the woodman, death, has felled us, give shelter and bring blessing to thousands in the other world. Not an hour of the time, not a single agony of the trial is lost; everything that we suffer here is transmuted otherwhere into strength and usefulness, into greatness and beauty of character. 2 [Note: S. A. Brooke, The Ship of the Soul, 43.]

(2) It is Christ’s mind that His people should abide for a season in the world for the sake of others. He has purposes to accomplish in His people, and by them, which render it necessary that they should, in all ordinary cases, pass a time of sojourn amid the cares and temptations of the world. We are not left in doubt as to the reason of our Lord’s declining to pray that His saints should be taken out of the world. He explains it Himself in John 17:18: “As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world.” We know what Christ was sent into the world to do. It was that He might save it. “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” In like manner Christ’s people are sent into the world for the world’s good. In the humbler fashion, which alone is competent to men, Christ’s people are like Christ Himself, the light of the world. Christ’s plan is to do the work of His Kingdom on the earth by means of His own people. He does not send angels from heaven to preach the Gospel, or to minister food and raiment to the poor, or to comfort mourners, or to put evildoers to shame by their holy life. These honourable functions it is His will and pleasure that His own people should discharge. When the world shall have been converted to Christ, it will be found that the instruments employed have been men of like passions with others. And this being so, it is easy enough to understand why Christ does not desire that His people should be at once taken out of the world. The world needs their example, their prayers, their good deeds, their instructions; and, for the world’s sake, they must abide here for a season, and not only abide on the earth, but throw themselves heartily into the throng and turmoil of life in the world, according as God may call them.

For thousands of years there lay before man all the possibilities of insulating an electric current, and so of confining it within certain bounds, and of directing its energy into a definite channel, and yet the thing never dawned upon his mind until the time of Stephen Gray. And since his day the development of electrical science has been proportionate to the progress made in the knowledge of insulation. In all the advance made in the arts and sciences by the nations of antiquity, we have no evidence that any one of them ever discovered that a wire could be so covered that it would be insulated, and so retain and transmit a current; and without this knowledge of insulation no progress in electricity was possible. An induction coil could not be constructed, and so there could be no dynamo or electric motor. In short, there could be no transmission of electrical energy in any form. Insulation is as much a matter of necessity in things spiritual as in things electrical. This does not mean, however, the insulation which is found in isolation so much as that which is the product of life. It is not secured by separating one’s self from his fellows, whether in the cell of the monastery or in the religious retreat. It is rather the possession of life that shields a man from his hostile environment, and enables him to triumph over it. 1 [Note: C. H. Tyndall, Electricity and its Similitudes, 114.]

2. The spirit of Christ’s prayer was the habit of His life. If He was not of this world, it was not because He left it to itself, or wrapped Himself in any mystery, or was without sympathy for any human condition, or untouched by any cry of emotion. He lived as a man among men. He assumed no special sanctity, no signs of separation. He sat at rich men’s tables. He associated with those of evil repute and of no repute. He said of Himself that He came eating and drinking. It was charged against Him that He was “gone to be guest with a man that is a sinner.” He gave currency Himself to the coarse reproach that He was “a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber,” not fearing to take it up, and only adding, “Wisdom is justified of all her children.” For he who cannot pass blamelessly through the common conditions of our life, taking them as they are, and evading none of them, is no saint of God and no saviour of men. It is not being above any human necessity, but meeting it fully and purely, that tests spiritual power. If the Son of Man was not of the world, it was not because His spirit was not large enough to take in both earth and heaven; it was because this earth was a sacred place where God was unfolding His providence and men were fulfilling their preparatory destinies; and when He looked upon them in the light of their immortality, His tenderness flowed out even in tears—not the tears that lie near to the eyes, but out of the anguish of His spirit—for those who, in the crisis of the world’s opportunity, were rejecting the counsel of God against themselves, not knowing the time of their visitation.

It is said of every painting that has no clear outlook to the sky, that it leaves a stifling impression on the mind of confinement and limitation. And so of every human life that has no natural outlet to the infinite: it is then of the world, and of the world only. Yet we have no external measurements for such states of the spirit. Only the individual conscience, and He who is greater than the conscience, can tell where worldliness prevails, with the heavenly outlook closed. Each heart must answer for itself, and at its own risk. That our souls are committed to our own keeping at our own peril, in a world so mixed as this, is the last reason why we should slumber over the charge, or betray the trust. If only that outlet to the infinite is kept open, the inner bond with eternal life preserved, while not one movement of this world’s business is interfered with, not one pulse-beat of its happiness repressed, with all natural associations dear and cherished, with all human sympathies fresh and warm, we shall yet be near to the Kingdom of heaven, within the order of the Kosmos of God in the world, but not of the world—not taken out of it, but kept from its evil. 1 [Note: J. Hamilton Thom, Laws of Life after the Mind of Christ, 311.]

If It was a true inspiration of the artist who depicted a monk at his desk in the monastery cell, with pen in hand, and eyes looking upward for illumination, and the Holy Spirit descending in the form of a dove to bring the light and guidance he sought. That was a true inspiration; but it was equally true to depict a foul spirit speaking from beneath, seeking to engage the monk’s attention, that he might whisper in his ear the corrupt and corrupting counsel of the world. In convent and in the busiest highway the two voices call, and no withdrawal of the body will deliver us from the subtle and ensnaring influence of the evil world. 2 [Note: J. H. Jowett, Apostolic Optimism, 57.]

3. The more we make of this life, the more credible another life becomes. The greater this life is made, the easier to believe in the next. No one would infer Paradise from the vast African desert. It is when the traveller visits European zones, sees their magnificence of verdure and bloom and the grand creations of man, that the soul readily believes in God and eternity.

A noted novelist has said that when the great and pure souls of earth were beheld it was easy to believe in immortality. We have suffered from two causes—from religious zealots disparaging this world, and from infidel minds underrating the next. The former take from this beautiful world its purpose, while the latter deprive it of the mystery and the hope of Heaven. Christ has delivered us from both. For He stood forth emphasizing the value of this life and assigning to His disciples their place in it as His servants. He taught them their obligation to ornament and develop this world. This earth is the first stage in the soul’s career. Only a grand human life can bear any adequate testimony to the truths of Christ’s Gospel. Here it is given to those accepting it to show its relation to the State; to the social charities human misery makes so needful; to the school, with its eager young life to be trained; to the home, wherein are to blossom the graces and amenities that alone can perpetuate it and make it “sweet home”; to politics, that they may be cleansed and reveal the spirit of that patriotism whose renaissance is the hope of the hour. It is at such points as these, where Christianity has touched this earth and made it better, that it finds its protection from the ice of unbelief and the attacks of ridicule. 1 [Note: M. M. G. Dana.]

II

The Enemy

1. The Greek word that ends the text is an adjective, preceded by an article, and being in the genitive case the custom is to supply a substantive. Hence the rendering: “that thou shouldest keep them from the evil one.” The statement then points to “the prince of this world,” the author and embodiment of evil. Not that the word “Satan,” or the word “Devil,” must always be taken to mean one spirit in the Scriptures: “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven,” means that Christ saw evil spirits discomfited. “The devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour,” means, not one fallen spirit merely, but many fallen spirits seeking whom they may influence for evil.

2. What, then, is this evil (or “evil one,” as the R.V. has it) from which our Lord prays we should be kept? Does it consist in outward tribulation, in the trials and troubles of life, in poverty, bereavements, bodily sufferings? Obviously not. Christ knew that man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. He Himself, as Perfect Man, underwent all these, leaving us the one perfect example of patient submission to God’s will. It was indeed for this purpose that He left His Father’s throne to come and live amongst us on this earth, that there might be no thorny path or barren wilderness of trouble which He as our great Leader had not passed through before us, no fierce temptation which He as Perfect Man had not experienced and triumphed over, thus leaving us an example that we should follow His steps, and in all these things be more than conquerors. So then this evil from which He prays God to keep us is not an outward one, but one far more deadly and subtle—an inward and spiritual enemy. He prays that we may be kept from the wiles of the evil one, who, as a roaring lion, goeth about seeking whom he may devour, from any indulged sin that would come between us and God, from any earthly care or pleasure that may deaden our spiritual faculties and separate the soul from the enjoyment of God’s love.

(1) There is virtue in environment. In the region of the Natural Sciences we find the botanist and the biologist arguing that any peculiar formation or growth in plant or animal which maintains itself and becomes persistent must be accounted for by something in its environment. There must be something there to justify it, to make it worth while that it should exist, otherwise it would not have maintained itself, at least in vigour. They argue thus from the organism to its environment, and set to work to verify their argument by finding that hitherto unsuspected element or process in external nature with which the peculiar formation brings the plant or animal into advantageous correspondence. There is no reason why the argument should not apply with equal force to the invisible spiritual faculties and developments of human nature; the only difference is that in this region it does not from the nature of the case admit of ocular verification.

You have seen a lily floating in the black sullied waters of a foul bog in the country. All about it are foulness and impurity; but amid all the vileness the lily is pure as the white snowflakes that fall from the winter clouds. It floats on the surface of the stained waters, but never takes a stain. It ever holds up its pure face towards God’s blue sky, and pours its fragrance all about it, like the incense from the censer of a vestal priestess. So it is possible for a true soul to live in this sinful world, keeping itself unsullied, and breathing out the fragrance of love. 1 [Note: J. R. Miller, Glimpses through Life’s Windows, 186.]

(2) But there is peril in environment. Christ does not make light of the dangers which beset His disciples in this world. He had met the tempter and defeated him, but He knew the craft and cunning with which he lies in wait to deceive, and this prayer is a cry of warning. St. Paul does not underrate our peril: “For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” The noble and the good of former days unite in declaring that this world is to the servant of Christ an enemy’s country. There are the god of this world, the powers of this world, the men of this world, the things of this world—all in their degree fighting against the man who believes in Jesus. As an old writer has said, this world is like a chess-board, you cannot make a move in any direction but the devil instantly sets out some creature to attack you.

Long ago I made a change of habitat from the hill country of western Carolina to what was regarded as a malarious district near the eastern coast. I was warned of the probable consequences to my health, but I laughed at the fears of my friends. I protested that there was nothing in the world the matter with the air. Was I not a chemist? At least, I was so accounted in those days when I filled that chair in a humble college. The air had just the same constituents as were to be found in the hill country—oxygen, nitrogen, vapour of water, and a trace of carbonic acid. And so for two years I laughed at chills and fevers, and then I shook for two months. There was something baneful in the air, even though chemical analysis failed to detect its presence. 1 [Note: P. S. Henson, The Four Faces, 233.]

III

The Keeper

“That thou shouldest keep them.” What a wealth of quiet experience there is in the phrase, “The Lord shall preserve thy going out.” It is worth while at the beginning of any day to pause to gather so precious a promise. But like many another fair promise it is at the same time a challenge. The God who waits at the door with the offer of companionship, scrutinizes our going forth. We have, as it were, to pass Him to get into the street. He is the sentry who must know our business, and why we go out, before He can give us safe conduct. The assurance of protection can be tasted only by the man whose daily purpose is in accordance with the will of God, who can give the answer of his Master, that he is about the Father’s business.

In China men have conceived of a sleeping Deity. There, lying on his side, with calm face, closed eyes, and head resting upon his hand, is a gilded wooden figure, 30 feet long, and well proportioned. But he does not mind his worshippers. His left arm is resting upon his body, and his bare feet are placed one upon the other. This Buddha is sleeping, while the world goes on. Standing about him are twelve crowned and beautifully dressed images, and in front are the symbols of sacrifice and incense. How unlike Him who neither slumbers nor sleeps!

O strange and wild is the world of men

Which the eyes of the Lord must see—

With continents, islands, tribes and tongues,

With multitudes bond and free!

All kings of the earth bow down to Him,

And yet—He can think on me.

For none can measure the mind of God

Or the bounds of eternity,

He knows each life that has come from Him,

To the tiniest bird and bee,

And the love of His heart is so deep and wide

That it takes in even me. 1 [Note: Mary E. Allbright.]

1. The disciple cannot keep himself.—The Saviour did not turn to those who stood round Him and bind them by strong vows to remain faithful when He was gone. He knew their weakness, and He looked away from them to God’s strength. It is well for us to know our weakness. We cannot keep ourselves. We have no strength to meet the attack, and no skill to evade it. How will you do? Will you resolve sternly to resist when next you are tempted? Such resolves have been made, as in a soul’s agony they have been made, and they have gone down before the fierce onslaught like lead before the blow-pipe, or they have yielded to the gentle wooings and insinuations of the evil one. Be not too confident, that is, not self-confident. St. Peter’s brave challenge to man or devil to make him desert his Master was but the prelude to his fall.

2. We are kept by outward restraints, by commands and prohibitions and providences. It is told of one of the great painters of Italy, that, being engaged upon a fresco inside the dome of a lofty cathedral, and standing on a platform hung more than a hundred feet from the floor, he paused to look at the effect of his work, and, absorbed in his art, kept walking backward for a better view, till, forgetful of danger, he had almost reached the platform’s edge, unconscious that two more backward steps would hurl him down to death. A brother artist seeing his danger, but afraid to speak lest a sudden shout should precipitate the fall he was anxious to prevent, seized a brush full of paint and hurled it against the face of the brilliant figure on the dome, completely spoiling the labour of many days. But that saved the painter’s life; for, resenting what he thought an insult, and springing forward with a cry, he only then discovered that that had been a friendly act to save him from an awful death. And when God, with a seemingly cruel hand blots out our beautiful visions, and spoils the life-picture that we thought so fair, till we cry out in surprise and anger too, He may be saying with a tender voice, “It was to keep you from falling.”

“Don’t you think, sir,” said a very sincere but simple man, to me, one Sunday, as I was leaving the pulpit of a chapel filled chiefly by the poor, “don’t you think that you repeat the Lord’s Prayer the wrong way? Don’t you think you had better repeat it as our minister repeats it? He always says, ‘Leave us not in temptation.’ You don’t think that God ever leads us into temptation, sir, do you? Had you not better follow our minister’s way, sir?” “No,” I replied; “I don’t think I had better follow your minister’s way. I think he had better follow Christ’s way and repeat the prayer as Christ taught it. Listen, my friend,” I said; “the prayer is clear enough and forcible enough if you will read it through. But you are like some other people that I know, you insist on reading the Bible with your thumb-nail instead of your brains. You stick your thumb-nail into one word on a page and will not see any other word, even on the same page. When you read any other book you allow it to explain itself. You read all adjoining passages, as well as the immediate context; and, above all, you do not ignore the context. You let the book explain itself. Do the same with the Lord’s Prayer.” “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”; that is, lead us not into temptation that shall overpower us, expose us not to overmuch trial, trial under which our weakness may sink. Christ does not mean that we are to pray never to be tempted, but only that we may be shielded from temptations too great for our strength; and that we may be delivered from the sin of yielding to the temptation. 1 [Note: T. Cooper, Plain Pulpit Talk, 205.]

3. We are kept by the vision of pure things.—In ascending the lofty peaks of the Jungfrau and Monte Rosa, the guides are said to resort not infrequently to the artifice of endeavouring to interest the traveller in the beauty of the lovely flowers growing there, with a view to distract his attention from the fearful abysses which the giddy path overhangs. By a similar device of wisdom and love are the saints preserved as they pursue their perilous way. God establishes their steps by charming their eye with things of beauty, interest, and delectableness, and by filling their heart with the love of them. Home, sweet home, with its pleasantness and pathos; the charm of literature, the miracles of science, the spell of music, the visions of art; the daily round, with its ever fresh solicitudes and satisfactions; the calls of patriotism, the demands of duty, the glow of love, the pleasures of friendship, social service, the abandon of pastimes—these, and many other similar things pertaining to the natural life, when accepted, exercised, and enjoyed in the sunshine of the Lord, constitute our strength and guarantee our peace, despite all the visions of sin, all the allurements of world, flesh, and devil. We are not saved by some unknown magic, but God draws our heart to Himself through the sanctified gifts, situations, and activities which go to the making up of human life.

4. We are kept by God’s strengthening grace in our hearts.—Not abstraction from the world, but protection from the evil! The deliverance is to be effected, not by the removal of the body, but by the reinforcement of the spirit. Our redemption is to be accomplished, not by changing our locality, but by changing the condition of the heart. The purpose of our Saviour is to perfect us in holiness, not by withdrawing us from all infection, but by making us proof against all disease in the endowment of invincible health. The ideal of aspiring discipleship is to be found not in innocence, with an environment destitute of temptation, but in holiness, despite the menacing advances of infection and disease. “In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.” “I pray not that thou shouldest take them from the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil one.”

As the diver in his bell sits dry at the bottom of the sea, and draws a pure air from the free heavens far above him, and is parted from that murderous waste of green death that clings so closely round the translucent crystal walls, which keep him safe, so we, enclosed in God, shall repel from ourselves all that would overflow to destroy us and our work, and may by His grace lay deeper than the waters some courses in the great building that shall one day rise stately and many-mansioned from out of the conquered waves.

A writer tells of going with a party into a coal mine. On one side of the gangway grew a plant which was perfectly white. The visitors were astonished that there, where the coal dust was continually flying, this little plant should remain so pure and white. A miner took a handful of black coal dust and threw it upon the plant but none adhered. The visitors repeated the experiment, but the coal dust would not cling. There was a wonderful enamel on the folds of the white plant to which the finest perceptible speck would not adhere. Living there, amid clouds of black dust, nothing could stain its snowy whiteness.

5. We must co-operate with God.—Indeed the Apostle Jude says, “Keep yourselves in the love of God.” God’s love to us—that is the element within which the keeping of ourselves becomes real keeping, safe keeping, happy keeping. That is the overarching firmament, with its height and breadth of bright infinitude, within which our keeping is kept. We ourselves are to abide within our own poor keeping: yes, and our own poor keeping is to abide within God’s tender might of love. The flower is to be environed by the frail globe of glass: the frail globe is to be environed and to be penetrated by the sweet warm sunlight, that comes across the tracks of worlds to illumine our dark atmosphere with safety and life.

If I feel that I am enclosed by the strong ramparts of a fortress-home, there is animating reason why I should guard myself from the lesser hazards that may still encompass me within that home; my keeping of myself is not at an end, but is only reduced to manageable dimensions. If I be on board a steam-liner, which holds her head before the wildest weather with undaunted majesty, and only fills the air above her bows with the smoke of billows she is shattering in the strong tremor of her power, I have still to care how I mount the companion-way, and pace the deck, and stow my valuables in my cabin. Indeed, it is only when I am secure from wreck or foundering, that all this minor care is of much account. 1 [Note: J. A. Kerr Bain, For Heart and Life, 85.]

I rest on Thy unwearied mind;

Thy planning and Thy love go on,

Nor dost Thou leave me far behind;

I’m carried to another dawn.

The new day breaks. From earth’s old mould

Fresh flowers grow along my way.

New life is flashed on problems old;

On ancient life new forces play.

O wondrous, wakeful Warden! When

The last great nightfall comes to me,

From that deep slumber rouse me then,

That I Thy tireless child may be. 2 [Note: Archibald Haddon.]

IV

The Intercessor

“I pray.”—Jesus assumes the rôle of Advocate. To St. Peter He said, “I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not.” And He says the same to every disciple who is being sifted by the wicked one. Our great High Priest lifts up the voice of continual intercession for us. His own Passion is His Plea. Those five red-lipped wounds plead eloquently with the Father; and nothing that they ask is ever refused.

Look, Father, look on His Anointed Face,

And only look on us as found in Him;

Look not on our misusings of Thy grace,

Our prayer so languid, and our faith so dim.

For lo! between our sins and their reward

We set the Passion of Thy Son our Lord.

I remember a wonderful mural painting. It depicts the Jews brought into subjection to the heathen. To the left stands Pharaoh, exquisite, effeminate, deadly cruel. In one hand he lifts the scourge, and with the other he grasps the hair of the captives. On the right is the Assyrian king, duller, heavier, with knotted limbs. He presses down the yoke on the poor prisoners. But supplicating hands are raised up to heaven, and Jehovah lends His ear to the cry of His people. The cherubim fly before Him, their wings a glowing crimson. They hide His face; but from behind the wings issue His arms. The slender Pharaoh He represses by the mere impact of His fingers. The brute force of the Assyrian He holds in a grasp of tremendous power. Fear not, O trembling heart: when Jesus presents your prayers before the throne, no enemy can prevail against you. 1 [Note: A. Smellie, In the Secret Place, 34.]

Environment and Character

Literature

Alexander (S. A.), The Mind of Christ, 418.

Benson (R. M.), The Final Passover, ii. (pt. ii.) 457.

Binnie (W.), Sermons, 171.

Bramston (J. F.), Fratribus, 164.

Brooke (S. A.), The Ship of the Soul, 31.

Carter (T. T.), Meditations on the Public Life of our Lord, ii. 298.

Cooper (T.), Plain Pulpit Talk, 196.

Dods (M.), Footsteps in the Path of Life, 70.

Gibson (J. M.), Glory of Life on Earth, 1.

Gray (W. H.), The Children’s Friend, 202.

Gregg (D.), Individual Prayer as a Working Force, 125.

Hiley (R. W.), A Year’s Sermons, iii. 234.

Jerdan (C.), For the Lambs of the Flock, 121.

Jowett (J. H.), Apostolic Optimism, 47.

Lidgett (J. S.), Apostolic Ministry, 215.

Rainsford (M.), The Lord’s Prayer for Believers, 286, 301.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Christ’s Relation to His People, 351.

British Weekly Pulpit, iii. 473.

Cambridge Review, i. No. 21.

Christian Age, xlvi. 13; liii. 325.

Christian World Pulpit, li. 316 (Gibson); lv. 136 (Jowett); lxxi. 268 (Rushbrooke).