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+Project Gutenberg's Expositions of Holy Scripture, by Alexander Maclaren
+#6 in our series by Alexander Maclaren
+
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+Title: Expositions of Holy Scripture
+       St. John Chapters I to XIV
+
+Author: Alexander Maclaren
+
+Release Date: May, 2005 [EBook #8070]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on June 11, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Franks, David King
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+EXPOSITIONS OF
+HOLY SCRIPTURE
+
+ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D. D., Litt. D.
+
+
+
+
+ST. JOHN
+
+Vols. I and II
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+THE WORD IN ETERNITY, IN THE WORLD, AND IN THE FLESH (John i. 1-14)
+
+THE LIGHT AND THE LAMPS (John i. 8; v. 35)
+
+'THREE TABERNACLES' (John i. 14; Rev. vii. 15; xxi. 3)
+
+THE FULNESS OF CHRIST (John i. 16)
+
+GRACE AND TRUTH (John i. 17)
+
+THE WORLD'S SIN-BEARER (John i. 29)
+
+THE FIRST DISCIPLES: I. JOHN AND ANDREW (John i. 37-39)
+
+THE FIRST DISCIPLES: II. SIMON PETER (John i. 40-42)
+
+THE FIRST DISCIPLES: III. PHILIP (John i. 43)
+
+THE FIRST DISCIPLES: IV. NATHANAEL (John i. 45-49)
+
+THE FIRST DISCIPLES: V. BELIEVING AND SEEING (John i. 50, 51)
+
+JESUS THE JOY-BRINGER (John ii. 1-11)
+
+THE FIRST MIRACLE IN CANA--THE WATER MADE WINE (John ii. 11)
+
+CHRIST CLEANSING THE TEMPLE (John ii. 16)
+
+THE DESTROYERS AND THE RESTORER (John ii. 19)
+
+TEACHER OR SAVIOUR? (John iii. 2)
+
+WIND AND SPIRIT (John iii. 8)
+
+THE BRAZEN SERPENT (John iii. 14)
+
+CHRIST'S MUSTS (John iii. 14)
+
+THE LAKE AND THE RIVER (John iii. 16)
+
+THE WEARIED CHRIST (John iv. 6, 32)
+
+'GIVE ME TO DRINK' (John iv. 7, 26)
+
+THE GIFT AND THE GIVER (John iv. 10)
+
+THE SPRINGING FOUNTAIN (John iv. 14)
+
+THE SECOND MIRACLE (John iv. 54)
+
+THE THIRD MIRACLE IN JOHN'S GOSPEL (John v, 8)
+
+THE LIFE-GIVER AND JUDGE (John v. 17-27)
+
+THE FOURTH MIRACLE IN JOHN'S GOSPEL (John vi. 11)
+
+'FRAGMENTS' OR 'BROKEN PIECES' (John vi. 12)
+
+THE FIFTH MIRACLE IN JOHN'S GOSPEL (John vi. 19, 20)
+
+HOW TO WORK THE WORK OF GOD (John vi. 28, 29)
+
+THE MANNA (John vi. 48-50)
+
+ONE SAYING WITH TWO MEANINGS (John vii. 33, 34; xiii. 33)
+
+THE ROCK AND THE WATER (John vii. 37, 38)
+
+THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD (John viii. 12)
+
+THREE ASPECTS OF FAITH (John viii. 30, 31)
+
+'NEVER IN BONDAGE' (John viii. 33)
+
+ONE METAPHOR AND TWO MEANINGS (John ix. 4; Romans xiii. l2)
+
+THE SIXTH MIRACLE IN JOHN'S GOSPEL--THE BLIND MADE TO SEE, AND THE
+SEEING MADE BLIND (John ix. 6,7)
+
+THE GIFTS TO THE FLOCK (John x. 9)
+
+THE GOOD SHEPHERD (John x. 14, 15)
+
+'OTHER SHEEP' (John x. 16 R.V.)
+
+THE DELAYS OF LOVE (John xi. 5, 6)
+
+CHRIST'S QUESTION TO EACH (John xi. 26, 27)
+
+THE OPEN GRAVE AT BETHANY (John xi. 30-45)
+
+THE SEVENTH MIRACLE IN JOHN'S GOSPEL--THE RAISING OF LAZARUS (John xi.
+43, 44)
+
+CAIAPHAS (John xi. 49, 50)
+
+LOVE'S PRODIGALITY CENSURED AND VINDICATED (John xii. 1-1l)
+
+A NEW KIND OF KING (John xii. 12-26)
+
+AFTER CHRIST: WITH CHRIST (John xii. 26)
+
+THE UNIVERSAL MAGNET (John xii. 32)
+
+THE SON OF MAN (John xii. 34)
+
+A PARTING WARNING (John xii. 35, 36 R V.)
+
+THE LOVE OF THE DEPARTING CHRIST (John xiii. 1)
+
+THE SERVANT-MASTER (John xiii. 3-5)
+
+THE DISMISSAL OF JUDAS (John xiii. 27)
+
+THE GLORY OF THE CROSS (John xiii. 31, 32)
+
+CANNOT AND CAN (John xiii. 33)
+
+SEEKING JESUS (John xiii. 33)
+
+'AS I HAVE LOVED' (John xiii. 34, 35)
+
+'QUO VADIS?' (John xiii. 37, 38)
+
+A RASH VOW (John xiii. 38)
+
+FAITH IN GOD AND CHRIST (John xiv. 1)
+
+'MANY MANSIONS' (John xiv. 2)
+
+THE FORERUNNER (John xiv. 2, 3)
+
+THE WAY (John xiv. 4-7)
+
+THE TRUE VISION OF GOD (John xiv. 8-11)
+
+CHRIST'S WORKS AND OURS (John xiv. 12-14)
+
+LOVE AND OBEDIENCE (John xiv. 15)
+
+THE COMFORTER GIVEN (John xiv. 16, 17)
+
+THE ABSENT PRESENT CHRIST (John xiv. 18, 19)
+
+THE GIFTS OF THE PRESENT CHRIST (John xiv. 20, 21)
+
+WHO BRING CHRIST (John xiv. 22-24)
+
+THE TEACHER SPIRIT (John xiv. 25, 26)
+
+CHRIST'S PEACE (John xiv. 27)
+
+JOY AND FAITH, THE FRUITS OF CHRIST'S DEPARTURE (John xiv. 28, 29)
+
+CHRIST FORESEEING HIS PASSION (John xiv. 30, 31)
+
+
+
+
+THE WORD IN ETERNITY, IN THE WORLD, AND IN THE FLESH
+
+
+'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
+Word was God. 2. The same was in the beginning with God. 3. All things
+were made by Him; and without Him was not any thing made that was
+made. 4. In Him was life; and the life was the light of men. 5. And
+the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
+6. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7. The same
+came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through
+him might believe. 8. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear
+witness of that Light. 9. That was the true Light, which lighteth
+every man that cometh into the world. 10. He was in the world, and the
+world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not. 11. He came unto
+His own, and His own received Him not. 12. But as many as received
+Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them
+that believe on His name: 13. Which were born, not of blood, nor of
+the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. 14. And the
+Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld His glory, the
+glory as of the only-begotten of the Father,) full of grace and
+truth.'--JOHN i. 1-14.
+
+The other Gospels begin with Bethlehem; John begins with 'the bosom of
+the Father.' Luke dates his narrative by Roman emperors and Jewish
+high-priests; John dates his 'in the beginning.' To attempt adequate
+exposition of these verses in our narrow limits is absurd; we can only
+note the salient points of this, the profoundest page in the New
+Testament.
+
+The threefold utterance in verse 1 carries us into the depths of
+eternity, before time or creatures were. Genesis and John both start
+from 'the beginning,' but, while Genesis works downwards from that
+point and tells what followed, John works upwards and tells what
+preceded--if we may use that term in speaking of what lies beyond
+time. Time and creatures came into being, and, when they began, the
+Word 'was.' Surely no form of speech could more emphatically declare
+absolute, uncreated being, outside the limits of time. Clearly, too,
+no interpretation of these words fathoms their depth, or makes worthy
+sense, which does not recognise that the Word is a person. The second
+clause of verse 1 asserts the eternal communion of the Word with God.
+The preposition employed means accurately 'towards,' and expresses the
+thought that in the Word there was motion or tendency towards, and not
+merely association with, God. It points to reciprocal, conscious
+communion, and the active going out of love in the direction of God.
+The last clause asserts the community of essence, which is not
+inconsistent with distinction of persons, and makes the communion of
+active Love possible; for none could, in the depths of eternity, dwell
+with and perfectly love and be loved by God, except one who Himself
+was God.
+
+Verse 1 stands apart as revealing the pretemporal and essential nature
+of the Word. In it the deep ocean of the divine nature is partially
+disclosed, though no created eye can either plunge to discern its
+depths or travel beyond our horizon to its boundless, shoreless
+extent. The remainder of the passage deals with the majestic march of
+the self-revealing Word through creation, and illumination of
+humanity, up to the climax in the Incarnation.
+
+John repeats the substance of verse 1 in verse 2, apparently in order
+to identify the Agent of creation with the august person whom he has
+disclosed as filling eternity. By Him creation was effected, and,
+because He was what verse 1 has declared Him to be, therefore was it
+effected by Him. Observe the three steps marked in three consecutive
+verses. 'All things were made by Him'; literally 'became,' where the
+emergence into existence of created things is strongly contrasted with
+the divine 'was' of verse 1. 'Through Him' declares that the Word is
+the agent of creation; 'without Him' (literally, 'apart from Him')
+declares that created things continue in existence because He
+communicates it to them. Man is the highest of these 'all things,' and
+verse 4 sets forth the relation of the Word to Him, declaring that
+'life,' in all the width and height of its possible meanings, inheres
+in Him, and is communicated by Him, with its distinguishing
+accompaniment, in human nature, of light, whether of reason or of
+conscience.
+
+So far, John has been speaking as from the upper or divine side, but
+in verse 5 he speaks from the under or human, and shows us how the
+self-revelation of the Word has, by some mysterious necessity, been
+conflict. The 'darkness' was not made by Him, but it is there, and the
+beams of the light have to contend with it. Something alien must have
+come in, some catastrophe have happened, that the light should have to
+stream into a region of darkness.
+
+John takes 'the Fall' for granted, and in verse 5 describes the whole
+condition of things, both within and beyond the region of special
+revelation. The shining of the light is continuous, but the darkness
+is obstinate. It is the tragedy and crime of the world that the
+darkness will not have the light. It is the long-suffering mercy of
+God that the light repelled is not extinguished, but shines meekly on.
+
+Verses 6-13 deal with the historical appearance of the Word. The
+Forerunner is introduced, as in the other Gospels; and, significantly
+enough, this Evangelist calls him only 'John,'--omitting 'the
+Baptist,' as was very natural to him, the other John, who would feel
+less need for distinguishing the two than others did. The subordinate
+office of a witness to the light is declared positively and
+negatively, and the dignity of such a function is implied. To witness
+to the light, and to be the means of leading men to believe, was
+honour for any man.
+
+The limited office of the Forerunner serves as contrast to the
+transcendent lustre of the true Light. The meaning of verse 9 may be
+doubtful, but verses 10 and 11 clearly refer to the historical
+manifestation of the Word, and probably verse 9 does so too. Possibly,
+however, it rather points to the inner revelation by the Word, which
+is the 'light of men.' In that case the phrase 'that cometh into the
+world' would refer to 'every man,' whereas it is more natural in this
+context to refer it to 'the light,' and to see in the verse a
+reference to the illumination of humanity consequent on the appearance
+of Jesus Christ. The use of 'world' and 'came' in verses 10 and 11
+points in that direction. Verse 9 represents the Word as 'coming';
+verse 10 regards Him as come--'He was in the world.'
+
+Note the three clauses, so like, and yet so unlike the august three in
+verse 1. Note the sad issue of the coming--'The world knew Him not.'
+In that 'world' there was one place where He might have looked for
+recognition, one set of people who might have been expected to hail
+Him; but not only the wide world was blind ('knew not'), but the
+narrower circle of 'His own' fought against what they knew to be light
+('received not').
+
+But the rejection was not universal, and John proceeds to develop the
+blessed consequences of receiving the light. For the first time he
+speaks the great word 'believe.' The act of faith is the condition or
+means of 'receiving.' It is the opening of the mental eye for the
+light to pour in. We possess Jesus in the measure of our faith. The
+object of faith is 'His name,' which means, not this or that
+collocation of letters by which He is designated, but His whole
+self-revelation. The result of such faith is 'the right to become
+children of God,' for through faith in the only-begotten Son we
+receive the communication of a divine life which makes us, too, sons.
+That new life, with its consequence of sonship, does not belong to
+human nature as received from parents, but is a gift of God mediated
+through faith in the Light who is the Word.
+
+Verse 14 is not mere repetition of the preceding, but advances beyond
+it in that it declares the wonder of the way by which that divine Word
+did enter into the world. John here, as it were, draws back the
+curtain, and shows us the transcendent miracle of divine love, for
+which he has been preparing in all the preceding. Note that he has not
+named 'the Word' since verse 1, but here he again uses the majestic
+expression to bring out strongly the contrast between the
+ante-temporal glory and the historical lowliness. These four words,
+'The Word became flesh,' are the foundation of all our knowledge of
+God, of man, of the relations between them, the foundation of all our
+hopes, the guarantee of all our peace, the pledge of all blessedness.
+'He tabernacled among us.' As the divine glory of old dwelt between
+the cherubim, so Jesus is among men the true Temple, wherein we see a
+truer glory than that radiant light which filled the closed chamber of
+the holy of holies. Rapturous remembrances rose before the Apostle as
+he wrote, 'We beheld His glory'; and he has told us what he has beheld
+and seen with his eyes, that we also may have fellowship with him in
+beholding. The glory that shone from the Incarnate Word was no
+menacing or dazzling light. He and it were 'full of grace and truth,'
+perfect Love bending to inferiors and sinners, with hands full of
+gifts and a heart full of tenderness and the revelation of reality,
+both as regards God and man. His grace bestows all that our lowness
+needs, His truth teaches all that our ignorance requires. All our
+gifts and all our knowledge come from the Incarnate Word, in whom
+believing we are the children of God.
+
+
+
+
+THE LIGHT AND THE LAMPS
+
+
+'He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that
+Light.'--JOHN i. 8.
+
+'He was a burning and a shining light; and ye were willing for a
+season to rejoice in His light.'--JOHN v. 35.
+
+My two texts both refer to John the Baptist. One of them is the
+Evangelist's account of him, the other is our Lord's eulogium upon
+him. The latter of my texts, as the Revised Version shows, would be
+more properly rendered, 'He was a lamp' rather than 'He was a light,'
+and the contrast between the two words, the 'light' and 'the lamps,'
+is my theme. I gather all that I would desire to say into three
+points: 'that Light' and its witnesses; the underived Light and the
+kindled lamps; the undying Light and the lamps that go out.
+
+I. First of all, then, the contrast suggested to us is between 'that
+Light' and its witnesses.
+
+John, in that profound prologue which is the deepest part of
+Scripture, and lays firm and broad in the depths the foundation-stones
+of a reasonable faith, draws the contrast between 'that Light' and
+them whose business it was to bear witness to it. As for the former, I
+cannot here venture to dilate upon the great, and to me absolutely
+satisfying and fundamental, thoughts that lie in these eighteen first
+verses of this Gospel. 'The Word was with God,' and that Word was the
+Agent of Creation, the Fountain of Life, the Source of the Light which
+is inseparable from all human life. John goes back, with the
+simplicity of a child's speech, which yet is deeper than all
+philosophies, to a Beginning, far anterior to 'the Beginning' of which
+Genesis speaks, and declares that before creation that Light shone;
+and he looks out over the whole world, and declares, that before and
+beyond the limits of the historical manifestation of the Word in the
+flesh, its beams spread over the whole race of man. But they are all
+focussed, if I may so speak, and gathered to a point which burns as
+well as illuminates, in the historical manifestation of Jesus Christ
+in the flesh. 'That was the true Light which lighteth every man that
+cometh into the world.'
+
+Next, he turns to the highest honour and the most imperative duty
+laid, not only upon mighty men and officials, but upon all on whose
+happy eyeballs this Light has shone, and into whose darkened hearts
+the joy and peace and purity of it have flowed, and he says, 'He was
+sent'--and they are sent--'to bear witness of that Light.' It is the
+noblest function that a man can discharge. It is a function that is
+discharged by the very existence through the ages of a community
+which, generation after generation, subsists, and generation after
+generation manifests in varying degrees of brightness, and with
+various modifications of tint, the same light. There is the family
+character in all true Christians, with whatever diversities of
+idiosyncrasies, and national life or ecclesiastical distinctions.
+Whether it be Francis of Assisi or John Wesley, whether it be Thomas a
+Kempis or George Fox, the light is one that shines through these
+many-coloured panes of glass, and the living Church is the witness of
+a living Lord, not only before it, and behind it, and above it, but
+living in it. They are 'light' because they are irradiated by Him.
+They are 'light' because they are 'in the Lord.' But not only by the
+fact of the existence of such a community is the witness-bearing
+effected, but it comes as a personal obligation, with immense weight
+of pressure and immense possibilities of joy in the discharge of it,
+to every Christian man and woman.
+
+What, then, is the witness that we all are bound to bear, and shall
+bear if we are true to our obligations and to our Lord? Mainly, dear
+brethren, the witness of experience. That a Christian man shall be
+able to stand up and say, 'I know this because I live it, and I
+testify to Jesus Christ because I for myself have found Him to be the
+life of my life, the Light of all my seeing, the joy of my heart, my
+home, and my anchorage'--that is the witness that is impregnable. And
+there is no better sign of the trend of Christian thought to-day than
+the fact that the testimony of experience is more and more coming to
+be recognised by thoughtful men and writers as being the sovereign
+attestation of the reality of the Light. 'I see'; that is the proof
+that light has touched my eyeballs. And when a man can contrast, as
+some of us can, our present vision with our erstwhile darkness, then
+the evidence, like that of the sturdy blind man in the Gospels, who
+had nothing to say in reply to the subtleties and Rabbinical traps and
+puzzles but only 'I was blind; now I see'--his experience is likely to
+have the effect that it had in another miracle of healing: 'Beholding
+the man which was healed standing amongst them, they could say nothing
+against it.' I should think they could not.
+
+But there is one thing that will always characterise the true
+witnesses to that Light, and that is self-suppression. Remember the
+beautiful, immovable humility of the Baptist about whom these texts
+were spoken: 'What sayest thou of thyself?' 'I am a Voice,' that is
+all. 'Art thou that Prophet?' 'No!' 'Art thou the Christ?' 'No! I am
+nothing but a Voice.' And remember how, when John's disciples tried to
+light the infernal fires of jealousy in his quiet heart by saying, 'He
+whom thou didst baptise, and to whom thou didst give witness'--He whom
+thou didst start on His career--'is baptising,' poaching upon thy
+preserves, 'and all men come unto Him,' the only answer that he gave
+was, 'The friend of the Bridegroom'--who stands by in a quiet, dark
+corner--'rejoices greatly because of the Bridegroom's voice.' Keep
+yourself out of sight, Christian teachers and preachers; put Christ in
+the front, and hide behind Him.
+
+II. Now let me ask you to look at the other contrast that is suggested
+by our other text. The underived light and the kindled lamps.
+
+It is possible to read the words of that second text thus--'He was a
+lamp kindled and (therefore) shining.' But whether that be the
+meaning, or whether the usual rendering is correct, the emblem itself
+carries the same thought, for a lamp must be lit by contact with a
+light, and must be fed with oil, if its flame is to be sustained. And
+so the very metaphor-whatever the force of the ambiguous word--in its
+eloquent contrast between the Light and the lamp, suggests this
+thought, that the one is underived, self-fed, and therefore undying,
+and that the other owes all its flame to the touch of that uncreated
+Light, and burns brightly only on condition of its keeping up the
+contact with Him, and being fed continually from His stores of
+radiance.
+
+I need not say more than a word with regard to the former member of
+that contrast suggested here. That unlit Light derives its brilliancy,
+according to the Scriptural teaching, from nothing but its divine
+union with the Father. So that long before there were eyes to see,
+there was the eradiation and outshining of the Father's glory. I do
+not enter into these depths, but this I would say, that what is called
+the 'originality' of Jesus is only explained when we reverently see in
+that unique life the shining through a pure humanity, as through a
+sheet of alabaster, of that underived, divine Light. Jesus is an
+insoluble problem to men who will not see in Him the Eternal Light
+which 'in the beginning was with God.' You find in Him no trace of
+gradual acquisition of knowledge, or of arguing or feeling His way to
+His beliefs. You find in Him no trace of consciousness of a great
+horizon of darkness encompassing the region where He sees light. You
+find in Him no trace of a recognition of other sources from which He
+has drawn any portion of His light. You find in Him the distinct
+declaration that His relation to truth is not the relation of men who
+learn, and grow, and acquire, and know in part; for, says He, 'I am
+the Truth.' He stands apart from us all, and above us all, in that He
+owes His radiance to none, and can dispense it to every man. The
+question which the puzzled Jews asked about Him, 'How knoweth this Man
+letters, having never learned?' may be widened out to all the
+characteristics of His human life. To me the only answer is: 'Thou art
+the King of glory, O Christ! Thou art the Everlasting Son of the
+Father.'
+
+Dependent on Him are the little lights which He has lit, and in the
+midst of which He walks. Union with Jesus Christ--'that Light'--is the
+condition of all human light. That is true over all regions, as I
+believe. 'The inspiration of the Almighty giveth understanding.' The
+candle of the Lord shines in every man, and 'that true Light lighteth
+every man that cometh into the world.' Thinker, student, scientist,
+poet, author, practical man--all of them are lit from the uncreated
+Source, and all of them, if they understand their own nature, would
+say, 'In Thy light do we see Light.'
+
+But especially is this great thought true and exemplified within the
+limits of the Christian life. For the Christian to be touched with
+Christ's Promethean finger is to flame into light. And the condition
+of continuing to shine is to continue the contact which first
+illuminated. A break in the contact, of a finger's breadth, is as
+effectual as one of a mile. Let Christian men and women, if they would
+shine, remember, 'Ye are light in the Lord'; and if we stray, and get
+without the circle of the Light, we pass into darkness, and ourselves
+cease to shine.
+
+Brethren, it is threadbare truth, that the condition of Christian
+vitality and radiance is close and unbroken contact with Jesus Christ,
+the Source of all light. Threadbare; but if we lived as if we believed
+it, the Church would be revolutionised and the world illuminated; and
+many a smoking wick would flash up into a blazing torch. Let Christian
+people remember that the words of my text define no special privilege
+or duty of any official or man of special endowments, but that to all
+of us has been said, 'Ye are My witnesses,' and to all of us is
+offered the possibility of being 'burning and shining lights' if we
+keep ourselves close to that Light.
+
+III. Lastly, the second of my texts suggests--the contrast between the
+Undying Light and the lamps that go out.
+
+'For a season ye were willing to rejoice in His light.' There is
+nothing in the present condition of the civilised and educated world
+more remarkable and more difficult for some people to explain than the
+contrast between the relation which Jesus Christ bears to the present
+age, and the relation which all other great names in the
+past--philosophers, poets, guides of men--bear to it. There is nothing
+in the world the least like the vividness, the freshness, the
+closeness, of the personal relation which thousands and thousands of
+people, with common sense in their heads, bear to that Man who died
+nineteen hundred years ago. All others pass, sooner or later, into the
+darkness. Thickening mists of oblivion, fold by fold, gather round the
+brightest names. But here is Jesus Christ, whom all classes of
+thinkers and social reformers have to reckon with to-day, who is a
+living power amongst the trivialities of the passing moment, and in
+whose words and in the teaching of whose life serious men feel that
+there lie undeveloped yet, and certainly not yet put into practice,
+principles which are destined to revolutionise society and change the
+world. And how does that come?
+
+I am not going to enter upon that question; I only ask you to think of
+the contrast between His position, in this generation, to communities
+and individuals, and the position of all other great names which lie
+in the past. Why, it does not take more than a lifetime such as mine,
+for instance, to remember how the great lights that shone seventy
+years ago in English thinking and in English literature, have for the
+most part gone out, and what we young men thought to be bright
+particular stars, this new generation pooh-poohs as mere exhalations
+from the marsh or twinkling and uncertain tapers, and you will find
+their books in the twopenny-box at the bookseller's door. A cynical
+diplomatist, in one of our modern dramas, sums it up, after seeing the
+death of a revolutionary, 'I have known eight leaders of revolts.' And
+some of us could say, 'We have known about as many guides of men who
+have been forgotten and passed away.' 'His Name shall endure for ever.
+His name shall continue as long as the sun, and men shall be blessed
+in Him; all generations shall call Him blessed.' Even Shelley had the
+prophecy forced from him--
+
+  'The moon of Mahomet
+  Arose and it shall set,
+  While blazoned as on heaven's eternal noon,
+  The Cross leads generations on.'
+
+We may sum up the contrast between the undying Light and the lamps
+that go out in the old words: 'They truly were many, because they were
+not suffered to continue by reason of death, but this Man, because He
+continueth ever... is able to save unto the uttermost them that come
+unto God through Him.'
+
+So, brethren, when lamps are quenched, let us look to the Light. When
+our own lives are darkened because our household light is taken from
+its candlestick, let us lift up our hearts and hopes to Him that
+abideth for ever. Do not let us fall into the folly, and commit the
+sin, of putting our heart's affections, our spirit's trust, upon any
+that can pass and that must change. We need a Person whom we can
+clasp, and who never will glide from our hold. We need a Light
+uncreated, self-fed, eternal. 'Whilst ye have the Light, believe in
+the Light, that ye may be the children of light.'
+
+
+
+
+'THREE TABERNACLES'
+
+'The Word ... dwelt among us.'--JOHN i. 14.
+
+'... He that sitteth on the Throne shall dwell among them.'--REV. vii.
+15.
+
+'... Behold, the Tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with
+them.'--REV. xxi. 3.
+
+The word rendered 'dwelt' in these three passages, is a peculiar one.
+It is only found in the New Testament--in this Gospel and in the Book
+of Revelation. That fact constitutes one of the many subtle threads of
+connection between these two books, which at first sight seem so
+extremely unlike each other; and it is a morsel of evidence in favour
+of the common authorship of the Gospel and of the Apocalypse, which
+has often, and very vehemently in these latter days of criticism, been
+denied.
+
+The force of the word, however, is the matter to which I desire
+especially to draw attention. It literally means 'to dwell in a tent,'
+or, if we may use such a word, 'to tabernacle,' and there is no doubt
+a reference to the Tabernacle in which the divine Presence abode in
+the wilderness and in the land of Israel before the erection. In all
+three passages, then, we may see allusion to that early symbolical
+dwelling of God with man. 'The Word tabernacled among us'; so is the
+truth for earth and time. 'He that sitteth upon the throne shall
+spread His tabernacle upon' the multitude which no man can number, who
+have made their robes white in the blood of the Lamb; that is the
+truth for the spirits of just men made perfect, the waiting Church,
+which expects the redemption of the body. 'God shall tabernacle with
+them'; that is the truth for the highest condition of humanity, when
+the Tabernacle of God shall be with redeemed men in the new earth.
+'Let us build three tabernacles,' one for the Incarnate Christ, one
+for the interspace between earth and heaven, and one for the
+culmination of all things. And it is to these three aspects of the one
+thought, set forth in rude symbol by the movable tent in the
+wilderness, that I ask you to turn now.
+
+I. First, then, we have to think of that Tabernacle for earth. 'The
+Word was made flesh, and dwelt, as in a tent, amongst us.'
+
+The human nature, the visible, material body of Jesus Christ, in which
+there enshrined itself the everlasting Word, which from the beginning
+was the Agent of all divine revelation, that is the true Temple of
+God. When we begin to speak about the special presence of Omnipresence
+in any one place, we soon lose ourselves, and get into deep waters of
+glory, where there is no standing. And I do not care to deal here with
+theological definitions or thorny questions, but simply to set forth,
+as the language of my text sets before us, that one transcendent,
+wonderful, all-blessed thought that this poor human nature is capable
+of, and has really once in the history of the world received into
+itself, the real, actual presence of the whole fulness of the
+Divinity. What must be the kindred and likeness between Godhood and
+manhood when into the frail vehicle of our humanity that wondrous
+treasure can be poured; when the fire of God can burn in the bush of
+our human nature, and that nature not be consumed? So it has been. 'In
+Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.'
+
+And when we come with our questions, How? In what manner? How can the
+lesser contain the greater? we have to be content with the recognition
+that the manner is beyond our fathoming, and to accept the fact,
+pressed upon our faith, that our hearts may grasp it and be at peace.
+God hath dwelt in humanity. The everlasting Word, who is the
+forthcoming of all the fulness of Deity into the realm of finite
+creatures, was made flesh and dwelt among us.
+
+But the Tabernacle was not only the dwelling-place of God, it was also
+and, therefore, the place of Revelation of God. So in our text there
+follows, 'we beheld His glory.' As in the tent in the wilderness there
+hovered between the outstretched wings of the silent cherubim, above
+the Mercy-seat, the brightness of the symbolical cloud which was
+expressly named 'the glory of God,' and was the visible manifestation
+of His real presence; so John would have us think that in that lowly
+humanity, with its curtains and its coverings of flesh, there lay
+shrined in the inmost place the brightness of the light of the
+manifest glory of God. 'We beheld His glory.' The rapturous adoration
+of the remembrance overcomes him, and he breaks his sentence, reckless
+of grammatical connection, as the fulness of the blessed memory floods
+into his soul. 'That glory was as of the Only Begotten of the Father.'
+The manifestation of God in Christ is unique, as becomes Him who
+partakes of the nature of that God of whom He is the Representative
+and the Revealer.
+
+And how did that glory make itself known to us? By miracle? Yes! As we
+read in the story of the first that Christ wrought, 'He manifested
+forth His glory and His disciples believed upon Him.' By miracle? Yes!
+As we read His own promise at the grave of Lazarus: 'Said I not unto
+thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of
+God?' But, blessed be His name, miracle is not the highest
+manifestation of Christ's glory and of God's. The uniqueness of the
+revelation of Christ's glory in God does not depend upon the deeds
+which He wrought. For, as the context goes on to tell, the Word which
+tabernacled among us was 'full of grace and truth,' and therein is the
+glory most gloriously revealed.
+
+The lambent light of stooping love that shone forth warning and
+attracting in His gentle life, and the clear white beam of unmingled
+truth that streamed from the radiant purity of Christ's life, revealed
+God to hearts that pine for love and spirits that hunger for truth, as
+no others of God's self-revealing works have done. And that revelation
+of the glory of God in the fulness of grace and truth is the highest
+possible revelation. For the divinest thing in God is love, and the
+true 'glory of God' is neither some symbolical flashing light nor the
+pomp of mere power and majesty; nor even those inconceivable and
+incommunicable attributes which we christen with names like
+Omnipotence and Omnipresence and Infinitude, and the like. These are
+all at the fringes of the brightness. The true central heart and
+lustrous light of the glory of God lie In His love, and of that glory
+Christ is the unique Representative and Revealer, because He is the
+only Begotten Son, and 'full of grace and truth.'
+
+Thus the Word tabernacled amongst us. And though the Tabernacle to
+outward seeming was covered by curtains and skins that hid all the
+glowing splendour within; yet in that lowly life that was lived in the
+body of His humiliation, and knew our limitations and our weaknesses,
+'the glory of the Lord was revealed; and all flesh hath seen it
+together' and acknowledged the divine Presence there.
+
+Still further the Tabernacle was the place of sacrifice. So in the
+tabernacle of His flesh Jesus offered up the one sacrifice for sins
+for ever. In the offering up of His human life in continuous
+obedience, and in the offering up of His body and blood in the bitter
+Passion of the Cross, He brought men nigh unto God.
+
+Therefore, because of all these things, because the Tabernacle is the
+dwelling-place of God, the place of revelation, and the place of
+sacrifice, therefore, finally is it the meeting-place betwixt God and
+man. In the Old Testament it is always called by the name which our
+Revised Version has accurately substituted for 'tabernacle of the
+congregation,' namely 'tent of meeting.' The correctness of that
+rendering and the meaning of the name are established by several
+passages in the Old Testament, as for instance, 'There I will meet
+with you, to speak there unto thee, and there I will meet with the
+children of Israel.' So in Christ, who by His Incarnation lays His
+hand upon both, God touches man and man touches God. We who are afar
+off are made nigh, and in that 'true tabernacle which the Lord pitched
+and not man' we meet God and are glad.
+
+  'And so the word was flesh, and wrought
+  With human hands the creed of creeds,
+  In loveliness of perfect deeds.'
+
+The temple for earth is 'the temple of His body.'
+
+II. We have the Tabernacle for the Heavens.
+
+In the context of our second passage we have a vision of the great
+multitude redeemed out of all nations and kindreds, 'standing before
+the Throne and before the Lamb, arrayed in white robes, and palms in
+their hands.' The palms in their hands give important help towards
+understanding the vision. As has been often remarked, there are no
+heathen emblems in the Book of the Apocalypse. All its metaphors move
+within the circle of Jewish experiences and facts. So that we are not
+to think of the Roman palm of victory, but of the Jewish palm which
+was borne at the Feast of Tabernacles. What was the Feast of
+Tabernacles? A festival established on purpose to recall to the minds
+and to the gratitude of the Jews settled in their own land the days of
+their wandering in the wilderness. Part of the ritual of it was that
+during its celebration they builded for themselves booths or
+tabernacles of leaves and boughs of trees, under which they dwelt,
+thus reminding themselves of their nomad condition.
+
+Now what beauty and power it gives to the word of my text, if we take
+in this allusion to the Jewish festival! The great multitude bearing
+the palms are keeping the feast, memorial of past wilderness
+wanderings; and 'He that sitteth on the throne shall spread His
+tabernacle above them,' as the word might be here rendered. That is to
+say, He Himself shall build and be the tent in which they dwell; He
+Himself shall dwell with them in it. He Himself, in closer union than
+can be conceived of here, shall keep them company during that feast.
+
+What a thought of that condition--the condition as I believe
+represented in this vision--of the spirits of the just made perfect,
+'who wait for the adoption, to wit, the resurrection of the body,' is
+given us if we take this point of view to interpret the whole lovely
+symbolism. It is all a time of glad, grateful remembrance of the
+wilderness march. It is all a time in which festal joys shall be
+theirs, and the memory of the trials and the weariness and the sorrow
+and the solitude that are past shall deepen to a more exquisite
+poignancy of delight, the rest and the fellowship and the felicity of
+that calm Presence, and God Himself shall spread His tent above them,
+lodge with them, and they with Him.
+
+And so, dear brethren, rest in that assurance, that though we know so
+little of that state, we know this: 'Absent from the body, present
+with the Lord,' and that the happy company who bear the palms shall
+dwell in God, and God in them.
+
+III. And now, lastly, look at that final vision which we have in these
+texts, which we may call the Tabernacle for the renewed earth.
+
+I do not pretend to interpret the scenery and the setting of these
+Apocalyptic visions with dogmatic confidence, but it seems to me as if
+the emblems of this final vision coincide with dim hints in many other
+portions of Scripture; to the effect that some cosmical change having
+passed upon this material world in which we dwell, it, in some
+regenerated form, shall be the final abode of a regenerated and
+redeemed humanity. That, I think, is the natural interpretation of a
+great deal of Scriptural teaching.
+
+For that highest condition there is set forth this as the
+all-sufficing light upon it. 'Behold, the Tabernacle of God is with
+men, and He will tabernacle with them.' The climax and the goal of all
+the divine working, and the long processes of God's love for, and
+discipline of, the world, are to be this, that He and men shall abide
+together in unity and concord. That is God's wish from the beginning.
+We read in one of the profound utterances of the Book of Proverbs how
+from of old the 'delights' of the Incarnate Wisdom which foreshadowed
+the Incarnate Word 'were with the sons of men.' And, at the close of
+all things, when the vision of this final chapter shall be fulfilled,
+God will say, settling Himself in the midst of a redeemed humanity,
+'Lo! here will I dwell, for I have desired it. This is My rest for
+ever.' He will tabernacle with men, and men with Him.
+
+We know not, and never shall know until experience strips the bandages
+from our eyes, what new methods of participation of the divine nature,
+and new possibilities of intimacy and intercourse with Him may be ours
+when the veils of flesh and sense and time have all dropped away. New
+windows may be opened in our spirits, from which we shall perceive new
+aspects of the divine character. New doors may be opened in our souls,
+from out of which we may pass to touch parts of His nature, all
+impalpable and inconceivable to us now. And when all the veils of a
+discordant moral nature are taken away, and we are pure, then we shall
+see, then we shall draw nigh to God. The thing that chiefly separates
+man from God is man's sin. When that is removed, the centrifugal force
+which kept our tiny orb apart from the great central sun being
+withdrawn, we shall, as it were, fall into the brightness and be one,
+not losing our sense of individuality, which would be to lose all the
+blessedness, but united with Him in a union far more intimate than
+earth can parallel. 'The Tabernacle of God shall be with men, and He
+will tabernacle with them.'
+
+Do not let us forget that this highest and ultimate hope that is held
+forth here, of the union and communion, perfect and perpetual, of
+humanity with God, does not sweep aside Jesus Christ. For through all
+eternity the Everlasting Word, the Christ who bears our nature in its
+glorified form, or, rather, whose nature in its glorified form we
+shall bear, is the Medium of Revelation, and the Medium of
+communication between man and God.
+
+'I saw no Temple therein,' says this final vision of the Apocalypse,
+but 'God Almighty and the Lamb,' and these are the Temples thereof.
+Therefore through eternity God shall tabernacle with men, as He does
+tabernacle with us now through Him, in whom dwelleth as in its
+perennial habitation, 'all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.'
+
+So we have the three tabernacles, for earth, for heaven, for the
+renewed earth; and these three, if I may say so, are like the triple
+division of that ancient Tabernacle in the wilderness: the Outer
+Court; the Holy Place; the Holiest of all. Let us enter into that
+outer court, and abide and commune with that God who comes near to us,
+revealing, forgiving, in the person of His Son, and then we shall pass
+from court to court, 'and go from strength to strength, until every
+one of us in Zion appear before God'; and enter into the Holiest of
+all, where 'within the veil' we shall receive splendours of revelation
+undreamed of here, and enjoy depths of communion to which the
+selectest moments of fellowship with God on earth are shallow and
+poor.
+
+
+
+
+THE FULNESS OF CHRIST
+
+'And of His fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.'--JOHN
+1.16.
+
+What a remarkable claim that is which the Apostle here makes for his
+Master! On the one side he sets His solitary figure as the universal
+Giver; on the other side are gathered the whole race of men,
+recipients from Him. As in the wilderness the children of Israel
+clustered round the rock from which poured out streams, copious enough
+for all the thirsty camp, John, echoing his Master's words, 'If any
+man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink,' here declares 'Of _His_
+fulness have _all we_ received.'
+
+I. Notice, then, the one ever full Source.
+
+The words of my text refer back to those of the fourteenth verse: 'The
+Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.' 'And
+of His fulness have all we received.' The 'fulness' here seems to mean
+that of which the Incarnate Word was full, the 'grace and truth' which
+dwelt without measure in Him; the unlimited and absolute completeness
+and abundance of divine powers and glories which 'tabernacled' in Him.
+And so the language of my text, both verbally and really, is
+substantially equivalent to that of the Apostle Paul. 'In Him dwelleth
+all the fulness of the Godhead bodily; and ye are complete in Him.'
+The whole infinite Majesty, and inexhaustible resources of the divine
+nature, were incorporated and insphered in that Incarnate Word from
+whom all men may draw.
+
+There are involved in that thought two ideas. One is the unmistakable
+assertion of the whole fulness of the divine nature as being in the
+Incarnate Word, and the other is that the whole fulness of the divine
+nature dwells in the Incarnate Word in order that men may get at it.
+
+The words of my text go back, as I said, to the previous verse; but
+notice what an advance upon that previous verse they present to us.
+There we read, 'We beheld His glory.' To _behold_ is much, but to
+_possess_ is more. It is much to say that Christ comes to manifest
+God, but that is a poor, starved account of the purpose of His coming,
+if that is all you have to say. He comes to manifest Him. Yes! but He
+comes to communicate Him, not merely to dazzle us with a vision, not
+merely to show us Him as from afar, not merely to make Him known to
+understanding or to heart; but to bestow--in no mere metaphor, but in
+simple, literal fact--the absolute possession of the divine nature.
+'We beheld His glory' is a reminiscence that thrills the Evangelist,
+though half a century has passed since the vision gleamed upon his
+eyes; but 'of His fulness have all we received' is infinitely and
+unspeakably more. And the manifestation was granted that the
+possession might be sure, for this is the very centre and heart of
+Christianity, that in Him who is Christianity God is not merely made
+known, but given; not merely beheld, but possessed.
+
+In order that that divine fulness might belong to us there was needed
+that the Word should be made flesh; and there was further needed that
+incarnation should be crowned by sacrifice, and that life should be
+perfected in death. The alabaster box had to be broken before the
+house could be filled with the odour of the ointment. If I may so say,
+the sack, the coarse-spun sack of Christ's humanity, had to be cut
+asunder in order that the wealth that was stored in it might be poured
+into our hands. God came near us in the life, but God became ours in
+the death, of His dear Son. Incarnation was needed for that great
+privilege--'we beheld His glory'; but the Crucifixion was needed in
+order to make possible the more wondrous prerogative: 'Of His fulness
+have all we received.' God gives Himself to men in the Christ whose
+life revealed and whose death imparted Him to the world.
+
+And so He is the sole Source. All men, in a very real sense, draw from
+His fulness. 'In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.' The
+life of the body and the life of the spirit willing, knowing, loving,
+all which makes life into light, all comes to us through that
+everlasting Word of God. And when that Word has 'become flesh and
+dwelt among us,' His gifts are not only the gifts of light and life,
+which all men draw from Him, but the gifts of grace and truth which
+all those who love Him receive at His hands. His gifts, like the water
+from some fountain, may flow underground into many of the pastures of
+the wilderness; and many a man is blessed by them who knows not from
+whence they come. It is He from whom all the truth, all the grace
+which illuminates and blesses humanity, flow into all lands in all
+ages.
+
+II. Consider, then, again, the many receivers from the one Source. 'Of
+His fulness have all we received.'
+
+Observe, we are not told definitely what it is that we receive. If we
+refer back to words in a previous verse, they may put us on the right
+track for answering the question, What is it that we get? 'He came
+unto His own,' says verse 11, 'and His own received Him not; but as
+many as received Him, to them gave He power,' etc. That answers the
+question, What do we receive? Christ is more than all His gifts. All
+His gifts are treasured up in Him and inseparable from Him. We get
+Jesus Christ Himself.
+
+The blessings that we receive may be stated in many different ways.
+You may say we get pardon, purity, hope, joy, the prospect of Heaven,
+power for service; all these and a hundred more designations by which
+we might describe the one gift. All these are but the consequences of
+our having got the Christ within our hearts. He does not give pardon
+and the rest, as a king might give pardon and honours, a thousand
+miles off, bestowing it by a mere word, upon some criminal, but He
+gives all that He gives because He gives Himself. The real possession
+that we receive is neither more nor less than a loving Saviour, to
+enter our spirits and abide there, and be the spirit of our spirits,
+and the life of our lives.
+
+Then, notice the universality of this possession. John has said, in
+the previous words, '_We_ beheld His glory.' He refers there, of
+course, to the comparatively small circle of the eye-witnesses of our
+Master's life; who, at the time when he wrote, must have been very,
+very few in number. They had had the prerogative of seeing with their
+eyes and handling with their hands the Word of life that 'was
+manifested unto us'; and with that prerogative the duty of bearing
+witness of Him to the rest of men. But in the 'receiving,' John
+associates with himself, and with the other eyewitnesses, all those
+who had listened to their word, and had received the truth in the love
+of it. '_We beheld' refers to the narrower circle; 'we _all_ received'
+to the wider sweep of the whole Church. There is no exclusive class,
+no special prerogative. Every Christian man, the weakest, the
+lowliest, the most uncultured, rude, ignorant, foolish, the most
+besotted in the past, who has wandered furthest away from the Master;
+whose spirit has been most destitute of all sparks of goodness and of
+God--receives from out of His fulness. 'If any man have not the Spirit
+of Christ he is none of His.' And every one of us, if we will, may
+have dwelling in our hearts, in the greatness of His strength, in the
+sweetness of His love, in the clearness of His illuminating wisdom,
+the Incarnate Word, the Comforter, the All-in-all whom 'we all
+receive.'
+
+And, as I said, that word 'all' might have even a wider extension
+without going beyond the limits of the truth. For on the one side
+there stands Christ, the universal Giver; and grouped before Him, in
+all attitudes of weakness and of want, is gathered the whole race of
+mankind. And from Him there pours out a stream copious enough to
+supply all the necessities of every human soul that lives to-day, of
+every human soul that has lived in the past, of every one that shall
+live in the future. There is no limit to the universality except only
+the limit of the human will: 'Whosoever will, let him take the water
+of life freely.'
+
+Think of that solitary figure of the Christ reared up, as it were,
+before the whole race of man, as able to replenish all their emptiness
+with His fulness, and to satisfy all their thirst with His
+sufficiency. Dear brother! you have a great gaping void in your
+heart--an aching emptiness there, which you know better than I can
+tell you. Look to Him who can fill it and it shall be filled. He can
+supply all your wants as He can supply all the wants of every soul of
+man. And after generations have drawn from Him, the water will not
+have sunk one hairsbreadth in the great fountain, but there will be
+enough for all coming eternities as there has been enough for all past
+times. He is like His own miracle--the thousands are gathered on the
+grass, they do 'all eat and are filled.' As their necessities required
+the bread was multiplied, and at the last there was more left than
+there had seemed to be at the beginning. So 'of His fulness have all
+we received'; and after a universe has drawn from it, for an Eternity,
+the fulness is not turned into scantiness or emptiness.
+
+III. And so, lastly, notice the continuous flow from the inexhaustible
+Source. 'Of His fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.'
+
+The word 'for' is a little singular. Of course it means _instead of,
+in exchange for_; and the Evangelist's idea seems to be that as one
+supply of grace is given and used, it is, as it were, given back to
+the Bestower, who substitutes for it a fresh and unused vessel, filled
+with new grace. He might have said, grace _upon_ grace; one supply
+being piled upon the other. But his notion is, rather, one supply
+given in substitution for the other, 'new lamps for old ones.'
+
+Just as a careful gardener will stand over a plant that needs water,
+and will pour the water on the surface until the earth has drunk it
+up, and then add a little more; so He gives step by step, grace for
+grace, an uninterrupted bestowal, yet regulated according to the
+absorbing power of the heart that receives it. Underlying that great
+thought are two things: the continuous communication of grace, and the
+progressive communication of grace. We have here the continuous
+communication of grace. God is always pouring Himself out upon us in
+Christ. There is a perpetual out flow from Him to us: if there is not
+a perpetual inflow into us from Him it is our fault, and not His. He
+is always giving, and His intention is that our lives shall be a
+continual reception. Are they? How many Christian men there are whose
+Christian lives at the best are like some of those Australian or
+Siberian rivers; in the dry season, a pond here, a stretch of sand,
+waterless and barren there, then another place with a drop of muddy
+water in some hollow, and then another stretch of sand, and so on. Why
+should not the ponds be linked together by a flashing stream? God is
+always pouring Himself out; why do we not always take Him in?
+
+There is but one answer, and the answer is, that we do not fulfil the
+condition, which condition is simple faith. 'As many as received Him,
+to them gave He power to become the sons of God; even to them that
+believed on His name.' Faith is the condition of receiving, and
+wherever there is a continuous trust there will be an unbroken grace;
+and wherever there are interrupted gifts it is because there has been
+an intermitted trust in Him. Do not let your lives be like some dimly
+lighted road, with a lamp here, and a stretch of darkness, and then
+another twinkling light; let the light run all along the side of your
+path, because at every moment your heart is turning to Christ with
+trust. Make your faith continuous, and God will make His grace
+incessant, and out of His fulness you will draw continual supplies of
+needed strength.
+
+But not only have we here the notion of continuous, but also, as it
+seems to me, of progressive gifts. Each measure of Christ received, if
+we use it aright, makes us capable of possessing more of Christ. And
+the measure of our capacity is the measure of His gift, and the more
+we can hold the more we shall get. The walls of our hearts are
+elastic, the vessel expands by being filled out; it throbs itself
+wider by desire and faith. The wider we open our mouths the larger
+will be the gift that God puts into them. Each measure and stage of
+grace utilised and honestly employed will make us capable and
+desirous, and, therefore, possessors, of more and more of the grace
+that He gives. So the ideal of the Christian life, and God's intention
+concerning us, is not only that we should have an uninterrupted, but a
+growing possession, of Christ and of His grace.
+
+Is that the case with you, my friend? Can you hold more of God than
+you could twenty years ago? Is there any more capacity in your soul
+for more of Christ than there was long, long ago? If there is you have
+more of Him; if you have not more of Him it is because you cannot
+contain more; and you cannot contain more because you have not desired
+more, and because you have been so wretchedly unfaithful in your use
+of what you had. The ideal is, 'they go from strength to strength,'
+and the end of that is, 'every one of them appeareth before God.'
+
+So, dear brother, as the dash of the waves will hollow out some little
+indentation on the coast, and make it larger and larger until there is
+a great bay, with its headlands miles apart, and its deep bosom
+stretching far into the interior, and all the expanse full of flashing
+waters and leaping waves, so the giving Christ works a place for
+Himself in a man's heart, and makes the spirit which receives and
+faithfully uses the gifts which He brings, capable of more of Himself,
+and fills the widened space with larger gifts and new grace.
+
+Only remember the condition of having Him is trusting to His name and
+longing for His presence. 'If any man open the door I will come in.'
+We have Him if we trust Him. That trust is no mere passive reception,
+such as is the case with some empty jar which lies open-mouthed on the
+shore and lets the sea wash into it and out of it, as may happen. But
+the 'receive' of our text might be as truly rendered 'take.' Faith is
+an active taking, not a passive receiving. We must 'lay hold on
+eternal life.' Faith is the hand that grasps the offered gift, the
+mouth that feeds upon the bread of God, the voice that says to Christ,
+'Come in, Thou blessed of the Lord; why standest Thou without?' Such a
+faith alone brings us into vital connection with Jesus. Without it,
+you will be none the richer for all His fulness, and may perish of
+famine in the midst of plenty, like a man dying of hunger outside the
+door of a granary. They who believe take the Saviour who is given, and
+they who take receive, and they who receive obtain day by day growing
+grace from the fulness of Christ, and so come ever nearer to the
+realisation of the ultimate purpose of the Father, that they should be
+'filled with all the fulness of God.'
+
+
+
+
+GRACE AND TRUTH
+
+'The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus
+Christ.'--JOHN 1. 17.
+
+There are scarcely any traces, in the writings of the Apostle John, of
+that great controversy as to the relation of the Law and the Gospel
+which occupied and embittered so much of the work of the Apostle Paul.
+We have floated into an entirely different region in John's writings.
+The old controversies are dead--settled, I suppose, mainly by Paul's
+own words, and also to a large extent by the logic of events. This
+verse is almost the only one in which John touches upon that extinct
+controversy, and here the Law is introduced simply as a foil to set
+off the brightness of the Gospel. All artists know the value of
+contrast in giving prominence. A dark background flashes up brighter
+colours into brilliancy. White is never so white as when it is
+relieved against black. And so here the special preciousness and
+distinctive peculiarities of what we receive in Christ are made more
+vivid and more distinct by contrast with what in old days 'was given
+by Moses.'
+
+Every word in this verse is significant. 'Law' is set against 'grace
+and truth.' It was 'given'; they 'came.' Moses is contrasted with
+Christ. So we have a threefold antithesis as between Law and Gospel:
+in reference to their respective contents; in reference to the manner
+of their communication; and in reference to the person of their
+Founders. And I think, if we look at these three points, we shall get
+some clear apprehension of the glories of that Gospel which the
+Apostle would thereby commend to our affection and to our faith.
+
+I. First of all, then, we have here the special glory of the contents
+of the Gospel heightened by the contrast with Law.
+
+Law has no tenderness, no pity, no feeling. Tables of stone and a pen
+of iron are its fitting vehicles. Flashing lightnings and rolling
+thunders symbolise the fierce light which it casts upon men's duty and
+the terrors of its retribution. Inflexible, and with no compassion for
+human weakness, it tells us what we ought to be, but it does not help
+us to be it. It 'binds heavy burdens, and grievous to be borne,' upon
+men's consciences, but puts not forth 'the tip of a finger' to enable
+men to bear them. And this is true about law in all forms, whether it
+be the Mosaic Law, or whether it be the law of our own country, or
+whether it be the laws written upon men's consciences. These all
+partake of the one characteristic, that they help nothing to the
+fulfilment of their own behests, and that they are barbed with
+threatenings of retribution. Like some avenging goddess, law comes
+down amongst men, terrible in her purity, awful in her beauty, with a
+hard light in her clear grey eyes--in the one hand the tables of
+stone, bearing the commandments which we have broken, and in the other
+a sharp two-edged sword.
+
+And this is the opposite of all that comes to us in the Gospel. The
+contrast divides into two portions. The 'Law' is set against 'grace
+and truth.' Let us look at these two in order.
+
+What we have in Christ is not law, but grace. Law, as I said, has no
+heart; the meaning of the Gospel is the unveiling of the heart of God.
+Law commands and demands; it says: 'This shalt thou do, or else--';
+and it has nothing more that it can say. What is the use of standing
+beside a lame man, and pointing to a shining summit, and saying to
+him, 'Get up there, and you will breathe a purer atmosphere'? He is
+lying lame at the foot of it. There is no help for any soul in law.
+Men are not perishing because they do not know what they ought to do.
+Men are not bad because they doubt as to what their duty is. The worst
+man in the world knows a great deal more of what he ought to do than
+the best man in the world practises. So it is not for want of precepts
+that so many of us are going to destruction, but it is for want of
+power to fulfil the precepts.
+
+Grace is love giving. Law demands, grace bestows. Law comes saying 'Do
+this,' and our consciences respond to the imperativeness of the
+obligation. But grace comes and says, 'I will help thee to do it.' Law
+is God requiring; grace is God bestowing. 'Give what Thou commandest,
+and then command what Thou wilt.'
+
+Oh, brethren! we have all of us written upon the fleshly tablets of
+our hearts solemn commandments which we know are binding upon us; and
+which we sometimes would fain keep, but cannot. Is this not a message
+of hope and blessedness that comes to us? Grace has drawn near in
+Jesus Christ, and a giving God, who bestows upon us a life that will
+unfold itself in accordance with the highest law, holds out the
+fulness of His gift in that Incarnate Word. Law has no heart; the
+Gospel is the unveiling of the heart of God. Law commands; grace is
+God bestowing Himself.
+
+And still further, law condemns. Grace is love that bends down to an
+evildoer, and deals not on the footing of strict retribution with the
+infirmities and the sins of us poor weaklings. And so, seeing that no
+man that lives but hears in his heart an accusing voice, and that
+every one of us knows what it is to gaze upon lofty duties that we
+have shrunk from, upon plain obligations from the yoke of which we
+have selfishly and cowardly withdrawn our necks; seeing that every
+man, woman, and child listening to me now has, lurking in some corner
+of their hearts, a memory that only needs to be quickened to be a
+torture, and deeds that only need to have the veil drawn away from
+them to terrify and shame them--oh! surely it ought to be a word of
+gladness for every one of us that, in front of any law that condemns
+us, stands forth the gentle, gracious form of the Christ that brings
+pardon, and 'the grace of God that bringeth salvation unto all men.'
+Thank God! law needed to be 'given,' but it was only the foundation on
+which was to be reared a better thing. 'The law was given By
+Moses'--'a schoolmaster,' as conscience is to-day, 'to bring us to
+Christ' by whom comes the grace that loves, that stoops, that gives,
+and that pardons.
+
+Still further, there is another antithesis here. The Gospel which
+comes by Christ is not law, but truth. The object of law is to
+regulate conduct, and only subordinately to inform the mind or to
+enlighten the understanding. The Mosaic Law had for its foundation, of
+course, a revelation of God. But that revelation of God was less
+prominent, proportionately, than the prescription for man's conduct.
+The Gospel is the opposite of this. It has for its object the
+regulation of conduct; but that object is less prominent,
+proportionately, than the other, the manifestation and the revelation
+of God. The Old Testament says 'Thou shalt'; the New Testament says
+'God is.' The Old was Law; the New is Truth.
+
+And so we may draw the inference, on which I do not need to dwell, how
+miserably inadequate and shallow a conception of Christianity that is
+which sets it forth as being mainly a means of regulating conduct, and
+how false and foolish that loose talk is that we hear many a
+time.--'Never mind about theological subtleties; conduct is the main
+thing.' Not so. The Gospel is not law; the Gospel is truth. It is a
+revelation of God to the understanding and to the heart, in order that
+thereby the will may be subdued, and that then the conduct may be
+shaped and moulded. But let us begin where it begins, and let us
+remember that the morality of the New Testament has never long been
+held up high and pure, where the theology of the New Testament has
+been neglected and despised. 'The law came by Moses; truth came by
+Jesus Christ.'
+
+But, still further, let me remind you that, in the revelation of a God
+who is gracious, giving to our emptiness and forgiving our sins--that
+is to say, in the revelation of grace--we have a far deeper, nobler,
+more blessed conception of the divine nature than in law. It is great
+to think of a righteous God, it is great and ennobling to think of One
+whose pure eyes cannot look upon sin, and who wills that men should
+live pure and noble and Godlike lives. But it is far more and more
+blessed, transcending all the old teaching, when we sit at the feet of
+the Christ who gives, and who pardons, and look up into His deep eyes,
+with the tears of compassion shining in them, and say: 'Lo! This is
+our God! We have waited for Him and He will save us.' That is a better
+truth, a deeper truth than prophets and righteous men of old
+possessed; and to us there has come, borne on the wings of the mighty
+angel of His grace, the precious revelation of the Father-God whose
+heart is love. 'The law was given by Moses,' but brighter than the
+gleam of the presence between the Cherubim is the lambent light of
+gentle tenderness that shines from the face of Jesus Christ. Grace,
+and therefore truth, a deeper truth, came by Him.
+
+And, still further, let me remind you of how this contrast is borne
+out by the fact that all that previous system was an adumbration, a
+shadow and a premonition of the perfect revelation that was to come.
+Temple, priest, sacrifice, law, the whole body of the Mosaic
+constitution of things was, as it were, a shadow thrown along the road
+in advance by the swiftly coming King. The shadow fell before Him, but
+when He came the shadow disappeared. The former was a system of types,
+symbols, pictures. Here is the reality that antiquates and fulfils and
+transcends them all. 'The law was given by Moses; grace and truth came
+by Jesus Christ.'
+
+II. Now, secondly, look at the other contrast that is here, between
+giving and coming.
+
+I do not know that I have quite succeeded in making clear to my own
+mind the precise force of this antithesis. Certainly there is a
+profound meaning if one can fathom it; perhaps one might put it best
+in something like the following fashion.
+
+The word rendered 'came' might be more correctly translated 'became,'
+or 'came into being.' The law was _given_; grace and truth _came to
+be_.
+
+Now, what do we mean when we talk about a law being given? We simply
+mean, I suppose, that it is promulgated, either in oral or in written
+words. It is, after all, no more than so many words. It is given when
+it is spoken or published. It is a verbal communication at the best.
+'But grace and truth came to be.' They are realities; they are not
+words. They are not communicated by sentences, they are actual
+existences; and they spring into being as far as man's historical
+possession and experience of them are concerned--they spring into
+being in Jesus Christ, and through Him they belong to us all. Not that
+there was no grace, no manifest lore of God, in the world, nor any
+true knowledge of Him before the Incarnation, but the earlier portions
+of this chapter remind us that all of grace, however restrained and
+partial, that all of truth, however imperfect and shadowy it may have
+been, which were in the world before Christ came, were owing to the
+operation of that Eternal Word 'Who became flesh and dwelt among us,'
+and that these, in comparison with the affluence and the fulness and
+the nearness of grace and truth after Christ's coming, were so small
+and remote that it is not an exaggeration to say that, as far as man's
+possession and experience of them are concerned, the giving love of
+God and the clear and true knowledge of His deep heart of tenderness
+and grace, sprang into being with the historical manifestation of
+Jesus Christ the Lord.
+
+He comes to reveal by no words. His gift is not like the gift that
+Moses brought down from the mountain, merely a writing upon tables;
+His gift is not the letter of an outward commandment, nor the letter
+of an outward revelation. It is the thing itself which He reveals by
+being it. He does not speak about grace, He brings it; He does not
+show us God by His words, He shows us God by His acts. He does not
+preach about Him, but He lives Him, He manifests Him. His gentleness,
+His compassion, His miracles, His wisdom, His patience, His tears, His
+promises; all these are the very Deity in action before our eyes; and
+instead of a mere verbal revelation, which is so imperfect and so
+worthless, grace and truth, the living realities, are flashed upon a
+darkened world in the face of Jesus Christ. How cold, how hard, how
+superficial, in comparison with that fleshly table of the heart of
+Christ on which grace and truth were written, are the stony tables of
+law, which bore after all, for all their majesty, only words which are
+breath and nothing besides.
+
+III. And so, lastly, look at the contrast that is drawn here between
+the persons of the Founders.
+
+I do not suppose that we are to take into consideration the difference
+between the limitations of the one and the completeness of the other.
+I do not suppose that the Apostle was thinking about the difference
+between the reluctant service of the Lawgiver and the glad obedience
+of the Son; or between the passion and the pride that sometimes marred
+Moses' work, and the continual calmness and patient meekness that
+perfected the sacrifice of Jesus. Nor do I suppose that there flashed
+before his memory the difference between that strange tomb where God
+buried the prophet, unknown of men, in the stern solitude of the
+desert, true symbol of the solemn mystery and awful solitude with
+which the law which we have broken invests death, to our trembling
+consciences, and the grave in the garden with the spring flowers
+bursting round it, and visited by white-robed angels, who spoke
+comfort to weeping friends, true picture of what His death makes the
+grave for all His followers.
+
+But I suppose he was mainly thinking of the contrast between the
+relation of Moses to his law, and of Christ to His Gospel. Moses was
+but a medium. His personality had nothing to do with his message. You
+may take away Moses, and the law stands all the same. But Christ is so
+interwoven with Christ's message that you cannot rend the two apart;
+you cannot have the figure of Christ melt away, and the gift that
+Christ brought remain. If you extinguish the sun you cannot keep the
+sunlight; if you put away Christ in the fulness of His manhood and of
+His divinity, in the power of His Incarnation and the omnipotence of
+His cross--if you put away Christ from Christianity, it collapses into
+dust and nothingness.
+
+So, dear brethren, do not let any of us try that perilous experiment.
+You cannot melt away Jesus and keep grace and truth. You cannot tamper
+with His character, with His nature, with the mystery of His passion,
+with the atoning power of His cross, and preserve the blessings that
+He has brought to the world. If you want the grace which is the
+unveiling of the heart of God, the gift of a giving God and the pardon
+of a forgiving Judge; or if you want the truth, the reality of the
+knowledge of Him, you can only get them by accepting Christ. 'I _am_
+the Truth, and the Way, and the Life.' There _is_ a 'law given which
+gives life,' and 'righteousness _is_ by that law.' There is a Person
+who is the Truth, and our knowledge of the truth is through that
+Person, and through Him alone. By humble faith receive Him into your
+hearts, and He will come bringing to you the fulness of grace and
+truth.
+
+
+
+
+THE WORLD'S SIN-BEARER
+
+'The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold the
+Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.'--JOHN i. 29.
+
+Our Lord, on returning from His temptation in the wilderness, came
+straight to John the Baptist. He was welcomed with these wonderful and
+rapturous words, familiarity with which has deadened our sense of
+their greatness. How audacious they would sound to some of their first
+hearers! Think of these two, one of them a young Galilean carpenter,
+to whom His companion witnesses and declares that He is of worldwide
+and infinite significance. It was the first public designation of
+Jesus Christ, and it throws into exclusive prominence one aspect of
+His work.
+
+John the Baptist summing up the whole of former revelation which
+concentrated in Him, pointed a designating finger to Jesus and said,
+'That is He!' My text is the sum of all Christian teaching ever since.
+My task, and that of all preachers, if we understand it aright, is but
+to repeat the same message, and to concentrate attention on the same
+fact--'The Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.' It is
+the one thing needful for you, dear friend, to believe. It is the
+truth that we all need most of all. There is no reason for our being
+gathered together now, except that I may beseech you to behold for
+yourselves the Lamb of God which takes away the world's sin.
+
+I. Now let me ask you to note, first, that Jesus Christ is the world's
+sin-bearer.
+
+The significance of the first clause of my text, 'the Lamb of God,' is
+deplorably weakened if it is taken to mean only, or mainly, that Jesus
+Christ, in the sweetness of His human nature, is gentle and meek and
+patient and innocent and pure. It _does_ mean all that, thank God! But
+it was no mere description of Christ's disposition which John the
+Baptist conceived himself to be uttering, as is clear by the words
+that follow in the next clause. His reason for selecting (under divine
+guidance, as I believe) that image of 'the Lamb of God,' went a great
+deal deeper than anything in the temper of the Person of whom he was
+speaking. Many streams of ancient prophecy and ritual converge upon
+this emblem, and if we want to understand what is meant by the
+designation 'the Lamb of God,' we must not content ourselves with the
+sentimentalisms which some superficial teachers have supposed to
+exhaust the significance of the expression; but we must submit to be
+led back by John, who was the summing up of all the ancient
+Revelation, to the sources in that Revelation from which he drew this
+metaphor.
+
+First and chiefest of these, as I take it, are the words which no Jew
+ever doubted referred to the Messiah, until after He had come, and the
+Rabbis would not believe in Him, and so were bound to hunt up another
+interpretation--I mean the great words in the prophecy which, I
+suppose, is familiar to most of us, where there are found two
+representations, one, 'He was led as a Lamb to the slaughter, and as a
+sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He opened not His mouth'; and
+the other, still more germane to the purpose of my text, 'the Lord
+hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.... By His knowledge shall He
+justify many, for He shall bear their iniquities.' John the Baptist,
+looking back through the ages to that ancient prophetic utterance,
+points to the young Man standing by his side, and says, 'There it is
+fulfilled.'
+
+But the prophetic symbol of the Lamb, and the thought that He bore the
+iniquity of the many, had their roots in the past, and pointed back to
+the sacrificial lamb, the lamb of the daily sacrifice, and especially
+to the lamb slain at the Passover, which was an emblem and sacrament
+of deliverance from bondage. Thus the conceptions of vicarious
+suffering, and of a death which is a deliverance, and of blood which,
+sprinkled on the doorposts, guards the house from the destroying
+angel, are all gathered into these words.
+
+Nor do these exhaust the sources of this figure, as it comes from the
+venerable and sacred past. For when we read 'the Lamb _of God_,' who
+is there that does not recognise, unless his eyes are blinded by
+obstinate prejudice, a glance backward to that sweet and pathetic
+story when the father went up with his son to the top of Mount Moriah,
+and to the boy's question, 'Where is the lamb?' answered, 'My son, God
+Himself will provide the lamb!' John says, 'Behold the Lamb that God
+_has_ provided, the Sacrifice, on whom is laid a world's sins, and who
+bears them away.'
+
+Note, too, the universality of the power of Christ's sacrificial work.
+John does not say 'the _sins_,' as the Litany, following an imperfect
+translation, makes him say. But he says, 'the _sin_ of the world,' as
+if the whole mass of human transgression was bound together, in one
+black and awful bundle, and laid upon the unshrinking shoulders of
+this better Atlas who can bear it all, and bear it all away. Your sin,
+and mine, and every man's, they were all laid upon Jesus Christ.
+
+Now remember, dear brethren, that in this wondrous representation
+there lie, plain and distinct, two things which to me, and I pray they
+may be to you, are the very foundation of the Gospel to which we have
+to trust. One is that on Christ Jesus, in His life and in His death,
+were laid the guilt and the consequences of a world's sin. I do not
+profess to be ready with an explanation of how that is possible. That
+it is a fact I believe, on the authority of Christ Himself and of
+Scripture; that it is inconsistent with the laws of human nature may
+be asserted, but never can be proved. Theories manifold have been
+invented in order to make it plain. I do not know that any of them
+have gone to the bottom of the bottomless. But Christ in His perfect
+manhood, wedded, as I believe it is, to true divinity, is capable of
+entering into--not merely by sympathy, though that has much to do with
+it--such closeness of relation with human kind, and with every man, as
+that on Him can be laid the iniquity of us all.
+
+Oh, brethren! what was the meaning of 'I have a baptism to be baptized
+with,' unless the cold waters of the flood into which He unshrinkingly
+stepped, and allowed to flow over Him, were made by the gathered
+accumulation of the sins of the whole world? What was the meaning of
+the agony in Gethsemane? What was the meaning of that most awful word
+ever spoken by human lips, in which the consciousness of union with,
+and of separation from, God, were so marvellously blended, 'My God! my
+God! why hast Thou forsaken Me?' unless the Guiltless was then loaded
+with the sins of the world, which rose between Him and God?
+
+Dear friends, it seems to me that unless this transcendent element be
+fairly recognised as existing in the passion and death of Jesus
+Christ, His demeanour when He came to die was far less heroic and
+noble and worthy of imitation than have been the deaths of hundreds of
+people who drew all their strength to die from Him. I do not venture
+to bring a theory, but I press upon you the fact, He bears the sins of
+the world, and in that awful load are yours and mine.
+
+There is the other truth here, as clearly, and perhaps more directly,
+meant by the selection of the expression in my text, that the
+Sin-bearer not only carries, but carries _away_, the burden that is
+laid upon Him. Perhaps there may be a reference--in addition to the
+other sources of the figure which I have indicated as existing in
+ritual, and prophecy, and history--there may be a reference in the
+words to yet another of the eloquent symbols of that ancient system
+which enshrined truths that were not peculiar to any people, but were
+the property of humanity. You remember, no doubt, the singular
+ceremonial connected with the scapegoat, and many of you will recall
+the wonderful embodiment of it given by the Christian genius of a
+modern painter. The sins of the nation were symbolically laid upon its
+head, and it was carried out to the edge of the wilderness and driven
+forth to wander alone, bearing away upon itself into the darkness and
+solitude--far from man and far from God--the whole burden of the
+nation's sins. Jesus Christ takes away the sin which He bears, and
+there is, as I believe, only one way by which individuals, or society,
+or the world at large, can thoroughly get rid of the guilt and penal
+consequences and of the dominion of sin, and that is, by beholding the
+Lamb of God that takes upon Himself, that He may carry away out of
+sight, the sin of the world. So much, then, for the first thought that
+I wish to suggest to you.
+
+II. Now let me ask you to look with me at a second thought, that such
+a world's Sin-bearer is the world's deepest need.
+
+The sacrifices of every land witness to the fact that humanity all
+over the world, and through all the ages, and under all varieties of
+culture, has been dimly conscious that its deepest need was that the
+fact of sin should be dealt with. I know that there are plenty of
+modern ingenious ways of explaining the universal prevalence of an
+altar and a sacrifice, and the slaying of innocent creatures, on other
+grounds, some of which I think it is not uncharitable to suppose are
+in favour mainly because they weaken this branch of the evidence for
+the conformity of Christian truth with human necessities. But
+notwithstanding these, I venture to affirm, with all proper submission
+to wiser men, that you cannot legitimately explain the universal
+prevalence of sacrifice, unless you take into account as one--I should
+say the main--element in it, this universally diffused sense that
+things are wrong between man and the higher Power, and need to be set
+right even by such a method.
+
+But I do not need to appeal only to this world-wide fact as being a
+declaration of what man's deepest need is. I would appeal to every
+man's own consciousness--hard though it be to get at it; buried as it
+is, with some of us, under mountains of indifference and neglect; and
+callous as it is with many of us by reason of indulgence in habits of
+evil. I believe that in every one of us, if we will be honest, and
+give heed to the inward voice, there does echo a response and an amen
+to the Scripture declaration, 'God hath shut up all under sin.' I ask
+you about yourselves, is it not so? Do you not know that, however you
+may gloss over the thing, or forget it amidst a whirl of engagements
+and occupations, or try to divert your thoughts into more or less
+noble or ignoble channels of pleasures and pursuits, there does lie,
+in each of our hearts, the sense, dormant often, but sometimes like a
+snake in its hybernation, waking up enough to move, and sometimes
+enough to sting--there does lie, in each of us, the consciousness that
+we are wrong with God, and need something to put us right?
+
+And, brethren, let modern philanthropists of all sorts take this
+lesson: The thing that the world wants is to have sin dealt
+with--dealt with in the way of conscious forgiveness; dealt with in
+the way of drying up its source, and delivering men from the power of
+it. Unless you do that, I do not say you do nothing, but you pour a
+bottle full of cold water into Vesuvius, and try to put the fire out
+with that. You may educate, you may cultivate, you may refine; you may
+set political and economical arrangements right in accordance with the
+newest notions of the century, and what then? Why! the old thing will
+just begin over again, and the old miseries will appear again, because
+the old grandmother of them all is there, the sin that has led to
+them.
+
+Now do not misunderstand me, as if I were warring against good and
+noble men who are trying to remedy the world's evils by less thorough
+methods than Christ's Gospel. They will do a great deal. But you may
+have high education, beautiful refinement of culture and manners; you
+may divide out political power in accordance with the most democratic
+notions; you may give everybody 'a living wage,' however extravagant
+his notions of a living wage may be. You may carry out all these
+panaceas and the world will groan still, because you have not dealt
+with the tap-root of all the mischief. You cannot cure an internal
+cancer with a plaster upon the little finger, and you will never
+stanch the world's wounds until you go to the Physician that has balm
+and bandage, even Jesus Christ, that takes away the sins of the world.
+I profoundly distrust all these remedies for the world's misery as in
+themselves inadequate, even whilst I would help them all, and regard
+them all as then blessed and powerful, when they are consequences and
+secondary results of the Gospel, the first task of which is to deal by
+forgiveness and by cleansing with individual transgression.
+
+And if I might venture to go a step further, I would like to say that
+this aspect of our Lord's work on which John the Baptist concentrated
+all our attention is the only one which gives Him power to sway men,
+and which makes the Gospel--the record of His work--the kingly power
+in the world that it is meant to be. Depend upon it, that in the
+measure in which Christian teachers fail to give supreme importance to
+that aspect of Christ's work they fail altogether. There are many
+other aspects which, as I have just said, follow in my conception from
+this first one; but if, as is obviously the tendency in many quarters
+to-day, Christianity be thought of as being mainly a means of social
+improvement, or if its principles of action be applied to life without
+that basis of them all, in the Cross which takes away the world's
+iniquity, then it needs no prophet to foretell that such a
+Christianity will only have superficial effects, and that, in losing
+sight of this central thought, it will have cast away all its power.
+
+I beseech you, dear brethren, remember that Jesus Christ is something
+more than a social reformer, though He is the first of them, and the
+only one whose work will last. Jesus Christ is something more than a
+lovely pattern of human conduct, though He is that. Jesus Christ is
+something more than a great religious genius who set forth the
+Fatherhood of God as it had never been set forth before. The Gospel of
+Jesus Christ is the record not only of what He said but of what He
+did, not only that He lived but that He died; and all His other
+powers, and all His other benefits and blessings to society, come as
+results of His dealing with the individual soul when He takes away its
+guilt and reconciles it to God.
+
+III. And so, lastly, let me ask you to notice that this Sin-bearer of
+the world is our Sin-bearer if we 'behold' Him.
+
+John was simply summoning ignorant eyes to look, and telling of what
+they would see. But his call is susceptible, without violence, of a
+far deeper meaning. This is really the one truth that I want to press
+upon you, dear friends--'Behold the Lamb of God!'
+
+What is that beholding? Surely it is nothing else than our recognising
+in Him the great and blessed work which I have been trying to
+describe, and then resting ourselves upon that great Lord and
+sufficient Sacrifice. And such an exercise of simple trust is well
+named beholding, because they who believe do see, with a deeper and a
+truer vision than sense can give. You and I can see Christ more really
+than these men who stood round Him, and to whom His flesh was 'a
+veil'--as the Epistle to the Hebrews calls it--hiding His true
+divinity and work. They who thus behold by faith lack nothing either
+of the directness or of the certitude that belong to vision. 'Seeing
+is believing,' says the cynical proverb. The Christian version inverts
+its terms, 'Believing is seeing.' 'Whom having not seen ye love, in
+whom though now ye see Him not, yet believing ye rejoice.'
+
+And your simple act of 'beholding,' by the recognition of His work and
+the resting of yourself upon it, makes the world's Sin-bearer your
+Sin-bearer. You appropriate the general blessing, like a man taking in
+a little piece of a boundless prairie for his very own. Your
+possession does not make my possession of Him less, for every eye gets
+its own beam, and however many eyes wait upon Him, they all receive
+the light on to their happy eyeballs. You can make Christ your own,
+and have all that He has done for the world as your possession, and
+can experience in your own hearts the sense of your own forgiveness
+and deliverance from the power and guilt of your own sin, on the
+simple condition of looking unto Jesus. The serpent is lifted on the
+pole, the dying camp cannot go to it, but the filming eyes of the man
+in his last gasp may turn to the gleaming image hanging on high; and
+as he looks the health begins to tingle back into his veins, and he is
+healed.
+
+And so, dear brethren, behold Him; for unless you do, though He has
+borne the world's sin, your sin will not be there, but will remain on
+your back to crush you down. 'O Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins
+of the world, have mercy upon _me_!'
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRST DISCIPLES: I. JOHN AND ANDREW
+
+'And the two disciples heard Him speak, and they followed Jesus. 38.
+Then Jesus turned, and saw them following, and saith unto them, What
+seek ye? They said unto Him, Rabbi, (which is to say, being
+interpreted, Master,) where dwellest Thou? 39. He saith unto them,
+Come and see. They came and saw where He dwelt, and abode with Him
+that day: for it was about the tenth hour.'--JOHN i. 37-39.
+
+In these verses we see the head waters of a great river, for we have
+before us nothing less than the beginnings of the Christian Church. So
+simply were the first disciples made. The great society of believers
+was born like its Master, unostentatiously and in a corner.
+
+Jesus has come back from His conflict in the wilderness after His
+baptism, and has presented Himself before John the Baptist for his
+final attestation. It was a great historical moment when the last of
+the Prophets stood face to face with the Fulfilment of all prophecy.
+In his words, 'Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the
+world!' Jewish prophecy sang its swan-song, uttered its last
+rejoicing, 'Eureka! I have found Him!' and died as it spoke.
+
+We do not sufficiently estimate the magnificent self-suppression and
+unselfishness of the Baptist, in that he, with his own lips, here
+repeats his testimony in order to point his disciples away from
+himself, and to attach them to Jesus. If he could have been touched by
+envy he would not so gladly have recognised it as his lot to decrease
+while Jesus increased. Bare magnanimity that in a teacher! The two who
+hear John's words are Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, and an anonymous
+man. The latter is probably the Evangelist. For it is remarkable that
+we never find the names of James and John in this Gospel (though from
+the other Gospels we know how closely they were associated with our
+Lord), and that we only find them referred to as 'the sons of
+Zebedee,' once near the close of the book. That fact points, I think,
+in the direction of John's authorship of this Gospel.
+
+These two, then, follow behind Jesus, fancying themselves unobserved,
+not desiring to speak to Him, and probably with some notion of
+tracking Him to His home, in order that they may seek an interview at
+a later period. But He who notices the first beginnings of return to
+Him, and always comes to meet men, and is better to them than their
+wishes, will not let them steal behind Him uncheered, nor leave them
+to struggle with diffidence and delay. So He turns to them, and the
+events ensue which I have read in the verses that follow as my text.
+
+We have, I think, three things especially to notice here. First, the
+Master's question to the whole world, 'What seek ye?' Second, the
+Master's invitation to the whole world, 'Come and see!' Lastly, the
+personal communion which brings men's hearts to Him, 'They came and
+saw where He dwelt, and abode with Him that day.'
+
+I. So, then, first look at this question of Christ to the whole world,
+'What seek ye?'
+
+As it stands, on its surface, and in its primary application, it is
+the most natural of questions. Our Lord hears footsteps behind Him,
+and, as any one would do, turns about, with the question which any one
+would ask, 'What is it that you want?' That question would derive all
+its meaning from the look with which it was accompanied, and the tone
+in which it was spoken. It might mean either annoyance and rude
+repulsion of a request, even before it was presented, or it might mean
+a glad wish to draw out the petition, and more than half a pledge to
+bestow it. All depends on the smile with which it was asked and the
+intonation of voice which carried it to their ears. And if we had been
+there we should have felt, as these two evidently felt, that though in
+form a question, it was in reality a promise, and that it drew out
+their shy wishes, made them conscious to themselves of what they
+desired, and gave them confidence that their desire would be granted.
+Clearly it had sunk very deep into the Evangelist's mind; and now, at
+the end of his life, when his course is nearly run, the never-to-be-
+forgotten voice sounds still in his memory, and he sees again, in
+sunny clearness, all the scene that had transpired on that day by the
+fords of the Jordan. The first words and the last words of those whom
+we have learned to love are cut deep on our hearts.
+
+It was not an accident that the first words which the Master spoke in
+His Messianic office were this profoundly significant question, 'What
+seek ye?' He asks it of us all, He asks it of us to-day. Well for them
+who can answer, 'Rabbi! where dwellest _Thou_?' 'It is Thou whom we
+seek!' So, venturing to take the words in that somewhat wider
+application, let me just suggest to you two or three directions in
+which they seem to point.
+
+First, the question suggests to us this: the need of having a clear
+consciousness of what is our object in life. The most of men have
+never answered that question. They live from hand to mouth, driven by
+circumstances, guided by accidents, impelled by unreflecting passions
+and desires, knowing what they want for the moment, but never having
+tried to shape the course of their lives into a consistent whole, so
+as to stand up before God in Christ when He puts the question to them,
+'What seek ye?' and to answer the question.
+
+These incoherent, instinctive, unreflective lives that so many of you
+are living are a shame to your manhood, to say nothing more. God has
+made us for something else than that we should thus be the sport of
+circumstances. It is a disgrace to any of us that our lives should be
+like some little fishing-boat, with an unskilful or feeble hand at the
+tiller, yawing from one point of the compass to another, and not
+keeping a straight and direct course. I pray you, dear brethren, to
+front this question: 'After all, and at bottom, what is it I am living
+for? Can I formulate the aims and purposes of my life in any
+intelligible statement of which I should not be ashamed?' Some of you
+are not ashamed to do what you would be very much ashamed to say, and
+you practically answer the question, 'What are you seeking?' by
+pursuits that you durst not call by their own ugly names.
+
+There may be many of us who are living for our lusts, for our
+passions, for our ambitions, for avarice, who are living in all
+uncleanness and godlessness. I do not know. There are plenty of
+shabby, low aims in all of us which do not bear being dragged out into
+the light of day. I beseech you to try and get hold of the ugly things
+and bring them up to the surface, however much they may seek to hide
+in the congenial obscurity and twist their slimy coils round something
+in the dark. If you dare not put your life's object into words,
+bethink yourselves whether it ought to be your life's object at all.
+
+Ah, brethren! if we would ask ourselves this question, and answer it
+with any thoroughness, we should not make so many mistakes as to the
+places where we look for the things for which we are seeking. If we
+knew what we were really seeking, we should know where to go to look
+for it. Let me tell you what you are seeking, whether you know it or
+not. You are seeking for rest for your heart, a home for your spirits;
+you are seeking for perfect truth for your understandings, perfect
+beauty for your affections, perfect goodness for your conscience. You
+are seeking for all these three, gathered into one white beam of
+light, and you are seeking for it all in a Person. Many of you do not
+know this, and so you go hunting in all manner of impossible places
+for that which you can only find in one. To the question, 'What seek
+ye?' the deepest of all answers, the only real answer, is, 'My soul
+thirsteth for God, for the living God.' If you know that, you know
+where to look for what you need! 'Do men gather grapes of thorns?' If
+these are really the things that you are seeking after, in all your
+mistaken search--oh! how mistaken is the search! Do men look for
+pearls in cockle-shells, or for gold in coal-pits; and why should you
+look for rest of heart, mind, conscience, spirit, anywhere and in
+anything short of God? 'What seek ye?'--the only answer is, 'We seek
+_Thee_!'
+
+And then, still further, let me remind you how these words are not
+only a question, but are really a veiled and implied promise. The
+question, 'What do you want of Me?' may either strike an intending
+suppliant like a blow, and drive him away with his prayer sticking in
+his throat unspoken, or it may sound like a merciful invitation, 'What
+is thy petition, and what is thy request, and it shall be granted unto
+thee?' We know which of the two it was here. Christ asks all such
+questions as this (and there are many of them in the New Testament),
+not for His information, but for our strengthening. He asks people,
+not because He does not know before they answer, but that, on the one
+hand, their own minds may be clear as to their wishes, and so they may
+wish the more earnestly because of the clearness; and that, on the
+other hand, their desires being expressed, they may be the more able
+to receive the gift which He is willing to bestow. So He here turns to
+these men, whose purpose He knew well enough, and says to them, 'What
+seek ye?' Herein He is doing the very same thing on a lower level, and
+in an outer sphere, as is done when He appoints that we shall pray for
+the blessings which He is yearning to bestow, but which He makes
+conditional on our supplications, only because by these supplications
+our hearts are opened to a capacity for receiving them.
+
+We have, then, in the words before us, thus understood, our Lord's
+gracious promise to give what is desired on the simple condition that
+the suppliant is conscious of his own wants, and turns to Him for the
+supply of them. 'What seek ye?' It is a blank cheque that He puts into
+their hands to fill up. It is the key of His treasure-house which He
+offers to us all, with the assured confidence that if we open it we
+shall find all that we need.
+
+Who is He that thus stands up before a whole world of seeking,
+restless spirits, and fronts them with the question which is a pledge,
+conscious of His capacity to give to each of them what each of them
+requires? Who is this that professes to be able to give all these men
+and women and children bread here in the wilderness? There is only one
+answer--the Christ of God.
+
+And He has done what He promises. No man or woman ever went to Him,
+and answered this question, and presented their petition for any real
+good, and was refused. No man can ask from Christ what Christ cannot
+bestow. No man can ask from Christ what Christ will not bestow. In the
+loftiest region, the region of inward and spiritual gifts, which are
+the best gifts, we can get everything that we want, and our only limit
+is, not His boundless omnipotence and willingness, but our own poor,
+narrow, and shrivelled desires. 'Ask, and ye shall receive; seek, and
+ye shall find.'
+
+Christ stands before us, if I may so say, like some of those fountains
+erected at some great national festival, out of which pour for all the
+multitude every variety of draught which they desire, and each man
+that goes with his empty cup gets it filled, and gets it filled with
+that which he wishes. 'What seek ye?' Wisdom? You students, you
+thinkers, you young men that are fighting with intellectual
+difficulties and perplexities, 'What seek ye?' Truth? He gives us
+that. You others, 'What seek ye?' Love, peace, victory, self-control,
+hope, anodyne for sorrow? Whatever you desire, you will find in Jesus
+Christ. The first words with which He broke the silence when He spake
+to men as the Messias, were at once a searching question, probing
+their aims and purposes, and a gracious promise pledging Him to a task
+not beyond His power, however far beyond that of all others, even the
+task of giving to each man his heart's desire. 'What seek ye?' 'Seek,
+and ye shall find.'
+
+II. Then, still further, notice how, in a similar fashion, we may
+regard here the second words which our Lord speaks as being His
+merciful invitation to the world. 'Come and see.'
+
+The disciples' answer was simple and timid. They did not venture to
+say, 'May we talk to you?' 'Will you take us to be your disciples?'
+All they can muster courage to ask now is, 'Where dwellest Thou?' At
+another time, perhaps, we will go to this Rabbi and speak with Him.
+His answer is, 'Come, come now; come, and by intercourse with Me learn
+to know Me.' His temporary home was probably nothing more than some
+selected place on the river's bank, for 'He had not where to lay His
+head'; but such as it was, He welcomes them to it. 'Come and see!'
+
+Take a plain, simple truth out of that. Christ is always glad when
+people resort to Him. When He was here in the world, no hour was
+inconvenient or inopportune; no moment was too much occupied; no
+physical wants of hunger, or thirst, or slumber were ever permitted to
+come between Him and seeking hearts. He was never impatient. He was
+never wearied of speaking, though He was often wearied in speaking. He
+never denied Himself to any one or said, 'I have something else to do
+than to attend to you.' And just as in literal fact, whilst He was
+here upon earth, nothing was ever permitted to hinder His drawing near
+to any man who wanted to draw near to Him, so nothing now hinders it;
+and He is glad when any of us resort to Him and ask Him to let us
+speak to Him and be with Him. His weariness or occupation never shut
+men out from Him then. His glory does not shut them out now.
+
+Then there is another thought here. This invitation of the Master is
+also a very distinct call to a firsthand knowledge of Jesus Christ.
+Andrew and John had heard from the Baptist about Him, and now what He
+bids them to do is to come and hear Himself. That is what He calls
+you, dear brethren, to do. Do not listen to us, let the Master Himself
+speak to you. Many who reject Christianity reject it through not
+having listened to Jesus Himself teaching them, but only to
+theologians and other human representations of the truth. Go and ask
+Christ to speak to you with His own lips of truth, and take Him as the
+Expositor of His own system. Do not be contented with traditional talk
+and second-hand information. Go to Christ, and hear what He Himself
+has to say to you.
+
+Then, still further, in this 'Come and see' there is a distinct call
+to the personal act of faith. Both of these words, '_come_' and
+'_see_,' are used in the New Testament as standing emblems of faith.
+Coming to Christ is trusting Him; trusting Him is seeing Him, looking
+unto Him. 'Come unto Me, and I will give you rest,' 'Look unto Me, and
+be ye saved, all ye ends of the earth.' There are two metaphors, both
+of them pointing to one thing, and that one thing is the invitation
+from the dear lips of the loving Lord to every man, woman, and child
+in this congregation. 'Come and see!' 'Put your trust in Me, draw near
+to Me by desire and penitence, draw near to Me in the fixed thought of
+your mind, in the devotion of your will, in the trust of your whole
+being. Come to Me, and see Me by faith; and then--and then--your
+hearts will have found what they seek, and your weary quest will be
+over, and, like the dove, you will fold your wings and nestle at the
+foot of the Cross, and rest for evermore. Come! "Come and see!"'
+
+III. So, lastly, we have in these words a parable of the blessed
+experience which binds men's hearts to Jesus for ever. 'They came and
+saw where He dwelt, and abode with Him that day, for it was about the
+tenth hour.'
+
+'Dwelt' and 'abode' are the same words in the original. It is one of
+John's favourite words, and in its deepest meaning expresses the
+close, still communion which the soul may have with Jesus Christ,
+which communion, on that never-to-be-forgotten day, when he and Andrew
+sat with Him in the quiet, confidential fellowship that disclosed
+Christ's glory 'full of grace and truth' to their hearts, made them
+His for ever.
+
+If the reckoning of time here is made according to the Hebrew fashion,
+the 'tenth hour' will be ten o'clock in the morning. So, one long day
+of talk! If it be according to the Roman legal fashion, the hour will
+be four o'clock in the afternoon, which would only give time for a
+brief conversation before the night fell. But, in any case, sacred
+reserve is observed as to what passed in that interview. A lesson for
+a great deal of blatant talk, in this present day, about conversion
+and the details thereof!
+
+  'Not easily forgiven
+  Are those, who setting wide the doors, that bar
+  The secret bridal chambers of the heart.
+  Let in the day.'
+
+John had nothing to say to the world about what the Master said to him
+and his brother in that long day of communion.
+
+One plain conclusion from this last part of our narrative is that the
+impression of Christ's own personality is the strongest force to make
+disciples. The character of Jesus Christ is, after all, the central
+and standing evidence and the mightiest credential of Christianity. It
+bears upon its face the proof of its own truthfulness. If such a
+character was not lived, how did it ever come to be described, and
+described by such people? And if it was lived, how did it come to be
+so? The historical veracity of the character of Jesus Christ is
+guaranteed by its very uniqueness. And the divine origin of Jesus
+Christ is forced upon us as the only adequate explanation of His
+historical character. 'Truly this man was the Son of God.'
+
+I believe that to lift Him up is the work of all Christian preachers
+and teachers; as far as they can to hide themselves behind Jesus
+Christ, or at the most to let themselves appear, just as the old
+painters used to let their own likenesses appear in their great
+altar-pieces--a little kneeling figure there, away in a dark corner of
+the background. Present Christ, and He will vindicate His own
+character; He will vindicate His own nature; He will vindicate His own
+gospel. 'They came and saw where He dwelt, and abode with Him,' and
+the end of it was that they abode with Him for evermore. And so it
+will always be.
+
+Once more, personal experience of the grace and sweetness of this
+Saviour binds men to Him as nothing else will:
+
+  'He must be loved ere that to you
+  He will seem worthy of your love.'
+
+The deepest and sweetest and most precious part of His character and
+of His gifts can only be known on condition of possessing Him and
+them, and they can be possessed only on condition of holding
+fellowship with Him. I do not say to any man: 'Try trust in order to
+be sure that Jesus Christ is worthy to be trusted,' for by its very
+nature faith cannot be an experiment or provisional. I do not say that
+my experience is evidence to you, but at the same time I do say that
+it is worth any man's while to reflect upon this, that none who ever
+trusted in Him have been put to shame. No man has looked to Jesus and
+has said: 'Ah! I have found Him out! His help is vain, His promises
+empty.' Many men have fallen away from Him, I know, but not because
+they have proved Him untruthful, but because they have become
+unfaithful.
+
+And so, dear brethren, I come to you with the old message, 'Oh!
+taste,' and thus you will 'see that the Lord is good.' There must be
+the faith first, and then there will be the experience, which will
+make anything seem to you more credible than that He whom you have
+loved and trusted, and who has answered your love and your trust,
+should be anything else than the Son of God, the Saviour of mankind.
+Come to Him and you will see. The impregnable argument will be put
+into your mouth--'Whether this man be a sinner or no, I know not. One
+thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see.' Look to Him,
+listen to Him, and when He asks you, 'What seek ye?' answer, 'Rabbi,
+where dwellest Thou? It is Thou whom I seek.' He will welcome you to
+close blessed intercourse with Him, which will knit you to Him with
+cords that cannot be broken, and with His loving voice making music in
+memory and heart, you will be able triumphantly to confess--'Now we
+believe, not because of any man's saying, for we have heard Him
+ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the
+world.'
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRST DISCIPLES: II. SIMON PETER
+
+
+'One of the two which heard John speak, and followed him, was Andrew,
+Simon Peter's brother. 41. He first findeth his own brother Simon, and
+saith unto him, We have found the Messias, which is, being
+interpreted, the Christ. 42. And he brought him to Jesus. And when
+Jesus beheld him, He said, Thou art Simon the son of Jona: thou shalt
+be called Cephas, which is, by interpretation, a stone.'--JOHN i.
+40-42.
+
+There are many ways by which souls are brought to their Saviour.
+Sometimes, like the merchantman seeking goodly pearls, men seek Him
+earnestly and find Him. Sometimes, by the intervention of another, the
+knowledge of Him is kindled in dark hearts. Sometimes He Himself takes
+the initiative, and finds those that seek Him not. We have
+illustrations of all these various ways in these simple records of the
+gathering in of the first disciples. Andrew and his friend, with whom
+we were occupied in our last sermon, looked for Christ and found Him.
+Peter, with whom we have to do now, was brought to Christ by his
+brother; and the third of the group, consisting of Philip, was sought
+by Christ while he was not thinking of Him, and found an unsought
+treasure; and then Philip again, like Andrew, finds a friend, and
+brings him to Christ.
+
+Each of the incidents has its own lesson, and each of them adds
+something to the elucidation of John's two great subjects: the
+revelation of Jesus as the Son of God, and the development of that
+faith in Him which gives us life. It may be profitable to consider
+each group in succession, and mark the various aspects of these two
+subjects presented by each.
+
+In this incident, then, we have two things mainly to consider: first,
+the witness of the disciple; second, the self-revelation of the
+Master.
+
+I. The witness of the disciple.
+
+We have seen that the unknown companion of Andrew was probably the
+Evangelist himself, who, in accordance with his uniform habit,
+suppresses his own name, and that that omission points to John's
+authorship of this Gospel. Another morsel of evidence as to the date
+and purpose of the Gospel lies in the mention here of Andrew as 'Simon
+Peter's brother.' We have not yet heard anything about Simon Peter.
+The Evangelist has never mentioned his name, and yet he takes it for
+granted that his hearers knew all about Peter, and knew him better
+than they did Andrew. That presupposes a considerable familiarity with
+the incidents of the Gospel story, and is in harmony with the theory
+that this fourth Gospel is the latest of the four, and was written for
+the purpose of supplementing, not of repeating, their narrative. Hence
+a number of the phenomena of the Gospel, which have troubled critics,
+are simply and sufficiently explained.
+
+But that by the way. Passing that, notice first the illustration that
+we get here of how instinctive and natural the impulse is, when a man
+has found Jesus Christ, to tell some one else about Him. Nobody said
+to Andrew, 'Go and look for your brother,' and yet, as soon as he had
+fairly realised the fact that this Man standing before him was the
+Messiah, though the evening seems to have come, he hurries away to
+find his brother, and share with him the glad conviction.
+
+Now, that is always the case. If a man has any real depth of
+conviction, he cannot rest till he tries to share it with somebody
+else. Why, even a dog that has had its leg mended, will bring other
+limping dogs to the man that was kind to it. Whoever really believes
+anything becomes a propagandist.
+
+Look round about us to-day! and hearken to the Babel, the wholesale
+Babel of noises, where every sort of opinion is trying to make itself
+heard. It sounds like a country fair where every huckster is shouting
+his loudest. That shows that the men believe the things that they
+profess. Thank God that there is so much earnestness in the world! And
+now are Christians to be dumb whilst all this vociferous crowd is
+calling its wares, and quacks are standing on their platforms shouting
+out their specifics, which are mostly delusions? Have you not a
+medicine that will cure everything, a real heal-all, a veritable
+pain-killer? If you believe that you have, certainly you will never
+rest till you share your boon with your brethren.
+
+If the natural effect of all earnest conviction, viz. a yearning and
+an absolute necessity to speak it out, is no part of your Christian
+experience, very grave inferences ought to be drawn from that. This
+man, before he was four-and-twenty hours a disciple, had made another.
+Some of you have been disciples for as many years, and have never even
+tried to make one. Whence comes that silence which is, alas, so common
+among us?
+
+It is very plain that, making all allowance for changed manners, for
+social difficulties, for timidity, for the embarrassment that besets
+people when they talk to other people about religion, which is 'such
+an awkward subject to introduce into mixed company,' and the
+like,--making all allowance for these, there is a deplorable number of
+Christian people who ought to be, in their own circles, evangelists
+and missionaries, who are, if I may venture to quote very rude words
+which the Bible uses, 'Dumb dogs lying down, and loving to slumber.'
+'He first findeth his own brother, Simon!'
+
+Now, take another lesson out of this witness of the disciple, as to
+the channel in which such effort naturally runs. 'He _first_ findeth
+_his own brother_'; does not that imply a second finding by the other
+of the two? The language of the text suggests that the Evangelist's
+tendency to the suppression of himself, of which I have spoken, hides
+away, if I may so say, in this singular expression, the fact that he
+too went to look for a brother, but that Andrew found his brother
+before John found his. If so, each of the original pair of disciples
+went to look for one who was knit to him by close ties of kindred and
+affection, and found him and brought him to Christ; and before the day
+was over the Christian Church was doubled, because each member of it,
+by God's grace, had added another. Home, then, and those who are
+nearest to us, present the natural channels for Christian work. Many a
+very earnest and busy preacher, or Sunday-school teacher, or
+missionary, has brothers and sisters, husband or wife, children or
+parents at home to whom he has never said a word about Christ. There
+is an old proverb, 'The shoemaker's wife is always the worst shod.'
+The families of many very busy Christian teachers suffer wofully for
+want of remembering 'he first findeth his own brother.' It is a poor
+affair if all your philanthropy and Christian energy go off noisily in
+Sunday-schools and mission-stations, and if your own vineyard is
+neglected, and the people at your own fireside never hear anything
+from you about the Master whom you say you love. Some of you want that
+hint; will you take it?
+
+But then, the principle is one that might be fairly expanded beyond
+the home circle. The natural relationships into which we are brought
+by neighbourhood and by ordinary associations prescribe the direction
+of our efforts. What, for instance, are we set down in this swarming
+population of Lancashire for? For business and personal ends? Yes,
+partly. But is that all? Surely, if we believe that 'there is a
+divinity that shapes our ends' and determines the bounds of our
+habitation, we must believe that other purposes affecting other people
+are also meant by God to be accomplished through us, and that where a
+man who knows and loves Christ Jesus is brought into neighbourly
+contact with thousands who do not, he is thereby constituted his
+brethren's keeper, and is as plainly called to tell them of Christ as
+if a voice from Heaven had bid him do it. What is to be said of the
+depth and vital energy of the Christianity that neither hears the call
+nor feels the impulse to share its blessing with the famishing Lazarus
+at its gate? What will be the fate of such a church? Why, if you live
+in luxury in your own well drained and ventilated house, and take no
+heed to the typhoid fever or cholera in the slums at its back, the
+chances are that seeds of the disease will find their way to you, and
+kill your wife, or child, or yourself. And if you Christian people,
+living in the midst of godless people, do not try to heal them, they
+will infect you. If you do not seek to impress your conviction that
+Christ is the Messiah upon an unbelieving generation, the unbelieving
+generation will impress upon you its doubts whether He is; and your
+lips will falter, and a pallor will come over the complexion of your
+love, and your faith will become congealed and turn into ice.
+
+Notice again the simple word which is the most powerful means of
+influencing most men.
+
+Andrew did not begin to argue with his brother. Some of us can do that
+and some of us cannot. Some of us are influenced by argument and some
+of us are not. You may pound a man's mistaken creed to atoms with
+sledge-hammers of reasoning, and he is not much the nearer being a
+Christian than he was before; just as you may pound ice to pieces and
+it is pounded ice after all. The mightiest argument that we can use,
+and the argument that we can all use, if we have got any religion in
+us at all, is that of Andrew, 'We have found the Messias.'
+
+I recently read a story in some newspaper or other about a minister
+who preached a very elaborate course of lectures in refutation of some
+form of infidelity, for the special benefit of a man that attended his
+place of worship. Soon after, the man came and declared himself a
+Christian. The minister said to him, 'Which of my discourses was it
+that removed your doubts?' The reply was, 'Oh! it was not any of your
+sermons that influenced me. The thing that set me thinking was that a
+poor woman came out of the chapel beside me, and stumbled on the
+steps, and I stretched out my hand to help her, and she said "Thank
+you!" Then she looked at me and said, "Do you love Jesus Christ, my
+blessed Saviour?" And I did not, and I went home and thought about it;
+and now I can say _I_ love Jesus.' The poor woman's word, and her
+frank confession of her experience, were all the transforming power.
+
+If you have found Christ, you can say that you have. Never mind about
+the how! Any how! Only say it! A boy that is sent on an errand by his
+father has only one duty to perform, and that is to repeat what he was
+told. Whether we have any eloquence or not, whether we have any logic
+or not, whether we can speak persuasively and gracefully or not, if we
+have laid hold of Christ at all we can say that we have; and it is at
+our peril that we do not. We can say it to somebody. There is surely
+some one who will listen to you more readily than to any one else.
+Surely you have not lived all your life and bound nobody to you by
+kindness and love, so that they will gladly attend to what you say.
+Well, then, _use_ the power that is given to you.
+
+Remember the beginnings of the Christian Church--two men, each of whom
+found his brother. Two and two make four; and if every one of us would
+go, according to the old law of warfare, and each of us slay our man,
+or rather each of us give life by God's grace to some one, or try to
+do it, our congregations and our churches would grow as fast as,
+according to the old problem, the money grew that was paid down for
+the nails in the horse's shoes. Two snowflakes on the top of a
+mountain gather an avalanche by the time they reach the valley. 'He
+first findeth his brother, Simon.'
+
+II. And now I turn to the second part of this text, the
+self-revelation of the Master.
+
+The bond which knit these men to Christ at first was by no means the
+perfect Christian faith which they afterwards attained. They
+recognised Him as the Messiah, they were personally attached to Him,
+they were ready to accept His teaching and to obey His commandments.
+That was about as far as they had gone. But they were scholars. They
+had entered the school. The rest would come. It would be absurd to
+expect that Christ would begin by preaching to them faith in His
+divinity and atoning work. He binds them to _Himself_. That is lesson
+enough for a beginner for one day.
+
+It was the impression which Christ Himself made on Simon which
+completed the work begun by his brother. What, then, was the
+impression? He comes all full of wonder and awe, and he is met by a
+look and a sentence. The look, which is described by an unusual word,
+was a penetrating gaze which regarded Peter with fixed attention. It
+must have been remarkable, to have lived in John's memory for all
+these years. Evidently, as I think, a more than natural insight is
+implied. So, also, the saying with which our Lord received Peter seems
+to me to be meant to show more than natural knowledge: 'Thou art
+Simon, the son of Jonas.' Christ may, no doubt, have learned the
+Apostle's name and lineage from his brother, or in some other ordinary
+way. But if you observe the similar incident which follows in the
+conversation with Nicodemus, and the emphatic declaration of the next
+chapter that Jesus knew both 'all men,' and 'what was in man'--both
+human nature as a whole, and each individual--it is more natural to
+see here superhuman knowledge.
+
+So then, the first point in our Lord's self-revelation here is that He
+shows Himself possessed of supernatural and thorough knowledge. One
+remembers the many instances where our Lord read men's hearts, and the
+prayer addressed to Him probably, by Peter, 'Thou, Lord, which knowest
+the hearts of all men,' and the vision which John saw of 'eyes like a
+flame of fire,' and the sevenfold 'I know thy works.'
+
+It may be a very awful thought, 'Thou, God, seest me.' It is a very
+unwelcome thought to a great many men, and it will be so to us unless
+we can give it the modification which it receives from the belief in
+the divinity of Jesus Christ, and feel sure that the eyes which are
+blazing with divine omniscience are dewy with divine and human love.
+
+Do you believe it? Do you feel that Christ is looking at you, and
+searching you altogether? Do you rejoice in it? Do you carry it about
+with you as a consolation and a strength in moments of weakness and in
+times of temptation? Is it as blessed to you to feel 'Thou Christ
+beholdest me now,' as it is for a child to feel that, when it is
+playing in the garden, its mother is sitting up at the window watching
+it, and that no harm can come? There have been men driven mad in
+prisons because they knew that somewhere in the wall there was a
+little pinhole, through which a gaoler's eye was always, or might be
+always, glaring down at them. And the thought of an absolute
+Omniscience up there, searching me to the depths of my nature, may
+become one from which I recoil shudderingly, and will not be
+altogether a blessed one unless it comes to me in this shape:--'My
+Christ knows me altogether and loves me better than He knows. And so I
+will spread myself out before Him, and though I feel that there is
+much in me which I dare not tell to men, I will rejoice that there is
+nothing which I need to tell to Him. He knows me through and through.
+He knew me when He died for me. He knew me when He forgave me. He knew
+me when He undertook to cleanse me. Like this very Peter I will say,
+"Lord, Thou knowest all things," and, like him, I will cling the
+closer to His feet, because I know, and He knows, my weakness and my
+sin.'
+
+Another revelation of our Lord's relation to His disciples is given in
+the fact that He changes Simon's name. Jehovah, in the Old Testament,
+changes the names of Abraham and of Jacob. Babylonian kings in the Old
+Testament change the names of their vassal princes. Masters impose
+names on their slaves; and I suppose that even the marriage custom of
+the wife's assuming the name of the husband rests originally upon the
+same idea of absolute authority. That idea is conveyed in the fact
+that our Lord changes Peter's name, and so takes absolute possession
+of him, and asserts His mastery over him. We belong to Him altogether,
+because He has given Himself altogether for us. His absolute authority
+is the correlative of His utter self-surrender. He who can come to me
+and say, 'I have spared not my life for thee,' and He only, has the
+right to come to me and say, 'yield yourself wholly to Me.' So,
+Christian friends, your Master wants all your service; do you give
+yourselves up to Him out and out, not by half and half.
+
+Lastly, that change of name implies Christ's power and promise to
+bestow a new character and new functions and honours. Peter was by no
+means a 'Peter' then. The name no doubt mainly implies official
+function, but that official function was prepared for by personal
+character; and in so far as the name refers to character, it means
+firmness. At that epoch Peter was rash, impulsive, headstrong,
+self-confident, vain, and therefore, necessarily changeable. Like the
+granite, all fluid and hot, and fluid because it was hot, he needed to
+cool in order to solidify into rock. And not until his self-confidence
+had been knocked out of him, and he had learned humility by falling;
+not until he had been beaten from all his presumption, and tamed down,
+and sobered and steadied by years of difficulty and responsibilities,
+did he become the rock that Christ meant him to be. All _that_ lay
+concealed in the future, but in the change of his name, while he stood
+on the very threshold of his Christian career, there was preached to
+him, and there is preached to us, this great truth, that if you will
+go to Jesus Christ He will make a new man of you. No man's character
+is so obstinately rooted in evil but that Christ can change its set
+and direction. No man's natural dispositions are so faulty and low but
+that Christ can develop counterbalancing virtues, and out of the evil
+and weakness make strength. He will not make a Peter into a John, or a
+John into a Paul, but He will deliver Peter from the 'defects of his
+qualities,' and lead them up into a higher and a nobler region. There
+are no outcasts in the view of the transforming Christ. He dismisses
+no people out of His hospital as incurable, because anybody,
+everybody, the blackest, the most rooted in evil, those who have
+longest indulged in any given form of transgression, may all come to
+Him; with the certainty that if they will cleave to Him, He will read
+all their character and all its weaknesses, and then with a glad smile
+of welcome and assured confidence on His face, will ensure to them a
+new nature and new dignities. 'Thou art Simon--thou shalt be Peter.'
+
+The process will be long. It will be painful. There will be a great
+deal pared off. The sculptor makes the marble image by chipping away
+the superfluous marble. Ah! and when you have to chip away superfluous
+flesh and blood it is bitter work, and the chisel is often deeply dyed
+in gore, and the mallet seems to be very cruel. Simon did not know all
+that had to be done to make a Peter of him. We have to thank God's
+providence that we do not know all the sorrows and trials of the
+process of making us what He wills us to be. But we may be sure of
+this, that if only we keep near our Master, and let Him have His way
+with us, and work His will upon us, and if only we will not wince from
+the blows of the Great Artist's chisel, then out of the roughest block
+He will carve the fairest statue; and He will fulfil for us at last
+His great promise: 'I will give unto him a white stone, and in the
+stone a new name written, which no man knoweth save he that receiveth
+it.'
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRST DISCIPLES: III. PHILIP
+
+'The day following Jesus would go forth into Galilee, and findeth
+Philip, and saith unto him, Follow Me.'--JOHN i. 43.
+
+'The day following'--we have a diary in this chapter and the next,
+extending from the day when John the Baptist gives his official
+testimony to Jesus, up till our Lord's first journey to Jerusalem. The
+order of events is this. The deputation from the Sanhedrim to John
+occupied the first day. On the second Jesus comes back to John after
+His temptation, and receives his solemn attestation. On the third day,
+John repeats his testimony, and three disciples, probably four, make
+the nucleus of the Church. These are the two pairs of brothers, James
+and John, Andrew and Peter, who stand first in every catalogue of the
+Apostles, and were evidently nearest to Christ.
+
+'The day following' of our text is the fourth day. On it our Lord
+determines to return to Galilee. His objects in His visit to John were
+accomplished--to receive his public attestation, and to gather the
+first little knot of His followers. Thus launched upon His course, He
+desired to return to His native district.
+
+These events had occurred where John was baptising, in a place called
+in the English version Bethabara, which means 'The house of crossing,'
+or as we might say, Ferry-house. The traditional site for John's
+baptism is near Jericho, but the next chapter (verse i.) shows that it
+was only a day's journey from Cana of Galilee, and must therefore have
+been much further north than Jericho. A ford, still bearing the name
+Abarah, a few miles south of the lake of Gennesaret, has lately been
+discovered. Our Lord, then, and His disciples had a day's walking to
+take them back to Galilee. But apparently before they set out on that
+morning, Philip and Nathanael were added to the little band. So these
+two days saw six disciples gathered round Jesus.
+
+Andrew and John sought Christ and found Him. To them He revealed
+Himself as very willing to be approached, and glad to welcome any to
+His side. Peter, who comes next, was brought to Christ by his brother,
+and to him Christ revealed Himself as reading his heart, and promising
+and giving him higher functions and a more noble character.
+
+Now we come to the third case, 'Jesus findeth Philip,' who was not
+seeking Jesus, and who was brought by no one. To him Christ reveals
+Himself as drawing near to many a heart that has not thought of Him,
+and laying a masterful hand of gracious authority on the springs of
+life and character in that autocratic word 'Follow Me.' So we have a
+gradually heightening revelation of the Master's graciousness to all
+souls, to them that seek and to them that seek Him not. It is only to
+the working out of these simple thoughts that I ask your attention
+now.
+
+I. First, then, let us deal with the revelation that is given us here
+of the seeking Christ.
+
+Every one who reads this chapter with even the slightest attention
+must observe how 'seeking' and 'finding' are repeated over and over
+again. Christ turns to Andrew and John with the question, 'What _seek_
+ye?' Andrew, as the narrative says, '_findeth_ his own brother, Simon,
+and saith unto him, "We have _found_ the Messias!"' Then again, Jesus
+_finds_ Philip; and again, Philip, as soon as he has been won to
+Jesus, goes off to _find_ Nathanael; and his glad word to him is, once
+more, 'We have _found_ the Messias.' It is a reciprocal play of
+finding and seeking all through these verses.
+
+There are two kinds of finding. There is a casual stumbling upon a
+thing that you were not looking for, and there is a finding as the
+result of seeking. It is the latter which is here. Christ did not
+casually stumble upon Philip, upon that morning, before they departed
+from the fords of the Jordan on their short journey to Cana of
+Galilee. He went to look for this other Galilean, one who was
+connected with Andrew and Peter, a native of the same little village.
+He went and found him; and whilst Philip was all unexpectant and
+undesirous, the Master came to him and laid His hand upon him, and
+drew him to Himself.
+
+Now that is what Christ often does. There are men like the merchantman
+who went all over the world seeking goodly pearls, who with some eager
+longing to possess light, or truth, or goodness, or rest, search up
+and down and find it nowhere, because they are looking for it in a
+hundred different places. They are expecting to find a little here and
+a little there, and to piece all together to make of the fragments one
+all-sufficing restfulness. Then when they are most eager in their
+search, or when, perhaps, it has all died down into despair and
+apathy, the veil seems to be withdrawn, and they see Him whom they
+have been seeking all the time and knew not that He was there beside
+them. All, and more than all, that they sought for in the many pearls
+is stored for them in the one Pearl of great price. The ancient
+covenant stands firm to-day as for ever. 'Seek and ye shall find,
+knock and it shall be opened unto you.'
+
+But then there are others, like Paul on the road to Damascus or like
+Matthew the publican, sitting at the receipt of custom, on whom there
+is laid a sudden hand, to whom there comes a sudden conviction, on
+whose eyes, not looking to the East, there dawns the light of Christ's
+presence. Such cases occur all through the ages, for He is not to be
+confined, bless His name! within the narrow limits of answering
+seeking souls, or of showing Himself to people that are brought to Him
+by human instrumentality; but far beyond these bounds He goes, and
+many a time discloses His beauty and His sweetness to hearts that wist
+not of Him, and who can only say, 'Lo! God was in this place, and I
+knew it not.' 'Thou wast found of them that sought Thee not.'
+
+As it was in His miracles upon earth, so it has been in the sweet and
+gracious works of His grace ever since. Sometimes He healed in
+response to the yearning desire that looked out of sick eyes, or that
+spoke from parched lips, and no man that ever came to Him and said
+'Heal me!' was sent away beggared of His blessing. Sometimes He healed
+in response to the beseeching of those who, with loving hearts,
+carried their dear ones and laid them at His feet. But sometimes, to
+magnify the spontaneity and the completeness of His own love, and to
+show us that He is bound and limited by no human co-operation, and
+that He is His own motive, He reached out the blessing to a hand that
+was not extended to grasp it; and by His question, 'Wilt thou be made
+whole?' kindled desires that else had lain dormant for ever.
+
+And so in this story before us; He will welcome and over-answer Andrew
+and John when they come seeking; He will turn round to them with a
+smile on His face, that converts the question, 'What seek ye?' into an
+invitation, 'Come and see.' And when Andrew brings his brother to Him,
+He will go more than halfway to meet him. But when these are won,
+there still remains another way by which He will have disciples
+brought into His Kingdom, and that is by Himself going out and laying
+His hand on the man and drawing him to His heart by the revelation of
+His love. But further, and in a deeper sense, He really seeks us all,
+and, unasked, bestows His love upon us.
+
+Whether we seek Him or no, there is no heart upon earth which Christ
+does not desire; and no man or woman within the sound of His gospel
+whom He is not in a very real sense seeking that He may draw them to
+Himself. His own word is a wonderful one: 'The Father _seeketh_ such
+to worship Him'; as if God went all up and down the world looking for
+hearts to love Him and to turn to Him with reverent thankfulness. And
+as the Father, so the Son--who is for us the revelation of the Father:
+'The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.' No
+one on earth wanted Him, or dreamed of His coming. When He bowed the
+heavens and gathered Himself into the narrow space of the manger in
+Bethlehem, and took upon Him the limitations and the burdens and the
+weaknesses of manhood, it was not in response to any petition, it was
+in reply to no seeking; but He came spontaneously, unmoved, obeying
+but the impulse of His own heart, and because He would have mercy. He
+who is the Beginning, and will be First in all things, was first in
+this, that before they called He answered, and came upon earth
+unbesought and unexpected, because His own infinite love brought Him
+hither. Christ's mercy to a world does not come like water in a well
+that has to be pumped up, by our petitions, by our search, but like
+water in some fountain, rising sparkling into the sunlight by its own
+inward impulse. He is His own motive; and came to a forgetful and
+careless world, like a shepherd who goes after his flock in the
+wilderness, not because they bleat for him, while they crop the
+herbage which tempts them ever further from the fold and remember him
+and it no more, but because he cannot have them lost. Men are not
+conscious of needing Christ till He comes. The supply creates the
+demand. He is like the 'dew which tarrieth not for man, nor waiteth
+for the sons of men.'
+
+But not only does Christ seek us all, inasmuch as the whole conception
+and execution of His great work are independent of man's desires, but
+He seeks us each in a thousand ways. He longs to have each of us for
+His disciples. He seeks each of us for His disciples, by the motion of
+His Spirit on our spirits, by stirring conviction in our consciences,
+by pricking us often with a sense of our own evil, by all our
+restlessness and dissatisfaction, by the disappointments and the
+losses, as by the brightnesses and the goodness of earthly
+providences, and often through such agencies as my lips and the lips
+of other men. The Master Himself, who seeks all mankind, has sought
+and is seeking you at this moment. Oh! yield to His search. The
+shepherd goes out on the mountain side, for all the storm and the
+snow, and wades knee-deep through the drifts until he finds the sheep.
+And your Shepherd, who is also your Brother, has come looking for you,
+and at this moment is putting out His hand and laying hold of some of
+you through my poor words, and saying to you, as He said to Philip,
+'Follow Me!'
+
+II. And now let us next consider that word of authority which, spoken
+to the one man in our text, is really spoken to us all.
+
+'Jesus findeth Philip, and saith unto him, "Follow Me!"' No doubt a
+great deal more passed, but no doubt what more passed was less
+significant and less important for the development of faith in this
+man than what is recorded. The word of authority, the invitation which
+was a demand, the demand which was an invitation, and the personal
+impression which He produced upon Philip's heart, were the things that
+bound him to Jesus Christ for ever. 'Follow Me,' spoken at the
+beginning of the journey of Christ and His disciples back to Galilee,
+might have meant merely, on the surface, 'Come back with us.' But the
+words have, of course, a much deeper meaning. They mean--be My
+disciple. Think what is implied in them, and ask yourself whether the
+demand that Christ makes in these words is an unreasonable one, and
+then ask yourselves whether you have yielded to it or not.
+
+We lose the force of the image by much repetition. Sheep follow a
+shepherd. Travellers follow a guide. Here is a man upon some dangerous
+cornice of the Alps, with a ledge of limestone as broad as the palm of
+your hand, and perhaps a couple of feet of snow above that, for him to
+walk upon, a precipice on either side; and his guide says, as he ropes
+himself to him, 'Now, tread where I tread!' Travellers follow their
+guides. Soldiers follow their commanders. There is the hell of the
+battlefield; here a line of wavering, timid, raw recruits. Their
+commander rushes to the front and throws himself upon the advancing
+enemy with the one word, 'Follow' and the coward becomes a hero.
+Soldiers follow their captains. Your Shepherd comes to you and calls,
+'Follow Me.' Your Captain and Commander comes to you and calls,
+'Follow Me.' In all the dreary wilderness, in all the difficult
+contingencies and conjunctions, in all the conflicts of life, this Man
+strides in front of us and proposes Himself to us as Guide, Example,
+Consoler, Friend, Companion, everything; and gathers up all duty, all
+blessedness, in the majestic and simple words, 'Follow Me.'
+
+It is a call at the least to accept Him as a Teacher, but the whole
+gist of the context here is to show us that from the beginning
+Christ's disciples did not look upon Him as a Rabbi's disciples did,
+as being simply a teacher, but recognised Him as the Messias, the Son
+of God, the King of Israel. So that they were called upon by this
+command to accept His teaching in a very special way, not merely as
+Hillel or Gamaliel asked their disciples to accept theirs. Do you do
+that? Do you take Him as your illumination about all matters of
+theoretical truth, and of practical wisdom? Is His declaration of God
+your theology? Is His declaration of His own Person your creed? Do you
+think about His Cross as He did when He elected to be remembered in
+all the world by the broken body and the shed blood, which were the
+symbols of His reconciling death? Is His teaching, that the Son of Man
+comes to 'give His life a ransom for many,' the ground of your hope?
+Do you follow Him in your belief, and following Him in your belief, do
+you accept Him as, by His death and passion, the Saviour of your soul?
+That is the first step--to follow Him, to trust Him wholly for what He
+is, the Incarnate Son of God, the Sacrifice for the sins of the whole
+world, and therefore for your sins and mine. This is a call to faith.
+
+It is also a call to obedience. 'Follow Me' certainly means 'Do as I
+bid you,' but softens all the harshness of that command. Sedulously
+plant your tremulous feet in His firm footsteps. Where you see His
+track going across the bog be not afraid to walk after Him, though it
+may seem to lead you into the deepest and the blackest of it. 'Follow
+Him' and you will be right. 'Follow Him' and you will be blessed. Do
+as Christ did, or as according to the best of your judgment it seems
+to you that Christ would have done if He had been in your
+circumstances; and you will not go far wrong. 'The Imitation of
+Christ,' which Thomas a Kempis wrote his book about, is the sum of all
+practical Christianity. 'Follow Me!' makes discipleship to be
+something more than intellectual acceptance of His teaching, something
+more than even reliance for my salvation upon His work. It makes
+discipleship--springing out of these two--the acceptance of His
+teaching and the consequent reliance, by faith, upon His word--to be a
+practical reproduction of His character and conduct in mine.
+
+It is a call to communion. If a man follows Christ he will walk close
+behind Him, and near enough to Him to hear Him speak, and to be
+'guided by His eye.' He will be separated from other people, and from
+other paths. In these four things, then--Faith, Obedience, Imitation,
+Communion--lies the essence of discipleship. No man is a Christian who
+has not in some measure all four. Have you got them?
+
+What right has Jesus Christ to ask me to follow Him? Why should I? Who
+is He that He should set Himself up as being the perfect Example and
+the Guide for all the world? What has He done to bind me to Him, that
+I should take Him for my Master, and yield myself to Him in a
+subjection that I refuse to the mightiest names in literature, and
+thought, and practical benevolence? Who is this that assumes thus to
+dominate over us all? Ah! brethren, there is only one answer. 'This is
+none other than the Son of God who has given Himself a ransom for me,
+and therefore has the right, and only therefore has the right, to say
+to me, "Follow Me."'
+
+III. And now one last word. Think for a moment about this silently and
+swiftly obedient disciple.
+
+Philip says nothing. Of course the narrative is mere sketchy outline.
+He is silent, but he yields. Ah, brethren, how quickly a soul may be
+won or lost! That moment, when Philip's decision was trembling in the
+balance, was but a moment. It might have gone the other way, for
+Christ has no pressed men in His army; they are all volunteers. It
+might have gone the other way. A moment may settle for you whether you
+will be His disciple or not. People tell us that the belief in
+instantaneous conversions is unphilosophical. It seems to me that the
+objections to them are unphilosophical. All decisions are matters of
+an instant. Hesitation may be long, weighing and balancing may be a
+protracted process, but the decision is always a moment's work, a
+knife-edge. And there is no reason whatever why any one listening to
+me may not now, if he or she will, do as this man Philip did on the
+spot, and when Christ says 'Follow Me,' turn to Him and answer, 'I
+will follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest.'
+
+There is an old church tradition which says that the disciple who at a
+subsequent period answered Christ, 'Lord! suffer me first to go and
+bury my father,' was this same Apostle. I do not think that at all
+likely, but the tradition suggests to us one last thought about the
+reasons why people are kept back from yielding this obedience to
+Christ's invitation. Many of you are kept back, as that
+procrastinating follower was, because there are some other duties
+which you feel, or make to be, more important. 'I will think about
+Christianity and turning religious when this, that, or the other thing
+has been got over. I have my position in life to make. I have a great
+many things to do that must be done at once, and really, I have not
+time to think about it.'
+
+Then there are some of you that are kept from following Christ because
+you have never yet found out that you need a guide at all. Then there
+are some of you that are kept back because you like very much better
+to go your own way, and to follow your own inclination, and dislike
+the idea of following the will of another. There are a host of other
+reasons that I do not need to deal with now; but oh! brethren, none of
+them is worth pleading. They are excuses, they are not reasons. 'They
+all with one consent began to make excuse'--excuses, not reasons; and
+manufactured excuses, in order to cover a decision which has been
+taken before, and on other grounds altogether, which it is not
+convenient to bring up to the surface. I am not going to deal with
+these in detail, but I beseech you, do not let what I venture to call
+Christ's seeking of you once more, even by my poor words now, be in
+vain.
+
+Follow Him. Trust, obey, imitate, hold fellowship with Him. You will
+always have a Companion, you will always have a Protector. 'He that
+followeth Me,' saith He, 'shall not walk in darkness, but shall have
+the light of life.' And if you will listen to the Shepherd's voice and
+follow Him, that sweet old promise will be true, in its divinest and
+sweetest sense, about your life, in time; and about your life in the
+moment of death, the isthmus between two worlds, and about your life
+in eternity--'They shall not hunger nor thirst, neither shall the sun
+nor heat smite them; for He that hath mercy on them shall lead them,
+even by the springs of water shall He guide them.' 'Follow thou Me.'
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRST DISCIPLES: IV. NATHANAEL
+
+
+'Philip findeth Nathanael, and saith unto him, We have found Him, of
+whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write, Jesus of Nazareth,
+the son of Joseph. 46. And Nathanael said unto him, Can there any good
+thing come out of Nazareth? Philip saith unto him, Come and see. 47.
+Jesus saw Nathanael coming to Him, and saith of him, Behold an
+Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile! 48. Nathanael saith unto Him,
+Whence knowest Thou me? Jesus answered and said unto him, Before that
+Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee. 49.
+Nathanael answered and saith unto Him, Rabbi, Thou art the Son of God;
+Thou art the King of Israel.'--JOHN i. 45-49.
+
+The words are often the least part of a conversation. The Evangelist
+can tell us what Nathanael said to Jesus, and what Jesus said to
+Nathanael, but no Evangelist can reproduce the look, the tone, the
+magnetic influence which streamed out from Christ, and, we may
+believe, more than anything He said, riveted these men to Him.
+
+It looks as if Nathanael and his companions were very easily
+convinced, as if their adhesion to such tremendous claims as those of
+Jesus Christ was much too facile a thing to be a very deep one. But
+what can be put down in black and white goes a very short way to solve
+the secret of the power which drew them to Himself.
+
+The incident which is before us now runs substantially on the same
+lines as the previous bringing of Peter to Jesus Christ. In both cases
+the man is brought by a friend, in both cases the friend's weapon is
+simply the expression of his own personal experience, 'We have found
+the Messias,' although Philip has a little more to say about Christ's
+correspondence with the prophetic word. In both cases the work is
+finished by our Lord Himself manifesting His own supernatural
+knowledge to the inquiring spirit, though in the case of Nathanael
+that process is a little more lengthened out than in the case of
+Peter, because there was a little ice of hesitation and of doubt to be
+melted away. And Nathanael, starting from a lower point than Peter,
+having questions and hesitations which the other had not, rises to a
+higher point of faith and certitude, and from his lips first of all
+comes the full articulate confession, beyond which the Apostles never
+went as long as our Lord was upon earth: 'Rabbi, Thou art the Son of
+God; Thou art the King of Israel.' So that both in regard to the
+revelation that is given of the character of our Lord, and in regard
+to the teaching that is given of the development and process of faith
+in a soul, this last narrative fitly crowns the whole series. In
+looking at it with you now, I think I shall best bring out its force
+by asking you to take it as falling into these three portions: first,
+the preparation--a soul brought to Christ by a brother; then the
+conversation--a soul fastened to Christ by Himself; and then the
+rapturous confession--'Rabbi, Thou art the Son of God; Thou art the
+King of Israel.'
+
+I. Look, then, first of all, at the preparation--a soul brought to
+Christ by a brother.
+
+'Philip findeth Nathanael.' Nathanael, in all probability, as
+commentators will tell you, is the Apostle Bartholomew; and in the
+catalogues of the Apostles in the Gospels, Philip and he are always
+associated together. So that the two men, friends before, had their
+friendship riveted and made more close by this sacredest of all bonds,
+that the one had been to the other the means of bringing him to Jesus
+Christ. There is nothing that ties men to each other like that. If you
+want to know the full sweetness of association with friends, and of
+human love, get some heart knit to yours by this sacred and eternal
+bond that it owes to you its first knowledge of the Saviour. So all
+human ties will be sweetened, ennobled, elevated, and made perpetual.
+
+'We have found Him, of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did
+write: Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Joseph.' Philip knows nothing
+about Christ's supernatural birth, nor about its having been in
+Bethlehem; to him He is the son of a Nazarene peasant. But,
+notwithstanding that, He is the great, significant, mysterious Person
+for whom the whole sacred literature of Israel had been one long
+yearning for centuries; and he has come to believe that this Man
+standing beside him is the Person on whom all previous divine
+communications for a millennium past focussed and centred.
+
+I need not dwell upon these words, because to do so would be to repeat
+substantially what I said in a former sermon on these first disciples,
+about the value of personal conviction as a means of producing
+conviction in the minds of others, and about the necessity and the
+possibility of all who have found Christ for themselves saying so to
+others, and thereby becoming His missionaries and evangelists.
+
+I do not need to repeat what I said on that occasion; therefore I pass
+on to the very natural hesitation and question of Nathanael: 'Can
+there any good thing come out of Nazareth?' A prejudice, no doubt, but
+a very harmless one; a very thin ice which melted as soon as Christ's
+smile beamed upon him. And a most natural prejudice. Nathanael came
+from Cana of Galilee, a little hill village, three or four miles from
+Nazareth. We all know the bitter feuds and jealousies of neighbouring
+villages, and how nothing is so pleasant to the inhabitants of one as
+a gibe about the inhabitants of another. And in Nathanael's words
+there simply speaks the rustic jealousy of Cana against Nazareth.
+
+It is easy to blame him, but do you think that you or I, if we had
+been in his place, would have been likely to have said anything very
+different? Suppose you were told that a peasant out of Ross-shire was
+a man on whom the whole history of this nation hung. Do you think you
+would be likely to believe it without first saying, 'That is a strange
+place for such a person to be born in'? Galilee was the despised part
+of Palestine, and Nazareth obviously was a proverbially despised
+village of Galilee; and this Jesus was a carpenter's son that nobody
+had ever heard of. It seemed to be a strange head on which the divine
+dove should flutter down, passing by all the Pharisees and the
+Scribes, all the great people and wise people. Nathanael's prejudice
+was but the giving voice to a fault that is as wide as humanity, and
+which we have every day of our lives to fight with; not only in regard
+to religious matters but in regard to all others--namely, the habit of
+estimating people, and their work, and their wisdom, and their power
+to teach us, by the class to which they are supposed to belong, or
+even by the place from which they come.
+
+'Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?' 'Can a German teach an
+Englishman anything that he does not know?' 'Is a Protestant to owe
+anything of spiritual illumination to a Roman Catholic?' 'Are we
+Dissenters to receive any wisdom or example from Churchmen?' 'Will a
+Conservative be able to give any lessons in politics to a Liberal?'
+'Is there any other bit of England that can teach Lancashire?' Take
+care that whilst you are holding up your hands in horror against the
+prejudices of our Lord's contemporaries, who stumbled at His origin,
+you are not doing the same thing in regard to all manner of subjects
+twenty times a day.
+
+That is one very plain lesson, and not at all too secular for a
+sermon. Take another. This three-parts innocent prejudice of Nathanael
+brings into clear relief for us what a very real obstacle to the
+recognition of our Lord's Messianic authority His apparent lowly
+origin was. We have got over it, and it is no difficulty to us; but it
+was so then. When Jesus Christ came into this world Judaea was ruled
+by the most heartless of aristocracies, an aristocracy of cultured
+pedants. Wherever you get such a class you get people who think that
+there can be nobody worth looking at, or worth attending to, outside
+the little limits of their own supercilious superiority. Why did Jesus
+Christ come from 'the men of the earth,' as the Rabbis called all who
+had not learned to cover every plain precept with spiders' webs of
+casuistry? Why, for one thing, in accordance with the general law that
+the great reformers and innovators always come from outside these
+classes, that the Spirit of the Lord shall come on a herdsman like
+Amos, and fishermen and peasants spread the Gospel through the world;
+and that in politics, in literature, in science, as well as in
+religion, it is always true that 'not many wise men after the flesh,
+not many mighty, not many noble are called.' To the cultivated classes
+you have to look for a great deal that is precious and good, but for
+fresh impulse, in unbroken fields, you have to look outside them. And
+so the highest of all lives is conformed to the general law.
+
+More than that, 'Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Joseph,' came thus
+because He was the poor man's Christ, because He was the ignorant
+man's Christ, because His word was not for any class, but as broad as
+the world. He came poor, obscure, unlettered, that all who, like Him,
+were poor and untouched by the finger of earthly culture, might in Him
+find their Brother, their Helper, and their Friend.
+
+'Philip saith unto him, Come and see.' He is not going to argue the
+question. He gives the only possible answer to it--'You ask Me, can
+any good thing come out of Nazareth?' 'Come and see whether it is a
+good thing or no; and if it is, and if it came out of Nazareth, well
+then, the question has answered itself.' The quality of a thing cannot
+be settled by the origin of the thing.
+
+As it so happened, this Man did not come out of Nazareth at all,
+though neither Philip nor Nathanael knew it; but if He had, it would
+have been all the same. The right answer was 'Come and see.'
+
+Now although, of course, there is no kind of correspondence between
+the mere prejudice of this man Nathanael and the rooted intellectual
+doubts of other generations, yet 'Come and see' carries in it the
+essence of all Christian apologetics. By far the wisest thing that any
+man who has to plead the cause of Christianity can do is to put Christ
+well forward, and let people look at Him, and trust Him to produce His
+own impression. We may argue round, and round, and round about Him for
+evermore, and we shall never convince as surely as by simply holding
+Him forth. 'I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me.' Yet we
+are so busy proving Christianity that we sometimes have no time to
+preach it; so busy demonstrating that Jesus Christ is this, that, and
+the other thing, or contradicting the notion that He is not this,
+that, and the other thing, that we forget simply to present Him for
+men to look at. Depend upon it, whilst argument has its function, and
+there are men that must be approached thereby; on the whole, and for
+the general, the best way of propagating Christianity is to proclaim
+it, and the second best way is to prove it. Our arguments do fare very
+often very much as did that elaborate discourse that a bishop once
+preached to prove the existence of a God, at the end of which a simple
+old woman who had not followed his reasoning very intelligently,
+exclaimed, 'Well, for all he says, I can't help thinking there is a
+God after all.' The errors that are quoted to be confuted often remain
+more clear in the hearers' minds than the attempted confutations. Hold
+forth Christ--cry aloud to men, 'Come and see!' and some eyes will
+turn and some hearts cleave to Him.
+
+And on the other side, dear brethren, you have not done fairly by
+Christianity until you have complied with this invitation, and
+submitted your mind and heart honestly to the influence and the
+impression that Christ Himself would make upon it.
+
+II. We come now to the second stage--the conversation between Christ
+and Nathanael, where we see a soul fastened to Christ by Himself.
+
+In general terms, as I remarked, the method by which our Lord
+manifests His Messiahship to this single soul is a revelation of His
+supernatural knowledge of him. But a word or two may be said about the
+details. Mark the emphasis with which the Evangelist shows us that our
+Lord speaks this discriminating characterisation of Nathanael before
+Nathanael had come to Him: 'He saw him coming.' So it was not with a
+swift, penetrating glance of intuition that He read his character in
+his face. It was not that He generalised rapidly from one action which
+He had seen him do. It was not from any previous personal knowledge of
+him, for, obviously, from the words of Philip to Nathanael, the latter
+had never seen Jesus Christ. As Nathanael was drawing near Him, before
+he had done anything to show himself, our Lord speaks the words which
+show that He had read his very heart: 'Behold an Israelite indeed, in
+whom is no guile.'
+
+That is to say, here is a man who truly represents that which was the
+ideal of the whole nation. The reference is, no doubt, to the old
+story of the occasion on which Jacob's name was changed to Israel. And
+we shall see a further reference to the same story in the subsequent
+verses. Jacob had wrestled with God in that mysterious scene by the
+brook Jabbok, and had overcome, and had received instead of the name
+Jacob, 'a supplanter,' the name of Israel, 'for as a Prince hast thou
+power with God and hast prevailed.' And, says Christ: 'This man also
+is a son of Israel, one of God's warriors, who has prevailed with Him
+by prayer.' 'In whom is no guile'--Jacob in his early life had been
+marked and marred by selfish craft. Subtlety and guile had been the
+very keynote of his character. To drive that out of him, years of
+discipline and pain and sorrow had been needed. And not until it had
+been driven out of him could his name be altered, and he become
+Israel. This man has had the guile driven out of him. By what process?
+The words are a verbal quotation from Psalm xxxii.: 'Blessed is he
+whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the
+man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit
+there is no guile.' Clear, candid openness of spirit, and the freedom
+of soul from all that corruption which the Psalmist calls 'guile,' is
+the property of him only who has received it, by confession, by
+pardon, and by cleansing, from God. Thus Nathanael, in his wrestling,
+had won the great gift. His transgression had been forgiven; his
+iniquity had been covered; to him God had not imputed his sin; and in
+his spirit, therefore, there was no guile. Ah, brother! if that black
+drop is to be cleansed out of your heart, it must be by the same
+means--confession to God and pardon from God. And then you too will be
+a prince with Him. and your spirit will be frank and free, and open
+and candid.
+
+Nathanael, with astonishment, says, 'Lord, whence knowest Thou me?'
+Not that he appropriates the description to himself, or recognises the
+truthfulness of it, but he is surprised that Christ should have means
+of forming any judgment with reference to him, and so he asks Him,
+half expecting an answer which will show the natural origin of our
+Lord's knowledge: 'Whence knowest Thou me?' Then comes the answer,
+which, to supernatural insight into Nathanael's character, adds
+supernatural knowledge of Nathanael's secret actions: 'Before that
+Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee. And
+it is because I saw thee under the fig-tree that I knew thee to be "an
+Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile."' So then, under the
+fig-tree, Nathanael must have been wrestling in prayer; under the
+fig-tree must have been confessing his sins; under the fig-tree must
+have been longing and looking for the Deliverer who was to 'turn away
+ungodliness from Jacob.' So solitary had been that vigil, and so
+little would any human eye that had looked upon it have known what had
+been passing in his mind, that Christ's knowledge of it and of its
+significance at once lights up in Nathanael's heart the fire of the
+glad conviction, 'Thou art the Son of God.' If we had seen Nathanael,
+we should only have seen a man sitting, sunk in thought, under a
+fig-tree; but Jesus had seen the spiritual struggle which had no
+outward marks, and to have known which He must have exercised the
+divine prerogative of reading the heart.
+
+I ask you to consider whether Nathanael's conclusion was not right,
+and whether that woman of Samaria was not right when she hurried back
+to the city, leaving her water-pot, and said, 'Come and see a man that
+told me _all_ that ever I did.' That 'all' was a little stretch of
+facts, but still it was true in spirit. And her inference was
+absolutely true: 'Is not this the Christ, the Son of God?' This is the
+first miracle that Jesus Christ wrought. His supernatural knowledge,
+which cannot be struck out from the New Testament representations of
+His character, is as much a mark of divinity as any of the other of
+His earthly manifestations. It is not the highest; it does not appeal
+to our sympathies as some of the others do, but it is irrefragable.
+Here is a man to whom all men with whom He came in contact were like
+those clocks with a crystal face which shows us all the works. How
+does He come to have this perfect and absolute knowledge?
+
+That omniscience, as manifested here, shows us how glad Christ is when
+He sees anything good, anything that He can praise in any of us.
+'Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile.' Not a word
+about Nathanael's prejudice, not a word about any of his faults
+(though no doubt he had plenty of them), but the cordial praise that
+he was an honest, a sincere man, following after God and after truth.
+There is nothing which so gladdens Christ as to see in us any faint
+traces of longing for, and love towards, and likeness to, His own
+self. His omniscience is never so pleased as when beneath heaps and
+mountains of vanity and sin it discerns in a man's heart some poor
+germ of goodness and longing for His grace.
+
+And then again, notice how we have here our Lord's omniscience set
+forth as cognisant of all our inward crises and struggles, 'When thou
+wast under the fig tree, I saw thee.' I suppose all of us could look
+back to some place or other, under some hawthorn hedge, or some
+boulder by the seashore, or some mountain-top, or perhaps in some
+back-parlour, or in some crowded street, where some never-to-be-
+forgotten epoch in our soul's history passed, unseen by all eyes, and
+which would have shown no trace to any onlooker, except perhaps a
+tightly compressed lip. Let us rejoice to feel that Christ sees all
+these moments which no other eye can see. In our hours of crisis, and
+in our monotonous, uneventful moments, in the rush of the furious
+waters, when the stream of our lives is caught among rocks, and in the
+long, languid reaches of its smoothest flow, when we are fighting with
+our fears or yearning for His light, or even when sitting dumb and
+stolid, like snow men, apathetic and frozen in our indifference, He
+sees us, and pities, and will help the need which He beholds.
+
+  'Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,
+  And thy Saviour is not by;
+  Think not thou canst weep a tear,
+  And thy Saviour is not near.'
+
+'When thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee.'
+
+III. One word more about this rapturous confession, which crowns the
+whole: 'Rabbi, Thou art the Son of God; Thou art the King of Israel.'
+
+Where had Nathanael learned these great names? He was a disciple of
+John the Baptist, and he had no doubt heard John's testimony as
+recorded in this same chapter, when he told us how the voice from
+Heaven had bid him recognise the Messiah by the token of the
+descending Dove, and how he 'saw and bare record that this is the Son
+of God.' John's testimony was echoed in Nathanael's confession.
+Undoubtedly he attached but vague ideas to the name, far less
+articulate and doctrinal than we have the privilege of doing. To him
+'Son of God' could not have meant all that it ought to mean to us, but
+it meant something that he saw clearly, and a great deal beyond that
+he saw but dimly. It meant that God had sent, and was in some special
+sense the Father of, this Jesus of Nazareth.
+
+'Thou art the King of Israel,' John had been preaching, 'The Kingdom
+of Heaven is at hand.' The Messiah was to be the theocratic King, the
+King, not of 'Judah' nor of 'the Jews,' but of 'Israel,' the nation
+that had entered into covenant with God. So the substance of the
+confession was the Messiahship of Jesus, as resting upon His special
+divine relationship and leading to His Kingly sway.
+
+Notice also the enthusiasm of the confession; one's ear hears clearly
+a tone of rapture in it. The joy-bells of the man's heart are all
+a-ringing. It is no mere intellectual acknowledgment of Christ as
+Messiah. The difference between mere head-belief and heart-faith lies
+precisely in the presence of these elements of confidence, of
+enthusiastic loyalty, and absolute submission.
+
+So the great question for each of us is, not, Do I believe as a piece
+of my intellectual creed that Christ is 'the Messiah, the Son of God,
+the King of Israel'? I suppose almost all my hearers here now do that.
+That will not make you a Christian, my friend. That will neither save
+your soul nor quiet your heart, nor bring you peace and strength in
+life, nor open the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven to you. A man may be
+miserable, wholly sunk in all manner of wickedness and evil, die the
+death of a dog, and go to punishment hereafter, though he believe that
+Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the King of Israel. You want
+something more than that. You want just this element of rapturous
+acknowledgment, of loyal submission, absolute obedience, of
+unfaltering trust.
+
+Look at these first disciples, six brave men that had all that loyalty
+and love to Him; though there was not a soul in the world but
+themselves to share their convictions. Do they not shame you? When He
+comes to you, as He does come, with this question, 'Whom do ye say
+that I am?' may God give you grace to answer, 'Thou art the Christ,
+the Son of the living God,' and not only to answer it with your lips,
+but to trust Him wholly with your hearts, and with enthusiastic
+devotion to bow your whole being in adoring wonder and glad submission
+at His feet. If we are 'Israelites indeed,' our hearts will crown Him
+as the 'King of Israel.'
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRST DISCIPLES: V. BELIEVING AND SEEING
+
+'Jesus answered and said unto him, Because I said unto thee, I saw
+thee under the fig tree, believest thou? thou shalt see greater things
+than these. 51. And He saith unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto you,
+Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending
+and descending upon the Son of Man.'--JOHN i. 50, 51.
+
+Here we have the end of the narrative of the gathering together of the
+first disciples, which has occupied several sermons. We have had
+occasion to point out how each incident in the series has thrown some
+fresh light upon two main subjects, namely, upon some phase or other
+of the character and work of Jesus Christ, or upon the various ways by
+which faith, which is the condition of discipleship, is kindled in
+men's souls. These closing words may be taken as the crowning thoughts
+on both these matters.
+
+Our Lord recognises and accepts the faith of Nathanael and his
+fellows, but, like a wise Teacher, lets His pupils at the very
+beginning get a glimpse of how much lies ahead for them to learn; and
+in the act of accepting the faith gives just one hint of the great
+tract of yet uncomprehended knowledge of Him which lies before them;
+'Because I said unto thee, I saw thee under the fig tree, believest
+thou? thou shalt see greater things than these.' He accepts
+Nathanael's confession and the confession of his fellows. Human lips
+have given Him many great and wonderful titles in this chapter. John
+called Him 'the Lamb of God'; the first disciples hailed Him as the
+'Messias, which is the Christ'; Nathanael fell before Him with the
+rapturous exclamation, 'Thou art the Son of God; Thou art the King of
+Israel!' All these crowns had been put on His head by human hands, but
+here He crowns Himself. He makes a mightier claim than any that they
+had dreamed of, and proclaims Himself to be the medium of all
+communication and intercourse between heaven and earth: 'Hereafter ye
+shall see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and
+descending upon the Son of Man.'
+
+So, then, there are two great principles that lie in these verses, and
+are contained in, first, our Lord's mighty promise to His new
+disciples, and second, in our Lord's witness to Himself. Let me say a
+word or two about each of these.
+
+I. Our Lord's promise to His new disciples.
+
+Christ's words here may be translated either as a question or as an
+affirmation. It makes comparatively little difference to the
+substantial meaning whether we read 'believest thou?' or 'thou
+believest.' In the former case there will be a little more vivid
+expression of surprise and admiration at the swiftness of Nathanael's
+faith, but in neither case are we to find anything of the nature of
+blame or of doubt as to the reality of his belief. The question, if it
+be a question, is no question as to whether Nathanael's faith was a
+genuine thing or not. There is no hint that he has been too quick with
+his confession, and has climbed too rapidly to the point that he has
+attained. But in either case, whether the word be a question or an
+affirmation, we are to see in it the solemn and glad recognition of
+the reality of Nathanael's confession and belief.
+
+Here is the first time that that word 'belief' came from Christ's
+lips; and when we remember all the importance that has been attached
+to it in the subsequent history of the Church, and the revolution in
+human thought which followed upon our Lord's demand of our faith,
+there is an interest in noticing the first appearance of the word. It
+was an epoch in the history of the world when Christ first claimed and
+accepted a man's faith.
+
+Of course the second part of this verse, 'Thou shalt see greater
+things than these,' has its proper fulfilment in the gradual
+manifestation of His person and character, which followed through the
+events recorded in the Gospels. His life of service, His words of
+wisdom, His deeds of power and of pity, His death of shame and of
+glory, His Resurrection and His Ascension, these are the 'greater
+things' which Nathanael is promised. They all lay unrevealed yet, and
+what our Lord means is simply this: 'If you will continue to trust in
+Me, as you have trusted Me, and stand beside Me, you will see unrolled
+before your eyes and comprehended by your faith the great facts which
+will make the manifestation of God to the world.' But though that be
+the original application of the words, yet I think we may fairly draw
+from them some lessons that are of importance to ourselves; and I ask
+you to look at the hint that they give us about three things,--faith
+and discipleship, faith and sight, faith and progress. 'Believest
+thou? thou shalt see greater things than these.'
+
+First, here is light thrown upon the relation between faith and
+discipleship. It is clear that our Lord here uses the word for the
+first time in the full Christian sense, that He regards the exercise
+of faith as being practically synonymous with being a disciple, that
+from the very first, believers were disciples, and disciples were
+believers.
+
+Then, notice still further that our Lord here employs the word
+'belief' without any definition of what or whom it is that they were
+to believe. He Himself, and not certain thoughts about Him, is the
+true object of a man's faith. We may believe a proposition, but faith
+must grasp a person. Even when the person is made known to us by a
+proposition which we have to believe before we can trust the person,
+still the essence of faith is not the intellectual process of laying
+hold upon a certain thought, and acquiescing in it, but the moral
+process of casting myself in full confidence upon the Being that is
+revealed to me by the thought,--of laying my hand, and leaning my
+weight, on the Man about whom it tells me. And so faith, which is
+discipleship, has in it for its very essence the personal element of
+trust in Jesus Christ.
+
+Then, further, notice how widely different from our creed was
+Nathanael's creed, and yet how identical with our faith, if we are
+Christians, was Nathanael's faith. He knew nothing about the very
+heart of Christ's work, His atoning death. He knew nothing about the
+highest glory of Christ's person, His divine Sonship, in its unique
+and lofty sense. These lay unrevealed, and were amongst the greater
+things which he was yet to see; but though thus his knowledge was
+imperfect, and his creed incomplete as compared with ours, his faith
+was the very same. He laid hold upon Christ, he clave to Him with all
+his heart, he was ready to accept His teaching, he was willing to do
+His will, and as for the rest--'Thou shalt see greater things than
+these.' So, dear brethren, from these words of my text here, from the
+unhesitating attribution of the lofty notion of faith to this man,
+from the way in which our Lord uses the word, are gathered these three
+points that I beseech you to ponder: there is no discipleship without
+faith; faith is the personal grasp of Christ Himself; the contents of
+creeds may differ whilst the element of faith remains the same. I
+beseech you let Christ come to you with the question of my text, and
+as He looks you in the eyes, hear Him say to you, 'Believest _thou_?'
+
+Secondly, notice how in this great promise to the new disciples there
+is light thrown upon another subject, viz. the connection between
+faith and sight. There is a great deal about seeing in this context.
+Christ said to the first two that followed Him, 'Come and see.' Philip
+met Nathanael's thin film of prejudice with the same words, 'Come and
+see.' Christ greeted the approaching Nathanael with 'When thou wast
+under the fig tree I saw thee.' And now His promise is cast into the
+same metaphor: 'Thou shalt see greater things than these.'
+
+There is a double antithesis here. 'I saw thee,' 'Thou shalt see Me.'
+'Thou wast convinced because thou didst feel that thou wert the
+passive object of My vision. Thou shalt be still more convinced when
+illuminated by Me. Thou shalt see even as thou art seen. I saw thee,
+and that bound thee to Me; thou shalt see Me, and that will confirm
+the bond.'
+
+There is another antithesis, namely--between believing and seeing.
+'Thou believest--that is thy present; thou shalt see, that is thy hope
+for the future.' Now I have already explained that, in the proper
+primary meaning and application of the words, the sight which is here
+promised is simply the observance with the outward eye of the
+historical facts of our Lord's life which were yet to be learned. But
+still we may gather a truth from this antithesis which will be of use
+to us. 'Thou believest--thou shalt see'; that is to say, in the
+loftiest region of spiritual experience you must believe first, in
+order that you may see.
+
+I do not mean, as is sometimes meant, by that statement that a man has
+to try to force his understanding into the attitude of accepting
+religious truth, in order that he may have an experience which will
+convince him that it is true. I mean a very much simpler thing than
+that, and a very much truer one, viz. this, that unless we trust to
+Christ and take our illumination from Him, we shall never behold a
+whole set of truths which, when once we trust Him, are all plain and
+clear to us. It is no mysticism to say that. What do you _know_ about
+God?--I put emphasis upon the word 'know'--What do you know about Him,
+however much you may argue and speculate and think probable, and fear,
+and hope, and question, about Him? What do you know about Him apart
+from Jesus Christ? What do you know about human duty, apart from Him?
+What do you know of all that dim region that lies beyond the grave,
+apart from Him? If you trust Him, if you fall at His feet and say
+'Rabbi! Thou art my Teacher and mine illumination,' then you will see.
+You will see God, man, yourselves, duty; you will see light upon a
+thousand complications and perplexities; and you will have a
+brightness above that of the noonday sun, streaming into the thickest
+darkness of death and the grave and the awful hereafter. Christ is the
+Light. In that 'Light shall we see light.' And just as it needs the
+sun to rise in order that my eye may behold the outer world, so it
+needs that I shall have Christ shining in my heaven to illuminate the
+whole universe, in order that I may see clearly. 'Believe and thou
+shalt see.' For only when we trust Him do the mightiest truths that
+affect humanity stand plain and clear before us.
+
+And besides that, if we trust Christ, we get a living experience of a
+multitude of facts and principles which are all mist and darkness to
+men except through their faith; an experience which is so vivid and
+brings such certitude as that it may well be called vision. The world
+says, 'Seeing is believing.' So it is about the coarse things that you
+can handle, but about everything that is higher than these invert the
+proverb, and you get the truth. 'Seeing is believing.' Yes, in regard
+to outward things. Believing is seeing in regard to God and spiritual
+truth. 'Believest thou? thou shalt see.'
+
+Then, thirdly, there is light here about another matter, the
+connection between faith and progress. 'Thou shalt see greater things
+than these.' A wise teacher stimulates his scholars from the
+beginning, by giving them glimpses of how much there is ahead to be
+learnt. That does not drive them to despair; it braces all their
+powers. And so Christ, as His first lesson to these men, substantially
+says, 'You have learnt nothing yet, you are only beginning.' That is
+true about us all. Faith at first, both in regard to its contents and
+its quality, is very rudimentary and infantile. A man when he is first
+converted--perhaps suddenly--knows after a fashion that he himself is
+a very sinful, wretched, poor creature, and he knows that Jesus Christ
+has died for him, and is his Saviour, and his heart goes out to Him,
+in confidence and love and obedience. But he is only standing at the
+door and peeping in as yet. He has only mastered the alphabet. He is
+but on the frontier of the promised land. His faith has brought him
+into contact with infinite power, and what will be the end of that? He
+will indefinitely grow. His faith has started him on a course to which
+there is no natural end. As long as it keeps alive he will be growing
+and growing, and getting nearer and nearer to the great centre of all.
+
+So here is a grand possibility opened out in these simple words, a
+possibility which alone meets what you need, and what you are craving
+for, whether you know it or not, namely, something that will give you
+ever new powers and acquirements; something which will ensure your
+closer and ever closer approach to an absolute object of joy and
+truth; something that will ensure you against stagnation and guarantee
+unceasing progress. Everything else gets worn out, sooner or later; if
+not in this world, then in another. There is one course on which a man
+can enter with the certainty that there is no end to it, that it will
+open out, and out, and out as he advances--with the certainty that,
+come life, come death, it is all the same.
+
+When the plant grows too tall for the greenhouse they lift the roof,
+and it grows higher still. Whether you have your growth in this lower
+world, or whether you have your top up in the brightness and the blue
+of heaven, the growth is in one direction. There is a way that secures
+endless progress, and here lies the secret of it: 'Thou believest!
+thou shalt see greater things than these.'
+
+Now, brethren, that is a grand possibility, and it is a solemn lesson
+for some of you. You professing Christian people, are you any taller
+than you were when you were born? Have you grown at all? Are you
+growing now? Have you seen any further into the depths of Jesus Christ
+than you did on that first day when you fell at His feet and said,
+'Thou art the Son of God, Thou art the King of Israel'? His promise to
+you then was, 'Thou believest, thou shalt see greater things.' If you
+have not seen greater things it is because your faith has broken down,
+if it has not expired.
+
+II. Now let me turn to the second thought which lies in these great
+words.
+
+We have here, as I said, our Lord crowning Himself by His own witness
+to His own dignity. 'Hereafter ye shall see the heavens opened.' Mark
+how, with superbly autocratic lips, He bases this great utterance upon
+nothing else but His own word. Prophets ever said, 'Thus saith the
+Lord.' Christ ever said: 'Verily, verily, I say unto you.' 'Because He
+could swear by no greater, He sware by Himself.' He puts His own
+assurance instead of all argument and of all support to His words.
+
+'Hereafter.' A word which is possibly not genuine, and is omitted, as
+you will observe, in the Revised Version. If it is to be retained it
+must be translated, not 'hereafter,' as if it were pointing to some
+indefinite period in the future, but 'from henceforth,' as if
+asserting that the opening heavens and the descending angels began to
+be manifested from that first hour of His official work. 'Ye shall see
+heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending.' That is
+an allusion from the story of Jacob at Bethel. We have found reference
+to Jacob's history already in the conversation with Nathanael, 'An
+Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile.' And here is an unmistakable
+reference to that story, when the fugitive, with his head on the stony
+pillow, and the violet Syrian sky, with all its stars, rounding itself
+above him, beheld the ladder on which the angels of God ascended and
+descended. 'So,' says Christ, 'you shall see, in no vision of the
+night, in no transitory appearance, but in a practical waking reality,
+that ladder come down again, and the angels of God moving upon it in
+their errands of mercy.'
+
+And who, or what, is this ladder? Christ. Do not read these words as
+meaning that the angels of God were to come down on Him to help, and
+to honour, and to succour Him as they did once or twice in His life,
+but as meaning that they are to ascend and descend by Him for the help
+and blessing of the whole world.
+
+That is to say, to put it into plain words, Christ is the sole medium
+of communication between heaven and earth, the ladder with its foot
+upon the earth in His humanity, and its top in the heavens. 'No man
+hath ascended up into heaven save He which came down from heaven, even
+the Son of Man which is in heaven.'
+
+My time will not allow me to expand these thoughts as I would have
+done; let me put them in the briefest outline. Christ is the medium of
+all communication between heaven and earth, inasmuch as He is the
+medium of all revelation. I have spoken incidentally about that in the
+former part of this sermon, so I do not dwell on it now. Christ is the
+ladder between heaven and earth, inasmuch as in Him the sense of
+separation, and the reality of separation, are swept away. Sin has
+shut heaven; there comes down from it many a blessing upon unthankful
+heads, but between it in its purity and the earth in its muddy
+foulness 'there is a great gulf fixed.' It is not because God is great
+and I am small, or because He is Infinite and I am a mere pin-point as
+against a great continent, it is not because He lives for ever, and my
+life is but a hand-breadth, it is not because of the difference
+between His Omniscience and my ignorance, His strength and my
+weakness, that I am parted from Him. 'Your sins have separated between
+you and your God,' and no man, build he Babels ever so high, can reach
+thither. There is one means by which the separation is at an end, and
+by which all objective hindrances to union, and all subjective
+hindrances, are alike swept away. Christ has come, and in Him the
+heavens have bended down to touch, and touching to bless, this low
+earth, and man and God are at one once more.
+
+He is the ladder, or sole medium of communication, inasmuch as by Him
+all divine blessings, grace, helps, and favours, come down angel-like,
+into our weak and needy hearts. Every strength, every mercy, every
+spiritual power, consolation in every sorrow, fitness for duty,
+illumination in darkness, all gifts that any of us can need, come to
+us down on that one shining way, the mediation and the work of the
+Divine-Human Christ, the Lord.
+
+He is the ladder, the sole medium of communication between heaven and
+earth, inasmuch as by Him my poor desires and prayers and
+intercessions, my wishes, my sighs, my confessions rise to God. 'No
+man cometh to the Father but by Me.' He is the ladder, the means of
+all communication between heaven and earth, inasmuch as at the last,
+if ever we enter there at all, we shall enter through Him and through
+Him alone, who is 'the Way, the Truth, and the Life.'
+
+Ah, dear brethren! men are telling us now that there is no connection
+between earth and heaven except such as telescopes and spectroscopes
+can make out. We are told that there is no ladder, that there are no
+angels, that possibly there is no God, or if that there be, we have
+nothing to do with Him nor He with us; that our prayers cannot get to
+His ears, if He have ears, nor His hand be stretched out to help us,
+if He have a hand. I do not know how this cultivated generation is to
+he brought back again to faith in God and delivered from that ghastly
+doubt which empties heaven and saddens earth to its victims, but by
+giving heed to the word which Christ spoke to the whole race while He
+addressed Nathanael, 'Ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God
+ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.' If He be the Son of
+God, then all these heavenly messengers reach the earth by Him. If He
+be the Son of Man, then every man may share in the gifts which through
+Him are brought into the world, and His Manhood, which evermore dwelt
+in heaven, even while on earth, and was ever girt about by angel
+presences, is at once the measure of what each of us may become, and
+the power by which we may become it.
+
+One thing is needful for this wonderful consummation, even our faith.
+And oh! how blessed it will be if in waste solitudes we can see the
+open heaven, and in the blackest night the blaze of the glory of a
+present Christ, and hear the soft rustle of angels' wings filling the
+air, and find in every place 'a house of God and a gate of heaven,'
+because He is there. All that may be yours on one condition:
+'Believest thou? Thou shalt see heaven open, and the angels of God
+ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.'
+
+
+
+
+JESUS THE JOY-BRINGER
+
+'And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and the
+mother of Jesus was there: 2. And both Jesus was called, and His
+disciples, to the marriage. 3. And when they wanted wine, the mother
+of Jesus saith unto Him, They have no wine. 4. Jesus saith unto her,
+Woman, what have I to do with thee? Mine hour is not yet come. 5. His
+mother saith unto the servants, Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it.
+6. And there were set there six waterpots of stone, after the manner
+of the purifying of the Jews, containing two or three firkins apiece.
+7. Jesus saith unto them, Fill the waterpots with water. And they
+filled them up to the brim. 8. And He saith unto them, Draw out now,
+and bear unto the governor of the feast. And they bare it. 9. When the
+ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and knew
+not whence it was: (but the servants which drew the water knew;) the
+governor of the feast called the bridegroom, 10. And saith unto him,
+Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have
+well drunk, then that which is worse; but thou hast kept the good wine
+until now. 11. This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of
+Galilee, and manifested forth His glory; and His disciples believed on
+Him.'--JOHN ii. 1-11.
+
+The exact dating of this first miracle indicates an eye-witness. As
+Nazareth was some thirty miles distant from the place where John was
+baptizing, and Cana about four miles from Nazareth, the 'third day' is
+probably reckoned from the day of the calling of Philip. Jesus and His
+disciples seem to have been invited to the marriage feast later than
+the other guests, as Mary was already there. She appears to have been
+closely connected with the family celebrating the feast, as appears
+from her knowledge of the deficiency in the wine, and her direction to
+the servants.
+
+The first point, which John makes all but as emphatic as the miracle
+itself, is the new relation between Mary and Jesus, the lesson she had
+to learn, and her sweet triumphant trust. Now that she sees her Son
+surrounded by His disciples, the secret hope which she had nourished
+silently for so long bursts into flame, and she turns to Him with
+beautiful faith in His power to help, even in the small present need.
+What an example her first word to Him sets us all! Like the two sad
+sisters at Bethany, she is sure that to tell Him of trouble is enough,
+for that His own heart will impel Him to share, and perchance to
+relieve it. Let us tell Jesus our wants and leave Him to deal with
+them as He knows how.
+
+Of course, His addressing her as 'Woman' has not the meaning which it
+would have with us, for the term is one of respect and courtesy, but
+there is a plain intimation of a new distance in it, which is
+strengthened by the question, 'What is there in common between us?'
+What in common between a mother and her son! Yes, but she has to learn
+that the assumption of the position of Messiah in which her mother's
+pride so rejoiced, carried necessarily a consequence, the first of the
+swords which were to pierce that mother's heart of hers. That her Son
+should no more call her 'mother,' but 'woman,' told her that the old
+days of being subject to her were past for ever, and that the old
+relation was merged in the new one of Messiah and disciple--a bitter
+thought, which many a parent has to taste the bitterness of still,
+when wider outlooks and new sense of a vocation come to their
+children. Few mothers are able to accept the inevitable as Mary did,
+Jesus' 'hour' is not to be prescribed to Him, but His own
+consciousness of the fit time must determine His action. What gave Him
+the signal that the hour was struck is not told us, nor how soon after
+that moment it came. But the saying gently but decisively declares His
+freedom, His infallible accuracy, and certain intervention at the
+right time. We may think that He delays, but He always helps, 'and
+that right early.'
+
+Mary's sweet humility and strong trust come out wonderfully in her
+direction to the servants, which is the exact opposite of what might
+have been expected after the cold douche administered to her eagerness
+to prompt Jesus. Her faith had laid hold of the little spark of
+promise in that 'not yet,' and had fanned it into a flame. 'Then He
+will intervene, and I can leave Him to settle when.' How firm, though
+ignorant, must have been the faith which did not falter even at the
+bitter lesson and the apparent repulse, and how it puts to shame our
+feebler confidence in our better known Lord, if ever He delays our
+requests! Mary left all to Jesus; His commands were to be implicitly
+obeyed. Do we submit to Him in that absolute fashion both as to the
+time and the manner of His responses to our petitions?
+
+The next point is the actual miracle. It is told with remarkable
+vividness and equally remarkable reserve. We do not even learn in what
+precisely it consisted. Was all the water in the vessels turned into
+wine? Did the change affect only what was drawn out? No answer is
+possible to these questions. Jesus spoke no word of power, nor put
+forth His hand. His will silently effected the change on matter. So He
+manifested forth His glory as Creator and Sustainer, as wielding the
+divine prerogative of affecting material things by His bare volition.
+
+The reality of the miracle is certified by the jovial remark of the
+'ruler of the feast.' As Bengel says: 'The ignorance of the ruler
+proves the goodness of the wine; the knowledge of the servants, the
+reality of the miracle.' His palate, at any rate, was not so dulled as
+to be unable to tell a good 'brand' when he tasted it, nor is there
+any reason to suppose that Jesus was supplying more wine to a company
+that had already had more than enough.
+
+The ruler's words are not meant to apply to the guests at that feast,
+but are quite general. But this Evangelist is fond of quoting words
+which have deeper meanings than the speakers dreamed, and with his
+mystically contemplative eye he sees hints and symbols of the
+spiritual in very common things. So we are not forcing higher meanings
+into the ruler's jest, but catching one intention of John's quotation
+of it, when we see in it an unconscious utterance of the great truth
+that Jesus keeps His best wine till the last. How many poor deluded
+souls are ever finding that the world does the very opposite, luring
+men on to be its slaves and victims by brilliant promises and
+shortlived delights, which sooner or later lose their deceitful lustre
+and become stale, and often positively bitter! 'The end of that mirth
+is heaviness.' The dreariest thing in all the world is a godless old
+age, and one of the most beautiful things in all the world is the calm
+sunset which so often glorifies a godly life that has been full of
+effort for Jesus, and of sorrows patiently borne as being sent by Him.
+
+  'Full often clad in radiant vest
+  Deceitfully goes forth the morn,'
+
+but Christ more than keeps His morning's promises, and Christian
+experience is steadily progressive, if Christians cling close to Him,
+and Heaven will supply the transcendent confirmation of the blessed
+truth that was spoken unawares by the 'ruler' at that humble feast.
+
+What effect the miracle produced on others is not told; probably the
+guests shared the ruler's ignorance, but its effect on the disciples
+is that they 'believed on Him.' They had 'believed' already, or they
+would not have been disciples (John i. 50), but their faith was
+deepened as well as called forth afresh. Our faith ought to be
+continuously and increasingly responsive to His continuous
+manifestations of Himself which we can all find in our own experience.
+
+Jesus 'manifested His glory' in this first sign. What were the rays of
+that mild radiance? Surely the chief of them, in addition to the
+revelation of His sovereignty over matter, to which we have already
+referred, is that therein He hallowed the sweet sacred joys of
+marriage and family life, that therein He revealed Himself as looking
+with sympathetic eye on the ties that bind us together, and on the
+gladness of our common humanity, that therein He reveals Himself as
+able and glad to sanctify and elevate our joys and infuse into them a
+strange new fragrance and power. The 'water' of our ordinary lives is
+changed into 'wine.' Jesus became 'acquainted with grief' in order
+that He might impart to every believing and willing soul His own joy,
+and that by its remaining in us, our joy might be full.
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRST MIRACLE IN CANA--THE WATER MADE WINE
+
+'This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and
+manifested forth His glory.'--JOHN ii. 11.
+
+The keynote of this Gospel was struck in the earlier verses of the
+first chapter in the great words, 'The Word was made flesh and dwelt
+among us, and we beheld His glory, full of grace and truth.' To these
+words there is an evident reference in this language. The Evangelist
+regards Christ's first miracle as the first ray of that forth-flashing
+glory of the Incarnate Word. To this Evangelist all miracles are
+especially important as being _signs_, which is the word he generally
+employs to designate them. They are not mere portents, but significant
+revelations as well as wonders. It is not, I think, accidental that
+there are just seven miracles of our Lord's, before His crucifixion,
+recorded by John, and one of the Risen Lord.
+
+These signs are all set forth by the Evangelist as manifestations of
+various aspects of that one white light, of uncreated glory which rays
+from Christ. They are, if I may so say, the sevenfold colours into
+which the one beam is analysed. Each of them might be looked at in
+turn as presenting some fresh thought of what the 'glory...full of
+grace and truth' is.
+
+I begin with the first of the series. What, then, is the 'glory of the
+only Begotten Son' which flashes forth upon us from the miracle? My
+object is simply to try to answer that question for you.
+
+I. First, then, we see here the revelation of His creative power.
+
+It is very noteworthy that the miraculous fact is veiled entirely in
+the narrative. Not a word is said of the method of operation, it is
+not even said that the miracle was wrought; we are only told what
+preceded it, and what followed it. Itself is shrouded in deep silence.
+The servants fill the water-pots.--'Draw out now,' and they draw, 'and
+bear it to the governor of the feast.' Where the miraculous act comes
+in we do not know; what was its nature we cannot tell. How far it
+extended is left obscure. Was all the large quantity of water in these
+six great vessels of stone transformed into wine, or was the change
+effected in the moment when the portion that was wanted was drawn from
+them and on that portion only? We cannot answer the question.
+Probably, I think, the latter; but at all events a veil is dropped
+over the fact.
+
+Only this, we see that in this miracle, even more conspicuously than
+in any other of our Lord's, there are no means at all employed.
+Sometimes He used material vehicles, anointing a man's eyes with clay,
+or moistening the ear with the spittle; sometimes sending a man to
+bathe in the Pool of Siloam; sometimes laying His hand on the sick;
+sometimes healing from a distance by the mere utterance of His word.
+But here there is not even a word; no means of any kind employed, but
+the silent forth-putting of His will, which, without token, without
+visible audible indication of any sort, passes with sovereign power
+into the midst of material things and there works according to His own
+purpose. Is not this the signature of divinity, that without means the
+mere forth-putting of the will is all that is wanted to mould matter
+as plastic to His command? It is not even, 'He spake and it was done,'
+but silently He willed, and 'the conscious water knew its Lord, and
+blushed.' This is the glory of the Incarnate Word.
+
+Now that was no interruption of the order of things established in the
+Creation. There was no suspension of natural laws here. What happened
+was only this, that the power which generally works through mediating
+links came into immediate connection with the effect. What does it
+matter whether your engine transmits its powers through half a dozen
+cranks, or two or three less? What does it matter whether the chain be
+longer or shorter? Some parenthetical links are dropped here, that is
+all that is unusual. For in all ordinary natural operations, as we
+call them, the profound prologue of this Gospel teaches us to believe
+that Christ, the Eternal Word, works according to His will. He was the
+Agent of creation. He is the Agent of that preservation which is only
+a continual creation. In Him is life, and all living things live
+because of the continual presence and operation upon them of His
+divine power. And again I say, what is phenomenal and unusual in this
+miracle is but the suppression of two or three of the connecting links
+between the continual cause of all creatural existences, and its
+effect. So let us learn that whether through a long chain of so-called
+causes, or whether close up against the effect, without the
+intervention of these parenthetical and transmitting media, the divine
+power works. The power is one, and the reason for the effect is one,
+that Christ ever works in the world, and is that Eternal Word,
+'without whom was not anything made that was made.' 'This beginning of
+miracles did Christ... and manifested His glory.'
+
+II. Then, again, we see here, I think, the revelation of one great
+purpose of our Lord's coming, to hallow all common, and especially all
+family, life.
+
+What a strange contrast there is between the simple gladness of the
+rustic village wedding and the tremendous scene of the Temptation in
+the wilderness, which preceded it only by a few days! What a strange
+contrast there is between the sublime heights of the first chapter and
+the homely incident which opens the ministry! What a contrast between
+the rigid asceticism of the Forerunner, 'who came neither eating nor
+drinking,' and the Son of Man, who enters thus freely and cheerfully
+into the common joys and relationships of human nature! How unlike the
+scene at the marriage-feast must have been to the anticipations of the
+half-dozen disciples that had gathered round Him, all a-tingling with
+expectation as to what would be the first manifestation of His
+Messianic power! The last thing they would have dreamed of would have
+been to find Him in the humble home in Cana of Galilee. Some people
+say 'this miracle is unworthy of Him, for it was wrought upon such a
+trivial occasion.' And was it a trivial occasion that prompted Him
+thus to commence His career, not by some high and strained and remote
+exhibition of more than human saintliness or power, but by entering
+like a Brother into the midst of common, homespun, earthly joys, and
+showing how His presence ennobled and sanctified these? Surely the
+world has gained from Him, among the many gifts that He has given to
+it, few that have been the fountain of more sacred sweetness and
+blessedness than is opened in that fact that the first manifestation
+of His glory had for its result the hallowing of the marriage tie.
+
+And is it not in accordance with the whole meaning and spirit of His
+works that 'forasmuch as the brethren were partakers of' anything, 'He
+Himself likewise should take part of the same,' and sanctify every
+incident of life by His sharing of it? So He protests against that
+faithless and wicked division of life into sacred and secular, which
+has wrought such harm both in the sacred and in the secular regions.
+So He protests against the notion that religion has to do with another
+world rather than with this. So He protests against the narrowing
+conception of His work which would remove from its influence anything
+that interests humanity. So He says, as it were, at the very beginning
+of His career, 'I am a Man, and nothing that is human do I reckon
+foreign to Myself.'
+
+Brethren! let us learn the lesson that all life is the region of His
+Kingdom; that the sphere of His rule is everything which a man can do
+or feel or think. Let us learn that where His footsteps have trod is
+hallowed ground. If a prince shares for a few moments in the
+festivities of his gathered people on some great occasion, how
+ennobled the feast seems! If he joins in their sports or in their
+occupations for a while as an act of condescension, how they return to
+them with renewed vigour! And so we. We have had our King in the midst
+of all our family life, in the midst of all our common duties;
+therefore are they consecrated. Let us learn that all things done with
+the consciousness of His presence are sacred. He has hallowed every
+corner of human life by His presence; and the consecration, like some
+pungent and perennial perfume, lingers for us yet in the else
+scentless air of daily life, if we follow His footsteps.
+
+Sanctity is not singularity. There is no need to withdraw from any
+region of human activity and human interest in order to develop the
+whitest saintliness, the most Christlike purity. The saint is to be in
+the world, but not of it; like the Master, who went straight from the
+wilderness and its temptations to the homely gladness of the rustic
+marriage.
+
+III. Still further, we have here a symbol of Christ's glory as the
+ennobler and heightener of all earthly joys.
+
+That may be taken with perhaps a permissible play of fancy as one
+meaning, at any rate, of the transformation of water into wine; the
+less savoury and fragrant and powerful liquid into the more so. Wine,
+in the Old Testament especially, is the symbol of gladness, and though
+it received a deeper and a sacreder meaning in the New Testament as
+being the emblem of His blood shed for us, it is the Old Testament
+point of view that prevails here. And therefore, I say, we may read in
+the incident the symbol of His transforming power. He comes, the Man
+of Sorrows, with the gift of joy in His hand. It is not an unworthy
+object--not unworthy, I mean, of a divine sacrifice--to make men glad.
+It is worth His while to come from Heaven to agonise and to die, in
+order that He may sprinkle some drops of incorruptible and everlasting
+joy over the weary and sorrowful hearts of earth. We do not always
+give its true importance to gladness in the economy of our lives,
+because we are so accustomed to draw our joys from ignoble sources
+that in most of our joys there is something not altogether creditable
+or lofty. But Christ came to bring gladness, and to transform its
+earthly sources into heavenly fountains; and so to change all the less
+sweet, satisfying, and potent draughts which we take from earth's
+cisterns into the wine of the Kingdom; the new wine, strong and
+invigorating, 'making glad the heart of man.'
+
+Our commonest blessings, our commonest joys, if only they be not foul
+and filthy, are capable of this transformation. Link them with Christ;
+be glad in Him. Bring Him into your mirth, and it will change its
+character. Like a taper plunged into a jar of oxygen, it will blaze up
+more brightly. Earth, at its best and highest, without Him is like
+some fair landscape lying in the shadow; and when He comes to it, it
+is like the same scene when the sun blazes out upon it, flashes from
+every bend of the rippling river, brings beauty into many a shady
+corner, opens all the flowering petals and sets all the birds singing
+in the sky. The whole scene changes when a beam of light from Him
+falls upon earthly joys. He will transform them and ennoble them and
+make them perpetual. Do not meddle with mirth over which you cannot
+make the sign of the Cross and ask Him to bless it; and do not keep
+Him out of your gladness, or it will leave bitterness on your lips,
+howsoever sweet it tastes at first.
+
+Ay! and not only can this Master transform the water at the marriage
+feast into the wine of gladness, but the cups that we all carry, into
+which our tears have dropped--upon these too He can lay His hand and
+change them into cups of blessing and of salvation.
+
+'Blessed are they... who, passing through the valley of weeping,
+gather their tears into a well; the rain also covereth it with
+blessings.' So the old Psalm put the thought that sorrow may be turned
+into a solemn joy, and may lie at the foundation of our most flowery
+fruitfulness. And the same lesson we may learn from this symbol. The
+Christ who transforms the water of earthly gladness into the wine of
+heavenly blessedness, can do the same thing for the bitter waters of
+sorrow, and can make them the occasions of solemn joy. When the leaves
+drop we see through the bare branches. Shivering and cold they may
+look, but we see the stars beyond, and that is better. 'This beginning
+of miracles' will Jesus repeat in every sad heart that trusts itself
+to Him.
+
+IV. And last of all, we have here a token of His glory as supplying
+the deficiencies of earthly sources.
+
+'His mother saith unto Him, "They have no wine."' The world's banquet
+runs out, Christ supplies an infinite gift. These great water-pots
+that stood there, if the whole contents of them were changed, as is
+possible, contained far more than sufficient for the modest wants of
+the little company. The water that flowed from each of them, in
+obedience to the touch of the servant's hand, if the change were
+effected then, as is possible, would flow on so long as any thirsted
+or any asked. And Christ gives to each of us, if we choose, a fountain
+that will spring unto life eternal. And when the world's platters are
+empty, and the world's cups are all drained dry, He will feed and
+satisfy the immortal hunger and the blessed thirst of every spirit
+that longs for Him.
+
+The rude speech of the governor of the feast may lend itself to
+another aspect of this same thought. He said, in jesting surprise,
+'Thou hast kept the good wine until now,' whereas the world gives its
+best first, and when the palate is dulled and the appetite diminished,
+then 'that which is worse.' How true that is; how tragically true in
+some of our lives! In the individual the early days of hope and
+vigour, when all things were fresh and wondrous, when everything was
+apparelled in the glory of a dream, contrast miserably with the bitter
+experiences of life that most of us have made. Habit comes, and takes
+the edge off everything. We drag remembrance, like a lengthening
+chain, through all our life; and with remembrance come remorse and
+regret. 'The vision splendid' no more attends men, as they plod on
+their way through the weariness of middle life, or pass down into the
+deepening shadows of advancing and solitary old age. The best comes
+first, for the men who have no good but this world's. And some of you
+have got nothing in your cups but dregs that you scarcely care to
+drink.
+
+But Jesus Christ keeps the best till the last. His gifts become
+sweeter every day. No time can cloy them. Advancing years make them
+more precious and more necessary. The end is better in this course
+than the beginning. And when life is over, and we pass into the
+heavens, the word will come to our lips, with surprise and with
+thankfulness, as we find how much better it all is than we had ever
+dreamed it should be: 'Thou hast kept the good wine until now.'
+
+Oh, my brother! do not touch that cup that is offered to you by the
+harlot world, spiced and fragrant and foaming; 'at the last it biteth
+like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder.' But take the pure joys
+which the Christ, loved, trusted, obeyed, summoned to your feast and
+welcomed in your heart, will bring to you; and these shall grow and
+greaten until the perfection of the Heavens.
+
+
+
+
+CHRIST CLEANSING THE TEMPLE
+
+'Take these things hence; make not My Father's house an house of
+merchandise.'--JOHN ii. 16.
+
+The other Evangelists do not record this cleansing of the Temple at
+the beginning of Christ's ministry, but, as we all know, tell of a
+similar act at its very close. John, on the other hand, has no notice
+of the latter incident. The question, then, naturally arises, are
+these diverse narratives accounts of the same event? The answer seems
+to me to be in the negative, because John's Gospel is evidently
+intended to supplement the other three, and to record incidents either
+unknown to, or unnoticed by, them, and, as a matter of fact, the whole
+of this initial visit of our Lord to Jerusalem is omitted by the three
+Evangelists. Then the two incidents are distinctly different in tone,
+in setting, and in the words with which our Lord accompanies them.
+They are both appropriate in the place in which they stand, the one as
+the initial and the other as all but the final act of His Messiahship.
+So we may learn from the repetition of this cleansing the solemn
+lesson: that outward reformation of religious corruptions is of small
+and transient worth. For in three years--perhaps in as many weeks--the
+abuse that He corrected returned in full force.
+
+Now, this narrative has many points of interest, but I think I shall
+best bring out its meaning if I remind you, by way of introduction,
+that the Temple of Jerusalem was succeeded by the Temple of the
+Christian Church, and that each individual Christian man is a temple.
+So there are three things that I want to set before you: what Christ
+did in the Temple; what He does in the Church; what He will do to each
+of us if we will let Him.
+
+I. First, then, what Christ did in the Temple.
+
+Now, the scene in our narrative is not unlike that which may be
+witnessed in any Roman Catholic country in the cathedral place or
+outside the church on the saint's day, where there are long rows of
+stalls, fitted up with rosaries, and images of the saint, and candles,
+and other apparatus for worship.
+
+The abuse had many practical grounds on which it could be defended. It
+was very convenient to buy sacrifices on the spot, instead of having
+to drag them from a distance. It was no less convenient to be able to
+exchange foreign money, possibly bearing upon it the head of an
+emperor, for the statutory half-shekel. It was profitable to the
+sellers, and no doubt to the priests, who were probably sleeping
+partners in the concern, or drew rent for the ground on which the
+stalls stood. And so, being convenient for all and profitable to many,
+the thing became a recognised institution.
+
+Being familiar it became legitimate, and no one thought of any
+incongruity in it until this young Nazarene felt a flash of zeal for
+the sanctity of His Father's house consuming Him. Catching up some of
+the reeds which served as bedding for the cattle, He twisted them into
+the semblance of a scourge, which could hurt neither man nor beast. He
+did not use it. It was a symbol, not an instrument. According to the
+reading adopted in the Revised Version, it was the sheep and cattle,
+not their owners, whom He 'drove out.' And then, dropping the scourge,
+He turned to the money-changers, and, with the same hand, overthrew
+their tables. And then came the turn of the sellers of doves. He would
+not hurt the birds, nor rob their owners. And so He neither overthrew
+nor opened the cages, but bade them 'Take these things hence'; and
+then came the illuminating words, 'Make not My Father's house a house
+of merchandise.'
+
+Now this incident is very unlike our Lord's usual method, even if we
+do not exaggerate the violence which He employed. It is unlike in two
+respects: in the use of compulsion, and in aiming at mere outward
+reformation. And both of these points are intimately connected with
+its place in His career.
+
+It was the first public appearance of Jesus before His nation as
+Messiah. He inaugurates His work by a claim--by an act of
+authority--to be the King of Israel and the Lord of the Temple. If we
+remember the words from the last prophet, in which Malachi says that
+'the Messenger of the Covenant...shall suddenly come to His Temple,
+and purify the sons of Levi,' we get the significance of this
+incident. We have to mark in it our Lord's deliberate assumption of
+the role of Messiah; His shaping His conduct so as to recall to all
+susceptible hearts that last utterance of prophecy, and to recognise
+the fact that at the beginning of His career He was fully conscious of
+His Son-ship, and inaugurated His work by the solemn appeal to the
+nation to recognise Him as their Lord.
+
+And this is the reason, as I take it, why the anomalous incident is in
+its place at the beginning of His career no less than the repetition
+of it was at the close. And this is the explanation of the anomaly of
+the incident. It is His solemn, authoritative claiming to be God's
+Messenger, the Messiah long foretold.
+
+Then, further, this incident is a singular manifestation of Christ's
+unique power. How did it come that all these sordid hucksters had not
+a word to say, and did not lift a finger in opposition, or that the
+Temple Guard offered no resistance, and did not try to quell the
+unseemly disturbance, or that the very officials, when they came to
+reckon with Him, had nothing harsher to say than, 'What sign showest
+Thou unto us, seeing that Thou doest these things'? No miracle is
+needed to explain that singular acquiescence. We see in lower forms
+many instances of a similar thing. A man ablaze with holy indignation,
+and having a secret ally in the hearts of those whom He rebukes, will
+awe a crowd even if he does not infect them. But that is not the full
+explanation. I see here an incident analogous to that strange event at
+the close of Christ's ministry, when, coming out from beneath the
+shadows of the olives in the garden, He said to the soldiers 'Whom
+seek ye?' and they fell backwards and wallowed on the ground. An
+overwhelming impression of His personal majesty, and perhaps some
+forth-putting of that hidden glory which did swim up to the surface on
+the mountain of Transfiguration, bowed all these men before Him, like
+reeds before the wind. And though there was no recognition of His
+claim, there was something in the Claimant that forbade resistance and
+silenced remonstrance.
+
+Further, this incident is a revelation of Christ's capacity for
+righteous indignation. No two scenes can be more different than the
+two recorded in this chapter: the one that took place in the rural
+seclusion of Cana, nestling among the Galilean hills, the other that
+was done in the courts of the Temple swarming with excited
+festival-keepers; the one hallowing the common joys of daily life, the
+other rebuking the profanation of what assumed to be a great deal more
+sacred than a wedding festival; the one manifesting the love and
+sympathy of Jesus, His power to ennoble all human relationships, and
+His delight in ministering to need and bringing gladness, and the
+other setting forth the sterner aspect of His character as consumed
+with holy zeal for the sanctity of God's name and house. Taken
+together, one may say that they cover the whole ground of His
+character, and in some very real sense are a summary of all His work.
+The programme contains the whole of what is to follow hereafter.
+
+We may well take the lesson, which no generation ever needed more than
+the present, both by reason of its excellences and of its defects,
+that there were no love worthy of a perfect spirit in which there did
+not lie dormant a dark capacity of wrath, and that Christ Himself
+would not have been the Joy-bringer, the sympathising Gladdener which
+He manifested Himself as being in the 'beginning of miracles in Cana
+of Galilee' unless, side by side, there had lain in Him the power of
+holy indignation and, if need be, of stern rebuke. Brethren, we must
+retain our conception of His anger if we are not to maim our
+conception of His love. There is no wrath like the wrath of the Lamb.
+The Temple court, with the strange figure of the Christ with a scourge
+in His hand, is a revelation which this generation, with its
+exaggerated sentimentalism, with its shrinking, by reason of its good
+and of its evil, from the very notion of a divine retribution based
+upon the eternal antagonism between good and evil, most sorely needs.
+
+II. Now, secondly, notice what Christ does in His Church.
+
+I need not remind you how God's method of restoration is always to
+restore with a difference and a progress. The ruined Temple on Zion
+was not to be followed by another house of stone and lime, but by 'a
+spiritual house,' builded together for 'a habitation of God in the
+Spirit.' The Christian Church takes the place of that material
+sanctuary, and is the dwelling-place of God.
+
+That being so, let us take the lesson that that house, too, may be
+desecrated. There may be, as there were in the original Temple, the
+externals of worship, and yet, eating out the reality of these, there
+may be an inward mercenary spirit.
+
+Note how insensibly such corruption creeps in to a community. You
+cannot embody an idea in a form or in an external association without
+immediately dragging it down, and running the risk of degradation. It
+is just like a drop of quicksilver which you cannot expose to the air
+but instantaneously its brightness is dimmed by the scum that forms on
+its surface. A church as an outward institution is exposed to all the
+dangers to which other institutions are exposed. And these creep on
+insensibly, as this abuse had crept on. So it is not enough that we
+should be at ease in our consciences in regard to our practices as
+Christian communities. We become familiar with any abuse, and as we
+become familiar we lose the power of rightly judging of it. Therefore
+conscience needs to be guided and enlightened quite as much as to be
+obeyed.
+
+How long has it taken the Christian Church to learn the wickedness of
+slavery? Has the Christian Church yet learned the unchristianity of
+War? Are there no abuses amongst us, which subsequent generations will
+see to be so glaring that they will talk about us as we talk about our
+ancestors, and wonder whether we were Christians at all when we could
+tolerate such things? They creep on gradually, and they need continual
+watchfulness if they are not to assume the mastery.
+
+The special type of corruption which we find in this incident is one
+that besets the Church always. Of course, if I were preaching to
+ministers, I should have a great deal to say about that. For men that
+are necessarily paid for preaching have a sore temptation to preach
+for pay. But it is not only we professionals who have need to lay to
+heart this incident. It is all Christian communities, established and
+non-established churches, Roman Catholic and Protestant. The same
+danger besets them all. There must be money to work the outward
+business of the house of God. But what about people that 'run'
+churches as they run mills? What about people whose test of the
+prosperity of a Christian community is its balance-sheet? What about
+the people that hang on to religious communities and services for the
+sake of what they can make out of them? We have heard a great deal
+lately about what would happen 'if Christ came to Chicago.' If Christ
+came to any community of professing Christians in this land, do you
+not think He would need to have the scourge in His hand, and to say
+'Make not My Father's house a house of merchandise'? He will come; He
+does come; He is always coming if we would listen to Him. And at long
+intervals He comes in some tremendous and manifest fashion, and
+overthrows the money-changers' tables.
+
+Ah, brethren! if Jesus Christ had not thus come, over and over again,
+to His Church, Christian men would have killed Christianity long ago.
+Did you ever think that Christianity is the only religion that has
+shown recuperative power and that has been able to fling off its
+peccant humours? They used to say--I do not know whether it is true or
+not--that Thames water was good to put on board ship because of its
+property of corrupting and then clearing itself, and becoming fit to
+drink. We and our brethren, all through the ages, have been corrupting
+the Water of Life. And how does it come to be sweet and powerful
+still? This tree has substance in it when it casts its leaves. That
+unique characteristic of Christianity, its power of reformation, is
+not self-reformation, but it is a coming of the Lord to His temple to
+'purify the sons of Levi, that their offering may be pleasant as in
+days of yore.'
+
+So one looks upon the spectacle of churches labouring under all manner
+of corruptions; and one need not lose heart. The shortest day is the
+day before the year turns; and when the need is sorest the help is
+nearest. And so I, for my part, believe that very much of the
+organisations of all existing churches will have to be swept away. But
+I believe too, with all my heart--and I hope that you do--that, though
+the precious wheat is riddled in the sieve, and the chaff falls to the
+ground, not one grain will go through the meshes. Whatever becomes of
+churches, the Church of Christ shall never have its strength so sapped
+by abuses that it must perish, or its lustre so dimmed that the Lord
+of the Temple must depart from His sanctuary.
+
+III. Lastly, note what Christ will do for each of us if we will let
+Him.
+
+It is not a community only which is the temple of God. For the
+Apostles in many places suggest, and in some distinctly say, 'ye are
+the temples' individually, as well as the Temple collectively, of the
+Most High. And so every Christian soul--by virtue of that which is the
+deepest truth of Christianity, the indwelling of Christ in men's
+hearts by faith--is a temple of God; and every human soul is meant to
+be and may become such. That temple can be profaned. There are many
+ways in which professing Christians make it a house of merchandise.
+There are forms of religion which are little better than chaffering
+with God, to give Him so much service if He will repay us with so much
+Heaven. There are too many temptations, to which we yield, to bring
+secular thoughts into our holiest things. Some of us, by reason not of
+wishing wealth but of dreading penury, find it hard to shut worldly
+cares out of our hearts. We all need to be on our guard lest the
+atmosphere in which we live in this great city shall penetrate even
+into our moments of devotion, and the noise of the market within
+earshot of the Holy of Holies shall disturb the chant of the
+worshippers. It is Manchester's temptation, and it is one that most of
+us need to be guarded against.
+
+So engrossed, and, as we should say, necessarily engrossed--or, at all
+events, legitimately engrossed--are we in the pursuits of our daily
+commerce, that we have scarcely time enough or leisure of heart and
+mind enough to come into 'the secret place of the Most High.' The
+worshippers stop outside trading for beasts and doves, and they have
+no time to go into the Temple and present their offerings.
+
+It is our besetting danger. Forewarned is forearmed, to some extent.
+Would that we could all hear, as we go about our ordinary avocations,
+that solemn voice, 'Make not My Father's house a house of
+merchandise,' and could keep the inner sanctuary still from the
+noises, and remote from the pollutions, of the market hard by!
+
+We cannot cast out these or any other desecrating thoughts and desires
+by ourselves, except to a very small degree. And if we do, then there
+happens what our Lord warned us against in profound words. The house
+may be emptied of the evil tenant in some measure by our own
+resolution and self-reformation. But if it is not occupied by Him, it
+remains 'empty,' though it is 'swept and garnished.' Nature abhors a
+vacuum, and into the empty house there come the old tenant and seven
+brethren blacker than himself. The only way to keep the world out of
+my heart is to have Christ filling it. If we will ask Him He will come
+to us. And if He has the scourge in His hand, let Him be none the less
+welcome a guest for that. He will come, and when He enters, it will be
+like the rising of the sun, when all the beasts of the forest slink
+away and lay them down in their dens. It will be like the carrying of
+the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord of the whole earth into the temple
+of Dagon, when the fish-like image fell prone and mutilated on the
+threshold. If we say to Him, 'Arise, O Lord, into Thy rest, Thou and
+the Ark of Thy strength,' He will enter in, and by His entrance will
+'make the place of His feet glorious' and pure.
+
+
+
+
+THE DESTROYERS AND THE RESTORER
+
+'Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this Temple, and in three
+days I will raise it up.'--JOHN ii. 19.
+
+This is our Lord's answer to the Jewish request for a sign which
+should warrant His action in cleansing the Temple. There are two such
+cleansings recorded in the Gospels; this one His first public act, and
+another, omitted by John, but recorded in the other Gospels, which was
+almost His last public act.
+
+It has been suggested that these are but two versions of one incident;
+and although there is no objection in principle to admitting the
+possibility of that explanation, yet in fact it appears to me
+insufficient and unnecessary. For each event is appropriate in its own
+place. In each there is a distinct difference in tone. The incident
+recorded in the present chapter has our Lord's commentary, 'Make not
+My Father's house a house of merchandise'; in that recorded in the
+Synoptic Gospels the profanation is declared as greater, and the
+rebuke is more severe. The 'house of merchandise' has become, by their
+refusal to render to Him what was His, 'a den of thieves.' In the
+later incident there is a reference in our Lord's quotation from the
+Old Testament to the entrance of the Gentiles into the Kingdom. There
+is no such reference here. In the other Gospels there is no record of
+this question which the Jews asked, nor of our Lord's significant
+answer, whilst yet a caricatured and mistaken version of that answer
+was known to the other Evangelists, and is put by them into the mouths
+of the false witnesses at our Lord's trial. They thus attest the
+accuracy of our narrative even while they seem not to have known of
+the incident.
+
+All these things being taken into account, I think that we have to do
+with a double, of which there are several instances in the Gospels,
+the same event recurring under somewhat varied circumstances, and
+reflecting varied aspects of truth. But it is to our Lord's words in
+vindication of His right to cleanse the Temple rather than to the
+incident on which they are based that I wish to turn your attention
+now: 'Destroy this Temple,' said our Lord, as His sufficient and only
+answer to the demand for a sign, 'and in three days I will raise it
+up.'
+
+Now these words, enigmatical as they are, seem to me to be very
+profound and significant; and I wish, on this Easter Sunday, to look
+at them as throwing a light upon the gladness of this day. They
+suggest to me three things: I find in them, first, an enigmatical
+forecast of our Lord's own history; second, a prophetic warning of
+Israel's; and last, a symbolical foreshadowing of His world-wide work
+as the Restorer of man's destructions. 'Destroy this Temple, and in
+three days I will raise it up.'
+
+I. First then, I think, we see here an enigmatical forecast of our
+Lord's own history.
+
+Notice, first, that marvellous and unique consciousness of our Lord's
+as to His own dignity and nature. 'He spake of the temple of His
+body.' Think that here is a man, apparently one of ourselves, walking
+amongst us, living the common life of humanity, who declares that in
+Him, in an altogether solitary and peculiar fashion, there abides the
+fulness of Deity. Think that there has been a Man who said, 'In this
+place is One greater than the Temple.' And people have believed Him,
+and do believe Him, and have found that the tremendous audacity of the
+words is simple verity, and that Christ is, in inmost reality, all
+which the Temple was but in the poorest symbol. In it there had dwelt,
+though there dwelt no longer at the time when He was speaking, a
+material and symbolical brightness, the expression of something which,
+for want of a better name, we call the 'presence of God.' But what was
+that flashing fire between the cherubim that brooded over the
+Mercy-seat, with a light that was lambent and lustrous as the light of
+love and of life--what was that to the glory, moulded in meekness and
+garbed in gentleness, the glory that shone, merciful and hospitable
+and inviting--a tempered flame on which the poorest, diseased, blind
+eyes could look, and not wince--from the face and from the character
+of Jesus Christ the Lord? He is greater than the Temple, for in Him,
+in no symbol but in reality, abode and abides the fulness of that
+unnameable Being whom we name Father and God. And not only does the
+fulness abide, but in Him that awful Remoteness becomes for us a
+merciful Presence; the infinite abyss and closed sea of the divine
+nature hath an outlet, and becomes a 'river of water of life.' And as
+the ancient name of that Temple was the 'Tent of Meeting,' the place
+where Israel and God, in symbolical and ceremonial form, met together,
+so, in inmost reality in Christ's nature, Manhood and Divinity cohere
+and unite, and in Him all of us, the weak, the sinful, the alien, the
+rebellious, may meet our Father. 'He that hath seen Me hath seen the
+Father.' 'In this place is One greater than the Temple.'
+
+And so this Jewish Peasant, at the very beginning of His earthly
+career, stands up there, in the presence of the ancestral sanctities
+and immemorial ceremonials which had been consecrated by all these
+ages and commanded by God Himself, and with autocratic hand sweeps
+them all on one side, as one that should draw a curtain that the
+statue might be seen, and remains poised Himself in the vacant place,
+that all eyes may look upon Him, and on Him alone. 'Destroy this
+Temple.... He spake of the temple of His body.'
+
+Still further, notice how here we have, at the very beginning of our
+Lord's career, His distinct prevision of how it was all going to end.
+People that are willing to honour Jesus Christ, and are not willing to
+recognise His death as the great purpose for which He came, tell us
+that, like as with other reformers and heroes and martyrs, His death
+was the result of the failure of His purpose. And some of them talk to
+us very glibly, in their so-called 'Lives of Jesus Christ' about the
+alteration in Christ's plan which came when He saw that His message
+was not going to be received. I do not enter upon all the reasons why
+such a construction of Christ's work cannot hold water, but here is
+one--for any one who believes this story before us--that at the very
+beginning, before He had gone half a dozen steps in His public career,
+when the issues of the experiment, if it was a man that was making the
+experiment, were all untried; when, if it were merely a
+martyr-enthusiast that was beginning his struggle, some flickering
+light of hope that He would be received of His brethren must have
+shone, or He would never have ventured upon the path--that then, with
+no mistake, with no illusion, with no expectation of a welcome and a
+Hosanna, but with the clearest certitude of what lay before Him, our
+Lord _beheld_ and accepted His Cross. Its shadow fell upon His path
+from the beginning, because the Cross was the purpose for which He
+came. 'To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the
+world,' said He--when the reality of it was almost within arm's length
+of Him--'to bear witness to the Truth,' and His bearing witness to the
+truth was perfected and accomplished on the Cross. Here, at the very
+commencement of His career, we have it distinctly set forth, 'the Son
+of Man came to give His life a ransom for many.'
+
+And, brethren, that fact is important, not only because it helps us to
+understand that His death is the centre of His work, but also because
+it helps us to a loving and tender thought of Him, how all His life
+long, with that issue distinctly before Him, He journeyed towards it
+of His own loving will; how every step that He took on earth's flinty
+roads, taken with bleeding and pure feet, He took knowing whither He
+was going. This Isaac climbs the mountain to the place of sacrifice,
+with no illusions as to what He is going up the mountain for. He knows
+that He goes up to be the lamb of the offering, and knowing it, He
+goes. Therefore let us love Him with love as persistent as was His
+own, who discerning the end from the beginning, willed to be born and
+to live because He had resolved to die, for you and me and every man.
+
+And then, further, we have here our Lord's claim to be Himself the
+Agent of His own resurrection. '_I_ will raise it up in three days.'
+Of course, in Scripture, we more frequently find the Resurrection
+treated as being the result of the power of God the Father. We more
+ordinarily read that Christ was raised; but sometimes we read, as
+here, that Christ rises, and we have solemn words of His own, 'I have
+power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.' Think of a
+man saying, 'I am going to bring My own body from the dust of death,'
+and think of the man who said that _doing_ it. If that is true, if
+this prediction was uttered, and being uttered was fulfilled--what
+then? I do not need to answer the question. My brother, this day
+declares that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. 'Destroy this
+Temple'--there is a challenge--'and in three days I will raise it up';
+and He did it. And He is the Lord of the Temple as well as the Temple.
+Down on your knees before Him, with all your hearts and with all your
+confidence, and worship, and trust, and love for evermore 'the Second
+Man,' who 'is the Lord from Heaven!'
+
+II. Now let us turn to the other aspects of these words. I think we
+see here, in the next place, a prophetic warning of the history of the
+men to whom He was speaking.
+
+There must be a connection between the interpretation of the words
+which our Evangelist assures us is the correct one, and the
+interpretation which would naturally have occurred to a listener, that
+by 'this Temple' our Lord really meant simply the literal building in
+which He spoke. There is such a connection, and though our Lord did
+not only mean the Temple, He _did_ mean the Temple. To say so is not
+forcing double meanings in any fast and loose fashion upon Scripture,
+nor playing with ambiguities, nor indulging in any of the vices to
+which spiritualising interpretation of Scripture leads, but it is
+simply grasping the central idea of the words of my text. Rightly
+understood they lead us to this: 'The death of Christ was the
+destruction of the Jewish Temple and polity, and the raising again of
+Christ from the dead on the third day was the raising again of that
+destroyed Theocracy and Temple in a new and nobler fashion.' Let us
+then look for a moment, and it shall only be for a moment, at these
+two thoughts.
+
+If any one had said to any of that howling mob that stood round Christ
+at the judgment-seat of the High Priest, and fancied themselves
+condemning Him to death, because He had blasphemed the Temple: 'You,
+at this moment, are pulling down the holy and beautiful house in which
+your fathers praised; and what you are doing now is the destruction of
+your national worship and of yourselves,' the words would have been
+received with incredulity; and yet they were simple truth. Christ's
+death destroyed that outward Temple. The veil was 'rent in twain from
+the top to the bottom' at the moment He died; which was the
+declaration indeed that henceforward the Holiest of All was patent to
+the foot of every man, but was also the declaration that there was no
+more sanctity now within those courts, and that Temple, and
+priesthood, and sacrifice, and altar, and ceremonial and all, were
+antiquated. That 'which was perfect having come,' Christ's death
+having realised all which Temple-worship symbolised, that which was
+the shadow was put away when the substance appeared.
+
+And in another fashion, it is also true that the death of our Lord
+Jesus Christ, inflicted by Jewish hands, was the destruction of the
+Jewish worship, in the way of natural sequence and of divine
+chastisement. When the husbandmen rejected the Son who was sent 'last
+of all,' there was nothing more for it but that they should be 'cast
+out of the vineyard,' and the firebrand which the Roman soldier, forty
+years afterwards, tossed into the Holiest of All, and which burned the
+holy and beautiful house with fire, was lit on the day when Israel
+cried 'Crucify Him! Crucify Him!'
+
+Oh, brethren! What a lesson it is to us all of how blind even
+so-called religious zeal may be; how often it is true that men in
+their madness and their ignorance destroy the very institutions which
+they are trying to conserve! How it warns us to beware lest we,
+unknowing what we are about, and thinking that we are fighting for the
+honour of God, may really all the while be but serving ourselves and
+rejecting His message and His Messenger!
+
+And then let me remind you that another thing is also true, that just
+as the Jewish rejection of Christ was their own rejection as the
+people of God, and their attempted destruction of Christ the
+destruction of the Jewish Temple, so the other side of the truth is
+also here, viz. that His rising again is the restoration of the
+destroyed Temple in nobler and fairer form. Of course the one real
+Temple is the body of Jesus Christ, as we have said, where sacrifice
+is offered, where God dwells, where men meet with God. But in a
+secondary and derivative sense, in the place of the Jewish Temple has
+come the Christian Church, which is, in a far deeper and more inward
+fashion, what that ancient system aspired to be.
+
+Christ has builded up the Church on His Resurrection. On His
+Resurrection, I say, for there is nothing else on which it could rest.
+If men ask me what is the great evidence of Christ's Resurrection, my
+answer is--the existence in the world of a Church. Where did it come
+from? How is it possible to conceive that without the Resurrection of
+Jesus Christ such a structure as the Christian society should have
+been built upon a dead man's grave? It would have gone to pieces, as
+all similar associations would have gone. What had happened after that
+moment of depression which scattered them every man to his own, and
+led some of them to say, with pathetic use of the past tense to
+describe their vanished expectations, 'We _trusted_ that it had been
+He which should have redeemed Israel'? What was the force that instead
+of driving them asunder drew them together? What was the power that,
+instead of quenching their almost dead hopes, caused them to flame up
+with renewed vigour heaven-high? How came it that that band of
+cowardly, dispirited Jewish peasants, who scattered in selfish fear
+and heart-sick disappointment, were in a few days found bearding all
+antagonism, and convinced that their hopes had only erred by being too
+faint and dim? The only answer is in their own message, which
+explained it all: 'Him hath God raised from the dead, whereof we are
+all witnesses.'
+
+The destroyed Temple disappears, and out of the dust and smoke of the
+vanishing ruins there rises, beautiful and serene, though incomplete
+and fragmentary and defaced with many a stain, the fairer reality, the
+Church of the living Christ. 'Destroy this Temple, and in three days I
+will raise it up.'
+
+III. Lastly, we have here a foreshadowing of our Lord's world-wide
+work as the Restorer of man's destructions.
+
+Man's folly, godlessness, worldliness, lust, sin, are ever working to
+the destruction of all that is sacred in humanity and in life, and to
+the desecrating of every shrine. We ourselves, in regard to our own
+hearts, which are made to be the temples of the 'living God,' are
+ever, by our sins, shortcomings, and selfishness, bringing pollution
+into the holiest of all; 'breaking down the carved work thereof with
+axes and hammers,' and setting up the abomination of desolation in the
+holy places of our hearts. We pollute them all--conscience,
+imagination, memory, will, intellect. How many a man listening to me
+now has his nature like the facade of some of our cathedrals, with the
+empty niches and broken statues proclaiming that wanton desecration
+and destruction have been busy there?
+
+My brother! what have you done with your heart? 'Destroy this temple.'
+Christ spoke to men who did not know what they were doing; and He
+speaks to you. It is the inmost meaning of the life of many of you.
+Hour by hour, day by day, action by action, you are devastating and
+profaning the sanctities of your nature, and the sacred places there
+where God ought to live.
+
+Listen to His confident promise. He knows that in me He is able to
+restore to more than pristine beauty all which I, by my sin, have
+destroyed; to reconsecrate all which I, by my profanity, have
+polluted; to cast out the evil deities that desecrate and deform the
+shrine; and to make my poor heart, if only I will let Him come in to
+the ruined chamber, a fairer temple and dwelling-place of God.
+
+'In three days,' does He do it? In one sense--Yes! Thank God! the
+power that hallows and restores the desecrated and cast-down temple in
+a man's heart, was lodged in the world in those three days of death
+and resurrection. The fact that He 'died for our sins,' the fact that
+He was 'raised again for our justification,' are the plastic and
+architectonic powers which will build up any character into a temple
+of God.
+
+And yet more than 'forty and six years' will that temple have to be
+'in building.' It is a lifelong task till the top-stone be brought
+forth. Only let us remember this: Christ, who is Architect and
+Builder, Foundation and Top-stone; ay! and Deity indwelling in the
+temple, and building it by His indwelling--this Christ is not one of
+those who 'begin to build and are not able to finish.' He realises all
+His plans. There are no ruined edifices in 'the City'; nor any
+half-finished fanes of worship within the walls of that great
+Jerusalem whose builder and maker is Christ.
+
+If you will put yourselves in His hands, and trust yourselves to Him,
+He will take away all your incompleteness, and will make you body,
+soul, and spirit, temples of the Lord God; as far above the loftiest
+beauty and whitest sanctity of any Christian character here on earth
+as is the building of God, 'the house not made with hands, eternal in
+the heavens,' above 'the earthly house of this tabernacle.'
+
+He will perfect this restoring work at the last, when His Word to His
+servant Death, as He points him to us, shall be 'Destroy this temple,
+and I will raise it up.'
+
+
+
+
+TEACHER OR SAVIOUR?
+
+'The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto Him, Rabbi, we know
+that Thou art a Teacher come from God: for no man can do these
+miracles that Thou doest, except God be with him.'--JOHN iii. 2.
+
+The connection in which the Evangelist introduces the story of
+Nicodemus throws great light on the aspect under which we are to
+regard it. He has just been saying that upon our Lord's first visit to
+Jerusalem at the Passover there was a considerable amount of interest
+excited, and a kind of imperfect faith in Him drawn out, based solely
+on His miracles. He adds that this faith was regarded by Christ as
+unreliable; and he goes on to explain that our Lord exercised great
+reserve in His dealings with the persons who professed it, for the
+reason that 'He knew all men, and needed not that any should testify
+of man, for He knew what was in man.'
+
+Now, if you note that reiteration of the word 'man,' you will
+understand the description which is given of the person who is next
+introduced. 'He knew what was in man. There was a _man_ of the
+Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews.' It would have been
+enough to have said, 'There was a Pharisee.' When John says 'a _man_
+of the Pharisees,' he is not merely carried away by the echo in his
+ears of his own last words, but it is as if he had said, 'Now, here is
+one illustration of the sort of thing that I have been speaking about;
+one specimen of an imperfect faith built upon miracles; and one
+illustration of the way in which Jesus Christ dealt with it.'
+
+Nicodemus was 'a Pharisee.' That tells us the school to which he
+belonged, and the general drift of his thought. He was 'a ruler of the
+Jews.' That tells us that he held an official position in the supreme
+court of the nation, to which the Romans had left some considerable
+shadow of power in ecclesiastical matters. And this man comes to
+Christ and acknowledges Him. Christ deals with him in a very
+suggestive fashion. His confession, and the way in which our Lord
+received it, are what I desire to consider briefly in this sermon.
+
+I. Note then, first, this imperfect confession.
+
+Everything about it, pretty nearly, is wrong. 'He came to Jesus by
+night,' half-ashamed and wholly afraid of speaking out the conviction
+that was working in him. He was a man in position. He could not
+compromise himself in the eyes of his co-Sanhedrists. 'It would be a
+grave thing for a man like me to be found in converse with this new
+Rabbi and apparent Prophet. I must go cautiously, and have regard to
+my reputation and my standing in the world; and shall steal to Him by
+night.' There is something wrong with any convictions about Jesus
+Christ which let themselves be huddled up in secret. The true
+apprehension of Him is like a fire in a man's bones, that makes him
+'weary of forbearing' when he locks his lips, and forces him to speak.
+If Christians can be dumb, there is something dreadfully wrong with
+their Christianity. If they do not regard Jesus Christ in such an
+aspect as to oblige them to stand out in the world and say, 'Whatever
+anybody says or thinks about it, I am Christ's man,' then be sure that
+they do not yet know Him as they ought to do.
+
+Nicodemus 'came to Jesus by night,' and therein condemned himself. He
+said, 'Rabbi, we know.' There is more than a _soupcon_ of patronage in
+that. He is giving Jesus Christ a certificate, duly signed and sealed
+by Rabbinical authority. He evidently thinks that it is no small
+matter that he and some of his fellows should have been disposed to
+look with favour upon this new Teacher. And so he comes, if not
+patronising the young man, at all events extremely conscious of his
+own condescension in recognising Him with his 'We know.'
+
+Had he the right to speak for any of his colleagues? If so, then at
+that very early stage of our Lord's ministry there was a conviction
+beginning to work in that body of ecclesiastics which casts a very
+lurid light on their subsequent proceedings. It was a good long while
+after, when Jesus Christ's attitude towards them had been a little
+more clearly made out than it was at the beginning, that they said
+officially, 'As for this fellow, we know not whence He is.' They
+'knew' when He did not seem to be trenching on their prerogatives, or
+driving His Ithuriel-spear through their traditional professions of
+orthodoxy and punctilious casuistries. But when He trod on their toes,
+when He ripped up their pretensions, when He began to show His
+antagonism to their formalism and traditionalism, _then_ they did not
+know where He came from. And there are many of us who are very polite
+to Jesus Christ as long as He does not interfere with us, and who
+begin to doubt His authority when He begins to rebuke our sins.
+
+The man that said 'We know,' and then proceeded to tell Christ the
+grounds upon which He was accepted by him, was not in the position
+which becomes sinful men drawing near to their Saviour. 'We know that
+Thou art a Teacher'--contrast that, with its ring of complacency, and,
+if not superior, at least co-ordinate, authority, with 'Jesus! Master!
+have mercy on me,' or with 'Lord! save or I perish,' and you get the
+difference between the way in which a formalist, conceited of his
+knowledge, and a poor, perishing sinner, conscious of his ignorance
+and need, go to the Saviour.
+
+Further, this imperfect confession was of secondary value, because it
+was built altogether upon miraculous evidence. Now, there has been a
+great deal of exaggeration about the value of the evidence of miracle.
+The undue elevation to which it was lifted in the apologetic
+literature of the eighteenth century, when it was almost made out as
+if there was no other proof that Jesus came from God than that He
+wrought miracles, has naturally led, in this generation and in the
+last one, to an equally exaggerated undervaluing of its worth. Jesus
+Christ did appeal to signs; He did also most distinctly place faith
+that rested merely upon miracle as second best; when He said, for
+instance, 'If ye believe not Me, yet believe the works.' Nicodemus
+says, 'We know that Thou art a Teacher sent from God, because no man
+can do these miracles except God be with him.' Ah! Nicodemus! did not
+the substance of the teaching reveal the source of the teaching even
+more completely than the miracles that accompanied it? Surely, if I
+may use an old illustration, the bell that rings in to the sermon
+(which is the miracles) is less conclusive as to the divine source of
+the teaching than is the sermon itself. Christ Himself is His own best
+evidence, and His words shine in their own light, and need no signs in
+order to authenticate their source. The signs are there, and are
+precious in my eyes less as credentials of His authority than as
+revelations of His character and His work. They are wonders; that is
+much. They are proofs; as I believe. But, high above both of these
+characteristics, they are signs of the spiritual work that He does,
+and manifestations of His redeeming power. And so a faith that had no
+ears for the ring of the divine voice in the words, and no eyes for
+the beauty and perfection of the character, was vulgar and low and
+unreliable, inasmuch as it could give no better reason for itself than
+that Jesus had wrought miracles,
+
+I need not remind you of how noticeable it is that at this very early
+stage in our Lord's ministry there were a sufficient number of
+miracles done to be qualified by the Evangelist as 'many,' and to have
+been a very powerful factor in bringing about this real, though
+imperfect, faith. John has only told us of one miracle prior to this;
+and the other Evangelists do not touch upon these early days of our
+Lord's ministry at all. So that we are to think of a whole series of
+works of power and supernatural grace which have found no record in
+these short narratives. How much more Jesus Christ was, and did, and
+said, than any book can ever tell! These are but parts of His ways; a
+whisper of His power. The fulness of it remains unrevealed after all
+revelation.
+
+But the central deficiency of this confession lies in the altogether
+inadequate conception of Jesus Christ and His work which it embodies.
+'We know that Thou art a Teacher, a miracle-worker, a man sent from
+God, and in communion with Him.' These are large recognitions, far too
+large to be spoken of any but a select few of the sons of men. But
+they fall miserably beneath the grandeur, and do not even approach
+within sight of the central characteristic, of Christ and of His work.
+Nicodemus is the type of large numbers of men nowadays. All the people
+that have a kind of loose, superficial connection with Christianity
+re-echo substantially his words. They compliment Jesus Christ out of
+His divinity and out of His redeeming work, and seem to think that
+they are rather conferring an honour upon Christianity when they
+condescend to say, 'We, the learned pundits of literature; we, the
+arbiters of taste; we, the guides of opinion; we, the writers in
+newspapers and magazines and periodicals; we, the leaders in social
+and philanthropic movements--we recognise that Thou art a Teacher.'
+Yes, brethren, and the recognition is utterly inadequate to the facts
+of the case, and is insult, and not recognition.
+
+II. Let me ask you to look now, in the next place, at the way in which
+Jesus Christ deals with this imperfect confession.
+
+It was a great thing for a young Rabbi from Nazareth, who had no
+certificate from the authorities, to find an opening thus into the
+very centre of the Sanhedrim. There is nothing in life, to an ardent
+young soul, at the beginning of his career--especially if he feels
+that he has a burden laid upon him to deliver to his fellows--half so
+sweet as the early recognition by some man of wisdom and weight and
+influence, that he too is a messenger from God. In later years praise
+and acknowledgment cloy. And one might have expected some passing word
+from the Master that would have expressed such a feeling as that, if
+He had been only a young Teacher seeking for recognition. I remember
+that in that strange medley of beauty and absurdity, the Koran,
+somewhere or other, there is an outpouring of Mahomet's heart about
+the blessedness of his first finding a soul that would believe in him.
+And it is strange that Jesus Christ had no more welcome for this man
+than the story tells that He had. For He meets him without a word of
+encouragement; without a word that seemed to recognise even a growing
+and a groping confidence, and yet He would not 'quench the smoking
+flax.' Yes! sometimes the kindest way to deal with an imperfect
+conception is to show unsparingly why it is imperfect; and sometimes
+the apparent repelling of a partial faith is truly the drawing to
+Himself by the Christ of the man, though his faith be not approved.
+
+So, notice how our Lord meets the imperfections of this
+acknowledgment. He begins by pointing out what is the deepest and
+universal need of men. Nicodemus had said, 'Rabbi, we know that Thou
+art a Teacher come from God.' And Christ says, 'Verily, verily, I say
+unto you, ye must be born again.' What has that to do with Nicodemus's
+acknowledgment? Apparently nothing; really everything. For, if you
+will think for a moment, you will see how it meets it precisely, and
+forces the Rabbi to deepen his conception of the Lord. The first thing
+that you and I want, for our participation in the Kingdom of God, is a
+radical out-and-out change in our whole character and nature. 'Ye must
+be born again'; now, whatever more that means, it means, at all
+events, this--a thorough-going renovation and metamorphosis of a man's
+nature, as the sorest need that the world and all the individuals that
+make up the world have.
+
+The deepest ground of that necessity lies in the fact of sin. Brother,
+we can only verify our Lord's assertion by honestly searching the
+depths of our own hearts, and looking at ourselves in the light of
+God. Think what is meant when we say, 'He is Light, and in Him is no
+darkness at all.' Think of that absolute purity, that, to us, awful
+aversion from all that is evil, from all that is sinful. Think of what
+sort of men they must be who can see the Lord. And then look at
+yourself. Are we fit to pass that threshold? Are we fit to gaze into
+that Face? Is it possible that we should have fellowship with Him? Oh,
+brethren, if we rightly meditate upon two facts, the holiness of God
+and our own characters, I think we shall feel that Jesus Christ has
+truly stated the case when He says, 'Ye must be born again.' Unless
+you and I can get ourselves radically changed, there is no Heaven for
+us; there is no fellowship with God for us. We must stand before Him,
+and feel that a great gulf is fixed between us and Him.
+
+And so when a man comes with his poor little 'Thou art a Teacher,' no
+words are wanted in order to set in glaring light the utter inadequacy
+of such a conception as that. What the world wants is not a Teacher,
+it is a Life-giver. What men want is not to be told the truth; they
+know it already. What they want is not to be told their duty; they
+know that too. What they want is some power that shall turn them clean
+round. And what each of us wants before we can see the Lord is that,
+if it may be, something shall lay hold of us, and utterly change our
+natures, and express from our hearts the black drop that lies there
+tainting everything.
+
+Now, this necessity is met in Jesus Christ. For there were two 'musts'
+in His talk with Nicodemus, and both of them bore directly on the one
+purpose of deepening Nicodemus's inadequate conception of what He was
+and what He did. He said, 'Ye must be born again,' in order that his
+hearer, and we, might lay to heart this, that we need something more
+than a Teacher, even a Life-giver; and He said, 'The Son of Man must
+be lifted up,' in order that we might all know that in Him the
+necessity is met, and that the Son of Man, who came down from Heaven,
+and is in Heaven, even whilst He is on earth, is the sole ladder by
+which men can ascend into Heaven and gaze upon God.
+
+Thus it is Christ's work as Redeemer, Christ's sacrifice on the Cross,
+Christ's power as bringing to the world a new and holy life, and
+breathing it into all that trust in Him, which make the very centre of
+His work. Set by the side of that this other, 'Thou art a Teacher sent
+from God.' Ah, brethren, that will not do; it will not do for you and
+me! We want something a great deal deeper than that. The secret of
+Jesus is not disclosed until we have passed into the inner shrine,
+where we learn that He is the Sacrifice for the world, and the Source
+and Fountain of a new life. I beseech you, take Christ's way of
+dealing with this certificate of His character given by the Rabbi who
+did not know his own necessities, and ponder it.
+
+Mark the underlying principle which is here--viz. if you want to
+understand Christ you must understand sin; and whoever thinks lightly
+of it will think meanly of Him. An underestimate of the reality, the
+universality, the gravity of the fact of sin lands men in the
+superficial and wholly impotent conception, 'Rabbi! Thou art a Teacher
+sent from God.' A true knowledge of myself as a sinful man, of my need
+of pardon, of my need of cleansing, of my need of a new nature, which
+must be given from above, and cannot be evolved from within, leads me,
+and I pray it may lead you, to cast yourself down before Him, with no
+complaisant words of intellectual recognition upon your lips, but with
+the old cry, 'Lord! be merciful to me a sinner.'
+
+III. And now, dear friends, one last word. Notice when and where this
+imperfect disciple was transformed into a courageous confessor.
+
+We do not know what came immediately of this conversation. We only
+know that some considerable time after, Nicodemus had not screwed
+himself up to the point of acknowledging out and out, like a brave
+man, that he was Christ's follower; but that he timidly ventured in
+the Sanhedrim to slip in a remonstrance ingeniously devised to conceal
+his own opinions, and yet to do some benefit to Christ, when he said,
+'Does our law judge any man before it hear him?' And, of course, the
+timid remonstrance was swept aside, as it deserved to be, by the
+ferocious antagonism of his co-Sanhedrists.
+
+But when the Cross came, and it had become more dangerous to avow
+discipleship, he plucked up courage, or rather courage flowed into him
+from that Cross, and he went boldly and 'craved the body of Jesus,'
+and got it, and buried it. No doubt when he looked at Jesus hanging on
+the Cross, he remembered that night in Jerusalem when the Lord had
+said, 'The Son of Man must be lifted up,' and he remembered how He had
+spoken about the serpent lifted in the wilderness, and a great light
+blazed in upon him, which for ever ended all hesitation and timidity
+for him. And so he was ready to be a martyr, or anything else, for the
+sake of Him whom he now found to be far more than a 'Teacher,' even
+the Sacrifice by whose stripes he was healed.
+
+Dear brethren, I bring that Cross to you now, and pray you to see
+there Christ's real work for us, and for the world. He has taught us,
+but He has done more. He has not only spoken, He has died. He has not
+only shown us the path on which to walk, He has made it possible for
+us to walk in it. He is not merely one amongst the noble band that
+have guided and inspired and instructed humanity, but He stands
+alone--not _a_ Teacher, but _the_ Redeemer, 'the Lamb of God, which
+taketh away the sins of the world.'
+
+If He is a Teacher, take His teachings, and what are they? These, that
+He is the Son of God; that 'He came from God'; that He 'went to God';
+that He 'gives His life a ransom for many'; that He is to be the Judge
+of mankind; that if we trust in Him, our sins are forgiven and our
+nature is renewed. Do not go picking and choosing amongst His
+teachings, for these which I have named are as surely His as
+'Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to
+them,' or any other of the moral teachings which the world professes
+to admire. Take the whole teachings of the whole Christ, and you will
+confess Him to be the Redeemer of your souls, and the Life-giver by
+whom, and by whom alone, we enter the Kingdom of God.
+
+
+
+
+WIND AND SPIRIT
+
+'The wind bloweth where it listeth, and them hearest the sound
+thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so
+is every one that is born of the Spirit.'--JOHN iii. 8.
+
+Perhaps a gust of night wind swept round the chamber where Nicodemus
+sat listening to Jesus, and gave occasion for this condensed parable.
+But there is occasion sufficient for it in the word 'Spirit,' which,
+both in the language in which our Lord addressed the ruler of the
+Sanhedrim, and in that which John employed in recording the
+conversation, as in our own English, means both 'spirit' and 'breath.'
+This double signification of the word gives rise to the analogies in
+our text, and it also raises the question as to the precise meaning of
+the text. There are two alternatives, one adopted by our Authorised
+and Revised Version, and one which you will find relegated to the
+margin of the latter. We may either read 'the wind bloweth' or 'the
+Spirit breathes.' I must not be tempted here to enter into a
+discussion of the grounds upon which the one or the other of these two
+renderings may be preferred. Suffice it to say that I adhere to the
+rendering which lies before us, and find here a comparison between the
+salient characteristics of the physical fact and the operations of the
+Divine Spirit upon men's spirits.
+
+But then, there is another step to be taken. Our Lord has just been
+laying down the principle that like begets like, that flesh produces
+flesh, and spirit, spirit. And so, applying that principle, He says
+here, not as might be expected, 'So is the work of the Divine Spirit
+in begetting new life in men,' but 'So is he that is born of the
+Spirit.' There are three things brought into relation with one
+another: the physical fact; the operations of the Spirit of God, of
+which that physical fact in its various characteristics may be taken
+as a symbol; and the result of its operations in the new man who is
+made 'after the image of Him that created him.'
+
+It is to the last of these that I wish to turn. Here you have the
+ideal of the Christian life, considered as the product of the free
+Spirit of God, the picture of what all Christian people have the
+capacity of being, the obligation to be, and are, just in the measure
+in which that new life, which the Spirit of God bestows, is dominant
+in them and moulding their character. So I take these characteristics
+just as they arise.
+
+I. Here you have the freedom of the new life.
+
+'The wind bloweth where it listeth.' Of course, in these days of
+weather forecasts and hoisting cones, we know that the wind is subject
+to as rigid physical laws as any other phenomena. But Jesus Christ
+speaks here, as the Bible always speaks about Nature, from two points
+of view--one the popular, regarding the thing as it looks on the
+surface, and the other what I may call the poetico-devout--finding
+'sermons in stones, books in the running brooks,' and hints of the
+spiritual world in all the phenomena of the natural. So, just as in
+spite of meteorological science, there has passed into common speech
+the proverbial simile 'as free as the wind,' so Jesus Christ says
+here, 'The wind bloweth where it listeth, ... so is every one that is
+born of the Spirit.' He passes by the intermediate link, the Spirit
+that is the parent of the life, and deals with the resulting life and
+declares that it is self-impelled and self-directed. Is that a
+characteristic to be desired or admired? Is doing as we list precisely
+the description of the noblest life? It is the description of the
+purely animal one. It is the description of an entirely ignoble and
+base one. It may become the description of an atrociously criminal
+one. But we do not generally think that a man that says 'Thus I will;
+thus I command; let the fact that I will it stand in the place of all
+reason,' is speaking from a lofty point of view.
+
+But there are two sorts of 'listing.' There is the listing which is
+the yielding to the mob of ignoble passions and clamant desires of the
+animal nature within us, and there is the 'listing' which is obeying
+the impulses of a higher will, that has been blended with ours. And
+there you come to the secret of true freedom, which does not consist
+in doing as I like, but in liking to do as God wishes me to do. When
+our Lord says 'where it listeth,' He implies that a change has passed
+over a man, when that new life is born within him, whereby the law,
+the known will of God, is written upon his heart, and, inscribed on
+these fleshly tables, becomes no longer an iron force external to him,
+but a vital impulse within him. That is freedom, to have my better
+will absolutely conterminous and coincident with the will of God, so
+far as I know it. Just as a man is not imprisoned by limits beyond
+which he has no desire to go, so freedom, and elevation, and nobility
+come by obeying, not the commands of an external authority, but the
+impulse of an inward life.
+
+'Ye have not received the spirit of bondage,' because God hath given
+us the Spirit of power, and of love, and of self-control, which keeps
+down that base and inferior 'listing,' and elevates the higher and the
+nobler one, 'Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty,'
+because duty has become delight, and there is no desire in the new and
+higher nature for anything except that which God enjoins. The true
+freedom is when, by the direction of our will, we change 'must' into
+'I delight to do Thy will.' So we are set free from the bondage and
+burden of a law that is external, and is not loved, and are brought
+into the liberty of, for dear love's sake, doing the will of the
+beloved.
+
+  'Myself shall to my darling be
+   Both law and impulse,'
+
+says one of the poets about a far inferior matter. It is true in
+reference to the Christian life, and the 'liberty wherewith Christ
+hath made us free,'
+
+But, then, in order freely to understand the sweep and the greatness
+of this perfect law of liberty, we must remember that the new life is
+implanted in us precisely in order that we may suppress, and, if need
+be, cast out and exorcise, that lower 'listing,' of which I have said
+that it is always ignoble and sometimes animal. For this freedom will
+bring with it the necessity for continual warfare against all that
+would limit and restrain it--namely, the passions and desires and
+inclinations of our baser or nobler, but godless, self. These are, as
+it were, deposed by the entrance of the new life. But it is a
+dangerous thing to keep dethroned and discrowned tyrants alive, and
+the best thing is to behead them, as well as to cast them from their
+throne. 'If ye, through the Spirit, do put to death the deeds' and
+inclinations and wills 'of the flesh, ye shall live'; and if you do
+not, they will live and will kill you. So the freedom of the new life
+is a militant freedom, and we have to fight to maintain it. As Burke
+said about the political realm, 'the price of liberty is eternal
+vigilance,' so we say about the new life of the Christian man--he is
+free only on condition that he keeps well under hatches the old
+tyrants, who are ever plotting and struggling to have dominion once
+again.
+
+Still further, whilst this new life makes us free from the harshness
+of a law that can only proclaim duty, and also makes us free from our
+own baser selves, it makes us free from all human authority. The true
+foundation of the Christian democracy is that each individual soul has
+direct and immediate access to, and direct and real possession of,
+God, in his spirit and life. Therefore, in the measure in which we
+draw into ourselves the new life and the Spirit of God shall we be
+independent of men round us, and be able to say, 'With me it is a very
+small matter to be judged of you or of man's judgment.' That new life
+ought to make men _original_, in the deep and true sense of the word,
+as drawing their conceptions of duty and their methods of life, not at
+second hand from other men, but straight from God Himself. If the
+Christian Church was fuller of that divine life than it is, it would
+be fuller of all varieties of Christian beauty and excellence, and all
+these would be the work of 'that one and the selfsame Spirit dividing
+to every man severally as He will.' If this congregation were indeed
+filled with the new life, there would be an exuberance of power, and a
+harmonious diversity of characteristics about it, and a burning up of
+the conventionalities of Christian profession such as we do not dream
+of to-day. 'The wind bloweth where it listeth.'
+
+II. Here we have this new life in its manifestation.
+
+'Thou hearest the sound,' or, as the Word might literally be rendered,
+the 'voice thereof,' from the little whisper among the young soft
+leaves of the opening beeches in our woods to-day, up to the typhoon
+that spreads devastation over leagues of tropical ocean. That voice,
+now a murmur, now a roar, is the only manifestation of the unseen
+force that sweeps around us. And if you are a Christian man or woman
+your new life should be thus perceptible to others, in a variety of
+ways, no doubt, and in many degrees of force. You cannot show its
+roots; you are bound to show its fruits. You cannot lay bare your
+spirits, and say to the world, 'Look! there is the presence of a
+divine germ in me,' but you can go about amongst men, and witness to
+the possession of it by the life that you live. There are a great many
+Christian people from whom, if you were to listen ever so intently,
+you would not hear a sough or a ripple. There is a dead calm; the
+'rushing mighty wind' has died down; and there is nothing but a greasy
+swell upon the windless ocean. 'The wind bloweth,' and the 'sound' is
+heard. The wind ceases, and there is a hideous silence. And that is
+the condition of many a man and woman that has a name to live and is
+dead. Does anybody hear the whisper of that breath in your life,
+Christian man? It is not for me to answer the question; it is for you
+to ask it and answer it for yourselves.
+
+And Christians should be in the world, as the very breath of life
+amidst stagnation. When the Christian Church first sprung into being
+it did come into that corrupt, pestilential march of ancient
+heathenism with healing on its wings, and like fresh air from the pure
+hills into some fever-stricken district. Wherever there has been a new
+outburst, in the experience of individuals and of churches, of that
+divine life, there has come, and the world has felt that there has
+come, a new force that breathes over the dry bones, and they live.
+Alas, alas! that so frequently the professing Christian Church has
+ceased to discharge its plain function, to breathe on the slain that
+they may live.
+
+They are curing, or say they are curing, consumption nowadays, by
+taking the patient and keeping him in the open air, and letting the
+wind of heaven blow freely about him. That, and not shutting people in
+warm chambers, and coddling them with the prescriptions of social and
+political reformation, that is the cure for the world's diseases.
+Wherever the new life is vigorous in men, men will hear the sound
+thereof, and recognise that it comes from heaven.
+
+III. Lastly, here we have the new life in its double secret.
+
+I have been saying that it has a means of manifestation which all
+Christian people are bound to exemplify. But our Lord draws a broad
+distinction between that which can be manifested and that which
+cannot. As I said, you can show the leaves and the fruits; the roots
+are covered. 'Thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell
+whence it cometh, nor whither it goeth.'
+
+The origin of that new life is 'hid with Christ in God.' And so, since
+we are not dependent upon external things for the communication of the
+life, we should not be dependent upon them for its continuation and
+its nourishment, and we should realise that, if we are Christians, we
+are living in two regions, and, though as regards the surface life we
+belong to the things of time, as regards the deepest life, we belong
+to eternity. All the surface springs may run dry. What then? As long
+as there is a deep-seated fountain that comes welling up, the fields
+will be green, and we may laugh at famine and drought. If it be true
+that 'our lives are hid with Christ in God,' then it ought to be true
+that the nourishments, as well as the direction and impulse of them,
+are drawn from Him, and that we seek not so much for the abundance of
+the things that minister to the external as for the fulness of those
+that sustain the inward, the true life, the life of Christ in the
+soul.
+
+The world does not know where that Christian life comes from. If you
+are a Christian, you ought to bear in your character a certain
+indefinable something that will suggest to the people round you that
+the secret power of your life is other than the power which moulds
+theirs. You may be naturalised, and you may speak fairly well the
+language of the country in which you are a sojourner, but there ought
+to be something in your accent which tells where you come from, and
+betrays the foreigner. We ought to move amongst men, having about us
+that which cannot be explained by what is enough to explain their
+lives. A Christian life should be the manifestation to the world of
+the supernatural.
+
+They 'know not whence it cometh nor whither it goeth.' No; that new
+life in its feeblest infancy, and before it speaks, if I may so say,
+is, by its very existence, a prophet, and declares that there must be,
+beyond this 'bank and shoal of time,' a region to which it is native,
+and in which it may grow to maturity. You will find in your
+greenhouses exotics that stand there, after all your pains and coals,
+stunted, and seeming to sigh for the tropical heat which is their
+home. The earnest of our inheritance, the first-fruits of the Spirit,
+the Christian life which originated in, and is sustained by, the
+flowing of the divine life into us, demands that, somehow or other,
+the stunted plant should be lifted and removed into that 'higher house
+where these are planted'--and what shall be the spread of its
+branches, and the lustre of its leaves, and what the gorgeousness of
+its blossoms, and what the perennial sweetness of its fruits then and
+there, 'it doth not yet appear.'
+
+They 'know not whither it goeth.' And even those who themselves
+possess it know not, nor shall know, through the ages of a progressive
+approximation to the ever-approached and never-attained perfection.
+'This spake He of the Holy Ghost, which they that believe on Him
+should receive.' Trust Christ, and 'the law of the Spirit of Life in
+Christ Jesus shall make you free from the law of sin and death.'
+
+
+
+
+THE BRAZEN SERPENT
+
+'Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness.'--JOHN iii. 14.
+
+This is the second of the instances in this Gospel in which our Lord
+lays His hand upon an institution or incident of the Old Testament, as
+shadowing forth some aspect of His work. In the first of these
+instances, under the image of the ladder that Jacob saw, our Lord
+presented Himself as the sole medium of communication between heaven
+and earth; here He goes a step further into the heart of His work, and
+under the image, very eloquent to the Pharisee to whom He was
+speaking, of the brazen serpent lifted up on the pole in the desert,
+proclaims Himself as the medium of healing and of life to a poisoned
+world.
+
+Now, Nicodemus has a great many followers to-day. He took up a
+position which many take up. He recognised Christ as a Teacher, and
+was willing to accord to the almost unknown young man from Galilee the
+coveted title of 'Rabbi.' He came to Him with a little touch of
+condescension, and evidently thought that for him, a ruler of the
+Jews, a member of the upper and educated classes, to be willing to
+speak of Jesus as a Teacher, was an endorsement that the young
+aspirant might be gratified to receive. 'Rabbi, _we_ know that Thou
+art a Teacher sent from God'--but he stopped there. He is not the only
+one who compliments Jesus Christ, while he degrades Him from His
+unique position. Now, to this inadequate conception of our Lord's
+Person and work, Christ opposed the solemn insistence on the
+incapacity of human nature as it is, to enter into communion with, and
+submission to, God. And then He passes on to speak--in precise
+parallelism with the position that He took up when He likened Himself
+to the Ladder of Jacob's vision--of Himself as being the Son of Man
+that came down from Heaven, and therefore is able to reveal heavenly
+things. In my text He further unveils in symbol the mystery and
+dignity of His Person and of His work, whilst He speaks of a
+mysterious lifting up of this Son of Man who came down from heaven.
+These are the truths that the conception of Christ as a great Teacher
+needs for its completion; the contrariety of human nature with the
+divine will, the Incarnation of the Son of God, the Crucifixion of the
+Incarnate Son. And so we have here three points, to which I desire to
+turn, as setting forth the conception of His own work which Jesus
+Christ presented as completing the conception of it, to which
+Nicodemus had attained.
+
+I. There is, first, the lifting up of the Son of Man.
+
+Now, of course, the sole purpose of setting that brazen serpent on the
+pole was to render it conspicuous, and all that Nicodemus could _then_
+understand by the symbol was that, in some unknown way, this
+heaven-descended Son of Man should be set forth before Israel and the
+world as being the Healer of all their diseases. But we are wiser,
+after the event, than the ruler of the Jews could be at the threshold
+of Christ's ministry. We have also to remember that this is not the
+only occasion, though it is the first, on which our Lord used this
+very significant expression. For twice over in this Gospel we find it
+upon His lips--once when, addressing the unbelieving multitude, He
+says 'When ye have lifted up the Son of Man, then shall ye know that I
+am He'; and once when in soliloquy, close on Calvary, He says, as the
+vision of a world flocking to Him rises before Him on occasion of the
+wish of a few Greek proselytes to see Him, 'I, if I be lifted up, will
+draw all men unto Me.' We do not need, though we have, the
+Evangelist's commentary, 'this He spake signifying what death He
+should die.'
+
+So, if we accept the historical veracity of this Gospel, we here
+perceive Jesus Christ, at the very beginning of His career, and before
+the dispositions of the nation towards Him had developed themselves in
+action, discerning its end, and seeing, gaunt and grim before Him, the
+Cross that was lifted up on Calvary. Enthusiasts and philanthropists
+and apostles of all sorts, in the regions of science and beneficence
+and morals and religion, begin their career with trusting that their
+'brethren should have understood' that God was speaking through them.
+But no illusion of that sort, according to these Evangelists, drew
+Jesus Christ out of His seclusion at Nazareth and impelled Him on His
+career. From the beginning He knew that the Cross was to be the end.
+That Cross was not to Him a necessity, accepted as the price of
+faithfulness in doing His work, so that His attitude was, 'I will
+speak what is in Me, though I die for it,' but it was to Him the very
+heart of the work which He came to do. Therefore, after He had said to
+the ruler of the Jews that the Son of Man, as descended from Heaven,
+was able to _speak_ of heavenly things, He added the deeper necessity,
+He 'must be lifted up.' Where lay the 'must'? In the requirement of
+the work which He had set Himself to do. Beneath this great saying
+there lies a pathetic, stern, true conception of the condition of
+human nature. That desert encampment, with the poisoned men dying on
+every hand, is the emblem under which Jesus Christ, the gentlest and
+the sweetest soul that ever lived, looked out upon humanity. And it
+was because the facts of human nature called for something far more
+than a teacher that He said 'the Son of Man must be lifted up.' For
+what they needed, and what He had set Himself to bring, could only be
+brought by One who yielded Himself up for the sins of the whole world.
+
+But that 'must,' which thus arose from the requirements of the task
+that He had set before Him, had its source in His own heart; it was no
+necessity imposed upon Him from without. True, it was a necessity laid
+on Him by filial obedience, but also true, it was the necessity
+accepted by Him in pursuance of the impulse of His own heart. He must
+die because He must save, and He must save because He loved. So He was
+not nailed to the Cross by the nails and hammers of the Roman
+soldiers, and the taunt that was flung at Him as He hung there had a
+deeper meaning, as scoffs thrown at Him and His cause ordinarily have,
+than the scoffers understood: 'He saved others,' and therefore
+'Himself He cannot save.'
+
+So here we have Christ accepting, as well as discerning, the Cross.
+And we have more than that. We have Christ looking at the Cross as
+being, not humiliation, but exaltation. 'The Son of Man must be lifted
+up.' And what does that mean? It means the same thing that He said
+when, near the end, He declared, 'The hour is come that the Son of Man
+should be glorified.' We are accustomed to speak--and we speak
+rightly--of His death as being the lowest point of the humiliation
+which was inherent in the very fact of His humanity. He condescended
+to be born; He stooped yet more to die. But whilst that is true, the
+other side is also true--that in the Cross Christ is lifted up, and
+that it is His Throne. For what see we there? The highest exhibition,
+the tenderest revelation, of His perfect love. And what see we there
+besides? The supreme manifestation of the highest power.
+
+  ''Twas great to speak a world from nought,
+   'Tis greater to redeem.'
+
+To save humanity, to make it possible that men should receive that
+second birth, and should enter into the Kingdom of God--that was a
+greater work, because a work not only of creation, but of restoration,
+than it was to send forth the stars on their courses and to 'preserve'
+the ancient heavens 'from wrong.' There is a revelation of divine
+might when we 'lift up our eyes on high,' and see how, 'because He is
+great in power, not one faileth.' But there is a mightier revelation
+of divine power when we see how, from amidst the ruins of humanity, He
+can restore the divine image, and piece together, as it were, without
+sign of flaw or crack or one fragment wanting, the fair image that was
+shattered into fragments by the blow of Sin's heavy mace. Power in its
+highest operation, power in its tenderest efficacy, power in its
+widest sweep, are set forth on the Cross of Christ, and that weak Man
+hanging there, dying in the dark, is 'the power of God' as well as
+'the wisdom of God.' The Cross is Christ's Throne, but it is His
+sovereign manifestation of love and power only if it is what, as I
+believe He told us it was, and what His servants from His lips caught
+the interpretation of it as being, the death for the sins of the
+sin-stricken world. Unless we can believe that, when He died, He died
+for us, I know not why Christ's death should appeal to our love. But
+if we recognise--as I pray that we all may recognise--that our deep
+need for something far more than Teacher or Pattern has been met in
+that great 'one Sacrifice for sins for ever,' then the magnetism of
+the Cross begins to tell, and we understand what He meant when He
+said, 'I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me.' Brethren, the
+Cross is His Throne, from which He rules the world, and if you strike
+His sacrifice for sins out of your conception of His work, you have
+robbed Him of sovereignty, and taken out of His hand the sceptre by
+which He governs the hearts and wills of rebellious and restored men.
+
+II. Notice, again, how we have here the look at the uplifted Son of
+Man.
+
+I do not need to paint for you what your own imaginations can
+sufficiently paint for yourselves--the scene in the wilderness where
+the dying men from the very outskirts of the camp could turn a filmy
+eye to the brazen serpent hanging in their midst. That look is the
+symbol of what we need, in order that the life-giving power of Christ
+should enter into our death. There is no better description of the act
+of Christian faith than that picture of the dying Israelite turning
+his languid eye to the symbol of healing and life. That trust which
+Jesus emphasises here in 'whosoever _believeth_ on Him,' He opposes
+very emphatically to Nicodemus's confession, 'We know that Thou art a
+Teacher.' We know--you have to go a step further, Nicodemus! 'We
+know'; well and good, but are you included in 'whosoever believeth'?
+Faith is an advance on credence. There is an intellectual side to it,
+but its essence is what is the essence of trust always, the act of the
+will throwing itself on that which is discerned to be trustworthy. You
+know that a given man is reliable--that is not relying on him. You
+have to go a step further. And so, dear brethren, you may believe
+thirty-nine or thirty-nine thousand Articles with an unfaltering
+credence, and you may be as far away from faith as if you did not
+believe one of them. There may be a perfect belief and an absolute
+want of faith. And on the other hand, blessed be God! there may be a
+real and an operative trust with a very imperfect or mistaken creed.
+The wild flowers on the rock bloom fair and bright, though they have
+scarcely any soil in which to strike their roots, and the plants in
+the most fertile garden may fail to produce flowers and seed. So trust
+and credence are not always of the same magnitude.
+
+This trust is no arbitrary condition. The Israelite was bid to turn to
+the brazen serpent. There was no connection between his look and his
+healing, except in so far as the symbol was a help to, and looking at
+it was a test of, his faith in the healing power of God. But it is no
+arbitrary appointment, as many people often think it is, which
+connects inseparably together the look of faith and the eternal life
+that Christ gives. For seeing that salvation is no mere external gift
+of shutting up some outward Hell and opening the door to some outward
+Heaven, but is a state of heart and mind, of relation to God, the only
+way by which that salvation can come into a man's heart is that he,
+knowing his need of it, shall trust Christ, and through Him the new
+life will flow into his heart. Faith is trust, and trust is the
+stretching out of the hand to take the precious gift, the opening of
+the heart for the influx of the grace, the eating of the bread, the
+drinking of the water, of life.
+
+It is the only possible condition. God forbid that I should even seem
+to depreciate other forms of healing men's evils and redressing men's
+wrongs, and diminishing the sorrows of humanity! We welcome them all;
+but education, art, culture, refinement, improved environment,
+bettered social and political conditions, whilst they do a great deal,
+do not go down to the bottom of the necessity. And after you have
+built your colleges and art museums and stately pleasure-houses, and
+set every man in an environment that is suited to develop him, you
+will find out what surely the world might have found out already,
+that, as in some stately palace built in the Campagna, the malaria is
+in the air, and steals in at the windows, and infects all the
+inhabitants. Thank God for all these other things! but you cannot heal
+a man who has poison in his veins by administering cosmetics, and you
+cannot put out Vesuvius with a jugful of water. If the camp is to be
+healed, the Christ must be lifted up.
+
+III. And now, lastly, here we have the life that comes with a look at
+the lifted-up Son of Man.
+
+Those of you who are using the Revised Version will see that there is
+a little change made here, partly by the exclusion of a clause and
+partly by changing the order of the words. The alteration is not only
+nearer the original text, but brings out a striking thought. It reads
+that 'whosoever believeth may in Him have eternal life.' Now, it is
+far too late a period of my discourse to enlarge upon all that these
+great words would suggest to us, but let me just, in a sentence or
+two, mark the salient points.
+
+'Eternal life'; do not bring that down to the narrow and inadequate
+conception of unending existence. It involves that, but it means a
+great deal more. It means a life of such a sort as is worth calling
+life, which is a life in union with God, and therefore full of
+blessedness, full of purity, full of satisfaction, full of desire and
+aspiration, and all these with the stamp of unendingness deeply
+impressed upon them. And that is what comes to us through the look.
+Not only is the process of dying arrested, but there is substituted
+for it a new process of growing possession of a new life. You 'must be
+born again,' Christ had been saying to Nicodemus. The change that
+passes upon a man when once he has anchored his trust on Jesus Christ,
+the uplifted Son of Man, is so profound that it is nothing else than a
+new birth, and a new life comes into his veins untainted by the
+poison, and with no proclivity to death.
+
+'May have eternal life'--now, here, on the instant. That eternal life
+is no future gift to be bestowed upon mortal men when they have passed
+through the agony of death, but it is a gift which comes to us here,
+and may come to any man on the instant of his looking to Jesus Christ.
+
+'May in Him have eternal life'--union with Christ by faith, that
+profound incorporation--if I may use the word--into Him, which the New
+Testament sets forth in all sorts of aspects as the very foundation of
+the blessings of Christianity; that union is the condition of eternal
+life. So, dear brethren, we all need that the poison shall be cast out
+of our veins. We all need that the tendency downwards to a condition
+which can only be described as death may be arrested, and the motion
+reversed. We all need that our knowledge shall be vitalised into
+faith. We all need that the past shall be forgiven, and the power of
+sin upon us in the present shall be cancelled. 'The blood of Jesus
+Christ cleanseth from all sin,' because it was shed for the remission
+of the sins of the many, and is transfused, an untainted principle of
+life, into our veins. What Jesus said to Nicodemus by night in that
+quiet chamber in Jerusalem, what He said in effect and act upon the
+Cross, when uplifted there, is what He says to each of us from the
+Throne where He is now lifted up: 'Whosoever believeth shall in Me
+have eternal life.' Take Him at His word, and you will find that it is
+true.
+
+
+
+
+CHRIST'S MUSTS
+
+
+'... Even so must the Son of Man be lifted up.'--JOHN iii. 14.
+
+I have chosen this text for the sake of one word in it, that solemn
+'must' which was so often on our Lord's lips. I have no purpose of
+dealing with the remainder of this clause, nor indeed with it at all,
+except as one instance of His use of the expression. But I have felt
+it might he interesting, and might set old truths in a brighter light,
+if we gather together the instances in which Christ speaks of the
+great necessity which dominated His life, and shaped even small acts.
+
+The expression is most frequently used in reference to the Passion and
+Resurrection. There are many instances in the Gospels, in which He
+speaks of that _must_. The first of these is that of my text. Then
+there is another class, of which His word to His mother when a
+twelve-year-old child may be taken as a type: 'Wist ye not that I
+_must_ be about My Father's business?' where the mysterious
+consciousness of a special relation to God in the child's heart drew
+Him to the Temple and to His Father's work. Other similar instances
+are those in which He responded to the multitude when they wanted to
+keep Him to themselves: 'I _must_ preach in other cities also'; or as
+when He said, 'I _must_ work the works of Him that sent Me while it is
+day.'
+
+Yet another aspect of the same necessity is presented when, looking
+far beyond the earthly work and suffering, He discerned the future
+triumph which was to be the issue of these, and said, 'Other sheep I
+have... them also I _must_ bring.'
+
+And yet another is in reference to a very small matter: His selection
+of a place for a few hours' rest on His last fateful journey to
+Jerusalem, when He said, 'Zaccheus,... to-day I _must_ abide at thy
+house.'
+
+Now, if we put these instances together, we shall get some precious
+glimpses into our Lord's heart, and His view of life.
+
+I. Here we see Christ recognising and accepting the necessity for His
+death.
+
+My text, if we accept John's Gospel, contributes an altogether new
+element to our conception of our Lord as announcing His death. For the
+other three Gospels lay emphasis on it as being part of His teaching,
+especially during the later stage of His ministry. But it does not
+follow that He began to think about it or to see it, when He began to
+speak about it. There are reasons for the earlier comparative
+reticence, and there is no ground for the conclusion that then first
+began to dawn upon a disappointed enthusiast the grim reality that His
+work was not going to prosper, and that martyrdom was necessary. That
+is a notion that has been frequently upheld of late years, but to me
+it seems altogether incongruous with the facts of the case. And, if
+John's Gospel is a true record, that theory is shivered against this
+text, which represents Him at the very beginning of His career--the
+time when, according to that other theory, He was full of the usual
+buoyant and baseless anticipations of a reformer commencing His
+course--as telling Nicodemus, 'Even so _must_ the Son of Man be lifted
+up.' In like manner, in the previous chapter of this same Gospel, we
+have the significant though enigmatical utterance: 'Destroy this
+Temple, and in three days I will raise it up'; with the Evangelist's
+authoritative comment: 'He spake of the Temple of His body.' So, from
+the beginning of His career, the end was clear before Him.
+
+And why _must_ He go to the Cross? Not merely, as the other
+Evangelists put it, in order that 'it might be fulfilled which was
+spoken of the prophets.' It was not that Jesus must die because the
+prophets had said that Messiah should, but that the prophets had said
+that Messiah should because Jesus must. There was a far deeper
+necessity than the fulfilment of any prophetic utterance, even the
+necessity which shaped that utterance. The work of Jesus Christ could
+not be done unless He died. He could not be the Saviour of the world
+unless He was the sacrifice for the sins of the world.
+
+We cannot see all the grounds of that solemn imperative, but this we
+can see, that it was because of the requirements of the divine
+righteousness, and because of the necessities of sinful men. And so
+Christ's was no martyr's death, who had to die as the penalty of the
+faithful discharge of His duty. It was not the penalty that He paid
+for doing His work, but it was the work itself. Not that gracious
+life, nor 'the loveliness of perfect deeds,' nor His words of sweet
+wisdom, nor His acts of transcendent power, equalled only by the pity
+that moved the power, completed His task, but He 'came to give His
+life a ransom for many.'
+
+'Must' is a hard word. It may express an unwelcome necessity. Was this
+necessity unwelcome? When He said, 'The Son of Man must be lifted up,'
+was He shrinking, or reluctantly submitting? Ah, no! He _must_ die
+because He _would_ save, and He _would_ save because He _did_ love.
+His filial obedience to God coincided with His pity for men: and not
+merely in obedience to the requirements of the divine righteousness,
+but in compassion for the necessities of sinners, necessity was laid
+upon Him.
+
+Oh, brethren! nothing held Christ to the Cross but His own desire to
+save us. Neither priests nor Romans carried Him thither. What fastened
+Him to it was not the nails driven by rude hands. And the reason why
+He did not, as the taunters bade Him do, come down from it, was
+neither a physical nor a moral necessity unwelcome to Himself, but the
+yielding of His own will to do all which was needed for man's
+salvation.
+
+This sacrifice was bound to the altar by the cords of love. We have
+heard of martyrs who have refused to be tied to the stake, and have
+kept themselves motionless in the centre of the fierce flames by the
+force of their wills. Jesus Christ fastened Himself to the Cross and
+died because He would.
+
+And, oh! if we think of that sweet, serene life as having clear before
+it from the very first steps that grim end, how infinitely it gains in
+pathetic beauty and in heart-touchingness! What wonderful
+self-abnegation! How he was at leisure from Himself, with a heart of
+pity for every sorrow, and loins girt for all service, though during
+all His life the Cross closed the vista! Think that human shrinking
+was felt by Him, think that it was so held back that His purpose never
+faltered, think that each of us may say, 'He _must_ die because He
+_would_ save me'; and then ask, 'What shall I render to the Lord for
+all His benefits toward me?'
+
+II. In a second class of these utterances, we see Christ impelled by
+filial obedience and the consciousness of His mission.
+
+'Wist ye not that I must be about My Father's business?' That was a
+strange utterance for a boy of twelve. It seems to negative the
+supposition that what is called the 'Messianic consciousness' dawned
+upon Jesus Christ first after His baptism and the descent of the
+Spirit. But however that may be, it and the similar passages to which
+I have already referred, bearing upon His discharge of His work prior
+to His death, teach that the necessity was an inward necessity
+springing from His consciousness of Sonship, and His recognition of
+the work that He had to do. And so He is our great Example of
+spontaneous obedience, which does violence to itself if it does not
+obey. It was instinct that sent the boy into the Temple. Where should
+a Son be but in His Father's house? How could He not be doing His
+Father's business?
+
+Thus He stands before us, the pattern for the only obedience that is
+worth calling so, the obedience which would be pained and ill at ease
+unless it were doing the work of God. Religion is meant to make it a
+second nature, or, as I have ventured to call it, an instinct--a
+spontaneous, uncalculating, irrepressible desire--to be in fellowship
+with God, and to be doing His will. That is the meaning of our
+Christianity. There is no obedience in reluctant obedience; forced
+service is slavery, not service. Christianity is given for the
+specific purpose that it may bring us so into touch with Jesus Christ
+as that the mind which was in Him may be in us; and that we too may be
+able to say, with a kind of wonder that people should have expected to
+find us in any other place, or doing anything else, 'Wist ye not that
+because I am a Son, _I_ must be about my Father's business?' As
+certainly as the sunflower follows the sun, so certainly will a man
+animated by the mind that was in Jesus Christ, like Him find his very
+life's breath in doing the Father's will.
+
+So then, brethren, what about our grudging service? What about our
+reluctant obedience? What about the widespread mistake that religion
+prohibits wished-for things and enforces unwelcome duties? If my
+Christianity does not make me recoil from what it forbids, and spring
+eagerly to what it commends, my Christianity is of very little use. If
+when in the Temple we are like idle boys in school, always casting
+glances at the clock and the door, and wishing ourselves outside, we
+may just as well be out as in. Glad obedience is true obedience. Only
+he who can say, 'Thy law is within my heart, and I do Thy will because
+I love Thee, and cannot but do as Thou desirest,' has found the joy
+possible to a Christian life. It is not 'harsh and crabbed,' as those
+that look upon it from the outside may 'suppose,' but musical and full
+of sweetness. There is nothing more blessed than when 'I choose'
+covers exactly the same ground as 'I ought.' And when duty is delight,
+delight will never become disgust, nor joy pass away.
+
+III. We see, in yet another use of this great 'must,' Christ
+anticipating His future triumph.
+
+'Other sheep I have which are not of this fold; them also I must
+bring, and there shall be one flock and one Shepherd.' Striking as
+these words are in themselves, they are still more striking when we
+notice their connection; for they follow immediately upon His
+utterance about laying down His life for the sheep. So, then, this was
+a work beyond the Cross, and whatever it was, it was to be done after
+He had died.
+
+I need not point out to you how far afield Christ's vision goes out
+into the dim, waste places, where on the dark mountains the straying
+sheep are torn and frightened and starving. I need not dwell upon how
+far ahead in the future His glance travels, or how magnificent and how
+rebuking to our petty narrowness this great word is. 'There shall be
+one _flock_' (not fold); and they shall be one, not because they are
+within the bounds of any visible 'fold,' but because they are gathered
+round the one Shepherd, and in their common relation to Him are knit
+together in unity.
+
+But what sort of a Man is this who considers that His widest work is
+to be done by Him after He is dead? 'Them also I _must_ bring.' Thou?
+how? when? Surely such words as these, side by side with a clear
+prevision of the death that was so soon to come, are either
+meaningless or the utterance of an arrogance bordering on insanity, or
+they anticipate what an Evangelist declares did take place--that the
+Lord was 'taken up into heaven and sat at the right hand of God,'
+whilst His servants 'went everywhere preaching the Word, the Lord also
+working with them and confirming the Word' with the signs He wrought.
+
+'Them also I must bring.' That is not merely a necessity rooted in the
+nature of God and the wants of men. It is not merely a necessity
+springing from Christ's filial obedience and sense of a mission; but
+it is a 'must' of destiny, a 'must' which recognises the sure results
+of His passion; a 'must' which implies the power of the Cross to be
+the reconciliation of the world. And so for all pessimistic thoughts
+to-day, or at any time, and when Christian men's hearts may be
+trembling for the Ark of God--although, perhaps, there may be little
+reason for the tremor--and in the face of all blatant antagonisms and
+of proud Goliaths despising the 'foolishness of preaching,' we fall
+back upon Christ's great 'must.' It is written in the councils of
+Heaven more unchangeably than the heavens; it is guaranteed by the
+power of the Cross; it is certain, by the eternal life of the
+crucified Saviour, that He will one day be the King of humanity, and
+_must_ bring His wandering sheep to couch in peace, one flock round
+one Shepherd.
+
+IV. Lastly, we have Christ applying the greatest principle to the
+smallest duty.
+
+'Zaccheus! make haste and come down; to-day I _must_ abide in thy
+house.' Why must He? Because Zaccheus was to be saved, and was worth
+saving. What was the 'must'? To stop for an hour or two on His road to
+the Cross. So He teaches us that in a life penetrated by the thought
+of the divine will, which we gladly obey, there are no things too
+great, and none too trivial, to be brought under the dominion of that
+law, and to be regulated by that divine necessity. Obedience is
+obedience, whether in large things or in small. There is no scale of
+magnitude applicable to the distinction between God's will and that
+which is not God's will. Gravitation rules the motes that dance in the
+sunshine as well as the mass of Jupiter. A triangle with its apex in
+the sun, and its base beyond the solar system, has the same properties
+and comes under the same laws as one that a schoolboy scrawls upon his
+slate. God's truth is not too great to rule the smallest duties. The
+star in the East was a guide to the humble house at Bethlehem, and
+there are starry truths high in the heavens that avail for our
+guidance in the smallest acts of life.
+
+So, brethren, bring your doings under that all-embracing law of
+duty--duty, which is the heathen expression for the will of God. There
+are great regions of life in which lower necessities have play.
+Circumstances, our past, bias and temper, relationship, friendship,
+civic duty, and the like--all these bring their necessities; but let
+us think of them all as being, what indeed they are, manifestations to
+us of the will of our Father. There are great tracts of life in which
+either of two courses may be right, and we are left to the decision of
+choice rather than of duty; but high above all these, let us see
+towering that divine necessity. It is a daily struggle to bring 'I
+will' to coincide with 'I ought'; and there is only one adequate and
+always powerful way of securing that coincidence, and that is to keep
+close to Jesus Christ and to drink in His spirit. Then, when duty and
+delight are conterminous, 'the rough places will be plain, and the
+crooked things straight, and every mountain shall be brought low, and
+every valley shall be exalted,' and life will be blessed, and service
+will be freedom. Joy and liberty and power and peace will fill our
+hearts when this is the law of our being; 'All that the Lord hath
+spoken, that _must_ I do.'
+
+
+
+
+THE LAKE AND THE RIVER
+
+'God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that
+whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting
+life.'--JOHN iii. 16.
+
+I venture to say that my text shows us a lake, a river, a pitcher, and
+a draught. 'God so loved the world'--that is the lake. A lake makes a
+river for itself--'God so loved the world that He _gave_ His... Son.'
+But the river does not quench any one's thirst unless he has something
+to lift the water with: 'God so loved the world that He gave His...
+Son, that whosoever _believeth_ on Him.' Last comes the draught:
+'shall not perish, but have _everlasting life._'
+
+I. The great lake, God's love.
+
+Before Jesus Christ came into this world no one ever dreamt of saying
+'God _loves_.' Some of the Old Testament psalmists had glimpses of
+that truth and came pretty near expressing it. But among all the 'gods
+many and lords many,' there were lustful gods and beautiful gods, and
+idle gods, and fighting gods and peaceful gods: but not one of whom
+worshippers said, 'He loves.' Once it was a new and almost incredible
+message, but we have grown accustomed to it, and it is not strange any
+more to us. But if we would try to think of what it means, the whole
+truth would flash up into fresh newness, and all the miseries and
+sorrows and perplexities of our lives would drift away down the wind,
+and we should be no more troubled with them. 'God loves' is the
+greatest thing that can be said by lips.
+
+'God ... loved the world.' Now when we speak of loving a number of
+individuals--the broader the stream, the shallower it is, is it not?
+The most intense patriot in England does not love her one
+ten-thousandth part as well as he loves his own little girl. When we
+think or feel anything about a great multitude of people, it is like
+looking at a forest. We do not see the trees, we see the whole wood.
+But that is not how God loves the world. Suppose I said that I loved
+the people in India, I should not mean by that that I had any feeling
+about any individual soul of all those dusky millions, but only that I
+massed them all together; or made what people call a generalisation of
+them. But that is not the way in which God loves. He loves all because
+He loves each. And when we say, 'God so loved the world,' we have to
+break up the mass into its atoms, and to think of each atom as being
+an object of His love. We all stand out in God's love just as we
+should do to one another's eyes, if we were on the top of a
+mountain-ridge with a clear sunset sky behind us. Each little black
+dot of the long procession would be separately visible. And we all
+stand out like that, every man of us isolated, and getting as much of
+the love of God as if there was not another creature in the whole
+universe but God and ourselves. Have you ever realised that when we
+say, 'He loved the world,' that really means, as far as each of us is
+concerned, He loves _me_? And just as the whole beams of the sun come
+pouring down into every eye of the crowd that is looking up to it, so
+the whole love of God pours down, not upon a multitude, an
+abstraction, a community, but upon every single soul that makes up
+that community. He loves us all because He loves us each. We shall
+never get all the good of that thought until we translate it, and lay
+it upon our hearts. It is all very well to say, 'Ah yes! God is love,'
+and it is all very well to say He loves 'the world.' But I will tell
+you what is a great deal better--to say--what Paul said--'Who loved
+_me_ and gave Himself for _me_.'
+
+Now, there is one other suggestion that I would make to you before I
+go on, and that is that all through the New Testament, but especially
+in John's Gospel, 'the world' does not only mean men, but _sinful_
+men, men separated from God. And the great and blessed truth taught
+here is that, however I may drag myself away from God, I cannot drive
+Him away from me, and that however little I may care for Him, or love
+Him, or think about Him, it does not make one hairs-breadth of
+difference as to the fact that He loves me. I know, of course, that if
+a man does not love Him back again, God's love has to take shapes that
+it would not otherwise take, which may be extremely inconvenient for
+the man. But though the shape may alter, _must_ alter, the fact
+remains; and every sinful soul on the earth, including Judas
+Iscariot--who is said to head the list of crimes--has God's love
+resting upon him.
+
+II. The river.
+
+Now, to go back to my metaphor, the lake makes a river. 'God so loved
+the world that He gave His only begotten Son.'
+
+So then, it was not Christ's death that turned God from hating and
+being angry, but it was God's love that appointed Christ's death. If
+you will only remember that, a great many of the shallow and popular
+objections to the great doctrine of the Atonement disappear at once.
+'God so loved ... that He gave.' But some people say that when we
+preach that Jesus Christ died for our sins, that God's wrath might not
+fall upon men, our teaching is immoral, because it means 'Christ came,
+and so God loved.' It is the other way about, friend. 'God so loved
+... that He gave.'
+
+But now let me carry you back to the Old Testament. Do you remember
+the story of the father taking his boy who carried the bundle of wood
+and the fire, and tramping over the mountains till they reached the
+place where the sacrifice was to be offered? Do you remember the boy's
+question that brings tears quickly to the reader's eyes: 'Here is the
+wood, and here is the fire, where is the lamb'? Do you not think it
+would be hard for the father to steady his voice and say, 'My son, God
+will provide the lamb'? And do you remember the end of that story?
+'The Angel of the Lord said unto Abraham, Because thou hast done this
+thing, and hast not _withheld_ thy son, _thine only son_, from Me,
+therefore blessing I will bless thee,' etc. Remember that one of the
+Apostles said, using the very same word that is used in Genesis as to
+Abraham's giving up his son to God, 'He _spared not_ His own Son, but
+delivered Him up to the death for us all.' Does not that point to a
+mysterious parallel? Somehow or other--we have no right to attempt to
+say how--somehow or other, God not only _sent_ His Son, as it is said
+in the next verse to my text, but far more tenderly, wonderfully,
+pathetically, God _gave_--gave up His Son, and the sacrifice was
+enhanced, because it was His only begotten Son.
+
+Ah! dear brethren, do not let us be afraid of following out all that
+is included in that great word, 'God ... _loved_ the world.' For there
+is no love which does not delight in giving, and there is no love that
+does not delight in depriving itself, in some fashion, of what it
+gives. And I, for my part, believe that Paul's words are to be taken
+in all their blessed depth and wonderfulness of meaning when he says,
+'He gave up'--as well as gave--'Him to the death for us all.'
+
+And now, do you not think that we are able in some measure to estimate
+the greatness of that little word 'so'? 'God _so_ loved'--_so_ deeply,
+so holily, _so_ perfectly--that He 'gave His only begotten Son'; and
+the gift of that Son is, as it were, the river by which the love of
+God comes to every soul in the world.
+
+Now there are a great many people who would like to put the middle
+part of this great text of ours into a parenthesis. They say that we
+should bring the first words and the last words of this text together,
+and never mind all that lies between. People who do not like the
+doctrine of the Cross would say, 'God so loved the world that He
+gave... everlasting life'; and there an end. 'If there is a God, and
+if He loves the world, why cannot He save the world without more ado?
+There is no need for these interposed clauses. God so loved the world
+that everybody will go to heaven'--that is the gospel of a great many
+of you; and it is the gospel of a great many wise and learned people.
+But it is not John's Gospel, and it is not Christ's Gospel. The
+beginning and the end of the text cannot be buckled up together in
+that rough-and-ready fashion. They have to be linked by a chain; and
+there are two links in the chain: God forges the one, and we have to
+forge the other. 'God so loved the world that He gave'--then He has
+done His work. 'That whosoever believeth'--that is your work. And it
+is in vain that God forges _His_ link, unless you will forge _yours_
+and link it up to His. 'God so loved the world,' that is step number
+one in the process; 'that He gave,' that is step number two; and then
+there comes another 'that'--'that whosoever believeth,' that is step
+number three; and they are all needed before you come to number four,
+which is the landing-place and not a step--'should not perish, but
+have everlasting life.'
+
+III. The pitcher.
+
+I come to what I called the pitcher, with which we draw the water for
+our own use--'that whosoever believeth.' You perhaps say, 'Yes, I
+believe. I accept every word of the Gospel, I quite believe that Jesus
+Christ died, as a matter of history; and I quite believe that He died
+for men's sins.' And what then? Is that what Jesus Christ meant by
+believing? To believe _about_ Him is not to believe _on_ Him; and
+unless you believe on Him you will get no good out of Him. There is
+the lake, and the river must flow past the shanties in the clearing in
+the forest, if the men there are to drink. But it may flow past their
+doors, as broad as the Mississippi, and as deep as the ocean; but they
+will perish with thirst, unless they dip in their hands, like Gideon's
+men, and carry the water to their own lips. Dear friend, what you have
+to do--and your soul's salvation, and your peace and joy and nobleness
+in this life and in the next depend absolutely upon it--is simply to
+trust in Jesus Christ and His death for your sins.
+
+I sometimes wish we had never heard that word 'faith.' For as soon as
+we begin to talk about 'faith,' people begin to think that we are away
+up in some theological region far above everyday life. Suppose we try
+to bring it down a little nearer to our businesses and bosoms, and
+instead of using a word that is kept sacred for employment in
+religious matters, and saying 'faith,' we say 'trust.' That is what
+you give to your wives and husbands, is it not? And that is exactly
+what you have to give to Jesus Christ, simply to lay hold of Him as a
+man lays hold of the heart that loves him, and leans his whole weight
+upon it. Lean hard on Him, hang on Him, or, to take the other metaphor
+that is one of the Old Testament words for trust, 'flee for refuge' to
+Him. Fancy a man with the avenger of blood at his back, and the point
+of the pursuer's spear almost pricking his spine--don't you think he
+would make for the City of Refuge with some speed? That is what you
+have to do. He that believeth, and by trust lays hold of the Hand that
+holds him up, will never fall; and he that does not lay hold of that
+Hand will never stand, to say nothing of rising. And so by these two
+links God's love of the world is connected with the salvation of the
+world.
+
+IV. The draught.
+
+Finally, we have here the draught of living water. Did you ever think
+why our text puts 'should not perish' first? Is it not because, unless
+we put our trust in Him, we shall certainly perish, and because,
+therefore, that certainty of perishing must be averted before we can
+have 'everlasting life'?
+
+Now I am not going to enlarge on these two solemn expressions,
+'perishing' and 'everlasting life.' I only say this: men do not need
+to wait until they die before they 'perish.' There are men and women
+here now who are dead--dead while they live, and when they come to
+die, the perishing, which is condemnation and ruin, will only be the
+making visible, in another condition of life, of what is the fact
+to-day. Dear brethren, you do not need to die in order to perish in
+your sins, and, blessed be God, you can have everlasting life before
+you die. You can have it now, and there is only one way to have it,
+and that is to lay hold of Him who is the Life. And when you have
+Jesus Christ in your heart, whom you will be sure to have if you trust
+Him, then you will have life--life eternal, here and now, and death
+will only make manifest the eternal life which you had while you were
+alive here, and will perfect it in fashions that we do not yet know
+anything about.
+
+Only remember, as I have been trying to show you, the order that runs
+through this text. Remember the order of these last words, and that we
+must first of all be delivered from eternal and utter death, before we
+can be invested with the eternal and absolute life.
+
+Now, dear brethren, I dare say I have never spoken to the great
+majority of you before; it is quite possible I may never speak to any
+of you again. I have asked God to help me to speak so as that souls
+should be drawn to the Saviour. And I beseech you now, as my last
+word, that you would listen, not to me, but to Him. For it is He that
+says to us, 'God so loved the world, that He gave His Son, that
+whosoever'--'whosoever,' a blank cheque, like the M. or N. of the
+Prayer-book, or the A. B. of a schedule; you can put your own name in
+it--'that whosoever believeth on Him shall not perish, but
+have'--here, now--'everlasting life.'
+
+
+
+
+THE WEARIED CHRIST
+
+'Jesus therefore, being wearied with His journey, sat thus on the
+well.... He said unto them, I have meat to eat that ye know not
+of.'--JOHN iv. 6,32.
+
+Two pictures result from these two verses, each striking in itself,
+and gaining additional emphasis by the contrast. It was during a long
+hot day's march that the tired band of pedestrians turned into the
+fertile valley. There, whilst the disciples went into the little
+hill-village to purchase, if they could, some food from the despised
+inhabitants, Jesus, apparently too exhausted to accompany them, 'sat
+_thus_ on the well.' That little word _thus_ seems to have a force
+difficult to reproduce in English. It is apparently intended to
+enhance the idea of utter weariness, either because the word 'wearied'
+is in thought to be supplied, 'sat, being thus wearied, on the well';
+or because it conveys the notion which might be expressed by our 'just
+as He was'; as a tired man flings Himself down anywhere and anyhow,
+without any kind of preparation beforehand, and not much caring where
+it is that he rests.
+
+Thus, utterly worn out, Jesus Christ sits on the well, whilst the
+western sun lengthens out the shadows on the plain. The disciples come
+back, and what a change they find. Hunger gone, exhaustion ended,
+fresh vigour in their wearied Master. What had made the difference?
+The woman's repentance and joy. And He unveils the secret of His
+reinvigoration when He says, 'I have meat to eat that ye know not
+of'--the hidden manna. 'My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me,
+and to finish His work.'
+
+Now, I think if we take just three points of view, we shall gain the
+lessons of this remarkable contrast. Note, then, the wearied Christ;
+the devoted Christ; the reinvigorated Christ.
+
+I. The wearied Christ.
+
+How precious it is to us that this Gospel, which has the loftiest
+things to say about the manifest divinity of our Lord, and the glory
+that dwelt in Him, is always careful to emphasise also the manifest
+limitations and weaknesses of the Manhood. John never forgets either
+term of his great sentence in which all the gospel is condensed, 'the
+Word became flesh.' Ever he shows us 'the Word'; ever 'the flesh.'
+Thus it is he only who records the saying on the Cross, 'I thirst.' It
+is he who tells us how Jesus Christ, not merely for the sake of
+getting a convenient opening of a conversation, or to conciliate
+prejudices, but because He needed what He asked, said to the woman of
+Samaria, 'Give Me to drink.' So the weariness of the Master stands
+forth for us as pathetic proof that it was no shadowy investiture with
+an apparent Manhood to which He stooped, but a real participation in
+our limitations and weaknesses, so that work to Him was fatigue, even
+though in Him dwelt the manifest glory of that divine nature which
+'fainteth not, neither is weary.'
+
+Not only does this pathetic incident teach us for our firmer faith,
+and more sympathetic and closer apprehension, the reality of the
+Manhood of Jesus Christ, but it supplies likewise some imperfect
+measure of His love, and reveals to us one condition of His power. Ah!
+if He had not Himself known weariness He never could have said, 'Come
+unto Me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you
+rest.' It was because Himself 'took our infirmities,' and amongst
+these the weakness of tired muscles and exhausted frame, that 'He
+giveth power to the faint, and to them that have no might He
+increaseth strength.' The Creator must have no share in the
+infirmities of the creature. It must be His unwearied power that calls
+them all by their names; and because He is great in might 'not one' of
+the creatures of His hand can 'fail.' But the Redeemer must
+participate in that from which He redeems; and the condition of His
+strength being 'made perfect in our weakness' is that our weakness
+shall have cast a shadow upon the glory of His strength. The measure
+of His love is seen in that, long before Calvary, He entered into the
+humiliation and sufferings and sorrows of humanity; a condition of His
+power is seen in that, forasmuch as the 'children were partakers of
+flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise took part of the same,' not
+only that 'through death He might deliver' from death, but that in
+life He might redeem from the ills and sorrows of life.
+
+Nor does that exhausted Figure, reclining on Jacob's Well, preach to
+us only what _He_ was. It proclaims to us likewise what _we_ should
+be. For if His work was carried on to the edge of His capacity, and if
+He shrank not from service because it involved toil, what about the
+professing followers of Jesus Christ, who think that they are exempted
+from any form of service because they can plead that it will weary
+them? What about those who say that they tread in His footsteps, and
+have never known what it was to yield up one comfort, one moment of
+leisure, one thrill of enjoyment, or to encounter one sacrifice, one
+act of self-denial, one aching of weariness for the sake of the Lord
+who bore all for them? The wearied Christ proclaims His manhood,
+proclaims His divinity and His love, and rebukes us who consent to
+'walk in the way of His commandments' only on condition that it can be
+done without dust or heat; and who are ready to run the race that is
+set before us, only if we can come to the goal without perspiration or
+turning a hair. 'Jesus, being wearied with His journey, sat thus on
+the well.'
+
+II. Still further, notice here the devoted Christ.
+
+It is not often that He lets us have a glimpse into the innermost
+chambers of His heart, in so far as the impelling motives of His
+course are concerned. But here He lays them bare. 'My meat is to do
+the will of Him that sent Me, and to finish His work.'
+
+Now, it is no mere piece of grammatical pedantry when I ask you to
+notice that the language of the original is so constructed as to give
+prominence to the idea that the aim of Christ's life was the doing of
+the Father's will; and that it is the aim rather than the actual
+performance and realisation of the aim which is pointed at by our
+Lord. The words would be literally rendered 'My meat is _that I may
+do_ the will of Him that sent Me and finish His work'--that is to say,
+the very nourishment and refreshment of Christ was found in making the
+accomplishment of the Father's commandment His ever-impelling motive,
+His ever-pursued goal. The expression carries us into the inmost heart
+of Jesus, dealing, as it does, with the one all-pervading motive
+rather than with the resulting actions, fair and holy as these were.
+
+Brethren, the secret of our lives, if they are at all to be worthy and
+noble, must be the same--the recognition, not only as they say now,
+that we have a mission, but that there _is_ a Sender; which is a
+wholly different view of our position, and that He who sends is the
+loving Father, who has spoken to us in that dear Son, who Himself made
+it His aim thus to obey, in order that it might be possible for us to
+re-echo His voice, and to repeat His aim. The recognition of the
+Sender, the absolute submission of our wills to His, must run through
+all the life. You may do your daily work, whatever it be, with this
+for its motto, 'the will of the Lord be done'; and they who thus can
+look at their trade, or profession, and see the trivialities and
+monotonies of their daily occupations, in the transfiguring light of
+that great thought, will never need to complain that life is small,
+ignoble, wearisome, insignificant. As with pebbles in some clear brook
+with the sunshine on it, the water in which they are sunk glorifies
+and magnifies them. If you lift them out, they are but bits of dull
+stone; lying beneath the sunlit ripples they are jewels. Plunge the
+prose of your life, and all its trivialities, into that great stream,
+and it will magnify and glorify the smallest and the homeliest.
+Absolute submission to the divine will, and the ever-present thrilling
+consciousness of doing it, were the secret of Christ's life, and ought
+to be the secret of ours.
+
+Note the distinction between doing the will and perfecting the work.
+That implies that Jesus Christ, like us, reached forward, in each
+successive act of obedience to the successive manifestations of the
+Father's will, to something still undone. The work will never be
+perfected or finished except on condition of continual fulfilment,
+moment by moment, of the separate behests of that divine will. For the
+Lord, as for His servants, this was the manner of obedience, that He
+'pressed towards the mark,' and by individual acts of conformity
+secured that at last the whole 'work' should have been so completely
+accomplished that He might be able to say upon the Cross, 'It is
+finished.' If we have any right to call ourselves His, we too have
+thus to live.
+
+III. Lastly, notice the reinvigorated Christ.
+
+I have already pointed out the lovely contrast between the two
+pictures, the beginning and the end of this incident; so I need not
+dwell upon that. The disciples wondered when they found that Christ
+desired and needed none of the homely sustenance that they had brought
+to Him. And when He answered their sympathy rather than their
+curiosity--for they did not ask Him any questions, but they said to
+Him, 'Master, eat'--with 'I have meat to eat that ye know not of,'
+they, in their blind, blundering fashion, could only imagine that some
+one had brought Him something. So they gave occasion for the great
+words upon which we have been touching.
+
+Notice, however, that Christ here sets forth the lofty aim at
+conformity to the divine will and fulfilment of the divine Work as
+being the meat of the soul. It is the true food for us all. The spirit
+which feeds upon such food will grow and be nourished. And the soul
+which feeds upon its own will and fancies, and not upon the plain
+brown bread of obedience, which is wholesome, though it be often
+bitter, will feed upon ashes, which will grate upon the teeth and hurt
+the palate. Such a soul will be like those wretched infants that are
+discovered sometimes at 'baby-farms,' starved and stunted, and not
+grown to half their right size. If you would have your spirits strong,
+robust, well nourished, live by obedience, and let the will of God be
+the food of your souls, and all will be well.
+
+Souls thus fed can do without a good deal that others need. Why,
+enthusiasm for anything lifts a man above physical necessities and
+lower desires, even in its poorest forms. A regiment of soldiers
+making a forced march, or an athlete trying to break the record, will
+tramp, tramp on, not needing food, or rest, or sleep, until they have
+achieved their purpose, poor and ignoble though it may be. In all
+regions of life, enthusiasm and lofty aims make the soul lord of the
+body and of the world.
+
+And in the Christian life we shall be thus lords, exactly in
+proportion to the depth and earnestness of our desires to do the will
+of God. They who thus are fed can afford 'to scorn delights and live
+laborious days.' They who thus are fed can afford to do with plain
+living, if there be high impulses as well as high thinking. And sure I
+am that nothing is more certain to stamp out the enthusiasm of
+obedience which ought to mark the Christian life than the luxurious
+fashion of living which is getting so common to-day amongst professing
+Christians.
+
+It is not in vain that we read the old story about the Jewish boys
+whose faces were radiant and whose flesh was firmer when they were fed
+on pulse and water than on all the wine and dainties of the Babylonish
+court. 'Set a knife to thy throat if thou be a man given to appetite,'
+and let us remember that the less we use, and the less we feel that we
+need, of outward goods, the nearer do we approach to the condition in
+which holy desires and lofty aims will visit our spirits.
+
+I commend to you, brethren, the story of our text, in its most literal
+application, as well as in the loftier spiritual lessons that may be
+drawn from it. To be near Christ, and to desire to live for Him,
+delivers us from dependence upon earthly things; and in those who thus
+do live the old word shall be fulfilled, 'Better is a little that a
+righteous man hath, than the abundance of many wicked.'
+
+
+
+
+'GIVE ME TO DRINK'
+
+'... Jesus saith unto her, Give Me to drink.... Jesus saith unto her,
+I that speak unto thee am He.'--JOHN iv. 7, 26.
+
+This Evangelist very significantly sets side by side our Lord's
+conversations with Nicodemus and with the woman of Samaria. The
+persons are very different: the one a learned Rabbi of reputation,
+influence, and large theological knowledge of the then fashionable
+kind; the other an alien woman, poor--for she had to do this menial
+task of water-drawing in the heat of the day--and of questionable
+character.
+
+The diversity of persons necessitates great differences in the form of
+our Lord's address to each; but the resemblances are as striking as
+the divergencies. In both we have His method of gradually unveiling
+the truth to a susceptible soul, beginning with symbol and a hint,
+gradually enlarging the hint and translating the symbol; and finally
+unveiling Himself as the Giver and the Gift. There is another
+resemblance; in both the characteristic gift is that of the Spirit of
+Life, and, perhaps, in both the symbol is the same. For we read in one
+of 'water and the Spirit'; and in the other of the fountain within,
+springing into everlasting life. However that may be, the process of
+teaching is all but identical in substance in both cases, though in
+form so various.
+
+The words of our Lord which I have taken for our text now are His
+first and last utterance in this conversation. What a gulf lies
+between! They are linked together by the intervening sayings, and
+constitute with these a great ladder, of which the foot is fast on
+earth, and the top fixed in heaven. On the one hand, He owns the
+lowest necessities; on the other, He makes the highest claims. Let us
+ponder on this remarkable juxtaposition, and try to gather the lessons
+that are plain in it.
+
+I. First, then, I think we see here the mystery of the dependent
+Christ.
+
+'Give Me to drink': 'I am He.' Try to see the thing for a moment with
+the woman's eyes. She comes down from her little village, up amongst
+the cliffs on the hillside, across the narrow, hot valley, beneath the
+sweltering sunshine reflected from the bounding mountains, and she
+finds, in the midst of the lush vegetation round the ancient well, a
+solitary, weary Jew, travel-worn, evidently exhausted--for His
+disciples had gone away to buy food, and He was too wearied to go with
+them--looking into the well, but having no dipper or vessel by which
+to get any of its cool treasure. We lose a great deal of the meaning
+of Christ's request if we suppose that it was merely a way of getting
+into conversation with the woman, a 'breaking of the ice.' It was a
+great deal more than that. It was the utterance of a felt and painful
+necessity, which He Himself could not supply without a breach of what
+He conceived to be His filial dependence. He could have brought water
+out of the well. He did not need to depend upon the pitcher that the
+disciples had perhaps unthinkingly carried away with them when they
+went to buy bread. He did not need to ask the woman to give, but He
+chose to do so. We lose much if we do not see in this incident far
+more than the woman saw, but we lose still more if we do not see what
+she did see. And the words which the Master spoke to her are no mere
+way of introducing a conversation on religious themes; but He asked
+for a draught which He needed, and which He had no other way of
+getting.
+
+So, then, here stands, pathetically set forth before us, our Lord's
+true participation in two of the distinguishing characteristics of our
+weak humanity--subjection to physical necessities and dependence on
+kindly help. We find Him weary, hungry, thirsty, sometimes slumbering.
+And all these instances are documents and proofs for us that He was a
+true man like ourselves, and that, like ourselves, He depended on 'the
+woman that ministered to Him' for the supply of His necessities, and
+so knew the limitations of our social and else helpless humanity.
+
+But then a wearied and thirsty man is nothing of much importance. But
+here is a Man who _humbled Himself_ to be weary and to thirst. The
+keynote of this Gospel, the one thought which unlocks all its
+treasures, and to the elucidation of which, in all its aspects, the
+whole book is devoted, is, 'The Word was made flesh.' Only when you
+let in the light of the last utterance of our text, 'I that speak unto
+thee am He,' do we understand the pathos, the sublimity, the depth and
+blessedness of meaning which lie in the first one, 'Give Me to drink.'
+When we see that He bowed Himself, and willingly stretched out His
+hands for the fetters, we come to understand the significance of these
+traces of His manhood. The woman says, with wonder, 'How is it that
+Thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me?' and that was wonderful. But,
+as He hints to her, if she had known more clearly who this Person was,
+that seemed to be a Jew, a deeper wonder would have crept over her
+spirit. The wonder is that the Eternal Word should need the water of
+the well, and should ask it of a poor human creature.
+
+And why this humiliation? He could, as I have said, have wrought a
+miracle. He that fed five thousand, He that had turned water into wine
+at the rustic marriage-feast, would have had no difficulty in
+quenching His thirst if he had chosen to use His miraculous power
+therefore. But He here shows us that the true filial spirit will rather
+die than cast off its dependence on the Father, and the same motive
+which led Him to reject the temptation in the wilderness, and to
+answer with sublime confidence, 'Man doth not live by bread alone, but
+by every word from the mouth of God,' forbids Him here to use other
+means of securing the draught that He so needed than the appeal to the
+sympathy of an alien, and the swift compassion of a woman's heart.
+
+And then, let us remember that the motive of this willing acceptance
+of the limitations and weaknesses of humanity is, in the deepest
+analysis, simply His love to us; as the mediaeval hymn has it,
+'Seeking me, Thou satest weary.'
+
+In that lonely Traveller, worn, exhausted, thirsty, craving for a
+draught of water from a stranger's hand, is set forth 'the glory of
+the Father, full of grace and truth.' A strange manifestation of
+divine glory this! But if we understand that the glory of God is the
+lustrous light of His self-revealing love, perhaps we shall understand
+how, from that faint, craving voice, 'Give Me to drink,' that glory
+sounds forth more than in the thunders that rolled about the rocky
+peak of Sinai. Strange to think, brethren, that the voice from those
+lips dry with thirst, which was low and weak, was the voice that spoke
+to the sea, 'Peace! be still,' and there was a calm; that said to
+demons, 'Come out of him!' and they evacuated their fortress; that
+cast its command into the grave of Lazarus, and he came forth; and
+which one day all that are in the grave shall hear, and hearing shall
+obey. 'Give Me to drink.' 'I that speak unto thee am He.'
+
+II. Secondly, we may note here the self-revealing Christ.
+
+The process by which Jesus gradually unveils His full character to
+this woman, so unspiritual and unsusceptible as she appeared at first
+sight to be, is interesting and instructive. It would occupy too much
+of your time for me to do more than set it before you in the barest
+outline. Noting the singular divergence between the two sayings which
+I have taken as our text, it is interesting to notice how the one
+gradually merges into the other. First of all, Jesus Christ, as it
+were, opens a finger of His hand to let the woman have a glimpse of
+the gift lying there, that that may kindle desire, and hints at some
+occult depth in His person and nature all undreamed of by her yet, and
+which would be the occasion of greater wonder, and of a reversal of
+their parts, if she knew it. Then, in answer to her, half
+understanding that He meant more than met the ear, and yet opposing
+the plain physical difficulties that were in the way, in that He had
+'nothing to draw with, and the well is deep,' and asking whether He
+were greater than our father Jacob, who also had given, and given not
+only a draught, but the well, our Lord enlarges her vision of the
+blessedness of the gift, though He says but little more of its nature,
+except in so far as that may be gathered from the fact that the water
+that He will give will be a permanent source of satisfaction,
+forbidding the pangs of unquenched desire ever again to be felt as
+pangs; and from the other fact that it will be an inward possession,
+leaping up with a fountain's energy, and a life within itself,
+towards, and into everlasting life. Next, he strongly assails
+conscience and demands repentance, and reveals Himself as the reader
+of the secrets of the heart. Then He discloses the great truths of
+spiritual worship. And, finally, as a prince in disguise might do, He
+flings aside the mantle of which He had let a fold or two be blown
+back in the previous conversation, and stands confessed. 'I that speak
+unto thee am He.' That is to say, the kindling of desire, the proffer
+of the all-satisfying gift, the quickening of conscience, the
+revelation of a Father to be worshipped in spirit and in truth, and
+the final full disclosure of His person and office as the Giver of the
+gift which shall slake all the thirsts of men--these are the stages of
+His self-revelation.
+
+Then note, not only the process, but the substance of the revelation
+of Himself. The woman had a far more spiritual and lofty conception of
+the office of Messiah than the Jews had. It is not the first time that
+heretics have reached a loftier ideal of some parts of the truth than
+the orthodox attain. To the Jew the Messiah was a conquering king, who
+would help them to ride on the necks of their enemies, and pay back
+their persecutions and oppressions. To this Samaritan woman--speaking,
+I suppose, the conceptions of her race--the Messiah was One who was to
+'_tell_ us all things.'
+
+Jesus Christ accepts the position, endorses her anticipations, and in
+effect presents Himself before her and before us as the Fountain of
+all certitude and knowledge in regard to spiritual matters. For all
+that we can know, or need to know, with regard to God and man and
+their mutual relations; for all that we can or need know in regard to
+manhood, its ideal, its obligations, its possibilities, its destinies;
+for all that we need to know of men in their relation to one another,
+we have to turn to Jesus Christ, the Messiah, who 'will tell us all
+things.' He is the Fountain of light; He is the Foundation of
+certitude; and they who seek, not hypotheses and possibilities and
+conjectures and dreams, but the solid substance of a reliable
+knowledge, must grasp Him, and esteem the words of His mouth and the
+deeds of His life more than their necessary food.
+
+He meets this woman's conceptions as He had met those of Nicodemus. To
+him He had unveiled Himself as the Son of God, and the Son of Man who
+came down from heaven, and is in heaven, and ascends to heaven. To the
+woman He reveals Himself as the Messiah, who will tell us all truth,
+and to both as the Giver of the gift which shall communicate and
+sustain and refresh the better life. But I cannot help dwelling for a
+moment upon the remarkable, beautiful, and significant designation
+which our Lord employs here. 'I that speak unto thee.' The word in the
+original, translated by our version 'speak,' is even more sweet,
+because more familiar, and conveys the idea of unrestrained frank
+intercourse. Perhaps we might render 'I who am talking with Thee!' and
+that our Lord desired to emphasise to the woman's heart the notion of
+His familiar intercourse with her, Messiah though He were, seems to me
+confirmed by the fact that He uses the same expression, with
+additional grace and tenderness about it, when He says, with such
+depth of meaning, to the blind man whom He had healed, 'Thou hast both
+seen Him,' with the eyes to which He gave sight and object of sight,
+'and it is He that _talketh_ with thee.' The familiar Christ who will
+come and speak to us face to face and heart to heart, 'as a man
+speaketh with his friend,' is the Christ who will tell us all things,
+and whom we may wholly trust.
+
+Note too how this revelation has for its condition the docile
+acceptance of the earlier and imperfect teachings. If the woman had
+not yielded herself to our Lord's earlier words, and, though with very
+dim insight, yet with a heart that sought to be taught, followed Him
+as He stepped from round to round of the ascending ladder, she had
+never stood on the top and seen this great vision. If you see nothing
+more in Jesus Christ than a man like yourself, compassed with our
+infirmities, and yet sweet and gracious and good and pure, be true to
+what you know, and put it into practice, and be ready to accept all
+the light that dawns. They that begin down at the bottom with hearing
+'Give me to drink,' may stand at the top, and hear Him speak to them
+His unveiled truth and His full glory. 'To him that hath shall be
+given.' 'If any man wills to do His will he shall know of the
+teaching.'
+
+III. Lastly, we have here the universal Christ.
+
+The woman wondered that, being a Jew, He spoke to her. As I have said,
+our Lord's first utterance is simply the expression of a real physical
+necessity. But it is none the less what the woman felt it to be, a
+strange overleaping of barriers that towered very high. A Samaritan, a
+woman, a sinner, is the recipient of the first clear confession from
+Jesus Christ of His Messiahship and dignity. She was right in her
+instinct that something lay behind His sweeping aside of the barriers
+and coming so close to her with His request. These two, the prejudices
+of race and the contempt for woman, two of the crying evils of the old
+world, were overpassed by our Lord as if He never saw them. They were
+too high for men's puny limbs; they made no obstacle to the march of
+His divine compassion. And therein lies a symbol, if you like, but
+none the less a prophecy that will be fulfilled, of the universal
+adaptation and destination of the Gospel, and its independence of all
+distinctions of race and sex, condition, moral character. In Jesus
+Christ 'there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, neither bond
+nor free'; ye 'are all one in Christ.' If He had been but a Jew, it
+was wonderful that He should talk to a Samaritan. But there is nothing
+in the character and life of Christ, as recorded in Scripture, more
+remarkable and more plain than the entire absence of any racial
+peculiarities, or of characteristics owing to His position in space or
+time. So unlike His nation was He that the very _elite_ of His nation
+snarled at Him and said, 'Thou art a Samaritan!' So unlike them was He
+that one feels that a character so palpitatingly human to its core,
+and so impossible to explain from its surroundings, is inexplicable,
+but on the New Testament theory that He is not a Jew, or man only, but
+the Son of Man, the divine embodiment of the ideal of humanity, whose
+dwelling was on earth, but His origin and home in the bosom of God.
+Therefore Jesus Christ is the world's Christ, your Christ, my Christ,
+every man's Christ, the Tree of Life that stands in the midst of the
+garden, that all men may draw near to it and gather of its fruit.
+
+Brother, answer His proffer of the gift as this woman did: 'Sir, give
+me this water, that I thirst not; neither go all the way to the
+world's broken cisterns to draw'; and He will put into your hearts
+that indwelling fountain of life, so that you may say like this
+woman's townspeople: 'Now I have heard Him myself, and know that this
+is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.'
+
+
+
+
+THE GIFT AND THE GIVER
+
+'Jesus answered and said unto her, If thou knewest the gift of God,
+and who it is that saith unto thee, Give Me to drink; thou wouldest
+have asked of Him, and He would have given thee living water.'--JOHN
+iv. 10.
+
+This Gospel has two characteristics seldom found together: deep
+thought and vivid character-drawing. Nothing can be more clear-cut and
+dramatic than the scene in the chapter before us. There is not a word
+of description of this Samaritan woman. She paints herself, and it is
+not a beautiful picture. She is apparently of the peasant class, from
+a little village nestling on the hill above the plain, come down in
+the broiling sunshine to Jacob's well. She is of mature age, and has
+had a not altogether reputable past. She is frivolous, ready to talk
+with strangers, with a tongue quick to turn grave things into jests;
+and yet she possesses, hidden beneath masses of unclean vanities, a
+conscience and a yearning for something better than she has, which
+Christ's words awoke, and which was finally so enkindled as to make
+her fit to receive the full declaration of His Messiahship, which
+Pharisees and priests could not be trusted with.
+
+I need scarcely do more than remind you of the way in which the
+conversation between this strangely assorted pair began. The solitary
+Jew, sitting spent with travel on the well, asks for a draught of
+water; not in order to get an opening for preaching, but because He
+needs it. She replies with an exclamation of light wonder, half a jest
+and half a sarcasm, and challenging a response in the same tone.
+
+But Christ lifts her to a higher level by the words of my text, which
+awed levity, and prepared for a fuller revelation. 'Thou dost wonder
+that I, being a Jew, ask drink of thee, a Samaritan. If thou knewest
+who I am, thy wonder at My asking would be more. If thou knewest what
+I have to give, we should change places, and thou wouldest ask, and I
+should bestow.'
+
+So then, we have here gift, Giver, way of getting, and ignorance that
+hinders asking. Let us look at these.
+
+I. First, the gift of God. Now it is quite clear that our Lord means
+the same thing, whatever it may be, by the two expressions, the 'gift
+of God' and the 'living water.' For, unless He does, the whole
+sequence of my text falls to pieces. 'Living water' was suggested, no
+doubt, by the circumstances of the moment. There, in the well, was an
+ever-springing source, and, says He, a like supply, ever welling up
+for thirsty lips and foul hands, ever sweet and ever sufficient, God
+is ready to give.
+
+We may remember how, all through Scripture, we hear the tinkle of
+these waters as they run. The force of the expression is to be
+gathered largely from the Old Testament and the uses of the metaphor
+there. It has been supposed that by the 'living water' which God gives
+is here meant some one specific gift, such as that of the Holy Spirit,
+which sometimes is expressed by the metaphor. Rather I should be
+disposed to say the 'living water' is eternal life. 'With Thee is the
+fountain of life.' And so, in the last resort, the gift of God is God
+Himself. Nothing else will suffice for us, brethren. We need Him, and
+we need none but Him.
+
+Our Lord, in the subsequent part of this conversation, again touches
+upon this great metaphor, and suggests one or two characteristics,
+blessings, and excellences of it. 'It shall be _in_ him,' it is
+something that we may carry about with us in our hearts, inseparable
+from our being, free from all possibility of being filched away by
+violence, being rent from us by sorrows, or even being parted from us
+by death. What a man has outside of him he only seems to have. Our
+only real possessions are those which have passed into the substance
+of our souls. All else we shall leave behind. The only good is inward
+good; and this water of life slakes our thirst because it flows into
+the deepest place of our being, and abides there for ever.
+
+Oh! you that are seeking your satisfaction from fountains that remain
+outside of you after all your efforts, learn that all of them, by
+reason of their externality, will sooner or later be 'broken cisterns
+that can hold no water.' And I beseech you, if you want rest for your
+souls and stilling for their yearnings, look for it there, where only
+it can be found, in Him, who not only dwells in the heavens to rule
+and to shower down blessings, but enters into the waiting heart and
+abides there, the inward, and therefore the only real, possession and
+riches. 'It shall be in him a fountain of water.'
+
+It is 'springing up'--with an immortal energy, with ever fresh
+fulness, by its own inherent power, needing no pumps nor machinery,
+but ever welling forth its refreshment, an emblem of the joyous energy
+and continual freshness of vitality, which is granted to those who
+carry God in their hearts, and therefore can never be depressed beyond
+measure, nor ever feel that the burden of life is too heavy to bear,
+or its sorrows too sharp to endure.
+
+It springs up 'into eternal life,' for water must seek its source, and
+rise to the level of its origin, and this fountain within a man, that
+reaches up ever towards the eternal life from which it came, and which
+it gives to its possessor, will bear him up, as some strong spring
+will lift the clods that choked its mouth, will bear him up towards
+the eternal life which is native to it, and therefore native to him.
+
+Brethren, no man is so poor, so low, so narrow in capacity, so limited
+in heart and head, but that he needs a whole God to make him restful.
+Nothing else will. To seek for satisfaction elsewhere is like sailors
+who in their desperation, when the water-tanks are empty, slake their
+thirst with the treacherous blue that washes cruelly along the
+battered sides of their ship. A moment's alleviation is followed by
+the recurrence, in tenfold intensity, of the pangs of thirst, and by
+madness, and death. Do not drink the salt water that flashes and rolls
+by your side when you can have recourse to the fountain of life that
+is with God.
+
+'Oh!' you say, 'commonplace, threadbare pulpit rhetoric.' Yes! Do you
+live as if it were true? It will never be too threadbare to be dinned
+into your head until it has passed into your lives and regulated them.
+
+II. Now, in the next place, notice the Giver.
+
+Jesus Christ blends in one sentence, startling in its boldness, the
+gift of God, and Himself as the Bestower. This Man, exhausted for want
+of a draught of water, speaks with parched lips a claim most
+singularly in contrast with the request which He had just made: 'I
+will give thee the living water.' No wonder that the woman was
+bewildered, and could only say, 'The well is deep, and Thou hast
+nothing to draw with.' She might have said, 'Why then dost Thou ask
+me?' The words were meant to create astonishment, in order that the
+astonishment might awaken interest, which would lead to the capacity
+for further illumination. Suppose you had been there, had seen the Man
+whom she saw, had heard the two things that she heard, and knew no
+more about Him than she knew, what would _you_ have thought of Him and
+His words? Perhaps you would have been more contemptuous than she was.
+See to it that, since you know so much that explains and warrants
+them, you do not treat them worse than she did.
+
+Jesus Christ claims to give God's gifts. He is able to give to that
+poor, frivolous, impure-hearted and impure-lifed woman, at her
+request, the eternal life which shall still all the thirst of her
+soul, that had often in the past been satiated and disgusted, but had
+never been satisfied by any of its draughts.
+
+And He claims that in this giving He is something more than a channel,
+because, says He, 'If thou hadst asked of Me I would give thee.' We
+sometimes think of the relation between God and Christ as being
+typified by that of some land-locked sea amidst remote mountains, and
+the affluent that brings its sparkling treasures to the thirsting
+valley. But Jesus Christ is no mere vehicle for the conveyance of a
+divine gift, but His own heart, His own power, His own love are in it;
+and it is His gift just as much as it is God's.
+
+Now I do not do more than pause for one moment to ask you to think of
+what inference is necessarily involved in such a claim as this. If we
+know anything about Jesus Christ at all, we know that He spoke in this
+tone, not occasionally, but habitually. It will not do to pick out
+other bits of His character or actions and admire these and ignore the
+characteristic of His teachings--His claims for Himself. And I have
+only this one word to say, if Jesus Christ ever said anything the
+least like the words of my text, and if they were not true, what was
+He but a fanatic who had lost His head in the fancy of His
+inspiration? And if He said these words and they _were_ true, what is
+He then? What but that which this Gospel insists from its beginning to
+its end that He was--the Eternal Word of God, by whom all divine
+revelation from the beginning has been made, and who at last 'became
+flesh' that we might 'receive of His fulness,' and therein 'be filled
+with all the fulness of God.' Other alternative I, for my part, see
+none.
+
+But I would have you notice, too, the connection between these human
+needs of the Saviour and His power to give the divine gift. Why did He
+not simply say to this woman, 'If thou knewest who I am?' Why did He
+use this periphrasis of my text, 'Who it is that saith unto thee,
+"Give Me to drink"'? Why but because He wanted to fix her attention on
+the startling contradiction between His appearance and His claims--on
+the one hand asserting divine prerogative, on the other forcing into
+prominence human weakness and necessity, because these two things, the
+human weakness and the divine prerogative, are inseparably braided
+together and intertwined. Some of you will remember the great scene in
+Shakespeare where the weakness of Caesar is urged as a reason for
+rejecting his imperial authority:--
+
+  'Ay! and that tongue of his, that bade the Romans
+  Mark him, and write his speeches in their books,
+  Alas! it cried, "Give me some drink, ...
+  Like a sick girl."'
+
+And the inference that is drawn is, how can he be fit to be a ruler of
+men? But we listen to our Caesar and Emperor, when He asks this woman
+for water, and when He says on the Cross, 'I thirst,' and we feel that
+these are not the least of His titles to be crowned with many crowns.
+They bring Him nearer to us, and they are the means by which His love
+reaches its end, of bestowing upon us all, if we will have it, the cup
+of salvation. Unless He had said the one of these two things, He never
+could have said the other. Unless the dry lips had petitioned, 'Give
+Me to drink,' the gracious lips could never have said, 'I will give
+thee living water.' Unless, like Jacob of old, this Shepherd could
+say, 'In the day the drought consumed Me,' it would have been
+impossible that the flock 'shall hunger no more, neither shall they
+thirst any more, ... for the Lamb that is in the midst of the throne
+shall lead them to living fountains of water.'
+
+III. Again, notice how to get the gift.
+
+Christ puts together, as if they were all but contemporaneous, 'thou
+wouldst have asked of Me,' and 'I would have given thee.' The hand on
+the telegraph transmits the message, and back, swift as the lightning,
+flashes the response. The condition, the only condition, and the
+indispensable condition, of possessing that water of life--the summary
+expression for all the gifts of God in Jesus Christ, which at the last
+are essentially God Himself--is the desire to possess it turned to
+Jesus Christ. Is it not strange that men should not desire; is it not
+strange and sad that such foolish creatures are we that we do not want
+what we need; that our wishes and needs are often diametrically
+opposite? All men desire happiness, but some of us have so vitiated
+our tastes and our palates by fiery intoxicants that the water of life
+seems dreadfully tasteless and unstimulating, and so we will rather go
+back again to the delusive, poisoned drinks than glue our lips to the
+river of God's pleasures.
+
+But it is not enough that there should be the desire. It must be
+turned to Him. In fact the asking of my text, so far as you and I are
+concerned, is but another way of speaking the great keyword of
+personal religion, faith in Jesus Christ. For they who ask, know their
+necessity, are convinced of the power of Him to whom they appeal to
+grant their requests, and rely upon His love to do so. And these three
+things, the sense of need, the conviction of Christ's ability to save
+and to satisfy, and of His infinite love that desires to make us
+blessed--these three things fused together make the faith which
+receives the gift of God.
+
+Remember, brethren, that another of the scriptural expressions for the
+act of trusting in Him, is _taking_, not asking. You do not need to
+ask, as if for something that is not provided. What we all need to do
+is to open our eyes to see what is there. If we like to put out our
+hands and take it. Why should we be saying, 'Give me to drink,' when a
+pierced hand reaches out to us the cup of salvation, and says, 'Drink
+ye all of it'? 'Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ... and drink ...
+without money and without price.'
+
+There is no other condition but desire turned to Christ, and that is
+the necessary condition. God cannot give men salvation, as veterinary
+surgeons drench unwilling horses--forcing the medicine down their
+throats through clenched teeth. There must be the opened mouth, and
+wherever there is, there will be the full supply. 'Ask, and ye shall
+receive'; take, and ye shall possess.
+
+IV. Lastly, mark the ignorance that prevents asking.
+
+Jesus Christ looked at this poor woman and discerned in her, though,
+as I said, it was hidden beneath mountains of folly and sin, a thirsty
+soul that was dimly longing for something better. And He believed
+that, if once the mystery of His being and the mercy of God's gifts
+were displayed before her, she would melt into a yearning of desire
+that is certain to be fulfilled. In some measure the same thing is
+true of us all. For surely, surely, if only you saw realities, and
+things as they are, some of you would not be content to continue as
+you are--without this water of life. Blind, blind, blind, are the men
+who grope at noon-day as in the dark and turn away from Jesus. If you
+knew, not with the head only, but with the whole nature, if you knew
+the thirst of your soul, the sweetness of the water, the readiness of
+the Giver, and the dry and parched land to which you condemn
+yourselves by your refusal, surely you would bethink yourself and fall
+at His feet and ask, and get, the water of life.
+
+But, brethren, there is a worse case than ignorance; there is the case
+of people that know and refuse, not by reason of imperfect knowledge,
+but by reason of averted will. And I beseech you to ponder whether
+that may not be your condition. 'Whosoever _will_, let him come.' 'Ye
+_will_ not come unto Me that ye might have life.' I do not think I
+venture much when I say that I am sure there are people hearing me
+now, not Christians, who are as certain, deep down in their hearts,
+that the only rest of the soul is in God, and the only way to get it
+is through Christ, as any saint of God's ever was. But the knowledge
+does not touch their will because they like the poison and they do not
+want the life.
+
+Oh! dear friends, the instantaneousness of Christ's answer, and the
+certainty of it, are as true for each of us as they were for this
+woman. The offer is made to us all, just as it was to her. We can
+gather round that Rock like the Israelites in the wilderness, and
+slake every thirst of our souls from its outgushing streams. Jesus
+Christ says to each of us, as He did to her, tenderly, warningly,
+invitingly, and yet rebukingly, 'If thou knewest ... thou wouldst ask,
+... and I would give.'
+
+Take care lest, by continual neglect, you force Him at last to change
+His words, and to lament over you, as He did over the city that He
+loved so well, and yet destroyed. 'If thou _hadst_ known in thy day
+the things that belong to thy peace. But now they are hid from thine
+eyes.'
+
+
+
+
+THE SPRINGING FOUNTAIN
+
+'The water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water,
+springing up into everlasting life.'--JOHN iv. 14.
+
+There are two kinds of wells, one a simple reservoir, another
+containing the waters of a spring. It is the latter kind which is
+spoken about here, as is clear not only from the meaning of the word
+in the Greek, but also from the description of it as 'springing up.'
+That suggests at once the activity of a fountain. A fountain is the
+emblem of motion, not of rest. Its motion is derived from itself, not
+imparted to it from without. Its 'silvery column' rises ever
+heavenward, though gravitation is too strong for it, and drags it back
+again.
+
+So Christ promises to this ignorant, sinful Samaritan woman that if
+she chose He would plant in her soul a gift which would thus well up,
+by its own inherent energy, and fill her spirit with music, and
+refreshment, and satisfaction.
+
+What is that gift? The answer may be put in various ways which really
+all come to one. It is Himself, the unspeakable Gift, His own greatest
+gift; or it is the Spirit 'which they that believe on Him should
+receive,' and whereby He comes and dwells in men's hearts; or it is
+the resulting life, kindred with the life bestowed, a consequence of
+the indwelling Christ and the present Spirit.
+
+And so the promise is that they who believe in Him and rest upon His
+love shall receive into their spirits a new life principle which shall
+rise in their hearts like a fountain, 'springing up into everlasting
+life.'
+
+I think we shall best get the whole depth and magnitude of this great
+promise if, throwing aside all mere artificial order, we simply take
+the words as they stand here in the text, and think, first, of
+Christ's gift as a fountain within; then as a fountain springing,
+leaping up, by its own power; and then as a fountain 'springing into
+everlasting life.'
+
+I. First, Christ's gift is represented here as a fountain within.
+
+Most men draw their supplies from without; they are rich, happy,
+strong, only when externals minister to them strength, happiness,
+riches. For the most of us, what we have is that which determines our
+felicity.
+
+Take the lowest type of life, for instance, the men of whom the
+majority, alas! I suppose, in every time is composed, who live
+altogether on the low plane of the world, and for the world alone,
+whether their worldliness take the form of sensuous appetite, or of
+desire to acquire wealth and outward possessions. The thirst of the
+body is the type of the experience of all such people. It is satisfied
+and slaked for a moment, and then back comes the tyrannous appetite
+again. And, alas! the things that you drink to satisfy the thirst of
+your souls are too often like a publican's adulterated beer, which has
+got salt in it, and chemicals, and all sorts of things to stir up,
+instead of slaking and quenching, the thirst. So 'he that loveth
+silver shall not be satisfied with silver, nor he that loveth
+abundance with increase.' The appetite grows by what it feeds on, and
+a little lust yielded to to-day is a bigger one to-morrow, and half a
+glass to-day grows to a bottle in a twelvemonth. As the old classical
+saying has it, he 'who begins by carrying a calf, before long is able
+to carry an ox'; so the thirst in the soul needs and drinks down a
+constantly increasing draught.
+
+And even if we rise up into a higher region and look at the experience
+of the men who have in some measure learned that 'a man's life
+consisteth not in the abundance of the things that he possesseth,' nor
+in the abundance of the gratification that his animal nature gets, but
+that there must be an inward spring of satisfaction, if there is to be
+any satisfaction at all; if we take men who live for thought, and
+truth, and mental culture, and yield themselves up to the enthusiasm
+for some great cause, and are proud of saying, 'My mind to me a
+kingdom is,' though they present a far higher style of life than the
+former, yet even that higher type of man has so many of his roots in
+the external world that he is at the mercy of chances and changes, and
+he, too, has deep in his heart a thirst that nothing, no truth, no
+wisdom, no culture, nothing that addresses itself to one part of his
+nature, though it be the noblest and the loftiest, can ever satisfy
+and slake.
+
+I am sure I have some such people in my audience, and to them this
+message comes. You may have, if you will, in your own hearts, a
+springing fountain of delight and of blessedness which will secure
+that no unsatisfied desires shall ever torment you. Christ in His
+fulness, His Spirit, the life that flows from both and is planted
+within our hearts, these are offered to us all; and if we have them we
+carry inclosed within ourselves all that is essential to our felicity;
+and we can say, 'I have learned in whatsoever state I am therewith to
+be self-satisfying,' not with the proud, stoical independence of a man
+who does not want either God or man to make him blessed, but with the
+humble independence of a man who can say 'my sufficiency is of God.'
+
+No independence of externals is possible, nor wholesome if it were
+possible, except that which comes from absolute dependence on Jesus
+Christ.
+
+If you have Christ in your heart then life is possible, peace is
+possible, joy is possible, under all circumstances and in all places.
+Everything which the soul can desire, it possesses. You will be like
+the garrison of a beleaguered castle, in the courtyard of which is a
+sparkling spring, fed from some source high up in the mountains, and
+finding its way in there by underground channels which no besiegers
+can ever touch. Sorrows will come, and make you sad, but though there
+may be much darkness round about you, there will be light in the
+darkness. The trees may be bare and leafless, but the sap has gone
+down to the roots. The world may be all wintry and white with snow,
+but there will be a bright little fire burning on your own
+hearthstone. You will carry within yourselves all the essentials to
+blessedness. If you have 'Christ in the vessel' you can smile at the
+storm. They that drink from earth's fountains 'shall thirst again';
+but they who have Christ in their hearts will have a fountain within
+which will not freeze in the bitterest cold, nor fail in the fiercest
+heat. 'The water that I shall give him shall be in him a fountain.'
+
+II. Christ's gift is a springing fountain.
+
+The emblem, of course, suggests motion by its own inherent impulse.
+Water may be stagnant, or it may yield to the force of gravity and
+slide down a descending river-bed, or it may be pumped up and lifted
+by external force applied to it, or it may roll as it does in the sea,
+drawn by the moon, driven by the winds, borne along by currents that
+owe their origin to outward heat or cold. But a fountain rises by an
+energy implanted within itself, and is the very emblem of joyous,
+free, self-dependent and self-regulated activity.
+
+And so, says Christ, 'The water that I shall give him shall be in him
+a springing fountain'; it shall not lie there stagnant, but leap like
+a living thing, up into the sunshine, and flash there, turned into
+diamonds, when the bright rays smile upon it.
+
+So here is the promise of two things: the promise of activity, and of
+an activity which is its own law.
+
+The promise of activity. There seems small blessing, in this
+overworked world, in a promise of more active exertion; but what an
+immense part of our nature lies dormant and torpid if we are not
+Christians! How much of the work that is done is dreary, wearisome,
+collar-work, against the grain. Do not the wheels of life often go
+slowly? Are you not often weary of the inexpressible monotony and
+fatigue? And do you not go to your work sometimes, though with a
+fierce feeling of 'need-to-do-it,' yet also with inward repugnance?
+And are there not great parts of your nature that have never woke into
+activity at all, and are ill at ease, because there is no field of
+action provided for them? The mind is like millstones; if you do not
+put the wheat into them to grind, they will grind each other's faces.
+So some of us are fretting ourselves to pieces, or are sick of a vague
+disease, and are morbid and miserable because the highest and noblest
+parts of our nature have never been brought into exercise. Surely this
+promise of Christ's should come as a true Gospel to such, offering, as
+it does, if we will trust ourselves to Him, a springing fountain of
+activity in our hearts that shall fill our whole being with joyous
+energy, and make it a delight to live and to work. It will bring to us
+new powers, new motives; it will set all the wheels of life going at
+double speed. We shall be quickened by the presence of that mighty
+power, even as a dim taper is brightened and flames up when plunged
+into a jar of oxygen. And life will be delightsome in its hardest
+toil, when it is toil for the sake of, and by the indwelling strength
+of, that great Lord and Master of our work.
+
+And there is not only a promise of activity here, but of activity
+which is its own law and impulse. That is a blessed promise in two
+ways. In the first place, law will be changed into delight. We shall
+not be driven by a commandment standing over us with whip and lash, or
+coming behind us with spur and goad, but that which we ought to do we
+shall rejoice to do; and inclination and duty will coincide in all our
+lives when our life is Christ's life in us.
+
+That should be a blessing to some of you who have been fighting
+against evil and trying to do right with more or less success, more or
+less interruptedly and at intervals, and have felt the effort to be a
+burden and a wearisomeness. Here is a promise of emancipation from all
+that constraint and yoke of bondage which duty discerned and unloved
+ever lays upon a man's shoulders. When we carry within us the gift of
+a life drawn from Jesus Christ, and are able to say like Him, 'Lo, I
+come to do Thy will, and Thy law is within my heart,' only then shall
+we have peace and joy in our lives. 'The law of the Spirit of life in
+Christ Jesus makes us free from the law of sin and death.'
+
+And then, in the second place, that same thought of an activity which
+is its own impulse and its own law, suggests another aspect of this
+blessedness, namely, that it sets us free from the tyranny of external
+circumstances which absolutely shape the lives of so many of us. The
+lives of all must be to a large extent moulded by these, but they need
+not, and should not be completely determined by them. It is a
+miserable thing to see men and women driven before the wind like
+thistledown. Circumstances must influence us, but they may either
+influence us to base compliance and passive reception of their stamp,
+or to brave resistance and sturdy nonconformity to their
+solicitations. So used, they will influence us to a firmer possession
+of the good which is most opposite to them, and we shall be the more
+unlike our surroundings, the more they abound in evil. You can make
+your choice whether, if I may so say, you shall be like balloons that
+are at the mercy of the gale and can only shape their course according
+as it comes upon them and blows them along, or like steamers that have
+an inward power that enables them to keep their course from whatever
+point the wind blows, or like some sharply built sailing-ship that,
+with a strong hand at the helm, and canvas rightly set, can sail
+almost in the teeth of the wind and compel it to bear her along in all
+but the opposite direction to that in which it would carry her if she
+lay like a log on the water.
+
+I beseech you all, and especially you young people, not to let the
+world take and shape you, like a bit of soft clay put into a
+brick-mould, but to lay a masterful hand upon it, and compel it to
+help you, by God's grace, to be nobler, and truer, and purer.
+
+It is a shame for men to live the lives that so many amongst us live,
+as completely at the mercy of externals to determine the direction of
+their lives as the long weeds in a stream that yield to the flow of
+the current. It is of no use to preach high and brave maxims, telling
+men to assert their lordship over externals, unless we can tell them
+how to find the inward power that will enable them to do so. But we
+can preach such noble exhortations to some purpose when we can point
+to the great gift which Christ is ready to give, and exhort them to
+open their hearts to receive that indwelling power which shall make
+them free from the dominion of these tyrant circumstances and
+emancipate them into the 'liberty of the sons of God.' 'The water that
+I shall give him shall be in him a leaping fountain.'
+
+III. The last point here is that Christ's gift is a fountain
+'springing up into everlasting life.'
+
+The water of a fountain rises by its own impulse, but howsoever its
+silver column may climb it always falls back into its marble basin.
+But this fountain rises higher, and at each successive jet higher,
+tending towards, and finally touching, its goal, which is at the same
+time its course. The water seeks its own level, and the fountain
+climbs until it reaches Him from whom it comes, and the eternal life
+in which He lives. We might put that thought in two ways. First, the
+gift is eternal in its duration. The water with which the world
+quenches its thirst perishes. All supplies and resources dry up like
+winter torrents in summer heat. All created good is but for a time. As
+for some, it perishes in the use; as for other, it evaporates and
+passes away, or is 'as water spilt upon the ground which cannot be
+gathered up'; as for all, we have to leave it behind when we go hence.
+But this gift springs into everlasting life, and when we go it goes
+with us. The Christian character is identical in both worlds, and
+however the forms and details of pursuits may vary, the essential
+principle remains one. So that the life of a Christian man on earth
+and his life in heaven are but one stream, as it were, which may,
+indeed, like some of those American rivers, run for a time through a
+deep, dark canyon, or in an underground passage, but comes out at the
+further end into broader, brighter plains and summer lands; where it
+flows with a quieter current and with the sunshine reflected on its
+untroubled surface, into the calm ocean. He has one gift and one life
+for earth and heaven--Christ and His Spirit, and the life that is
+consequent upon both.
+
+And then the other side of this great thought is that the gift tends
+to, is directed towards, or aims at and reaches, everlasting life. The
+whole of the Christian experience on earth is a prophecy and an
+anticipation of heaven. The whole of the Christian experience of earth
+evidently aims towards that as its goal, and is interpreted by that as
+its end. What a contrast that is to the low and transient aims which
+so many of us have! The lives of many men go creeping along the
+surface when they might spring heavenwards. My friend! which is it to
+be with you? Is your life to be like one of those Northern Asiatic
+rivers that loses itself in the sands, or that flows into, or is
+sluggishly lost in, a bog; or is it going to tumble over a great
+precipice, and fall sounding away down into the blackness; or is it
+going to leap up 'into everlasting life'? Which of the two aims is the
+wiser, is the nobler, is the better?
+
+And a life that thus springs will reach what it springs towards. A
+fountain rises and falls, for the law of gravity takes it down; this
+fountain rises and reaches, for the law of pressure takes it up, and
+the water rises to the level of its source. Christ's gift mocks no
+man, it sets in motion no hopes that it does not fulfil; it stimulates
+to no work that it does not crown with success. If you desire a life
+that reaches its goal, a life in which all your desires are satisfied,
+a life that is full of joyous energy, that of a free man emancipated
+from circumstances and from the tyranny of unwelcome law, and
+victorious over externals, open your hearts to the gift that Christ
+offers you; the gift of Himself, of His death and passion, of His
+sacrifice and atonement, of His indwelling and sanctifying Spirit.
+
+He offered all the fulness of that grace to this Samaritan woman, in
+her ignorance, in her profligacy, in her flippancy. He offers it to
+you. His offer awoke an echo in her heart, will it kindle any response
+in yours? Oh! when He says to you, 'The water that I shall give will
+be in you a fountain springing into everlasting life,' I pray you to
+answer as she did--'Sir!--Lord--give me this water, that I thirst not;
+neither come to earth's broken cisterns to draw.'
+
+
+
+
+THE SECOND MIRACLE
+
+'This is again the second miracle that Jesus did, when He was come out
+of Judaea into Galilee.'--JOHN iv. 54.
+
+The Evangelist evidently intends us to connect together the two
+miracles in Cana. His object may, possibly, be mainly chronological,
+and to mark the epochs in our Lord's ministry. But we cannot fail to
+see how remarkably these two miracles are contrasted. The one takes
+place at a wedding, a homely scene of rural festivity and gladness.
+But life has deeper things in it than gladness, and a Saviour who
+preferred the house of feasting to the house of mourning would be no
+Saviour for us. The second miracle, then, turns to the darker side of
+human experience. The happiest home has its saddened hours; the truest
+marriage joy has associated with it many a care and many an anxiety.
+Therefore, He who began by breathing blessing over wedded joy goes on
+to answer the piteous pleading of parental anxiety. It was fitting
+that the first miracle should deal with gladness, for that is God's
+purpose for His creatures, and that the second should deal with
+sicknesses and sorrows, which are additions to that purpose made
+needful by sin.
+
+Again, the first miracle was wrought without intercession, as the
+outcome of Christ's own determination that His hour for working it was
+come. The second miracle was drawn from Him by the imperfect faith and
+the agonising pleading of the father.
+
+But the great peculiarity of this second miracle in Cana is that it is
+moulded throughout so as to develop and perfect a weak faith. Notice
+how there are three words in the narrative, each of which indicates a
+stage in the history. 'Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not
+_believe_.' ... 'The man _believed_ the word that Jesus had spoken
+unto him, and he went his way.' ... 'Himself _believed_ and his whole
+house.'
+
+We have here, then, Christ manifested as the Discerner, the Rebuker,
+the Answerer, and therefore the Strengthener, of a very insufficient
+and ignorant faith. It is a lovely example of the truth of that
+ancient prophecy, 'He will not quench the smoking flax.' So these
+three stages, as it seems to me, are the three points to observe. We
+have, first of all, Christ lamenting over an imperfect faith. Then we
+have Him testing, and so strengthening, a growing faith. And then we
+have the absent Christ rewarding and crowning a tested faith. I think
+if we look at these three stages in the story we shall get the main
+points which the Evangelist intends us to observe.
+
+I. First, then, we have here our Lord lamenting over an ignorant and
+sensuous faith.
+
+At first sight His words, in response to the hurried, eager appeal of
+the father, seem to be strangely unfeeling, far away from the matter
+in hand. Think of how breathlessly, feeling that not an instant is to
+be lost, the poor man casts himself at the Master's feet, and pleads
+that his boy is 'at the point of death.' And just think how, like a
+dash of cold water upon this hot impatience, must have come these
+strange words that seem to overleap his case altogether, and to be
+gazing beyond him--'Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not
+believe.' 'What has that to do with me and my dying boy, and my
+impatient agony of petition?' 'It has everything to do with you.'
+
+It is the revelation, first of all, of Christ's singular calmness and
+majestic leisure, which befitted Him who needed not to hurry, because
+He was conscious of absolute power. As when the pleading message was
+sent to Him: 'He whom Thou lovest is sick, He abode still two days in
+the same place where He was'; because He loved Lazarus and Martha and
+Mary; and just as when Jairus is hurrying Him to the bed where his
+child lies dead, He pauses on the way to attend to the petition of
+another sufferer; so, in like calmness of majestic leisure, He here
+puts aside the apparently pressing and urgent necessity in order to
+deal with a far deeper, more pressing one.
+
+For in the words there is not only a revelation of our Lord's majestic
+leisure, but there is also an indication of what He thought of most
+importance in His dealing with men. It was worthy of His care to heal
+the boy; it was far more needful that He should train and lead the
+father to faith. The one can wait much better than the other.
+
+And there is in the words, too, something like a sigh of profound
+sorrow. Christ is not so much rebuking as lamenting. It is His own
+pained heart that speaks; He sees in the man before Him more than the
+man's words indicated; reading his heart with that divine omniscience
+which pierces beyond the surface, and beholding in him the very same
+evil which affected all his countrymen. So He speaks to him as one of
+a class, and thus somewhat softens the rebuke even while the answer to
+the nobleman's petition seems thereby to become still less direct, and
+His own sorrowful gaze at the wide-reaching spirit of blindness seems
+thereby to become more absorbed and less conscious of the individual
+sufferer kneeling at His feet.
+
+Christ had just come from Samaria, the scorn of the Jews, and there He
+had found people who needed no miracles, whose conception of the
+Messiah was not that of a mere wonder-worker, but of one who will
+'tell us all things,' and who believed on Him not because of the
+portents which He wrought, but because they heard Him themselves, and
+His words touched their consciences and stirred strange longings in
+their hearts. On the other hand, this Evangelist has carefully pointed
+out in the preceding chapters how such recognition as Christ had thus
+far received 'in His own country' had been entirely owing to His
+miracles, and had been therefore regarded by Christ Himself as quite
+unreliable (chap. ii. 23-25), while even Nicodemus, the Pharisee, had
+seen no better reason for regarding Him as a divinely sent Teacher
+than 'these miracles that Thou doest.' And now here He is no sooner
+across the border again than the same spirit meets Him. He hears it
+even in the pleading, tearful tones of the father's voice, and that so
+clearly that it is for a moment more prominent even to His pity than
+the agony and the prayer. And over that Christ sorrows. Why? Because,
+to their own impoverishing, the nobleman and his fellows were blind to
+all the beauty of His character. The graciousness of His nature was
+nothing to them. They had no eyes for His tenderness and no ears for
+His wisdom; but if some vulgar sign had been wrought before them, then
+they would have run after Him with their worthless faith. And that
+struck a painful chord in Christ's heart when He thought of how all
+the lavishing of His love, all the grace and truth which shone radiant
+and lambent in His life, fell upon blind eyes, incapable of beholding
+His beauty; and of how the manifest revelation of a Godlike character
+had no power to do what could be done by a mere outward wonder.
+
+This is not to disparage the 'miraculous evidence.' It is only to put
+in its proper place the spirit, which was blind to the self-attesting
+glory of His character, which beheld it and did not recognise it as
+'the glory of the Only Begotten of the Father.'
+
+That very same blindness to the divine which is in Jesus Christ,
+because material things alone occupy the heart and appeal to the mind,
+is still the disease of humanity. It still drives a knife into the
+loving heart of the pitying and helpful Christ. The special form which
+it takes in such a story as this before us is long since gone. The
+sense-bound people of this generation do not ask for signs. Miracles
+are rather a hindrance than a help to the reception of Christianity in
+many quarters. People are more willing to admire, after a fashion, the
+beauty of Christ's character, and the exalted purity of His teaching
+(meaning thereby, generally, the parts of it which are not exclusively
+His), than to accept His miracles. So far round has the turn in the
+wheel gone in these days.
+
+But although the form is entirely different the spirit still remains.
+Are there not plenty of us to whom sense is the only certitude? We
+think that the only knowledge is the knowledge that comes to us from
+that which we can see and touch and handle, and the inferences that we
+may draw from these; and to many all that world of thought and beauty,
+all those divine manifestations of tenderness and grace, are but mist
+and cloudland. Intellectually, though in a somewhat modified sense,
+this generation has to take the rebuke: 'Except ye see, ye will not
+believe.'
+
+And practically do not the great mass of men regard the material world
+as all-important, and work done or progress achieved there as alone
+deserving the name of 'work' or 'progress,' while all the glories of a
+loving Christ are dim and unreal to their sense-bound eyes? Is it not
+true to-day, as it was in the old time, that if a man would come among
+you, and bring you material good, that would be the prophet for you?
+True wisdom, beauty, elevating thoughts, divine revelations; all these
+go over your heads. But when a man comes and multiplies loaves, then
+you say, 'This is of a truth the prophet that should come into the
+world.' 'Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe.'
+
+And on the other side, is it not sadly true about those of us who have
+the purest and the loftiest faith, that we feel often as if it was
+very hard, almost impossible, to keep firm our grasp of One who never
+is manifested to our sense? Do we not often feel, 'O that I could for
+once, for once only, hear a voice that would speak to my outward ear,
+or see some movement of a divine hand'? The loftiest faith still leans
+towards, and has an hankering after, some external and visible
+manifestation, and we need to subject ourselves to the illuminating
+rebuke of the Master who says, 'Except ye see signs and wonders, ye
+will not believe,' and, therefore, your faith that craves the support
+of some outward thing, and often painfully feels that it is feeble
+without it, is as yet but very imperfect and rudimentary.
+
+II. And so we have here, as the next stage of the narrative, our Lord
+testing, and thus strengthening, a growing faith.
+
+The nobleman's answer to our Lord's strange words sounds, at first
+sight, as if these had passed over him, producing no effect at all.
+'Sir, come down ere my child die'; it is almost as if he had said, 'Do
+not talk to me about these things at present. Come and heal my boy.
+That is what I want; and we will speak of other matters some other
+time.' But it is not exactly that. Clearly enough, at all events, he
+did not read in Christ's words a reluctance to yield to his request,
+still less a refusal of it. Clearly he did not misunderstand the sad
+rebuke which they conveyed, else he would not have ventured to
+reiterate his petition. He does not pretend to anything more than he
+has, he does not seek to disclaim the condemnation that Christ brings
+against him, nor to assume that he has a loftier degree or a purer
+kind of faith than he possesses. He holds fast by so much of Christ's
+character as he can apprehend; and that is the beginning of all
+progress. What he knows he knows. He has sore need; that is something.
+He has come to the Helper; that is more. He is only groping after Him,
+but he will not say a word beyond what he knows and feels; and,
+therefore, there is something in him to work upon; and faith is
+already beginning to bud and blossom. And so his prayer is his best
+answer to Christ's word: 'Sir, come down ere my child die.'
+
+Ah! dear brethren, any true man who has ever truly gone to Christ with
+a sense even of some outward and temporal need, and has ever really
+prayed at all, has often to pass through this experience, that the
+first result of his agonising cry shall be only the revelation to him
+of the unworthiness and imperfection of his own faith, and that there
+shall seem to be strange delay in the coming of the blessing so longed
+for. And the true attitude for a man to take when there is unveiled
+before him, in his consciousness, in answer to his cry for help, the
+startling revelation of his own unworthiness and imperfection--the
+true answer to such dealing is simply to reiterate the cry. And then
+the Master bends to the petition, and because He sees that the second
+prayer has in it less of sensuousness than the first, and that some
+little germ of a higher faith is beginning to open, He yields, and yet
+He does not yield. 'Sir, come down ere my child die.' Jesus saith unto
+him, 'Go thy way, thy son liveth.'
+
+Why did He not go with the suppliant? Why, in the act of granting,
+does He refuse? For the suppliant's sake. The whole force and beauty
+of the story come out yet more vividly if we take the contrast between
+it and the other narrative, which presents some points of similarity
+with it--that of the healing of the centurion's servant at Capernaum.
+There the centurion prays that Christ would but speak, and Christ
+says, 'I will come.' There the centurion does not feel that His
+presence is necessary, but that His word is enough. Here the nobleman
+says 'Come,' because it has never entered his mind that Christ can do
+anything unless He stands like a doctor by the boy's bed. And he says,
+too, 'Come, _ere my child die_,' because it has never entered his mind
+that Christ can do anything if his boy has once passed the dark
+threshold.
+
+And because his faith is thus feeble, Christ refuses its request,
+because He knows that so to refuse is to strengthen. Asked but to
+'speak' by a strong faith, He rewards it by more than it prays, and
+offers to 'come.' Asked to 'come' by a weak faith, He rewards it by
+less, which yet is more, than it had requested; and refuses to come,
+that He may heal at a distance; and thus manifests still more
+wondrously His power and His grace.
+
+His gentle and wise treatment is telling; and he who was so
+sense-bound that 'unless he saw signs and wonders he would not
+believe,' turns and goes away, bearing the blessing, as he trusts, in
+his hands, while yet there is no sign whatever that he has received
+it.
+
+Think of what a change had passed upon that man in the few moments of
+his contact with Christ. When he ran to His feet, all hot and
+breathless and impatient, with his eager plea, he sought only for the
+deliverance of his boy, and sought it at the moment, and cared for
+nothing else. When he goes away from Him, a little while afterwards,
+he has risen to this height, that he believes the bare word, and turns
+his back upon the Healer, and sets his face to Capernaum in the
+confidence that he possesses the unseen gift. So has his faith grown.
+
+And that is what you and I have to do. We have Christ's bare word, and
+no more, to trust to for everything. We must be content to go out of
+the presence-chamber of the King with only His promise, and to cleave
+to that. A feeble faith requires the support of something sensuous and
+visible, as some poor trailing plant needs a prop round which it may
+twist its tendrils. A stronger faith strides away from the Master,
+happy and peaceful in its assured possession of a blessing for which
+it has nothing to rely upon but a simple bare word. That is the faith
+that we have to exercise. Christ has spoken. That was enough for this
+man, who from the babyhood of Christian experience sprang at once to
+its maturity. Is it enough for you? Are you content to say, 'Thy word,
+Thy naked word, is all that I need, for Thou hast spoken, and Thou
+wilt do it'?
+
+'Go thy way; thy son liveth.' What a test! Suppose the father had not
+gone his way, would his son have lived? No! The son's life and the
+father's reception from Christ of what he asked were suspended upon
+that one moment. Will he trust Him, or will he not? Will he linger, or
+will he depart? He departs, and in the act of trusting he gets the
+blessing, and his boy is saved.
+
+And look how the narrative hints to us of the perfect confidence of
+the father now. Cana was only a few miles from Capernaum. The road
+from the little city upon the hill down to where the waters of the
+lake flashed in the sunshine by the quays of Capernaum was only a
+matter of a few hours; but it was the next day, and well on into the
+next day, before he met the servants that came to him with the news of
+his boy's recovery. So sure was he that his petition was answered that
+he did not hurry to return home, but leisurely and quietly went
+onwards the next day to his child. Think of the difference between the
+breathless rush up to Cana, and the quiet return from it. 'He that
+believeth shall not make haste.'
+
+III. And so, lastly, we have here the absent Christ crowning and
+rewarding the faith which has been tested.
+
+We have the picture of the father's return. The servants meet him.
+Their message, which they deliver before he has time to speak, is
+singularly a verbal repetition of the promise of the Master, 'Thy son
+liveth.' His faith, though it be strong, has not yet reached to the
+whole height of the blessing, for he inquires 'at what hour he began
+to _amend_,' expecting some slow and gradual recovery; and he is told
+'that at the seventh hour,' the hour when the Master spoke, 'the fever
+left him,' and all at once and completely was he cured. So, more than
+his faith had expected is given to him; and Christ, when he lays His
+hand upon a man, does His work thoroughly, though not always at once.
+
+Why was the miracle wrought in that strange fashion? Why did our Lord
+fling out His power as from a distance rather than go and stand at the
+boy's bedside? We have already seen the reason in the peculiar
+condition of the father's mind; but now notice what it was that he had
+learned by such a method of healing, not only the fact of Christ's
+healing power, but also the fact that the bare utterance of His will,
+whether He were present or absent, had power. And so a loftier
+conception of Christ would begin to dawn on him.
+
+And for us that working of Christ at a distance is prophetic. It
+represents to us His action to-day. Still He answers our cries that He
+would come down to our help by sending forth from the city on the
+hills, the city of the wedding feast, His healing power to descend
+upon the sick-beds and the sorrows and the sins that afflict the
+villages beneath. 'He sendeth forth His commandment upon earth, His
+word runneth very swiftly.'
+
+This new experience enlarged and confirmed the man's faith. The second
+stage to which he had been led by Christ's treatment was simply belief
+in our Lord's specific promise, an immense advance on his first
+position of belief which needed sight as its basis.
+
+But he had not yet come to the full belief of, and reliance upon, that
+Healer recognised as Messiah. But the experience which he now has had,
+though it be an experience based upon miracle, is the parent of a
+faith which is not merely the child of wonder, nor the result of
+beholding an outward sign. And so we read:--'So the father knew that
+it was at the same hour in the which Jesus said unto him, Thy son
+liveth. And himself believed and his whole house.'
+
+A partial faith brings experience which confirms and enlarges faith;
+and they who dimly apprehend Him, and yet humbly love Him, and
+imperfectly trust Him, will receive into their bosoms such large gifts
+of His love and gracious Spirit that their faith will be strengthened,
+and they will grow into the full stature of peaceful confidence.
+
+The way to increase faith is to exercise faith. And the true parent of
+perfect faith is the experience of the blessings that come from the
+crudest, rudest, narrowest, blindest, feeblest faith that a man can
+exercise. Trust Him as you can, do not be afraid of inadequate
+conceptions, or of a feeble grasp. Trust Him as you can, and He will
+give you so much more than you expected that you will trust Him more,
+and be able to say: 'Now I believe, because I have heard Him myself,
+and know that this is the Christ, the Saviour of the world.'
+
+
+
+
+THE THIRD MIRACLE IN JOHN'S GOSPEL
+
+
+'Jesus saith unto him, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk.'--JOHN v.8
+
+This third of the miracles recorded in John's Gospel finds a place
+there, as it would appear, for two reasons: first, because it marks
+the beginning of the angry unbelief on the part of the Jewish rulers,
+the development of which it is one part of the purpose of this Gospel
+to trace; second, because it is the occasion for that great utterance
+of our Lord about His Sonship and His divine working as the Father
+also works, which occupies the whole of the rest of the chapter, and
+is the foundation of much which follows in the Gospel. It is for these
+reasons, and not for the mere sake of adding another story of a
+miraculous cure to the many which the other Evangelists have given us,
+that John narrates for us this history.
+
+If, then, we consider the reason for the introduction of the miracle
+into the Gospel, we may be saved from the necessity of dwelling,
+except very lightly, upon some of the preliminary details which
+preceded the actual cure. It does not matter much to us for our
+present purpose which Feast it was on which Jesus went up to
+Jerusalem, nor whether the pool was by the sheep-market or by the
+sheep-gate, nor whereabouts in Jerusalem Bethesda might happen to be.
+It may be of importance for us to notice that the mention of the angel
+who appears in the fourth verse is not a part of the original
+narrative. The true text only tells us of an intermittent pool which
+possessed, or was supposed to possess, curative energy; and round
+which the kindness of some forgotten benefactor had built five rude
+porches. There lay a crowd of wasted forms, and pale, sorrowful faces,
+with all varieties of pain and emaciation and impotence marked upon
+them, who yet were gathered in Bethesda, which being interpreted means
+'a house of mercy.' It is the type of a world full of men suffering
+various sicknesses, but all sick; the type of a world that gathers
+with an eagerness, not far removed from despair, round anything that
+seems to promise, however vaguely, to help and to heal; the type of a
+world, blessed be God, which, amidst all its sad variety of woe and
+weariness, yet sits in the porches of 'a house of mercy,' and has in
+the midst a 'fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness,' whose
+energy is as mighty for the last comer of all the generations as for
+the first that stepped into its cleansing flood.
+
+This poor man, sick and impotent for eight and thirty years--many of
+which he had spent, as it would appear, day by day, wearily dragging
+his paralysed limbs to the fountain with daily diminishing hope--this
+poor man attracts the regard of Christ when He enters, and He puts to
+him the strange question, 'Wilt thou be made whole?' Surely there was
+no need to ask that; but no doubt the many disappointments and the
+long years of waiting and of suffering had stamped apathy upon the
+sufferer's face, and Christ saw that the first thing that was needed,
+in order that His healing power might have a point of contact in the
+man's nature, was to kindle some little flicker of hope in him once
+more.
+
+And so, no doubt, with a smile on His face, which converted the
+question into an offer, He says: 'Wilt thou be made whole?' meaning
+thereby to say, 'I will heal thee if thou wilt.' And there comes the
+weary answer, as if the man had said: 'Will I be made whole? What have
+I been lying here all these years for? I have nobody to put me into
+the pool.'
+
+Yes, it is a hopeful prospect to hold out to a man whose disease is
+inability to walk, that if he will walk to the water he will get
+cured, and be able to walk afterwards. Why, he could not even roll
+himself into the pond, and so there he had lain, a type of the
+hopeless efforts at self-healing which we sick men put forth, a type
+of the tantalising gospels which the world preaches to its subjects
+when it says to a paralysed man: 'Walk that you may be healed; keep
+the commandments that you may enter into life.'
+
+And so we have come at last to the main point of the narrative before
+us, and I fix upon these words, the actual words in which the cure was
+conveyed, as communicating to us some very important lessons and
+thoughts about Christ and our relation to Him.
+
+I. First, I see in them Christ manifesting Himself as the Giver of
+power to the powerless who trust Him.
+
+His words may seem at first hearing to partake of the very same almost
+cruel irony as the condition of cure which had already proved
+hopelessly impracticable. He, too, says, 'Walk that you may be cured';
+and He says it to a paralysed and impotent man. But the two things are
+very different, for before this cripple could attempt to drag his
+impotent limbs into an upright position, and take up the little light
+couch and sling it over his shoulders, he must have had some kind of
+trust in the person that told him to do so. A very ignorant trust, no
+doubt, it was; but all that was set before him about Jesus Christ he
+grasped and rested upon. He only knew Him as a Healer, and he trusted
+Him as such. The contents of a man's faith have nothing to do with the
+reality of his faith; and he that, having only had the healing power
+of Christ revealed to him, lays hold of that Healer, cleaves to Him
+with as genuine a faith as the man who has the whole fulness and
+sublimity of Christ's divine and human character and redeeming work
+laid out before him, and who cleaves to these. The hand that grasps is
+one, whatsoever be the thing that it grasps.
+
+So it is no spiritualising of this story, or reading into it a deeper
+and more religious meaning than belongs to it, to say that what passed
+in that man's heart and mind before he caught up his little bed and
+walked away with it, was essentially the same action of mind and heart
+by which a sinful man, who knows that Christ is his Redeemer, grasps
+His Cross and trusts his soul to Him. In the one case, as in the
+other, there is confidence in the person; only in the one case the
+person was only known as a Healer, and in the other the person is
+known as a Saviour. But the faith is the same whatever it apprehends.
+
+Christ comes and says to him, 'Rise, take up thy bed and walk.' There
+is a movement of confidence in the man's heart; he tries to obey, and
+in the act of obedience the power comes to him.
+
+Ah, brother! it is always so. All Christ's commandments are gifts.
+When He says to you, 'Do this!' He pledges Himself to give you power
+to do it. Whatsoever He enjoins He strengthens for. He binds Himself,
+by His commandments, and every word of His lips which says to us 'Thou
+shalt!' contains as its kernel a word of His which says 'I will.' So
+when He commands, He bestows; and we get the power to keep His
+commandments when in humble faith we make the effort to do His will.
+It is only when we try to obey for the love's sake of Him that has
+healed us that we are able to obey. And be sure of this, whensoever we
+attempt to do what we know to be the Master's will, because He has
+given Himself for us, our power will be equal to our desire, and
+enough for our duty. As St. Augustine says: 'Give what Thou
+commandest, and command what Thou wilt.'
+
+'Rise, take up thy bed and walk,' or as in another case, 'Stretch
+forth thy hand.' 'And he stretched it forth, and his hand was restored
+whole as the other.' Christ gives power to keep His commandments to
+the impotent who try to obey, because they have been healed by Him.
+
+II. In the next place, we have in this miracle our Lord set forth as
+the absolute Master, because He is the Healer.
+
+The Pharisees and their friends had no eyes for the miracle; but if
+they found a man carrying his light couch on the Sabbath day, that was
+a thing that excited their interest, and must be seen to immediately.
+
+And so, paying no attention to the fact that it was a paralysed man
+who was doing this, with the true narrow instinct of the formalist,
+they lay hold only of the fact of the broken Rabbinical restrictions,
+and try to stop him with these. 'It is the Sabbath day! It is not
+lawful for thee to carry thy bed.'
+
+And they get an answer which goes a great deal deeper than the speaker
+knew, and puts the whole subject of Christian obedience on its right
+footing. 'He answered them, He that made me whole, the same said unto
+me, Take up thy bed and walk.' As if he had said: 'He gave me the
+power, had He not a right to tell me what to do with it? It was His
+gift that I could lift my bed; was I not bound to walk when and where
+He that had made me able to walk at all chose to bid me?'
+
+And if you generalise that it just comes to this: the only person that
+has a right to command you is the Christ who saves you. He has the
+absolute authority to do as He will with your restored spiritual
+powers, because He has bestowed them all upon you. His dominion is
+built upon His benefits. He is the King because He is the Saviour. He
+rules because He has redeemed. He begins with giving, and it is only
+afterwards that He commands; and He turns to each of us with that
+smile upon His lips, and with tenderness in His voice which will bind
+any man, who is not an ingrate, to Him for ever. 'If ye love Me, keep
+My commandments.'
+
+There is always something hard and distasteful to the individual will
+in the tone of authority assumed by any man whatsoever. We always more
+or less rebel and shrink from that; and there is only one thing that
+makes commandment sweet, and that is when it drops like honey from the
+honeycomb, from lips that we love. So does it in the case of Christ's
+commands to us. It is joy to know and to do the will of One to whom
+the whole heart turns with gratitude and affection. And Christ blesses
+and privileges us by the communication to us of His pleasure
+concerning us, that we may have the gladness of yielding to His
+desires, and so meeting the love which commands with the happy love
+which obeys. 'He that made me whole, the same said unto me...' and
+what He says it must be joy to do.
+
+So, 'My yoke is easy and My burden is light,' not because Christ
+diminishes the requirements of law; not because the standard of
+Christian obedience is lowered beneath any other standard of conduct
+and character. It is far higher. The things which make Christian duty
+are often very painful in themselves. There is always self-sacrifice
+in Christian virtue, and self-sacrifice has always a sting in it; but
+the 'yoke is easy and the burden is light,' because, if I may so say,
+the yoke is padded with the softest velvet of love, and lies upon our
+necks lightly because He has laid it there. All the rigid harshness of
+precept is done away when the precept comes from Christ's lips, and
+His commandment 'makes the crooked things straight and the rough
+places plain'; and turns duty, distasteful duty, into joyful service.
+The blessed basis of Christian obedience, and of Christ's authority,
+is Christ's redemption.
+
+III. And then, still further, we have here our Lord setting Himself
+forth as the divine Son, whose working needs and knows no rest.
+
+We find, in the subsequent part of the chapter, that 'the Jews,' as
+they are called, by which is meant the antagonistic portion of the
+nation, sought to slay Christ 'because He had done these things on the
+Sabbath day.' But Jesus answered them, 'My Father worketh hitherto,
+and I work.' Unquestionably the form which the healing took was
+intended by our Lord to bring into prominence the very point which
+these pedantic casuists laid hold of. He meant to draw attention to
+His sweeping aside of the Rabbinical casuistries of the law of the
+Sabbath. And He meant to do it in order that He might have the
+occasion of making this mighty claim, which is lodged in these solemn
+and profound words, to possess a Sonship, which, like the divine
+working, wrought, needing and knowing no repose.
+
+'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.' The rest, which the old
+story in Genesis attributed to the Creator after the Creation, was not
+to be construed as if it meant the rest of inactivity; but it was the
+rest of continuous action. God's rest and God's work are one.
+Throughout all the ages preservation is a continuous creation. The
+divine energy is streaming out for evermore, as the bush that burns
+unconsumed, as the sun that flames undiminished for ever, pouring out
+from the depth of that divine nature, and for ever sustaining a
+universe. So that there is no Sabbath, in the sense of a cessation
+from action, proper to the divine nature; because all His action is
+repose, and 'e'en in His very motion there is rest.' And this divine
+coincidence of activity and of repose belongs to the divine Son in His
+divine-human nature. With that arrogance which is the very audacity of
+blasphemy, if it be not the simplicity of a divine consciousness, He
+puts His own work side by side with the Father's work, as the same in
+principle, the same in method, the same in purpose, the same in its
+majestic coincidence of repose and of energy.
+
+'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. Therefore for Me, as for Him,
+there is no need of a Sabbath of repose.' Human activity is dissipated
+by toil, human energy is exhausted by expenditure. Man works and is
+weary; man works and is distracted. For the recovery of the serenity
+of his spirit, and for the renewal of his physical strength, repose of
+body and gathering in of mind, such as the Sabbath brought, were
+needed; but neither is needed for Him who toils unwearied in the
+heavens; and neither is needed for the divine nature of Him who
+labours in labours parallel with the Father's here upon the earth.
+
+Now remember that this is no abolition of the Sabbatic rest for
+Christ's followers. Rather the ground on which He here asserts His
+superiority over, and His non-dependence upon, such a repose shows, or
+at all events implies, that all mere human workers need such rest, and
+should thankfully accept it. But it is a claim on His part to a divine
+equality. It is a claim on His part to do works which are other than
+human works. It is a claim on His part to be the Lord of a divine
+institution, living above the need of it, and able to mould it at His
+will.
+
+And so it opens up depths, into which we cannot go now, of the
+relations of that divine Father and that divine Son; and makes us feel
+that the little incident in which He turned to a paralysed man and
+said: 'Rise, take up thy bed and walk,' on the Sabbath day, like some
+small floating leaf of sea-weed upon the surface, has great deep
+tendrils that go down and down into the very abyss of things, and lays
+hold upon that central truth of Christianity, the divinity of the Son
+of God, who is One with the ever-working Father.
+
+IV. Lastly, we have in this incident yet another lesson. We have the
+Healer who is also the Judge, warning the healed of the possibilities
+of a relapse.
+
+'Jesus findeth him in the Temple, and said unto him, Behold, thou art
+made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.' The man's
+eight-and-thirty years of illness had apparently been brought on by
+dissipation. It was a sin of flesh, avenged in the flesh, that had
+given him that miserable life. One would have thought he had got
+warning enough, but we all know the old proverb about what happened
+when the devil was ill, and what befell his resolutions when he got
+better. And so Christ comes to him again with this solemn warning:
+'There is a worse thing than eight-and-thirty years of paralysis. You
+fell once, and sore was your punishment. If you fall twice, your
+punishment will be sorer.' Why? Because the first one had done him no
+good. So here are lessons for us. There is always danger that we shall
+fall back into old sins, even if we think we have overcome them. The
+mystic influence of habit, enfeebled will, the familiar temptation,
+the imagination rebelling, the memory tempting, sometimes even, as in
+the case of a man that has been a drunkard, the physical effect of the
+odour of his temptation upon his nostrils--all these things make it
+extremely unlikely that a man who has once been under the condemnation
+of any evil shall never be tempted to fall under its sway again.
+
+And such a fall is not only more criminal than the former, it is more
+deadly than the former. 'It were better for them not to have known the
+way of righteousness, than after they have known it to turn aside.'
+'The last state of that man is worse than the first.'
+
+My brother, there is no blacker condemnation; and if I may use a
+strong word, there is no hotter hell, than that which belongs to an
+apostate Christian. 'It has happened unto them according to the true
+proverb. The dog is turned to his vomit again.' Very unpolite, a very
+coarse metaphor? Yes; to express a far worse reality.
+
+Christian men and women! you have been made whole. 'Sin no more, lest
+a worse thing come unto you.' And turn to that Lord and say, 'Hold
+Thou me up and I shall be saved.' Then the enemies will not be able to
+recapture you, and the chains which have dropped from your wrists will
+never enclose them any more.
+
+
+
+
+THE LIFE-GIVER AND JUDGE
+
+'But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. 18.
+Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill Him, because He not only
+had broken the Sabbath, but said also that God was His Father, making
+Himself equal with God. 19. Then answered Jesus and said unto them,
+Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of Himself, but
+what He seeth the Father do: for what things soever He doeth, these
+also doeth the Son likewise. 20. For the Father loveth the Son, and
+sheweth Him all things that Himself doeth: and He will shew Him
+greater works than these, that ye may marvel. 21. For as the Father
+raiseth up the dead, and quickeneth them; even so the Son quickeneth
+whom He will. 22. For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed
+all judgment unto the Son: 23. That all men should honour the Son,
+even as they honour the Father. He that honoureth not the Son,
+honoureth not the Father which hath sent Him. 24. Verily, verily, I
+say unto you, He that heareth My word, and believeth on Him that sent
+Me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but
+is passed from death unto life. 25. Verily, verily, I say unto you,
+The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of
+the Son of God: and they that hear shall live. 26. For as the Father
+hath life in Himself; so hath He given to the Son to have life in
+Himself; 27. And hath given Him authority to execute judgment also,
+because He is the Son of Man.'--JOHN v. 17-27.
+
+'The Jews' were up in arms because Jesus had delivered a man from
+thirty-eight years of misery. They had no human sympathies for the
+sufferer, whom hope deferred had made sick and hopeless, but they
+shuddered at the breach of the Sabbath. 'Sacrifice' was more important
+in their view than 'mercy.' They did not acknowledge that the miracle
+proved Christ's Messiahship, but they were quite sure that doing it on
+the Sabbath proved His wickedness. How formalism twists men's
+judgments of the relative magnitude of form and spirit!
+
+Jesus' vindication of His action roused them still farther, for He put
+it on a ground which seemed to them nothing short of blasphemy: 'My
+Father worketh even until now, and I work.' They fastened on one point
+in that great saying, namely, that it claimed Sonship in a special
+sense, and vindicated His right to disregard the Sabbath law on that
+ground. God's rest is not inaction. 'Preservation is a continual
+creation.' All being subsists because God is ever working. The Son
+co-operates with the Father, and for Him, as for the Father, the
+Sabbath law does not apply. The charge of breaking the Sabbath fades
+into insignificance before the sin, in the objectors' eyes, of making
+such claims. Therefore our Lord proceeds to expand and justify them.
+
+He makes, first, a general statement in verses 19 and 20, in which He
+sets forth the relation involved in the very idea of Fatherhood and
+Sonship. He, as perfect Son of God, is perfectly one with the Father
+in will and act, and so knit to Him in sympathy that a self-originated
+action is impossible, not by reason of defect of power, but by reason
+of unity of being. That perfect unity is expressed negatively ('can do
+nothing') and then positively ('doeth likewise'). But it is not
+manifest in actions alone, but has its deep roots in the perfect love
+which flows ever from each to each, and in the Father's perfect
+communication to the Son, and the Son's perfect reception from the
+Father. Jesus claimed to stand in such a relation to the Father that
+He was able to do whatsoever the Father did, and 'in like manner' as
+the Father did it; that He was the unique object of the Father's love,
+and capable of receiving complete communications as to 'all things
+that Himself doeth'; that He lived in such complete unity with the
+Father that His every act was the result of it, and that no trace of
+self-will had ever tinged His perfect spirit. What man has ever made
+such claims and not been treated as insane? He makes them, and
+likewise says that He is 'lowly of heart'; and the world listens, if
+not believing, at any rate reverent, as in the presence of the best
+man that ever lived. Strange goodness, to claim such divine
+prerogatives, unless the claim is valid!
+
+It is expanded in verses 21-23 into two great classes of works, which
+Jesus says that He does. Both are distinctively divine works. To give
+life and to judge the world are equally beyond human power; they are
+equally His actions. These are the 'greater works' which He foretells
+in verse 20, and they are greater than the miracle of healing which
+had originated the whole conversation. To give life at first, and to
+give it again to the dead, and not only to revivify, but to raise
+them, are plainly competent to no power short of the divine; and here
+Jesus calmly claims them.
+
+That tremendous claim is here made in the widest sense, including both
+the corporeally and the spiritually dead, who are afterwards treated
+of separately. The Son is the fountain of life in all the aspects of
+that wide-reaching word; and He 'quickeneth whom He will,' as He had
+spontaneously healed the impotent man. Does that assertion contradict
+the other, just before it, that He does nothing of Himself? No; for
+His will, while His, is ever harmonious with the Father's, just as His
+love, which is ever coincident with the Father's. Does that assertion
+imply His arbitrary pleasure, or make man's will a cipher? No; for His
+will is guided by righteous love, and wills to quicken those who
+comply with His conditions. But the assertion does declare that His
+will to quicken is omnipotent, and that His voice can pierce 'the
+dull, cold ear of death,' and bring back the soul to the empty house
+of this tabernacle, or rouse the spirit 'dead in trespasses.'
+
+The other divine prerogative of judging is inseparable from that of
+revivifying, and in regard to it Christ's claim is still higher, for
+He says that it is wholly vested in Him as Son. The idea of judgment
+here, like that of quickening, with which it is associated, is to be
+taken in its more general sense ('_all_ judgment'), and therefore as
+including both the present judgment, for which Jesus said that He was
+come into the world, and which men pass on themselves by the very fact
+of their attitude to Him and His Gospel, and also the future final
+judgment, which manifests character and determines destiny. Both these
+has the Father given into the hands of the Son.
+
+The purpose, so far as men are concerned, of the Son's investiture,
+with these solemn prerogatives, is that He may receive universal
+divine honour. A narrower purpose was stated in verse 20, where the
+persons seeing His works are only His then audience, and the effect
+sought to be produced is merely 'marvel.' But wonder is meant to lead
+on to recognition of the meaning of His power, and of the mystery of
+His person, and that, again, to rendering to Him precisely the same
+honour as is due to the Father. No more unmistakable demand for
+worship, no more emphatic assertion of divinity, can be made than lie
+in these words. To worship Christ does not intercept the honour due to
+God; to worship the Son is to worship the Father; and no man honours
+the Father who sent Him who does not honour the Son whom He has sent.
+
+In verses 24-27 the two related prerogatives are presented in their
+spiritual aspect, while in the later verses of the chapter the
+resurrection and quickening of the literally dead are dealt with. Mark
+the significant new term introduced in verse 24, 'He that believeth.'
+That spiritual resurrection from the death of sin and self is wrought
+on 'whom He will,' but He wills that it shall be wrought on them who
+believe. Similarly, in verse 25, it is 'they that hear' who 'shall
+live.' It must be so, for there is no other way by which life from
+Him, who is the Life, can pass into and quicken us than by our opening
+our hearts by faith for its inflow. The mysteries of the Son's
+divinity and of His imparted life are deep, but the condition of
+receiving that life is plain. If we will trust Jesus, we shall live;
+if not, we are dead. Trusting Him is trusting the Father that sent
+Him, and that Father becomes accessible to our trust when we 'hear'
+Christ's 'word.'
+
+The effects of faith are immediate, and the poor present may be
+enriched and clothed in celestial light for each of us, if we will.
+For Jesus does not point first to the mysteries of the resurrection of
+the dead, and the tremendous solemnities of the final judgment, but to
+what we may each enter upon at any moment. The believing man '_hath_
+eternal life,' and 'cometh not into judgment.' That life is not
+reserved to be entered on in the blessed future, but is a present
+possession. True, it will blossom into unexampled nobleness when it is
+transported into its native country, like some exotic in our colder
+climates if it were carried back to the tropics. But it is a present
+possession, and heaven is not different in kind from the Christian
+life on earth, but differs mainly in degree and in circumstances. And
+he that has the life here and now is, by its moulding of his outward
+life, preserved from the sins which would bring him into judgment, and
+the merciful judgment to which he is still subject is that for which
+his truest self longs. And that blessed condition carries in it the
+pledge that, at the last great day, which is to others a 'day of
+wrath, a dreadful day,' he whom Christ has quickened by His own
+indwelling life shall have 'boldness before Him.'
+
+Obviously, in these verses the present effects of faith are in view,
+since Jesus emphatically declares that the 'hour now is' when they can
+be realised. Once more He states in the strongest terms, and as the
+reason for the assurance that faith secures to us life, His possession
+of the two divine prerogatives of quickening and judging. What a
+paradox it is to say that it is '_given_' to Him to have 'life in
+_Himself_'! And when was that gift given? In the depths of eternity.
+
+He 'sits on no precarious throne, nor borrows leave to be,' and hence
+He can impart life and lose none. Inseparably connected with that
+given, and yet self-inherent, life, is the capacity for executing
+judgment which belongs to Him as 'a Son of man.' It has been as 'the
+Son' of the Father that it has been considered, in the previous
+verses, as belonging to Him; but now it is as a true man that He is
+fitted to bear, and actually is clothed with, that judicial power. No
+doubt He is Judge of all, because by His incarnation and earthly life
+He presents to all the offer of eternal life, by their attitude to
+which offer men are judged. But the connection of thought seems rather
+to be that Christ's Manhood, inextricably intertwined with His
+divinity, is equally needed with the latter to constitute Him our
+Judge. He 'knoweth our frame,' from the inside, as it were, and the
+participation in our nature which fits Him to 'be a merciful and
+faithful High Priest' also fits Him to be the Judge of mankind.
+
+
+
+
+THE FOURTH MIRACLE IN JOHN'S GOSPEL
+
+'And Jesus took the loaves; and when He had given thanks, He
+distributed to the disciples, and the disciples to them that were set
+down; and likewise of the fishes as much as they would.'--JOHN vi. 11.
+
+This narrative of the miraculous feeding of the five thousand is
+introduced into John's Gospel with singular abruptness. We read in the
+first verse of the chapter: 'After these things Jesus went over the
+Sea of Galilee,' _i.e._ from the western to the eastern side. But the
+Evangelist does not tell us how or when He got to the western side.
+'These things,' which are recorded in the previous chapter, are the
+healing of the impotent man at the Pool of Bethesda, the consequent
+outburst of Jewish hostility, and the profound and solemn discourse of
+our Lord, in which He claims filial relationship to the Father. So
+that we must insert between the chapters a journey from Jerusalem to
+Galilee, and a lapse at all events of some months--or, if the feast
+referred to in the previous chapter be, as it may be, the Passover, an
+interval of nearly a year. So little care for the mere framework of
+events has this fourth Gospel; so entirely would the Evangelist have
+us see that his reason for narrating this miracle is mainly its
+spiritual lessons and the revelation which it makes of Christ as
+Himself the Bread of Life.
+
+Similarly, he has no care to tell us anything about the reasons for
+our Lord's retirement with His disciples from Galilee to the eastern
+bank. These we have to learn from the other Evangelists. They give us
+several concurrent motives--the news of the death of John the Baptist;
+and of the desire of the bloody tyrant to see Jesus, which foreboded
+evil; also the return of the twelve Apostles from their trial journey,
+which involved the necessity of rest for them; and, perhaps, the
+approach of the Passover, which our Lord did not purpose to observe in
+Jerusalem because of the Jewish hostility, and which, therefore,
+suggested the withdrawal to temporary retirement.
+
+All these reasons concurring, He and His disciples would seek for a
+brief space of seclusion and repose. But the hope of securing such was
+vain. The people followed in crowds so eagerly, so hastily, in such
+enormous numbers, that no natural or ordinary provision for their
+wants could be thought of. Hence the occasion for the miracle before
+us.
+
+Now I think that this narrative, with which I wish to deal, falls
+mainly into two portions, both of which suggest for us some important
+lessons. There is, first, the preparations for the sign; and then
+there is the sign itself. Let us look at these two points in
+succession.
+
+I. First, then, the preparations for the sign.
+
+Now it is to be observed that this is the only incident before our
+Lord's last journey to Jerusalem which is recorded by all four
+Evangelists; therefore the variations between the narratives are of
+especial interest, and these variations are very considerable. We
+find, for instance, that in John's account the question as to how the
+bread was to be provided came from Christ; in the other Evangelists'
+accounts that question is discussed first amongst the Apostles
+privately. We find from John's narrative that the question was
+suggested even before the multitudes had come to Jesus. We find in the
+Synoptic Gospels that it arose at the close of a long day of teaching
+and of healing.
+
+Now it is possible that this diversity of time may be the solution of
+the diversity of the person proposing. That is to say, it is quite
+legitimate to conclude that John's account takes up the incident at an
+earlier period than the other Evangelists do, and that the full order
+of events was this; that, privately, at the beginning of the day,
+whilst the people were yet flocking to our Lord, He, to one of the
+disciples alone, suggests the question, 'Whence shall we buy bread
+that these may eat?' and that the answer, 'Two hundred pennyworth of
+bread is not sufficient that every one of them may take a little,'
+explains for us the suggestion of the same amount at a subsequent part
+of the day, by the Apostles when they asked our Lord the question,
+'Shall we go and buy two hundred pennyworth of bread that these may
+eat?'
+
+Be that as it may, we may pause for a moment upon this question of our
+Lord's, 'Whence shall we buy bread that these may eat?'
+
+Now notice what a lovely glimpse we get there into the quick-rising
+sympathy of the Saviour with all forms of human necessity. He had gone
+away to snatch a brief moment of rest. The rest is denied Him; the
+hurrying crowds come pressing with their vulgar curiosity--for it was
+nothing better--after Him. No movement of impatience passes across His
+mind; no reluctance as He turns away from the vanishing prospect of a
+quiet afternoon with His friends. He looks upon them, and the first
+thought is a quick, instinctive movement of a divine and yet most
+human sympathy. The question rises in His mind of how He was to
+provide for them; they were not hungry yet; they had not thought where
+their bread was to come from. But He cared for the careless, and His
+heart was prophetic of their necessities, and quick to determine 'what
+He should do' to supply them. So is it ever. Before we call, He
+answers. Thy mercy, O loving Christ! needs no more than the sight of
+human necessities, or even the anticipation of them, swiftly to bestir
+itself for their satisfaction and their supply.
+
+But, farther, He selects for the question Philip, a man who seems to
+have been what is called--as if it were the highest praise--an
+'intensely practical person'; who seems to have had little faith in
+anything that he could not get hold of by his senses, and who lived
+upon the low level of 'common sense.' He always lays stress upon
+'seeing.' His answer to Nathanael when he said, 'Can any good thing
+come out of Nazareth?' was, 'Come and see.' A very good answer, and
+yet one that relies only on the external manifestation of Christ to
+the senses. Then, on another occasion, he breaks in upon the lofty
+spiritualities of our Lord's final discourse to His disciples, with
+the _malapropos_ request, 'Lord, show us the Father, and it sufficeth
+us.' And so here, to the man who believed in his eyesight, and did not
+easily apprehend much else, Jesus puts this question, 'Where is the
+bread to come from for all these people? This He said to prove him.'
+He hoped that the question might have shaped itself in the hearer's
+mind into a promise, and that he might have been able to say in
+answer, 'Thou canst supply; we need not buy.'
+
+So Christ does still. He puts problems before us, too, to settle;
+takes us, as it were, into His confidence with interrogations that try
+us, whether we can rise above the level of the material and visible,
+or whether all our conceptions of possibilities are bounded by these.
+And sometimes, even though the question at first sight seems to evoke
+only such a response as it did here, it works more deeply down below
+afterwards, and we are helped by the very difficulty to rise to a
+clear faith.
+
+Philip's answer is very significant. 'Two hundred pennyworth of bread
+are not sufficient.' He casts his eye over the multitude, he makes a
+rough, rapid calculation, one does not exactly see the data on which
+it was based; and he comes to the conclusion, 'Two hundred pennyworth'
+(in our English money some L. 7 or L. 8 worth) would give them each a
+morsel. And no doubt he thought himself very practical. He was a man
+of figures; he believed in what could be put into tables and
+statistics. Yes; and like a great many other people of his sort, he
+left out one small element in his calculation, and that was Jesus
+Christ, and so his answer went creeping along the low levels, dragging
+itself like a half-wounded snake, when it might have risen on the
+wings of faith into the empyrean, and soared and sung.
+
+So learn that when we have to deal with Christ's working--and when
+have we not to deal with Christ's working?--perhaps probabilities that
+can be tabulated are not altogether the best bases upon which to rest
+our calculations. Learn that the audacity of a faith that expects
+great things, though there be nothing visible upon which to build, is
+wiser and more prudent than the creeping common-sense that adheres to
+facts which are shadows, and forgets that the chief fact is that we
+have an Almighty Helper and Friend at our sides.
+
+Still further, among these preliminaries, let us point to the
+exhibition of the inadequate resources which Christ, according to the
+fuller narrative in the other Evangelists, desired to know. 'There is
+a little lad here with five barley loaves'--one per thousand--'and two
+small fishes'--insufficient in quantity and very, very common in
+quality, for barley bread was the food of the poorest. 'But what are
+they among so many?' And Christ says, 'Bring them to Me.'
+
+Christ's preparation for making our poor resources adequate for
+anything is to drive home into our hearts the consciousness of their
+insufficiency. We need, first of all, to be brought to this, 'All that
+I have is this wretched little stock; and what is that measured
+against the work that I have to do, and the claims upon me?' Only when
+we are brought to that can His great power pour itself into us and
+fill us with rejoicing and overcoming strength. The old mystics used
+to say, and they said truly: 'You must be emptied of yourself before
+you can be filled by God.' And the first thing for any man to learn,
+in preparation for receiving a mightier power than his own into his
+opening heart, is to know that all his own strength is utter and
+absolute weakness. 'What are they among so many?' When we have once
+gone right down into the depths of felt impotence, and when our work
+has risen before us, as if it were far too great for our poor
+strengths which are weaknesses, then we are brought, and only then,
+into the position in which we may begin to hope that power equal to
+our desire will be poured into our souls.
+
+And so the last of the preparations that I will touch upon is that
+majestic preparation for blessing by obedience. 'And Jesus said, Make
+the men sit down.' And there they sat themselves, as Mark puts it in
+his picturesque way, like so many garden plots--the rectangular
+oblongs in a garden in which pot-herbs are grown--on the green grass,
+below the blue sky, by the side of the quiet lake. Cannot you fancy
+how some of them seated themselves with a scoff, and some with a quiet
+smile of incredulity; and some half sheepishly and reluctantly; and
+some in mute expectancy; and some in foolish wonder; and yet all of
+them with a partial obedience? And says John in the true translation:
+'So the men sat down, therefore Jesus took the loaves.' Sit you down
+where He bids you, and your mouths will not be long empty. Do the
+things He tells you, and you will get the food that you need. Our
+business is to obey and to wait, and His business is, when we are
+seated, to open His hand and let the mercy drop. So much for the
+preparations for this great miracle.
+
+II. Now, in the next place, a word as to the sign itself.
+
+I take two lessons, and two only, out of it. I see in it, first, a
+revelation of Christ, as continually through all the ages sustaining
+men's physical life. And I see in it, second, a symbol of Christ as
+Himself the Bread of Life.
+
+As to the first, there is here, I believe, a revelation of the law of
+the universe, of Christ as being through all the ages the Sustainer of
+the physical life of men. What was done then once, with the
+suppression of certain links in the chain, is done always, with the
+introduction of those links. The miraculous moment in the narrative is
+not described to us. We do not know where or when there came in the
+supernatural power which multiplied the loaves--probably as they
+passed from the hand of the Master. But be that as it may, it was
+Christ's will that made the provision which fed all these five
+thousand. And I believe that the teaching of Scripture is in
+accordance with the deepest philosophy, that the one cause of all
+physical phenomena is the will of a present God; howsoever that may
+usually conform to the ordinary method of working which people
+generalise and call laws. The reason why anything is, and the reason
+why all things change, is the energy there and then of the indwelling
+God who is in all His works, and who is the only Will and Power in the
+physical world.
+
+And I believe, further, that Scripture teaches us that that continuous
+will, which is the cause of all phenomena and the underlying
+subsistence on which all things repose, is all managed and mediated by
+Him who from of old was named the Word; 'in whom was life, and without
+whom was not anything made that was made.' Our Christ is Creator, our
+Christ is Sustainer, our Christ moves the stars and feeds the
+sparrows. He was 'before all things, and in Him all things consist.'
+He opens His hand--and there is the print of a nail in it--and
+'satisfies the desire of every living thing.'
+
+So learn how to think of second causes, and see in this story a
+transient manifestation, in unusual form, of an eternal and permanent
+fact. Jesus took the loaves and distributed to them that were set
+down.
+
+And so, secondly, the miracle is a _sign_--a symbol of Him as the true
+Bread and Food of the world. That is the explanation and commentary
+which He Himself appends to it in the subsequent part of the chapter,
+in the great discourse which is founded upon this miracle.
+
+'I am the Bread of Life.' There is a triple statement by our Lord upon
+this subject in the remaining portion of the chapter. He says, 'I am
+the Bread of Life.' My personality is that which not only sustains
+life when it is given, but gives life to them that feed upon it. But
+more than that, 'the bread which I will give,' pointing to some future
+'giving' beyond the present moment, and therefore something more than
+His life and example, 'is My flesh, which'--in some as yet unexplained
+way--'I give for the life of the world.' And that there may be no
+misunderstanding, there is a third, deeper, more mysterious statement
+still: 'My flesh is meat indeed, and My blood is drink indeed.'
+Repulsive and paradoxical, but in its very offensiveness and paradox,
+proclaiming that it covers a mighty truth, and the truth, brother, is
+this, the one Food that gives life to will, affections, conscience,
+understanding, to the whole spirit of a man, is that great Sacrifice
+of the Incarnate Lord who gave upon the Cross His flesh, and on the
+Cross shed His blood, for the life of the world that was 'dead in
+trespasses and sins.' Christ, our Passover, is sacrificed for us, and
+we feed on the sacrifice. Let your conscience, your heart, your
+desires, your anticipations, your understanding, your will, your whole
+being feed on Him. He will be cleansing, He will be love, He will be
+fruition, He will be hope, He will be truth, He will be righteousness,
+He will be all. Feed upon Him by that faith which is the true eating
+of the true Bread, and your souls shall live.
+
+And notice finally here, the result of this miracle as transferred to
+the region of symbol. 'They did all eat and were filled'; men, women,
+children, both sexes, all ages, all classes, found the food that they
+needed in the bread that came from Christ's hands. If any man wants
+dainties that will tickle the palates of Epicureans, let him go
+somewhere else. But if he wants bread, to keep the life in and to stay
+his hunger, let him go to this Christ who is 'human nature's daily
+food.'
+
+The world has scoffed for nineteen centuries at the barley bread that
+the Gospel provides; coarse by the side of its confectionery, but it
+is enough to give life to all who eat it. It goes straight to the
+primal necessities of human nature. It does not coddle a class, or
+pander to unwholesome, diseased, or fastidious appetites. It is the
+food of the world, and not of a section. All men can relish it, all
+men need it. It is offered to them all.
+
+And more than that; notice the inexhaustible abundance. 'They did all
+eat, and were filled.' And then they took up--not 'of the fragments,'
+as our Bible gives it, conveying the idea of the crumbs that littered
+the grass after the repast was over, but of the 'broken pieces'--the
+portions that came from Christ's hands--twelve baskets full, an
+immensely greater quantity than they had to start with. 'The gift doth
+stretch itself as 'tis received.' Other goods and other possessions
+perish with the using, but this increases with use. The more one eats,
+the more there is for him to eat. And all the world may live upon it
+for ever, and there will be more at the end than there was at the
+beginning.
+
+Brethren, why do ye 'spend your money for that which is not bread'?
+There is no answer worthy of a rational soul, no answer that will
+stand either the light of conscience or the clearer light of the Day
+of Judgment. I come to you now, and although my poor words may be but
+like the barley bread and the two fishes--nothing amongst all this
+gathered audience--I come with Christ in my hands, and I say to you,
+'Eat, and your souls shall live.' He will spread a table for you in
+the wilderness, and take you to sit at last at His table in His
+Kingdom.
+
+
+
+
+'FRAGMENTS' OR 'BROKEN PIECES'
+
+'When they were filled, He said unto His disciples, Gather up the
+fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.'--JOHN vi. 12.
+
+The Revised Version correctly makes a very slight, but a very
+significant change in the words of this verse. Instead of 'fragments'
+it reads 'broken pieces.' The change seems very small, but the effect
+of it is considerable. It helps our picture of the scene by correcting
+a very common misapprehension as to what it was which the Apostles are
+bid to gather up. The general notion, I suppose, is that the
+'fragments' are the crumbs that fell from each man's hands, as he ate,
+and the picture before the imagination of the ordinary reader is that
+of the Apostles' carefully collecting the _debris_ of the meal from
+the grass where it had dropped. But the true notion is that the
+'broken pieces which remain over' are the unused portions into which
+our Lord's miracle-working hand had broken the bread, and the true
+picture is that of the Apostles carefully putting away in store for
+future use the abundant provision which their Lord had made, beyond
+the needs of the hungry thousands. And that conception of the command
+teaches far more beautiful and deeper lessons than the other.
+
+For if the common translation and notion be correct, all that is
+taught us, or at least what is principally taught us, is the duty of
+thrift and careful economy; whereas the other shows more clearly that
+what is taught us is that Jesus Christ always gets ready for His
+people something over and above the exact limits of their bare need at
+the moment, that He prepares for His poor and hungry dependants in
+royal fashion, leaving ever a wide margin of difference between what
+would be just enough to keep the life in them, and His liberal
+housekeeping. Further, we are taught a lesson of wise husbandry and
+economy in the use of that overplus of grace which Christ ministers,
+and are instructed that the laws of prudent thrift have as honoured a
+place in the management of spiritual as of temporal wealth. 'Gather
+up,' says our Lord, 'the pieces which I broke, the large provision
+which I made for possible wants. My gifts are in excess of the
+requirements of the moment. Take care of them till you need them.'
+That is a worthier interpretation of His command than one which merely
+sees in it an exhortation to thrifty taking care of the crumbs that
+fell from the lips of the hungry eaters.
+
+Looking at this command, then, with this slight alteration of
+rendering, and consequent widening of scope, we may briefly try to
+gather up the lessons which it obviously suggests.
+
+I. We have that thought, to which I have already referred, as more
+strikingly brought out by the slight alteration of translation, which,
+by the use of '_broken_ pieces,' suggests the connection with Christ's
+_breaking_ the loaves and fishes. We are taught to think of the large
+surplus in Christ's gifts over and above our need. Our Lord has
+Himself given us a commentary upon this miracle. All Christ's miracles
+are parables, for all teach us, on the level of natural and outward
+things, lessons that are true in regard to the spiritual world; but
+this one is especially symbolical, as indeed are all these recorded in
+John's Gospel. And here we have Christ, on the day after the miracle,
+commenting upon it in His long and profound discourse upon the Bread
+of Life, which plainly intimates that He meant His office of feeding
+the hungry crowds, with bread supernaturally increased by the touch of
+His hand, to be but a picture and a guide which might lead to the
+apprehension of the higher view of Himself as the 'bread of God which
+came down from heaven,' feeding and 'giving life to the world' by His
+broken body and shed blood.
+
+So that we are not inventing a fanciful interpretation of an incident
+not meant to have any meaning deeper than shows on the surface, when
+we say that the abundance far beyond what the eaters could make use of
+at the moment really represented the large surplus of inexhaustible
+resources and unused grace which is treasured for us all in Christ
+Jesus. Whom He feeds He feasts. His gifts answer our need, and
+over-answer it, for He is 'able to do exceeding abundantly above that
+which we ask or think,' and neither our conceptions, nor our
+petitions, nor our present powers of receiving, are the real limits of
+the illimitable grace that is laid up for us in Christ, and which,
+potentially, we have each of us in our hands whenever we lay our hands
+on Him.
+
+Oh, dear friends! what you and I have ever had and felt of Christ's
+power, sweetness, preciousness, and love is as nothing compared with
+the infinite depths of all those which lie in Him. The sea fills the
+little creeks along its shore, but it rolls in unfathomed depths,
+boundless to the horizon away out there in the mid-Atlantic. And all
+the present experience of all Christian people, of what Christ is, is
+like the experience of the first settlers in some great undiscovered
+continent; who timidly plant a little fringe of population round its
+edge and grow their scanty crops there, whilst the great prairies of
+miles and miles, with all their wealth and fertility, are lying
+untrodden and unknown in the heart of the untraversed continent. The
+most powerful telescope leaves nebulae unresolved, which, though they
+seem but a dim dust of light, are all ablaze with mighty suns. The
+'goodness' which He has 'wrought before the sons of men for them that
+fear' Him is, as the Psalmist adoringly exclaims, wondrously 'great,'
+but still greater is that which the same verse of the Psalm
+celebrates--the goodness which He has 'laid up for them that fear
+Him.' The gold which is actually coined and passing from hand to hand,
+is but a fraction, a mere scale, as it were, off the surface of the
+great uncoined mass of bullion that lies stored in the vaults there.
+Christ is a great deal more than any man, or than all men, have yet
+found Him to be. 'Gather up the broken pieces'; and see that nothing
+of that infinite preciousness of His be lost by us.
+
+II. Then there is another very simple lesson which I draw. This
+command suggests for us Christ's thrift (if I may use the word) in the
+employment of His miraculous power.
+
+Surely they might have said: 'If thou canst multiply five loaves into
+all this abundance, why should we be trudging about, each with a
+basket on his back full of bread, when we have with us He whose word
+can make it for us at any moment?' Yes, but a law which characterises
+all the miraculous, in both the Old and the New Testament, and which
+broadly distinguishes Christ's miracles from all the false miracles of
+false religions is this, that the miraculous is pared down to the
+smallest possible amount, that not one hairsbreadth beyond the
+necessity shall be done by miracle; that whatever men can do they
+shall do; that their work shall stop as late, and begin again as soon
+as possible. Thus, though Christ was going to raise Lazarus, men's
+hands had to roll away the stone; and when Christ had raised Lazarus,
+men's hands had to loose the napkins from his face. And though Christ
+was able to say to the daughter of Jairus, '_Talitha cumi!_' (damsel,
+arise!) His next word was: 'Give her something to eat.' Where the
+miraculous was needed it was used, and not a hairsbreadth beyond
+absolute necessity did it extend.
+
+And so here Christ multiplies the bread, and yet each of the Apostles
+has to take a basket, probably some kind of woven wicker-work article
+which they would carry for holding their little necessaries in their
+peregrinations; each Apostle has to take his basket, and perhaps
+emptying it of some of his humble apparel, to fill it with these bits
+of bread; for Christ was not going to work miracles where men's thrift
+and prudence could be employed.
+
+Nor does He do so now. We live by faith, and our dependence on Him can
+never be too absolute. Only laziness sometimes dresses itself in the
+garb and speaks with the tongue of faith, and pretends to be truthful
+when it is only slothful. 'Why criest thou unto Me?' said God to
+Moses, 'speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward.' True
+faith sets us to work. It is not to be perverted into idle and false
+depending upon Him to work for us, when by the use of our own ten
+fingers and our own brains, guided and strengthened by His working in
+us, we can do the work that is set before us.
+
+III. Still further, there is another lesson here. Not only does the
+injunction show us Christ's thrift in the employment of the
+supernatural, but it teaches us our duty of thrift and care in the use
+of the spiritual grace bestowed upon us.
+
+These men had given to them this miraculously made bread; but they had
+to exercise ordinary thrift in the preservation of the supernatural
+gift. Christ has been given to you by the most stupendous miracle that
+ever was or can be wrought, and if you are Christian people, you have
+the Spirit of Christ given to you, to dwell in your hearts, to make
+you wise and fair, gentle and strong, and altogether Christlike. But
+you have to take care of these gifts. You have to exercise the common
+virtues of economy and thrift in your use of the divine gifts as in
+your use of the common things of daily life. You have to use wisely
+and not waste the Bread of God that came down from heaven, or that
+Bread of God will not feed you. You have to provide the basket in
+which to carry the unexhausted residue of the divine gift, or you may
+stand hungry in the very midst of plenty, and whilst within arm's
+length of you there is bread enough and to spare to feed the whole
+world.
+
+The lesson of my text, which is most eminently brought out if we adopt
+the translation which I have referred to at the beginning of these
+remarks, is, then, just this: Christian men, be watchful stewards of
+that great gift of a living Christ, the food of your souls, that has
+been by miracle bestowed upon you. Such gathering together for future
+need of the unused residue of grace may be accomplished by three ways.
+First, there must be a diligent use of the grace given. See that you
+use to the very full, in the measure of your present power of
+absorbing and your present need, the gift bestowed upon you. Be sure
+that you take in as much of Christ as you can contain before you begin
+to think of what to do with the overplus. If we are not careful to
+take what we can, and to use what we need, of Christ, there is little
+chance of our being faithful stewards of the surplus. The water in a
+mill-stream runs over the trough in great abundance when the wheel is
+not working, and one reason why so many Christians seem to have so
+much more given to them in Christ than they need is because they are
+doing no work to use up the gift.
+
+A second essential to such stewardship is the careful guarding of the
+grace given from whatever would injure it. Let not worldliness,
+business, cares of the world, the sorrows of life, its joys, duties,
+anxieties or pleasures--let not these so come into your hearts that
+they will elbow Christ out of your hearts, and dull your appetite for
+the true Bread that came down from heaven.
+
+And lastly, not only by use and by careful guarding, but also by
+earnest desire for larger gifts of the Christ who is large beyond all
+measure, shall we receive more and more of His sweetness and His
+preciousness into our hearts, and of His beauty and glory into our
+transfigured characters. The basket that we carry, this recipient
+heart of ours, is elastic. It can stretch to hold any amount that you
+like to put into it. The desire for more of Christ's grace will
+stretch its capacity, and as its capacity increases the inflowing gift
+greatens, and a larger Christ fills the larger room of my poor heart.
+
+So the lesson is taught us of our prudence in the care and use of the
+grace bestowed on us, and we are bidden to cherish a happy confidence
+in the inexhaustible resources of Christ, and the continual gift in
+the future of even larger measures of grace, which are all ours
+already, given to us at the first reception of Him into our hearts,
+and only needing our faithfulness to be growingly ours in experience
+as they are ours from the first in germ.
+
+IV. Finally, a solemn warning is implied in this command, and its
+reason 'that nothing be lost.'
+
+Then there is a possibility of losing the gift that is freely given to
+us. We may waste the bread, and so, sometime or other when we are
+hungry, awake to the consciousness that it has dropped out of our
+slack hands. The abundance of Christ's grace may, so far as you are
+profited or enriched by it, be like the unclaimed millions of money
+which nobody asks for and that is of use to no living soul. You may be
+paupers while all God's riches in glory are at your disposal, and
+starving while baskets full of bread broken for us by Christ lie
+unused at our sides. Some of us have never tasted the sweetness or
+been fed by the nutritiousness of that Bread of God which came down
+from heaven. And more marvellous still, there may be some of us, who
+having come to Christ hungry and been fed by Him, have ceased to care
+for the pure nourishment and taste for the manna, and are turning
+again with gross appetite to the husks in the swine's trough.
+Negligent Christians! worldly Christians! you who care more for money
+and other dainties and delights which perish with the using--
+backsliding Christians, who once hungered and thirsted for more of
+Christ, and now have no longing for Him--awake to the danger in which
+you stand of letting all your spiritual wealth slip through your
+fingers; behold the treasures, yet unreached, within your grasp, and
+seek to garner and realise them. Gather up the broken pieces which
+remain over, lest everything be lost.
+
+
+
+
+THE FIFTH MIRACLE IN JOHN'S GOSPEL
+
+'So when they had rowed about five-and-twenty or thirty furlongs, they
+see Jesus walking on the sea, and drawing nigh unto the ship: and they
+were afraid. 20. But He said unto them, It is I; be not afraid.'--JOHN
+vi. 19,20.
+
+There are none of our Lord's parables recorded in this Gospel, but all
+the miracles which it narrates are parables. Moral and religious truth
+is communicated by the outward event, as in the parable it is
+communicated by the story. The mere visible fact becomes more than
+semi-transparent. The analogy between the spiritual and the natural
+world which men instinctively apprehend, of which the poet and the
+orator and the religious teacher have always made abundant use, and
+which it has sometimes been attempted, unsuccessfully as I think, to
+elevate to the rank of a scientific truth, underlies the whole series
+of these miracles. It is the principal if not the only key to the
+meaning of this one before us.
+
+The symbolism which regards life under the guise of a voyage, and its
+troubles and difficulties under the metaphor of storm and tempest, is
+especially natural to nations that take kindly to the water, like us
+Englishmen. I do not know that there is any instance, either in the
+Old or in the New Testament, of the use of that to us very familiar
+metaphor; but the emblem of the sea as the symbol of trouble, unrest,
+rebellious power, is very familiar to the writers of the Old
+Testament. And the picture of the divine path as in the waters, and of
+the divine prerogative as being to 'tread upon the heights of the
+sea,' as Job has it, is by no means unknown. So the natural symbolism,
+and the Old Testament use of the expressions, blend together, as I
+think, in suggesting the one point of view from which this miracle is
+to be regarded.
+
+It is found in two of the other Evangelists, and the condensed account
+of it which we have in this Gospel, by its omission of Peter's walking
+on the water, and of some other smaller but graphic details that the
+other Evangelists give us, serves to sharpen the symbolical meaning of
+the whole story, and to bring that as its great purpose and
+signification into prominence.
+
+We shall, I think, then, best gain the lessons intended to be drawn if
+we simply follow the points of the narrative in their order as they
+stand here.
+
+I. We have here, first of all, then, the struggling toilers.
+
+The other Evangelists tell us that after the feeding of the five
+thousand our Lord 'constrained' His disciples to get into the ship,
+and to pass over to the other side. The language implies
+unwillingness, to some extent, on their part, and the exercise of
+authority upon His. Our Evangelist, who does not mention the
+constraint, supplies us with the reason for it. The preceding miracle
+had worked up the excitement of the mob to a very dangerous point.
+Crowds are always the same, and this crowd thought, as any other crowd
+anywhere and in any age would have done, that the prophet that could
+make bread at will was the kind of prophet whom they wanted. So they
+determined to take Him by force, and make Him a king; and Christ,
+seeing the danger, and not desiring that His Kingdom should be
+furthered by such unclean hands and gross motives, determined to
+withdraw Himself into the loneliness of the bordering hills. It was
+wise to divide the little group; it would distract attention; it might
+lead some of the people, as we know it did lead them, to follow the
+boat when they found it was gone. It would save the Apostles from
+being affected by the coarse, smoky enthusiasm of the crowd. It would
+save them from revealing the place of His retirement. It might enable
+Him to steal away more securely unobserved; so they are sent across to
+the other side of the lake, some five or six miles. An hour or two
+might have done it, but for some unknown reason they seem to have
+lingered. Perhaps they had no special call for haste. The Paschal
+moon, nearly full, would be shining down upon the waters; their hearts
+and minds would be busy with the miracle which they had just seen. And
+so they may have drifted along, not caring much when they reached
+their destination. But suddenly one of the gusts of wind which are
+frequently found upon mountain lakes, especially towards nightfall,
+rose and soon became a gale with which they could not battle. Our
+Evangelist does not tell us how long it lasted, but we get a note of
+time from St. Mark, who says it was 'about the fourth watch of the
+night'; that is between the hours of three and six in the morning of
+the subsequent day. So that for some seven or eight hours at least
+they had been tugging at the useless oars, or sitting shivering, wet
+and weary, in the boat.
+
+Is it not the history of the Church in a nutshell? Is it not the
+symbol of life for us all? The solemn law under which we live demands
+persistent effort, and imposes continual antagonism upon us; there is
+no reason why we should regard that as evil, or think ourselves hardly
+used, because we are not fair-weather sailors. The end of life is to
+make men; the meaning of all events is to mould character. Anything
+that makes me stronger is a blessing, anything that develops my
+_morale_ is the highest good that can come to me. If therefore
+antagonism mould in me
+
+  'The wrestling thews that throw the world,'
+
+and give me good, strong muscles, and put tan and colour into my
+cheek, I need not mind the cold and the wet, nor care for the
+whistling of the wind in my face, nor the dash of the spray over the
+bows. Summer sailing in fair weather, amidst land-locked bays, in blue
+seas, and under calm skies, may be all very well for triflers, but
+
+  'Blown seas and storming showers'
+
+are better if the purpose of the voyage be to brace us and call out
+our powers.
+
+And so be thankful if, when the boat is crossing the mouth of some
+glen that opens upon the lake, a sudden gust smites the sheets and
+sends you to the helm, and takes all your effort to keep you from
+sinking. Do not murmur, or think that God's Providence is strange,
+because many and many a time when 'it is dark, and Jesus is not yet
+come to us,' the storm of wind comes down upon the lake and threatens
+to drive us from our course. Let us rather recognise Him as the Lord
+who, in love and kindness, sends all the different kinds of weather
+which, according to the old proverb, make up the full-summed year.
+
+And then notice how, in this first picture of our text, the symbolism
+so naturally lends itself to spiritual meanings, not only in regard to
+the tempest that caught the unthinking voyagers, but also in regard to
+other points; such as the darkness amidst which they had to fight the
+tempest, and the absence of the Master. Once before, they had been
+caught in a similar storm on the lake, but it was daylight then, and
+Jesus was with them, and that made all the difference. This time it
+was night, and they looked up in vain to the green Eastern hills, and
+wondered where in their folds He was lurking, so far from their help.
+Mark gives us one sweet touch when he tells us that Christ on the
+hillside there _saw_ them toiling in rowing, but they did not see Him.
+No doubt they felt themselves deserted, and sent many a wistful glance
+of longing towards the shore where He was. Hard thoughts of Him may
+have been in some of their minds. 'Master, carest Thou not?' would be
+springing to some of their lips with more apparent reason than in the
+other storm on the lake. But His calm and loving gaze looked down
+pitying on all their fear and toil. The darkness did not hide from
+Him, nor His own security on the steadfast land make Him forget, nor
+his communion with the Father so absorb Him as to exclude thoughts of
+them.
+
+It is a parable and a prophecy of the perpetual relation between the
+absent Lord and the toiling Church. He is on the mountain while we are
+on the sea. The stable eternity of the Heavens holds Him; we are
+tossed on the restless mutability of time, over which we toil at His
+command. He is there interceding for us. Whilst He prays He beholds,
+and He beholds that He may help us by His prayer. The solitary crew
+were not so solitary as they thought. That little dancing speck on the
+waters, which held so much blind love and so much fear and trouble,
+was in His sight, as on the calm mountain-top He communed with God. No
+wonder that weary hearts and lonely ones, groping amidst the darkness,
+and fighting with the tempests and the sorrows of lift, have ever
+found in our story a symbol that comes to them with a prophecy of hope
+and an assurance of help, and have rejoiced to know that they on the
+sea are beheld of the Christ in the sky, and that 'the darkness hideth
+not from' His loving eye.
+
+II. And now turn to the next stage of the story before us. We have the
+approaching Christ.
+
+'When they had rowed about five-and-twenty or thirty furlongs,' and so
+were just about the middle of the lake, 'they see Jesus walking on the
+sea and drawing nigh unto the ship.' They were about half-way across
+the lake. We do not know at what hour in the fourth watch the Master
+came. But probably it was towards daybreak. Toiling had endured for a
+night. It would be in accordance with the symbolism that joy and help
+should come with the morning.
+
+If we look for a moment at the miraculous fact, apart from the
+symbolism, we have a revelation here of Christ as the Lord of the
+material universe, a kingdom wider in its range and profounder in its
+authority than that which that shouting crowd had sought to force upon
+Him. His will consolidated the yielding wave, or sustained His
+material body on the tossing surges. Whether we suppose the miracle as
+wrought on the one or the other, makes no difference to its value as a
+manifestation of the glory of Christ, and of His power over the
+physical order of things. In the latter case there would, perhaps, be
+a hint of a power residing in His material frame, of which we possibly
+have other phases, as in the Transfiguration, which may be a prophecy
+of what lordship over nature is possible to a sinless manhood. However
+that may be, we have here a wonderful picture which is true for all
+ages of the mighty Christ, to whose gentle footfall the unquiet surges
+are as a marble pavement; and who draws near in the purposes of His
+love, unhindered by antagonism, and using even opposing forces as the
+path for His triumphant progress. Two lessons may be drawn from this.
+One is that in His marvellous providence Christ uses all the tumults
+and unrest, the opposition and tempests which surround the ship that
+bears His followers, as the means of achieving His purposes. We stand
+before a mystery to which we have no key when we think of these two
+certain facts; first, the Omnipotent redeeming will of God in Christ;
+and, second, the human antagonism which is able to rear itself against
+that. And we stand in the presence of another mystery, most blessed,
+and yet which we cannot unthread, when we think, as we most assuredly
+may, that in some mysterious fashion He works His purposes by the very
+antagonism to His purposes, making even head-winds fill the sails, and
+planting His foot on the white crests of the angry and changeful
+billows. How often in the world's history has this scene repeated
+itself, and by a divine irony the enemies have become the helpers of
+Christ's cause, and what they plotted for destruction has turned out
+rather to the furtherance of the Gospel! 'He maketh the wrath of man
+to praise Him, and with the residue thereof He girdeth Himself.'
+
+Another lesson for our individual lives is this, that Christ, in His
+sweetness and His gentle sustaining help, comes near to us all across
+the sea of sorrow and trouble. A more tender, a more gracious sense of
+His nearness to us is ever granted to us in the time of our darkness
+and our grief than is possible to us in the sunny hours of joy. It is
+always the stormy sea that Christ comes across, to draw near to us;
+and they who have never experienced the tempest have yet to learn the
+inmost sweetness of His presence. When it is night, and it is dark, at
+the hour which is the keystone of night's black arch, Christ comes to
+us, striding across the stormy waters. Sorrow brings _Him_ near to
+_us_. Do you see that sorrow does not drive _you_ away from Him!
+
+III. Then, still further, we note in the story before us the terror
+and the recognition.
+
+St. John does not tell us why they were afraid. There is no need to
+tell us. They see, possibly in the chill uncertain light of the grey
+dawn breaking over the Eastern hills, a Thing coming to them across
+the water there. They had fought gallantly with the storm, but this
+questionable shape freezes their heart's blood, and a cry, that is
+audible above even the howling of the wind and the dash of the waves,
+gives sign of the superstitious terror that crept round the hearts of
+those commonplace, rude men.
+
+I do not dwell upon the fact that the average man, if he fancies that
+anything from out of the Unseen is near him, shrinks in fear. I do not
+ask you whether that is not a sign and indication of the deep
+conviction that lies in men's souls, of a discord between themselves
+and the unseen world; but I ask you if we do not often mistake the
+coming Master, and tremble before Him when we ought to be glad?
+
+We are often so absorbed with our work, so busy tugging at the oar, so
+anxiously watching the set of current, so engaged in keeping the helm
+right, that we have no time and no eyes to look across the ocean and
+see who it is that is coming to us through all the hurly-burly. Our
+tears fill our eyes, and weave a veil between us and the Master. And
+when we do see that there is Something there, we are often afraid of
+it, and shrink from it. And sometimes when a gentle whisper of
+consolation, or some light air, as it were, of consciousness of His
+presence, breathes through our souls, we think that it is only a
+phantasm of our own making, and that the coming Christ is nothing more
+than the play of our thoughts and imaginations.
+
+Oh, brethren, let no absorption in cares and duties, let no
+unchildlike murmurings, let no selfish abandonment to sorrow, blind
+you to the Lord who always comes near troubled hearts, if they will
+only look and see! Let no reluctance to entertain religious ideas, no
+fear of contact with the Unseen, no shrinking from the thought of
+Christ as a _Kill-joy_ keep you from seeing Him as He draws near to
+you in your troubles. And let no sly, mocking Mephistopheles of doubt,
+nor any poisonous air, blowing off the foul and stagnant marshes of
+present materialism, make you fancy that the living Reality, treading
+on the flood there, is a dream or a fancy or the projection of your
+own imagination on to the void of space. He is real, whatever may be
+phenomenal and surface. The storm is not so real as the Christ, the
+waves not so substantial as He who stands upon them. They will pass
+and quieten, He will abide for ever. Lift up your hearts and be glad,
+because the Lord comes to you across the waters, and hearken to His
+voice: 'It is I! Be not afraid.'
+
+The encouragement not to fear follows the proclamation, 'It is I!'
+What a thrill of glad confidence must have poured itself into their
+hearts, when once they rose to the height of that wondrous fact!
+
+  'Well roars the storm to those who hear
+   A deeper voice across the storm.'
+
+There is no fear in the consciousness of His presence. It is His old
+word: 'Be not afraid!' And He breathes it whithersoever He comes; for
+His coming is the banishment of danger and the exorcism of dread. So
+that if only you and I, in the midst of all storm and terror, can say
+'It is the Lord,' then we may catch up the grand triumphant chorus of
+the old psalm, and say: 'Though the waters thereof roar and be
+troubled, and the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea, yet
+I will not fear.' The Lord is with us; the everlasting Christ is our
+Helper, our Refuge, and our Strength.
+
+IV. So, lastly, we have here in this story the end of the tempest and
+of the voyage.
+
+Our Evangelist does not record, as the others do, that the storm
+ceased upon Christ's being welcomed into the little boat. The other
+Evangelists do not record, as he does, the completion of the voyage.
+'Immediately the ship was at the land whither they went.' The two
+things are cause and effect. I do not suppose, as many do, that a
+subordinate miracle is to be seen in that last clause of our text, or
+that the 'immediately' is to be taken as if it meant that without one
+moment's delay, or interval, the voyage was completed; but only, which
+I think is all that is needful, that the falling of the tempest and
+the calming of the waters which followed upon the Master's entrance
+into the vessel made the remainder of the voyage comparatively brief
+and swift.
+
+It is not always true, it is very seldom true, that when Christ comes
+on board opposition ends, and the haven is reached. But it is always
+true that when Christ comes on board a new spirit enters into the men
+who have Him for their companion, and are conscious that they have. It
+makes their work easy, and makes them 'more than conquerors' over what
+yet remains. With what a different spirit the weary men would bend
+their backs to the oars once more when they had the Master on board,
+and with what a different spirit you and I will set ourselves to our
+work if we are sure of His presence. The worst of trouble is gone when
+Christ shares it with us. There is a wonderful charm to stay His rough
+wind in the assurance that in all our affliction He is afflicted. If
+we feel that we are following in His footsteps, we feel that He stands
+between us and the blast, a refuge from the storm and a covert from
+the tempest. And if still, as no doubt will be the case, we have our
+share of trouble and storm and sorrow and difficulty, yet the worst of
+the gale will be passed, and though a long swell may still heave, the
+terror and the danger will have gone with the night, and hope and
+courage and gladness revive as the morning's sun breaks over the still
+unquiet waves, and shows us our Master with us and the white walls of
+the port glinting in the level beams.
+
+Friends, life is a voyage, anyhow, with plenty of storm and danger and
+difficulty and weariness and exposure and anxiety and dread and
+sorrow, for every soul of man. But if you will take Christ on board,
+it will be a very different thing from what it will be if you cross
+the wan waters alone. Without Him you will make shipwreck of
+yourselves; with Him your voyage may seem perilous and be tempestuous,
+but He will 'make the storm a calm,' and will bring you to the haven
+of your desire.
+
+
+
+
+HOW TO WORK THE WORK OF GOD
+
+'Then said they unto Him, What shall we do, that we might work the
+works of God? 29. Jesus answered and said unto them, This is the work
+of God, that ye, believe on Him whom He hath sent.'--JOHN vi. 28, 29.
+
+The feeding of the five thousand was the most 'popular' of Christ's
+miracles. The Evangelist tells us, with something between a smile and
+a sigh, that 'when the people saw it, they said, This is of a truth
+that Prophet that should come into the world,' and they were so
+delighted with Him and with it, that they wanted to get up an
+insurrection on the spot, and make a King of Him. I wonder if there
+are any of that sort of people left. If two men were to come into
+Manchester to-morrow morning, and one of them were to offer material
+good, and the other wisdom and peace of heart, which of them, do you
+think, would have the larger following? We need not cast a stone at
+the unblushing, frank admiration that these men had for a Prophet who
+could feed them, for that is exactly the sort of prophet that a great
+number of us would like best if they spoke out.
+
+So Jesus Christ had to escape from the inconvenient enthusiasm of
+these mistaken admirers of His; and they followed Him in their
+eagerness, but were met with words which lift them into another region
+and damp their zeal. He tries to turn away their thoughts from the
+miracle to a far loftier gift. He contrasts the trouble which they
+willingly took in order to get a meal with their indifference as to
+obtaining the true bread from heaven, and He bids them work for it
+just as they had shown themselves ready to work for the other.
+
+They put to Him this question of my text, so strangely blending as it
+does right and wrong, 'You have bid us work; tell us how to work? What
+must we do that we may work the works of God?' Christ answers, in
+words that illuminate their confusions and clear the whole matter,
+'This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent.'
+
+I. Faith, then, is a work.
+
+You know that the commonplace of evangelical teaching opposes faith to
+works; and the opposition is perfectly correct, if it be rightly
+understood. But I have a strong impression that a great deal of our
+preaching goes clean over the heads of our hearers, because we take
+for granted, and they fancy that they understand, the meaning of terms
+because the terms themselves are so familiar. And I believe that many
+people go to churches and chapels all their lives long, and hear this
+doctrine dinned into them, that they are to be saved by faith, and not
+by works, and never approach a definite understanding of what it
+means.
+
+So let me just for a moment try to clear up the terms of this
+apparently paradoxical statement that faith is a work. What do we mean
+by faith? What do you mean by saying that you have faith in your
+friend, in your wife, in your husband, in your guide? You simply mean,
+and we mean, that you trust the person, grasping him by the act of
+trust. On trust the whole fabric of human society depends, as well as
+in another aspect of the same expression does the whole fabric of
+Manchester commerce. Faith, confidence, the leaning of myself on one
+discerned to be true, trusty, strong, sufficient for the purpose in
+hand, whatever it may be--that, and nothing more mysterious, nothing
+further away from daily life and the common emotions which knit us to
+one another, is, as I take it, what the New Testament means when it
+insists upon faith.
+
+Ah, we all exercise it. You put it forth in certain low levels and
+directions. 'The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her,' is
+the short summary of the happy lives of many, I have no doubt, of my
+present hearers. Have you none of that confidence to spare for God? Is
+it all meant to be poured out upon weak, fallible, changeful creatures
+like ourselves, and none of it to rise to the One in whom absolute
+confidence may eternally be fixed?
+
+But then, of course, as we may see by the exercise of the same emotion
+in regard to one Another, the under side (as I have been accustomed to
+say to you) of this confidence in God or Christ is diffidence of
+myself. There is no real exercise of confidence which does not
+involve, as an essential part of itself, the going out from myself in
+order that I may lay all the weight and the responsibility of the
+matter in hand upon Him in whom I trust. And so Christian faith is
+compounded of these two elements, or rather, it has these two sides
+which correspond to one another. The same figure is convex or concave
+according as you look at it from one side or another. If you look at
+faith from one side, it rises towards God; if from the other, it
+hollows itself out into a great emptiness. And so the under side of
+faith is distrust; and he that puts his confidence in God thereby goes
+out of himself, and declares that in himself there is nothing to rest
+upon.
+
+Now that two-sided confidence and diffidence, trust and distrust,
+which are one, is truly a work. It is not an easy one either; it is
+the exercise of our own inmost nature. It is an effort of will. It has
+to be done by coercing ourselves. It has to be maintained in the face
+of many temptations and difficulties. The contrast between faith and
+work is between an inward act and a crowd of outward performances. But
+the faith which knits me to God is my act, and I am responsible for
+it.
+
+But yet it is not a work, just because it is a ceasing from my own
+works, and going out from myself that He may enter in. Only remember,
+when we say, 'Not by works of righteousness, but by the faith of
+Christ,' we are but proclaiming that the inward man must exercise that
+act of self-abnegation and confession of its own impotence, and
+ceasing from all reliance on anything which it does, whereby, and
+whereby alone, it can be knit to God. 'Labour not for the meat that
+perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto eternal life.... This
+is the work of God, that ye believe.' You are responsible for doing
+that, or for not doing it.
+
+II. Secondly, faith, and not a multitude of separate acts, is what
+pleases God.
+
+Mark the difference between the form of the question and that of the
+answer. The people say, 'What are we to do that we may work the
+_works_ of God?' Christ answers in the singular: 'This is the _work_.'
+They thought of a great variety of observances and deeds. He gathers
+them all up into one. They thought of a pile, and that the higher it
+rose the more likely they were to be accepted. He unified the
+requirement, and He brought it all down to this one act, in which all
+other acts are included, and on which alone the whole weight of a
+man's salvation is to rest. 'What shall we do that we might work the
+works of God?' is a question asked in all sorts of ways, by the hearts
+of men all round about us; and what a babble of answers comes! The
+priest says, 'Rites and ceremonies.' The thinker says, 'Culture,
+education.' The moralist says, 'Do this, that, and the other thing,'
+and enumerates a whole series of separate acts. Jesus Christ says,
+'One thing is needful.... This is the work of God.' He brushes away
+the sacerdotal answer and the answer of the mere moralist, and He
+says, 'No! Not _do_; but _trust_.' In so far as that is act, it is the
+only act that you need.
+
+That is evidently reasonable. The man is more than his work; motive is
+more important than action; character is deeper than conduct. God is
+pleased, not by what men do, but by what men are. We must _be_ first,
+and then we shall _do_. And it is obviously reasonable, because we can
+find analogies to the requirement in all other relations of life. What
+would you care for a child that scrupulously obeyed, and did not love
+or trust? What would a prince think of a subject who was ostentatious
+in acts of loyalty, and all the while was plotting and nurturing
+treason in his heart?
+
+If doing separate acts of righteousness be the way to work the works
+of God, then no man has ever done them. For it is a plain fact that
+every man falls below his own conscience--which conscience is less
+scrupulous than the divine law. The worst of us knows a great deal
+more than the best of us does; and our lives, universally, are, at the
+best, lives of partial effort after unreached attainments of obedience
+and of virtue.
+
+But, even supposing that we could perform, far more completely than we
+do, the requirements of our own consciences, and conform to the
+evident duties of our position and relations, do you think that
+without faith we should be therein working the works of God? Suppose a
+man were able fully to realise his own ideal of goodness, without any
+confidence in God underlying all his acts; do you think that these
+would be acts that would please God? It seems to me that, however
+lovely and worthy of admiration, looked at with human eyes only, many
+lives are, which have nobly and resolutely fought against evil, and
+struggled after good, if they have lacked the crowning grace of doing
+this for God's sake, they lack, I was going to say, almost everything;
+I will not say that, but I will say that they lack that which makes
+them acceptable, well-pleasing to Him. The poorest, the most imperfect
+realisation of our duty and ideal of conduct which has in it a love
+towards God and a faith in Him that would fain do better if it could,
+is a nobler thing, I venture to say, in the eyes of Heaven--which are
+the truth-seeing eyes--than the noblest achievements of an untrusting
+soul. It does not seem to me that to say so is bigotry or narrowness
+or anything else but the plain deduction from this, that a man's
+relation to God is the deepest thing about him, and that if that be
+right, other things will come right, and if that be wrong nothing is
+as right as it might be.
+
+Here we have Jesus Christ laying the foundation for the doctrine which
+is often said to be Pauline, as if that meant something else than
+coming from Jesus Christ. We often hear people say, 'Oh, your
+evangelical teaching of justification by faith, and all that, comes
+out of Paul's Epistles, not out of Christ's teaching, nor out of
+John's Gospel.' Well, there is a difference, which it is blindness not
+to recognise, between the seeds of teaching in our Lord's words, and
+the flowers and fruit of these seeds, which we get in the more
+systematised and developed teaching of the Epistles. I frankly admit
+that, and I should expect it, with my belief as to who Christ is, and
+who Paul is. But in that saying, 'This is the work of God, that ye
+believe on Him whom He hath sent,' is the germ of everything that Paul
+has taught us about the works of the law being of no avail, and faith
+being alone and unfailing in its power of uniting men to God, and
+bringing them into the possession of eternal life. The saying stands
+in John's Gospel, and so Paul and John alike received, though in
+different fashions, and wrought out on different lines of subsequent
+teaching, the germinal impulse from these words of the Master. Let us
+hear no more about salvation by faith being a Pauline addition to
+Christ's Gospel, for the lips of Christ Himself have declared 'this is
+the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent.'
+
+III. Thirdly, this faith is the productive parent of all separate
+works of God.
+
+The teaching that I have been trying to enforce has, I know, been so
+presented as to make a pillow for indolence, and to be closely allied
+to immorality. It has been so presented, but it has not been so
+presented half as often as its enemies would have us believe. For I
+know of but very few, and those by no means the most prominent and
+powerful of the preachers of the great doctrine of salvation by faith,
+who have not added, as its greatest teacher did: 'Let ours also be
+careful to maintain good works for necessary uses.' But the true
+teaching is not that trust is a substitute for work, but that it is
+the foundation of work. The Gospel is, first of all, Trust; then, set
+yourselves to do the works of faith. It works by love, it is the
+opening of the heart to the entrance of the life of Christ, and, of
+course, when that life comes in, it will act in the man in a manner
+appropriate to its origin and source, and he that by faith has been
+joined to Jesus Christ, and has opened his heart to receive into that
+heart the life of Christ, will, as a matter of course, bring forth, in
+the measure of his faith, the fruits of righteousness.
+
+We are surely not despising fruits and flowers when we insist upon the
+root from which they shall come. A man may take separate acts of
+partial goodness, as you see children in the springtime sticking
+daisies on the spikes of a thorn-twig picked from the hedges. But
+these will die. The basis of all righteousness is faith, and the
+manifestation of faith is practical righteousness. 'Show Me thy faith
+by thy works' is Christ's teaching quite as much as it is the teaching
+of His sturdy servant James. And so, dear friends, we are going the
+shortest way to enrich lives with all the beauties of possible human
+perfection when we say, 'Begin at the beginning. The longest way round
+is the shortest way home; trust Him with all your hearts first, and
+that will effloresce into "whatsoever things are lovely and whatever
+things are of good report."' In the beautiful metaphor of the Apostle
+Peter, in his second Epistle, Faith is the damsel who leads in the
+chorus of consequent graces; and we are exhorted to 'add to our faith
+virtue,' and all the others that unfold themselves in harmonious
+sequence from that one central source.
+
+If I had time I should be glad to turn for a moment to the light which
+such considerations cast upon subjects that are largely occupying the
+attention of the Christian Church to-day. I should like to insist
+that, before you talk much about applied Christianity, you should be
+very sure that in men there _is_ a Christianity to apply. I venture to
+profess my own humble belief that in ninety-nine cases out of a
+hundred, Christian ministers and churches will do no more for the
+social, political, and intellectual and moral advancement of men and
+the elevation of the people by sticking to their own work and
+preaching this Gospel--'This is the work of God, that ye believe on
+Him whom He hath sent.'
+
+IV. Lastly, this faith secures the bread of life.
+
+The bread of life is the starting-point of the whole conversation. In
+the widest possible sense it is whatsoever truly stills the hunger of
+the immortal soul. In a deeper sense it is the person of Jesus Christ
+Himself, for He not only says that He will _give_, but that He _is_
+the Bread of Life. And, in the deepest sense of all, it is His flesh
+broken for us in His sacrifice on the Cross. That bread is a gift. So
+the paradox results which stands in our text--_work_ for the bread
+which God will _give_. If it be a gift, that fact determines what sort
+of work must be done in order to possess it. If it be a gift, then the
+only work is to accept it. If it be a gift, then we are out of the
+region of _quid pro quo_; and have not to bring, as Chinese do, great
+strings of copper cash that, all added up together, do not amount to a
+shilling, in order to buy what God will bestow upon us. If it be a
+gift, then to trust the Giver and to accept the gift is the only
+condition that is possible.
+
+It is not a condition that God has invented and arbitrarily imposed.
+The necessity of it is lodged deep in the very nature of the case. Air
+cannot get to the lungs of a mouse in an air-pump. Light cannot come
+into a room where all the shutters are up and the keyhole stopped. If
+a man chooses to perch himself on some little stool of his own, with
+glass legs to it, and to take away his hand from the conductor, no
+electricity will come to him. If I choose to lock my lips, Jesus
+Christ does not prise open my clenched teeth to put the bread of life
+into my unwilling mouth. If we ask, we get; if we take, we get.
+
+And so the paradox comes, that we work for a gift, with a work which
+is not work because it is a departure from myself. It is the same
+blessed paradox which the prophet spoke when he said, 'Buy ... without
+money and without price.' Oh! what a burden of hopeless effort and
+weary toil--like that of the man that had to roll the stone up the
+hill, which ever slipped back again--is lifted from our shoulders by
+such a word as this that I have been poorly trying to speak about now!
+'Thou art careful and troubled about many things,' poor soul! trying
+to be good; trying to fight yourself, and the world, and the devil.
+Try the other plan, and listen to Him saying, 'Give up self-imposed
+effort in thine own strength. Take, eat, this is My body, which is
+broken for you.'
+
+
+
+
+THE MANNA
+
+'I am that bread of life. 49. Your fathers did eat manna in the
+wilderness, and are dead. 50. This is the bread which cometh down from
+heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die.'--JOHN vi. 48-50.
+
+'This is of a truth that Prophet,' said the Jews, when Christ had fed
+the five thousand on the five barley loaves and the two small fishes.
+That was the kind of Teacher for them; they were quite unaffected by
+the wisdom of His words and the beauty of His deeds, but a miracle
+that found food precisely met their wants, and so there was excited an
+impure enthusiasm, very unwelcome to Jesus. Therefore He withdrew
+Himself from it, and when the people followed Him, all full of
+expectation, to get some more loaves and see some more miracles, He
+met them with a douche of cold water that cooled their enthusiasm and
+flung them back into a critical, questioning mood. They pointed to the
+miracle of the manna, and hinted that, if He expected them to accept
+Him, He must do as Moses had done, or something like it. Probably
+there was a Jewish tradition in existence then to the effect that the
+Messiah was to repeat the miracle of the manna. But, at all events,
+Christ lays hold of the reference that they put into His hands, and He
+said in effect, 'Manna? Yes; I give, and am, the true Manna.'
+
+So this is the third of the instances in this Gospel in which our Lord
+pointed to Old Testament incidents and institutions as symbolising
+Himself. In the first of them, when He likened Himself to the ladder
+that Jacob saw, He claimed to be the Medium of communication between
+heaven and earth. In the second of them, when He likened Himself to
+the brazen serpent lifted in the camp, He claimed to be the Healer of
+a sin-stricken and poisoned world. And now, with an allusion both to
+the miracle and to the Jewish demand for the repetition of the manna
+sign, He claims to be the true Food for a starving world. So there are
+three things in my text: Christ's claim, His requirements, and His
+promise; the bread, the eating, the issues.
+
+I. Here is a claim of Christ's.
+
+As I have already said, in the whole wonderful conversation of which I
+have selected a portion for my text, there is a double reference to
+the miracle of the loaves and of the manna. What our Lord means to
+assert for Himself is that which is common to both of these--viz. that
+He supplies the great primal wants of humanity, the hunger of the
+heart. There may be another reference also, which I just notice
+without dwelling upon it. Barley loaves were the coarsest and least
+valuable form of bread. They were not only of little worth, but
+altogether inadequate to feeding the five thousand. The palates,
+unaccustomed to the stinging savours of the garlic and the leeks of
+Egypt, loathed the light bread. And so Jesus Christ comes into the
+world in lowly form, like the barley loaf or the light bread from
+which men whose tastes have been vitiated by the piquant savours of
+more earthly nourishment turn away as insipid. And yet He in His
+lowliness, He in His savourlessness, is that which meets the deepest
+wants of humanity, and is every man's fare because He will be any
+man's satisfaction.
+
+But I wish to bring before your notice the wonderful way in which our
+Lord, in this great dissertation concerning Himself as the Bread of
+Life, gradually unfolds the depths of His meaning and of His offer. He
+began with saying that He, the Son of Man, will give to men the bread
+that 'endures to everlasting life.' And then when that saying is but
+dimly understood, and yet awakes some strange new desires and
+appetites in the hearers, and they come to Him and ask, 'Lord,
+evermore give us this bread,' He answers them with opening another
+finger of His hand, as it were, and showing them a little more of the
+treasure that lies in His palm. For He says, 'I _am_ that Bread of
+Life.' That is an advance on the previous saying. He gives bread, and
+any man that was conscious of possessing some great truth or some
+great blessing which, believed and accepted, would refresh and nourish
+humanity, might have said the same thing. But now we pass into the
+_penumbra_ of a greater mystery: 'I am that Bread of Life.' You cannot
+separate what Christ gives from what Christ is. You can take the
+truths that another man proclaims, altogether irrespective of him and
+his personality. That only disturbs, and the sooner it is got rid of,
+the firmer and the purer our possession of the message for which he is
+only the medium. You can take Plato's teaching and do as you like with
+Plato. But you cannot take Christ's teaching and do as you like with
+Christ. His personality is the centre of His gift to the world. 'I am
+that Bread of Life.' That He should give it is much; that He should
+_be_ it is far more.
+
+And notice how, when He has thus drawn us a little further into the
+magic circle of the light, He not only asserts the inseparableness of
+His gift from His Person, but also asserts, with a reference, no
+doubt, to the manna, 'I am the Bread that came down from heaven.' The
+listeners immediately laid hold of that one point, and neglected for
+the moment all the rest, and they fixed with a true instinct--although
+it was for the purpose of contradicting it--on this central point,
+'that came down from heaven.' They said one to the other, 'How can
+this man say that He came down from heaven? Is not this Jesus the Son
+of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?' So, brethren, as the
+manna that descended from above in the dew of the night was to the
+bread that was baked in a baker's oven, so is the Christ to the
+manhood that has its origin in the natural processes of birth. The
+Incarnation of the Son of God, becoming Son of Man for us and for our
+salvation, is involved in this great claim. You do not get to the
+heart of Christ's message unless you have accepted this as the truth
+concerning Him, that 'in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was
+with God, and the Word was God,' and that at a definite point in the
+long process of the ages, 'the Word became flesh, and dwelt amongst
+us.' He will never be 'the Bread of Life' unless He is 'the Bread that
+came down from heaven.' For humanity needs that the blue heavens that
+bend remote above should come down; and we cannot be lifted 'out of
+the horrible pit and the miry clay' unless a Hand from above be
+reached down into the depths of our degradation, and lift us from our
+lowness. Heaven must come to earth, if earth is to rise to heaven. The
+ladder must be let down from above, if ever from the lower levels men
+are to ascend thither where at the summit the face of God can be seen.
+
+But that is not all. Our Lord, if I may recur to a former figure, went
+on to open another finger of His hand, and to show still more of the
+gift. For He not only said, 'the Son of Man gives the bread,' and 'I
+am the Bread that came down from heaven,' but He went on to say, in a
+subsequent stage of the conversation, 'the Bread that I will give is
+My flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.' Now, notice
+that '_will_ give.' Then, though the Word was made flesh, and the
+manna came down from heaven, the especial gift of His flesh for the
+life of the world was, at the time of His speaking, a future thing.
+And what He meant is still more clearly brought out, when we read
+other words which are the very climax of this conversation, when He
+declares that the condition of our having life in ourselves is our
+'eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of Man.' The
+figure is made repulsive on purpose, in order that it may provoke us
+to penetrate to its meaning. It was even more repulsive to the Jew,
+with his religious horror of touching or tasting anything in which the
+blood was. And yet our Lord not only speaks of Himself as the Bread,
+but of His flesh and blood as being the Food of the world. The
+separation of the two clearly indicates a violent death, and I, for my
+part, have no manner of doubt that, in these great words in which our
+Lord lays bare the deepest foundations of His claim to be the Food of
+humanity, there is couched, in the veiled language which was necessary
+at the then stage of His mission, a distinct reference to His death,
+as being the Sacrifice on which a hunger-stricken world may feed and
+be satisfied.
+
+So here we have, in three steps, the great central truth of the Gospel
+set forth in symbolical aspect: the Son that gives, the Son that is,
+the Bread of the world, and the death whereby His flesh and blood are
+separated and become the nourishment of all sin-stricken souls. I do
+not say one word to enforce these claims, but I beseech you deal
+fairly with these Gospel narratives, and do not go on picking out of
+them bits of Christ's actions or words, which commend themselves to
+you, and ignoring all the rest. There is no more reason to believe
+that Jesus Christ ever said, 'As ye would that men should do to you,
+do ye even so to them likewise,' or any other part of that Sermon on
+the Mount which some people take as their Christianity, than there is
+to believe that He said, 'The bread which I give is My flesh, which I
+will give for the life of the world.' Believe it or not, it is not
+dealing with the Scripture records as you deal with other historical
+records if, for subjective reasons, you brush aside all that
+department of our Lord's teaching. And if you do accept it, what
+becomes of His 'sweet reasonableness'? What becomes of His meekness
+and lowliness of heart? I was going to say what becomes of His sanity,
+that He should stand up, a youngish man from Nazareth, in the
+synagogue of Capernaum, and should say, 'I, heaven-descended, and
+slain by men, am the Bread of Life to the whole world'?
+
+I was going to make another observation, which I must just pass with
+the slightest notice, and that is that, taking this point of view and
+giving full weight to these three stages of our Lord's progressive
+revelation of Himself, we have the answer to the question, What is the
+connection between these discourses and the ordinance of the Lord's
+Supper? Our modern sacramentarian friends will have it that Jesus
+Christ is speaking of the Communion in this chapter. I take it, and I
+venture to think it the reasonable explanation, that He is not
+speaking about the Communion, but that this discourse and that rite
+are dealing with the same truths--the one in articulate words, the
+other in equivalent symbols. And so we have not to read into the text
+any allusion to the rite, but to see in the text and in the rite the
+proclamation of the same thing--viz. that the flesh and the blood of
+the Sacrifice for sins is the food on which a sinful and cleansed
+world may feed.
+
+II. So, secondly, let me ask you to note our Lord's requirement here.
+
+He carries on the metaphor. 'This is the Bread which cometh down from
+heaven, that a man may eat thereof and not die.' The eating
+necessarily follows from the symbol of the bread, as the designation
+of the way by which we all, with our hungry hearts, may feed upon this
+Bread of God. I need not remind you that in many a place, and in this
+whole context, we find the explanation of the symbol very plainly. In
+another part of this conversation we read, under another metaphor
+which comes to the same thing, 'He that cometh unto Me shall never
+hunger, and he that believeth on Me shall never thirst. So the eating
+and the coming are diverse symbols for the one thing, the believing.
+When a man eats he appropriates to himself, and incorporates into his
+very being, the food of which he partakes. And when a man trusts
+Christ he appropriates to himself, and incorporates into his inmost
+being, the very life of Jesus Christ. You say, 'That is mysticism';
+but it is the New Testament teaching, that when I trust Christ I get
+more than His gifts--I get Himself; that when my faith goes out to Him
+it not only rests me on Him, but it brings Him into me, and that food
+of the spirit becomes the life, as we shall see, of _my_ spirit.
+
+That condition is indispensable. It is useless to have food on your
+table or your plate or in your hand, it does not nourish you there:
+you must eat it, and then you gain sustenance from it. Many a hungry
+man has died at the door of a granary. Some of us are starving, though
+beside us there is 'the Bread of God that came down from heaven.'
+Brethren, you must eat, and I venture to put the question to
+you--_not_ Do you believe that Jesus Christ is the world's Saviour?
+_not_ Do you believe in an Incarnation? _not_ Do you believe in an
+Atonement? but Have you claimed your portion in the Bread? Have you
+taken it into your own lips? _Crede et manducasti_, said Augustine,
+'believe'--or, rather, _trust_--'and thou hast eaten.' Have _you_?
+
+Further, let me remind you that under this eating is included not only
+some initial act of faith, but a continuous course of partaking. The
+dinner you ate this day last year is of no use for to-day's hunger.
+The act of faith done long ago will not bring the Bread to nourish you
+now. You must repeat the meal. And very strikingly and beautifully in
+the last part of this conversation our Lord varies the word for
+eating, and substitutes--as if He were speaking to those who had
+fulfilled the previous condition--another one which implies the
+ruminant action of certain animals. And that is what Christian men
+have to do, to feed over and over and over again on the 'Bread of God
+which came down from heaven.' Christ, and especially in and through
+His death for us, can nourish and sustain our wills, giving them the
+pattern of what they should desire, and the motive for which they
+should desire it. Christ, and especially through His death, can feed
+our consciences, and take away from them all the painful sense of
+guilt, while He sharpens them to a far keener sensitiveness to evil.
+Christ, and especially through His death, can feed our understandings,
+and unveil therein the deepest truths concerning God and man,
+concerning man's destiny and God's mercy. Christ, and especially in
+His death, can feed our affections, and minister to love and desire
+and submission and hope their celestial nourishment. He is 'the Bread
+of God,' and we have but to eat of that which is laid before us.
+
+III. So, lastly, we have here the issues.
+
+'Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead.' This
+Bread secures that if 'a man eat thereof he shall not die.' The bread
+that perishes feeds a life that perishes; but this Bread not only
+sustains but creates a life that cannot perish, and, taken into the
+spirits of men that are 'dead in trespasses and sins,' imparts to them
+a life that has no affinity to evil, and therefore no dread of
+extinction.
+
+If 'a man eats thereof he shall not die,' Christ annihilates for us
+the mere accident of physical death. That is only a momentary jolt on
+the course. That may all be crammed into a parenthesis. 'He shall not
+die,' but live the true life which comes from the possession of union
+with Him who is the Life. The bread which we eat sustains life; the
+Bread which He gives originates it. The bread which we eat is
+assimilated to our bodily frame, the Bread which He gives assimilates
+our spiritual nature to His. And so it comes to be the only food that
+stills a hungry heart, the only food that satisfies and yet never
+cloys, which, eating, we are filled, and being filled are made capable
+of more, and, being capable of more, receive more. In blessed and
+eternal alternation, fruition and desire, satisfaction and appetite,
+go on.
+
+'Why do ye spend money for that which is not bread?' You cannot answer
+the question with any reasonable answer. Oh, dear friends! I beseech
+you, listen to that Lord who is saying to each of us, 'Take, eat, this
+is My body, which is broken for you.'
+
+
+
+
+ONE SAYING WITH TWO MEANINGS
+
+'Then said Jesus unto them, Yet a little while am I with you, and then
+I go unto Him that sent Me. 34. Ye shall seek Me, and shall not find
+Me: and where I am, thither ye cannot come.'--JOHN vii. 33, 34.
+
+'Little children, yet a little while I am with you. Ye shall seek Me;
+and as I said unto the Jews, Whither I go, ye cannot come; so now I
+say to you.'--JOHN xiii. 33.
+
+No greater contrast can be conceived than that between these two
+groups to whom such singularly similar words were addressed. The one
+consists of the officers, tools of the Pharisees and of the priests,
+who had been sent to seize Christ, and would fain have carried out
+their masters' commission, but were restrained by a strange awe,
+inexplicable even to themselves. The other consists of the little
+company of His faithful, though slow, scholars, who made a great many
+mistakes, and sometimes all but tired out even His patience, and yet
+were forgiven much because they loved much. Hatred animated one group,
+loving sorrow the other.
+
+Christ speaks to them both in nearly the same words, but with what a
+different tone, meaning, and application! To the officers the saying
+is an exhibition of His triumphant confidence that their malice is
+impotent and their arms paralysed; that when He wills He will _go_,
+not be dragged by them or any man, but go to a safe asylum, where foes
+can neither find nor follow. The officers do not understand what He
+means. They think that, bad Jew as they have always believed Him to
+be, He may very possibly consummate His apostasy by going over to the
+Gentiles altogether; but, at any rate, they feel that He is to escape
+their hands.
+
+The disciples understand little more as to whither He goes, as they
+themselves confess a moment after; but they gather from His words His
+loving pity, and though the upper side of the saying seems to be
+menacing and full of separation, there is an under side that suggests
+the possibility of a reunion for them.
+
+The words are nearly the same in both cases, but they are not
+absolutely identical. There are significant omissions and additions in
+the second form of them. 'Little children' is the tenderest of all the
+names that ever came from Christ's lips to His disciples, and never
+was heard on His lips except on this one occasion, for parting words
+ought to be very loving words. 'A little while I am with you,' but He
+does not say, 'And then I go to Him that sent Me.' 'Ye shall seek Me,'
+but He does not say, 'And shall not find Me.' 'As I said unto the
+Jews, whither I go ye cannot come, so now I say to you,' that little
+word 'now' makes the announcement a truth for the present only. His
+disciples shall not seek Him in vain, but when they seek they shall
+find. And though for a moment they be parted from Him, it is with the
+prospect and the confidence of reunion. Let us, then, look at the two
+main thoughts here. First, the two 'seekings,' the seeking which is
+vain, and the seeking which is never vain; and the two 'cannots,' the
+inability of His enemies for evermore to come where He is, and the
+inability of His friends, for a little season, to come where He is.
+
+I. The two seekings.
+
+As I have observed, there is a very significant omission in one of the
+forms of the words. The enemies are told that they will never find
+Him, but no such dark words are spoken to the friends. So, then,
+hostile seeking of the Christ is in vain, and loving seeking of Him by
+His friends, though they understand Him but very poorly, and therefore
+seek Him that they may know Him better, is always answered and
+over-answered.
+
+Let me deal just for a moment or two with each of these. In their
+simplest use the words of my first text merely mean this: 'You cannot
+touch Me, I am passing into a safe asylum where your hands can never
+reach Me.'
+
+We may generalise that for a moment, though it does not lie directly
+in our path, and preach the old blessed truth that no man with hostile
+intent seeking for Christ in His person, in His Gospel, or in His
+followers and friends, can ever find Him. All the antagonism that has
+stormed against Him and His cause and words, and His followers and
+lovers, has been impotent and vain. The pursuers are like dogs chasing
+a bird, sniffing along the ground after their prey, which all the
+while sits out of their reach on a bough, and carols to the sky. As in
+the days of His flesh, His foes could not touch His person till He
+chose, and vainly sought Him when it pleased Him to hide from them, so
+ever since, in regard to His cause, and in regard to all hearts that
+love Him, no weapon that is formed against them shall prosper. They
+shall be wrapped, when need be, in a cloud of protecting darkness, and
+stand safe within its shelter. Take good cheer, all you that are
+trying to do anything, however little, however secular it may appear
+to be, for the good and well-being of your fellows! All such service
+is a prolongation of Christ's work, and an effluence from His, if
+there be any good in it at all; and it is immortal and safe, as is
+His. 'Ye shall seek Me and shall not find Me.'
+
+But then, besides that, there is another thought. It is not merely
+hostile seeking of Him that is hopeless vain. When the dark days came
+over Israel, under the growing pressure of the Roman yoke, and amidst
+the agonies of that last siege, and the unutterable sufferings which
+all but annihilated the nation, do you not think that there were many
+of these people who said to themselves: 'Ah! if we had only that Jesus
+of Nazareth back with us for a day or two; if we had only listened to
+Him!' Do you not think that before Israel dissolved in blood there
+were many of those who had stood hostile or alienated, who desired to
+see 'one of the days of the Son of Man,' and did not see it? They
+sought Him, not in anger any more; they sought Him, not in penitence,
+or else they would have found Him; but they sought Him simply in
+distress, and wishing that they could have back again what they had
+cared so little for when they had it.
+
+And are there no people listening to me now, to whom these words
+apply?--
+
+  'He that will not, when he may,
+  When he will it shall be--Nay!'
+
+Although it is (blessed be His name) always true that a seeking heart
+finds Him, and whensoever there is the faintest trace of penitent
+desire to get hold of Christ's hand it does grasp ours, it is also
+true that things neglected once cannot be brought back; that the
+sowing time allowed to pass can never return; and that they who have
+turned, as some of you have turned, dear friends, all your lives, a
+deaf ear to the Christ that asks you to love Him and trust Him, may
+one day wish that it had been otherwise, and go to look for Him and
+not find Him.
+
+There is another kind of seeking that is vain, an intellectual seeking
+without the preparation of the heart. There are, no doubt, some people
+here to-day that would say, 'We have been seeking the truth about
+religion all our lives, and we have not got to it yet.' Well, I do not
+want to judge either your motives or your methods, but I know this,
+that there is many a man who goes on the quest for religious
+certainty, and looks _at_, if not _for_ Jesus Christ, and is not
+really capable of discerning Him when he sees Him, because his eye is
+not single, or because his heart is full of worldliness or
+indifference, or because he begins with a foregone conclusion, and
+looks for facts to establish that; or because he will not cast down
+and put away evil things that rise up between him and his Master.
+
+My brother! if you go to look for Jesus Christ with a heart full of
+the world, if you go to look for Him while you wish to hold on by all
+the habitudes and earthlinesses of your past, you will never find Him.
+The sensualist seeks for Him, the covetous man seeks for Him, the
+passionate, ill-tempered man seeks for Him; the woman plunged in
+frivolities, or steeped to the eyebrows in domestic cares,--these may
+in some feeble fashion go to look for Him and they will not find Him,
+because they have sought for Him with hearts overcharged with other
+things and filled with the affairs of this life, its trifles and its
+sins.
+
+I turn for a moment to the seeking that is not vain. 'Ye shall seek
+Me' is not on Christ's lips to any heart that loves Him, however
+imperfectly, a sentence of separation or an appointment of a sorrowful
+lot, but it is a blessed law, the law of the Christian life.
+
+That life is all one great seeking after Christ. Love seeks the absent
+when removed from our sight. If we care anything about Him at all, our
+hearts will turn to Him as naturally as, when the winter begins to
+pinch, the migrating birds seek the sunny south, impelled by an
+instinct that they do not themselves understand.
+
+The same law which sends loving thoughts out across the globe to seek
+for husband, child, or friend when absent, sets the really Christian
+heart seeking for the Christ, whom, having not seen, it loves, as
+surely as the ivy tendril feels out for a support. As surely as the
+roots of a mountain-ash growing on the top of a boulder feel down the
+side of the rock till they reach the soil; as surely as the stork
+follows the warmth to the sunny Mediterranean, so surely, if your
+heart loves Christ, will the very heart and motive of your action be
+the search for Him.
+
+And if you do _not_ seek Him, brother, as surely as He is parted from
+our sense you will lose Him, and He will be parted from you wholly,
+for there is no way by which a person who is not before our eyes may
+be kept near us except only by diligent effort on our part to keep
+thought and love and will all in contact with Him; thought meditating,
+love going out towards Him, will submitting. Unless there be this
+effort, you will lose your Master as surely as a little child in a
+crowd will lose his nurse and his guide, if his hand slips from out
+the protecting hand. The dark shadow of the earth on which you stand
+will slowly steal over His silvery brightness, as when the moon is
+eclipsed, and you will not know how you have lost Him, but only be
+sadly aware that your heaven is darkened. 'Ye shall seek Me,' is the
+condition of all happy communion between Christ and us.
+
+And that seeking, dear brother, in the threefold form in which I have
+spoken of it--effort to keep Him in our thoughts, in our love, and
+over our will--is neither a seeking which starts from a sense that we
+do not possess Him, nor one which ends in disappointment. But we seek
+for Him because we already have Him in a measure, and we seek Him that
+we may possess Him more abundantly, and anything is possible rather
+than that such a search shall be vain. Men may go to created wells,
+and find no water, and return ashamed, and with their vessels empty,
+but every one who seeks for that Fountain of salvation shall draw from
+it with joy. It is as impossible that a heart which desires Jesus
+Christ shall not have Him, as it is that lungs dilated shall not fill
+with air, or as it is that an empty vessel put out in a rainfall shall
+not be replenished. He does not hide Himself, but He desires to be
+found. May I say that as a mother will sometimes pretend to her child
+to hide, that the child's delight may be the greater in searching and
+in finding, so Christ has gone away from our sight in order, for one
+reason, that He may stimulate our desires to feel after Him! If we
+seek Him hid in God, we shall find Him for the joy of our hearts.
+
+A great thinker once said that he would rather have the search after
+truth than the possession of truth. It was a rash word, but it pointed
+to the fact that there is a search which is only one shade less
+blessed than the possession. And if that be so in regard to any pure
+and high truth, it is still more so about Christ Himself. To seek for
+Him is joy; to find Him is joy. What can be a happier life than the
+life of constant pursuit after an infinitely precious object, which is
+ever being sought and ever being found; sought with a profound
+consciousness of its preciousness, found with a widening appreciation
+and capacity for its enjoyment? 'Ye shall seek Me' is a word not of
+evil but of good cheer; for buried in the depth of the commandment to
+search is the promise that we shall find.
+
+II, Secondly, let us look briefly at these two 'cannots.'
+
+'Whither I go, ye cannot come,' says He to His enemies, with no
+limitation, with no condition. The 'cannot' is absolute and permanent,
+so long as they retain their enmity. To His friends, on the other
+hand, He says, 'So now I say to you,' the law for to-day, the law for
+this side the flood, but not the law for the beyond, as He explains
+more fully in the subsequent words: 'Thou canst not follow Me now, but
+thou shalt follow Me afterwards.'
+
+So, then, Christ is somewhere. When He passed from life it was not
+into a state only, but into a place; and He took with Him a material
+body, howsoever changed. He is somewhere, and there friend and enemy
+alike cannot enter, so long as they are compassed with 'the earthly
+house of this tabernacle.' But the incapacity is deeper than that. No
+sinful man can pass thither. Where has He gone? The preceding words
+give us the answer. 'God shall glorify Him in Himself.' The prospect
+of that assumption into the inmost glory of the divine nature directly
+led our Lord to think of the change it would bring about in the
+relation of His humble friends to Him. While for Himself He triumphs
+in the prospect, He cannot but turn a thought to their lonesomeness,
+and hence come the words of our text. He has passed into the bosom and
+blaze of divinity. Can I walk there, can I pass into that tremendous
+fiery furnace? 'Who shall dwell with the everlasting burnings?' 'Ye
+cannot follow Me now.' No man can go thither except Christ goes
+thither.
+
+There are deep mysteries lying in that word of our Lords,--'I go to
+prepare a place for you.' We know not what manner of activity on His
+part that definitely means. It seems as if somehow or other the
+presence in Heaven of our Brother in His glorified humanity was
+necessary in order that the golden pavement should be trodden by our
+feet, and that our poor, feeble manhood should live and not be
+shrivelled up in the blaze of that central brightness.
+
+We know not how He prepares the place, but heaven, whatever it be, is
+no place for a man unless the Man, Christ Jesus, be there. He is the
+Revealer of God, not only for earth, but for heaven; not only for
+time, but for eternity. 'No man cometh unto the Father but by Me,' is
+true everywhere and always, there as here. So I suppose that, but for
+His presence, heaven itself would be dark, and its King invisible, and
+if a man could enter there he would either be blasted with unbearable
+flashes of brightness or grope at its noonday as the blind, because
+his eye was not adapted to such beams. Be that as it may, 'the
+Forerunner is for us entered.' He has gone before, because He knows
+the great City, 'His own calm home, His habitation from eternity.' He
+has gone before to make ready a lodging for us, in whose land He has
+dwelt so long, and He will meet us, who would else be bewildered like
+some dweller in a desert if brought to the capital, when we reach the
+gates, and guide our unaccustomed steps to the mansion prepared for
+us.
+
+But the power to enter there, even when He is there, depends on our
+union with Christ by faith. When we are joined to Him, the absolute
+'cannot,' based upon flesh, and still more upon sin, which is a
+radical and permanent impossibility, is changed into a relative and
+temporary incapacity. If we have faith in Christ, and are thereby
+drawing a kindred life from Him, our nature will be in process of
+being changed into that which is capable of bearing the brilliance of
+the felicities of heaven. But just as these friends of Christ, though
+they loved Him very truly, and understood Him a little, were a long
+way from being ready to follow Him, and needed the schooling of the
+Cross, and Olivet, and Pentecost, as well as the discipline of life
+and toil, before they were fully ripe for the harvest, so we, for the
+most part, have to pass through analogous training before we are
+prepared for the place which Christ has prepared for us. Certainly, so
+soon as a heart has trusted Christ, it is capable of entering where He
+is, and the real reason why the disciples could not come where He went
+was that they did not yet clearly know Him as the divine Sacrifice for
+theirs and the world's sins, and, however much they believed in Him as
+Messiah, had not yet, nor could have, the knowledge on which they
+could found their trust in Him as their Saviour.
+
+But, while that is true, it is also true that each advance in the
+grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour will bring with it
+capacity to advance further into the heart of the far-off land, and to
+see more of the King in His beauty. So, as long as His friends were
+wrapped in such dark clouds of misconception and error, as long as
+their Christian characters were so imperfect and incomplete as they
+were at the time of my text being spoken, they could not go thither
+and follow Him. But it was a diminishing impossibility, and day by day
+they approximated more and more to His likeness, because they
+understood Him more, and trusted Him more, and loved Him more, and
+grew towards Him, and, therefore, day by day became more and more able
+to enter into that Kingdom.
+
+Are you growing in power so to do? Is the only thing which unfits you
+for heaven the fact that you have a mortal body? In other respects are
+you fit to go into that heaven, and walk in its brightness and not be
+consumed? The answer to the question is found in another one--Are you
+joined to Jesus Christ by simple faith? The incapacity is absolute and
+eternal if the enmity is eternal.
+
+State and place are determined yonder by character, and character is
+determined by faith. Take a bottle of some solution in which
+heterogeneous substances have all been melted up together, and let it
+stand on a shelf and gradually settle down, and its contents will
+settle in regular layers, the heaviest at the bottom and the lightest
+at the top, and stratify themselves according to gravity. And that is
+how the other world is arranged--stratified. When all the confusions
+of this present are at an end, and all the moisture is driven off, men
+and women will be left in layers, like drawing to like. As Peter said
+about Judas with equal wisdom and reticence, 'He went to his own
+place.' That is where we shall all go, to the place we are fit for.
+
+God does not slam the door of heaven in anybody's face; it stands wide
+open. But there is a mystic barrier, unseen, but most real, more
+repellent than cherub and flaming sword, which makes it impossible for
+any foot to cross that threshold except the foot of the man whose
+heart and nature have been made Christlike, and fitted for heaven by
+simple faith in Him.
+
+Love Him and trust Him, and then your life on earth will be a blessed
+seeking and a blessed finding of Him whom to seek is joyous effort,
+whom to find is an Elysium of rest. You will walk here not parted from
+Him, but with your thoughts and your love, which are your truest self,
+going up where He is, until you drop 'the muddy vesture of decay'
+which unfits you whilst you wear it for the presence-chamber of the
+King, and so you will enter in and be 'for ever with the Lord.'
+
+
+
+
+THE ROCK AND THE WATER
+
+'In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried,
+saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto Me, and drink. 38. He
+that believeth on Me, as the Scripture hath said, out of his belly
+shall flow rivers of living water.'--JOHN vii. 37,38.
+
+The occasion and date of this great saying are carefully given by the
+Evangelist, because they throw much light on its significance and
+importance. It was 'on the last day, that great day of the Feast,'
+that 'Jesus stood and cried.' The Feast was that of Tabernacles, which
+was instituted in order to keep in mind the incidents of the desert
+wandering. On the anniversary of this day the Jews still do as they
+used to, and in many a foul ghetto and frowsy back street of European
+cities, you will find them sitting beneath the booths of green
+branches, commemorating the Exodus and its wonders. Part of that
+ceremonial was that on each morning of the seven, and possibly on the
+eighth, 'the last day of the Feast,' a procession of white-robed
+priests wound down the rocky footpath from the Temple to Siloam, and
+there in a golden vase drew water from the spring, chanting, as they
+ascended and re-entered the Temple gates where they poured out the
+water as a libation, the words of the prophet, 'with joy shall ye draw
+water out of the wells of salvation.'
+
+Picture the scene to yourselves--the white-robed priests toiling up
+the pathway, the crowd in the court, the sparkling water poured out
+with choral song. And then, as the priests stood with their empty
+vases, there was a little stir in the crowd, and a Man who had been
+standing watching, lifted up a loud voice and cried, 'If any man
+thirst, let him come unto _Me_, and drink.' Strange words to say,
+anywhere and anywhen, daring words to say there in the Temple court!
+For there and then they could mean nothing less than Christ's laying
+His hand on that old miracle, which was pointed to by the rite, when
+the rock yielded the water, and asserting that all which it did and
+typified was repeated, fulfilled, and transcended in Himself, and that
+not for a handful of nomads in the wilderness, but for all the world,
+in all its generations.
+
+So here is one more instance to add to those to which I have directed
+your attention on former occasions, in which, in this Gospel, we find
+Christ claiming to be the fulfilment of incidents and events in that
+ancient covenant, Jacob's ladder, the brazen serpent, the manna, and
+now the rock that yielded the water. He says of them all that they are
+the shadow, and the substance is in Him.
+
+I. So then, we have to look, first, at Christ's view of humanity as
+set forth here.
+
+You remember the story of how the people in the wilderness, distressed
+by that most imperative of all physical cravings, thirst, turned upon
+Moses and Aaron and said, 'Why have ye brought us here to die in the
+wilderness, where there are neither vines nor pomegranates,' but a
+land of thirst and death? Just as Christ, in the former instances to
+which we have already referred, selected and pointed to the poisoned
+and serpent-stricken camp as an emblem of humanity, and just as He
+pointed to the hunger of the men that were starving there, as an
+emblem, go here He says: 'That is the world--a congregation of thirsty
+men raging in their pangs, and not knowing where to find solace or
+slaking for their thirst.' I do not need to go over all the dominant
+desires that surge up in men's souls, the mind craving for knowledge,
+the heart calling out for love, the whole nature feeling blindly and
+often desperately after something external to itself, which it can
+grasp, and in which it can feel satisfied. You know them; we all know
+them. Like some plant growing in a cellar, and with feeble and
+blanched tendrils feeling towards the light which is so far away,
+every man carries about within himself a whole host of longing
+desires, which need to find something round which they may twine, and
+in which they can be at rest.
+
+'The misery of man is great upon him,' because, having these desires,
+he misreads so many of them, and stifles, ignores, atrophies to so
+large an extent the noblest of them. I know of no sadder tragedy than
+the way in which we misinterpret the meaning of these inarticulate
+cries that rise from the depths of our hearts, and misunderstand what
+it is that we are groping after, when we put out empty, and, alas! too
+often unclean, hands, to lay hold on our true good.
+
+Brethren, you do not know what you want, many of you, and there is
+something pathetic in the endless effort to fill up the heart by a
+multitude of diverse and small things, when all the while the deepest
+meaning of aspirations, yearnings, longings, unrest, discontent is,
+'My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God.' Nothing less than
+infinitude will satisfy the smallest heart of the humblest and least
+developed man. Nothing less than to have all our treasures in one
+accessible, changeless Infinity will ever give rest to a human soul.
+You have tried a multiplicity of trifles. It takes a great many bags
+of coppers to make up L. 1000, and they are cumbrous to carry. Would
+it not be better to part with a multitude of goodly pearls, if need
+be, in order to have all your wealth, and the satisfaction of all your
+desires, in the 'One Pearl of great price'? It is God for whom men are
+thirsting, and, alas! so many of us know it not. As the old prophet
+says, in words that never lose their pathetic power, 'they have hewn
+out for themselves cisterns'--one is not enough--they need many. They
+are only cisterns, which hold what is put into them, and they are
+'broken cisterns,' which cannot hold it. Yet we turn to these with a
+strange infatuation, which even the experience that teaches fools does
+not teach us to be folly. We turn _to_ these; and we turn _from_ the
+Fountain; the one, the springing, the sufficient, the unfailing, the
+exuberant Fountain of living waters. Some of you have cisterns on the
+tops of your houses, with a coating of green scum and soot on them,
+and do you like that foul draught better than the bright blessing that
+comes out of the heart of the rock, flashing and pure?
+
+But not only are these desires misread, but the noblest of them are
+stifled. I have said that the condition of humanity is that of thirst.
+Christ speaks in my text as if that thirst was by no means universal,
+and, alas! it is not, '_If_ any man thirst'; there are some of us that
+do not, for we are all so constituted that, unless by continual
+self-discipline, and self-suppression, and self-evolution, the lower
+desires will overgrow the loftier ones, and kill them, as weeds will
+some precious crop. And some of you are so much taken up with
+gratifying the lowest necessities and longings of your nature, that
+you leave the highest all uncared for, and the effect of that is that
+the unsatisfied longing avenges itself, for your neglect of it, by
+infusing unrest and dissatisfaction into what else would satisfy the
+lowest. 'He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver, nor
+he that loveth abundance with increase,' but he that loves God will be
+satisfied with less than silver, and will continue satisfied when
+decrease comes. If you would suck the last drop of sweetness out of
+the luscious purple grapes that grow on earth, you must have the
+appetite after the best things, recognised, and ministered to, and
+satisfied. And when we are satisfied with God, we shall 'have learnt
+in whatsoever state we are, therewith to be self-sufficing.' But, as I
+say, the highest desires are neglected, and the lowest are cockered
+and pampered, and so the taste is depraved. Many of you have no wish
+for God, and no desire after high and noble things, and are perfectly
+contented to browse on the low levels, or to feed on 'the husks that
+the swine do eat,' whilst all the while the loftiest of your powers is
+starving within. Brethren, before we can come to the Rock that yields
+the water, there must be the sense of need. Do you know what it is
+that you want? Have you any desire after righteousness and purity and
+nobleness, and the vision of God flaming in upon the pettinesses and
+commonplaces of this life which is 'sound and fury, signifying
+nothing,' and is trivial in all its pretended greatness, unless you
+have learned that you need God most of all, and will never be at rest
+till you have Him?
+
+II. Secondly, note here Christ's consciousness of Himself.
+
+Is there anything in human utterances more majestic and wonderful than
+this saying of my text, 'If any man thirst, let him come to Me'? There
+He claims to be separate altogether from those whose thirst He would
+satisfy. There He claims to be able to meet every aspiration, every
+spiritual want, every true desire in this complex nature of ours.
+There He claims to be able to do this for one, and therefore for all.
+There He claims to be able to do it for all the generations of
+mankind, right away down to the end. Who is He who thus plants Himself
+in the front of the race, knows their deep thirsts, takes account of
+the impotence of anything created to satisfy them, assumes the divine
+prerogative, and says, 'I come to satisfy every desire in every soul,
+to the end of time'? Yes, and from that day when He stood in the
+Temple and cried these words, down to this day, there have been, and
+there are, millions who can say, 'We have drawn water from this
+fountain of salvation, and it has never failed us.' Christ's audacious
+presentation of Himself to the world as adequate to fill all its
+needs, and slake all its thirst, has been verified by nineteen
+centuries of experience, and there are many men and women all over the
+world to-day who would be ready to set to their seals that Christ is
+true, and that He, indeed, is all-sufficient for the soul.
+
+Brethren, I do not wish to dwell upon this aspect of our Lord's
+character in more than a sentence, but I beseech you to ask yourselves
+what is the impression that is left of the character of a man who says
+such things, unless He was something more than one of our race? Jesus
+Christ, it is as clear as day, in these words makes a claim which only
+divinity can warrant Him in making, or can fulfil when it is made. And
+I would urge you to consider what the alternative is, if you do not
+believe that Jesus Christ here sets Himself forth as the Incarnate
+Word of God, sufficient for all humanity. 'I am meek and lowly in
+heart'--and His lowliness of heart is proved in a strange fashion, if
+He stands up before the race and says, 'If any man thirst, let him
+come unto Me and drink.'
+
+III. Note, further, Christ's invitation.
+
+'Let him come ... and drink'--two expressions for one thing. That
+invitation sounds all through Scripture, and, perhaps, there was
+lingering in our Lord's mind, besides the reference to the rock that
+yielded the water, some echo of the words of the second Isaiah: 'Ho!
+every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.' 'Nay!' said Christ,
+'not to the waters, but to Me.' And then we hear from His own lips the
+same invitation addressed to the woman of Samaria, with the difference
+that to her, an alien, He pointed only to the natural water in the
+well that had been Jacob's, whereas, to these people, the descendants
+of the chosen race, He pointed to the miracle in the desert, and
+claimed to fulfil that. And on the very last page of Scripture, as it
+is now arranged, there stands the echo again of this saying of my
+text, 'Let him that is athirst come'--there must be the sense of need,
+as I was saying, before there is the coming--'and whosoever will, let
+him take of the water of life freely.'
+
+Now, dear friends, beneath these two metaphorical expressions there
+lies one simple condition. I put it into three words, which, for the
+sake of being easily remembered, I cast into an alliterative form:
+approach Christ, appropriate Christ, adhere to Christ.
+
+Approach Christ. You come by faith, you come by love, you come by
+communion. And you can come if you will, though He is now on the
+throne.
+
+Appropriate Christ. It is vain that the water should be gushing from
+the rock there, unless you make it your own by drinking. It must pass
+your lips. It must become your personal possession. You must enclose a
+piece of the common, and make it your very own. 'He loved _us_, and
+gave Himself for _us_'; well and good, but strike out the 'us' and put
+in 'me.' 'He loved _me_ and gave Himself for _me_.' The river may be
+flowing right past your door, yet your lips may be cracked with
+thirst, even whilst you hear the tinkle of its music amongst the
+sedges and the pebbles. Appropriate Christ. 'Come ... and drink.'
+
+Adhere to Christ. You were thirsty yesterday: you drank. That will not
+slake to-day's thirst, nor prevent its recurrence. And you must keep
+on drinking if you are to keep from perishing of thirst. Day by day,
+drop by drop, draught by draught, you must drink. According to the
+ancient Jewish legend, which Paul in one of his letters refers to,
+about this very miracle, you must have the Rock following you all
+through your desert pilgrimage, and you must drink daily and hourly,
+by continual faith, love, and communion.
+
+IV. We have here not only these points, but a fourth. Christ's
+promise.
+
+'He that believeth on Me, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living
+water.' That is one case of the universal law that a man who trusts
+Christ becomes like the Christ whom he trusts. Derivatively and by
+impartation, no doubt, but still the man who has gone to that Rock, to
+the springing fountain as it pushes forth, receives into himself an
+inward life by the communication of Christ's divine Spirit, so that he
+has in him a fountain 'springing up into life everlasting.' The Book
+of Proverbs says, 'The good man shall be satisfied from himself,' but
+the good man is only satisfied from himself when he can say, 'I live,
+yet not I, but Christ liveth in me,' and from that better self he will
+be satisfied.
+
+So we may have a well in the courtyard, and may be able to bear in
+ourselves the fountain of water, and where the divine life of Christ
+by His Spirit has through faith been implanted within us, it will come
+out from us. There is a question for you Christian people--do any
+rivers of living water flow out of you? If they do not, it is to be
+doubted whether you have drunk of the fountain. There are many
+professing Christians who are like the foul little rivers that pass
+under the pavements in Manchester, all impure, and covered over so
+that nobody sees them. 'Out of him shall flow rivers of living
+water'--that is Christ's way of communicating the blessing of eternal
+life to the world--by the medium of those who have already received
+it. Christian men and women, if your faith has brought the life into
+you, see to it that approaching Christ, and appropriating Christ, and
+adhering to Christ, you are becoming assimilated to Christ, and in
+your daily life, God's grace fructifying through you to all, are
+'become as rivers of water in a dry place, and the shadow of a great
+rock in a weary land.'
+
+
+
+
+THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD
+
+'... I am the light of the world: he that followeth Me shall not walk
+in darkness, but shall have the light of life.'--JOHN viii. 12.
+
+Jesus Christ was His own great theme. Whatever be the explanation of
+the fact, there stands the fact that, if we know anything at all about
+His habitual tone of teaching, we know that it was full of Himself. We
+know, too, that what He said about Himself was very unlike the
+language becoming a wise and humble religious teacher. Both the
+prominence given to His own personality, and the tremendous claims He
+advances for Himself, are hard to reconcile with any conception of His
+nature and work except one,--that there we see God manifest in the
+flesh. Are such words as these fit to be spoken by any man conscious
+of his own limitations and imperfections of life and knowledge? Would
+they not be fatal to any one's pretensions to be a teacher of religion
+or morality? They assert that the Speaker is the Source of
+illumination for the world; the only Source; the Source for all. They
+assert that 'following' Him, whether in belief or in deed, is the sure
+deliverance from all darkness, either of error or of sin; and implants
+in every follower a light which is life. And the world, instead of
+turning away from such monstrous assumptions, and drowning them in
+scornful laughter, or rebelling against them, has listened, and
+largely believed, and has not felt them to mar the beauty of meekness,
+which, by a strange anomaly, this Man says that He has.
+
+Words parallel to these are frequent on our Lord's lips. In each
+instance they have some special appropriateness of application, as is
+probably the case here. The suggestion has been reasonably made, that
+there is an allusion in them to part of the ceremonial connected with
+the Feast of Tabernacles, at which we find our Lord present in the
+previous chapter. Commentators tell us that on the first evening of
+the Feast, two huge golden lamps, which stood one on each side of the
+altar of burnt offering in the Temple court, were lighted as the night
+began to fall, and poured out a brilliant flood over Temple and city
+and deep gorge; while far into the midnight, troops of rejoicing
+worshippers clustered about them with dance and song. The possibility
+of this reference is strengthened by the note of place which our
+Evangelist gives. 'These things spake Jesus in the treasury, as He
+taught in the Temple,' for the 'treasury' stood in the same court, and
+doubtless the golden lamps were full in sight of the listening groups.
+It is also strengthened by the unmistakable allusion in the previous
+chapter to another portion of the ceremonial of the Feast, where our
+Lord puts forth another of His great self-revelations and demands, in
+singular parallelism with that of our text, in the words, 'If any man
+thirst, let him come unto Me and drink.' That refers to the custom
+during the Feast of drawing water from the fountain of Siloam, which
+was poured out on the altar, while the gathered multitude chanted the
+old strain of Isaiah's prophecy: 'With joy shall ye draw water out of
+the wells of salvation.' It is to be remembered, too, in estimating
+the probability of our text belonging to these Temple-sayings at the
+Feast, that the section which separates it from them, and contains the
+story about the woman taken in adultery, is judged by the best critics
+to be out of place here, and is not found in the most valuable
+manuscripts. If, then, we suppose this allusion to be fairly probable,
+I think it gives a special direction and meaning to these grand words,
+which it may be worth while to think of briefly.
+
+The first thing to notice is--the intention of the ceremonial to which
+our Lord here points as a symbol of Himself. What was the meaning of
+these great lights that went flashing through the warm autumn nights
+of the festival? All the parts of that Feast were intended to recall
+some feature of the forty years' wanderings in the wilderness; the
+lights by the altar were memorials of the pillar of cloud by day and
+of fire by night. When, then, Jesus says, 'I am the Light of the
+world,' He would declare Himself as being in reality, and to every
+soul of man to the end of time, what that cloud with its heart of fire
+was in outward seeming to one generation of desert wanderers.
+
+Now, the main thing which _it_ was to these, was the visible vehicle
+of the divine presence. 'The Lord went before them in a pillar of a
+cloud.' 'The Lord looked through the pillar.' 'The Lord came down in
+the cloud and spake with him.' The 'cloud covered the Tabernacle, and
+the glory of the Lord appeared.' Such is the way in which it is ever
+spoken of, as being the manifestation to Israel in sensible form of
+the presence among them of God their King. 'The glory of the Lord' has
+a very specific meaning in the Old Testament. It usually signifies
+that brightness, the flaming heart of the cloudy pillar, which for the
+most part, as it would appear, veiled by the cloud, gathered radiance
+as the world grew darker at set of sun, and sometimes, at great crises
+in the history, as at the Red Sea, or on Sinai, or in loving communion
+with the law-giver, or in swift judgment against the rebels, rent the
+veil and flamed on men's eyes. I need not remind you how this same
+pillar of cloud and fire, which at once manifested and hid God, was
+thereby no unworthy symbol of Him who remains, after all revelation,
+unrevealed. Whatsoever sets forth, must also shroud, the infinite
+glory. Concerning all by which He makes Himself known to eye, or mind,
+or heart, it must be said, 'And there was the hiding of His power.'
+The fire is ever folded in the cloud. Nay, at bottom, the light which
+is full of glory is therefore inaccessible, and the thick darkness in
+which He dwells is but the 'glorious privacy' of perfect light.
+
+That guiding pillar, which moved before the moving people--a cloud to
+shelter from the scorching heat, a fire to cheer in the blackness of
+night--spread itself above the sanctuary of the wilderness; and 'the
+glory of the Lord filled the Tabernacle.' When the moving Tabernacle
+gave place to the fixed Temple, again '_the_ cloud filled the house of
+the Lord'; and there--dwelling between the cherubim, the types of the
+whole order of creatural life, and above the mercy-seat, that spoke of
+pardon, and the ark that held the law, and behind the veil, in the
+thick darkness of the holy of holies, where no feet trod, save once a
+year one white-robed priest, in the garb of a penitent, and bearing
+the blood that made atonement--shone the light of the glory of God,
+the visible majesty of the present Deity.
+
+But long centuries had passed since that light had departed. 'The
+glory' had ceased from the house that now stood on Zion, and the light
+from between the cherubim. Shall we not, then, see a deep meaning and
+reference to that awful blank, when Jesus standing there in the courts
+of that Temple, whose inmost shrine was, in a most sad sense, empty,
+pointed to the quenched lamps that commemorated a departed Shechinah,
+and said, 'I am the Light of the world'?
+
+He is the Light of the world, because in Him is the glory of God. His
+words are madness, and something very like blasphemy, unless they are
+vindicated by the visible indwelling in Him of the present God. The
+cloud of the humanity, 'the veil, that is to say, His flesh,' enfolds
+and tempers; and through its transparent folds reveals, even while it
+swathes, the Godhead. Like some fleecy vapour flitting across the sun,
+and irradiated by its light, it enables our weak eyes to see light,
+and not darkness, in the else intolerable blaze. Yes! Thou art the
+Light of the world, because in Thee dwelleth 'the fulness of the
+Godhead bodily.' Thy servant hath taught us the meaning of Thy words,
+when he said: 'The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us; and we
+beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,
+full of grace and truth.'
+
+Then, subordinate to this principal thought, is the other on which I
+may touch for a moment--that Christ, like that pillar of cloud and
+fire, _guides_ us in our pilgrimage. You may remember how emphatically
+the Book of Numbers (chap. ix.) dwells upon the absolute control of
+all the marches and halts by the movements of the cloud. When it was
+taken up, they journeyed; when it settled down, they encamped. As long
+as it lay spread above the Tabernacle, there they stayed. Impatient
+eyes might look, and impatient spirits chafe--no matter. The camp
+might be pitched in a desolate place, away from wells and palm-trees,
+away from shade, among fiery serpents, and open to fierce foes--no
+matter. As long as the pillar was motionless, no man stirred. Weary
+slow days might pass in this compulsory inactivity; but 'whether it
+were two days, or a month, or a year, that the cloud tarried upon the
+Tabernacle, the children of Israel journeyed not.' And whenever It
+lifted itself up,--no matter how short had been the halt, how weary
+and footsore the people, how pleasant the resting-place--up with the
+tent-pegs immediately, and away. If the signal were given at midnight,
+when all but the watchers slept, or at midday, it was all the same.
+There was the true Commander of their march. It was not Moses, nor
+Jethro, with his quick Arab eye and knowledge of the ground, that
+guided them; but that stately, solemn pillar, that floated before
+them. How they must have watched for the gathering up of its folds as
+they lay softly stretched along the Tabernacle roof; and for its
+sinking down, and spreading itself out, like a misty hand of blessing,
+as it sailed in the van!
+
+'I am the Light of the world.' We have in Him a better guide through
+worse perplexities than theirs. By His Spirit within us, by that
+all-sufficient and perfect example of His life, by the word of His
+Gospel, and by the manifold indications of His providence, Jesus
+Christ is our Guide. If ever we go astray, it is not His fault, but
+ours. How gentle and loving that guidance is, none who have not
+yielded to it can tell. How wise and sure, none but those who have
+followed it know. He does not say 'Go,' but 'Come.' When He puts forth
+His sheep, He goes before them. In all rough places His quick hand is
+put out to save us. In danger He lashes us to Himself, as Alpine
+guides do when there is perilous ice to get across. As one of the
+psalms puts it, with wonderful beauty: 'I will guide thee with Mine
+eye'--a glance, not a blow--a look of directing love, that at once
+heartens to duty and tells duty. We must be very near Him to catch
+that look, and very much in sympathy with Him to understand it; and
+when we do, we must be swift to obey. Our eyes must be ever toward the
+Lord, or we shall often be marching on, unwitting that the pillar has
+spread itself for rest, or idly dawdling in our tents long after the
+cloud has gathered itself up for the march. Do not let impatience lead
+you to hasty interpretation of His plans before they are fairly
+evolved. Many men by self-will, by rashness, by precipitate hurry in
+drawing conclusions about what they ought to do, have ruined their
+lives. Take care, in the old-fashioned phrase, of 'running before you
+are sent.' There should always be a good clear space between the
+guiding ark and you, 'about two thousand cubits by measure,' that
+there may be no mistakes about the road. It is neither reverent nor
+wise to be treading on the heels of our Guide in our eager confidence
+that we know where He wants us to go.
+
+Do not let the warmth by the camp-fire, or the pleasantness of the
+shady place where your tent is pitched, keep you there when the cloud
+lifts. Be ready for change, be ready for continuance, because you are
+in fellowship with your Leader and Commander; and let Him say, Go, and
+you go; Do this, and you gladly do it, until the hour when He will
+whisper, Come; and, as you come, the river will part, and the journey
+will be over, and 'the fiery, cloudy pillar,' that 'guided you all
+your journey through,' will spread itself out an abiding glory, in
+that higher home where 'the Lamb is the light thereof.'
+
+All true following of Christ begins with faith, or we might almost say
+that following _is_ faith, for we find our Lord substituting the
+former expression for the latter in another passage of this Gospel
+parallel with the present. 'I am come a Light into the world, that
+whosoever believeth on Me should not walk in darkness.' The two ideas
+are not equivalent, but faith is the condition of following; and
+following is the outcome and test, because it is the operation, of
+faith. None but they who trust Him will follow Him. He who does not
+follow, does not trust. To follow Christ, means to long and strive
+after His companionship; as the Psalmist says, 'My soul followeth hard
+after Thee.' It means the submission of the will, the effort of the
+whole nature, the daily conflict to reproduce His example, the
+resolute adoption of His command as my law, His providence as my will,
+His fellowship as my joy. And the root and beginning of all such
+following is in coming to Him, conscious of mine own darkness, and
+trustful in His great light. We must rely on a Guide before we accept
+His directions; and it is absurd to pretend that we trust Him, if we
+do not go as He bids us. So 'Follow thou Me' is, in a very real sense,
+the sum of all Christian duty.
+
+That thought opens out very wide fields, into which we must not even
+glance now; but I cannot help pausing here to repeat the remark
+already made, as to the gigantic and incomprehensible self-confidence
+that speaks here. 'Followeth _Me_'; then Jesus Christ calmly proposes
+Himself as the aim and goal for every soul of man; sets up His own
+doings as an all-sufficient rule for us all, with all our varieties of
+temper, character, culture, and work, and quietly assumes to have a
+right of precedence before, and of absolute command over, the whole
+world. They are all to keep _behind_ Him, He thinks, be they saints or
+sages, kings or beggars; and the liker they are to Himself, He thinks,
+the nearer they will be to perfectness and life. He puts Himself at
+the head of the mystic march of the generations, and, like the
+mysterious Angel that Joshua saw in the plain by Jericho, makes the
+lofty claim: 'Nay, but as _Captain_ of the Lord's host am I come up.'
+Do we admit His claim because we know His Name? Do we yield Him full
+trust because we have learned that He is the Light of men since He is
+the Word of God? Do we follow Him with loyal obedience, longing love,
+and lowly imitation, since He has been and is to us the Saviour of our
+souls?
+
+In the measure in which we do, the great promises of this wonderful
+saying will be verified and understood by us--'He that followeth Me
+shall not walk in darkness.' That saying has, as one may say, a lower
+and a higher fulfilment. In the lower, it refers to practical life and
+its perplexities. Nobody who has not tried it would believe how many
+difficulties are cleared out of a man's road by the simple act of
+trying to follow Christ. No doubt there will still remain obscurities
+enough as to what we ought to do, to call for the best exercise of
+patient wisdom; but an enormous proportion of them vanish like mist
+when the sun breaks through, when once we honestly set ourselves to
+find out whither the pillared Light is guiding. It is a reluctant
+will, and intrusive likings and dislikings, that obscure the way for
+us, much oftener than real obscurity in the way itself. It is seldom
+impossible to discern the divine will, when we only wish to know it
+that we may do it. And if ever it is impossible for us, surely that
+impossibility is like the cloud resting on the Tabernacle--a sign that
+for the present His will is that we should be still, and wait, and
+watch.
+
+But there is a higher meaning in the words than even this promise of
+practical direction. In the profound symbolism of Scripture,
+especially of this Gospel, 'darkness' is the name for the whole
+condition of the soul averted from God. So our Lord here is declaring
+that to follow Him is the true deliverance from that midnight of the
+soul. There are a darkness of ignorance, a darkness of impurity, a
+darkness of sorrow; and in that threefold gloom, thickening to a
+darkness of death, are they enwrapt who follow not the Light. That is
+the grim, tragical side of this saying, too sad, too awful for our
+lips to speak much of, and best left in the solemn impressiveness of
+that one word. But the hopeful, blessed side of it is, that the
+feeblest beginnings of trust in Jesus Christ, and the first tottering
+steps that try to tread in His, bring us into the light. It does not
+need that we have reached our goal, it is enough that our faces are
+turned to it, and our hearts desire to attain it, then we may be sure
+that the dominion of the darkness over us is broken. To follow, though
+it be afar off, and with unequal steps, fills our path with increasing
+brightness, and even though evil and ignorance and sorrow may thrust
+their blackness in upon our day, they are melting in the growing
+glory, and already we may give thanks 'unto the Father who hath made
+us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light, who
+hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us
+into the kingdom of His dear Son.'
+
+But we have not merely the promise that we shall be led by the light
+and brought into the light. A yet deeper and grander gift is offered
+here: 'He shall have the light of life.' I suppose that means, not, as
+it is often carelessly taken to mean, a light which illuminates the
+life, but, like the similar phrases of this Gospel, 'bread of life,'
+'water of life,'--light which is life. 'In Him was life, and the life
+was the light of men.' These two are one in their source, which is
+Jesus, the Word of God. Of Him we have to say, 'With Thee is the
+fountain of life, in Thy light shall we see light.' They are one in
+their deepest nature; the life is the light, and the light the life.
+And this one gift is bestowed upon every soul that follows Christ. Not
+only will our outward lives be illumined or guided from without, but
+our inward being will be filled with the brightness. 'Ye were
+sometimes darkness, now are ye light in the Lord.'
+
+That pillar of fire remained apart and without. But this true and
+better Guide of our souls enters in and dwells in us, in all the
+fulness of His triple gift of life, and light, and love. Within us He
+will chiefly prove Himself the Guide of our spirits, and will not
+merely cast His beams on the path of our feet, but will fill and flood
+us with His own brightness. All light of knowledge, of goodness, of
+gladness will be ours, if Christ be ours; and ours He surely will be
+if we follow Him. Let us take heed, lest turning away from Him we
+follow the will-o'-the-wisps of our own fancies, or the dancing
+lights, born of putrescence, that flicker above the swamps, for they
+will lead us into doleful lands where evil things haunt, and into
+outer darkness. Let us take heed how we use that light of God; for
+Christ, like His symbol of old, has a double aspect according to the
+eye which looks. 'It came between the camp of the Egyptians and the
+camp of Israel, and it was a cloud and darkness to them, but it gave
+light by night to these.' He is either a Stone of stumbling or a sure
+Foundation, a savour of life or of death, and which He is depends on
+ourselves. Trusted, loved, followed, He is light. Neglected, turned
+from, He is darkness. Though He be the Light of the world, it is only
+the man who follows Him to whom He can give the light of life.
+Therefore, man's awful prerogative of perverting the best into the
+worst forced Him, who came to be the light of men, to that sad and
+solemn utterance: 'For judgment I am come into this world, that they
+which see not might see, and that they which see might be made blind.'
+
+
+
+
+THREE ASPECTS OF FAITH
+
+'Many believed on Him. Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on
+Him....'--JOHN viii. 30,31.
+
+The Revised Version accurately represents the original by varying the
+expression in these two clauses, retaining 'believed on Him' in the
+former, and substituting the simple 'believed Him' in the latter. The
+variation in two contiguous clauses can scarcely be accidental in so
+careful a writer as the Apostle John. And the reason and meaning of it
+are obvious enough on the face of the narrative. His purpose is to
+distinguish between more and less perfect acceptance of Jesus Christ.
+The more perfect is the former, 'they believed on Him'; the less
+perfect is the latter, the simple acceptance of His word on His claim
+of Messiahship, which is stigmatised as shallow, and proved to be
+transient by the context.
+
+They were 'Jews' which believed, and they continued to be so whilst
+they were believing. Now, the word 'Jew' in this Gospel always
+connotes antagonism to Jesus Christ; and as for these persons, how
+slight and unreliable their adhesion to the Lord is, comes out in the
+course of the next few verses; and by the end of the chapter they are
+taking up stones to stone Him. So John would show us that there is a
+kind of acceptance which may be real, and may be the basis of
+something much better hereafter, but which, if it does not grow, rots
+and disappears; and he would draw a broad line of distinction between
+that and the other mental act, far deeper, more wholesome, more
+lasting and vital, which he designates as 'believing _on_ Him.' I take
+these words, then, for consideration, not so much to deal with other
+thoughts suggested by them, as because they afford me a starting-point
+for the consideration of the various phases of the act of believing,
+its blessings and its nature, and its relation to its objects, which
+are expressed in the New Testament by the various grammatical
+connections and constructions of this word.
+
+Now, the facts with which I wish to deal may be very briefly stated.
+There are three ways in which the New Testament represents the act of
+believing, and its relation to its Object, Christ. These three are,
+first, the simple one which appears in the text as 'believed Him.'
+Then there is a second, which appears in two forms, slightly
+different, but which, for our purpose, may be treated as substantially
+the same--'believing on Him.' And then there is a third, which,
+literally and accurately translated is, 'believing unto' or 'into
+Him.' That phrase is John's favourite one, and rather unfortunately,
+though perhaps necessarily, it has been generally rendered by our
+translators by the less forcible 'believing in,' which gives the idea
+of repose in, but does not give the idea of motion towards. These
+three, then, I think, do set forth, if we will ponder them, very large
+lessons as to the essence of this act of believing, as to the Object
+upon which it fastens, and as to the blessings which flow from it,
+which it will be worth our while to consider now. I may cast the whole
+into the shape of three exhortations: believe Him, believe on Him,
+believe unto Him.
+
+I. First, then, believe Christ.
+
+We accept a man's words when we trust the man. Even if belief, or
+faith, is represented in the New Testament, as it very rarely is, as
+having for its object the words of revelation, behind that acceptance
+of the words lies confidence in the person speaking. And the beginning
+of all true Christian faith has in it, not merely the intellectual
+acceptance of certain propositions as true, but a confidence in the
+veracity of Him by whom they are made known to us--even Jesus Christ
+our Lord.
+
+I do not need to insist upon that at any length here--it would take me
+away from my present purpose; but what I do wish to emphasise is, that
+from the very starting-point, the smallest germ of the most
+rudimentary and imperfect faith which knits a soul to Jesus Christ has
+Him for its Object, and is thus distinguished from the mere acceptance
+of truths which, on other grounds than the authority of the speaker,
+may legitimately commend themselves to a man.
+
+Then believe Him. Now, that breaks up into two thoughts, which are all
+that I intend to deduce from it now, although many more might be
+suggested. The one is this, that the least and the lowest that Jesus
+Christ asks from us is the entire and unhesitating acceptance of His
+utterances as final, conclusive, and absolutely true. Whatever more
+Jesus Christ may be, He is, by His life and words, the Communicator of
+divine and certain truth. He is a Teacher, though He is a great deal
+more. And whatever more Christian faith may be--and it is a great deal
+more--it requires, at least, the frank and full recognition of the
+authority of every word that comes from His lips. A Christianity
+without a creed is a dream. Bones without flesh are very dry, no
+doubt; but what about flesh without bones? An inert, shapeless mass.
+You will never have a vigorous and true Christian life if it is to be
+moulded according to the fantastic dream of these latter days, which
+tells us that we may take Jesus as the Guide of our conduct and need
+not mind about what He says to us. 'Believe Me' is His requirement.
+The words of His mouth, and the revelations which He has made in the
+sweetness of His life, and in all the graciousness of His dealings,
+are the very unveiling to man of absolute and final and certain truth.
+
+But then, on the other hand, let us remember that, while all this is
+most clear and distinct in the teaching of Scripture, it carries us
+but a very short way. We find, in the instance from which we take our
+starting-point in this sermon, the broad distinction drawn, and
+practically illustrated in the conduct of the persons concerned,
+between the simple acceptance of what Christ says, and a true faith
+that clings to Him for evermore. And the same kind of disparagement of
+the lower process of merely accepting His word is found more than once
+in connection with the same phrases. We find, for instance, the two
+which are connected in our texts used in a previous conversation
+between our Lord and His antagonists. When He says to them, 'This is
+the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent,' they
+reply, dragging down His claim to a lower level, 'What sign showest
+Thou, that we may see, and believe Thee?' He demanded belief _on_
+Himself; they answer, 'We are ready to _believe you_, on condition
+that we see something that may make the rendering of our belief a
+logical necessity for us.'
+
+Let us lay to heart the rudimentary and incomplete character of a
+faith which simply accepts the teaching of Jesus Christ, and does no
+more. The notion that orthodoxy is Christianity, that a man who does
+not contradict the teaching of the New Testament is thereby a
+Christian, is a very old and very perilous and very widespread one.
+There are many of us who have no better claim to be called Christians
+than this, that we never denied anything that Jesus Christ said,
+though we are not sufficiently interested in it, I was going to say,
+even to deny it. This rudimentary faith, which contents itself with
+the acceptance of the truth revealed, hardens into mere formalism, or
+liquefies into mere careless indifference as to the very truth that it
+professes to believe. There is nothing more impotent than creeds which
+lie dormant in our brains, and have no influence upon our lives. I
+wonder how many readers of this sermon, who fancy themselves good
+Christians, do with their creed as the Japanese used to do with their
+Emperor--keep him in a palace behind bamboo screens, and never let him
+do anything, whilst all the reality of power was possessed by another
+man, who did not profess to be a king at all. Do you think you are
+Christians because you would sign thirty-nine or three hundred and
+ninety articles of Christianity, if they were offered to you, while
+there is not one of them that influences either your thinking or your
+conduct? Do not let us have these 'sluggish kings,' with a mayor of
+the place to do the real government, but set on the throne of your
+hearts the principles of your religion, and see to it that all your
+convictions be translated into practice, and all your practice be
+informed by your convictions.
+
+This belief in a set of dogmas, on the authority of Jesus Christ,
+about which dogmas we do not care a rush, and which make no difference
+upon our lives, is the faith about which James has so many hard things
+to say; and he ventures upon a parallel that I should not like to
+venture on unless I were made bold by his example: 'Thou believest, O
+vain man! thou doest well: the devils also believe, and'--better than
+you, in that their belief does something for them, they 'believe--and
+_tremble_!' But what shall we say about a man who professes himself a
+disciple, and neither trembles, nor thrills, nor hopes, nor dreads,
+nor desires, nor does any single thing because of his creed? Believe
+Jesus, but do not stop there.
+
+II. Believe on Christ.
+
+Now, as I have remarked already, and as many of you know, there is a
+slightly different, twofold form of this phrase in Scripture. I need
+not trouble you with the minute distinction between the one and the
+other. Both forms coincide in the important point on which I wish to
+touch. That representation of believing on Christ carries us away at
+once from the mere act of acceptance of His word on His authority to
+the far more manifestly voluntary, moral, and personal act of reliance
+upon Him. The metaphor is expanded in various ways in Scripture, and
+instead of offering any thoughts of my own about it, I would simply
+ask attention to three of the forms in which it is set forth in the
+Old and in the New Testaments.
+
+The first of them, and the one which we may regard as governing the
+others, is that found in the words of Isaiah, 'Behold, I lay in Zion a
+stone, a sure Foundation'; and, as the Apostle Peter comments, 'He
+that believeth on Him shall not be confounded.' There the thoughts
+presented are the superposition of the building upon its Foundation,
+the rest of the soul, and the rearing of the life on the basis of
+Jesus Christ.
+
+How much that metaphor says to us about Him as the Foundation, in all
+the aspects in which we can apply that term! He is the Basis of our
+hope, the Guarantee of our security, the Foundation-stone of our
+beliefs, the very Ground on which our whole life reposes, the Source
+of our tranquillity, the Pledge of our peace. All that I think, feel,
+desire, wish, and do, ought to be rested upon that dear Lord, and
+builded on Him by simple faith. By patient persistence of effort
+rearing up the fabric of my life firmly upon Him, and grafting every
+stone of it--if I might so use the metaphor--into the bedding-stone,
+which is Christ, I shall be strong, peaceful, and pure.
+
+The storm comes, the waters rise, the winds howl, the hail and the
+rain 'sweep away the refuge of lies,' and the dwellers in these frail
+and foundationless houses are hurrying in wild confusion from one peak
+to another, before the steadily rising tide. But he that builds on
+that Foundation 'shall not make haste,' as Isaiah has it; shall not
+need to hurry to shift his quarters before the flood overtake him;
+shall look out serene upon all the hurtling fury of the wild storm,
+and the rise of the sullen waters. So, reliance on Christ, and the
+honest making of Him the Basis, not of our hopes only, but of our
+thinkings and of our doings, and of our whole being, is the secret of
+security, and the pledge of peace.
+
+Then there is another form of the same phrase, 'believing on,' in
+which is suggested not so much the figure of building upon a
+foundation, as of some feeble man resting upon a strong stay, or
+clinging to an outstretched and mighty arm. The same metaphor is
+implied in the word 'reliance.' We lean upon Christ when, forsaking
+all other props, and realising His sufficiency and sweetness, we rest
+the whole weight of our weariness and all the impotence of our
+weakness upon His strong and unwearied arm, and so are saved. All
+other stays are like that one to which the prophet compares the King
+of Egypt--the papyrus reed in the Nile stream, on which, if a man
+leans, it will break into splinters which will go into his flesh, and
+make a poisoned wound. But if we lean on Christ, we lean on a brazen
+wall and an iron pillar, and anything is possible sooner than that
+that stay shall give.
+
+There is still another form of the metaphor, in which neither building
+upon a foundation, nor leaning upon a support which is thought of as
+below what rests upon it, are suggested, but rather the hanging upon
+something firm and secure which is above what hangs from it. The same
+picture is suggested by our word 'dependence.' 'As a nail fastened in
+a sure place,' said one of the prophets, 'on Him shall hang all the
+glory of His Father's house.'
+
+  'Hangs my helpless soul on Thee.'
+
+The rope lowered over the cliffs supports the adventurous bird-nester
+in safety above the murmuring sea. They who clasp Christ's hand
+outstretched from above, may swing over the deepest, most vacuous
+abyss, and fear no fall.
+
+So, brother, build on Christ, rely on Him, depend on Him, and it shall
+not be in vain. But if you will not build on the sure Foundation, do
+not wonder if the rotten one gives way. If you will not lean on the
+strong Stay, complain not when the weak one crumbles to dust beneath
+your weight. And if you choose to swing over the profound depth at the
+end of a piece of pack-thread, instead of holding on by an adamantine
+chain wrapped round God's throne, you must be prepared for its
+breaking and your being smashed to pieces below.
+
+III. The last exhortation that comes out of this comparative study of
+these phrases is--Believe into Christ.
+
+That is a very pregnant and remarkable expression, and it can
+scarcely, as you see, be rendered into our language without a certain
+harshness; but still it is worth while to face the harshness for the
+sake of getting the double signification that is involved in it. For
+when we speak of believing unto or into Him, we suggest two things,
+both of which, apparently, were in the minds of the writers of the New
+Testament. One is motion towards, and the other is repose in, that
+dear Lord.
+
+So, then, true Christian faith is the flight of the soul towards
+Christ. Therein is one of the special blessednesses of the Christian
+life, that it has for its object and aim absolutely infinite and
+unattainable completeness and glory, so that unwearied freshness,
+inexhaustible buoyancy, endless progress, are the dower of every
+spirit that truly trusts in Christ. All other aims and objects are
+limited, transient, and will be left behind. Every other landmark will
+sink beneath the horizon, where so many of our landmarks have sunk
+already, and where they will all disappear when the last moment comes.
+But we may have, and if we are Christian people we shall have, bright
+before us, sufficiently certain of being reached to make our efforts
+hopeful and confident, sufficiently certain of never being reached to
+make our efforts blessed with endless aspirations, the great light and
+love of that dear Lord, to yearn after whom is better than to possess
+all besides, and following hard after whom, even in the very motion
+there is rest, and in the search there is finding. Religion is the
+flight of the soul, the aspiration of the whole man after the
+unattainable Attainable--'that I may know Him, and be found in Him.'
+
+Oh, how such thoughts ought to shame us who call ourselves Christians!
+Growth, progress, getting nearer to Christ, yearning ever with a great
+desire after Him!--do not the words seem irony when applied to most of
+us? Think of the average type of sluggish contentment with present
+attainments that marks Christian people--tortoises in their crawling
+rather than eagles in their flight. And let us take our portion of
+shame, and remember that the faith which believes Him, and that which
+believes on Him, both need to be crowned and perfected by that which
+believes towards Him, of which the motto is, 'Forgetting the things
+that are behind, I reach forward to the things that are before.'
+
+But there is another side to this last phase of faith. That true
+believing towards or unto Christ is the rest of the soul in Him. By
+faith that deep and most real union of the believing soul with Jesus
+Christ is effected which may be fitly described as our entrance into
+and abode in Him. The believer is as if incorporated into Him in whom
+he believes. Indeed, the Apostle ventures to use a more startling
+expression than _incorporation_ when he says that 'he that is joined
+to the Lord is one Spirit.' If by faith we press towards, by faith we
+shall be in, Christ. Faith is at once motion and rest, search and
+finding, desire and fruition. The felicity of this last form of the
+phrase is its expression of both these ideas, which are united in fact
+as in word. A rare construction of the verb _to believe_, with the
+simple preposition _in_, coincides with this part of the meaning of
+_believing unto_ or _into_, and need not be separately considered.
+
+With this understanding of its meaning, we see how natural is John's
+preference for this construction. For surely, if he has anything to
+tell us, it is that the true Christian life is a life enclosed, as it
+were, in Jesus Christ. Nor need I remind you how Paul, though he
+starts from a different point of view, yet coincides with John in this
+teaching. For, to him, to be 'in Christ' is the sum of all
+blessedness, righteousness, peace, and power. As in an atmosphere, we
+may dwell in Him. He may be the strong Habitation to which we may
+continually resort. One of the Old Testament words for trusting means
+taking refuge, and such a thought is naturally suggested by this New
+Testament form of expression. 'I flee unto Thee to hide me.' In that
+Fortress we dwell secure.
+
+To be in Jesus, wedded to Him by the conjunction of will and desire,
+wedded to Him in the oneness of a believing spirit and in the
+obedience of a life, to be thus in Christ is the crown and climax of
+faith, and the condition of all perfection. To be in Christ is life;
+to be out of Him is death. In Him we have redemption; in Him we have
+wisdom, truth, peace, righteousness, hope, confidence. To be in Him is
+to be in heaven. We enter by faith. Faith is not the acceptance merely
+of His Word, but is the reliance of the soul on Him, the flight of the
+soul towards Him, the dwelling of the soul in Him. 'Come, My people,
+into thy chambers, and shut thy doors about thee ... until the
+indignation be overpast.'
+
+
+
+
+'NEVER IN BONDAGE'
+
+'We... were never in bondage to any man: how gayest Thou, Ye shall be
+made free!'--JOHN viii. 33.
+
+'Never in bondage to any man'? Then what about Egypt, Babylon, Persia,
+Syria? Was there not a Roman garrison looking down from the castle
+into the very Temple courts where this boastful falsehood was uttered?
+It required some hardihood to say, 'Never in bondage to any man,' in
+the face of such a history, and such a present. But was it not just an
+instance of the strange power which we all have and exercise, of
+ignoring disagreeable facts, and by ingenious manipulation taking the
+wrinkles out of the photograph? The Jews were perhaps not
+misunderstanding Jesus Christ quite so much as these words may
+suggest. If He had been promising, as they chose to assume, political
+and external liberty, I fancy they would have risen to the bait a
+little more eagerly than they did to His words.
+
+But be that as it may, this strange answer of theirs suggests that
+power of ignoring what we do not want to see, not only in the way in
+which I have suggested, but also in another. For if they had any
+inkling of what Jesus meant by slavery and freedom, they, by such
+words as these, put away from themselves the thought that they were,
+in any deep and inward sense, bondsmen, and that a message of liberty
+had any application to them. Ah, dear friends! there was a great deal
+of human nature in these men, who thus put up a screen between them
+and the penetrating words of our Lord. Were they not doing just what
+many of us--all of us to some extent--do: ignoring the facts of their
+own necessities, of their own spiritual condition, denying the plain
+lessons of experience? Like them, are not we too often refusing to
+look in the face the fact that we all, apart from Him, are really in
+bondage? Because we do not realise the slavery, are we not indifferent
+to the offer of freedom? 'We were never in bondage'; consequently we
+add, 'How sayest Thou, Ye shall be made free?' So then, my text brings
+us to think of three things: our bondage, our ignorance of our
+bondage, our consequent indifference to Christ's offer of liberty. Let
+me say a word or two about each of these.
+
+First as to--
+
+I. Our bondage.
+
+Christ follows the vain boast in the text, with the calm, grave,
+profound explanation of what He meant: 'Whoso committeth sin is the
+slave of sin.' That is true in two ways. By the act of sinning a man
+shows that he is the slave of an alien power that has captured him;
+and in the act of sinning, he rivets the chains and increases the
+tyranny. He is a slave, or he would not obey sin. He is more a slave
+because he has again obeyed it. Now, do not let us run away with the
+idea that when Jesus speaks of sin and its bondage, He is thinking
+only, or mainly, of gross outrages and contradictions of the plain law
+of morality and decency, that He is thinking only of external acts
+which all men brand as being wrong, or of those which law qualifies as
+crimes. We have to go far deeper than that, and into a far more inward
+region of life than that, before we come to apprehend the inwardness
+and the depth of the Christian conception of what sin is. We have to
+bring our whole life close up against God, and then to judge its deeds
+thereby. Therefore, though I know I am speaking to a mass of
+respectable, law-abiding people, very few of you having any knowledge
+of the grosser and uglier forms of transgression, and I dare say none
+of you having any experience of what it is to sin against human law,
+though I do not charge you--God forbid!--with _vices_, and still less
+with _crimes_, I bring to each man's conscience a far more searching
+word than either of these two, when I say, 'We all have _sinned_ and
+come short of the glory of God.' This declaration of the universality
+and reality of the bondage of sin is only the turning into plain words
+of a fact which is of universal experience, though it may be of a very
+much less universal consciousness. We may not be aware of the fact,
+because, as I have to show you, we do not direct our attention to it.
+But there it is; and the truth is that every man, however noble his
+aspirations sometimes, however pure and high his convictions, and
+however honest in the main may be his attempts to do what is right,
+when he deals honestly with himself, becomes more or less conscious of
+just that experience which a great expert in soul analysis and
+self-examination made: 'I find a law'--an influence working upon my
+heart with the inevitableness and certainty of law--'that when I would
+do good, evil is present with me.'
+
+We all know that, whether we regard it as we ought or no. We all say
+Amen to that, when it is forced upon our attention. There _is_
+something in us that thwarts aspiration towards good, and inclines to
+evil.
+
+  'What will but felt the fleshly screen?'
+
+And it is not only a screen. It not only prevents us from rising as
+high as we would, but it sinks us so low as to do deeds that something
+within us recoils from and brands as evil. Jesus teaches us that he
+who commits sin is the slave of sin; that is to say, that an alien
+power has captured and is coercing the wrongdoer. That teaching does
+not destroy responsibility, but it kindles hope. A foreign foe, who
+has invaded the land, may be driven out of the land, and all his
+prisoners set free, if a stronger than he comes against him.
+Christianity is called gloomy and stern, because it preaches the
+corruption of man's heart. Is it not a gospel to draw a distinction
+between the evil that a man does, and the self that a man may be? Is
+it not better, more hopeful, more of a true evangel, to say to a man,
+'Sin dwelleth in you,' than to say, 'What is called sin is only the
+necessary action of human nature'? To believe that their present
+condition is not slavery makes men hopeless of ever gaining freedom,
+and the true gospel of the emancipation of humanity rests on the
+Christian doctrine of the bondage of sin.
+
+Let me remind you that freedom consists not in the absence of external
+constraints, but in the animal in us being governed by the will, for
+when the flesh is free the man is a slave. And it means that the will
+should be governed by the conscience; and it means that the conscience
+should be governed by God. These are the stages. Men are built in
+three stories, so to speak. Down at the bottom, and to be kept there,
+are inclinations, passions, lust, desires, all which are but blind
+aimings after their appropriate satisfaction, without any question as
+to whether the satisfaction is right or wrong; and above that a
+dominant will which is meant to control, and above that a conscience.
+That is the public men are more and more abasing themselves to the
+degradation of ministering to the supposed wishes instead of cutting
+dead against the grain of the wishes, if necessary, in order to meet
+the true wants, of the people. Wherever some one strong man stands up
+to oppose the wild current of popular desires, he may make up his mind
+that the charge of being 'a bad citizen, unpatriotic, a lover of the
+enemies of the people,' will be flung at him. You Christian men and
+women have to face the same calumnies as your Master had. The rotten
+eggs flung at the objects of popular execration--if I might use a
+somewhat violent figure--turn to roses in their flight. The praises of
+good men and the scoffs of loose-living and godless ones are equally
+valuable certificates of character. The Church which does not earn the
+same sort of opprobrium which attended its Master has probably failed
+of its duty. It is good to be called 'gloomy' and 'sour-visaged' by
+those whose only notion of pleasure is effervescent immorality; and it
+is good to be called intolerant by the crowd that desires us to be
+tolerant of vice. So, my friends, I want you to understand that you,
+too, have to tread in the Master's steps. The 'imitation of Jesus'
+does not consist merely in the sanctities and secrecies of communion,
+and the blessings of a meek and quiet heart, but includes standing
+where He stood, in avowed and active opposition to widespread evils,
+and, if need be, in the protesting opposition to popular error. And if
+you are called nicknames, never mind! Remember what the Master said,
+'They shall bring you before kings and magistrates'--the tribunal of
+the many-headed is a more formidable judgment-bench than that of any
+king--'and it shall turn to a testimony for you.'
+
+II. Now, secondly, this name is the witness to what I venture to call,
+for want of a better term, the originality of Jesus Christ.
+
+It bears witness to the dim feeling which onlookers had that in Him
+was a new phenomenon, not to be accounted for by birth and descent, by
+training and education, or by the whole of what people nowadays call
+environment. He did not come out of these circumstances. This is not a
+regulation pattern type of Jew. He is 'a Samaritan.' That is to say,
+He is unlike the people among whom He dwells; and betrays that other
+influences than those which shaped them have gone to the making of
+Him.
+
+That is one of the most marked, outstanding, and important features in
+the teaching and in the character of Jesus Christ, that it is
+absolutely independent of, and incapable of being accounted for by,
+anything that He derived from the circumstances in which He lived. He
+was a Jew, and yet He was not a Jew. He was not a Samaritan, and yet
+He was a Samaritan. He was not a Greek, and yet He was one. He was not
+a Roman, nor an Englishman, nor a Hindoo, nor an Asiatic, nor an
+African; and yet He had all the characteristics of these races within
+Himself, and held them all in the ample sweep of His perfect Manhood.
+
+If we turn to His teaching we find that, whilst no doubt to some
+extent it is influenced in its forms by the necessities of its
+adaptation to the first listeners, there is a certain element in it
+far beyond anything that came from Rabbis, or even from prophets and
+psalmists. Modern Christian scholarship has busied itself very much in
+these days with studying Jewish literature, so far as it is available,
+in order to ascertain how far it formed the teaching, or mind, of
+Jesus the Carpenter of Nazareth. There is a likeness, but the likeness
+only serves to make the unlikeness more conspicuous. And I, for my
+part, venture to assert that, whilst the form of our Lord's teaching
+may largely be traced to the influences under which He was brought up,
+and whilst the substance of some parts of it may have been anticipated
+by earlier Rabbis of His nation, the crowd that listened to Him on the
+mountain top had laid their fingers upon the more important fact when
+they 'wondered at His teaching,' and found the characteristic
+difference between it, and that of the men to whom they had listened,
+in the note of authority with which He spoke. Jesus never argues, He
+asserts; He claims; and in lieu of all arguments He gives you His own
+'Verily! verily! I say unto you.'
+
+Thus not only in its form, but in its substance, in its lofty
+morality, in its spiritual religion, in its revelation of the Father
+and the Fatherhood for all men, Christ's teaching as teaching stands
+absolutely alone.
+
+If we turn to His character, the one thing that strikes us is that
+about it there is nothing of the limitations of time or race which
+stamp all other men. He is not good after the fashion of His age, or
+of any other age; He is simply embodied and perfect Goodness. This
+Tree has shot up high above the fences that enclose the grove in which
+it grows, and its leaf lasts for ever.
+
+Run over, in your mind, other great names of heroes, saints, thinkers,
+poets; they all bear the stamp of their age and circumstances, and the
+type of goodness or the manner of thought which belonged to these.
+Jesus Christ alone stands before men absolutely free from any of the
+limitations which are essential in the case of every human excellence
+and teacher. And so He comes to us with a strange freshness, with a
+strange closeness; and nineteen centuries have not made Him fit less
+accurately to our needs than He did to those of the generation amidst
+which He condescended to live. Thickening mists of oblivion wrap all
+other great names as they recede into the past; and about the loftiest
+of them we have to say, 'This man, having served his generation, fell
+on sleep, and saw corruption.' But Jesus Christ lasts, because there
+is nothing local or temporary about His teaching or His character.
+
+Now this peculiar originality, as I venture to call it, of Christ's
+character is a very strong argument for the truthful accuracy of the
+picture drawn of Him in these four Gospels. Where did these four men
+get their Christ? Was it from imagination? Was it from myth? Was it
+from the accidental confluence of a multitude of traditions? There is
+an old story about a painter who, in despair of producing a certain
+effect of storm upon the sea, at last flung his wet sponge at the
+canvas, and to his astonishment found that it had done the very thing
+he wanted. But wet sponges cannot draw likenesses; and to allege that
+these four men drew such a picture, in such compass, without anybody
+sitting for it, seems to me about the most desperate hypothesis that
+ever was invented. If there were no Christ, or if the Christ that was,
+was not like what the Gospels paint Him as being, then the authors of
+these little booklets are consummate geniuses, and their works stand
+at the very top of the imaginative literature of the world. It is more
+difficult to account for the Gospels, if they are not histories, than
+it is to account for the Christ whom they tell us of if they are.
+
+And then, further, there is only one key to the mystery of this
+originality. Christ is perfect man, high above limitations, and owing
+nothing to environment, because He is the Son of God. I would as soon
+believe that grass roots, which for years, in some meadow, had brought
+forth, season after season, nothing but humble green blades, shot up
+suddenly into a palm tree, as I would believe that simple natural
+descent brought all at once into the middle of the dull succession of
+commonplace and sinful men this radiant and unique Figure. Account for
+Christ, all you unbelievers! The question of to-day, round which all
+the battle is being fought, is the person of Jesus Christ. If He be
+what the Gospels tell us that He is, there is nothing left for the
+unbeliever worth a struggle. 'What think ye of Christ? Whose Son is
+He?' The Jews said, 'Thou art a Samaritan!' We say, 'Thou art the
+Christ; the Son of the living God!'
+
+III. Lastly, the name bears witness to Christ's universality.
+
+I presume that, in addition to what seemed His hostility to what was
+taken to be true Judaism, another set of facts underlay the name--viz.
+those which indicated His kindly relations with the people whom it was
+every good Jew's pleasant duty to hate with all his heart. The story
+of the Samaritan woman in John's Gospel, the parable of the good
+Samaritan, the incident of the grateful leper, who was a Samaritan,
+the refusal to allow the eager Apostles to bring down fire from heaven
+to consume inhospitable churls in a Samaritan village, were but
+outstanding specimens of what must have been a characteristic of His
+whole career not unknown to His enemies. So they argued, 'If you love
+our enemies you must hate us; and you must be one of them,' thereby
+distorting, but yet presenting, what is the great glory of Christ's
+Gospel, and of Christ Himself, that He belongs to the world; and that
+His salvation, the sweep of His love, and the power of His Cross, are
+meant for all mankind.
+
+That universality largely arises from the absence of the limitations
+of which I have already spoken sufficiently. Because He belongs to no
+one period as regards His character, He is available for all periods
+as regards His efficacy. Because His teaching is not dyed in the hues
+of any school or of any age or of any cast of thought, it suits for
+all mankind. This water comes clear from the eternal rock, and has no
+taint of any soil through which it has flowed. Therefore the thirsty
+lips of a world may be glued to it, and drink and be satisfied. His
+one sacrifice avails for the whole world.
+
+But let me remind you that universality means also individuality, and
+that Jesus Christ is the Christ for all men because He is each man's
+Christ. The tree of life stands in the middle of the garden that all
+may have equal access to it. Is this universal Christ yours; thine?
+That is the question. Make Him so by putting out your hand and
+claiming your share in Him, by casting your soul upon Him, by trusting
+your all to Him, by listening to His word, by obeying His commands, by
+drinking in the fulness of His blessing. You can do so if you will. If
+you do not, the universal Christ is nothing to you. Make Him thine,
+and be sure that the sweep of His love and the efficacy of His
+sacrifice embrace and include thee. He is the universal Christ;
+therefore He is the only Christ; 'neither is there salvation in any
+other.' Through Him all men, each man, thou, must be saved. Without
+Him all men, every man, thou, can not be saved. Take Him for yours,
+and you will find that each who possesses Him, possesses Him
+altogether, and none hinders the other in his full enjoyment of 'the
+bread of God which came down from heaven.'
+
+
+
+
+ONE METAPHOR AND TWO MEANINGS
+
+'I must work the works of Him that sent Me, while it is day: the night
+cometh when no man can work.'--JOHN ix. 4.
+
+'The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off
+the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.'--ROMANS
+xiii. 12.
+
+The contrast between these two sayings will strike you at once. Using
+the same metaphors, they apply them in exactly opposite directions. In
+the one, life is the day, and the state beyond death the night; in the
+other, life is the night, and the state beyond death the day.
+Remarkable as the contrast is, it comes to be still more so if we
+remember the respective speakers. For each of them says what we should
+rather have expected the other to say. It would have been natural for
+Paul to have given utterance to the stimulus to diligence caused by
+the consciousness that the time of work was brief; and it would have
+been as natural for Jesus, who, as we believe, came from God, from the
+place of the eternal supernal glory, to have said that life here was
+night as compared with the illumination that He had known. But it is
+the divine Master who gives utterance to the common human
+consciousness of a brief life ending in inactivity, and it is the
+servant who takes the higher point of view.
+
+So strange did the words of my first text seem as coming from our
+Lord's lips, that the sense of incongruity seems to have been the
+occasion of the remarkable variation of reading which the Revised
+Version has adopted when it says '_We_ must work the works of Him that
+sent Me.' But that thought seems to me to be perfectly irrelevant to
+our Lord's purpose in this context, where He is vindicating His own
+action, and not laying down the duty of His servants. He is giving
+here one of these glimpses, that we so rarely get, into His own inmost
+heart. And so we have to take the sharp contrast between the Master's
+thought and the servant's thought, and to combine them, if we would
+think rightly about the present and the future, and do rightly in the
+present.
+
+I. Let me ask you to look at the Master's thought about the present
+and the future.
+
+As I have already said, our Lord gives utterance here to the very
+common, in fact, universal human consciousness. The contrast between
+the intense little spot of light and the great ring of darkness round
+about it; between 'the warm precincts of the cheerful day' and the
+cold solitudes of the inactive night has been the commonplace and
+stock-in-trade of moralists and thoughtful men from the beginning; has
+given pathos to poetry, solemnity to our days; and has been the ally
+of base as well as of noble things. For to say to a man, 'there are
+twelve hours in the day of life, and then comes darkness, the
+blackness that swallows up all activity,' may either be made into a
+support of all lofty and noble thoughts, or, by the baser sort, may
+be, and has been, made into a philosophy of the 'Let us eat and drink,
+for to-morrow we die' kind; 'Gather ye roses while ye may'; 'A short
+life and a merry one.' The thought stimulates to diligence, but it
+does nothing to direct the diligence. It makes men work furiously, but
+it never will prevent them from working basely. 'Whatsoever thy hand
+findeth to do, do it with thy might,' is a conclusion from the
+consideration that 'there is neither wisdom nor knowledge nor device
+in the grave whither we go,' but what the hand should find to do must
+be settled from altogether different considerations.
+
+Our Lord here takes the common human point of view, and says, 'Life is
+the time for activity, and it must be the more diligent because it is
+ringed by the darkness of the night.' What precisely does our Lord
+intend by His use of that metaphor of the night? No figures, we know,
+run upon all-fours. The point of comparison may be simply in some one
+feature common to the two things compared, and so all sorts of
+mischief may be done by trying to extend the analogy to other
+features. Now, there are a great many points in which day and night
+may respectively be taken as analogues of Life and Death and the state
+beyond death. There is a 'night of weeping'; there is a 'night of
+ignorance.' But our Lord Himself tells us what is the one point of
+comparison which alone is in His mind, when He says, 'The night
+cometh, when no man can work.' It is simply the night as a season of
+compulsory inactivity that suggests the comparison in our text. And so
+we have here the presentation of that dear Lord as influenced by the
+common human motive, and feeling that there was work to be done which
+must be crowded into a definite space, because when that space was
+past, there would be no more opportunity for the work to be done.
+
+Look at how, in the words of my first text, we have, as I said, a
+glimpse into His inmost heart. He lets us see that all His life was
+under the solemn compulsion of that great _must_ which was so often
+upon His lips, that He felt that He was here to do the Father's will,
+and that that obligation lay upon Him with a pressure which He neither
+could, nor would if He could, have got rid of.
+
+There are two kinds of 'musts' in our lives. There is the unwelcome
+necessity which grips us with iron and sharpened fangs; the needs-be
+which crushes down hopes and dreams and inclinations, and forces the
+slave to his reluctant task. And there is the 'must' which has passed
+into the will, into the heart, and has moulded the inmost desire to
+conformity with the obligation which no more stands over against us as
+a taskmaster with whip and chain, but has passed within us and is
+there an inspiration and a joy. He that can say, as Jesus Christ in
+His humanity could, and did say: 'My meat'--the refreshment of my
+nature, the necessary sustenance of my being--'is to do the will of my
+Father'; that man, and that man alone, feels no pressure that is pain
+from the incumbency of the necessity that blessedly rules His life.
+When 'I will' and 'I choose' coincide, like two of Euclid's triangles
+atop of one another, line for line and angle for angle, then comes
+liberty into the life. He that can say, not with a knitted brow and an
+unwilling ducking of his head to the yoke, 'I must do it,' but can
+say, 'Thy law is within my heart,' that is the Christlike, the free,
+the happy man.
+
+Further, our Lord here, in His thoughts of the present and the future,
+lets us see what He thought that the work of God in the world was. The
+disciples looked at the blind man sitting by the wayside, and what he
+suggested to them was a curious, half theological, half metaphysical
+question, in which Rabbinical subtlety delighted. 'Who did sin, this
+man or his parents?' They only thought of talking over the theological
+problem involved in the fact that, before he had done anything in this
+world to account for the calamity, he was _born_ blind. Jesus Christ
+looked at the man, and He did not think about theological cobwebs.
+What was suggested to Him was to fight against the evil and abolish
+it. It is sometimes necessary to discuss the origin of an evil thing,
+of a sorrow or a sin, in order to understand how to deal with and get
+rid of it. But unless that is the case, our first business is not to
+say, 'How comes this about?' but our business is to take steps to make
+it cease to come about. Cure the man first and then argue to your
+heart's content about what made him blind, but cure him first. And so
+Jesus Christ taught us that the meaning of the day of life was that we
+should set ourselves to abolish the works of the devil, and that the
+work of God was that we should fight against sin and sorrow, and in so
+far as it was in our power, abolish these, in all the variety of their
+forms, in all the vigour of their abundant growth. Sorrow and sin are
+God's call to every one of His sons and daughters to set themselves to
+cast them out of His fair creation; and 'the day' is the opportunity
+for doing that.
+
+Our Lord here, as I have already suggested, shows us very touchingly
+and beautifully, how entirely He bore our human nature, and had
+entered into our conditions, in that He, too, felt that common human
+emotion, and was spurred to unhasting and yet unresting diligence by
+the thought of the coming of the night. I suppose that although we
+have few chronological data in this Gospel of John, the hour of our
+Lord's death was really very near at that time. He had just escaped
+from a formidable attempt upon His life. 'They took up stones to stone
+Him, but He, passing through the midst of them, went His way,' is the
+statement which immediately precedes the account of His meeting with
+this blind man. And so under the pressure, perhaps, of that immediate
+experience which revealed the depths of hatred that was ready for
+anything against Him, He gives utterance to this expression: 'If it be
+the case that the time is at hand, then the more need that, Sabbath
+day as it is, I should pause here.' Though the multitude were armed
+with stones to stone Him, He stopped in His flight because there was a
+poor blind man there whom He felt that He needed to cure. Beautiful it
+is, and drawing Him very near to us,--and it should draw us very near
+to Him--that thus He shared in that essentially human consciousness of
+the limitation of the power to work, by the ring of blackness that
+encircled the little spot of illuminated light.
+
+But some will say, 'How is it possible that such a consciousness as
+this should really have been in the mind of Jesus Christ?' 'Did He not
+know that His death was not to be the end of His work? Did He not
+know, and say over and over again, in varying forms, that when He
+passed from earth, it was not into inactivity? Is it not the very
+characteristic of His mission that it is different from that of all
+other helpers and benefactors and teachers of the world, in that His
+death stands in the very middle of His work, and that on the one side
+of it there is activity, and on the other side of it there is still,
+and in some sense loftier and greater, activity?' Yes; all that is
+perfectly true, and I do not for a moment believe that our Lord was
+forgetting that the life on the earth was but the first volume of His
+biography, and of the records of His deeds, and that He contemplated
+them, as He contemplated always, the life beyond, as working in and on
+and over and through His servants, even unto the end of the world.
+
+But you have only to remember the difference between the earthly and
+the heavenly life of the Lord fully to understand the point of view
+that He takes here. The one is the basis of the other; the one is the
+seedtime, the other is the harvest. The one has only the limited years
+of the earthly life, in which it can be done; the other has the
+endless years of Eternity, through which it is to be continued. And if
+any part of that earthly life of the Lord had been void of its duty,
+and of its discharge of the Father's will, not even He, amidst the
+blaze of the heavenly glory, could have thereafter filled up the tiny
+gap. All the earthly years were needed to be filled with service, up
+to the great service and sacrifice of the Cross, in order that upon
+them might be reared the second stage and phase of His heavenly life.
+With regard to the one, He said on the Cross, 'It is finished.' But
+when He died He passed not into the night of inactivity, but into the
+day of greater service. And that higher and heavenly form of His work
+continues, and not until 'the kingdoms of this world are become the
+kingdoms of our God and of His Christ,' and the whole benefit and
+effect of His earthly life are imparted to the whole race of man, will
+it be said, 'It is done,' and the angels of heaven proclaim the
+completion of His work for man. But seeing that that work has its
+twofold forms, Jesus, like us, had to be conscious of the limitations
+of life, and of the night that followed the day.
+
+II. And now turn, in the second place, to the servant's thought.
+
+As I have already pointed out, it is the precise reversal of the
+other. What to Christ is 'day' to Paul is 'night.' What to Christ is
+'night' to Paul is 'day.' Now the first point that I would make is
+this, that the future would never have been 'day' to Paul if Jesus had
+not gone down into the darkness of the 'night.' I have said that there
+was only one point of comparison in our Lord's mind between night and
+death. But we may venture to extend the figure a little, and to say
+that the Light went into the 'valley of the shadow of Death,' and lit
+it up from end to end. The Life went into the palace of Death, and
+breathed life into all there. There is a great picture by one of the
+old monkish masters, on the walls of a Florentine convent, which
+represents the descent of Jesus to that dim region of the dead. Around
+Him there is a halo of light that shines into the gloomy corridor, up
+which the thronging patriarchs and saints of the Old Dispensation are
+coming, with outstretched hands of eager welcome and acceptance, to
+receive the blessing. Ah! it is true, 'the people that walked in
+darkness have seen a great Light; and to them that dwelt in the region
+of the shadow of death, unto them hath the Light shined.' Christ the
+Light has gone down into the darkness, and what to Him was night He
+has made for us day. Just as Scripture all but confines the name of
+_death_ to Christ's experience upon the Cross, and by virtue of that
+experience softens it down for the rest of us into the blessed image
+of _sleep_, so the Master has turned the night of death into the
+dawning of the day.
+
+Further, to the servant the brightness of that future day dimmed all
+earth's garish glories into darkness. It was because Paul saw the
+Beyond flaming with such lustre that the nearer distance to him seemed
+to have sunk into gloom. Just as a man or other object between you and
+the western sky when the sun is there will be all dark, so earth with
+heaven behind it becomes a mere shadowy outline. The day that is
+beyond outshines all the lustres and radiances of earth, and turns
+them into darkness. You go into a room out of blazing tropical
+sunshine, and it is all gloom and obscurity. He whose eyes are fixed
+on the day that is to come will find that here he walks as one in the
+night.
+
+And the brightness of that day, as well as the darkness of the present
+night, directed the servant as to what he should be diligent in. Since
+it is true that 'the day is at hand,' let us put on the armour of
+light, and dress ourselves in garb fitting for it. Since it is true
+that 'the night is far spent' let us put off the works of darkness.
+
+III. And so that brings me to the last point, and that is the
+combination of the Master's and the servant's thought, and the effect
+that it should produce upon us.
+
+It is not enough either for our hearts or our minds that we should say
+'the night cometh when no man can work.' Life is day, but it is night
+also. Death is night but it is dawning as well. We cannot understand
+either the present or the future unless we link them together. That
+death which is the cessation of activity in one aspect, is, for
+Christ's servants, as truly as for Christ, the beginning of an
+activity in a higher and nobler form. I do not believe in a heaven of
+rest, meaning by that, inaction; I still less believe in a death which
+puts an end to the activity of the human spirit. I believe that this
+world is our school, our apprenticeship, the place where we learn our
+trade and exercise our faculties, where we paint the picture, as it
+were, which we offer when we desire to be admitted to the great guild
+of artists, and according to the result of which, in the eye of the
+Judge, is our place hereafter. What the Germans call 'proof
+pieces'--that is the meaning of life. And though 'the night cometh
+when no man can work,' the day cometh when the characters we have made
+ourselves here, the habits we have cultivated and indulged in, the
+capacities we have exercised, and the set and drift of all our
+activity upon earth, will determine the work that we get to do there.
+
+So then, stereoscoping these two thoughts, we get the solid image that
+results from them both. And it teaches us not only diligence, and thus
+supplies stimulus, but it determines the direction of our diligence,
+and thus supplies guidance. We ought to be misers of our time and
+opportunities. Jesus Christ said, 'I must work the work of Him that
+sent Me while it is day; the night cometh.' How much more ought you
+and I to say so? And some of us ought very specially to say it, and to
+feel it, because the hour when we shall have to lay down our tools is
+getting very near, and the shadows are lengthening. If you had been in
+the fields in these summer evenings during the last few days, you
+would have seen the haymakers at work with more and more diligence as
+the evening drew on darker and darker. Dear friends, some of us are at
+the eleventh hour. Let us fill it with diligent work. The night
+cometh.
+
+But my texts not only stimulate to diligence, but they direct the
+diligence. If it be that there is a day beyond, and that Christ's folk
+are 'the children of the day,' then 'let us not sleep as do others,
+but let us watch and be sober.' We have to cast ourselves on Him as
+our Saviour, to love Him as our Lord and Friend, to take Him as our
+Pattern and our Guide, our Help, our Light, and our Life. And then we
+shall neither be deceived by life's garish splendours nor oppressed by
+its gloom and its sorrow; we shall neither shrink from that last
+moment, as a night of inaction, nor be too eager to cast off the
+burden of our present work, but we shall cheerfully toil at what will
+prepare us for 'the day,' and the bell at night that rings us out of
+mill and factory will not be unwelcome, for it will ring us in to
+higher work and nobler service. The transition will be like one of
+those summer nights in the Arctic circle, when the sun does not dip.
+Through a little thin film of less light we shall pass into the
+perfect day, where 'the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the light
+thereof,' and 'there shall be no more night.'
+
+
+
+
+THE SIXTH MIRACLE IN JOHN'S GOSPEL--THE BLIND MADE TO SEE, AND THE
+SEEING MADE BLIND
+
+'When Jesus had thus spoken, He spat on the ground, and made clay of
+the spittle, and He anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay,
+7. And said unto him, Go, wash in the Pool of Siloam, (which is by
+interpretation, Sent). He went his way, therefore, and washed, and
+came seeing.'--JOHN ix. 6, 7.
+
+The proportionate length at which this miracle and its accompanying
+effects are recorded, indicates very clearly the Evangelist's idea of
+their relative importance. Two verses are given to the story of the
+miracle; all the rest of the chapter to its preface and its issues. It
+was a great thing to heal a man that was blind from his birth, but the
+story of the gradual illumination of his spirit until it came to the
+full light of the perception of Christ as the Son of God, was far more
+to the Evangelist, and ought to be far more to us than giving the
+outward eye power to discern the outward light.
+
+The narrative has a prologue and an epilogue, and the true point of
+view from which to look at it is found in the solemn words with which
+our Lord closes the incident. 'For judgment am I come into this world,
+that they which see not might see, and that they which see might be
+made blind.'
+
+So then the mere sign, important as it is, is the least thing that we
+have to look at in our contemplations now.
+
+I. We have here our Lord unveiling His deepest motives for bestowing
+an unsought blessing.
+
+It is remarkable, I think, that out of the eight miracles recorded in
+this Gospel, there is only one in which our Lord responds to a request
+to manifest His miraculous power; the others are all spontaneous.
+
+In the other Gospels He heals sometimes because of the pleading of the
+sufferer; sometimes because of the request of compassionate friends or
+bystanders; sometimes unasked, because His own heart went out to those
+that were in pain and sickness. But in John's Gospel, predominantly we
+have the Son of God, who acts throughout as moved by His own deep
+heart. That view of Christ reaches its climax in His own profound
+words about His own laying down of His life: 'I came forth from the
+Father, and am come into the world. Again, I leave the world and go
+unto the Father.' So, not so much influenced by others as deriving
+motive and impulse and law from Himself, He moves upon earth a
+fountain and not a reservoir, the Originator and the Beginner of the
+blessings that He bears.
+
+And that is the point of view from which most strikingly the prologue
+of our narrative sets forth His action in the miracle here. 'As Jesus
+passed by,' says the story, 'He saw a man which was blind from his
+birth.' He fixes His eye upon him. No cry from the blind man's lips
+draws Him. He sits there unconscious of the kind eyes that were
+fastened upon him. The disciples stand at Christ's side, and have no
+share in His feelings. They ask Him to do nothing. To them the blind
+man is--what? A theological problem. No trace of pity touches their
+hearts. They do not even seem to have reckoned upon or expected
+Christ's miraculous intervention. And that is a very remarkable
+feature in the Gospels. At all events, they evidently do not expect it
+here; but all that the sight of this lifelong sufferer does in them is
+to raise a question, 'Who did sin; he or his parents?' Perhaps they do
+not quite see to the bottom of the alternative that they are
+suggesting; and we need not trouble ourselves to ask whether there was
+a full-blown notion of the pre-existence of the man's soul in their
+minds as they ask the question. Perhaps they remembered the impotent
+man to whom our Lord said, 'Go and sin no more lest a worse thing come
+unto thee.' And they may have thought that they had His sanction to
+the doctrine--as old as Job's friends--that wherever there was great
+suffering there must first have been great sin.
+
+That is all that the sight of sorrow does for some people. It leads to
+censorious judgments, or to mere idle and curious speculations. Christ
+lets us see what it did for Him, and what it is meant to do for us.
+'Neither hath this man sinned nor his parents, but he is born blind
+that the works of God may be made manifest in him.' That is to say,
+human sorrow is to be looked at by us as an opportunity for the
+manifestation through us of God's mercy in relieving and stanching the
+wounds through which the lifeblood is ebbing away. Do not stand coldly
+curious or uncharitably censorious. Do not make miserable men
+theological problems, but see in them a call for service. See in them
+an opportunity for letting the light of God, so much of it as is in
+you, shine from you, and your hands move in works of mercy.
+
+And then the Master goes on to state still more distinctly the law
+which dominated His life, and which ought to dominate ours: 'I must
+work the works of Him that sent Me while it is day; the night cometh
+when no man can work.' Then poor men's misery is an occasion for the
+love of God manifesting itself. Yes. But the love of God manifests
+itself through human media, through persons; and if we adopt the
+reading of these words which you will find in the Revised Version, and
+instead of saying '_I_ must work,' read '_We_ must work,' then we have
+Christ extending the law which ruled over His own life to all His
+followers, and making it supremely obligatory and binding upon each of
+us. He for His part, as I have said, moves through this Gospel as the
+Son of God, whose mercy, and all whose doings are self-originated. But
+the other side of that is that He moves through this Gospel in the
+humble attitude of filial obedience, ever recognising that the
+Father's will is supreme in His life; and that He is bound, with an
+obligation in which He rejoices, to do the will of Him that sent Him.
+The consciousness of a mission, the sense of filial obedience, the
+joyful surrender and harmonising of the will of the Son with the will
+of the Father; these things were the secret of the Master's life.
+
+And coupled with them, even in Him there was the consciousness that
+time was short; and although beyond the Cross and the grave there
+stretched for Him an eternity in which He would work for the blessing
+of the world, yet the special work which He had to do, while wearing
+the veil and weakness of flesh, had but few days and hours in which it
+could be done. Therefore, as we ought to do, He worked under the
+limitations of mortality, and recognised in the brevity of life
+another call to eager and continuous service.
+
+These were His motives which, in common with Him, we may share. But He
+adds another in which we have no share; and declares the unique
+consciousness which ever stirred Him to His self-manifesting and
+God-manifesting acts: 'As long as I am in the world I am the Light of
+the world.'
+
+Thus, moved by sorrow, recognising in man's misery the dumb cry for
+help, seeing in it the opportunity for the manifestation of the higher
+mercy of God; taking all evil to be the occasion for a brighter
+display of the love and the good which are divine; feeling that His
+one purpose upon earth was to crowd the moments with obedience to the
+will, and with the doing of the works of Him that sent Him; and
+possessing the sole and strange consciousness that from His person
+streams out all the light which illuminates the world--the Christ
+pauses before the unconscious blind man, and looking upon the poor,
+useless eyeballs, unaware how near light and sight stood, obeys the
+impulse that shapes His whole life, 'and when He had spoken _thus_,'
+proceeds to the strange cure.
+
+II. So we come, in the next place, to consider Christ as veiling His
+power under material means.
+
+There is only one other instance in the Gospels where a miracle is
+wrought in the singular fashion which is here employed, namely, the
+healing of the deaf-mute recorded in Mark's Gospel, where, in like
+manner, our Lord makes clay of the spittle, and anoints the ears of
+the deaf man with the clay. The variety of method in our Lord's
+miracles serves important purposes, as teaching us that the methods
+are nothing, and that He moved freely amongst them all, the real cause
+in every case being one and the same, the bare forth-putting of His
+will; and teaching us further that in each specific case there were
+reasons in the moral and religious condition of the persons operated
+upon for the adoption of the specific means employed, which we of
+course have no means of discovering. There is here, first then,
+healing by material means. The clay had no power of healing; the water
+of Siloam had no power of healing. The thing that healed was Christ's
+will, but He uses these externals to help the poor blind man to
+believe that he is going to be healed. He condescends to drape and
+veil His power in order that the dim eye, unaccustomed to the light,
+may look upon that shadowed representation of it when it could not
+gaze upon the pure brightness; as an eye may look upon a shaded lamp
+which could not bear its brilliance unsoftened and naked.
+
+This healing by material means in order to accommodate Himself to the
+weak faith which He seeks to evoke, and to strengthen thereby, is
+parallel, in principle, to His own Incarnation, and to His appointment
+of external rites and ordinances. Baptism, the Lord's Supper, a
+visible Church, outward means of worship, and so on, all these come
+under that same category. There is no life nor power in them except
+His will works through them, but they are crutches and helps for a
+weak and sense-bound faith to climb to the apprehension of the
+spiritual reality. It is not the clay, it is not the water, it is not
+the Church, the ordinances, the outward worship, the form of prayer,
+the sacrament--it is none of these things that have the healing and
+the grace in them. They are only ladders by which we may ascend to
+Him. So let us neither presumptuously antedate the time when we shall
+be able to do without them--the Heaven in 'which there is no
+Temple'--nor grovellingly and superstitiously elevate them to a place
+of importance and of power in the Christian life which Christ never
+meant them to fill. He heals through material means; the true source
+of healing is His own loving will.
+
+Further, He heals at a distance. We have here a parallel with the
+story of the nobleman's son at Capernaum, which we have already
+considered. There, too, we have the same phenomenon, the healing power
+sent forth from the Master, and operating far away from His corporeal
+personal presence. This was a test of faith, as the use of the clay
+had been a help to faith. Still He works His healing from afar,
+because to Him there is neither near nor far. In His divine ubiquity,
+that Son of Man, who in His glorified manhood is at the right hand of
+God the Father Almighty, is here and everywhere where there are
+weakness and suffering that turn to Him; ready to help, ready to bless
+and heal. 'Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.'
+
+Our Evangelist sees in the very name of that fountain in which the man
+washed, a symbol which is not to be passed by. 'Go, wash in the Pool
+of Siloam,' which, says John, 'is by interpretation, _Sent._' We have
+heard already about the Pool of Siloam in this section of the Gospel.
+In Chapter vii. we read, 'In the last day, that great day of the
+Feast, Jesus stood and said, "If any man thirst let him come to Me and
+drink."' These words were probably spoken on the last day of the Feast
+of Tabernacles, on which one part of the ceremonial was the drawing,
+with exuberant rejoicing, of water from the Pool of Siloam, and
+bearing it up to the Temple. In these words Christ pointed to that
+fountain which rises 'fast by the oracles of God,' and wells up from
+beneath the hill, that on which the Temple is built, as being a symbol
+of Himself.
+
+And here the Evangelist would have us suppose that, in like manner,
+the very name which the fountain bore (whether as being an outgush
+from beneath the Temple rock, or whether as being the gift of God) as
+applicable to Himself. The lesson to be learned is that the fountain
+in which we have to be cleansed 'from sin and from uncleanness,' whose
+waters are the lotion that will give eyesight to the blind, the true
+'fountain of perpetual youth,' which men have sought for in every
+land, is Christ Himself. In Him we have the welling forth of the heart
+of God, the water of life, the water of gladness, the immortal stream
+of which 'whoso drinketh shall never thirst,' and which, touching the
+blind eyeballs, washes away obscuration and gives new power of vision.
+
+III. Then, still further, we have here our Lord suspending healing on
+obedience.
+
+'Go and wash.' As He said to the impotent man: 'Stretch forth thine
+hand'; as He said to the paralytic in this Gospel: 'Take up thy bed
+and walk'; so here He says, 'Go and wash.' And some friendly hand
+being stretched out to the blind man, or he himself feeling his way
+over the familiar path, he comes to the pool and washes, and returns
+seeing.
+
+There is a double lesson there, on which I have no need to dwell.
+There is, first, the general truth that healing is suspended by Christ
+on compliance with His conditions. He does not simply say to any man,
+Be whole. He could and did say so sometimes in regard to bodily
+healing. But He cannot do so as regards the cure of our blind souls.
+To the sin-sick and sin-blinded man He says, 'Thou shalt be whole,
+if'--or 'I will make thee whole, provided that'--what?--provided that
+thou goest to the fountain where He has lodged the healing power. The
+condition on which sight comes to the blind is compliance with
+Christ's invitation, 'Come to Me; trust in Me; and thou shalt be
+whole.'
+
+Then there is a special lesson here, and that is, Obedience brings
+sight. 'If any man will do His will he shall know of the doctrine.'
+Are there any of you groping in darkness, compassed about with
+theological perplexities and religious doubts? Obey what you know. Do
+what you see clearly you ought to do. Bow your wills to the recognised
+truth. He who has turned all his knowledge into action will get more
+knowledge as soon as he needs it. 'Go and wash; and he went, and came
+seeing.'
+
+IV. And now, lastly, we have here our Lord shadowing His highest work
+as the Healer of blind souls.
+
+It is impossible for me to enter upon that wonderfully dramatic and
+instructive narrative which follows the account of the miracle, and
+describe the controversies between the sturdy, quick-witted, candid,
+blind man, and the narrow, bitter Pharisees. But just notice one or
+two points.
+
+The two parties are evidently represented as types of two contrasted
+classes. The blind man stands for an example of honest ignorance,
+knowing itself ignorant, and not to be coaxed or frightened or in any
+way provoked to pretending to knowledge which it does not possess;
+firmly holding by what it does know, and because conscious of its
+little knowledge, therefore waiting for light and willing to be led.
+Hence he is at once humble and sturdy, docile and independent, ready
+to listen to any voice which can really teach, and formidably quick to
+prick with wholesome sarcasm the inflated claims of mere official
+pretenders. The Pharisees, on the other hand, are sure that they know
+everything that can be known about anything in the region of religion
+and morality, and in their absolute confidence of their absolute
+possession of the truth, in their blank unconsciousness that it was
+more than their official property and stock-in-trade, in their
+complete incapacity to discern the glory of a miracle which
+contravened ecclesiastical proprieties and conventionalities, in their
+contempt for the ignorance which they were responsible for and never
+thought of enlightening, in their cruel taunt directed against the
+man's calamity, and in their swift resort to the weapon of
+excommunication of one whom it was much easier to cast out than to
+answer, are but too plain a type of a character which is as ready to
+corrupt the teachers of the Church as of the synagogue.
+
+One cannot but notice how constantly the phrase 'We know' occurs. The
+parents of the man use it thrice. The Pharisees have it on their lips
+in their first interview with him: 'We know that this man is a
+sinner.' He answers, declining to affirm anything about the character
+of the Man Jesus, because he, for his part, 'knows not,' but standing
+firmly by the solid reality which he 'knows,' in a very solid fashion,
+that his eyes have been opened. So we have the first encounter between
+knowledge which is ignorant, and ignorance which knows, to the
+manifest victory of the latter. Again, in the second round, they try
+to overbear the man's cool sarcasm with their vehement assertion of
+knowledge that God spake to Moses, but by the admission that even
+their knowledge did not reach to the determination of the question of
+the origin of Jesus' mission, lay themselves open to the sudden thrust
+of keen-eyed, honest humility's sharp rapier-like retort. 'Herein is a
+marvellous thing,' that you _Know-alls_, whose business it is to know
+where a professed miracle-worker comes from, 'know not from whence He
+is, and yet He hath opened mine eyes.' 'Now we know' (to use your own
+words) 'that God heareth not sinners, but if any man be a worshipper
+of God, and doeth His will, him He heareth.'
+
+Then observe how, on both sides, a process is going on. The man is
+getting more and more light at each step. He begins with 'a Man which
+is called Jesus.' Then he gets to a 'prophet,' then he comes to 'a
+worshipper of God, and one that does His will.' Then he comes to, 'If
+this man were not of God,' in some very special sense, 'He could do
+nothing.' These are his own reflections, the working out of the
+impression made by the fact on an honest mind; and because he had so
+used the light which he had, therefore Jesus gives him more, and finds
+him with the question, 'Dost thou believe on the Son of God?' Then the
+man who had shown himself so strong in his own convictions, so
+independent, and hard to cajole or coerce, shows himself now all
+docile and submissive, and ready to accept whatever Jesus says: 'Lord,
+who is He, that I might believe on Him?' That was not credulity. He
+already knew enough of Christ to know that he ought to trust Him. And
+to his docility there is given the full revelation; and he hears the
+words which Pharisees and unrighteous men were not worthy to hear:
+'Thou hast both _seen_ it is He that talketh with thee.' Then
+intellectual conviction, moral reliance, and the utter prostration and
+devotion of the whole man bow him at Christ's feet. 'Lord, I believe;
+and He worshipped Him.'
+
+There is the story of the progress of an honest, ignorant soul that
+knew itself blind, into the illumination of perfect vision.
+
+And as he went upwards, so steadily and tragically, downwards went the
+others. For they had light and they would not look at it; and it
+blasted and blinded them. They had the manifestation of Christ, and
+they scoffed and jeered at it, and turned their backs upon it, and it
+became a curse to them; falling not like dew but like vitriol on their
+spirits, blistering, not refreshing.
+
+Therefore Christ pronounces their fate, and sums up the story in the
+solemn two-edged sentence: 'For judgment am I come into the world,
+that they which see not might see, and that they which see might be
+made blind.'
+
+The purpose of His coming is not to judge, but to save. But if men
+will not let Him save, the effect of His coming will be to harm.
+Therefore, His coming will separate men into two parts, as a magnet
+will draw all the iron filings out of a heap and leave the brass. He
+comes not to judge, but His coming does judge. He is set for the rise
+or for the fall of men, and is 'a discerner of the thoughts and
+intents of the heart.'
+
+Light has a twofold effect. It is torture to the diseased eye; it is
+gladdening to the sound one. Christ is the light, as He is also both
+the power of seeing and the thing seen. Therefore, it cannot but be
+that His shining upon men's hearts shall judge them, and shall either
+enlighten or darken.
+
+We all have eyes--the organs by which we may see 'the light of the
+knowledge of the glory of God.' We have all blinded ourselves by our
+sin. Christ is come to show us God, to be the light by which we see
+God, and to strengthen and restore our faculty of seeing Him. If you
+welcome Him, and take Him into your hearts, He will be at once light
+and eyesight to you. But if you turn away from Him He will be
+blindness and darkness to you. He comes to pour eyesight on the blind,
+but He comes therefore also, most assuredly, to make still blinder
+those who do not know themselves to be blind, and conceit themselves
+to be clear-sighted. 'I thank Thee, Father, that Thou hast hid these
+things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.'
+
+They who see themselves to be blind, who know themselves to be
+ignorant, the lowly who recognise their sinfulness and misery and
+helplessness, and turn in their sore need to Christ, will be led by
+paths of growing knowledge and blessedness to the perfect day where
+their strengthened vision will be able to see light in the blaze which
+to us now is darkness. They who say 'I see,' and know not that they
+are miserable and blind, nor hearken to His counsel to 'anoint their
+eyes with eye salve that they may see,' will have yet another film
+drawn over their eyes by the shining of the light which they reject,
+and will pass into darkness where only enough of light and of eyesight
+remain to make guilt. Jesus Christ is for us light and vision. Trust
+to Him, and your eyes will be blessed because they see God. Turn from
+Him and Egyptian darkness will settle on your soul. 'To him that hath
+shall be given, and from him that hath not, even that which he hath
+shall be taken away.'
+
+
+
+
+THE GIFTS TO THE FLOCK
+
+'... By Me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and
+out, and find pasture.'--JOHN x. 9.
+
+One does not know whether the width or the depth of this marvellous
+promise is the more noteworthy. Jesus Christ presents Himself before
+the whole race of man, and declares Himself able to deal with the
+needs of every individual in the tremendous whole. 'If _any man_'--no
+matter who, where, when.
+
+For all noble and happy life there are at least three things needed:
+security, sustenance, and a field for the exercise of activity. To
+provide these is the end of all human society and government. Jesus
+Christ here says that He can give all these to every one.
+
+The imagery of the sheep and the fold is still, of course, in His
+mind, and colours the form of the representation. But the substance is
+the declaration that, to any and every soul, no matter how ringed
+about with danger, no matter how hampered and hindered in work, no
+matter how barren of all supply earth may be, He will give these, the
+primal requisites of life. 'He shall be saved, and shall go in and
+out, and find pasture.'
+
+Now I only wish to deal with these three aspects of the blessedness of
+a true Christian life which our Lord holds forth here as accessible to
+us all: security, the unhindered exercise of activity, and sustenance
+or provision.
+
+I. First, then, in and through Christ any man may be saved.
+
+I take it that the word 'saved' here is rather used with reference to
+the imagery of the parable than in its full Christian sense of
+ultimate and everlasting salvation, and that its meaning in its
+present connection might perhaps better be set forth by the rendering
+'safe' than 'saved.' At the same time, the two ideas pass into one
+another; and the declaration of my text is that because, step by step,
+conflict by conflict, in passing danger after danger, external and
+internal, Jesus Christ, through our union with Him, will keep us safe,
+at the last we shall reach eternal and everlasting salvation. 'He will
+save us' by the continual exercise of His protecting power, 'into His
+everlasting kingdom.' There is none other shelter for men's
+defenceless heads and naked, soft, unarmed bodies except only the
+shelter that is found in Him. There are creatures of low grade in the
+animal world which have the instinct, because their own bodies are so
+undefended and impotent to resist contact with sharp and penetrating
+substances, that they take refuge in the abandoned shells of other
+creatures. You and I have to betake ourselves behind the defences of
+that strong love and mighty Hand if ever we are to pass through life
+without fatal harm.
+
+For consider that, even in regard to outward dangers, union with Jesus
+Christ defends and delivers us. Suppose two men, two Manchester
+merchants, made bankrupt by the same commercial crisis; or two
+shipwrecked sailors lashed upon a raft; or two men sitting side by
+side in a railway carriage and smashed by the same collision. One is a
+Christian and the other is not. The same blow is altogether different
+in aspect and actual effect upon the two men. They endure the same
+thing externally, in body or in fortune. The outward man is similarly
+affected, but the man is differently affected. The one is crushed, or
+embittered, or driven to despair, or to drink, or to something or
+other to soothe the bitterness; the other bows himself with 'It is the
+Lord! Let Him do what seemeth Him good.'
+
+So the two disasters are utterly different, though in form they may be
+the same, and he that has entered into the fold by Jesus Christ is
+safe, not _from_ outward disaster--that would be but a poor thing--but
+_in_ it. For to the true heart that lives in fellowship with Jesus
+Christ, Sorrow, though it be dark-robed, is bright-faced, soft-handed,
+gentle-hearted, an angel of God. 'By Me if any man enter in, he shall
+be safe.'
+
+And further, in our union with Jesus Christ, by simple faith in Him
+and loyal submission and obedience, we do receive an impenetrable
+defence against the true evils, and the only things worth calling
+dangers. For the only real evil is the peril that we shall lose our
+confidence and be untrue to our best selves, and depart from the
+living God. Nothing is evil except that which tempts, and succeeds in
+tempting, us away from Him. And in regard to all such danger, to
+cleave to Christ, to realise His presence, to think of Him, to wear
+His name as an amulet on our hearts, to put the thought of Him between
+us and temptation as a filter through which the poisonous air shall
+pass, and be deprived of its virus, is the one secret of safety and
+victory.
+
+Real gift of power from Jesus Christ, the influx of His strength into
+our weakness, of some portion of the Spirit of life that was in Him
+into our deadness, is promised, and the promise is abundantly
+fulfilled to all men who trust Him when their hour of temptation
+comes. As the dying martyr, when he looked up into heaven, saw Jesus
+Christ 'standing at the right hand of God' ready to help, and, as it
+were, having started from His eternal seat on the Throne in the
+eagerness of His desire to succour His servant, so we may all see, if
+we will, that dear Lord ready to succour us, and close by our sides to
+deliver us from the evil in the evil, its power to tempt. If we could
+carry that vision into our daily life, and walk in its light, when
+temptation rings us round, how poor all the inducements to go away
+from Him would look!
+
+There is a power in the remembrance of Jesus to slay every wicked
+thought; and the things that tempt us most, that most directly appeal
+to our worst sides, to our sense, our ambition, our pride, our
+distrust, our self-will, all these lose their power upon us, and are
+discovered in their emptiness and insignificance, when once this
+thought flashes across the mind--Jesus Christ is my Defence, and Jesus
+Christ is my Pattern and my Companion.
+
+Oh, brother! do not trust yourself out amongst the pitfalls and snares
+of life without Him. If you do, the real evil of all evils will seize
+you for its own; but keep close to that dear Lord, and then 'there
+shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy
+dwelling.' The hidden temptation thou wilt pass by without being
+harmed; the manifest temptation thou wilt trample under foot. 'Thou
+shalt not be afraid for the pestilence that walketh in darkness, nor
+for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.' Hidden known temptations
+will be equally powerless; and in the fold into which all pass by
+faith in Christ thou shalt be safe. And so, kept safe from each danger
+and in each moment of temptation, the aggregate and sum of the several
+deliverances will amount to the everlasting salvation which shall be
+perfected in the heavens.
+
+Only remember the condition, 'By Me if any man enter in.' That is not
+a thing to be done once for all, but needs perpetual repetition. When
+we clasp anything in our hands, however tight the initial grasp,
+unless there is a continual effort of renewed tightening, the muscles
+become lax, and we have to renew the tension, if we are to keep the
+grasp. So in our Christian life it is only the continual repetition of
+the act which our Lord here calls 'entering in by Him' that will bring
+to us this continual exemption from, and immunity in, the dangers that
+beset us.
+
+Keep Christ between you and the storm. Keep on the lee side of the
+Rock of Ages. Keep behind the breakwater, for there is a wild sea
+running outside; and your little boat, undecked and with a feeble hand
+at the helm, will soon be swamped. Keep within the fold, for wolves
+and lions lie in every bush. Or, in plain English, live moment by
+moment in the realising of Christ's presence, power, and grace. So,
+and only so, shall you be safe.
+
+II. Now, secondly, note, in Jesus Christ any man may find a field for
+the unrestricted exercise of his activity.
+
+That metaphor of 'going in and out' is partly explained to us by the
+image of the flock, which passes into the fold for peaceful repose,
+and out again, without danger, for exercise and food; and is partly
+explained by the frequent use, in the Old Testament and in common
+conversation, of the expression 'going out and in' as the designation
+of the two-sided activity of human life. The one side is the
+contemplative life of interior union with God by faith and love; the
+other, the active life of practical obedience in the field of work
+which God provides for us. These two are both capable of being raised
+to their highest power, and of being discharged with the most
+unrestricted and joyous activity, on condition of our keeping close to
+Christ, and living by the faith of Him.
+
+Note, then, 'He shall go in.' That comes first, though it interferes
+with the propriety of the metaphor, since the previous words already
+contemplate an initial 'entering in by Me, the Door.' That is to say,
+that, given the union with Jesus Christ by faith, there must then, as
+the basis of all activity, follow very frequent and deep inward acts
+of contemplation, of faith, and aspiration, and desire. You must go
+into the depths of God through Christ. You must go into the depths of
+your own souls through Him. You must become accustomed to withdraw
+yourselves from spreading yourselves out over the distractions of any
+external activity, howsoever imperative, charitable, or necessary, and
+live alone with Jesus, 'in the secret place of the Most High.' It is
+through Him that we have access to the mysteries and innermost shrine
+of the Temple. It is through Him that we draw near to the depths of
+Deity. It is through Him that we learn the length and breadth and
+height and depth of the largest and loftiest and noblest truths that
+concern the spirit. It is through Him that we become familiar with the
+inmost secrets of our own selves. And only they who habitually live
+this hidden and sunken life of solitary and secret communion will ever
+do much in the field of outward work. Christians of this generation
+are far too much accustomed to live only in the front rooms of the
+house, that look out upon the street; and they know very little--far
+too little for their soul's health, and far too little for the
+freshness of their work and its prosperity--of that inward life of
+silent contemplation and expectant adoration, by which all strength is
+fed. Do not keep all your goods in the shop windows, and have nothing
+on your shelves but dummies, as is the case with far too many of us
+to-day. Remember that the Lord said first, 'He shall go in,' and
+unless you do you will not be 'saved.'
+
+But then, further, if there have been, and continue to be, this
+unrestricted exercise through Christ of that sweet and silent life of
+solitary communion with Him, then there will follow upon that an
+enlargement of opportunity, and power for outward service such as
+nothing but emancipation by faith in Him can ever bring. Howsoever, by
+external circumstances, you and I may be hampered and hindered,
+however often we may feel that if something outside of us were
+different, the development of our active powers would be far more
+satisfactory, and we could do a great deal more in Christ's cause, the
+true hindrance lies never without, but within; and it is only to be
+overcome by that plunging into the depths of fellowship with Him. And
+then, if we carry with us into the field of work, whether it be the
+commonplace, dusty, tedious, and often repulsive duties of our
+monotonous business; or whether it be the field of more distinctly
+unselfish and Christian service--if we carry with us into all places
+where we go to labour, the sweet thought of His presence, of His
+example, of His love, and of the smile that may come on His face as
+the reward of faithful service, then we shall find that external
+labour, drawing its pattern, its motive, its law, and the power for
+its discharge, from communion with Him, is no more task-work nor
+slavery; and even 'the rough places will be made smooth, and the
+crooked things will be made straight,' and distasteful work will be
+made at least tolerable, and hard burdens will be lightened, and the
+things that are 'seen and temporal' will shimmer into transparency,
+through which will shine out the things that are 'unseen and eternal.'
+
+Some of us are constitutionally made to prefer the one of these forms
+of Christian activity; some of us to prefer the other. The tendencies
+of this generation are far too much to the latter, to the exclusion of
+the former. It is hard to reconcile the conflicting claims, and I know
+of no better way to hit the just medium than by trying to keep
+ourselves always in touch with Jesus Christ, and then outward labour
+of any sort, whether for the bread that perishes or for His kingdom
+and righteousness, will never become so absorbing but that in it we
+may have our hearts in heaven, and the silent hour of communion with
+Him will never be so prolonged as to neglect outward duties. There was
+a demoniac boy in the plain, and therefore it was impossible to build
+tabernacles on the Mount of Transfiguration. But the disciples that
+had not climbed the Mount were all impotent to cast out the demoniac
+boy. We, if we keep near to Jesus Christ, will find that through Him
+we can 'go in and out,' and in both be pursuing the one uniform
+purpose of serving and pleasing Him. So shall be fulfilled in our
+cases the Psalmist's prayer, that 'I may dwell in the house of the
+Lord all the days of ray life, to behold His beauty, and to inquire in
+His Temple.'
+
+III. Lastly, in Jesus Christ any man may receive sustenance. 'They
+shall find pasture.'
+
+The imagery of the sheep and the fold is still, of course, present to
+the Master's mind, and shapes the form in which this great promise is
+set forth.
+
+I need only remind you, in illustration of it, of two facts, one, that
+in Jesus Christ Himself all the true needs of humanity are met and
+satisfied. He is 'the Bread of God that came down from heaven to give
+life to the world.' Do I want an outward object for my intellect? I
+have it in Him. Does my heart feel with its tendrils, which have no
+eyes at the ends of them, after something round which it may twine,
+and not fear that the prop shall ever rot or be cut down or pulled up?
+Jesus Christ is the home of love in which the dove may fold its wings
+and be at rest. Do I want (and I do if I am not a fool) an absolute
+and authoritative command to be laid upon my will; some one 'whose
+looks enjoin, whose lightest words are spells'? I find absolute
+authority, with no taint of tyranny, and no degradation to the
+subject, in that Infinite Will of His. Does my conscience need some
+strong detergent to be laid upon it which shall take out the stains
+that are most indurated, inveterate, and ingrained? I find it only in
+the 'blood that cleanseth from all sin.' Do my aspirations and desires
+seek for some solid and substantial and unquestionable and
+imperishable good to which, reaching out, they may be sure that they
+are not anchoring on cloudland? Christ is our hope. For all this
+complicated and craving commonwealth that I carry within my soul,
+there is but one satisfaction, even Jesus Christ Himself. Nothing else
+nourishes the whole man at once, but in Him are all the constituents
+that the human system requires for its nutriment and its growth in
+every part. So in and through Christ we find 'pasture.'
+
+But beyond that, if we are knit to Him by simple and continual faith,
+love, and obedience, then what is else barrenness becomes full of
+nourishment, and the unsatisfying gifts of the world become rich and
+precious. They are nought when they are put first, they are much when
+they are put second.
+
+I remember when I was in Australia seeing some wretched cattle trying
+to find grass on a yellow pasture where there was nothing but here and
+there a brown stalk that crumbled to dust in their mouths as they
+tried to eat it. That is the world without Jesus Christ. And I saw the
+same pasture six weeks after, when the rains had come, and the grass
+was high, rich, juicy, satisfying. That is what the world may be to
+you, if you will put it second, and seek first that your souls shall
+be fed on Jesus Christ. Then, and only then, will what is else water
+be turned by His touch and blessing into wine that shall fill the
+great jars to the brim, and be pronounced by skilled palates to be the
+good wine. 'I will feed them in a good pasture, and upon the high
+mountains of Israel shall their fold be. There shall they lie in a
+good fold, and in a fat pasture shall they feed upon the mountains of
+Israel.'
+
+
+
+
+THE GOOD SHEPHERD
+
+'I am the Good Shepherd, and know My sheep, and am known of Mine. 15.
+As the Father knoweth Me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down My
+life for the sheep.'--JOHN x. 14,15.
+
+'I am the Good Shepherd.' Perhaps even Christ never spoke more
+fruitful words than these. Just think how many solitary, wearied
+hearts they have cheered, and what a wealth of encouragement and
+comfort there has been in them for all generations. The little child
+as it lays itself down to sleep, cries--
+
+  'Jesus, tender Shepherd, hear me,
+  Bless Thy little lamb to-night,'
+
+and the old man lays himself down to die murmuring to himself, 'Though
+I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death, I will fear no evil,
+for Thou art with me.' 'I am the Good Shepherd.' No preaching can do
+anything but weaken and dilute the force of such words, and yet,
+though in all their sweet, homely simplicity they appeal to every
+heart, there are great depths in them that are worth pondering, and
+profound thoughts that need some elucidation.
+
+There are three points to be noticed--First, the general force of the
+metaphor, and then the two specific applications of it which our Lord
+Himself makes.
+
+I. First of all, then, let me say a few words as to the general
+application of the metaphor. The usual notion of these words confines
+itself to the natural meaning, and runs out into very true, but
+perhaps a little sentimental, considerations, laying hold of what is
+so plain on the very surface that I need not spend any time in
+speaking about it. Christ's pattern is my law; Christ's providence is
+my guidance and defence--which in the present case means Christ's
+companionship--is my safety, my sustenance--which in the present case
+means that Christ Himself is the bread of my soul. The Good Shepherd
+exercises care, which absolves the sheep from care, and in the present
+case means that my only duty is meek following and quiet trust. 'I am
+the Good Shepherd'--here is guidance, guardianship, companionship,
+sustenance--all responsibility laid upon His broad shoulders, and all
+tenderness in His deep heart, and so for us simple obedience and quiet
+trust.
+
+Another way by which we get the whole significance of this symbol is
+by noticing how the idea is strengthened by the word that accompanies
+it. Christ does not say 'I am a Shepherd,' but He says, 'I am _the
+good_ Shepherd.' At first sight that word 'good' is interpreted, as I
+have said, in a kind of sentimental, poetic way, as expressing our
+Lord's tenderness and love and care; but I do not think that is the
+full meaning here. You find up and down this Gospel of St. John
+phrases such as, 'I am the true bread,' 'I am the true vine,' and the
+meaning of the word that is here translated 'good' is very nearly
+parallel with that idea. The true bread, the true vine, the true
+Shepherd--which comes to this, to use modern phraseology, that Jesus
+Christ, in His relation to you and me, fulfils all that in figure and
+shadow is represented to the meditative eye by that lower relationship
+between the material shepherd and his sheep. That is the picture, this
+the reality. There is another point to be made clear, and that is,
+that whilst the word 'good' is perhaps a fair enough representation of
+that which is employed by our Lord, there is a special force and
+significance attached to the original, which is lost in our Bible. I
+do not know that it could have been preserved; but still it is
+necessary to state it. The expression here is the one that is
+generally rendered 'fair,' or 'lovely,' or 'beautiful,' and it belongs
+to the genius of that wonderful tongue in which the New Testament is
+written that it has a name for moral purity, considered as being
+lovely, the highest goodness, and the serenest beauty, which was what
+the old Greeks taught, howsoever little they may have practised it in
+their lives. And so here the thought is that _the_ Shepherd stands
+before us, the realisation of all which that name means, set forth in
+such a fashion as to be infinitely lovely and perfectly fair, and to
+draw the admiration of any man who can appreciate that which is
+beautiful, and can admire that which is of good report.
+
+There is another point still in reference to this first view of the
+text. Our Lord not only declares that He is the reality of which the
+earthly shepherd is the shadow, and that He as such is the flawless,
+perfect One, but that He alone is the reality. 'I am the Good
+Shepherd; in Me and in Me alone is that which men need.' And that
+leads me to another point which must just be mentioned, that we shall
+not reach the full meaning of these great words without taking into
+account the history of the metaphor in the Old Testament. Christ gives
+a second edition of the figure, and we are to remember all that went
+before. 'The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want'; 'Thou leddest Thy
+people like a flock, by the hand of Moses and Aaron.' These are but
+specimens of a continuous series of utterances in the old Revelation
+in which Jehovah Himself is the Shepherd of mankind; and there is also
+another class of passages of which I will quote one or two. 'He shall
+feed His flock like a shepherd, and carry them in His arms.' 'Awake, O
+sword, against the Man who is my fellow; smite the Shepherd, and the
+sheep shall be scattered.' There were, we should remember, two streams
+of representation, according to the one of which God Himself was the
+Shepherd of Israel, and according to the other of which the Messiah
+was the Shepherd; and here, as I believe, Jesus lays His hand on both
+the one and the other, and says: 'They are Mine, and they testify of
+Me.' So sweet, so gracious are the words, that we lose the sense of
+the grandeur of them, and need to think before we are able to
+understand how great and immense the claim that is made here upon our
+faith, and that this Man stands before us and arrogates to Himself the
+divine prerogative witnessed from of old by psalmist and prophet, and
+says that for Him were meant the prophecies of ancient times that
+spake of a human shepherd, and asserts that all the sustenance, care,
+authority, command, which the emblem suggests meet in Him in perfect
+measure.
+
+II. Now let us turn to the two special points which our Lord
+emphasises here, as being those in which His relation as the Good
+Shepherd is most conspicuously given. The language of my text runs: 'I
+am the Good Shepherd, and know My sheep, and am known of Mine. As the
+Father knoweth Me, even so know I the Father.' Our Western ways fail
+to bring out the full meaning of the emblem; but all Eastern
+travellers tell us what a strange bond of sympathy and loving regard,
+and docile recognition, springs up between the shepherd and his sheep
+away there in the Eastern pastures and deserts; and how he knows every
+one, though to a stranger's eye they are so like each other; and how
+even the dumb instincts and the narrow intelligence of the silly sheep
+recognise the shepherd, and will not be deceived by shepherd's
+garments worn to deceive, and will not follow the voice of a stranger.
+
+But we must further note that Christ lays hold of the dumb instincts
+of the animal, as illustrating, at the one end of the scale, the
+relation between Him and His followers, and lays hold of the communion
+between the Father and the Son at the other end of the scale, as
+illustrating the same thing. 'I know My sheep.' That is a knowledge
+like the knowledge of the shepherd, a bond of close intimacy. But He
+does not know them by reason of looking at them and thinking about
+them. It is something far more blessed than that. He knows me because
+He loves me; He knows me because He has sympathy with me, and I know
+Him, if I know Him at all, by my love, and I know Him by my sympathy,
+and I know Him by my communion. A loveless heart does not know the
+Shepherd, and unless the Shepherd's heart was all love He would not
+know His sheep. The Shepherd's love is an individualised love. He
+knows His flock as a flock because He knows the units of it, and we
+can rest ourselves upon the personal knowledge, which is personal love
+and sympathy, of Jesus Christ. 'And My sheep know Me'--not by force of
+intellect, not by understanding certain truths, all-important as that
+may be, but by having our hearts harmonised in Him, and our spirits
+put into sympathy and communion with Him. 'They know Me,' and rest
+comes with the knowledge; 'they know Me,' and in that knowing is the
+best answer to all doubt and fear. They are exposed to danger, but in
+the fold they can go quietly to rest, for they know that He is at the
+door watching through all dangers.
+
+III. Turn for a moment to the last point, 'I lay down My life for the
+sheep.' I have said that our Western ways fail to bring out fully the
+element of the metaphor which refers to the kind of sympathy between
+the shepherd and the sheep; and our Western life also fails to bring
+out this other element also. Shepherds in England never have need to
+lay down their life for the sheep. Shepherds in Palestine often did,
+and sometimes do. You remember David with the lion and the bear, which
+is but an illustration of the reality which underlies this metaphor.
+So, then, in some profound way, the shepherd's death is the sheep's
+safety. First of all, look at that most unmistakable, emphatic--I was
+going to say vehement, at any rate, intense--expression of the
+absolute voluntariness of Christ's death, 'I lay down My life,' as a
+man might strip off a vesture. And this application of the metaphor is
+made all the stronger by the words which follow: 'Therefore doth My
+Father love Me, because I lay down My life that I might take it again.
+No man taketh it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to
+lay it down, and I have power to take it again.' We read, 'Smite the
+shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered,' but here, somehow or
+other, the smiting of the Shepherd is not the scattering but the
+gathering of the flock. Here, somehow or other, the dead Shepherd has
+power to guard, to guide, to defend them. Here, somehow or other, the
+death of the Shepherd is the security of the sheep; and I say to you,
+the flock, that for every soul the entrance into the flock of God is
+through the door of the dying Christ, who laid down His life for the
+sheep, and makes them His sheep who trust in Him.
+
+
+
+
+'OTHER SHEEP'
+
+[Footnote: Preached before the Baptist Missionary Society.]
+
+'Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must
+bring, and they shall hear My voice; and they shall become one flock
+and one Shepherd.'--JOHN x. 16 (R.V.).
+
+There were many strange and bitter lessons in this discourse for the
+false shepherds, the Pharisees, to whom it was first spoken. But there
+was not one which would jar more upon their minds, and as they
+fancied, on their sacredest convictions, than this, that God's flock
+was wider than God's fold. Our Lord distinctly recognises Judaism with
+its middle wall of partition as a divine institution, and then as
+distinctly carries His gaze beyond it. To His hearers 'this fold,'
+their own national polity, held all the flock. Without were dogs, a
+doleful land, where 'the wild beasts of the desert met with the wild
+beasts of the islands.' And now this new Teacher, not content with
+declaring them hirelings, and Himself the only true Shepherd of
+Israel, breaks down the hedges and speaks of Himself as the Shepherd
+of men. No wonder that they said, 'He hath a devil and is mad.'
+
+During His earthly life our Lord, as we know, confined His own
+personal ministry for the most part to the lost sheep of the house of
+Israel. Not exclusively so, for He made at least one journey into the
+coasts of Tyre and Sidon, teaching and healing; a Syro-Phcenician
+woman held His feet, and received her request; and one of His
+miracles, of feeding the multitude, was wrought for hungry Gentiles.
+But while His work was in Israel, it was for mankind; and while 'this
+fold,' generally speaking, circumscribed His toils, it did not confine
+His love nor His thoughts. More than once world-wide declarations and
+promises broke from His lips, even before the final universal
+commission, 'Preach the Gospel to every creature.' 'I, if I be lifted
+up, will draw all men unto Me.' 'I am the Light of the world.' These
+and other similar sayings give us His lofty consciousness that He has
+received 'the heathen for His inheritance, and the uttermost parts of
+the earth for His possession.' Parallel with them in substance are the
+words before us, which, for our present purpose, we may regard as
+containing lessons from our Lord Himself of how He looked and would
+have us look on the heathen world, on His work and ours, and on the
+certain issues of both.
+
+I. We have here Christ teaching us how to think of the heathen world.
+
+Observe that His words are not a declaration that all mankind are His
+sheep. The previous verses have distinctly defined a class of men as
+possessing the name, and the succeeding ones reiterate the definition,
+and with equal distinctness exclude another class. 'Ye believe not,
+because ye are not My sheep as I said unto you.' His sheep are they
+who know Him and are known of Him. Between Him and them there is a
+communion of love, a union of life, and a consequent reciprocal
+knowledge, which transcends the closest intimacies of earthly life,
+and finds its only analogue in that deep and mysterious oneness which
+subsists between the Father, who alone knoweth the Son, and the only
+begotten Son, who being ever in the bosom of the Father, alone knoweth
+Him and revealeth Him to us. 'I know My sheep and am known of Mine; as
+the Father knoweth Me and I know the Father. They hear My voice and
+follow Me, and I give unto them eternal life.' Such are the
+characteristics of that relation between Christ and men by which they
+become His sheep. It is such souls as these whom our Lord beholds in
+the wasteful wilderness. He is speaking not of a relation which all
+men bear to Him by virtue of their creation, but of one which _they_
+bear to Him who believe in His name.
+
+Now this interpretation of the words does by no means contradict, but
+rather presupposes and rests upon the truth that all mankind come
+within the love of the divine heart, that He died for all, that all
+may be the subjects of His mediatorial kingdom, recipients of the
+offered mercy of God in Christ, and committed to the stewardship of
+the missionary Church. Resting upon these truths, the words of our
+text advance a step further and contemplate those who 'shall hereafter
+believe on Me.' Whether they be few or many is not the matter in hand.
+Whether at any future time they shall include all the dwellers upon
+earth is not the matter in hand. That every soul of man is included in
+the adaptation and intention and offer of the Gospel is not the matter
+in hand. But this is the matter in hand, that Jesus Christ in that
+moment of lofty elevation when He looked onwards to giving His life
+for the sheep, looked outwards also, far afield, and saw in every
+nation and people souls that He knew were His, and would one day know
+Him, and be led by Him 'in green pastures and beside still waters.'
+
+But where or what were they when He spoke? He does not mean that
+already they had heard His voice and were following His steps, and
+knew His love, and had received eternal life at His hand. This He
+cannot mean, for the plain reason that He goes on to speak of His
+'bringing' them and of their 'hearing,' a work yet to be done. It can
+only be, then, that He speaks of them thus in the fullness of that
+divine knowledge which 'calls things that are not as though they
+were.' It is then a prophetic word which He speaks here.
+
+We have only to think of the condition of the civilised heathendom of
+Christ's own day in order to feel the force of our text in its primary
+application. While the work of salvation was being prepared for the
+world in the life and death of our Lord, the world was being prepared
+for the tidings of salvation. Everywhere men were losing their faith
+in their idols, and longing for some deliverer. Some had become weary
+of the hollowness of philosophical speculation, and, like Pilate, were
+asking 'What is truth?' whilst, unlike Him, they waited for an answer,
+and will believe it when it comes from the lips of the Incarnate
+wisdom. Such were the Magi who were led by their starry science to His
+cradle, and went back to the depths of the Eastern lands with a better
+light than had guided them thither. Such were not a few of the early
+Christian converts, who had long been seeking hopelessly for goodly
+pearls, and had so been learning to know the worth of the One when it
+was offered to them. There were men who had been long sickening with
+despair amidst the rottenness of decaying mythologies and corrupting
+morals, and longing for some breath from heaven to blow health to
+themselves and to the world, and had so been learning to welcome 'the
+rushing mighty wind' when it came in power. There were simple souls,
+without as well as within the chosen people, waiting for the
+Consolation, though they knew not whence it was to come. There were
+many who had already learned to believe that 'salvation is of the
+Jews,' though they had still to learn that salvation is in Jesus. Such
+were that Aethiopian statesman who was poring over Isaiah when Philip
+joined him, the Roman centurion at Caesarea whose prayers and alms
+came up with acceptance before God, these Greeks of the West who came
+to His cross as the Eastern sages to His cradle, and were in Christ's
+eyes the advance guard and first scattered harbingers of the flocks
+who should come flying for refuge to Him lifted on the Cross, 'like
+doves to their windows.' The whole world showed that the fullness of
+time had come; and the history of the early years of the Church
+reveals in how many souls the process of preparation had been silently
+going on. It was like the flush of early spring, when all the buds
+that had been maturing and swelling in the cold, burst, and the tender
+flowers that had been reaching upwards to the surface in all the hard
+winter laugh out in beauty, and a green veil covers all the hedges at
+the first flash of the April sun.
+
+Not only these were in our Lord's thoughts when He saw His sheep in
+heathen lands. There were many who had no such previous preparation,
+but were plunged in all the darkness, nor knew that it was dark. Not
+only those wearied of idolatry, and dissatisfied with creeds outworn,
+but the barbarous people of Illyricum, the profligates of Corinth,
+hard rude men like the jailer at Philippi, and many more were before
+His penetrating eye. He who sees beneath the surface, and beyond the
+present, beholds His sheep where men can only see wolves. He sees an
+Apostle in the blaspheming Saul, a teacher for all generations in the
+African Augustine while yet a sensualist and a Manichee, a reformer in
+the eager monk Luther, a poet-evangelist in the tinker Bunyan. He sees
+the future saint in the present sinner, the angel's wings budding on
+many a shoulder where the world's burdens lie heavy, and the new name
+written on many a forehead that as yet bears but the mark of the
+beast, and the number of His name.
+
+And the sheep whom He sees while He speaks are not only the men of
+that generation. These mighty words are world-wide and world-lasting.
+The whole of the ages are in His mind. All nations are gathered before
+His prophetic vision, even as they shall one day be gathered before
+His judgment throne, and in all the countless mass His hand touches
+and His love clasps those who to the very end of time shall come to
+His call with loving faith, shall follow His steps with glad
+obedience.
+
+Thus does Christ look out upon the world that lay beyond the fold. I
+cannot stay to do more than refer in passing to the spirit which the
+words of our text breathe. There is the lofty consciousness that He is
+the Leader and Guide, the Friend and Helper of all, that He stands
+solitary in His power to bless. There is the full confidence that the
+earth is His to its uttermost border. There is the clear vision of the
+sorrowful condition of these heathen people, without a shepherd and
+without a fold, wandering on every high mountain and dying in every
+thirsty land where there is no water. There are the tenderest pity and
+yearning love for them in their extremity. There is the clear
+assurance that they will come and be blessed in Him. I pass by all the
+other thoughts, which naturally found themselves on these words, in
+order to urge the one which is most appropriate to our present
+engagement. Let us, dear brethren, take Christ as our pattern in our
+contemplations of the heathen world.
+
+He has set us the example of an outgoing look directed far beyond the
+limits of the existing churches, far beyond the point of present
+achievement. We are but too apt to circumscribe our operative thoughts
+and our warm sympathies within the circle of our sight, or of our own
+personal associations. Our selfishness and our indolence affect the
+objects of our contemplations quite as much as they do the character
+of our work. They vitiate both, by making ourselves the great object
+of both, and by weakening the force of both in a ratio that increases
+rapidly with the increasing distance from that favourite centre. It is
+but a subtle form of the same disease which keeps our thoughts penned
+within the bounds of any fold, or limited by the progress already
+achieved. For us the whole world is the possession of our Lord, who
+has died to redeem us. By us the whole ought to be contemplated with
+that same spirit of prophetic confidence which filled Him when He
+said, 'Other sheep I have which are not of this fold.' To press
+onwards, 'forgetting the things that are behind, and reaching forth to
+those which are before,' is the only fitting attitude for Christian
+men, either in regard to the gradual purifying of their own
+characters, or in regard to the gradual winning of the world for
+Christ. We ought to make all past successes stepping-stones to nobler
+things. The true use of the present is to reach up from it to a
+loftier future. The distance beckons; well for us if it do not beckon
+us in vain. We have yet to learn the first lesson of our Master's
+spirit, as expressed in these words, if we have not become familiar
+with the pitying contemplation of the wastes beyond the fold, nor
+fixed deep in our minds the faith that the amplitude of its walls will
+have to be widened with growing years till it fills the world. The cry
+echoes to us from of old, 'Lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy
+stakes, for thou shalt break forth on the right hand and on the left.'
+We take the first step to respond to the summons when we make the
+'regions beyond' one of the standing subjects of our devout thoughts,
+and take heed of supposing that the Church as we know it, has the same
+measurement which the man with the golden rod has measured for the
+eternal courts of Jerusalem, that shall be the joy of the whole earth.
+The very genius of the Gospel is aspiring. It is content with nothing
+short of universality for the sweep, and eternity for the duration,
+and absolute completeness for the measure, of its bestowments on man.
+We should be like men on a voyage of discovery, whose task is felt to
+be incomplete until headland after headland that fades in the dim
+distance has been rounded and surveyed, and the flag of our country
+planted upon it. After each has been passed another arises from the
+water, onwards we must go. There is no pause for our thoughts, none
+for our sympathy, none for our work, till our keels have visited, and
+the 'shout of a King' has been heard on every shore that fills 'the
+breadth of Thy land, O Emmanuel!' The limits of the visible community
+of Christ's Church to-day are far within the borders to which it must
+one day stretch. It is for us, taught by His words, to understand that
+we are yet as it were but encamped by Jericho, and at the beginning of
+the campaign. Ai and Bethhoron, and many a fight more are before us
+yet. The camp of the invaders, when they lay around the city of
+palm-trees, with the mountains in front and the Jordan behind, was not
+more unlike the settled order of the nation when it filled the land,
+than the ranks of Christ's army to-day are to the mighty multitudes
+that shall one day name His name, and follow His banner. Let us live
+in the future, and lay strongly hold on the distant; for both are our
+Lord's, and by so doing we shall the better do our Master's work in
+the present, and at hand.
+
+He has set us the example of a _penetrating_ gaze into heathenism,
+which reveals beneath its monotonous miseries, the souls that are His.
+We ought to look on every field of Christian effort with the assurance
+that in it there are some who will hear His voice. As it was when He
+came, so it is ever and everywhere. The world is being prepared for
+the Gospel. In some broad regions, faith in idolatry is dying out, and
+the moral condition of the people is undergoing a slow elevation.
+Individuals are being weaned from their gods, they know not how, and
+they will not know why till they hear of Christ. He sees in every land
+where the Gospel is being taken 'a people prepared for the Lord.' He
+sees the gold gleaming in the crevices of the caves, the gems, rough
+and unpolished, lying in the matrix. He looks not merely on the great
+mass of idolaters, but He sees the single souls who shall hear. It is
+for us to look on the same mass with confidence caught from His.
+Neither apathetic indifference nor faint-hearted doubt should be
+permitted to weaken our hands. The prospect may seem very dark, the
+power of the enemy very great, our resources very inadequate; but let
+us look with Christ's eye, we shall know that everywhere we may hope
+to find a response to our message. Who they may be, we know not. How
+many they may be, we know not. How they may be guided by Him, they
+know not. But He knows all. We may know that they are there. And as we
+cannot tell who they are but only that they are, we are bound to
+cherish hopes for all--the most degraded and outcast of our race. We
+have no right to give up any field or any man as hopeless. Christ's
+sheep will be found coming out of the midst of wolves and goats.
+Darkness may cover the earth, and gross darkness the people; but if we
+look upon it as Christ did, and as He would have us to look, we shall
+see lights flickering here and there in the obscurity, which shall
+burst out into a blaze. The prophetic eye, the boundlessly hopeful
+heart, the strong confidence that in every land where He is preached
+there will be those who shall hear--these are what He gives us when He
+says, 'Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold.'
+
+There is one other thought connected with these words which may be
+briefly referred to. It is that even now, in all lands where the
+Gospel has been preached, there are those whom Christ has received,
+although they have no connection with His visible Church.
+
+There are many goats within the fold. There are many sheep without it.
+Even in lands where the Gospel has long been preached, we do not
+venture to identify profession by Church fellowship with living union
+with Christ. Much more is this true of our missionary efforts, and the
+apparent converts whom they make. The results that appear are no
+measure of the results that have actually been accomplished. We often
+hear of men who had caught up some stray word in a Bengali
+market-place, or received a tract by the roadside from some passing
+missionary, and who, having carried away the seed in their hearts, had
+long been living as Christians remote from all churches and unknown by
+any. We can easily conceive that timidity in some cases, and distance
+in others, swell the ranks of these secret disciples. Though they
+follow not the footsteps of the flock, the Shepherd will lead them in
+their solitude. There will be many more names in the Lamb's book of
+life, depend upon it, than ever are written on the roll-calls of our
+churches, or in missionary statistics. The shooting-stars that yearly
+fill our sky are visible to us for a moment, when their orbit passes
+into the lighted heavens, and then they disappear in the shadow of the
+earth. But astronomers tell us that they are always there though to us
+they seem to blaze but for a moment. We cannot see them, but they move
+on their darkling path and have a sun round which they circle. So be
+sure that in many heathen lands there are believing souls, seen by us
+but for an instant and then lost, who yet fill their unseen place, and
+move obedient round the Sun of Righteousness. Their names on earth are
+dark, but when the manifestation of the sons of God shall come, they
+shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and as the stars for
+ever and ever. Our work has results beyond our knowledge now. When the
+Church, the Lamb's wife, shall lift up her eyes at the end of the
+days, prophecy tells us that she shall wonder to see her thronging
+children, whom she had never known till then, and will say, 'Who hath
+begotten me these? Behold I was left alone. These, where had they
+been?' These were God's hidden ones, nourished and brought up beyond
+the pale of the outward Church, but brought at last to share her
+triumph, and to abide at her side. 'Other sheep I have, which are not
+of this fold.'
+
+What confidence then, what tender pity, what hope should fill our
+minds when we look on the heathen world! We must never be contented
+with present achievements. We are committed to a task which cannot end
+till all the world hears the joyful sound and is blessed by walking in
+the light of His countenance. When the great Roman Catholic
+missionary, the Apostle of the East, was lying on his dying bed among
+the barbarous people whom he loved, his passing spirit was busy about
+his work, and, even in the article of death, while the glazing eye saw
+no more clearly and the ashen lips had begun to stiffen into eternal
+silence, visions of further conquests flashed before him, and his last
+word was 'Amplius'--_Onward_! It ought to be the motto of the
+missionary work of us, who boast a purer faith, to carry to the
+heathen and to fire our own souls. If ever we are tempted to repose,
+to despondency, to rest and be thankful when we number up our work and
+our converts, let us listen to His voice as it speaks in that supreme
+hour when He beheld the vision of the Cross, and beyond it that of a
+gathered world: 'Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold.'
+
+We have here--
+
+II. Christ teaching us how to think of His work and ours.
+
+'Them also I must bring.' A necessity is laid upon Him, which springs
+at once from that divine work which is the law of His life, and from
+His own love and pity. The means for accomplishing this necessary work
+are implied in the context, as in other parallel Scriptural sayings,
+to be His propitiatory death. The instrumentality employed is not only
+His own personal agency on earth, nor only His throned rule on the
+right hand of God with power over the Spirit of holiness, but also the
+work of His Church, and His work through them. Of that He is mainly
+speaking when He says, 'Them also I must bring.' Here, then, are some
+truths which ought to underlie and shape as well as animate our
+efforts for heathenism.
+
+And first, remember that the same sovereign necessity which was laid
+on Him presses on us.
+
+The 'Spirit of life' which was in Christ had its 'law,' which was the
+will of God. That shaped all His being, and He set us the example of
+perfectly clear recognition of, and perfect obedience to it, from the
+first moment when He said, 'I must be about My Father's business,' to
+the last, when He sighed forth, 'Father, into Thy hands I commit My
+spirit.' Hence the frequent sayings setting forth His work as
+determined by an imperative 'must,' which, whether it be alleged in
+reference to some apparently small or to some manifestly great thing
+in His life, is always equally imperative, and whether it seem to be
+based on the need for the fulfilment of some prophetic word, or on the
+proprieties and congruities of sonship, reposes at last on the will of
+God. His final words on the Passover night, before he went out to
+Gethsemane in the moonlight, contain the influence which moulded His
+whole earthly life, 'As the Father gave Me commandment, even so I do.'
+
+And this divine will constitutes for Him the deepest ground of the
+necessity in the case before us. The eternal counsels of God had
+willed that 'all the ends of the earth should see the salvation of the
+Lord'; therefore, whatever the toils and the pains, the loss and the
+death, He, whose meat and drink was to do the will of Him that sent
+Him, must give Himself to the task, nor rest till, one by one, the
+weary wanderers are brought back on His shoulders and folded in His
+love.
+
+In all which, let us remember, Jesus Christ is our pattern, not in His
+work for the salvation of men, but in the spirit in which He did His
+work. The solemn law of duty before which He bowed His head is a law
+for us also. The authoritative imperative which He obeyed has power
+over us. If we would have our lives holy and strong, wise and good, we
+must have 'the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, making us
+free from the law of sin and death,' for the obedience to the higher
+law enfranchises from slavery to the lower, and all other authority
+ceases over us when we are Christ's men. We are bound to service
+directed to the same end as His--even the salvation of the world. The
+same voice which says to Him, 'I will give Thee for a light to the
+Gentiles,' says to us, 'Ye are My witnesses, and My servant whom I
+have chosen.' The same Will which hath constituted Him the anointed
+Prophet, says of us, 'Touch not Mine anointed and do My prophets no
+harm.' We are redeemed that we may show forth God's praises. Not for
+ourselves alone, nor for purposes terminating in our own personal
+acceptance with God, or the perfecting of our own characters,
+priceless as these are, but for ends which affect the world has God
+had mercy on us. We are bought with a price that we may be the
+servants of God. We have received that we may give forth,
+
+  'God doth with us, as we with torches do,
+  Not light them for themselves.'
+
+'Arise, shine, for thy light is come.'
+
+This missionary work of ours, then, is not one that can be taken up
+and laid down at our own pleasure. It is no excrescence, or accidental
+outgrowth of the Church's life. We are all too apt to think of it as
+an extra, a kind of work of supererogation, which those may engage in
+who have a liking that way, and which those who do not care about it
+may leave alone, and no harm done. When shall we come to feel deeply,
+constantly, practically, that it must be done, and that we are sinning
+when we neglect it? Dear brethren, have we laid on our hearts and
+consciences the solemn weight of that necessity which moulded His
+life? Have we felt the awful power of God's plainly spoken will,
+driving us to this task? Do we know anything of that spirit which
+hears ever-pealing in our ears that awful commandment, 'Go, go to all
+the world, preach, preach the Gospel to every creature?' God commands
+us to take the trumpet, and if we would not soil our souls with gross
+and palpable sin, we must set it to our lips and sound an alarm, that
+by His grace shall wake the sleepers, and make the hoary walls of the
+robber-city that has afflicted the earth for so many weary
+millenniums, rock to their fall, that the redeemed of the Lord may
+pass over and set the captives free.
+
+If we felt this as we ought, surely our consecration would be more
+complete, and our service more worthy. A clear conviction of God's
+will pointing the path for us, is, in all things, a wondrous help to
+vigorous action, to calmness of heart, and thus to success. In this
+mighty work, it would brace us for larger efforts, and fit us for
+larger results. It would simplify and deepen our motives, and thus
+evolve from them nobler deeds and purer sacrifices. To all objections
+from so-called prudence, to all calculations from sparse results, to
+all cavils of onlookers who may carp and seek to hinder, we should
+have one all-sufficient answer. It is not for us to bandy arguments on
+such points as these. We care nothing for difficulties, for
+discouragements, for cost. We may think about these till we lose all
+the manly chivalry of Christian character, like the Apostle who gazed
+on the white crests of the angry breakers flashing in the pale
+moonlight, till he forgot who stood on the storm, and began to sink in
+his great fear. A nobler spirit ought to be ours. The toil is sore,
+the sacrifices many, and the yield seems small. Be it so! To all such
+thoughts we have one answer--Oh! that we felt more its solemn
+power!--such is the will of God. We are doing as we are bid, and we
+mean to go on. 'Them also must I bring,' says the Master. 'Necessity
+is laid upon me, yea, woe is me if I preach not the Gospel,' echoes
+the Apostle. Let us, in the consecration of resolved hearts, and in
+trembling obedience to the divine will, add our choral Amen, and in
+the face of all the paralysing suggestions of our own selfishness, and
+all the tempting voices of worldly wisdom and unbelieving scornfulness
+that would stay our enterprise, let us fling back the grand old
+answer, 'Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you
+more than unto God, judge ye, for we cannot but speak the things which
+we have seen and heard.'
+
+We must not forget, however, that it was no abhorrent toil to which
+Christ reluctantly consented. But in this case, as always with Him,
+the words of prophecy were true, 'I delight to do Thy will.' The
+schism between law and choice had no existence for Him; and when He
+says that He must bring the wandering sheep into the fold, He means
+not more because of God's will than because of His own yearning desire
+to pour out the treasures of His mercy.
+
+So it ought to be with us. Our missionary work should not be degraded
+beneath the level of duty indeed, but neither should it be left on
+that level. We ought not only to be led to it by a power without, but
+impelled by an energy within. If we would be like our Master, we must
+know the necessity arising from our own heart's promptings, which
+leads us to work for Him. He has very imperfectly caught the spirit of
+the Gospel who has never felt the word as a fire in his bones, making
+him weary of forbearing. If we only take to this work because we are
+bid, and without sympathy for men, and longing desire to bring them
+all to Him who has blessed us, we may almost as well leave it alone.
+We shall do very little good to anybody, to ourselves little, to the
+world less. That our own hearts may teach us this necessity, we must
+live near our Master, and know His grace for ourselves. In proportion
+as we do, we shall be eager to proclaim it, and not stand idling in a
+corner of the market-place, till some unmistakable order sends us into
+the vineyard, but go for the relief of our own feelings. 'This is a
+day of good tidings, and we cannot hold our peace,' said the poor
+lepers in the camp to one another. The same feeling that we must tell
+the good news just because we know it, and it will make our brethren
+glad, is part of the Christian character. A blessed necessity, then,
+is laid upon us. A blessed work is given us, which brings with it at
+once the joy of obedience to our Father's will, and the joy of
+gratifying a deep instinct of our nature. 'Them also must I bring,'
+said the Saviour, because He loved men. 'To me who am less than the
+least of all saints, is this _grace_ given, that I should preach among
+the Gentiles the unsearchable riches,' echoes the Apostle. Let us live
+in the light of our Lord's eye, and drink deep of His spirit, till the
+talk becomes a grace and privilege, not a burden, and till silence and
+idleness in His cause shall be felt to be impossible, because it would
+be violence to our own feelings, and the loss of a great joy as well
+as sin against our Father's will.
+
+Consider again, by what means the sheep are to be brought to Christ?
+The context distinctly answers the question. There His propitiatory
+death is emphatically set forth as the power by which it is to be
+accomplished. The verse before our text says, 'I lay down My life for
+the sheep'; that after our text says, 'Therefore doth My Father love
+Me, because I lay down My life.' It is the same connection of means
+and end as appears in the wonderful words with which He received the
+Greeks who came up to the feast, and heard the great truth, for want
+of which their philosophy and art came to nothing. 'Except a corn of
+wheat fall into the ground and die it abideth alone'--'I, if I be
+lifted up from the earth will draw all men unto Me.'
+
+Yes, brethren! the Cross of Christ, and it alone, gathers men into a
+unity; for it alone draws men to Christ. His death, as our
+propitiation, effects such a change in the aspects of the divine
+government, and in the incidence of the divine justice, that 'we who
+were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.' His death, as the
+constraining motive of life in the hearts which receive it, draws them
+away from their own ways by the cords of love, and binds them to Him.
+His death is His purchase of the gifts of that divine Spirit for the
+rebellious, who now convinces the world and endows the Church, 'till
+we all come unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of
+Christ.' The First Begotten from the dead is therefore the prince of
+all the kings of the earth, and He so rides among the nations as to
+bring the world to Himself. The philosophy of history lies in the
+words, 'Other sheep I have, them also I must bring.'
+
+Christian missions abundantly prove that the Cross and the
+proclamation of the Cross have this power, and that nothing else has.
+It is not the ethics of Christianity, nor the abstract truths which
+may be deduced from its story, but it is the story of the suffering
+Redeemer that gives it its power over human hearts, in all conditions,
+and climates, and stages of culture. The magnetism of the Cross alone
+is mighty enough to overcome the gravitation of the soul to sin and
+the world. We hear much nowadays about a new reformation which is to
+be effected on Christianity, by purifying it of its historical facts
+and of its repulsive sacrificial aspect. When this is done, and the
+pure spiritual ideas are disengaged from their fleshly garb, then, we
+are told, will be the apotheosis and glorification of Christ. This
+will be the real lifting up from the earth; this will draw all men.
+Aye, and when this is done what will be left? Christianity will be
+purified back again into a vague Deism, which one would have thought
+had proved itself toothless and impotent, centuries ago.
+Spiritualising will turn out to be very like evaporating, the residuum
+will be a miserably unsatisfactory something, near akin to nothing,
+and certainly incapable either of firing its disciples with a desire
+to spread their faith, if we may call it so by courtesy, or of drawing
+men to itself. A Christianity without a Sacrifice on the altar will be
+a Christianity without worshippers in the Temple. The King of Kings
+who rides forth conquering is clothed in a vesture dipped in blood.
+The Christian Emperor saw in the heavens the Cross, with the legend:
+'In this sign thou shalt conquer!' It is an emblem true for all time.
+The Cross is the power unto salvation. The races scattered on the
+earth have often sought to make for themselves a rallying-point, and
+their attempts at union have become Babels, centres of repulsion and
+confusion. God has given us the Centre, the Tree of life in the midst.
+The crucified Saviour is the Root of Jesse, which shall stand for an
+ensign for the people; to it shall the Gentiles seek, and resting
+beneath the shadow of the Cross be at peace. 'I, if I be lifted up
+from the earth, will draw all men unto Me.'
+
+Once more our Lord teaches us here to identify the work of the Church
+with His own. What His servants do for Him He does, for from Him they
+derive the power to do it, and from Him comes the blessing which makes
+it effectual. He works in us, He works with us, He works for us. He
+works in us. We have the grace of His Spirit to touch our hearts and
+sanctify us for service. He puts it into the wills and desires of His
+Church to consecrate themselves to the task. He teaches them sympathy
+and self-devotion. He breathes world-wide aspirations into them. He
+raises up men to go forth. He works _with_ us, helping our weakness,
+enlightening our ignorance, directing our steps, giving power to the
+student at his dry task of grammar and dictionary, being mouth and
+wisdom to them that speak in His name, touching the hearts of them
+that hear. In our basket He puts the seed-corn; the furrows of the
+field He makes soft with showers, and when it is sown He blesses the
+springing thereof. He works for us, opening doors among the nations,
+ordering the courses of providence, and holding His hand around His
+servants, so that they are immortal till their work is done; and can
+ever lift up thankful voices to Him who leads them joyful captives at
+His own triumphal car, as it rolls on its stately march, scattering
+the sweet odours of His name wherever the long procession sweeps
+through the world. We neither go a warfare at our own charges, nor in
+our own might. He will fight with us, and He will pay us liberally at
+the last. When we count up our own resources, do not we often leave
+Christ out of the reckoning? Do we not measure our strength against
+the enemies', and forget that one weak man, plus Christ, is always in
+the majority? 'It is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of My Father
+which speaketh in you.' 'I laboured, yet not I, but the grace of God
+which was with me.' So helped, so inspired, we are wrong to despond;
+we are wrong not to expect great things and attempt great things; we
+are wrong not to dare, we are wrong to do the work of the Lord
+negligently. Let us feel that Christ's work is ours, and we shall be
+bowed beneath the solemnity of the thought, shall accept joyfully the
+necessity. Let us feel that our work is Christ's, and we shall rejoice
+in infirmity that His power may rest upon us, shall bid adieu to
+faint-hearted fears, and be sure that then it must prosper. 'Arise, O
+Lord! plead Thine own cause.' Not unto us, O Lord! not unto us, but to
+Thy name give glory.
+
+'The Lord ascended into Heaven and sat on the right hand of God, and
+they went everywhere preaching the word.' It seems a strange contrast
+between the rest of the Lord, sitting in sublime expectancy of
+conscious power til His enemies become His footstool, and the toils of
+His scattered disciples. It is like that moment which the genius of the
+great painter has caught in an immortal work, when Jesus in rapt
+communion with the mighty dead, and crowned with the accepting word
+from Heaven, floated transfigured above the Holy Mount, while below
+His disciples wrestled impotently with the demon that would not be
+cast out. But it is not really contrast. He has not so parted the
+toils as that His are over ere ours begin. He has not left His Church
+militant to bear the brunt of the battle while the Captain of the
+Lord's host only watches the current of the heady fight--like Moses
+from the safe mountain. The Evangelist goes on to tell us that the
+Lord also was working with them and sharing their toils, lightening
+their burdens, preparing for them successes on earth, and a rest like
+His when He shall gird Himself and serve them. Thus, the first time
+that the heavens opened again to mortal eyes after they closed on His
+ascending form, was to show Him to the martyr in the council chamber,
+not sitting careless or restful, but _standing_ at the right hand of
+God, to intercede for, to strengthen, to receive and glorify His dying
+servant. He goes with us where we go, and through our works and gifts
+and prayers, through our proclamation of the Cross, He worketh His
+will, and shall finally accomplish that great necessity laid upon Him
+by the Father's counsels, and upon us by His commandment, and to be
+effected by His death, that He should die, not for that nation only,
+but also that He should gather together in one the children of God who
+are scattered abroad.
+
+We have here--
+
+III. Our Lord teaching us how to think of the certain issues of His
+work and ours.
+
+'They shall hear My voice, and there shall be one fold and one
+Shepherd.' We may regard these words as embracing two things; a nearer
+issue, namely, the response that will always attend His call; and a
+more remote, namely, the completion of His work. There is, of course,
+a very blessed sense in which the latter words are true now, and have
+been ever since Paul could say to those who had been aliens from the
+commonwealth of Israel, 'He hath made both one. Now, therefore, ye are
+no more foreigners but fellow-citizens with the saints.' But the fold
+which now exists, limited in numbers, with its members but partially
+conscious of their unity, and surrounded by those who follow hireling
+shepherds, does not exhaust these great words. They shall not be
+accomplished till that far-off future have come.
+
+But for the present we have the predictions of the former clause,
+'They shall hear My voice.' What manner of expectations does it teach
+us to cherish? It seems to speak not of universal reception of
+Christ's message, but of some as hearing and some as forbearing. It
+teaches us to look for divers results attending our missionary work.
+There will always be a Dionysius the Areopagite, the woman Lydia, the
+kindly barbarians, the conscience-stricken jailer. There will always
+be the scoffers, who mock when they hear of 'Jesus and the
+resurrection'; the hesitating who compound with conscience by
+promising to hear again of this matter, the fierce opponents who
+invoke constituted authorities or mob violence to crush the message.
+
+Again, the words seem to contemplate a long task. There is nothing
+about the rate at which His Kingdom shall spread, not a syllable to
+answer inquiries as to when the end shall come. The whole tone of the
+language suggests the idea that bringing back the sheep is to take a
+long time, and to cost many a tedious journey into the wilderness. Not
+a sudden outburst, but a slow kindling of the flame, is what our Lord
+teaches us here to expect.
+
+But while thus calm in tone and moderate in expectation, the words
+breathe a hope as confident as it is calm, as clear as it is moderate.
+There will always be a response. His voice shall never be lifted up in
+the snow-storm or lonely hillsides only to be blown back into His own
+ears, unheard and unheeded. Be they few or many, they shall hear. Be
+the toil longer or shorter, more or less severe, it shall not be in
+vain.
+
+And to these expectations we shall do wisely if we attune ours. Omit
+from your hopes what your Lord has omitted from His promises; do not
+ask what He has not told. Do not wonder if you encounter what He met,
+for the disciple is not greater than his Master, and only if they have
+kept My saying will they keep yours also. But, on the other hand,
+expect as much as He has prophesied; accept it when it comes as the
+fruit of His work, not of yours, and build a firm faith that your
+labour shall not be in vain on these calm and prescient words.
+
+So much for the course of the kingdom. And what of the end? One by one
+the sheep have been brought, at last they are all gathered in, not a
+hoof left behind. The stars steal singly into their places in the
+heavens as the darkness deepens, and He 'bringeth them forth by
+number,' until at the noon of night the sky is crowded with their
+lights, and 'for that He is great in power, not one faileth.' What
+expectations are we here taught to cherish then of the final issue?
+
+Mark, to begin with, that there is implied the ultimate universality
+of His dominion and sole supremacy of His throne. There is to be but
+one Shepherd, and over all the earth a great unity of obedience to
+Him. Here is the knell of all authority that does not own Him, and the
+subordination of all that does. The hirelings, the blind guides, that
+have misled and afflicted humanity for so many weary ages, shall be
+all sunk in oblivion. The false gods shall be discrowned, and lie
+shattered on their temple-sill, and there shall be no worshippers to
+care for or to try to repair their discomfiture. Bow your heads before
+Him, thinkers who have led men on devious paths and spoken but a
+partial truth and a wisdom all confused with foolishness! Lower your
+swords before Him, warriors who have builded your cities on blood and
+led men like sheep to the slaughter! He is more glorious and excellent
+than the mountains of prey. Cast your crowns before Him, princes and
+all judges of the earth, for He is King by right of the crown of
+thorns! This is the Lord of all--Teacher, Leader, Ruler of all men.
+All other names shall be forgotten but His shall abide. If they have
+been shepherds who would not come in by the door, a ransomed world
+shall rejoice over their fall with the ancient hymn, 'Other gods
+beside Thee have had dominion over us; they are dead, they shall not
+live, Thou hast destroyed them, and made all their memory to perish.'
+If they have been subject to the chief Shepherd and ensamples to the
+flock, they will rejoice to decrease before His increase, and having
+helped to bring the Bride to the Bridegroom, will gladly stand aside
+and be forgotten in the perfect love that enters into full fruition at
+the last. Then when none contest nor intercept the reverential
+obedience that the whole world brings to Him, shall be fulfilled the
+firm promise which declared long ago: 'I will set up one Shepherd over
+them, and He will feed them and be their Shepherd.'
+
+Mark again the blessed nature of the relation between Christ and all
+men which is here foretold. From of old, the shepherd has been in all
+nations the emblem of kingly power, of leadership of every sort. How
+often the fact has contradicted the symbol let history tell. But with
+Jesus the reality does not only contradict, but even transcends, the
+tender old comparison. He rules with a gentle sway. His sceptre is no
+rod of iron, but the shepherd's crook, and the inmost meaning of its
+use is that it may 'comfort' us, as David learned to feel. There
+gather round the metaphor all thoughts of merciful guidance, of tender
+care, of a helping arm when we are weak, of a loving bosom where we
+are carried when we are weary. It speaks of a seeking love that roams
+over every high hill till it finds, and of a strong shoulder that
+bears us back when He has found. It tells of sweet hours of rest in
+the hot noontide by still waters, of ample provision for all the
+soul's longings in green pastures. It speaks of footsteps that go
+before, in which men may follow and find them ways of pleasantness. It
+speaks of gentle callings by name which draw the heart. It speaks of
+defence when lion and bear come ravening down, and of safe couching by
+night when the silent stars behold the sleeping sheep and the wakeful
+shepherd. He Himself gives its highest significance to the emblem, in
+the words of this great discourse, when He fixes on His knowledge, His
+calling of His sheep, His going before them, His giving His life for
+them. Such are the gracious blessings which here He teaches us to
+think of as possessed in the happy days that shall be, by all the
+world.
+
+And, on the other hand, the symbol speaks of confiding love in the
+hearts of men, of a great peacefulness of meek obedience stilling and
+gladdening their wills, of the consciousness of His perfect love, and
+the knowledge of all His gracious character, of sweet answering
+communion with Him, of safety from all enemies, of freedom, of
+familiar passage in and out to God. Thus knit together shall be the
+one fold and the one Shepherd. 'They shall feed in the ways, and their
+pastures shall be in all high places. They shall not hunger nor
+thirst, neither shall the heat nor sun smite them, for He that hath
+mercy on them shall feed them, even by the springs of water shall He
+guide them.'
+
+Mark again what a vision is here given of the relations of men with
+one another.
+
+They are to be all gathered into a peaceful unity. They are to be one
+because they all hearken to one voice. It is to be observed that our
+Lord does not say, as our English Bible makes Him say, that there is
+to be one fold. He drops that word of set purpose in the latter clause
+of our text, and substitutes for it another, which may perhaps be best
+rendered flock. Why this change in the expression? Because, as it
+would seem, he would have us learn that the unity of that blessed
+future time is not to be like the unity of the Jewish Church, a formal
+and external one. That ancient polity was a fold. It held its members
+together by outward bonds of uniformity. But the universal Church of
+the future is to be a flock. It is to be really and visibly one. But
+it is to be so, not because it is hemmed in by one enclosure, but
+because it is to be gathered round one Shepherd. The more closely they
+are drawn to Him, the more near will they be to each other. The centre
+in which all the radii meet keeps them all in their places. 'We being
+many are one bread, for we are all partakers of that one bread.' In
+the ritual of the Old Covenant, the great golden candlestick with its
+seven branches stood in the court of the Temple, emblem of the formal
+oneness of the people, which was meant to be the light of the Lord to
+a dark world. In the vision of the New Covenant, the seer in Patmos
+beheld not the one lamp with its branches, but the seven golden
+candlesticks, which were made into a holier and a freer unity because
+the Son of Man walked in their midst--emblem of the oneness in
+diversity of the peoples, who were sometimes darkness, but shall one
+day be light in the Lord. There may continue to be national
+distinctions. There may or there may not be any external unity. But at
+all events our Lord turns away our thoughts from the outward to the
+inward, and bids us be sure that though the folds be many the flock
+shall be one, because they shall all hear and follow Him.
+
+The words, however, suggest for us the blessed thought of the peaceful
+relations that shall then subsist among men. The tribes of the earth
+shall couch beside each other like the quiet sheep in the fold, and
+having learned of His great meekness, they shall no more bite nor
+devour one another. Alas! alas! the words seem too good to be true.
+They seem long, long of coming to pass. Ever since they were spoken
+the old bloody work has been going on, and the old lusts of the human
+heart have been busy sowing the dragon's teeth that shall spring up in
+wars and fightings. In savage lands warfare rages on, ceaseless,
+ignoble, unrecorded, and seemingly purposeless as that of animalcules
+in a drop of water. On civilised soil, men, who love the same Christ
+and worship Him in the same tongue, are fronting each other at this
+hour. The war of actual swords, and the war of conflicting creeds, and
+the jostling of human selfishness in the rough road of life, are all
+around us, and their seeds are within ourselves. The race of men do
+not live like folded sheep, rather like a flock of wolves, who first
+run over and then devour their weaker fellows.
+
+But here is a fairer hope, and it will be fulfilled when all evil
+thoughts, and all selfish desires, and all jealous grudgings shall
+vanish from men's hearts, as unclean spirits at cockcrow, and shall
+leave them, self-forgetful, yielding of their own prerogatives,
+desirous of no other man's, abhorrent of inflicting, and patient of
+receiving wrong. There will be no fuel then to blow into sulphurous
+flame, though all the blasts from hell were to fan the embers. But
+peace and concord shall be in all men, for Christ shall be in all.
+National distinctions may abide, but national enmities--the oldest and
+deepest, shall disappear. There shall still be Assyria, and Egypt, and
+Israel, but their former relation will be replaced by a bond of amity
+in their common possession of Him who is our peace. 'In that day shall
+Israel be the third with Egypt, and with Assyria, even a blessing in
+the midst of the land, whom the Lord shall bless, saying, Blessed be
+Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine
+inheritance.' God be thanked! that though we see, and our fathers have
+seen, so much that seems to contradict our hopes of a peaceful world,
+and though to-day the hell-hounds of war are baying over the earth,
+and though nowhere can we see signs even of the approach of the
+halcyon time, yet we can wait for the vision, knowing that it will come
+at the appointed time, when
+
+  'No war or battle's sound
+  Is heard the world around,
+  The idle spear and shield are high uphung;
+  The trumpet speaks not to the armed throng,
+  And Kings sit still, with awful eye,
+  As if they surely knew their Sovereign Lord was by.'
+
+Such are the thoughts which our Lord would teach us as to the present
+and as to the future of our missionary work. For the one, moderate
+expectations of success, not unchequered by disappointment, and a
+brave patience in long toil. For the other, hopes which cannot be too
+glowing, and a faith which cannot be too obstinate. The one is being
+fulfilled in our own and our brethren's experience even now; we may be
+therefore all the more sure that the other will be so in due time. If
+we look with Christ's eyes, we shall not be depressed by the apparent
+unbroken surface of heathenism but see, as He did, everywhere souls
+that belong to Him, who may and must be won; we shall joyfully embrace
+the work which He has given us to do; we shall arm ourselves against
+the discouragements of the present, by living much in the past at the
+foot of the Cross, till we catch the true image of the Saviour's love,
+and much in the future in the midst of the ransomed flock, till we too
+behold the roses blossoming in the wilderness, the bright waters
+covering all the dry places in the desert, and the families of men
+sitting, clothed and in their right mind, at the feet of Jesus.
+
+Our missionary work is the pure and inevitable result of a belief in
+these words of my text. Can a man believe that Christ has other sheep
+for whom He died because He must bring them in, whom He will bring in
+because He died, and _not_ work according to his power in the line of
+the divine purposes? The missionary spirit is but the Christian spirit
+working in one particular direction. Missionary societies are but one
+of the authentic outcomes of Christian principles, as natural as
+holiness of life, or the act of prayer.
+
+To secure, then, a more vigorous energy in such work, we need chiefly
+what we need for all Christian growth--namely, more and deeper
+communion with Christ, a more vivid realisation of His grace and love
+for ourselves. And then we need that, under the double stimulus of His
+love and of His commandment--which at bottom are one--our minds should
+be more frequently occupied with this subject of Christian missions.
+Most of us know too little about the matter to feel very much. And
+then we need that we should more seriously reflect upon the facts in
+relation to our own personal responsibility and duty. You complain of
+the triteness of such appeals as this sermon. Brethren, have you ever
+tried that recipe for freshening up well-worn truths, namely, thinking
+about them in connection with the simplest, most important of all
+questions--what, then, ought I to do in view of these truths? Am I
+exaggerating when I say, that not one-half of the professing
+Christians of our day give an hour in the year to pondering that
+question, with reference to missionary work? Oh! dear friends, see to
+it that you live in Christ for yourselves, and then see to it that you
+think His thoughts about the heathen world, till your pity is stirred
+and your mind braced to the firm resolve that you too will work the
+works of Christ and bring in the wanderers.
+
+We have had as large results as Christ has led us to expect, and far
+larger than we deserved. Christian missions are yet in their
+infancy--alas! that it should be so. But in these seventy years since
+they may be said to have begun, what wonderful successes have been
+achieved. We are often told that we have done nothing. Is it so? The
+plant has been got together, methods of working have been
+systematised, mistakes in some measure corrected. We have spent much
+of our time in learning how to work, and that process is by no means
+over yet. But with all these deductions, which ought fairly to be
+made, how much has been accomplished? The Bible has been put into the
+languages of seven hundred millions of men. The beginnings of a
+Christian literature have been supplied for five-sixths of the world.
+Half a million of professed converts have been gathered in, or as many
+as there were at the end of the first century, after about the same
+number of years of labour, and with apostles for missionaries and
+miracles for proof. And if these still bear on their ankles the marks
+of the fetters, and limp as they walk, or cannot see very clearly at
+first, it is no more than might be expected from their long darkness
+in the prison-house, and it is no more than Paul had to contend with
+at Ephesus and Corinth.
+
+Every church that has engaged in the toil has shared in the blessing,
+and has its own instances of special prosperity. We have had Jamaica;
+the London Missionary Society, Madagascar, and the South Seas; the
+Wesleyans, Fiji; the Episcopal Societies, Tinnevelly; the American
+brethren, Burmah, and the Karens. Some of the ruder mythologies have
+been so utterly extirpated that the children of idolaters have seen
+the gods whom their fathers worshipped for the first time in the
+British Museum. While over those more compact and scientific systems
+which lie like an incubus on mighty peoples, there has crept a
+sickening consciousness of a coming doom, and they already half own
+their conqueror in the Stronger One than they.
+
+  'They feel from Judah's land
+  The dreaded Infant's hand.'
+
+'Bel boweth down, Nebo stoopeth, the idols are upon the beasts.'
+Surely God has granted us success enough for our thankful confidence,
+more than enough for our deserts. I repeat it, it is as much as He
+promised, as much as we had any right to expect, and it is a vast deal
+more than any other system of belief or of no belief, any of your
+spiritualised Christianities, or still more intangible creeds has ever
+managed, or ever thought of trying. To those who taunt us with no
+success, and who perhaps would not dislike Christian missions so much
+if they disliked Christian truth a little less, we may very fairly and
+calmly answer--This rod has budded at all events; do you the same with
+your enchantments.
+
+But the past is no measure of the future. From the very nature of the
+undertaking the ratio of progress increases at a rapid rate. The first
+ten years of labour in India showed twenty-seven converts, the seventh
+ten showed more than twenty-seven thousand. The preparation may be as
+slow as the solemn gathering of the thunder-clouds, as they
+noiselessly steal into their places, and slowly upheave their grey
+billowing crests; the final success may be as swift as the lightning
+which flashes in an instant from one side of the heavens to the other.
+It takes long years to hew the tunnel, to 'make the crooked straight,
+and the rough places plain,' and then smooth and fleet the great power
+rushes along the rails. To us the cry comes, 'Prepare ye in the desert
+an highway for our God.' The toil is sore and long, but 'the glory of
+the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.' The
+Alpine summits lie white and ghastly in the spring sunshine, and it
+seems to pour ineffectual beams on their piled cold; but by slow
+degrees it is silently loosening the bands of the snow, and after a
+while a goat's step, as it passes along a rocky ledge, or a breath of
+wind will move a tiny particle, and in an instant its motion spreads
+over a mile of mountain side, and the avalanche is rushing swifter and
+mightier at every foot down to the valley below, where it will all
+turn into sweet water, and ripple glancing in the sunshine. Such is
+our work. It may seem very hopeless, and be mostly unobservable in
+surface results, but it is very real for all that. The conquering
+impulse, for which our task may have been to prepare the way, will be
+given, and then we shall wonder to see how surely the kingdom was
+coming, even when we observed it not.
+
+Ye have need of patience, and to feed your patience, ye have need of
+fellowship with Christ, of faith in His promises, of sympathy with His
+mind. God has given us, dear brethren, special reason for renewed
+consecration to this service in the blessings which have during the
+year terminated our anxieties and crowned our work for our own
+Society. But let us not dwell upon what has been done. These successes
+are brooks by the way at which we may drink--nothing more. We ought to
+be like shepherds in the lonely mountain glens, who see in the
+fast-falling snow and the bitter blast a summons to the hillside, and
+there all the night long wherever the drift lies deepest and the wind
+bites the most sharply, search the most eagerly for the poor half-dead
+creatures, and as they find each, bear it back to the safe shelter,
+nor stay behind to count the rescued, nor to rest their weariness, for
+all the bright light in the cottage and the blackness without, but
+forth again on the same quest, till all the Master's sheep have been
+rescued from the white death that lay treacherous around, and are
+sleeping at peace in His folds. A mighty Voice ought ever to be
+sounding in our ears, 'Other sheep I have,' and the answer of our
+hearts and of our lives should be, 'Them also, O Lord! will I try to
+bring.' Not till the far-off issue is accomplished shall we have a
+right to rest, and then we, with all those He has helped us to gather
+to His side, shall be among that flock, whom He who is at once Lamb
+and Shepherd, our Brother and our Lord, our Sacrifice and King, 'shall
+feed and lead by living fountains of waters,' in the sweet pastures of
+the upper world, where there are no ravening wolves, nor false guides
+to terrify and bewilder His flock any more at all for ever.
+
+
+
+
+THE DELAYS OF LOVE
+
+'Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus. When He had
+heard therefore that he was sick, He abode two days still in the same
+place where He was.'--JOHN xi. 5, 6.
+
+We learn from a later verse of this chapter that Lazarus had been dead
+four days when Christ reached Bethany. The distance from that village
+to the probable place of Christ's abode, when He received the message,
+was about a day's journey. If, therefore, to the two days on which He
+abode still after the receipt of the news, we add the day which the
+messengers took to reach Him and the day which He occupied in
+travelling, we get the four days since which Lazarus had been laid in
+his grave. Consequently the probability is that, when our Lord had the
+message, the man was dead. Christ did not remain still, therefore, in
+order to work a greater miracle by raising Lazarus from the dead than
+He would have done by healing, but He stayed--strange as it would
+appear--for reasons closely connected with the highest well-being of
+all the beloved three, and _because_ He loved them.
+
+John is always very particular in his use of that word 'therefore,'
+and he points out many a subtle and beautiful connection of cause and
+effect by his employment of it. I do not know that any of them are
+more significant and more full of illumination with regard to the ways
+of divine providence than the instance before us. How these two
+sisters must have looked down the rocky road that led up from Jericho
+during those four weary days, to see if there were any signs of His
+coming. How strange it must have appeared to the disciples themselves
+that He made no sign of movement, notwithstanding the message. Perhaps
+John's scrupulous carefulness in pointing out that His love was
+Christ's reason for His quiescence may reflect a remembrance of the
+doubts that had crept over the minds of himself and his brethren
+during these two days of strange inaction. The Evangelist will have us
+learn a lesson, which reaches far beyond the instance in hand, and
+casts light on many dark places.
+
+I. Christ's delays are the delays of love.
+
+We have all of us, I suppose, had experience of desires for the
+removal of bitterness or sorrows, or for the fulfilment of
+expectations and wishes, which we believed, on the best evidence that
+we could find, to be in accordance with His will, and which we have
+been able to make prayers out of, in true faith and submission, which
+prayers have had to be offered over and over and over again, and no
+answer has come, It is part of the method of Providence that the
+lifting away of the burden and the coming of the desires should be a
+hope deferred. And instead of stumbling at the mystery, or feeling as
+if it made a great demand upon our faith, would it not be wiser for us
+to lay hold of that little word of the Apostle's here, and to see in
+it a small window that opens out on to a boundless prospect, and a
+glimpse into the very heart of the divine motives in His dealings with
+us?
+
+If we could once get that conviction into our hearts, how quietly we
+should go about our work! What a beautiful and brave patience there
+would be in us, if we habitually felt that the only reason which
+actuates God's providence in its choice of times of fulfilling our
+desires and lifting away our bitterness is our own good! Nothing but
+the purest and simplest love, transparent and without a fold in it,
+sways Him in all that He does. Why should it be so difficult for us to
+believe this? If we were more in the way of looking at life, with all
+its often unwelcome duty, and its arrows of pain and sorrow, and all
+the disappointments and other ills that it is heir to, as a
+discipline, and were to think less about the unpleasantness, and more
+about the purpose, of what befalls us, we should find far less
+difficulty in understanding that His delay is born of love, and is a
+token of His tender care.
+
+Sorrow is prolonged for the same reason as it was sent. It is of
+little use to send it for a little while. In the majority of cases,
+time is an element in its working its right effect upon us. If the
+weight is lifted, the elastic substance beneath springs up again. As
+soon as the wind passes over the cornfield, the bowing ears raise
+themselves. You have to steep foul things in water for a good while
+before the pure liquid washes out the stains. And so time is an
+element in all the good that we get out of the discipline of life.
+Therefore, the same love which sends must necessarily protract, beyond
+our desires, the discipline under which we are put. If we thought of
+it, as I have said, more frequently as discipline and schooling, and
+less frequently as pain and a burden, we should understand the meaning
+of things a great deal better than we do, and should be able to face
+them with braver hearts, and with a patient, almost joyous, endurance.
+
+If we think of some of the purposes of our sorrows and burdens, we
+shall discern still more clearly that time is needed for accomplishing
+them, and that, therefore, love must delay its coming to take them
+away. For example, the object of them all, and the highest blessing
+that any of us can obtain, is that our wills should be bent until they
+coincide with God's, and that takes time. The shipwright, when he gets
+a bit of timber that he wants to make a 'knee' out of, knows that to
+mould it into the right form is not the work of a day. A will may be
+_broken_ at a blow, but it will take a while to _bend_ it. And just
+because swiftly passing disasters have little permanent effect in
+moulding our wills, it is a blessing, and not an evil, to have some
+standing fact in our lives, which will make a continual demand upon us
+for continually repeated acts of bowing ourselves beneath His sweet,
+though it may seem severe, will. God's love in Jesus Christ can give
+us nothing better than the opportunity of bowing our wills to His, and
+saying, 'Not mine, but Thine be done.' If that is why He stops on the
+other side of Jordan, and does not come even to the loving messages of
+beloved hearts, then He shows His love in the sweetest and the
+loftiest form. So, dear friends, if you carry a lifelong sorrow, do
+not think that it is a mystery why it should lie upon your shoulders
+when there are omnipotence and an infinite heart in the heavens. If it
+has the effect of bending you to His purpose, it is the truest token
+of His loving care that He can send. In like manner, is it not worth
+carrying a weight of unfulfilled wishes, and a weariness of
+unalleviated sorrows, if these do teach us three things, which are one
+thing--faith, endurance, prayerfulness, and so knit us by a threefold
+cord that cannot be broken, to the very heart of God Himself?
+
+II. This delayed help always comes at the right time.
+
+Do not let us forget that Heaven's clock is different from ours. In
+our day there are twelve hours, and in God's a thousand years. What
+seems long to us is to Him 'a little while.' Let us not imitate the
+shortsighted impatience of His disciples, who said, 'What is this that
+He saith, A little while? We cannot tell what He saith.' The time of
+separation looked so long in anticipation to them, and to Him it had
+dwindled to a moment. For two days, eight-and-forty hours, He delayed
+His answer to Mary and Martha, and they thought it an eternity, while
+the heavy hours crept by, and they only said, 'It's very weary, He
+cometh not, they said.' How long did it look to them when they had got
+Lazarus back?
+
+The longest protraction of the fulfilment of the most yearning
+expectation and fulfilled desire will seem but as the winking of an
+eyelid when we get to estimate duration by the same scale by which He
+estimates it, the scale of Eternity. The ephemeral insect, born in the
+morning and dead when the day fades, has a still minuter scale than
+ours, but we should not think of regulating our estimate of long and
+short by it. Do not let us commit the equal absurdity of regulating
+the march of His providence by the swift beating of our timepieces.
+God works leisurely because God has eternity to work in.
+
+The answer always comes at the right time, and is punctual though
+delayed. For instance, Peter is in prison. The Church keeps praying
+for him; prays on, day after day. No answer. The week of the feast
+comes. Prayer is made intensely and fervently and continuously. No
+answer. The slow hours pass away. The last day of his life, as it
+would appear, comes and goes. No answer. The night gathers; prayer
+rises to heaven. The last hour of the last watch of the last night
+that he had to live has come, and as the veil of darkness is thinning,
+and the day is beginning to break, 'the angel of the Lord shone round
+about him.' But there is no haste in his deliverance. All is done
+leisurely, as in the confidence of ample time to spare, and perfect
+security. He is bidden to arise quickly, but there is no hurry in the
+stages of his liberation. 'Gird thyself and bind on thy sandals.' He
+is to take time to lace them. There is no fear of the quaternion of
+soldiers waking, or of there not being time to do all. We can fancy
+the half-sleeping and wholly-bewildered Apostle fumbling at the
+sandal-strings, in dread of some movement rousing his guards, and the
+calm angel face looking on. The sandals fastened, he is bidden to put
+on his garments and follow. With equal leisure and orderliness he is
+conducted through the first and the second guard of sleeping soldiers,
+and then through the prison gate. He might have been lifted at once
+clean out of his dungeon, and set down in the house many were gathered
+praying for him. But more signal was the demonstration of power which
+a deliverance so gradual gave, when it led him slowly past all
+obstacles and paralysed their power. God is never in haste. He never
+comes too soon nor too late. 'The Lord shall help them, and that right
+early.' Sennacherib's army is round the city, famine is within the
+walls. To-morrow will be too late. But to-night the angel strikes, and
+the enemies are all dead men. So God's delay makes the deliverance the
+more signal and joyous when it is granted. And though hope deferred
+may sometimes make the heart sick, the desire, when it comes, is a
+tree of life.
+
+III. The best help is not delayed.
+
+The principle which we have been illustrating applies only to one
+half--and that the less important half--of our prayers and of Christ's
+answers. For in regard to spiritual blessings, and our petitions for
+fuller, purer, and diviner life, there is no delay. In that region the
+law is not 'He abode still two days in the same place,' but 'Before
+they call I will answer, and while they are yet speaking I will hear.'
+If you have been praying for deeper knowledge of God, for lives liker
+His, for hearts more filled with the Spirit, and have not had the
+answer, do not fall back upon the misapplication of such a principle
+as this of my text, which has nothing to do with that region; but
+remember that the only reason why good people do not immediately get
+the blessings of the Christian life for which they ask lies in
+themselves, and not at all in God. 'Ye have not, because ye ask not.
+Ye ask and have not, because'--not because He delays, but because--'ye
+ask amiss,' or because, having asked, you get up from your knees and
+go away, not looking to see whether the blessing is coming down or
+not.
+
+Ah! there is a sad amount of lying and hypocrisy in prayers for
+spiritual blessings. Many petitioners do not want to have them. They
+would not know what to do with them if they got them. They make the
+requests because their fathers did so before them, and because these
+are the right kind of things to say in a prayer. Such prayers get no
+answers. If a man prays for some spiritual enlargement, and then goes
+out into the world and lives clean contrary to his prayers, what right
+has he to say that God delays His answers? No, He does not delay His
+answers, but we push back His answers, and the gift that _is_ given we
+will not take. Let us remember that the two halves of the divine
+dealings are not regulated by the same principle, though they be
+regulated by the same motive; and that the love which often delays for
+our good, in regard to the desires that have reference to outward
+things, is swift as the lightning to answer every petition which moves
+within the circle of our spiritual life.
+
+'Whatsoever things ye desire, when ye stand praying, believe that'
+then and there 'ye receive them'; and the undelaying God will take
+care that 'you shall have them.'
+
+
+
+
+CHRIST'S QUESTION TO EACH
+
+_For the Young_
+
+
+'... Believest then this? She saith unto Him, Yea, Lord.'--JOHN
+xi. 26, 27.
+
+As each of these annual sermons which I have preached for so long
+comes round, I feel more solemnly the growing probability that it may
+be the last. Like a man nearing the end of his day's work, I want to
+make the most of the remaining moments. Whether this is the last
+sermon of the sort that I shall preach or not, it is certainly the
+last of the kind that some of you will hear from me, or possibly from
+any one.
+
+So, dear friends, I have felt that neither you nor I can afford to
+waste this hour in considering subjects of secondary interest,
+appropriate as some of them might be. I wish to come to the main point
+at once, and to press upon you all, and especially on the younger
+portion of this audience, the question of your own personal religion.
+
+The words of my text, as you will probably remember, were addressed by
+our Lord to Martha, as she was writhing in agony over her dead
+brother. Christ proclaims, with singular calmness and majesty, His
+character and work as the Resurrection and the Life, and then seeks to
+draw her from her absorbing sorrow to an effort of faith which shall
+grasp the truths He proclaims. He flashes out this sudden question,
+like the swift thrust of a gleaming dagger. It is a demand for
+credence to His assertion--on His bare word--tremendous as that
+assertion is. And nobly was the demand met by the as swift,
+unfaltering answer, 'Yea, Lord,' I believe in Thee, and so I believe
+in Thy word.
+
+Now, friends, Jesus Christ is putting the same question to each of us.
+And I pray that our answers may be Martha's.
+
+I. Note, first, the significance of the question.
+
+'This.' What is _this_? The answer will tell us what are the central
+essential facts, faith in which makes a Christian. Of course the form
+in which our Lord's previous utterance was cast was coloured by the
+circumstances under which He spoke, and was so shaped as to meet the
+momentary exigency. But whilst thus the form is determined by the fact
+that He was speaking to a heart wrung by separation, and as a
+preliminary to a mighty act of resurrection, the essential truths
+which are so expressed are those which, as I believe, constitute the
+fundamental truths of Christianity--the very core and heart of the
+Gospel.
+
+Turn, then, but for a moment, to what immediately precedes my text.
+Our Lord says three things. First, He asserts His supernatural
+character and divine relation to life: 'I am the Resurrection and the
+Life.' Next, He declares that it is possible for Him to communicate to
+dying and to dead men a life which triumphs over death, and laughs at
+change, and persists through the superficial experience which we
+christen by the name of Death, unaffected, undiminished, as some sweet
+spring might gush up in the heart of a salt, solitary sea. And then He
+declares that the condition on which He, the Life-giver, gives of His
+immortal life to dying men, is their trust in Him. These three--His
+character and work, the gifts of which His hands are full, and the way
+by which the gifts may be appropriated by us men--these three are, as
+I take it, the central facts of Christianity. 'Believest thou this?'
+
+The question comes to us all; and in these days of unsettlement it is
+well to have some clear understanding of what is the 'irreducible
+minimum' of Christian teaching. I take it that it lies here. There are
+two opposite errors which, like all opposite errors, are bolted
+together, and revolve round a common centre. The one of them is the
+extreme conservative tendency which regards every pin and bolt of the
+tabernacle as if it were equally sacred with the altar and the ark.
+And the other is the tendency which christens itself 'liberal and
+progressive,' and which is always ready to exchange old lamps, though
+they have burnt brightly in the past, for new ones that are as yet
+only glittering metal and untried. In these days, when it is a
+presumption against any opinion, that our fathers believed it (an
+error into which young people are most prone to fall), and when, by
+the energy of contradiction, that error has evoked, and is evoking,
+the opposite exaggeration that adheres to all that is traditional, to
+all that has been regarded as belonging to the essentials of the
+Christian faith, and so is fearful, trembling for the Ark of God when
+there is no need, let us fall back upon these great words of the
+Master, and see that the things which constitute the living heart of
+His message and gift to the world are neither more nor less than these
+three: the supernatural Christ, the life which He imparts, and the
+condition on which He bestows it. 'Believest thou this?' If you do,
+you need take very little heed of the fluctuations of contemporary
+opinion as to other matters, valuable and important as these may be in
+their place; and may let men say what they will about disputed
+questions--about the method by which the vehicle of revelation has
+been created and preserved, about the regulation of the external forms
+of the Church, about a hundred other things that men often lose their
+tempers and spoil their Christianity by fighting for, and fall back
+upon the great central verity, a Christ from above, the Giver of Life
+to all that put their trust in Him.
+
+Let me expand this question for you. 'We all have sinned and come
+short of the glory of God'--'believest thou this?' 'We must all appear
+before the judgment-seat of Christ'--'believest thou this?' 'God so
+loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever
+believeth on Him should not perish'--'believest thou this?' 'The Son
+of Man came... to give His life a ransom for many'--'believest thou
+this?' 'Being justified by faith we have peace with God through our
+Lord Jesus Christ'--'believest thou this?' 'Now is Christ risen from
+the dead, and become the first fruits of them that slept'--'believest
+thou this?' 'I go to prepare a place for you'--'believest thou this?'
+'Where I am there shall also My servant be'--'believest thou this?'
+'So shall we ever be with the Lord'--'believest thou this?' That is
+Christianity; and not theories about inspiration, and priesthood, and
+sacramental efficacy, or any of the other thorny questions which have,
+in the course of ages, started up. Here is the living centre; hold
+fast, I beseech you, by it.
+
+Then, again, the significance of this question is in the direction of
+making clear for us the way by which men lay hold of these great
+truths. The truths are of such a sort as that merely to say, 'Oh yes,
+I believe it; it is quite true!' is by no means sufficient. If a man
+tells me that two parallel lines produced ever so far will never meet,
+I say, 'Yes, I believe it'; and there is nothing more to be done or
+said. If a man says to me, 'Two and two make four,' I say, 'Yes'; and
+there my assent ends. If a man says, 'It is right to do right,' it is
+quite clear that the attitude of intellectual assent, which was quite
+enough for the other order of statements, is not enough for this one;
+and to merely say, 'Oh yes, it is right to do right,' is by no means
+the only attitude which we ought to take in regard to such a truth.
+And if God comes to me and says, 'Thou art a sinful man, and Jesus
+Christ has died for thee; and if thou takest Him for thy Saviour thou
+shalt be saved in this life, and saved for ever,' it is just as clear
+that no mere acceptance of the saying as a verity exhausts my proper
+attitude in reference to it. Or to come to plainer words, no man will
+really, and out and out, and adequately, believe this gospel unless he
+does a great deal more than assent to it or refrain from contradicting
+it.
+
+So I desire to urge this form of the question on you now. Dear
+brethren, do you _trust_ in 'this,' which you say you believe? There
+is no greater enemy of the Christian faith than the ordinary
+lazy--what the philosophers call _otiose_, which is only a grand word
+for lazy--assent of the understanding, because men will not take the
+trouble to contradict it or think about it.
+
+That is the sort of Christianity which is the Christianity of a good
+many church and chapel-goers. They do not care enough about the
+subject to contradict the ordinary run of belief. Of all impotent
+things there is nothing more impotent than a creed which lies idly in
+a man's head, and never has touched his heart or his will. Why, I
+should get on a great deal better if I were talking to people that had
+never heard anything about the gospel than I have any chance of
+getting on with you, who have been drenched with it all your days,
+till it goes over you and runs off like water off a duck's back. The
+shells that were hurled against the earthworks of Sebastopol broke
+away the front surface of the mounds, and then the rubbish protected
+the fortifications; and that is what happens with many of my hearers.
+You have heard the gospel so often that the _debris_ of your old
+hearings is raised between you and me, and my words cannot get at you.
+'Believest thou this?'--not in the fashion in which people stand up in
+church or chapel and look about them and rattle off the Creed every
+Sunday of their lives, and attach not the ghost of an idea to a single
+clause of it; but in the sense that the conviction of these truths is
+so deep in your hearts that it moves your whole nature to cast
+yourselves on Jesus Christ as your Saviour and your all. That is the
+belief to which alone the life that is promised here will come. Oh!
+brethren, I have no business to ask you the question, and you have no
+need to answer it to me! Sometimes good, well-meaning people do a mint
+of harm by pushing such questions into the faces of people unprepared.
+But take the question into your own hearts, and remember what belief
+is, and what it is that you have to believe, and answer according to
+its true significance, and in the light of conscience, the solemn
+question that I press upon you.
+
+II. Now, secondly, let me ask you to think of what depends upon the
+answer.
+
+In the case before us--if I may look back to it for an instant--there
+is a very illuminative instance of what did depend upon it. Martha had
+to believe that Christ was the Resurrection and the Life as a
+condition precedent to her seeing that He was so. For, as He said
+Himself before He spoke the mighty word which raised Lazarus, 'Said I
+not unto thee that if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the
+glory of God?' and so her faith was the condition of her being able to
+verify the facts which her faith grasped. Well, let me put that into
+plainer words. It is just this--a man gets from Christ what he trusts
+Christ to give him, and there is no other way of proving the truth of
+His promises than by accepting His promises, and then they fulfil
+themselves. You cannot know that a medicine will cure you till you
+swallow it. You must first 'taste' before you 'see that God is good.'
+Faith verifies itself by the experience it brings.
+
+And what does it bring? I said, all for which a man trusts Christ. All
+is summed up in that one favourite word of our Lord as revealed in
+this fourth Gospel, which includes in itself everything of blessedness
+and of righteousness--life, life eternal. Dear brethren, you and I,
+apart from Jesus Christ, are dead in trespasses and sins. The life
+that we live in the flesh is an apparent life, which covers over the
+true death of separation from God. And you young people, fix this in
+your minds at the beginning, it will save you many a heartache, and
+many an error--there is nothing worth calling life, except that which
+comes to a quiet heart submissive and enfranchised through faith in
+Jesus Christ. And if you will trust yourselves to Him, and answer this
+question with your ringing 'Yea, Lord!' then you will get a life which
+will quicken you out of your deadness; a life which will mould you day
+by day into more entire beauty of character and conformity with
+Himself; a life which will shed sweetness and charm over dusty
+commonplaces, and make sudden verdure spring in dreary, herbless
+deserts; a life which will bring a solemn joy into sorrow, a strength
+for every duty; which will bring manna in the wilderness, honey from
+the rock, light in darkness, and a present God for your sufficient
+portion; a life which will run on into the dim glories of eternity,
+and know no change but advancement, through the millenniums of ages.
+
+But, dear brethren, whilst thus, on condition of their faith, the door
+into all divine and endless blessedness and progress is flung wide
+open for men, do not forget the other side of the issues which depend
+on this question. For if it is true that Jesus Christ is Life, and the
+Source of it, and that faith in Him is the way by which you and I get
+it, then there is no escape from the solemn conclusion that to be out
+of Christ, and not to be exercising faith in Him, is to be infected
+with death, and to be shut up in a charnel-house. I dare not suppress
+the plain teaching of Jesus Christ Himself: 'He that hath the Son hath
+life; he that hath not the Son hath not life.' The issues that depend
+upon the answer to this question of my text may be summed up, if I may
+venture to say so, by taking the words of our Lord Himself and
+converting them into their opposite. He said, 'He that believeth ...
+though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and
+believeth on Me shall never die.' That implies, He that believeth
+_not_ in Christ, though he were living, yet shall he die, and
+whosoever liveth and believeth _not_ shall never live. _These_ are the
+issues--the alternative issues--that depend on your answer to this
+question.
+
+III. And now, lastly, let me ask you to think of the direct personal
+appeal to every soul that lies in this question.
+
+I have dwelt upon two out of the three words of which the question is
+composed--'_believest_ thou _this_?' Let me dwell for a moment on the
+third of them--'believest _thou_?'
+
+Now that suggests the thought on which I do not need to dwell, but
+which I seek briefly to lay upon your hearts and consciences--viz.,
+the intensely personal act of your own faith, by which alone Jesus
+Christ can be of any use to you. Do not be led away by any vague
+notions which people have about the benefits of a Church or its
+ordinances. Do not suppose that any sacraments or any priest can do
+for you what you have to do in the awful solitude of your own
+determining will--put out your hand and grasp Jesus Christ. Can any
+person or thing be the condition or channel of spiritual blessing to
+you, except in so far as your own individual act of trust comes into
+play? You must take the bread with your own hands, you must masticate
+it with your own teeth, you must digest it with your own organs,
+before it can minister nourishment to your blood and force to your
+life. And there is only one way by which any man can come into any
+vital and life-giving connection with Jesus Christ, and that is, by
+the exercise of his own personal faith.
+
+And remember, too, that as the exercise of uniting trust in Jesus
+Christ is exclusively your own affair, so exclusively your own affair
+is the responsibility of answering this question. To you alone is it
+addressed. You, and only you, have to answer it.
+
+There was once a poor woman who went after Jesus Christ, and put out a
+pale, wasted, tremulous finger to touch the hem of His garment. His
+fine sensitiveness detected the light pressure of that petitioning
+finger, and allowed virtue to go out, though the crowd surged about
+Him and thronged Him. No crowds come between you and Jesus Christ. You
+and He, the two of you, have, so to speak, the world to yourselves,
+and straight to _you_ comes this question, 'Believest _thou_?'
+
+Ah! brethren, that habit of skulking into the middle of the multitude,
+and letting the most earnest appeal from the pulpit go diffused over
+the audience is the reason why you sit there quiet, complacent,
+perhaps wholly unaffected by what I am trying to make a pointed,
+individual address. Suppose all the other people in this place of
+worship were away but you and I, would not the word that I am trying
+to speak come with more force to your hearts than it does now? Well,
+think away the world and all its millions, and realise the fact that
+you stand in Christ's presence, with all His regard concentrated upon
+you, and that to thee individually this question comes from a
+gracious, loving heart, which longs that you answer, 'Yea, Lord, I
+believe!'
+
+Why should you not? Suppose you said to Him, 'No, Lord, I do not'; and
+suppose He said, 'Why do you not?' what do you think you would say
+then? You will have to answer it one day, in very solemn
+circumstances, when all the crowds will fall away, as they do from a
+soldier called out of the ranks to go up and answer for mutiny to his
+commanding officer. 'Every one of us shall give an account of
+himself,' and the lips that said so lovingly at the grave of Lazarus,
+'Believest thou this?' and are saying it again, dear friend, to you,
+even through my poor words, will ask it once more. For this is the
+question the answer to which settles whether we shall stand at His
+right hand or at His left. Say now, with humble faith, 'Yea, Lord!'
+and you will have the blessing of them who have not seen, and yet have
+believed.
+
+
+
+
+THE OPEN GRAVE AT BETHANY
+
+'Now Jesus was not yet come into the town, but was in that place where
+Martha met Him. The Jews then which were with her in the house, and
+comforted her, when they saw Mary, that she rose up hastily and went
+out, followed her, saying, She goeth unto the grave to weep there.
+Then when Mary was come where Jesus was, and saw Him, she fell down at
+His feet, saying unto Him, Lord, if Thou hadst been here, my brother
+had not died. When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also
+weeping which came with her, He groaned in the spirit, and was
+troubled, And said, Where have ye laid him? They say unto Him, Lord,
+come and see. Jesus wept. Then said the Jews, Behold how He loved him!
+And some of them said. Could not this Man, which opened the eyes of
+the blind, have caused that even this man should not have died! Jesus
+therefore again groaning in Himself, cometh to the grave. It was a
+cave, and a stone lay upon it. Jesus said, Take ye away the stone.
+Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto Him, Lord, by this
+time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days. Jesus saith unto
+her, Said I not unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou
+shouldest see the glory of God? Then they took away the stone from the
+place where the dead was laid. And Jesus lifted up His eyes, and said,
+Father, I thank Thee that Thou hast heard Me. And I know that Thou
+hearest Me always: but because of the people which stand by I said it,
+that they may believe that Thou hast sent Me. And when He thus had
+spoken, He cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And he that
+was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his
+face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him,
+and let him go. Then many of the Jews which came to Mary, and had seen
+the things which Jesus did, believed on Him.'--JOHN xi. 30-45.
+
+Why did Jesus stay outside Bethany and summon Martha and Mary to come
+to Him? Apparently that He might keep Himself apart from the noisy
+crowd of conventional mourners whose presence affronted the majesty
+and sanctity of sorrow, and that He might speak to the hearts of the
+two real mourners. A divine decorum forbade Him to go to the house.
+The Life-bringer keeps apart. His comforts are spoken in solitude. He
+reverenced grief. How beautifully His sympathetic delicacy contrasts
+with the heartless rush of those who 'were comforting' Mary when they
+thought that she was driven to go suddenly to the grave by a fresh
+burst of sorrow! If they had had any real sympathy or perception, they
+would have stayed where they were, and let the poor burdened heart
+find ease in lonely weeping. But, like all vulgar souls, they had one
+idea--never to leave mourners alone or let them weep.
+
+Three stages seem discernible in the self-revelation of Jesus in this
+crowning miracle: His agitation and tears, His majestic confidence in
+His life-giving power now to be manifested, and His actual exercise of
+that power.
+
+I. The repetition by Mary of Martha's words, as her first salutation,
+tells a pathetic story of the one thought that had filled both
+sisters' hearts in these four dreary days. Why had He not come? How
+easily He could have come! How surely He could have prevented all this
+misery! Confidence in His power blends strangely with doubt as to His
+care. A hint of reproach is in the words, but more than a hint of
+faith in His might. He does not rebuke the rash judgment implied, for
+He knew the true love underlying it; but He does not directly answer
+Mary, as He had done Martha, for the two sisters needed different
+treatment.
+
+We note that Mary has no such hope as Martha had expressed. Her more
+passive, meditative disposition had bowed itself, and let the grief
+overwhelm her. So in her we see a specimen of the excess of sorrow
+which indulges in the monotonous repetition of what would have
+happened if something else that did not happen had happened, and which
+is too deeply dark to let a gleam of hope shine in. Words will do
+little to comfort such grief. Silent sharing of its weeping and
+helpful deeds will do most.
+
+So a great wave of emotion swept across the usually calm soul of
+Jesus, which John bids us trace to its cause by 'therefore' (ver. 33).
+The sight of Mary's real, and the mourners' half-real, tears, and the
+sound of their loud 'keening,' shook His spirit, and He yielded to,
+and even encouraged, the rush of feeling ('troubled Himself'). But not
+only sympathy and sorrow ruffled the clear mirror of His spirit;
+another disturbing element was present. He 'was moved with
+indignation' (Rev. Ver. marg.). Anger at Providence often mingles with
+our grief, but that was not Christ's indignation. The only worthy
+explanation of that strange ingredient in Christ's agitation is that
+it was directed against the source of death,--namely, sin. He saw the
+cause manifested in the effects. He wept for the one, He was wroth at
+the other. The tears witnessed to the perfect love of the man, and of
+the God revealed in the man; the indignation witnessed to the recoil
+and aversion from sin of the perfectly righteous Man, and of the holy
+God manifested in Him. We get one glimpse into His heart, as on to
+some ocean heaving and mist-covered. The momentary sight proclaims the
+union in Him, as the Incarnate Word, of pity for our woes and of
+aversion from our sins.
+
+His question as to the place of the tomb is not what we should have
+expected; but its very abruptness indicates effort to suppress
+emotion, and resolve to lose no time in redressing the grief. Most
+sweetly human are the tears that start afresh after the moment's
+repression, as the little company begin to move towards the grave. And
+most sadly human are the unsympathetic criticisms of His sacred
+sorrow. Even the best affected of the bystanders are cool enough to
+note them as tokens of His love, at which perhaps there is a trace of
+wonder; while others snarl out a sarcasm which is double-barrelled, as
+casting doubt on the reality either of the love or of the power. 'It
+is easy to weep, but if He had cared for him, and could work miracles,
+He might surely have kept him alive.' How blind men are! 'Jesus wept,'
+and all that the lookers-on felt was astonishment that He should have
+cared so much for a dead man of no importance, or carping doubt as to
+the genuineness of His grief and the reality of His power. He shows us
+His pity and sorrow still--to no more effect with many.
+
+II. The passage to the tomb was marked by his continued agitation. But
+his arrival there brought calm and majesty. Now the time has come
+which He had in view when He left his refuge beyond Jordan; and, as is
+often the case with ourselves, suddenly tremor and tumult leave the
+spirit when face to face with a moment of crisis. There is nothing
+more remarkable in this narrative than the contrast between Jesus
+weeping and indignant, and Jesus serene and authoritative as He stands
+fronting the cave-sepulchre. The sudden transformation must have awed
+the gazers.
+
+He points to the stone, which, probably like that of many a grave
+discovered in Palestine, rolled in a groove cut in the rocky floor in
+front of the tomb. The command accords with His continual habit of
+confining the miraculous within the narrowest limits. He will do
+nothing by miracle which can be done without it. Lazarus could have
+heard and emerged, though the stone had remained. If the story had
+been a myth, he very likely would have done so. Like 'loose him, and
+let him go,' this is a little touch that cannot have been invented,
+and helps to confirm the simple, historical character of the account.
+
+Not less natural, though certainly as unlikely to have been told
+unless it had happened, is Martha's interruption. She must have heard
+what was going on, and, with her usual activity, have joined the
+procession, though we left her in the house. She thinks that Jesus is
+going into the grave; and a certain reverence for the poor remains, as
+well as for Him, makes her shrink from the thought of even His loving
+eyes seeing them now. Clearly she has forgotten the dim hopes which
+had begun in her when she talked with Jesus. Therefore He gently
+reminds her of these; for His words (ver. 40) can scarcely refer to
+anything but that interview, though the precise form of expression now
+used is not found in the report of it (vers. 25-27).
+
+We mark Christ's calm confidence in His own power. His identification
+of its effect with the outflashing of the glory of God, and His
+encouragement to her to exercise faith by suspending her sight of that
+glory upon her faith. Does that mean that He would not raise her
+brother unless she believed? No; for He had determined to 'awake him
+out of sleep' before He left Peraea. But Martha's faith was the
+condition of her seeing the glory of God in the miracle. We may see a
+thousand emanations of that glory, and see none of it. We shall see it
+if we exercise faith. In the natural world, 'seeing is believing'; in
+the spiritual, believing is seeing.
+
+Equally remarkable, as breathing serenest confidence, is the wonderful
+filial prayer. Our Lord speaks as if the miracle were already
+accomplished, so sure is He: 'Thou heardest Me.' Does this
+thanksgiving bring Him down to the level of other servants of God who
+have wrought miracles by divine power granted them? Certainly not; for
+it is in full accord with the teaching of all this Gospel, according
+to which 'the Son can do nothing of Himself,' but yet, whatsoever
+things the Father doeth, 'these also doeth the Son likewise.' Both
+sides of the truth must be kept in view. The Son is not independent of
+the Father, but the Son is so constantly and perfectly one with the
+Father that He is conscious of unbroken communion, of continual
+wielding of the whole divine power.
+
+But the practical purpose of the thanksgiving is to be specially
+noted. It suspends His whole claims on the single issue about to be
+decided. It summons the people to mark the event. Never before had He
+thus heralded a miracle. Never had He deigned to say thus solemnly,
+'If God does not work through Me now, reject Me as an impostor; if He
+does, yield to Me as Messiah.' The moment stands alone in His life.
+What a scene! There is the open tomb, with its dead occupant; there
+are the eager, sceptical crowd, the sisters pausing in their weeping
+to gaze, with some strange hopes beginning to creep into their hearts,
+the silent disciples, and, in front of them all, Jesus, with the
+radiance of power in the eyes that had just been swimming in tears,
+and a new elevation in His tones. How all would be hushed in
+expectance of the next moment's act!
+
+III. The miracle itself is told in the fewest words. What more was
+there to tell? The two ends, as it were, of a buried chain, appear
+above ground. Cause and effect were brought together. Rather, here was
+no chain of many links, as in physical phenomena, but here was the
+life-giving word, and there was the dead man living again. The 'loud
+voice' was as needless as the rolling away of the stone. It was but
+the sign of Christ's will acting. And the acting of His will, without
+any other cause, produces physical effects.
+
+Lazarus was far away from that rock cave. But, wherever he was, he
+could hear, and he must obey. So, with graveclothes entangling his
+feet, and a napkin about his livid face, he came stumbling out into
+the light that dazed his eyes, closed for four dark days, and stood
+silent and motionless in that awestruck crowd. One Person there was
+not awestruck. Christ's calm voice, that had just reverberated through
+the regions of the dead, spoke the simple command, 'Loose him, and let
+him go.' To Him it was no wonder that He should give back a life. For
+the Christ who wept is the Christ whose voice all that are in the
+graves shall hear, and shall come forth.
+
+
+
+
+THE SEVENTH MIRACLE IN JOHN'S GOSPEL--THE
+RAISING OF LAZARUS
+
+'And when Jesus thus had spoken, He cried with a loud voice, Lazarus,
+Come forth. 44. And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot
+with grave-clothes; and his face was bound about with a napkin.'--JOHN
+xi. 43, 44.
+
+The series of our Lord's miracles before the Passion, as recorded in
+this Gospel, is fitly closed with the raising of Lazarus. It crowns
+the whole, whether we regard the greatness of the fact, the manner of
+our Lord's working, the minuteness and richness of the accompanying
+details, the revelation of our Lord's heart, the consolations which it
+suggests to sorrowing spirits, or the immortal hopes which it kindles.
+
+And besides all this, the miracle is of importance for the development
+of the Evangelist's purpose, in that it makes the immediate occasion
+of the embittered hostility which finally precipitates the catastrophe
+of the Cross. Therefore the great length to which the narrative
+extends.
+
+Of course it is impossible for us to attempt, even in the most cursory
+manner, to go over the whole. We must content ourselves with dealing
+with one or two of the salient points. And there are three things in
+this narrative which I think well worthy of our notice. There is the
+revelation of Christ as our Brother, by emotion and sorrow. There is
+the revelation of Christ as our Lord by His consciousness of divine
+power. There is the revelation of Christ as our Life by His mighty
+life-giving word. And to these three points I ask you to turn briefly.
+
+I. First, then, we have here a revelation of Christ as our Brother, by
+emotion and sorrow.
+
+This miracle stands alone in the whole majestic series of His mighty
+works by the fact that it is preceded by a storm of emotion, which
+shakes the frame of the Master, which He is represented by the
+Evangelist not so much as suppressing as fostering, and which diverges
+and parts itself into the two feelings expressed by His groans and by
+His tears. The word which is rendered in our version 'He groaned in
+the spirit,' and which is twice repeated in the narrative, is,
+according to the investigations of the most careful philological
+commentators, expressive not only of the outward sign of an emotion,
+but of the nature of it. And the nature of the emotion is not merely
+the grief and the sympathy which distilled in tears, but it is
+something deeper and other than that. The word contains in it at least
+a tinge of the passion of 'indignation' (as it is expressed in the
+margin of the Revised Version). What caused the indignation? Cannot we
+fancy how there rose up, as in pale, spectral procession before His
+vision, the whole long series of human sorrows and losses, of which
+one was visible there before Him? He saw, in the one individual case,
+the whole _genus_. He saw the whole mass represented there, the ocean
+in the drop, and He looked beyond the fact and linked it with its
+cause. And as there rose before Him the reality of man's desolation
+through sin, and the thought that all this misery, loss, pain,
+parting, death, was a contradiction of the divine purpose, and an
+interruption of God's order, and that it had all been pulled down upon
+men's desperate heads by their own evil and their own folly, there
+rose in His heart the anger which is part of the perfectness of
+humanity when it looks upon sorrow linked by adamantine chains with
+sin.
+
+But the lightning of the wrath dissolved soon into the rain of pity
+and of sorrow, and, as we read, 'Jesus wept.' Looking upon the weeping
+Mary and the lamenting crowd, and Himself feeling the pain of the
+parting from the friend whom He loved, the tears, which are the
+confession of human nature that it is passing through an emotion too
+deep for words, came to His all-seeing eyes.
+
+Oh! brethren, surely--surely in this manifestation, or call it better,
+this revelation of Christ the Lord, expressed in these two
+emotions--surely there are large and blessed lessons for us! On them I
+can only touch in the lightest manner. Here, for one thing, is the
+blessed sign and proof of His true brotherhood with us. This
+Evangelist, to whom it was given to tell the Church and the world more
+than any of the others had imparted to them of the divine uniqueness
+of the Master's person, had also given to him in charge the
+corresponding and complementary message--to insist upon the reality
+and the verity of His manhood. His proclamation was 'the Word was made
+flesh,' and he had to dwell on both parts of that message, showing Him
+as the Word and showing Him as flesh. So he insists upon all the
+points which emerge in the course of his narrative that show the
+reality of Christ's corporeal manhood.
+
+He joins with the others, who had no such lofty proclamation entrusted
+to them, in telling us how He was 'bone of our bone, and flesh of our
+flesh,' in that He hungered and thirsted and slept, and was wearied;
+how He was man, reasonable soul and human spirit, in that He grieved
+and rejoiced, and wondered and desired, and mourned and wept. And so
+we can look upon Him, and feel that this in very deed is One of
+ourselves, with a spirit participant of all human experiences, and a
+heart tremulously vibrating with every emotion that belongs to man.
+
+Here we are also taught the sanction and the limits of sorrow.
+Christianity has nothing to do with the false Stoicism and the false
+religion which is partly pride and partly insincerity, that proclaims
+it wrong to weep when God smites. But just as clearly and distinctly
+as the story before us says to us, 'Weep for yourselves and for the
+loved ones that are gone,' so distinctly does it draw the limits
+within which sorrow is sacred and hallowing, and beyond which it is
+harmful and weakening. Set side by side the grief of these two poor
+weeping sisters, and the grief of the weeping Christ, and we get a
+large lesson. They could only repine that something else had not
+happened differently which would have made all different. 'If Thou
+hadst been here, my brother had not died.' One of the two sits with
+folded arms in the house, letting her sorrow flow over her pained
+head. Martha is unable, by reason of her grief, to grasp the
+consolation that is held out to her; her sorrow has made the hopes of
+the future seem to her very dim and of small account, and she puts
+away 'Thy brother shall rise again' with almost an impatient sweep of
+her hand. 'I know that he will rise in the resurrection at the last
+day. But oh! that is so far away, and what I want is present comfort.'
+Thus oblivious of duty, murmuring with regard to the accidents which
+might have been different, and unfitted to grasp the hopes that fill
+the future, these two have been hurt by their grief, and have let it
+overflow its banks and lay waste the land. But this Christ in His
+sorrow checks His sorrow that He may do His work; in His sorrow is
+confident that the Father hears; in His sorrow thinks of the
+bystanders, and would bring comfort and cheer to them. A sorrow which
+makes us more conscious of communion with the Father who is always
+listening, which makes us more conscious of power to do that which He
+has put it into our hand to do, which makes us more tender in our
+sympathies with all that mourn, and swifter and readier for our
+work--such a sorrow is doing what God meant for us; and is a blessing
+in so thin a disguise that we can scarcely call it veiled at all.
+
+And then, still further, there are here other lessons on which I
+cannot touch. Such, for instance, is the revelation in this emotion of
+the Master's, of a personal love that takes individuals to His heart,
+and feels all the sweetness and the power of friendship. That personal
+love is open to every one of us, and into the grace and the tenderness
+of it we may all penetrate. 'The disciple whom Jesus loved' is the
+Evangelist who, without jealousy, is glad to tell us that the same
+loving Lord took into the same sanctuary of His pure heart, Mary and
+Martha, and her brother. That which was given to them was not taken
+from him, and they each possessed the whole of the Master's love. So
+for every one of us that heart is wide open, and you and I, brethren,
+may contract such personal relations to the Master that we shall live
+with Christ as a man with his friend, and may feel that His heart is
+all ours.
+
+So much for the lessons of the emotions whereby Christ is manifested
+to us as our Brother.
+
+II. And now turn, in the next place, and that very briefly, to what
+lies side by side with this in the story, and at first sight may seem
+strangely contradictory of it, but in fact only completes the idea,
+viz. the majesties, calm consciousness of divine power by which He is
+revealed as our Lord.
+
+At one step from the agitation and the storm of feeling there comes,
+'Take ye away the stone.' And in answer to the lamentations of the
+sister are spoken the great and wonderful words, 'Said I not unto thee
+that if thou wouldst believe, thou shouldst see the glory of God?' And
+He looks back there to the message that had been sent to the sisters
+in response to their unspoken hope that He would come, 'This sickness
+is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may
+be glorified thereby.' And He shows us that from the first moment,
+with the spontaneousness which, as I have already remarked in previous
+sermons on these 'signs,' characterises all the miracles of John's
+Gospel, 'He Himself knew what He would do,' and in the consciousness
+of His divine power had resolved that the dead Lazarus should be the
+occasion for the manifestation, the flashing out to the world, of the
+glory of God in the life-giving Son.
+
+And then, in the same tone of majestic consciousness, there follows
+that thanksgiving _prior_ to the miracle as for the accomplished
+miracle. 'I thank Thee that Thou hast heard Me, and I knew that Thou
+hearest Me always: but because of the people which stand by I said it,
+that they may believe that Thou hast sent Me.' The best commentary
+upon these words, the deepest and the fullest exposition of the large
+truths that lie in them concerning the co-operation of the Father and
+the Son, is to be found in the passage from the fifth chapter of this
+Gospel, wherein there is set forth, drawn with the firmest hand, the
+clearest lines of truth upon this great and profound subject. 'The Son
+does nothing of Himself,' but 'whatsoever the Father doeth, that doeth
+the Son likewise.' A consciousness of continual co-operation with the
+Almighty Father, a consciousness that His will continually coincides
+with the Father's will, that unto Him there comes the power ever to do
+all that Omnipotence can do, and that though we may speak of a gift
+given and a power derived, the relation between the giving Father and
+the recipient Son is altogether different from, and other than the
+relation between, the man that asks and the God that bestows. Poor
+Martha said, 'I know that even now, whatsoever Thou askest of God He
+will give Thee.' She thought of Him as a good Man whose prayers had
+power with Heaven. But up into an altogether other region soars the
+consciousness expressed in these words as of a divine Son whose work
+is wholly parallel with the Father's work, and of whom the two things
+that sound contradictory can both be said. His omnipotence is His own;
+His omnipotence is the Father's: 'As the Father hath life' and
+therefore power in Himself, 'so hath He _given_'--there is the one
+half of the paradox--'so hath He given to the Son to have life _in
+Himself_'; there is the other. And unless you put them both together
+you do not think of Christ as Christ has taught us to think.
+
+III. Lastly, we have here the revelation of Christ as our Life in His
+mighty, life-giving word.
+
+The miracle, as I have said, stands high in the scale, not only by
+reason of what to us seems the greatness of the fact, though of
+course, properly speaking, in miracles there is no distinction as to
+the greatness of the fact, but also by reason of the manner of the
+working. The voice thrown into the cave reaches the ears of the
+sheeted dead: 'Lazarus, come forth!' And then, in words which convey
+the profound impression of awfulness and solemnity which had been made
+upon the Evangelist, we have the picture of the man with the
+graveclothes wrapped about his limbs, stumbling forth; and loving
+hands are bidden to take away the napkin which covered his face.
+Perhaps the hand trembled as it was put forth, not knowing what awful
+sight the veil might cover.
+
+With tenderest reticence, no word is spoken as to what followed. No
+hint escapes of the joy, no gleam of the experiences which the
+traveller brought back with him from that 'bourne' whence he had come.
+Surely some draught of Lethe must have been given him, that his spirit
+might be lulled into a wholesome forgetfulness, else life must have
+been a torment to him.
+
+But be that as it may, what we have to notice is the fact here, and
+what it teaches us as a fact. Is it not a revelation of Jesus Christ
+as the absolute Lord of Life and Death, giving the one, putting back
+the other? Death has caught hold of his prey. 'Shall the prey be taken
+from the mighty, and the lawful captive delivered? Yea, the prey shall
+be taken from the mighty.' His bare word is divinely operative. He
+says to that grisly shadow 'Come!' and he cometh; He says to him 'Go!'
+and he goeth. And as a shepherd will drive away the bear that has a
+lamb between his bloody fangs, and the brute retreats, snarling and
+growling, but dropping his prey, so at the Lord's voice Lazarus comes
+back to life, and disappointed Death skulks away to the darkness.
+
+The miracle shows Him as Lord of Death and Giver of Life. And it
+teaches another lesson, namely, the continuous persistency of the bond
+between Christ and His friend, unbroken and untouched by the
+superficial accident of life or death. Wheresoever Lazarus was he
+heard the voice, and wheresoever Lazarus was he knew the voice, and
+wheresoever Lazarus was he obeyed the voice. And so we are taught that
+the relationship between Christ our life, and all them that love and
+trust Him, is one on which the tooth of death that gnaws all other
+bonds in twain hath no power at all. Christ is the Life, and,
+therefore, Christ is the Resurrection, and the thing that we call
+death is but a film which spreads on the surface, but has no power to
+penetrate into the depths of the relationship between us and Him.
+
+Such, in briefest words, are the lessons of the miracle as a fact, but
+before I close I must remind you that it is to be looked at not only
+as a fact, but as a prophecy and as a parable.
+
+It is a prophecy in a modified sense, telling us at all events that He
+has the power to bid men back from the dust and darkness, and giving
+us the assurance which His own words convey to us yet more distinctly:
+'The hour is coming when all that are in the graves shall hear His
+voice and shall come forth.' My brother! there be two resurrections in
+that one promise: the resurrection of Christ's friends and the
+resurrection of Christ's foes. And though to both His voice will be
+the awakening, some shall rise to joy and immortality and 'some to
+shame and everlasting contempt.' You will hear the voice; settle it
+for yourselves whether when He calls and thou answerest thou wilt say,
+'Lo! here am I,' joyful to look upon Him; or whether thou wilt rise
+reluctant, and 'call upon the rocks and the hills to cover thee, and
+to hide thee from the face of Him that sitteth upon the Throne.'
+
+And this raising is a parable as well as a prophecy; for even as
+Christ was the life of this Lazarus, so, in a deeper and more real
+sense, and not in any shadowy, metaphorical, mystical sense, is Jesus
+Christ the life of every spirit that truly lives at all. We are 'dead
+in trespasses and sins.' For separation from God is death in all
+regions, death for the body in its kind, death for the mind, for the
+soul, for the spirit in their kinds; and only they who receive Christ
+into their hearts do live. Every Christian man is a miracle. There has
+been a true coming into the human of the divine, a true supernatural
+work, the infusion into a dead soul of the God-life which is the
+Christ-life.
+
+And you and I may have that life. What is the condition? 'They that
+hear shall live.' Do you hear? Do you welcome? Do you take that Christ
+into your hearts? Is He your Life, my brother?
+
+It is possible to resist that voice, to stuff your ears so full of
+clay, and worldliness, and sin, and self-reliance as that it shall not
+echo in your hearts. 'The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead
+shall hear the voice of the Son of Man, and they that hear shall
+live,' and obtain to-day 'a better resurrection' than the resurrection
+of the body. If you do not hear that voice, then you will 'remain in
+the congregation of the dead.'
+
+
+
+
+CAIAPHAS
+
+'And one of them, named Caiaphas being the high priest that same year,
+said unto them, Ye know nothing at all, nor consider that it is
+expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the
+whole nation perish not.'--JOHN xi. 49,50.
+
+The resurrection of Lazarus had raised a wave of popular excitement.
+Any stir amongst the people was dangerous, especially at the Passover
+time, which was nigh at hand, when Jerusalem would be filled with
+crowds of men, ready to take fire from any spark that might fall
+amongst them. So a hasty meeting of the principal ecclesiastical
+council of the Jews was summoned, in order to dismiss the situation,
+and concert measures for repressing the nascent enthusiasm. One might
+have expected to find there some disposition to inquire honestly into
+the claims of a Teacher who had such a witness to His claims as a man
+alive that had been dead. But nothing of the sort appears in their
+ignoble calculations. Like all weak men, they feel that 'something
+must be done' and are perfectly unable to say what. They admit
+Christ's miracles: 'This man doeth many miracles,' but they are not a
+bit the nearer to recognising His mission, being therein disobedient
+to their law and untrue to their office. They fear that any
+disturbance will bring Rome's heavy hand down on them, and lead to the
+loss of what national life they still possess. But even that fear is
+not patriotism nor religion. It is pure self-interest. 'They will take
+away _our_ place'--the Temple, probably--'and our nation.' The holy
+things were, in their eyes, their special property. And so, at this
+supreme moment, big with the fate of themselves and of their nation,
+their whole anxiety is about personal interests. They hesitate, and
+are at a loss what to do.
+
+But however they may hesitate, there is one man who knows his own
+mind--Caiaphas, the high priest. He has no doubt as to what is the
+right thing to do. He has the advantage of a perfectly clear and
+single purpose, and no sort of restraint of conscience or delicacy
+keeps him from speaking it out. He is impatient at their vacillation,
+and he brushes it all aside with the brusque and contemptuous speech:
+'Ye know nothing at all!' 'The one point of view for us to take is
+that of our own interests. Let us have that clearly understood; when
+we once ask what is "expedient for us," there will be no doubt about
+the answer. This man must die. Never mind about His miracles, or His
+teaching, or the beauty of His character. His life is a perpetual
+danger to our prerogatives. I vote for death!' And so he clashes his
+advice down into the middle of their waverings, like a piece of iron
+into yielding water; and the strong man, restrained by no conscience,
+and speaking out cynically the thought that is floating in all their
+minds, but which they dare not utter, is master of the situation, and
+the resolve is taken. 'From that day forth' they determined to put Him
+to death.
+
+But John regards this selfish, cruel advice as a prophecy. Caiaphas
+spoke wiser things than he knew. The Divine Spirit breathed in strange
+fashion through even such lips as his, and moulded his savage
+utterance into such a form as that it became a fit expression for the
+very deepest thought about the nature and the power of Christ's death.
+He did indeed die for that people--thinks the Evangelist--even though
+they have rejected Him, and the dreaded Romans _have_ come and taken
+away our place and nation--but His death had a wider purpose, and was
+not for that nation only, but that also 'He should gather together in
+one the children of God that are scattered abroad.'
+
+Let us, then, take these two aspects of the man and his counsel: the
+unscrupulous priest and his savage advice; the unconscious prophet and
+his great prediction.
+
+I. First, then, let us take the former point of view, and think of
+this unscrupulous priest and his savage advice. 'It is expedient for
+us that one man die for the people, and that the whole nation perish
+not.'
+
+Remember who he was, the high priest of the nation, with Aaron's mitre
+on his brow, and centuries of illustrious traditions embodied in his
+person; set by his very office to tend the sacred flame of their
+Messianic hopes, and with pure hands and heart to offer sacrifice for
+the sins of the people; the head and crown of the national religion,
+in whose heart justice and mercy should have found a sanctuary if they
+had fled from all others; whose ears ought to have been opened to the
+faintest whisper of the voice of God; whose lips should ever have been
+ready to witness for the truth.
+
+And see what he is! A crafty schemer, as blind as a mole to the beauty
+of Christ's character and the greatness of His words; utterly
+unspiritual; undisguisedly selfish; rude as a boor; cruel as a
+cut-throat; and having reached that supreme height of wickedness in
+which he can dress his ugliest thought in the plainest words, and send
+them into the world unabashed. What a lesson this speech of Caiaphas,
+and the character disclosed by it, read to all persons who have a
+professional connection with religion!
+
+He can take one point of view only, in regard to the mightiest
+spiritual revelation that the world ever saw; and that is, its bearing
+upon his own miserable personal interests, and the interests of the
+order to which he belongs. And so, whatever may be the wisdom, or
+miracles, or goodness of Jesus, because He threatens the prerogatives
+of the priesthood, He must die and be got out of the way.
+
+This is only an extreme case of a temper and a tendency which is
+perennial. Popes and inquisitors and priests of all Churches have done
+the same, in their degree, in all ages. They have always been tempted
+to look upon religion and religious truth and religious organisations
+as existing somehow for their personal advantage. And so 'the Church
+is in danger!' generally means 'my position is threatened,' and
+heretics are got rid of, because their teaching is inconvenient for
+the prerogatives of a priesthood, and new truth is fought against,
+because officials do not see how it harmonises with their
+pre-eminence.
+
+It is not popes and priests and inquisitors only that are examples of
+the tendency. The warning is needed by every man who stands in such a
+position as mine, whose business it is professionally to handle sacred
+things, and to administer Christian institutions and Christian ritual.
+All such men are tempted to look upon the truth as their
+stock-in-trade, and to fight against innovations, and to array
+themselves instinctively against progress, and frown down new aspects
+and new teachers of truth, simply because they threaten, or appear to
+threaten, the position and prerogatives of the teachers that be.
+Caiaphas's sin is possible, and Caiaphas's temptation is actual, for
+every man whose profession it is to handle the oracles of God.
+
+But the lessons of this speech and character are for us all.
+Caiaphas's sentence is an undisguised, unblushing avowal of a purely
+selfish standpoint. It is not a common depth of degradation to stand
+up, and without a blush to say: 'I look at all claims of revelation,
+at all professedly spiritual truth, and at everything else, from one
+delightfully simple point of view--I ask myself, how does it bear upon
+what I think to be to my advantage?' What a deal of perplexity a man
+is saved if he takes up that position! Yes! and how he has damned
+himself in the very act of doing it! For, look what this absorbing and
+exclusive self-regard does in the illustration before us, and let us
+learn what it will do to ourselves.
+
+This selfish consideration of our own interests will make us as blind
+as bats to the most radiant beauty of truth; aye, and to Christ
+Himself, if the recognition of Him and of His message seems to
+threaten any of these. They tell us that fishes which live in the
+water of caverns come to lose their eyesight; and men that are always
+living in the dark holes of their own selfishly absorbed natures,
+they, too, lose their spiritual sight; and the fairest, loftiest,
+truest, and most radiant visions (which are realities) pass before
+their eyes, and they see them not. When you put on regard for
+yourselves as they do blinkers upon horses, you have no longer the
+power of wide, comprehensive vision, but only see straight forward
+upon the narrow line which you fancy to be marked out by your own
+interests. If ever there comes into the selfish man's mind a truth, or
+an aspect of Christ's mission, which may seem to cut against some of
+his practices or interests, how blind he is to it! When Lord Nelson
+was at Copenhagen, and they hoisted the signal of recall, he put his
+telescope up to his blind eye and said, 'I do not see it!' And that is
+exactly what this self-absorbed regard to our own interests does with
+hundreds of men who do not in the least degree know it. It blinds them
+to the plain will of the Commander-in-chief flying there at the
+masthead. 'There are none so blind as those who will not see'; and
+there are none who so certainly will not see as those who have an
+uneasy suspicion that if they do see they will have to change their
+tack. So I say, look at the instance before us, and learn the lesson
+of the blindness to truth and beauty which are Christ Himself, which
+comes of a regard to one's own interests.
+
+Then again, this same self-regard may bring a man down to any kind and
+degree of wrongdoing. Caiaphas was brought down by it, being the
+supreme judge of his nation, to be an assassin and an accomplice of
+murderers. And it is only a question of accident and of circumstances
+how far that man will descend who once yields himself up to the
+guidance of such a disposition and tendency. We have all of us to
+fight against the developed selfishness which takes the form of this,
+that, and the other sin; and we have all of us, if we are wise, to
+fight against the undeveloped sin which lies in all selfishness.
+Remember that if you begin with laying down as the canon of your
+conduct, 'It is expedient for me,' you have got upon an inclined plane
+that tilts at a very sharp angle, and is very sufficiently greased,
+and ends away down yonder in the depths of darkness and of death, and
+it is only a question of time how far and how fast, how deep and
+irrevocable, will be your descent.
+
+And lastly, this same way of looking at things which takes 'It is
+expedient' as the determining consideration, has in it an awful power
+of so twisting and searing a man's conscience as that he comes to look
+at evil and never to know that there is anything wrong in it. This
+cynical high priest in our text had no conception that he was doing
+anything but obeying the plainest dictates of the most natural
+self-preservation when he gave his opinion that they had better kill
+Christ than have any danger to their priesthood. The crime of the
+actual crucifixion was diminished because the doers were so
+unconscious that it was a crime; but the crime of the process by which
+they had come to be unconscious--Oh how that was increased and
+deepened! So, if we fix our eyes sharply and exclusively on what makes
+for our own advantage, and take that as the point of view from which
+we determine our conduct, we may, and we shall, bring ourselves into
+such a condition as that our consciences will cease to be sensitive to
+right and wrong; and we shall do all manner of bad things, and never
+know it. We shall 'wipe our mouths and say: "I have done no harm."'
+So, I beseech you, remember this, that to live for self is hell, and
+that the only antagonist of such selfishness, which leads to
+blindness, crime, and a seared conscience, is to yield ourselves to
+the love of God in Jesus Christ and to say: 'I live, yet not I, but
+Christ liveth in me.'
+
+II. And now turn briefly to the second aspect of this saying, into
+which the former, if I may so say, melts away. We have the unconscious
+prophet and his great prediction.
+
+The Evangelist conceives that the man who filled the office of high
+priest, being the head of the theocratic community, was naturally the
+medium of a divine oracle. When he says, 'being the high priest _that
+year_, Caiaphas prophesied,' he does not imply that the high priestly
+office was annual, but simply desires to mark the fateful importance
+of that year for the history of the world and the priesthood. 'In that
+year' the great 'High Priest for ever' came and stood for a moment by
+the side of the earthly high priest--the Substance by the shadow--and
+by His offering of Himself as the one Sacrifice for sin for ever,
+deprived priesthood and sacrifice henceforward of all their validity.
+So that Caiaphas was in reality the last of the high priests, and
+those that succeeded him for something less than half a century were
+but like ghosts that walked after cock-crow. And what the Evangelist
+would mark is the importance of 'that year,' as making Caiaphas ever
+memorable to us. Solemn and strange that the long line of Aaron's
+priesthood ended in such a man--the river in a putrid morass--and that
+of all the years in the history of the nation, 'in that year' should
+such a person fill such an office!
+
+'Being high priest he prophesied.' And was there anything strange in a
+bad man's prophesying? Did not the Spirit of God breathe through
+Balaam of old? Is there anything incredible in a man's prophesying
+unconsciously? Did not Pilate do so, when he nailed over the Cross,
+'This is the King of the Jews,' and wrote it in Hebrew, and in Greek,
+and in Latin, conceiving himself to be perpetrating a rude jest, while
+he was proclaiming an everlasting truth? When the Pharisees stood at
+the foot of the Cross and taunted Him, 'He saved others, Himself He
+cannot save,' did they not, too, speak deeper things than they knew?
+And were not the lips of this unworthy, selfish, unspiritual,
+unscrupulous, cruel priest so used as that, all unconsciously, his
+words lent themselves to the proclamation of the glorious central
+truth of Christianity, that Christ died for the nation that slew Him
+and rejected Him, nor for them alone, but for all the world? Look,
+though but for a moment, at the thoughts that come from this new view
+of the words which we have been considering.
+
+They suggest to us, first of all, the twofold aspect of Christ's
+death. From the human point of view it was a savage murder by forms of
+law for political ends: Caiaphas and the priests slaying Him to avoid
+a popular tumult that might threaten their prerogatives, Pilate
+consenting to His death to avoid the unpopularity that might follow a
+refusal. From the divine point of view it is God's great sacrifice for
+the sin of the world. It is the most signal instance of that solemn
+law of Providence which runs all through the history of the world,
+whereby bad men's bad deeds, strained through the fine network, as it
+were, of the divine providence, lose their poison and become
+nutritious and fertilising. 'Thou makest the wrath of men to praise
+Thee; with the residue thereof Thou girdest Thyself.' The greatest
+crime ever done in the world is the greatest blessing ever given to
+the world. Man's sin works out the loftiest divine purpose, even as
+the coral insects blindly build up the reef that keeps back the
+waters, or as the sea in its wild, impotent rage, seeking to overwhelm
+the land, only throws upon the beach a barrier that confines its waves
+and curbs their fury.
+
+Then, again, this second aspect of the counsel of Caiaphas suggests
+for us the twofold consequences of that death on the nation itself.
+This Gospel of John was probably written after the destruction of
+Jerusalem. By the time that our Evangelist penned these words, the
+Romans _had_ come and taken away their place and their nation. The
+catastrophe that Caiaphas and his party had, by their short-sighted
+policy, tried to prevent, had been brought about by the very deed
+itself. For Christ's death was practically the reason for the
+destruction of the Jewish commonwealth. When 'the husbandmen said,
+Come! let us kill Him, and seize on the inheritance,' which is simply
+putting Caiaphas's counsel into other language, they thereby deprived
+themselves of the inheritance. And so Christ's death was the
+destruction and not the salvation of the nation.
+
+And yet, it was true that He died for that people, for every man of
+them, for Caiaphas as truly as for John, for Judas as truly as for
+Peter, for all the Scribes and the Pharisees that mocked round His
+Cross, as truly as for the women that stood silently weeping there. He
+died for them all, and John, looking back upon the destruction of his
+nation, can yet say, 'He died for that people.' Yes! and just because
+He did, and because they rejected Him, His death, which they would not
+let be their salvation, became their destruction and their ruin. Oh!
+brethren, it is always so! He is either 'a savour of life unto life,
+or a savour of death unto death!' 'Behold! I lay in Zion for a
+foundation, a tried Stone.' Build upon it and you are safe. If you do
+not build upon it, that Stone becomes 'a stone of stumbling and a rock
+of offence.' You must either build upon Christ or fall over Him; you
+must either build _upon_ Christ, or be crushed to powder _under_ Him.
+Make your choice! The twofold effect is wrought ever, but we can
+choose which of the two shall be wrought upon us.
+
+Lastly, we have here the twofold sphere in which our Lord's mighty
+death works its effects.
+
+I have already said that this Gospel was written after the fall of
+Jerusalem. The whole tone of it shows that the conception of the
+Church as quite separate from Judaism was firmly established. The
+narrower national system had been shivered, and from out of the dust
+and hideous ruin of its crushing fall had emerged the fairer reality
+of a Church as wide as the world. The Temple on Zion--which was but a
+small building after all--had been burned with fire. It was _their_
+place, as Caiaphas called it. But the clearing away of the narrower
+edifice had revealed the rising walls of the great temple, the
+Christian Church, whose roof overarches every land, and in whose
+courts all men may stand and praise the Lord. So John, in his home in
+Ephesus, surrounded by flourishing churches in which Jews formed a
+small and ever-decreasing element, recognised how far the dove with
+the olive-branch In its mouth flew, and how certainly that nation was
+only a little fragment of the many for whom Christ died.
+
+'The children of God that were scattered abroad' were all to be united
+round that Cross. Yes! the only thing that unites men together is
+their common relation to a Divine Redeemer. That bond is deeper than
+all national bonds, than all blood-bonds, than community of race, than
+family, than friendship, than social ties, than community of opinion,
+than community of purpose and action. It is destined to absorb them
+all. All these are transitory and they are imperfect; men wander
+isolated notwithstanding them all. But if we are knit to Christ, we
+are knit to all who are also knit to Him. One life animates all the
+limbs, and one life's blood circulates through all the veins. 'So also
+is Christ.' We are one in Him, in whom all the body fitly joined
+together maketh increase, and in whom all the building fitly framed
+together groweth. If we have yielded to the power of that Cross which
+draws us to itself, we shall have been more utterly alone, in our
+penitence and in our conscious surrender to Christ, than ever we were
+before. But He sets the solitary in families, and that solemn
+experience of being alone with our Judge and our Saviour will be
+followed by the blessed sense that we are no more solitary, but
+'fellow-citizens with the saints and of the household of God.'
+
+That death brings men into the _family_ of God. He will 'gather into
+one the scattered children of God.' They are called children by
+anticipation. For surely nothing can be clearer than that the doctrine
+of all John's writings is that men are not children of God by virtue
+of their humanity, except in the inferior sense of being made by Him,
+and in His image as creatures with spirit and will, but _become_
+children of God through faith in the Son of God, which brings about
+that new birth, whereby we become partakers of the Divine nature. 'To
+as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of
+God, even to them that believe on His name.'
+
+So I beseech you, turn yourselves to that dear Christ who has died for
+us all, for us each, for me and for thee, and put your confidence in
+His great sacrifice. You will find that you pass from isolation into
+society, from death into life, from the death of selfishness into the
+life of God. Listen to Him, who says: 'Other sheep I have which are
+not of this fold, them also I must bring, and they shall hear My
+voice: and there shall be one flock' because there is 'one Shepherd.'
+
+
+
+
+LOVE'S PRODIGALITY CENSURED AND
+VINDICATED
+
+'Then Jesus, six days before the passover, came to Bethany, where
+Lazarus was which had been dead, whom He raised from the dead. There
+they made Him a supper; and Martha served: but Lazarus was one of them
+that sat at the table with Him. Then took Mary a pound of ointment of
+spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped His
+feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the
+ointment. Then saith one of His disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon's
+son, which should betray Him, Why was not this ointment sold for three
+hundred pence, and given to the poor? This he said, not that he cared
+for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare
+what was put therein. Then said Jesus, Let her alone: against the day
+of My burying hath she kept this. For the poor always ye have with
+you; but Me ye have not always. Much people of the Jews therefore knew
+that He was there: and they came not for Jesus' sake only, but that
+they might see Lazarus also, whom He had raised from the dead. But the
+chief priests consulted that they might put Lazarus also to death;
+because that by reason of him many of the Jews went away, and believed
+on Jesus.'--JOHN xii. 1-11.
+
+Jesus came from Jericho, where He had left Zacchaeus rejoicing in the
+salvation that had come to his house, and whence Bartimaeus, rejoicing
+in His new power of vision, seems to have followed Him. A few hours
+brought Him to Bethany, and we know from other Evangelists what a
+tension of purpose marked Him, and awed the disciples, as He pressed
+on before them up the rocky way. His mind was full of the struggle and
+death which were so near. The modest village feast in the house of
+Simon the leper comes in strangely amid the gathering gloom; but, no
+doubt, Jesus accepted it, as He did everything, and entered into the
+spirit of the hour. He would not pain His hosts by self-absorbed
+aloofness at the table. The reason for the feast is obviously the
+raising of Lazarus, as is suggested by his being twice mentioned in
+verses 1 and 2.
+
+Our Lord had withdrawn to Ephraim so immediately after the miracle
+that the opportunity of honouring Him had not occurred. It was a brave
+tribute to pay Him in the face of the Sanhedrim's commandment (ch. xi.
+57). This incident sets in sharpest contrast the two figures of Mary,
+the type of love which delights to give its best, and Judas, the type
+of selfishness which is only eager to get; and it shows us Jesus
+casting His shield over the uncalculating giver, and putting meaning
+into her deed.
+
+I. In Eastern fashion, the guests seem to have all been males, no
+doubt the magnates of the village, and Jesus with His disciples. The
+former would have become accustomed to seeing Lazarus, but Christ's
+immediate followers would gaze curiously on him. And how he would gaze
+on Jesus, whom he had probably not seen since the napkin had been
+taken from his face. The two sisters were true to their respective
+characters. The bustling, practical Martha had perhaps not very fine
+or quickly moved emotions. She could not say graceful things to their
+benefactor, and probably she did not care to sit at His feet and drink
+in His teaching; but she loved Him with all her heart all the same,
+and showed it by serving. No doubt, she took care that the best dishes
+were carried to Jesus first, and, no doubt, as is the custom in those
+lands, she plied Him with invitations to partake. We do Martha less
+than justice if we do not honour her, and recognise that her kind of
+service is true service. She has many successors among Christ's true
+followers, who cannot 'gush' nor rise to the heights of His loftiest
+teaching, but who have taken Him for their Lord, and can, at any rate,
+do humble, practical service in kitchen or workshop. Their more
+'intellectual' or poetically emotional brethren are tempted to look
+down on them, but Jesus is as ready to defend Martha against Mary, if
+she depreciates her, as He is to vindicate Mary's right to her kind of
+expression of love, if Martha should seek to force her own kind on her
+sister. 'There are differences of ministries, but the same Lord.'
+
+Mary was one of the unpractical sort, whom Martha is very apt to
+consider supremely useless, and often to lose patience with. Could she
+not find something useful to do in all the bustle of the feast? Had
+she no hands that could carry a dish, and no common sense that could
+help things on? Apparently not. Every one else was occupied, and how
+should she show the love that welled up in her heart as she looked at
+Lazarus sitting there beside Jesus? She had one costly possession, the
+pound of perfume. Clearly it was her own, for she would not have taken
+it if Lazarus and Mary had been joint owners. So, without thinking of
+anything but the great burden of love which she blessedly bore, she
+'poured it on His head' (Mark) and on His feet, which the fashion of
+reclining at meals made accessible to her, standing behind Him, True
+love is profuse, not to say prodigal. It knows no better use for its
+best than to lavish it on the beloved, and can have no higher joy than
+that. It does not stay to calculate utility as seen by colder eyes. It
+has even a subtle delight in the very absence of practical results,
+for the expression of itself is the purer thereby. A basin of water
+and a towel would have done as well or better for washing Christ's
+feet, but not for relieving Mary's full heart. Do we know anything of
+that omnipotent impulse? Can we complacently set our givings beside
+Mary's?
+
+II. Judas is the foil to Mary. His sullen, black selfishness,
+stretching out hands like talons in eagerness to get, makes more
+radiant, and is itself made darker by, her shining deed of love.
+Goodness always rouses evil to self-assertion, and the other
+Evangelists connect Mary's action with Judas's final treachery as part
+of its impelling cause. They also show that his specious objection, by
+its apparent common sense and charitableness, found assent in the
+disciples. Three hundred pence worth of good ointment wasted which
+might have helped so many poor! Yes, and how much poorer the world
+would have been if it had not had this story! Mary was more
+utilitarian than her censors. She served the highest good of all
+generations by her uncalculating profusion, by which the poor have
+gained more than some few of them might have lost.
+
+Judas's criticism is still repeated. The world does not understand
+Christian self-sacrifice, for ends which seem to it shadowy as
+compared with the solid realities of helping material progress or
+satisfying material wants. A hundred critics, who do not do much for
+the poor themselves, will descant on the waste of money in religious
+enterprises, and smile condescendingly at the enthusiasts who are so
+unpractical. But love knows its own meaning, and need not be abashed
+by the censure of the unloving.
+
+John flashes out into a moment's indignation at the greed of Judas,
+which was masquerading as benevolence. His scathing laying bare of
+Judas's mean and thievish motive is no mere suspicion, but he must
+have known instances of dishonesty. When a man has gone so far in
+selfish greed that he has left common honesty behind him, no wonder if
+the sight of utterly self-surrendering love looks to him folly. The
+world has no instruments by which it can measure the elevation of the
+godly life. Mary would not be Mary if Judas approved of her or
+understood her.
+
+III. Jesus vindicates the act of His censured servant. His words fall
+into two parts, of which the former puts a meaning into Mary's act, of
+which she probably had not been aware, while the latter meets the
+carping criticism of Judas. That Jesus should see in the anointing a
+reference to His burying, pathetically indicates how that near end
+filled His thoughts, even while sharing in the simple feast. The clear
+vision of the Cross so close did not so absorb Him as to make Him
+indifferent either to Mary's love or to the villagers' humble
+festivity. However weighed upon, His heart was always sufficiently at
+leisure from itself to care for His friends and to defend them. He
+accepts every offering that love brings, and, in accepting, gives it a
+significance beyond the offerer's thought. We know not what use He may
+make of our poor service; but we may be sure that, if that which we
+can see to is right--namely, its motive,--He will take care of what we
+cannot see to--namely, its effect,--and will find noble use for the
+sacrifices which unloving critics pronounce useless waste.
+
+'The poor always ye have with you.' Opportunities for the exercise of
+brotherly liberality are ever present, and therefore the obligation to
+it is constant. But these permanent duties do not preclude the
+opportunities for such special forms of expressing special love to
+Jesus as Mary had shown, and as must soon end. The same sense of
+approaching separation as in the former clause gives pathos to that
+restrained 'not always.' The fact of His being just about to leave
+them warranted extraordinary tokens of love, as all loving hearts know
+but too well. But, over and above the immediate reference of the
+words, they carry the wider lesson that, besides the customary duties
+of generous giving laid on us by the presence of ordinary poverty and
+distresses, there is room in Christian experience for extraordinary
+outflows from the fountain of a heart filled with love to Christ. The
+world may mock at it as useless prodigality, but Jesus sees that it is
+done for Him, and therefore He accepts it, and breathes meaning into
+it.
+
+'Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, there
+shall also this, that this woman hath done, be told for a memorial of
+her.' The Evangelist who records that promise does not mention Mary's
+name; John, who does mention the name, does not record the promise. It
+matters little whether our names are remembered, so long as Jesus beam
+them graven on His heart.
+
+
+
+
+A NEW KIND OF KING
+
+'On the next day much people that were come to the feast, when they
+heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, took branches of palm-trees,
+and went forth to meet Him, and cried, Hosanna: Blessed is the King of
+Israel that cometh in the name of the Lord. And Jesus, when He had
+found a young ass, sat thereon; as it is written, Fear not, daughter
+of Sion: behold, thy King cometh, sitting on an ass's colt. These
+things understood not His disciples at the first: but when Jesus was
+glorified, then remembered they that these things were written of Him,
+and that they had done these things unto Him. The people therefore
+that was with Him when He called Lazarus out of his grave, and raised
+him from the dead, bare record. For this cause the people also met
+Him, for that they heard that He had done this miracle. The Pharisees
+therefore said among themselves, Perceive ye how ye prevail nothing!
+behold, the world is gone after Him. And there were certain Greeks
+among them that came up to worship at the feast: The same came
+therefore to Philip, which was of Bethsaida of Galilee, and desired
+him, saying, Sir, we would see Jesus. Philip cometh and telleth
+Andrew: and again Andrew and Philip tell Jesus, and Jesus answered
+them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of Man should be
+glorified. Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall
+into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth
+forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that
+hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal. If any
+man serve Me, let him follow Me; and where I am, there shall also My
+servant be: if any man serve Me, him will My Father honour.'--JOHN
+xii. 12-26.
+
+The difference between John's account of the entry into Jerusalem and
+those of the Synoptic Gospels is very characteristic. His is much
+briefer, but it brings the essentials out clearly, and is particular
+in showing its place as a link in the chain that drew on the final
+catastrophe, and in noting its effect on various classes.
+
+'The next day' in verse 12 was probably the Sunday before the
+crucifixion. To understand the events of that day we must try to
+realise how rapidly, and, as the rulers thought, dangerously,
+excitement was rising among the crowds who had come up for the
+Passover, and who had heard of the raising of Lazarus. The Passover
+was always a time when national feeling was ready to blaze up, and any
+spark might light the fire. It looked as if Lazarus were going to be
+the match this time, and so, on the Saturday, the rulers had made up
+their minds to have him put out of the way in order to stop the
+current that was setting in, of acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah.
+
+They had already made up their minds to dispose of Jesus, and now,
+with cynical contempt for justice, they determined to 'put Lazarus
+also to death.' So there were to be two men who were to 'die for the
+people.' Keeping all this wave of popular feeling in view, it might
+have been expected that Jesus would, as hitherto, have escaped into
+privacy, or discouraged the offered homage of a crowd whose Messianic
+ideal was so different from His.
+
+John is mainly concerned in bringing out two points in his version of
+the incident. First, he tells us what we should not have gathered from
+the other Evangelists, that the triumphal procession began in
+Jerusalem, not in Bethany. It was the direct result of the ebullition
+of enthusiasm occasioned by the raising of Lazarus. The course of
+events seems to have been that 'the common people of the Jews' came
+streaming out to Bethany on the Sunday to gape and gaze at the risen
+man and Him who had raised him, that they and some of those who had
+been present at the raising went back to the city and carried thither
+the intelligence that Jesus was coming in from Bethany next day, and
+that then the procession to meet Him was organised.
+
+The meaning of the popular demonstration was plain, both from the palm
+branches, signs of victory and rejoicing, and from the chant, which is
+in part taken from Psalm cxviii. The Messianic application of that
+quotation is made unmistakable by the addition, 'even the King of
+Israel.' In the Psalm, 'he that cometh in the name of Jehovah,' means
+the worshipper drawing near to the Temple, but the added words divert
+the expression to Jesus, hail Him as the King, and invoke Him as
+'Saviour.' Little did that shouting crowd understand what sort of a
+Saviour He was. Deliverance from Rome was what they were thinking of.
+
+We must remember what gross, unspiritual notions of the Messiah they
+had, and then we are prepared to feel how strangely unlike His whole
+past conduct Jesus' action now was. He had shrunk from crowds and
+their impure enthusiasm; He had slipped away into solitude when they
+wished to come by force to make Him a King, and had in every possible
+way sought to avoid publicity and the rousing of popular excitement.
+Now He deliberately sets Himself to intensify it. His choice of an ass
+on which to ride into Jerusalem was, and would be seen by many to be,
+a plain appropriation to Himself of a very distinct Messianic
+prophecy, and must have raised the heat of the crowd by many degrees.
+One can fancy the roar of acclaim which hailed Him when He met the
+multitude, and the wild emotion with which they strewed His path with
+garments hastily drawn off and cast before Him.
+
+Why did He thus contradict all His past, and court the smoky
+enthusiasm which He had hitherto damped? Because He knew that 'His
+hour' had come, and that the Cross was at hand, and He desired to
+bring it as speedily as might be, and thus to shorten the suffering
+that He would not avoid, and to finish the work which He was eager to
+complete. The impatience, as we might almost call it, which had marked
+Him on all that last journey, reached its height now, and may indicate
+to us for our sympathy and gratitude both His human longing to get the
+dark hour over and His fixed willingness to die for us.
+
+But even while Jesus accepted the acclamations and deliberately set
+Himself to stir up enthusiasm, He sought to purify the gross ideas of
+the crowd. What more striking way could He have chosen of declaring
+that all the turbulent passions and eagerness for a foot-to-foot
+conflict with Rome which were boiling in their breasts were alien to
+His purposes and to the true Messianic ideal, than that choosing of
+the meek, slow-pacing ass to bear Him? A conquering king would have
+made his triumphal entry in a chariot or on a battle-horse. This
+strange type of monarch is throned on an ass. It was not only for a
+verbal fulfilment of the prophecy, but for a demonstration of the
+essential nature of His kingdom, that He thus entered the city.
+
+John characteristically takes note of the effects of the entry on two
+classes, the disciples and the rulers. The former remembered with a
+sudden flash of enlightenment the meaning of the entry when the Cross
+and the Resurrection had taught them it. The rulers marked the popular
+feeling running high with bewilderment, and were, as Jesus meant them
+to be, made more determined to take vigorous measures to stop this
+madness of the mob.
+
+The second incident in this passage contrasts remarkably with the
+first, and yet is, in one aspect, a continuation of it. In the former,
+Jesus brought into prominence the true nature of His rule by His
+choosing the ass to carry Him, so declaring that His dominion rested,
+not on conquest, but on meekness. In the latter, He reveals a yet
+deeper aspect of His work, and teaches that His influence over men is
+won by utter self-sacrifice, and that His subjects must tread the same
+path of losing their lives by which He passes to His glory. The
+details of the incident are of small importance as compared with that
+great and solemn lesson; but we may note them in a few words. The
+desire of a few Greeks to see Him was probably only a reflection of
+the popular enthusiasm, and was prompted mainly by curiosity and the
+characteristic Greek eagerness to see any 'new thing.' The addressing
+of the request to Philip is perhaps explained by the fact that he 'was
+of Bethsaida of Galilee,' and had probably come into contact with
+these Greeks in the neighbouring Decapolis, on the other side of the
+lake. Philip's consultation of his fellow-townsman, Andrew, who is
+associated with him in other places, probably implies hesitation in
+granting so unprecedented a request. They did not know what Jesus
+might say to it. And what He did say was very unlike anything that
+they could have anticipated.
+
+The trivial request was as a narrow window through which Jesus'
+yearning spirit saw a great expanse--nothing less than the coming to
+Him of myriads of Gentiles, the 'much fruit' of which He immediately
+speaks, the 'other sheep' whom He 'must bring.' The thought must have
+been ever present to Him, or it would never have leaped to utterance
+on such an occasion. The little window shows us, too, what was
+habitually in His mind and heart. He, as it were, hears the striking
+of the hour of His glorification; in which expression the ideas of His
+being glorified by drawing men to the knowledge of His love, and of
+the Cross being not the lowest depth of His humiliation, but the
+highest apex of His glory--as it is always represented in this
+Gospel--seemed to be fused together.
+
+The seed must die if a harvest is to spring from it. That is the law
+for all moral and spiritual reformations. Every cause must have its
+martyrs. No man can be fruit-bearing unless he sacrifices himself. We
+shall not 'quicken' our fellows unless we 'die,' either literally or
+by the not less real martyrdom of rigid self-crucifixion and
+suppression.
+
+But that necessity is not only for Apostles or missionaries of great
+causes; it is the condition of all true, noble life, and prescribes
+the path not only for those who would live for others, but for all who
+would truly live their own lives. Self-renunciation guards the way to
+the 'tree of life.' That lesson was specially needed by 'Greeks,' for
+ignorance of it was the worm that gnawed the blossoms of their trees,
+whether of art or of literature. It is no less needed by our
+sensuously luxurious and eagerly acquisitive generation. The world's
+war-cries to-day are two--'Get!' 'Enjoy!' Christ's command is,
+'Renounce!' And in renouncing we shall realise both of these other
+aims, which they who pursue them only, never attain.
+
+Christ's servant must be Christ's follower: indeed service is
+following. The Cross has aspects in which it stands alone, and is
+incapable of being reproduced and makes all repetition needless. But
+it has also an aspect in which it not only _may_, but _must_, be
+reproduced in every disciple. And he who takes it for the ground of
+his trust only, and not as the pattern of his life, has need to ask
+himself whether his trust in it is genuine or worth anything. Of
+course they who follow a leader will arrive where the leader has gone,
+and though our feet are feeble and our progress devious and slow, we
+have here His promise that we shall not be lost in the desert, but,
+sustained by Him, will reach His side, and at last be where He is.
+
+
+
+
+AFTER CHRIST: WITH CHRIST
+
+'If any man serve Me, let him follow Me; and where I am, there shall
+also My servant be.'--John xii. 26.
+
+Our Lord was strangely moved by the apparently trivial incident of
+certain Greeks desiring to see Him. He recognised and hailed in them
+the first-fruits of the Gentiles. The Eastern sages at His cradle, and
+these representatives of Western culture within a few hours of the
+Cross, were alike prophets. So, in His answer to their request, our
+Lord passes beyond the immediate bearing of the request, and
+contemplates it in its relation to the future developments of His
+work. And the thought that the Son of Man is now about to begin to be
+glorified, at once brings Him face to face with the fact which must
+precede the glory, viz., His death.
+
+That great law that a higher life can only be reached by the decay of
+the lower, of which the Cross is the great instance, He illustrates,
+first, by an example from Nature, the corn of wheat which must die ere
+it brings forth fruit. Then He declares that this is a universal law,
+'He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in
+this world shall keep it unto life eternal.' And then He declares that
+this universal law, which has its adumbration in Nature, and applies
+to all mankind, and is manifested in its highest form on the Cross, is
+the law of the Christian discipleship. 'If any man serve Me, let him
+follow Me,' and, as a consequence, 'where I am, there shall also My
+servant be.'
+
+In two clauses He covers the whole ground of the present and the
+future. Many thinkers and teachers have tried to crystallise their
+systems into some brief formula which may stick in the memory and be
+capable of a handy application. 'Follow Nature,' said ancient sages,
+attaching a nobler meaning to the condensed commandment than its
+modern repeaters often do; 'Follow duty,' say others; 'Follow _Me_'
+says Christ. That is enough for life. And for all the dim regions
+beyond, this prospect is sufficient, 'Where I am, there shall also My
+servant be.' One Form towers above the present and the future, and
+they both derive their colouring and their worth from Him and our
+relation to Him. 'To follow'--that is the condensed summary of life's
+duty. 'To be with'--that is the crystallising of all our hopes.
+
+I. The all-sufficient law for life.
+
+'If any man serve Me, let him follow Me.' Everything is smelted down
+into that; and there you have a sufficient directory for every man's
+every action.
+
+Now although it has nothing to do with my present purpose, I can
+scarcely avoid pausing, just for a moment, to ask you to consider the
+perfect uniqueness of such an utterance as that. Think of one Man
+standing up before all mankind, and coolly and deliberately saying to
+them, 'I am the realised Ideal of human conduct; I am Incarnate
+Perfection; and all of you, in all the infinite variety of condition,
+culture, and character, are to take Me for your pattern and your
+guide.' The world has listened, and the world has not laughed nor been
+angry. Neither indignation nor mockery, which one might have expected
+would have extinguished such absurdity, has waited upon Christ's
+utterance. I have no time to dwell on this; it is apart from my
+purpose, but I would ask you fairly to consider how strange it is, and
+to ask how it is to be accounted for, that a Man said that, and that
+the wisest part of the world has consented to take Him at His own
+valuation; and after such an utterance as that, yet calls Him 'meek
+and lowly of heart.'
+
+But I pass away from that. What does He mean by this commandment,
+'Follow Me'? Of course I need not remind you that it brings all duty
+down to the imitation of Jesus Christ. That is a commonplace that I do
+not need to dwell upon, nor to follow out into the many regions into
+which it would lead us, and where we might find fruitful subjects of
+contemplation; because I desire, in a sentence or two, to insist upon
+the special form of following which is here enjoined. It is a very
+grand thing to talk about the imitation of Christ, and even in its
+most superficial acceptation it is a good guide for all men. But no
+man has penetrated to the depths of that stringent and all-
+comprehensive commandment who has not recognised that there is one
+special thing in which Christ is to be our Pattern, and that is in
+regard to the very thing in which we think that He is most unique and
+inimitable. It is His Cross, and not His life; it is His death, and
+not His virtues, which He is here thinking about, and laying it upon
+all of us as the encyclopaedia and sum of all morality that we should
+be conformed to it. I have already pointed out to you in my
+introductory remarks the force of the present context. And so I need
+not further enlarge upon that, nor vindicate my declaration that
+Christ's death is the pattern which is here set before us. Of course
+we cannot imitate that in its effects, except in a very secondary and
+figurative fashion. But the spirit that underlay it, as the supreme
+Example of self-sacrifice, is commended to us all as the royal law for
+our lives, and unless we are conformed thereto we have no right to
+call ourselves Christ's disciples. To die for the sake of higher life,
+to give up our own will utterly in obedience to God, and in the
+unselfish desire to help and bless others, that is the _Alpha_ and the
+_Omega_ of discipleship. It always has been so and always will be so.
+And so, dear brethren, let us lay it to our own hearts, and make very
+stringent inquiry into our own conduct, whether we have ever come
+within sight of what makes a true disciple--viz., that we should be
+'conformable unto His death.'
+
+Now our modern theology has far too much obscured this plain teaching
+of the New Testament, because it has been concerned--I do not say too
+much, but too exclusively, concerned--in setting forth the other
+aspect of Christ's death, by which it is what none of ours can ever
+even begin to be, the sacrifice for a world's sin. But, mind, there
+are two ways of looking at Christ's Cross. You must begin with
+recognising it as the basis of all your hope, the power by which you
+are delivered from sin as guilt, habit, and condemnation. And then you
+must take it, if it is to be the sacrifice and atonement for your
+sins, for the example of your lives, and mould yourselves after it.
+'If any man serve Me, let him follow Me,' and here is the special
+region in which the following is to be realised: 'He that loveth his
+life shall lose it, and he that hateth his life shall keep it unto
+life eternal.'
+
+Now, further, let me remind you that this brief, crystallised
+commandment, the essence of all practical godliness and Christianity,
+makes the blessed peculiarity of Christian morality. People ask what
+it is that distinguishes the teaching of the New Testament in regard
+to duty, from the teaching of lofty moralists and sages of old. Not
+the specific precepts, though these are, in many cases, deeper. Not
+the individual commandments, though the perspective of human
+excellences and virtues has been changed in Christianity, and the
+gentler and sweeter graces have been enthroned in the place where the
+world's morality has generally set the more ostentatious ones; the
+hero is, roughly speaking, the world's type, the saint is the New
+Testament's. But the true characteristic of Christian teaching as to
+conduct lies in this, that the law is in a Person, and that the power
+to obey the law comes from the love of the Person. All things are
+different; unwelcome duties are made less repulsive, and hard tasks
+are lightened, and sorrows are made tolerable, if only we are
+following Him. You remember the old story in Scottish history of the
+knight to whom was entrusted the king's heart; how, beset by the bands
+of the infidels, he tossed the golden casket into the thickest of
+their ranks and said, 'Go on, I follow thee'; and death itself was
+light when that thought spurred his steed forward.
+
+And so, brethren, it is far too hard a task to tread the road of duty
+which our consciences command us, unless we are drawn by Him Who is
+before us there on the road, and see the shining of His garments as He
+sets His face forward, and draws us after Him. It is easy to climb a
+glacier when the guide has cut with his ice-axe the steps in which he
+sets his feet, and we may set ours. The sternness of duty, and the
+rigidity of law, and the coldness of 'I ought,' are all changed when
+duty consists in following Christ, and He is before us on the rocky
+and narrow road.
+
+This precept is all-sufficient. Of course it will be a task of wisdom,
+of common sense, of daily culture in prudence and other graces; to
+apply the generalised precept to the specific cases that emerge in our
+lives. But whilst the application may require a great many subordinate
+by-laws, the royal statute is one, and simple, and enough. 'Follow
+Me.' Is it not a strange thing--it seems to me to be a perfectly
+unique thing, inexplicable except upon one hypothesis--that a life so
+brief, of which the records are so fragmentary, in which some of the
+relationships in which we stand had no place, and which was lived out
+in a world so utterly different from our own, should yet avail to be a
+guide to men, not in regard to specific points, so much as in regard
+to the imperial supremacy in it of these motives--Even Christ pleased
+not Himself; 'My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me.'
+
+And so, brethren, take this sharp test and apply it honestly to your
+own lives, day by day, in all their _minutiae_ as well as in their
+great things. 'If any man _serve_ Me,' how miserably that Christian
+'service' has been evacuated of its deepest meaning, and
+superficialised and narrowed! 'Service'--that means people getting
+into a building and singing and praying. Service--that means acts of
+beneficence, teaching and preaching and giving material or spiritual
+helps of various kinds. These things have almost monopolised the word.
+But Christ enlarges its shrivelled contents once more, and teaches us
+that, far above all specifically so-called acts of religious worship,
+and more indispensable than so-called acts of Christian activity and
+service, lies the self-sacrificing conformity of character to Him. 'If
+any man serve Me,' let him sing and praise and pray? Yes; 'If any man
+serve Me,' let him try to help other people, and in the service of man
+do service to Me? Yes; but deeper than all, and fundamental to the
+others, 'If any man serve Me, let him _follow_ Me'--Is that _my_
+discipleship? Let each one of us professing Christians ask himself.
+
+II. We have here the all-sufficient hope for the future.
+
+I know few things more beautiful than the perfectly _naive_ way in
+which the greatest of thoughts is here set forth by the simplest of
+figures. If two men are walking on the same road to a place, the one
+that is in front will get there first, and his friend that is coming
+up after him will get there second, if he keeps on; and they will be
+united at the end, because, one after the other, they travel the road.
+And so says Christ: 'Of course, if you follow Me, you will join Me;
+and where I am, there shall also My servant be.' The implications of a
+Christian life, which is true following of Christ here, necessarily
+led to the confidence that in that future there will be union with
+Him. That is a deep thought, which might afford material for much to
+be said, but on which I cannot dwell now.
+
+I remarked at an early stage of this sermon how singular it was that
+our Lord should present Himself as the Pattern for all human
+excellence. Is it not even more singular that He should venture to
+present His own companionship as the sufficient recompense for every
+sorrow, for every effort, for all pain, for all pilgrimage? To be with
+Him, He thinks, is enough for any man and enough for all men. Who did
+He think Himself to be? What did _He_ suppose His relation to the rest
+of us to be, who could thus calmly suggest to the world that the only
+thing that a heart needed for blessedness was to be beside Him? And we
+believe it, too little as it influences our lives. 'To be with Christ'
+is 'very much better'; better than all beneath the stars; better than
+all on this side eternity.
+
+What does our Lord mean by this all-sufficient hope? We know very
+little of that dim region beyond, but we know that until He comes
+again His departed servants are absent from the body. And, in our
+sense of the word, there can be no _place_ for spirits thus free from
+corporeal environment. And so place, to-day at all events for the
+departed saints, and in a subordinate degree all through eternity,
+even when they are clothed with a glorified body, must be but a symbol
+of state, of condition, of spiritual character. 'Where I am there
+shall My servant be,' means specially '_What I_ am, _that_ shall My
+servant be.' This perfect conformity to that dear Lord, whose
+footsteps we have followed; assimilation there, which is the issue of
+imitation here, though broken and imperfect, this is the hope that may
+gladden and animate every Christian heart.
+
+To be with Him is to be like Him, and therefore to be conscious of His
+presence in some fashion so intimate, so certain, as that all our
+earthly notions of presence, derived from the juxtaposition of
+corporeal frames, are infinite distance as compared with it. That is
+what my text dimly shadows for us. We know not how that union, which
+is to be as close as is possible while the distinction of personality
+is retained, may be accomplished. But this we know, that the
+coalescence of two drops of mercury, the running together of two drops
+of water, the blending of heart with heart here in love, are distance
+in comparison with the complete union of Christ and of the happy soul
+that rests in Him, as in an atmosphere and an ocean. Oh, brethren! it
+is not a thing to talk about; it is a thing to take to our hearts, and
+in silence to be thankful for; 'absent from the body; present with the
+Lord.'
+
+And is that not enough? The ground of it is enough. 'If we believe
+that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus
+will God bring with Him.' That future companionship is guaranteed to
+the Christian man by the words of Incarnate Truth, and by the
+resurrection of his Lord. The ground of it is enough, and the contents
+are enough--enough for faith; enough for hope; enough for peace;
+enough for work; and eminently enough for comfort.
+
+Ah! there are many other questions that we would fain ask, but to
+which there is no reply; but as the good old rough music of one of the
+eighteenth-century worthies has it, we have sufficient.
+
+  'My knowledge of that life is small,
+  The eye of faith is dim;
+  But 'tis enough that Christ knows all,
+  And I shall be with Him.'
+
+'It is enough for the disciple that he be as' (that is, with) 'his
+Master.' So let us take that thought to our hearts and animate
+ourselves with it, for it is legitimate for us to do so. That one hope
+is sufficient for us all.
+
+Only let us remember that, according to the teaching of my text, the
+companionship that blesses the future is the issue of following Him
+now. I know of no magic in death that is able to change the direction
+in which a man's face is turned. As he is travelling and has
+travelled, so he will travel when he comes through the tunnel, and out
+into the brighter light yonder. The line of a railway marked upon a
+map may stop at the boundaries of the country with which the map is
+concerned, but it is clearly going somewhere, and in the same
+direction. You want the other sheet of the map in order to see whither
+it is going. That is like your life. The map stops very abruptly, but
+the line does not stop. Take an unfinished row of tenements. On the
+last house there stick out bricks preparatory to the continuation of
+the row. And so our lives are, as it were, studded over with
+protuberances and preparations for the attachment thereto of a 'house
+not made with hands,' and yet conformed in its architecture to the row
+that we have built. The man that follows will attain. For life, the
+all-sufficient law is, _after Christ_; for hope, the all-sufficient
+assurance is, _with Christ_.
+
+
+
+
+THE UNIVERSAL MAGNET
+
+'I, if I be lifted up ... will draw all men unto Me.'--JOHN xii. 32.
+
+'Never man spake like this Man,' said the wondering Temple officials
+who were sent to apprehend Jesus. There are many aspects of our Lord's
+teaching in which it strikes one as unique; but perhaps none is more
+singular than the boundless boldness of His assertions of His
+importance to the world. Just think of such sayings as these: 'I am
+the Light of the world'; 'I am the Bread of Life'; 'I am the Door'; 'A
+greater than Solomon is here'; 'In this place is One greater than the
+Temple.' We do not usually attach much importance to men's estimate of
+themselves; and gigantic claims such as these are generally met by
+incredulity or scorn. But the strange thing about Christ's loftiest
+assertions of His world-wide worth and personal sinlessness is that
+they provoke no contradiction, and that the world takes Him at His own
+valuation. So profound is the impression that He has made, that men
+assent when He says, 'I am meek and lowly in heart,' and do not answer
+as they would to anybody else, 'If you were, you would never have said
+so.'
+
+Now there is no more startling utterance of this extraordinary
+self-consciousness of Jesus Christ than the words that I have used for
+my text. They go deep down into the secret of His power. They open a
+glimpse into His inmost thoughts about Himself which He very seldom
+shows us. And they come to each of us with a very touching and strong
+personal appeal as to what we are doing with, and how we individually
+are responding to, that universal appeal on which He says that He is
+exercising.
+
+I. So I wish to dwell on these words now, and ask you first to notice
+here our Lord's forecasting of the Cross.
+
+A handful of Greeks had come up to Jerusalem to the Passover, and they
+desired to see Jesus, perhaps only because they had heard about Him,
+and to gratify some fleeting curiosity; perhaps for some deeper and
+more sacred reason. But in that tiny incident our Lord sees the first
+green blade coming up above the ground which was the prophet of an
+abundant harvest; the first drop of a great abundance of rain. He
+recognises that He is beginning to pass out from Israel into the
+world. But the thought of His world-wide influence thus indicated and
+prophesied immediately brings along with it the thought of what must
+be gone through before that influence can be established. And he
+discerns that, like the corn of wheat that falls into the ground, the
+condition of fruitfulness for Him is death.
+
+Now we are to remember that our Lord here is within a few hours of
+Gethsemane, and a few days of the Cross, and that events had so
+unfolded themselves that it needed no prophet to see that there could
+only be one end to the duel which he had deliberately brought about
+between Himself and the rulers of Israel. So that I build nothing upon
+the anticipation of the Cross, which comes out at this stage in our
+Lord's history, for any man in His position might have seen, as
+clearly as He did, that His path was blocked, and that very near at
+hand, by the grim instrument of death. But then remember that this
+same expression of my text occurs at a very much earlier period of our
+Lord's career, and that if we accept this Gospel of John, at the very
+beginning of it He said, 'As Moses lifted up the serpent in the
+wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up'; and that that
+was no mere passing thought is obvious from the fact that midway in
+His career, if we accept the testimony of the same Gospel, He used the
+same expression to cavilling opponents when He said: 'When ye have
+lifted up the Son of Man, then shall ye know that I am He.' And so at
+the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of His career the same
+idea is cast into the same words, a witness of the hold that it had
+upon Him, and the continual presence of it to His consciousness.
+
+I do not need to refer here to other illustrations and proofs of the
+same thing, only I desire to say, as plainly and strongly as I can,
+that modern ideas that Jesus Christ only recognised the necessity of
+His death at a late stage of His work, and that like other reformers,
+He began with buoyant hope, and thought that He had but to speak and
+the world would hear, and, like other reformers, was disenchanted by
+degrees, are, in my poor judgment, utterly baseless, and bluntly
+contradicted by the Gospel narratives. And so, dear brethren, this is
+the image that rises before us, and that ought to appeal to us all
+very plainly; a Christ who, from the first moment of His consciousness
+of Messiahship--and how early that consciousness was I am not here to
+inquire--was conscious likewise of the death that was to close it. 'He
+came not to be ministered unto, but to minister,' and likewise for
+_this_ end, 'to give His life a ransom for the many.' That gracious,
+gentle life, full of all charities, and long-suffering, and sweet
+goodness, and patience, was not the life of a Man whose heart was at
+leisure from all anxiety about Himself, but the life of a Man before
+whom there stood, ever grim and distinct away on the horizon, the
+Cross and _Himself_ upon it. You all remember a well-known picture
+that suggests the 'Shadow of Death,' the shadow of the Cross falling,
+unseen by Him, but seen with open eyes of horror by His mother. But
+the reality is a far more pathetic one than that; it is this, that He
+came on purpose to die.
+
+But now there is another point suggested by these remarkable words,
+and that is that our Lord regarded the Cross of shame as exaltation or
+'lifting up.' I do not believe that the use of this remarkable phrase
+in our text finds its explanation in the few inches of elevation above
+the surface of the ground to which the crucified victims were usually
+raised. That is there, of course, but there is something far deeper
+and more wonderful than that in the background, and it is this in
+part, that that Cross, to Christ's eyes, bore a double aspect. So far
+as the inflicters or the externals of it were concerned, it was
+ignominy, shame, agony, the very lowest point of humiliation. But
+there was another side to it. What in one aspect is the _nadir_, the
+lowest point beneath men's feet, is in another aspect the _zenith_,
+the very highest point in the bending heaven above us. So throughout
+this Gospel, and very emphatically in the text, we find that we have
+the complement of the Pauline view of the Cross, which is, that it was
+shame and agony. For our Lord says, 'Now the hour is come when the Son
+of Man shall be glorified.' Whether it is glory or shame depends on
+what it was that bound Him there. The reason for His enduring it makes
+it the very climax and flaming summit of His flaming love. And,
+therefore, He is lifted up not merely because the Cross is elevated
+above the ground on the little elevation of Calvary, but that Cross is
+His throne, because there, in highest and sovereign fashion, are set
+forth His glories, the glories of His love, and of the 'grace and
+truth' of which He was 'full.'
+
+So let us not forget this double aspect, and whilst we bow before Him
+who 'endured the Cross, despising the shame,' let us also try to
+understand and to feel what He means when, in the vision of it, He
+said, 'the hour is come that the Son of Man shall be glorified.' It
+was meant for mockery, but mockery veiled unsuspected truth when they
+twined round His pale brows the crown of thorns, thereby setting forth
+unconsciously the everlasting truth that sovereignty is won by
+suffering; and placed in His unresisting hand the sceptre of reed,
+thereby setting forth the deep truth of His kingdom, that dominion is
+exercised in gentleness. Mightier than all rods of iron, or sharp
+swords which conquerors wield, and more lustrous and splendid than
+tiaras of gold glistening with diamonds, are the sceptre of reed in
+the hands, and the crown of thorns on the head, of the exalted,
+because crucified, Man of Sorrows.
+
+But there is still another aspect of Christ's vision of His Cross, for
+the 'lifting up' on it necessarily draws after it the lifting up to
+the dominion of the heavens. And so the Apostle, using a word kindred
+with that of my text, but intensifying it by addition, says, 'He
+became obedient even unto the death of the Cross, wherefore God also
+hath highly lifted Him up.'
+
+So here we have Christ's own conception of His death, that it was
+inevitable, that it was exaltation even in the act of dying, and that
+it drew after it, of inevitable necessity, dominion exercised from the
+heavens over all the earth. He was lifted up on Calvary, and because
+He was lifted up He has carried our manhood into the place of glory,
+and sitteth at the right hand of the Majesty on high. So much for the
+first point to which I would desire to turn your attention.
+
+II. Now we have here our Lord disclosing the secret of His attractive
+power.
+
+'I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me.' That
+'if' expresses no doubt, it only sets forth the condition. The Christ
+lifted up on the Cross is the Christ that draws men. Now I would have
+you notice the fact that our Lord thus unveils, as it were, where His
+power to influence individuals and humanity chiefly resides. He speaks
+about His death in altogether a different fashion from that of other
+men, for He does not merely say, 'If I be lifted up from the earth,
+this story of the Cross will draw men,' but He says, 'I will' do it;
+and thus contemplates, as I shall have to say in a moment, continuous
+personal influence all through the ages.
+
+Now that is not how other people have to speak about their deaths, for
+all other men who have influenced the world for good or for evil,
+thinkers and benefactors, and reformers, social and religious, all of
+them come under the one law that their death is no part of their
+activity, but terminates their work, and that thereafter, with few
+exceptions, and for brief periods, their influence is a diminishing
+quantity. So one Apostle had to say, 'To abide in the flesh is more
+needful for you,' and another had to say, 'I will endeavour that after
+my decease ye may keep in mind the things that I have told you'; and
+all thinkers and teachers and helpers glide away further and further,
+and are wrapped about with thicker and thicker mists of oblivion, and
+their influence becomes less and less.
+
+The best that history can say about any of them is, 'This man, having
+served his generation by the will of God, fell on sleep.' But that
+other Man who was lifted on the Cross saw no corruption, and the death
+which puts a period to all other men's work was planted right in the
+centre of His, and was itself part of that work, and was followed by a
+new form of it which is to endure for ever.
+
+The Cross is the magnet of Christianity. Jesus Christ draws men, but
+it is by His Cross mainly, and that He felt this profoundly is plain
+enough, not only from such utterances as this of my text, but, to go
+no further, from the fact that He has asked us to remember only one
+thing about Him, and has established that ordinance of the Communion
+or the Lord's Supper, which is to remind us always, and to bear
+witness to the world, of where is the centre of His work, and the fact
+which He most desires that men should keep in mind, not the
+graciousness of His words, not their wisdom, not the good deeds that
+He did, but 'This is My body broken for you ... this cup is the New
+Testament in My blood.' A religion which has for its chief rite the
+symbol of a death, must enshrine that death in the very heart of the
+forces to which it trusts to renew the world, and to bless individual
+souls.
+
+If, then, that is true, if Jesus Christ was not all wrong when He
+spoke as He did in my text, then the question arises, what is it about
+His death that makes it the magnet that will draw all men? Men are
+drawn by cords of love. They may be driven by other means, but they
+are drawn only by love. And what is it that makes Christ's death the
+highest and noblest and most wonderful and transcendent manifestation
+of love that the world has ever seen, or ever can see? No doubt you
+will think me very narrow and old-fashioned when I answer the
+question, with the profoundest conviction of my own mind, and, I hope,
+the trust of my own heart. The one thing that entitles men to
+interpret Christ's death as the supreme manifestation of love is that
+it was a death voluntarily undertaken for a world's sins.
+
+If you do not believe that, will you tell me what claim on your heart
+Christ has because He died? Has Socrates any claim on your heart? And
+are there not hundreds and thousands of martyrs who have just as much
+right to be regarded with reverence and affection as this Galilean
+carpenter's Son has, unless, when He died, He died as the Sacrifice
+for the sins of the whole world, and for yours and mine? I know all
+the pathetic beauty of the story. I know how many men's hearts are
+moved in some degree by the life and death of our Lord, who yet would
+hesitate to adopt the full-toned utterance which I have now been
+giving. But I would beseech you, dear friends, to lay this question
+seriously to heart, whether there is any legitimate reason for the
+reverence, the love, the worship, which the world is giving to this
+Galilean young man, if you strike out the thought that it was because
+He loved the world that He chose to die to loose it from the bands of
+its sin. It may be, it is, a most pathetic and lovely story, but it
+has not power to draw all men, unless it deals with that which all men
+need, and unless it is the self-surrender of the Son of God for the
+whole world.
+
+III. And now, lastly, we have here our Lord anticipating continuous
+and universal influence.
+
+I have already drawn attention to the peculiar fullness of the form of
+expression in my text, which, fairly interpreted, does certainly imply
+that our Lord at that supreme moment looked forward, as I have already
+said, to His death, not as putting a period to His work, but as being
+the transition from one form of influence operating upon a very narrow
+circle, to another form of influence which would one day flood the
+world. I do not need to dwell upon that thought, beyond seeking to
+emphasise this truth, that one ought to feel that Jesus Christ has a
+living connection now with each of us. It is not merely that the story
+of the Cross is left to work its results, but, as I for my part
+believe, that the dear Lord, who, before He became Man, was the Light
+of the World, and enlightened every man that came into it, after His
+death is yet more the Light of the World, and is exercising influence
+all over the earth, not only by conscience and the light that is
+within us, nor only through the effects of the record of His past, but
+by the continuous operations of His Spirit. I do not dwell upon that
+thought further than to say that I beseech you to think of Jesus
+Christ, not as One who died for our sins only, but as one who lives
+to-day, and to-day, in no rhetorical exaggeration but in simple and
+profound truth, is ready to help and to bless and to be with every one
+of us. 'It is Christ that died, yea, rather that is risen again, who
+is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for
+us.'
+
+But, beyond that, mark His confidence of universal influence: 'I
+_will_ draw all men.' I need not dwell upon the distinct adaptation of
+Christian truth, and of that sacrifice on the Cross, to the needs of
+all men. It is the universal remedy, for it goes direct to the
+universal epidemic. The thing that men and women want most, the thing
+that _you_ want most, is that your relation with God shall be set
+right, and that you shall be delivered from the guilt of past sin,
+from the exposure to its power in the present and in the future.
+Whatever diversities of climate, civilisation, culture, character the
+world holds, every man is like every other man in this, that he has
+'sinned and come short of the glory of God.' And it is because
+Christ's Cross goes direct to deal with that condition of things that
+the preaching of it is a gospel, not for this phase of society or that
+type of men or the other stage of culture, but that it is meant for,
+and is able to deliver and to bless, every man.
+
+So, brethren, a universal attraction is raying out from Christ's
+Cross, and from Himself to each of us. But that universal attraction
+can be resisted. If a man plants his feet firmly and wide apart, and
+holds on with both hands to some staple or holdfast, then the drawing
+cannot draw. There is the attraction, but he is not attracted. You
+demagnetise Christianity, as all history shows, if you strike out the
+death on the Cross for a world's sin. What is left is not a magnet,
+but a bit of scrap iron. And you can take yourself away from the
+influence of the attraction if you will, some of us by active
+resistance, some of us by mere negligence, as a cord cast over some
+slippery body with the purpose of drawing it, may slip off, and the
+thing lie there unmoved.
+
+And so I come to you now, dear friends, with the plain question, What
+are you doing in response to Christ's drawing of you? He has died for
+you on the Cross; does that not draw? He lives to bless you; does that
+not draw? He loves you with love changeless as a God, with love warm
+and emotional as a man; does that not draw? He speaks to you, I
+venture to say, through my poor words, and says, 'Come unto Me, and I
+will give you rest'; does that not draw? We are all in the bog. He
+stands on firm ground, and puts out a hand. If you like to clutch it,
+by the pledge of the nail-prints on the palm, He will lift you from
+'the horrible pit and the miry clay, and set your feet upon a rock.'
+God grant that all of us may say, 'Draw us, and we will run after
+Thee'!
+
+
+
+
+THE SON OF MAN
+
+'... Who is this Son of Man?'--JOHN xii. 34.
+
+I have thought that a useful sermon may be devoted to the
+consideration of the remarkable name which our Lord gives to
+Himself--'the Son of Man.' And I have selected this instance of its
+occurrence, rather than any other, because it brings out a point which
+is too frequently overlooked, viz. that the name was an entirely
+strange and enigmatical one to the people who heard it. This question
+of utter bewilderment distinctly shows us that, and negatives, as it
+seems to me, the supposition which is often made, that the name 'Son
+of Man,' upon the lips of Jesus Christ, was equivalent to Messiah.
+Obviously there is no such significance attached to it by those who
+put this question. As obviously, for another reason, the two names do
+not cover the same ground; for our Lord sedulously avoided calling
+Himself the Christ, and habitually called Himself the Son of Man.
+
+Now one thing to observe about this name is that it is never found
+upon the lips of any but Jesus Christ. No man ever called him the Son
+of Man whilst He was upon earth, and only once do we find it applied
+to Him in the rest of Scripture, and that is on the occasion on which
+the first martyr, Stephen, dying at the foot of the old wall, saw 'the
+heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.'
+Two other apparent instances of the use of the expression occur, both
+of them in the Book of Revelation, both of them quotations from the
+Old Testament, and in both the more probable reading gives 'a Son of
+Man,' not '_the_ Son of Man.'
+
+One more preliminary remark and I will pass to the title itself. The
+name has been often supposed to be taken from the remarkable prophecy
+in the Book of Daniel, of one 'like a son of man,' who receives from
+the Ancient of Days an everlasting kingdom which triumphs over those
+kingdoms of brute force which the prophet had seen. No doubt there is
+a connection between the prophecy and our Lord's use of the name, but
+it is to be observed that what the prophet speaks of is not 'the Son,'
+but 'one _like_ a son of man'; or in other words, that what the
+prophecy dwells upon is simply the manhood of the future King in
+contradistinction to the bestial forms of Lion and Leopard and Bear,
+whose kingdoms go down before him. Of course Christ fulfils that
+prediction, and is the 'One like a son of man,' but we cannot say that
+the title is derived from the prophecy, in which, strictly speaking,
+it does not occur.
+
+What, then, is the force of this name, as applied to Himself by our
+Lord?
+
+First, we have in it Christ putting out His hand, if I may say so, to
+draw us to Himself--identifying Himself with us. Then we have, just as
+distinctly, Christ, by the use of this name, in a very real sense
+distinguishing Himself from us, and claiming to hold a unique and
+solitary relation to mankind. And then we have Christ, by the use of
+this name in its connection with the ancient prophecy, pointing us
+onward to a wonderful future.
+
+I. First then, Christ thereby identifies Himself with us.
+
+The name Son of Man, whatever more it means, declares the historical
+fact of His Incarnation, and the reality and genuineness, the
+completeness and fullness, of His assumption of humanity. And so it is
+significant to notice that the name is employed continually in the
+places in the Gospels where especial emphasis is to be placed, for
+some reason or other, upon our Lord's manhood, as, for instance, when
+He would bring into view the depth of His humiliation. It is this name
+that He uses when He says: 'Foxes have holes and the birds of the air
+have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head.' The
+use of the term there is very significant and profound; He contrasts
+His homelessness, not with the homes of men that dwell in palaces, but
+with the homes of the inferior creatures. As if He would say, 'Not
+merely am I individually homeless and shelterless, but I am so because
+I am truly a man, the only creature that builds houses, and the only
+creature that has not a home. Foxes have holes, anywhere they can
+rest, the birds of the air have,' not as our Bible gives it, 'nests,'
+but 'roosting-places, any bough will do for them. All living creatures
+are at home in this material universe; I, as a Representative of
+humanity, wander a pilgrim and a sojourner.' We are all restless and
+homeless; the creatures correspond to their environment. We have
+desires and longings, wild yearnings, and deep-seated needs, that
+'wander through eternity'; the Son of Man, the representative of
+manhood, 'hath not where to lay His head.'
+
+Then the same expression is employed on occasions when our Lord
+desires to emphasise the completeness of His participation in all our
+conditions. As, for instance, 'the Son of Man came eating and
+drinking,' knowing the ordinary limitations and necessities of
+corporeal humanity; having the ordinary dependence upon external
+things; nor unwilling to taste, with pure and thankful lip, whatever
+gladness may be found in man's path through the supply of natural
+appetites.
+
+And the name is employed habitually on occasions when He desires to
+emphasise His manhood as having truly taken upon itself the whole
+weight and weariness of man's sin, and the whole burden of man's
+guilt, and the whole tragicalness of the penalties thereof, as in the
+familiar passages, so numerous that I need only refer to them and need
+not attempt to quote them, in which we read of the Son of Man being
+'betrayed into the hands of sinners'; or in those words, for instance,
+which so marvellously blend the lowliness of the Man and the lofty
+consciousness of the mysterious relation which He bears to the whole
+world; 'The Son of Man came, not to be ministered unto, but to
+minister, and to give His life a ransom for the many.'
+
+Now if we gather all these instances together (and they are only
+specimens culled almost at random), and meditate for a moment on the
+Name as illuminated by such words as these, they suggest to us, first,
+how truly and how blessedly He is 'bone of our bone, and flesh of our
+flesh.' All our human joys were His. He knew all human sorrow. The
+ordinary wants of human nature belonged to Him; He hungered, He
+thirsted, and was weary; He ate and drank and slept. The ordinary
+wants of the human heart He knew; He was hurt by hatred, stung by
+ingratitude, yearned for love; His spirit expanded amongst friends,
+and was pained when they fell away. He fought and toiled, and sorrowed
+and enjoyed. He had to pray, to trust, and to weep. He was a Son of
+Man, a true man among men. His life was brief; we have but fragmentary
+records of it for three short years. In outward form it covers but a
+narrow area of human experience, and large tracts of human life seem
+to be unrepresented in it. Yet all ages and classes of men, in all
+circumstances, however unlike those of the peasant Rabbi who died when
+he was just entering mature manhood, may feel that this man comes
+closer to them than all beside. Whether for stimulus for duty, or for
+grace and patience in sorrow, or for restraint in enjoyment, or for
+the hallowing of all circumstances and all tasks, the presence and
+example of the Son of Man are sufficient. Wherever we go, we may track
+His footsteps by the drops of His blood upon the sharp flints that we
+have to tread. In all narrow passes, where the briars tear the wool of
+the flock, we may see, left there on the thorns, what they rent from
+the pure fleece of the Lamb of God that went before. The Son of Man is
+our Brother and our Example.
+
+And is it not beautiful, and does it not speak to us touchingly and
+sweetly of our Lord's earnest desire to get very near us and to bring
+us very near to Him, that this name, which emphasises humiliation and
+weakness and the likeness to ourselves, should be the name that is
+always upon His lips? Just as, if I may compare great things with
+small, some teacher or philanthropist, that went away from civilised
+into savage life, might leave behind him the name by which he was
+known in Europe, and adopt some barbarous designation that was
+significant in the language of the savage tribe to whom he was sent,
+and say to them: 'That is my name now, call me by that,' so this great
+Leader of our souls, who has landed upon our coasts with His hands
+full of blessings, His heart full of love, has taken a name that makes
+Him one of ourselves, and is never wearied of speaking to our hearts,
+and telling us that it is that by which He chooses to be known. It is
+a touch of the same infinite condescension which prompted His coming,
+that makes Him choose as His favourite and habitual designation the
+name of weakness and identification, the name 'Son of Man.'
+
+II. But now turn to what is equally distinct and clear in this title.
+Here we have our Lord distinguishing Himself from us, and plainly
+claiming a unique relationship to the whole world.
+
+Just fancy how absurd it would be for one of us to be perpetually
+insisting on the fact that he was a man, to be taking that as his
+continual description of himself, and pressing it upon people's
+attention as if there was something strange about it. The idea is
+preposterous; and the very frequency and emphasis with which the name
+comes from our Lord's lips, lead one to suspect that there is
+something lying behind it more than appears on the surface. That
+impression is confirmed and made a conviction, if you mark the article
+which is prefixed, _the_ Son of Man. A Son of man is a very different
+idea. When He says '_the_ Son of Man' He seems to declare that in
+Himself there are gathered up all the qualities that constitute
+humanity; that He is, to use modern language, the realised Ideal of
+manhood, the typical Man, in whom is everything that belongs to
+manhood, and who stands forth as complete and perfect. Appropriately,
+then, the name is continually used with suggestions of authority and
+dignity contrasting with those of humiliation. 'The Son of Man is Lord
+of the Sabbath,' 'The Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins'
+and the like. So that you cannot get away from this, that this Man
+whom the whole world has conspired to profess to admire for His
+gentleness, and His meekness, and His lowliness, and His religious
+sanity, stood forward and said: 'I am complete and perfect, and
+everything that belongs to manhood you will find in Me.'
+
+And it is very significant in this connection that the designation
+occurs more frequently in the first three Gospels than in the fourth;
+which is alleged to present higher notions of the nature and
+personality of Jesus Christ than are found in the other three. There
+are more instances in Matthew's Gospel in which our Lord calls Himself
+the Son of Man, with all the implication of uniqueness and
+completeness which that name carries; there are more even in the
+Gospel of the Servant, the Gospel according to Mark, than in the
+Gospel of the Word of God, the Gospel according to John. And so I
+think we are entitled to say that by this name, which the testimony of
+all our four Gospels makes it certain, even to the most suspicious
+reader, that Christ applied to Himself, He declared His humanity, His
+absolutely perfect and complete humanity.
+
+In substance He is claiming the same thing for Himself that Paul
+claimed for Him when he called Him 'the second Adam.' There have been
+two men in the world, says Paul, the fallen Adam, with his infantile
+and undeveloped perfections, and the Christ, with His full and
+complete humanity. All other men are fragments, He is the 'entire and
+perfect chrysolite.' As one of our epigrammatic seventeenth-century
+divines has it, 'Aristotle is but the rubbish of an Adam,' and Adam is
+but the dim outline sketch of a Jesus. Between these two there has
+been none. The one Man as God meant him, the type of man, the perfect
+humanity, the realised ideal, the home of all the powers of manhood,
+is He who Himself claimed that place for Himself, and stepped into it
+with the strange words upon His lips, 'I am meek and lowly of heart.'
+
+'Who is this Son of Man?' Ah, brethren! 'who can bring a clean thing
+out of an unclean? Not one.' A perfect Son of Man, born of a woman,
+'bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh,' must be more than a Son of
+Man. And that moral completeness and that ideal perfection in all the
+faculties and parts of His nature which drove the betrayer to clash
+down the thirty pieces of silver in the sanctuary in despair that 'he
+had betrayed innocent blood'; which made Pilate wash his hands 'of the
+blood of this just person'; which stopped the mouths of the
+adversaries when He challenged them to convince Him of sin, and which
+all the world ever since has recognised and honoured, ought surely to
+lead us to ask the question, 'Who is this Son of Man?' and to answer
+it, as I pray we all may answer it, 'Thou art the Christ, the Son of
+the living God!'
+
+This fact of His absolute completeness invests His work with an
+altogether unique relationship to the rest of mankind. And so we find
+the name employed upon His own lips in connections in which He desires
+to set Himself forth as the single and solitary medium of all blessing
+and salvation to the world--as, for instance, 'The Son of Man came to
+give His life a ransom for the many'; 'Ye shall see the heavens
+opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of
+Man.' He is what the ladder was in the vision to the patriarch, with
+his head upon the stone and the Syrian sky over him--the Medium of all
+communication between earth and heaven. And that ladder which joins
+heaven to earth, and brings all angels down on the solitary watchers,
+comes straight down, as the sunbeams do, to every man wherever he is.
+Each of us sees the shortest line from his own standing-place to the
+central light, and its beams come straight to the apple of each man's
+eye. So because Christ is more than a man, because He is _the_ Man,
+His blessings come to each of us direct and straight, as if they had
+been launched from the throne with a purpose and a message to us
+alone. Thus He who is in Himself perfect manhood touches all men, and
+all men touch Him, and the Son of Man, whom God hath sealed, will give
+to every one of us the bread from heaven. The unique relationship
+which brings Him into connection with every soul of man upon earth,
+and makes Him the Saviour, Helper, and Friend of us all, is expressed
+when He calls Himself the Son of Man.
+
+III. And now one last word in regard to the predictive character of
+this designation.
+
+Even if we cannot regard it as being actually a quotation of the
+prophecy in the Book of Daniel, there is an evident allusion to that
+prophecy, and to the whole circle of ideas presented by it, of an
+everlasting dominion, which shall destroy all antagonistic power, and
+of a solemn coming for judgment of One like a Son of Man.
+
+We find, then, the name occurring on our Lord's lips very frequently
+in that class of passages with which we are so familiar, and which are
+so numerous that I need not quote them to you; in which He speaks of
+the second coming of the Son of Man; as, for instance, that one which
+connects itself most distinctly with the Book of Daniel, the words of
+high solemn import before the tribunal of the High Priest. 'Hereafter
+shall ye see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power, and
+coming in the glories of heaven'; or as when He says, 'He hath given
+Him authority to execute judgment also because He is the Son of Man';
+or as when the proto-martyr, with his last words, declared in sudden
+burst of surprise and thrill of gladness, 'I see the heavens opened,
+and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.'
+
+Two thoughts are all that I can touch on here. The name carries with
+it a blessed message of the present activity and perpetual manhood of
+the risen Lord. Stephen does not see Him as all the rest of Scripture
+paints Him, _sitting_ at the right hand of God, but _standing_ there.
+The emblem of His sitting at the right hand of God represents
+triumphant calmness in the undisturbed confidence of victory. It
+declares the completeness of the work that He has done upon earth, and
+that all the history of the future is but the unfolding of the
+consequences of that work which by His own testimony waa finished when
+He bowed His head and died. But the dying martyr sees him _standing_,
+as if He had sprung to His feet in response to the cry of faith from
+the first of the long train of sufferers. It is as if the Emperor upon
+His seat, looking down upon the arena where the gladiators are
+contending to the death, could not sit quiet amongst the flashing axes
+of the lictors and the purple curtains of His throne, and see their
+death-struggles, but must spring to His feet to help them, or at least
+bend down with the look and with the reality of sympathy. So Christ,
+the Son of Man, bearing His manhood with Him,
+
+  'Still bends on earth a Brother's eye,'
+
+and is the ever-present Helper of all struggling souls that put their
+trust in Him.
+
+Then as to the other and main thought here in view--the second coming
+of that perfect Manhood to be our Judge. It is too solemn a subject
+for human lips to say much about. It has been vulgarised, and the
+power taken out of it by many well-meant attempts to impress it upon
+men's hearts. But that coming is _certain_. That manhood could not end
+its relationship to us with the Cross, nor yet with the slow, solemn,
+upward progress which bore Him, pouring down blessings, up into the
+same bright cloud that had dwelt between the cherubim and had received
+Him into its mysterious recesses at the Transfiguration. That He
+should come again is the only possible completion of His work.
+
+That Judge is our Brother. So in the deepest sense we are tried by our
+Peer. Man's knowledge at its highest cannot tell the moral desert of
+anything that any man does. You may judge action, you may sentence for
+breaches of law, you may declare a man clear of any blame for such,
+but for any one to read the secrets of another heart is beyond human
+power; and if He that is the Judge were only a man there would be wild
+work, and many a blunder in the sentences that were given. But when we
+think that it is the Son of Man that is our Judge, then we know that
+the Omniscience of divinity, that ponders the hearts and reads the
+motives, will be all blended with the tenderness and sympathy of
+humanity; that we shall be judged by One who knows all our frame, not
+only with the knowledge of a Maker, if I may so say, as from outside,
+but with the knowledge of a possessor, as from within; that we shall
+be judged by One who has fought and conquered in all temptations; and
+most blessed of all, that we shall be judged by One with whom we have
+only to plead His own work and His own love and His Cross that we may
+stand acquitted before His throne.
+
+So, brethren, in that one mighty Name all the past, present, and
+future are gathered and blended together. In the past His Cross fills
+the retrospect: for the future there rises up, white and solemn, His
+judgment throne. 'The Son of Man _is_ come to give His life a ransom
+for the many'; that is the centre point of all history. The Son of Man
+_shall_ come to judge the world; that is the one thought that fills
+the future. Let us lay hold by true faith on the mighty work which He
+has done on the Cross, then we shall rejoice to see our Brother on the
+throne, when the 'judgment is set and the books are opened.' Oh,
+friends, cleave to Him ever in trust and love, in communion and
+imitation, in obedience and confession, that ye may be accounted
+worthy 'to stand before the Son of Man' in that day!
+
+
+
+
+A PARTING WARNING
+
+'Jesus therefore said unto them, Yet a little while is the light among
+you. Walk while ye have the light, that darkness overtake you not: and
+he that walketh in the darkness knoweth not whither he goeth. While ye
+have the light, believe on the light, that ye may become sons of
+light.'--JOHN xii. 35,36 (R.V.).
+
+These are the last words of our Lord's public ministry. He afterwards
+spoke only to His followers in the sweet seclusion of the sympathetic
+home at Bethany, and amid the sanctities of the upper chamber. 'Yet a
+little while am I with you';--the sun had all but set. Two days more,
+and the Cross was reared on Calvary, but there was yet time to turn to
+the light. And so His divine charity 'hoped all things,' and continued
+to plead with those who had so long rejected Him. As befits a last
+appeal, the words unveil the heart of Christ. They are solemn with
+warning, radiant with promise, almost beseeching in their earnestness.
+He loves too well not to warn, but He will not leave the bitterness of
+threatening as a last savour on the palate, and so the lips, into
+which grace is poured, bade farewell to His enemies with the promise
+and the hope that even they may become 'the sons of light.'
+
+The solemnity of the occasion, then, gives great force to the words;
+and the remembrance of it sets us on the right track for estimating
+their significance. Let us see what lessons for us there may be in
+Christ's last words to the world.
+
+I. There is, first, a self-revelation.
+
+It is no mere grammatical pedantry that draws attention to the fact
+that four times in this text does our Lord employ the definite
+article, and speak of 'the light.' And that that is no mere accident
+is obvious from the fact that, in the last clause of our text, where
+the general idea of light is all that is meant to be emphatic, the
+article is omitted. 'Yet a little while is _the_ light with you; walk
+while ye have _the_ light.... While ye have _the_ light, believe in
+_the_ light, that ye may be the children of light.'
+
+So then, most distinctly here, in His final appeal to the world, He
+draws back the curtain, as it were, takes away the shade that had
+covered the lamp, and lets one full beam stream out for the last
+impression that He leaves. Is it not profoundly significant and
+impressive that then, of all times, over and over again, in the
+compass of these short verses, this Galilean peasant makes the
+tremendous assertion that He is what none other can be, in a solitary
+and transcendent sense, _the_ Light of Mankind? Undismayed by
+universal rejection, unfaltering in spite of the curling lips of
+incredulity and scorn, unbroken by the near approach of certain
+martyrdom, He presents Himself before the world as its Light. Nothing
+in the history of mad, fanatical claims to inspiration and divine
+authority is to be compared with these assertions of our Lord. He is
+the fontal Source, He says, of all illumination; He stands before the
+whole race, and claims to be 'the Master-Light of all our seeing.'
+Whatsoever ideas of clearness of knowledge, of rapture of joy, of
+whiteness of purity, are symbolised by that great emblem, He declares
+that He manifests them all to men. Others may shine; but they are, as
+He said, 'lights kindled,' and therefore 'burning.' Others may shine,
+but they have caught their radiance from Him. All teachers, all
+helpers, all thinkers draw their inspiration, if they have any, from
+Him, in whom was life, and the Life was the Light of men.
+
+There has been blazing in the heavens of late a new star, that burst
+upon astonished astronomers in a void spot; but its brilliancy, though
+far transcending that of our sun, soon began to wane, and before long,
+apparently, there will be blackness again where there was blackness
+before. So all lights but His are temporary as well as derived, and
+men 'willing for a season to rejoice' in the fleeting splendours, and
+to listen to the teacher of a day, lose the illumination of his
+presence and guidance of his thoughts as the ages roll on. But _the_
+Light is 'not for an age, but for all time.'
+
+Now, brethren, this is Christ's estimate of Himself. I dwell not on it
+for the purpose of seeking to exhaust its depth of significance. In it
+there lies the assertion that He, and He only, is the source of all
+valid knowledge of the deepest sort concerning God and men, and their
+mutual relations. In it lie the assertion that He, and He only, is the
+source of all true gladness that may blend with our else darkened
+lives, and the further assertion that from Him, and from Him alone,
+can flow to us the purity that shall make us pure. We have to turn to
+that Man close by His Cross, on whom while He spoke the penumbra of
+the eclipse of death was beginning to show itself, and to say to Him
+what the Psalmist said of old to the Jehovah whom he knew, and whom we
+recognise as indwelling in Jesus: 'With Thee is the fountain of life.
+Thou makest us to drink of the river of Thy pleasures. In Thy light
+shall we see light.'
+
+So Christ thought of Himself; so Christ would have as to think of Him.
+And it becomes a question for us how, if we refuse to accept that
+claim of a solitary, underived, eternal, and universal power of
+illuminating mankind, we can save His character for the veneration of
+the world. We cannot go picking and choosing amongst the Master's
+words, and say 'This is historical, and that mythical.' We cannot
+select some of them, and leave others on one side. You must take the
+whole Christ if you take any Christ. And the whole Christ is He who,
+within sight of Calvary, and in the face of all but universal
+rejection, lifted up His voice, and, as His valediction to the world,
+declared, 'I am the Light of the world.' So He says to us. Oh that we
+all might cast ourselves before Him, with the cry, 'Lighten our
+darkness, O Lord, we beseech Thee!'
+
+II. Secondly, we have here a double exhortation.
+
+'Walk in the light; believe in the light.' These two sum up all our
+duties; or rather, unveil for us the whole fullness of the possible
+privileges and blessings of which our relation to that light is
+capable. It is obvious that the latter of them is the deeper in idea,
+and the prior in order of sequence. There must be the 'belief' in the
+light before there is the 'walk' in the light. Walking includes the
+ideas of external activity and of progress. And so, putting these two
+exhortations together, we get the whole of Christianity considered as
+subjective. 'Believe in the light; trust in the light,' and then
+'walk' in it. A word, then, about each of these branches of this
+double exhortation.
+
+'Trust in the light.' The figure seems to be dropped at first sight;
+for it wants little faith to believe in the sunshine at midday; and
+when the light is pouring out, how can a man but see it? But the
+apparent incongruity of the metaphor points to something very deep in
+regard to the spiritual side. We cannot but believe in the light that
+meets the eye when it meets it, but it is possible for a man to blind
+himself to the shining of this light. Therefore the exhortation is
+needed--'Believe in the light,' for only by believing it can you see
+it. Just as the eye is the organ of sight, just as its nerves are
+sensitive to the mysterious finger of the beam, just as on its
+mirroring surface impinges the gentle but mighty force that has winged
+its way across all the space between us and the sun, and yet falls
+without hurting, so faith, the 'inward eye which makes the bliss' of
+the solitary soul, is the one organ by which you and I can see the
+light. 'Seeing is believing,' says the old proverb. That is true in
+regard to the physical. Believing is seeing, is much rather the way to
+put it in regard to the spiritual and divine.
+
+Only as we trust the light do we see the light. Unless you and I put
+our confidence in Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Son of Man, we have
+no adequate knowledge of Him and no clear vision of Him. We must know
+that we may love; but we must love that we may know. We must believe
+that we may see. True, we must see that we may believe, but the
+preliminary vision which precedes belief is slight and dim as compared
+with the solidity and the depth of assurance with which we apprehend
+the reality and know the lustre of Him whom our faith has grasped. You
+will never know the glory of the light, nor the sweetness with which
+it falls upon the gazing eye, until you turn your face to that Master,
+and so receive on your susceptible and waiting heart the warmth and
+the radiance which He only can bestow. 'Believe in the light.' Trust
+it; or rather, trust Him who is it. He cannot deceive. This light from
+heaven can never lead astray. Absolutely we may rely upon it;
+unconditionally we must follow it. Lean upon Him--to take another
+metaphor--with all your weight. His arm is strong to bear the burden
+of our weaknesses, sorrows, and, above all, our sins. 'While ye have
+light, trust the light.'
+
+But then that is not enough. Man, with his double relations, must have
+an active and external as well as an inward and contemplative life.
+And so our Lord, side by side with the exhortation on which I have
+been touching, puts the other one, 'Walk in the light.' Our inward
+emotions, however deep and precious, however real the affiance,
+however whole-hearted the love, are maimed and stunted, and not what
+the light requires, unless there follows upon them the activity of the
+walk. What do we get the daylight for? To sit and gaze at it? By no
+means; but that it may guide us upon our path and help us in all our
+work. And so all Christian people need ever to remember that Jesus
+Christ has indissolubly bound together these two phases of our
+relation to Him as the light of life-inward and blessed contemplation
+by faith and outward practical activity. To walk is, of course, the
+familiar metaphor for the external life of man, and all our deeds are
+to be in conformity with the Light, and in communion with Him. This is
+the deepest designation, perhaps, of the true character of a Christian
+life in its external aspect--that it walks in Christ, doing nothing
+but as His light shines, and ever bearing along with it conscious
+fellowship with Him who is thus the guiding and irradiating and
+gladdening and sanctifying life of our lives, '_Walk_ in the light as
+He _is_ in the light.' Our days fleet and change; His are stable and
+the same. For, although these words which I have quoted, in their
+original application refer to God the Father, they are no less true
+about Him who rests at the right hand of God, and is one light with
+Him. He _is_ in the light. We may approximate to that stable and calm
+radiance, even though our lives are passed through changing scenes,
+and effort and struggle are their characteristics. And oh! how
+blessed, brother, such a life will be, all gladdened by the unsetting
+and unclouded sunshine that even in the shadiest places shines, and
+turns the darkness of the valley of the shadow of death into solemn
+light; teaching gloom to glow with a hidden sun!
+
+But there is not only the idea of activity here, there is the further
+notion of progress. Unless Christian people to their faith add work,
+and have both their faith and their consequent work in a continual
+condition of progress and growth, there is little reason to believe
+that they apprehend the light at all. If you trust the light you will
+walk in it; and if your days are not in conformity nor in communion
+with Him, and are not advancing nearer and nearer to the central
+blaze, then it becomes you to ask yourselves whether you have verily
+seen at all, or trusted at all, 'the Light of life.'
+
+III. Thirdly, there is here a warning.
+
+'Walk whilst ye have the light, lest the darkness come upon you.' That
+is the summing up of the whole history of that stiff-necked and
+marvellous people. For what has all the history of Israel been since
+that day but groping in the wilderness without any pillar of fire? But
+there is more than that in it. Christ gives us this one solemn warning
+of what falls on us if we turn away from Him. Rejected light is the
+parent of the densest darkness, and the man who, having the light,
+does not trust it, piles around himself thick clouds of obscurity and
+gloom, far more doleful and impenetrable than the twilight that
+glimmers round the men who have never known the daylight of
+revelation. The history of un-Christian and anti-Christian Christendom
+is a terrible commentary upon these words of the Master, and the cries
+that we hear all round us to-day from men who will not follow the
+light of Christ, and moan or boast that they dwell in agnostic
+darkness, tell us that, of all the eclipses that can fall upon heart
+and mind, there is none so dismal or thunderously dark as that of the
+men who, having seen the light of Christ in the sky, have turned from
+it and said, 'It is no light, it is only a mock sun.' Brethren, tempt
+not that fate.
+
+And if Christian men and women do not advance in their knowledge and
+their conformity, like clouds of darkness will fall upon them. None is
+so hopeless as the unprogressive Christian, none so far away as those
+who have been brought nigh and have never come any nigher. If you
+believe the light, see that you growingly trust and walk in it, else
+darkness will come upon you, and you will not know whither you go.
+
+IV. And lastly, there is here a hope and a promise.
+
+'That ye may be the sons of light.'
+
+Faith and obedience turn a man into the likeness of that in which he
+trusts. If we trust Jesus we open our hearts to Him; and if we open
+our hearts to Him He will come in. If you are in a darkened room, what
+have you to do in order to have it filled with glad sunshine? Open the
+shutters and pull up the blinds, and the light will do all the rest.
+If you trust the light, it will rush in and fill every crevice and
+cranny of your hearts. Faith and obedience will mould us, by their
+natural effect, into the resemblance of that on which we lean. As one
+of the old German mystics said, 'What thou lovest, that thou dost
+become.' And it is blessedly true. The same principle makes Christians
+like Christ, and makes idolaters like their gods. 'They that make them
+are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them,' says one
+of the Psalms. 'They followed after vanity and are become vain,' says
+the chronicler of Israel's defections. 'We with unveiled faces
+beholding'--or mirroring--'the glory of the Lord, are changed into the
+same image.' Trust the light and you become 'sons of the light.'
+
+And so, dear friends, all of us may hope that by degrees, as the
+reward of faith and of walking, we still may bear the image of the
+heavenly, even here on earth. While as yet we only believe in the
+light, we may participate in its transforming power, like some far-off
+planet on the utmost bounds of some solar system, that receives faint
+and small supplies of light and warmth, through a thick atmosphere of
+vapour, and across immeasurable spaces. But we have the assurance that
+we shall be carried nearer our centre, and then, like the planets that
+are closer to the sun than our earth is, we shall feel the fuller
+power of the heat, and be saturated with the glory of the light. 'We
+shall see Him as He is'; and then we too 'shall blaze forth like the
+sun in the kingdom of our Father.'
+
+
+
+
+THE LOVE OF THE DEPARTING CHRIST
+
+'... When Jesus knew that His hour was come that He should depart out
+of this world unto the Father, having loved His own which were in the
+world, He loved them unto the end.'--JOHN xiii. 1.
+
+The latter half of St. John's Gospel, which begins with these words,
+is the Holy of Holies of the New Testament. Nowhere else do the
+blended lights of our Lord's superhuman dignity and human tenderness
+shine with such lambent brightness. Nowhere else is His speech at once
+so simple and so deep. Nowhere else have we the heart of God so
+unveiled to us. On no other page, even of the Bible, have so many
+eyes, glistening with tears, looked and had the tears dried. The
+immortal words which Christ spoke in that upper chamber are His
+highest self-revelation in speech, even as the Cross to which they led
+up is His most perfect self-revelation in act.
+
+To this most sacred part of the New Testament my text is the
+introduction. It unveils to us gleams of Christ's heart, and does what
+the Evangelists very seldom venture to do, viz. gives us some sort of
+analysis of the influences which then determined the flow and the
+shape of our Lord's love.
+
+Many good commentators prefer to read the last words of my text, 'He
+loved them unto the _uttermost_' rather than 'unto the _end_'--so
+taking them to express the depth and degree rather than the permanence
+and perpetuity of our Lord's love. And that seems to me to be by far
+the worthier and the nobler meaning, as well as the one which is borne
+out by the usual signification of the expression in other Greek
+authors. It is much to know that the emotions of these last moments
+did not interrupt Christ's love. It is even more to know that in some
+sense they perfected it, giving even a greater vitality to its
+tenderness, and a more precious sweetness to its manifestations. So
+understood, the words explain for us why it was that in the sanctity
+of the upper chamber there ensued the marvellous act of the
+foot-washing, the marvellous discourses which follow, and the climax
+of all, that High-priestly prayer. They give utterance to a love which
+Christ's consciousness at that solemn hour tended to shapen and to
+deepen.
+
+So, under the Evangelist's guidance, we may venture to gaze at least a
+little way into these depths, and with all reverence to try and see
+something at all events of the fringe and surface of the love 'which
+passeth knowledge.' 'Jesus, knowing that His hour was come, that He
+should depart out of the world unto the Father, having loved His own
+which were in the world, loved them then unto the uttermost.'
+
+My object will be best accomplished by simply following the guidance
+of the words before us, and asking you to look first at that love as a
+love which was not interrupted, but perfected by the prospect of
+separation.
+
+I. It would take us much too far away, however interesting the
+contemplation might be, to dwell with any particularity upon our
+Lord's consciousness as it is here set forth in that 'He knew that His
+hour was come, that He should depart out of the world unto the
+Father.' But I can scarcely avoid noticing, though only in a few
+sentences, the salient points of that Christ-consciousness as it is
+set forth here.
+
+'He knew that His hour was come.' All His life was passed under the
+consciousness of a divine necessity laid upon Him, to which He
+lovingly and cheerfully yielded Himself. On His lips there are no
+words more significant, and few more frequent, than that divine 'I
+must!' 'It behoves the Son of Man' to do this, that, and the
+other--yielding to the necessity imposed by the Father's will, and
+sealed by His own loving resolve to be the Saviour of the world. And
+in like manner, all through His life He declares Himself conscious of
+the hours which mark the several crises and stages of His mission.
+They come to Him and He discerns them. No external power can coerce
+Him to any act till the hour come. No external power can hinder Him
+from the act when it comes. When the hour strikes He hears the phantom
+sound of the bell; and, hearing, He obeys. And thus, at the last and
+supreme moment, to Him it dawned unquestionable and irrevocable. How
+did He meet it? Whilst on the one hand there was the shrinking of
+which we have such pathetic testimony in the broken prayer that He
+Himself amended--'Father! save Me from this hour.... Yet for this
+cause came I unto this hour,'--there is a strange, triumphant joy,
+blending with the shrinking, that the decisive hour is at last come.
+
+Mark, too, the form which the consciousness took--not that now the
+hour had come for suffering or death or bearing the sins of the
+world--all which aspects of it were nevertheless present to Him, as we
+know; but that now He was soon to leave all the world beneath Him and
+to return to the Father.
+
+The terror, the agony, the shame, the mysterious burden of a world's
+sins were now to be laid upon Him--all these elements are submerged,
+as it were, and become less conspicuous than the one thought of
+leaving behind all the limitations, and the humiliations, and the
+compelled association with evil which, like a burning brand laid upon
+a tender skin, was an hourly and momentary agony to Him, and soaring
+above them all, unto His own calm home, His habitation from eternity
+with the Father, as He had been before the world was. How strange this
+blending of shrinking and of eagerness, of sorrow and of joy, of human
+trembling consciousness of impending death, and of triumphant
+consciousness of the approach of the hour when the Son of Man, even in
+His bitterest agony and deepest humiliation, should, paradoxically, be
+glorified, and should 'leave the world to go unto the Father'!
+
+We cannot enter with any particularity or depth into this marvellous
+and unique consciousness, but it is set forth here--and that is the
+point to which especially I desire to turn your attention--as the
+basis and the reason for a special tenderness softening His voice, and
+taking possession of His heart, as He thought of the impending
+separation.
+
+And is that not beautiful? And does it not help us to realise how
+truly 'bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh,' and bearing a heart
+thrilling with all innocent human emotions that divine Saviour was?
+We, too, have known what it is to feel, because of approaching
+separation from dear ones, the need for a tenderer tenderness. At such
+moments the masks of use and wont drop away, and we are eager to find
+some word, to put our whole souls into some look, our whole strength
+into one clinging embrace that may express all our love, and may be a
+joy to two hearts for ever after to remember. The Master knew that
+longing, and felt the pain of separation; and He, too, yielded to the
+human impulse which makes the thought of parting the key to unlock the
+hidden chambers of the most jealously guarded heart, and let the
+shyest of its emotions come out for once into the daylight. So,
+'knowing that His hour was come, He loved them unto the uttermost.'
+
+But there is not only in this a wonderful expression of the true
+humanity of the Christ, but along with that a suggestion of something
+more sacred and deeper still. For surely amidst all the parting scenes
+that the world's literature has enshrined, amidst all the examples of
+self-oblivion at the last moment, when a martyr has been the comforter
+of his weeping friends, there are none that without degradation to
+this can be set by the side of this supreme and unique instance of
+self-oblivion. Did not Christ, for the sake of that handful of poor
+people, first and directly, and for the rest of us afterwards, of
+course, secondarily and indirectly, so suppress all the natural
+emotions of these last moments as that their absolute absence is
+unique and singular, and points onwards to something more, viz. that
+this Man who was susceptible of all human affections, and loved us
+with a love which is not merely high above our grasp, absolute,
+perfect, changeless and divine, but with a love like our own human
+affection, had also more than a man's heart to give us, and gave us
+more, when, that He might comfort and sustain, He crushed down Himself
+and went to the Cross with words of tenderness and consolation and
+encouragement for others upon His lips? Knowing all that was lying
+before Him, He was neither absorbed nor confounded, but carried a
+heart at leisure to love even then 'unto the uttermost.'
+
+And if the prospect only sharpened and perfected, nor interrupted for
+one instant the flow of His love, the reality has no power to do aught
+else. In the glory, when He reached it, He poured out the same loving
+heart; and to-day He looks down upon us with the same Face that bent
+over the table in the upper room, and the same tenderness flows to us.
+When John saw his Master next, after His Ascension, amidst the glories
+of the vision in his rocky Patmos, though His face was as the sun
+shineth in his strength, it was the old face. Though His hand bore the
+stars in a cluster, it was the hand that had been pierced with the
+nails. Though the breast was girded with the golden girdle of
+sovereignty and of priesthood, it was the breast on which John's happy
+head had lain; and though the 'Voice was as the sound of many waters,'
+it soothed itself to a murmur, gentle as that with which the tideless
+sea about him rippled upon the silvery sand when He said, 'Fear not
+... I am the First and the Last.' Knowing that He goes to the Father,
+He loves to the uttermost, and being with the Father, He still so
+loves.
+
+II. And now I must, with somewhat less of detail, dwell upon the other
+points which this text brings out for us. It suggests to us next that
+we have in the love of Jesus Christ a love which is faithful to the
+obligations of its own past.
+
+Having loved, He loves. Because He had been a certain thing, therefore
+He is and He shall be that same. That is an argument that implies
+divinity. About nothing human can we say that because it has been
+therefore it shall be. Alas! about much that is human we have to say
+the converse, that because it has been, therefore it will cease to be.
+And though, blessed be God! they are few and they are poor who have
+had no experience in their lives of human hearts whose love in the
+past has been such that it manifestly is for ever, yet we cannot with
+the same absolute confidence say about one another, even about the
+dearest, 'Having loved, he loves.' But we can say so about Christ.
+There is no exhaustion in that great stream that pours out from His
+heart; no diminution in its flow.
+
+They tell us that the central light of our system, that great sun
+itself, pouring out its rays exhausts its warmth, and were it not
+continually replenished, must gradually, and even though continually
+replenished, will ultimately cease to blaze, and be a dead, cold mass
+of ashes. But this central Light, this heart of Christ, which is the
+Sun of the World, will endure like the sun, and after the sun is cold,
+His love will last for ever. He pours it out and has none the less to
+give. There is no bankruptcy in His expenditure, no exhaustion in His
+effort, no diminution in His stores. 'Thy mercy endureth for ever';
+'Thou hast loved, therefore Thou wilt love' is an inference for time
+and for eternity, on which we may build and rest secure.
+
+III. Then, still further, we have here this love suggested as being a
+love which has special tenderness towards its own. 'Having loved His
+own, He loved them to the uttermost.'
+
+These poor men who, with all their errors, did cleave to Him; who, in
+some dim way, understood somewhat of His greatness and His
+sweetness--and do you and I do more?--who, with all their sins, yet
+were true to Him in the main; who had surrendered very much to follow
+Him, and had identified themselves with Him, were they to have no
+special place in His heart because in that heart the whole world lay?
+Is there any reason why we should be afraid of saying that the
+universal love of Jesus Christ, which gathers into His bosom all
+mankind, does fall with special tenderness and sweetness upon those
+who have made Him theirs and have surrendered themselves to be His?
+Surely it must be that He has special nearness to those who love Him;
+surely it is reasonable that He should have special delight in those
+who try to resemble Him; surely it is only what one might expect of
+Him that He should in a special manner honour the drafts, so to speak,
+of those who have confidence in Him, and are building their whole
+lives upon Him. Surely, because the sun shines down upon dunghills and
+all impurities, that is no reason why it should not lie with special
+brightness on the polished mirror that reflects its lustre. Surely,
+because Jesus Christ loves--Blessed be His name!--the publicans and
+the harlots and the outcasts and the sinners, that is no reason why He
+should not bend with special tenderness over those who, loving Him,
+try to serve Him, and have set their whole hopes upon Him. The rainbow
+strides across the sky, but there is a rainbow in every little dewdrop
+that hangs glistening on the blades of grass. There is nothing
+limited, nothing sectional, nothing narrow in the proclamation of a
+special tenderness of Christ towards His own, when you accompany with
+that truth this other, that all men are besought by Him to come into
+that circle of 'His own,' and that only they themselves shut any out
+therefrom. Blessed be His name! the whole world dwells in His love,
+but there is an inner chamber in which He discovers all His heart to
+those who find in that heart their Heaven and their all. 'He came to
+His own,' in the wider sense of the word, and 'His own received Him
+not'; but also, 'having loved His own He loved them unto the end.'
+There are textures and lives which can only absorb some of the rays of
+light in the spectrum; some that are only capable of taking, so to
+speak, the violet rays of judgment and of wrath, and some who open
+their hearts for the ruddy brightness at the other end of the line. Do
+you see to it, brethren, that you are of that inner circle who receive
+the whole Christ into their hearts, and to whom He can unfold the
+fullness of His love.
+
+IV. And, lastly, my text suggests that love of Christ as being made
+specially tender by the necessities and the dangers of His friends.
+'He loved His own which were in the world,' and so loving them, 'loved
+them to the uttermost.'
+
+We have, running through these precious discourses which follow my
+text, many allusions to the separation which was to ensue, and to His
+leaving His followers in circumstances of peculiar peril, defenceless
+and solitary. 'I come unto Thee, and am no more in the world,' says He
+in the final High-priestly prayer, 'but these are in the world. Holy
+Father, keep them through Thine own name.' The same contrast between
+the certain security of the Shepherd and the troubled perils of the
+scattered flock seems to be in the words of my text, and suggests a
+sweet and blessed reason for the special tenderness with which He
+looked upon them. As a dying father on his deathbed may yearn over
+orphans that he is leaving defenceless, so Christ is here represented
+as conscious of an accession even to the tender longings of His heart,
+when He thought of the loneliness and the dangers to which His
+followers were to be exposed.
+
+Ah! It seems a harsh contrast between the Emperor, sitting throned
+there between the purple curtains, and the poor athletes wrestling in
+the arena below. It seems strange to think that a loving Master has
+gone up into the mountain, and has left His disciples to toil in
+rowing on the stormy sea of life; but the contrast is only apparent.
+For you and I, if we love and trust Him, are with Him 'in the heavenly
+places' even whilst we toil here, and He is with us, working with us,
+even whilst He 'sitteth at the right hand of God.'
+
+We may be sure of this, brethren, that that love ever increases its
+manifestations according to our deepening necessities. The darker the
+night the more lustrous the stars. The deeper, the narrower, the
+savager, the Alpine gorge, usually the fuller and the swifter the
+stream that runs through it. And the more that enemies and fears
+gather round about us, the sweeter will be the accents of our
+Comforter's voice, and the fuller will be the gifts of tenderness and
+grace with which He draws near to us. Our sorrows, dangers,
+necessities, are doors through which His love can come nigh.
+
+So, dear friends, we have had experience of sweet and transient human
+love; we have had experience of changeful and ineffectual love; turn
+away from them all to this immortal, deep heart of Christ's, welling
+over with a love which no change can affect, which no separation can
+diminish, which no sin can provoke, which becomes greater and tenderer
+as our necessities increase, and ask Him to fill your hearts with
+that, that you may 'know the length and breadth and depth and height
+of that love which passeth knowledge,' and so 'be filled with all the
+fullness of God.'
+
+
+
+
+THE SERVANT-MASTER
+
+'Jesus knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands,
+and that He was come from God, and went to God; He riseth from supper,
+and laid aside His garments; and took a towel, and girded Himself.
+After that He poureth water into a basin, and began to wash the
+disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith He was
+girded.'--JOHN xiii. 3-5.
+
+It has been suggested that the dispute as to 'which was the greatest,'
+which broke the sanctities of the upper chamber, was connected with
+the unwillingness of each of the Apostles to perform the menial office
+of washing the feet of his companions. They had come in from Bethany,
+and needed the service. But apparently it was omitted, and although we
+can scarcely suppose that the transcendent act which is recorded in my
+text was performed at the beginning of the meal, yet I think we shall
+not be wrong if we see in it a reference to the neglected service.
+
+The Evangelist who tells us of the dispute, and does not tell us of
+the foot-washing, preserves a sentence which finds its true meaning
+only in this incident, 'I am among you as He that serveth.' And
+although John is the only recorder of this pathetic incident, there
+are allusions in other parts of Scripture which seem to hint at it.
+As, for instance, when Paul speaks of 'taking upon Him the form of a
+servant'; and still more strikingly when Peter employs the remarkable
+word, which he does employ in his exhortation, 'Be ye clothed with
+humility.' For the word rendered there 'clothed' occurs only in that
+one place in Scripture, and means literally the putting on of a
+slave's costume. One can scarcely help, then, seeing in these three
+passages to which I have referred echoes of this incident which John
+alone preserves to us. And so we get at once a hint of the harmony and
+of the incompleteness of the Gospel records.
+
+I. Consider the motives of this act.
+
+Now that is ground upon which the Evangelists very seldom enter. They
+tell us what Christ did, but very rarely do they give us any glimpses
+into why He did it. But this section of the Gospel is remarkable for
+its full and careful analysis of what Christ's impelling motives were
+in the final acts of His life. How did John find out why Christ did
+this deed? Perhaps he who had 'leaned upon His bosom at supper,' and
+was evidently very closely associated with Him, may, in some
+unrecorded hour of intimate communion during the forty days between
+the Resurrection and the Ascension, have heard from the Master the
+exposition of His motives. But more probably, I think, the long years
+of growing likeness to his Lord, and of meditation upon the depth of
+meaning in the smallest events that his faithful memory recalled,
+taught him to understand Christ's purpose and motives. 'The secret of
+the Lord is with them that fear Him,' and the liker we get to our
+Master and the more we are filled with His Spirit, the more easy will
+it be for us to divine the purpose and the motives of His actions,
+whether as they are recorded in the Scripture or as they come to us in
+the experience of daily life.
+
+But, passing that point, I desire for a moment to fix your attention
+on the twofold key to our Lord's action which is given in this
+context. There is, first of all, in the first verse of the chapter, a
+general exposition of what was uppermost in His mind and heart during
+the whole of the period in the upper room. The act in our text, and
+the wonderful words which follow in the subsequent chapters, crowned
+by that great intercessory prayer, seem to me to be all explained for
+us by this first unveiling of His motives. 'When Jesus knew that His
+hour was come that He should depart out of this world unto the Father,
+having loved His own which were in the world, He loved them unto the
+end.'
+
+And then the words of my text, which apply more specifically to the
+single incident with which they are brought into connection, tell us
+in addition why this one manifestation of Christ's love was given.
+'Knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that
+He was come from God, and went to God.' There, then, are two
+explanations of motive, the one covering a wider area than the other,
+but both converging on the incident before us.
+
+The first of these is just this--the consciousness of impending
+separation moved Christ to a more than ordinarily tender manifestation
+of His love. For the rendering which you will find in the margin of
+the Revised Version, 'He loved them _to the uttermost_,' seems to me
+to be truer to the Evangelist's meaning than the other, 'He loved them
+unto the end.' For it was more to John's purpose to tell us that the
+shadow of the Cross only brought to the surface in more blessed and
+wonderful representation the deep love of His heart, than simply to
+tell us that that shadow did not stop its flow. It is much to know
+that all through His sorrow He continued to love; it is far more to
+know that the sorrow sharpened its poignancy, and deepened its depth,
+and made more tender its tenderness.
+
+How near to the man Christ that thought brings us! Do we not all know
+the impulse to make parting moments tender moments? The masks of use
+and wont drop off; the reticence which we, perhaps wisely, ordinarily
+cultivate in regard to our deepest feelings melts away. We yearn to
+condense all our unspoken love into some one word, act, look, or
+embrace, which it may afterwards be life to two hearts to remember.
+And Jesus Christ felt this. Because He was going away He could not but
+pour out Himself yet more completely than in the ordinary tenor of His
+life. The earthquake lays bare hidden veins of gold, and the heart
+opens itself out when separation impends. We shall never understand
+the works of Jesus Christ if we do as we are all apt to do, think of
+them as having only a didactic and doctrinal purpose. We must remember
+that there is in Him the true play of a human heart, and that it was
+to relieve His own love, as well as to teach these men their duty,
+that he rose from the supper, and prepared Himself to wash the
+disciples' feet.
+
+Then, on the other hand, the other motive which is brought by the
+Evangelists more immediately into connection with this incident is,
+'knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that
+He was come from God, and went to God.'
+
+The consciousness of the highest dignity impels to the lowliest
+submission. 'All things given into His hands,' means universal and
+absolute dominion. 'That He was come from God,' means pre-existence,
+voluntary incarnation, an eternal divine nature, and unbroken
+communion with the Father. 'That He went to God,' means a voluntary
+departure from this low world, and a return to 'His own calm home, His
+habitation from eternity.'
+
+And, gathered all together, the phrases imply His absolute
+consciousness of His divine nature. It was that that sent Him with the
+towel round His loins to wash the foul feet of the pedestrians who had
+come by the dusty and hot way from Bethany, and through all the
+abominations of an Eastern city, into the upper chamber.
+
+This was He who from the beginning 'was with God, and was God.' This
+was He who was the Lord of Death, Victor over the grave. This was He
+who by His own power ascended up on high, and reigns on the throne of
+the universe to-day. This was He whose breast the same Evangelist had
+seen before he wrote his Gospel, 'girded with the golden girdle' of
+priesthood and of sovereignty; and holding, in the hands that had laid
+the towel on the disciples' feet, the seven stars.
+
+Oh, brethren! if we believed our creeds, how our hearts would melt
+with wonder and awe that He who was so high stooped so low! 'Knowing
+that He came from God, and went to God,' and that even when He was
+kneeling there before these men, 'the Father had given all things into
+His hands,' what did He do? Triumph? Show His majesty? Flash His
+power? Demand service? 'Girded Himself with a towel and washed His
+disciples' feet'!
+
+The consciousness of loftiness does not alone avail to explain the
+transcendent lowliness. You need the former motive to be joined with
+it, because it is only love which bends loftiness to service, and
+turns the consciousness of superiority into yearning to divest oneself
+of the superiorities that separate, and to emphasise the emotions
+which unite.
+
+II. The detailed completeness of the act.
+
+The remarkable particularity of the account of the stages of the
+humiliation suggests the eye-witness. John carried them all in his
+mind ineffaceably, and long, long years after that memorable hour we
+hear him recalling each detail of the scene. We can see the little
+group startled by the disturbance of the order of the meal as He rose
+from the table, and the hushed wonder and the open-lipped expectation
+with which they watched to see what the next step would be. He rises
+from the table and divests Himself of the upper garments which impeded
+movement. 'What will He do next?' He takes the basin, standing there
+to be ready for washing the apostles' feet, but unused, and not even
+filled with water. He fills it Himself, asking none to help Him. He
+girds the towel round Him; and then, perhaps, begins with the
+betrayer; at any rate, not with Peter.
+
+Cannot you see them, as they look? Do not you feel the solemnity of
+the detailed particular account of each step?
+
+And may we not also say that all is a parable, or illustration, on a
+lower level, of the very same principles which were at work in the
+mightier fact of the greater condescension of His 'becoming flesh and
+dwelling among us'? He 'rose from the table,' as He rose from His
+place in 'the bosom of the Father.' He disturbed the meal as He broke
+the festivities of the heavens. He divested Himself of His garments,
+as 'He thought not equality with God a thing to be worn eagerly'; and
+'He girded Himself with the towel,' as He put on the weakness of
+flesh. Himself He filled the basin, by His own work providing the
+means of cleansing; and Himself applied the cleansing to the feet of
+those who were with Him. It is all a working out of the same double
+motive which drew Him downwards to our earth. The reason why He
+stooped, with His hands to wash the disciples' feet, is the same as
+the reason why He had hands to wash with--viz., that knowing Himself
+to be high over all, and loving all, He chose to become one with us,
+that we might become like unto Him. So the details of the act are a
+parable of His incarnation and death.
+
+III. And then, still further, note the purpose of the deed.
+
+Now although I have said that we never rightly understand our Lord's
+actions if we are always looking for dogmatic or doctrinal purposes,
+and thinking of them rather as being lectures, and sometimes rebukes
+in act, than as being the outgush of His emotions and His human-divine
+nature, yet we have also to take into account their moral and
+spiritual lessons. His acts are words and His words are acts. And
+although the main and primary purpose of this incident, in so far as
+it had any other purpose than to relieve Christ's own love by
+manifesting itself, and to comfort the disciples' hearts by the tender
+manifestation, was to teach them their duty, as we shall presently
+see, yet the special aspect of cleansing, which comes out so
+emphatically and prominently in the episode of Peter's refusal, is to
+be carried all along through the interpretation of the incident. This
+was the reason why Jesus Christ came from heaven and assumed flesh,
+and this was the reason why Jesus Christ, assuming flesh, bowed
+Himself to this menial office--to make men clean.
+
+I venture to say that we never understand Jesus Christ and His work
+until we recognise this as its prominent purpose, to cleanse us from
+sin. An inadequate conception of what we need, shallow, superficial
+views of the gravity and universality and obstinacy of the fact of
+sin, are an impenetrable veil between us and all real understanding of
+Jesus Christ. There is no adequate motive for such an astounding fact
+as the incarnation and sacrifice of the Son of God, except the purpose
+of redeeming the world. If you do not believe that you--you
+individually, and all of us your brethren--need to be cleansed, you
+will find it hard to believe in the divinity and atonement of Jesus
+Christ. If you have been down into the depths of your own heart, and
+found out what tremendous, diabolic power your own evil nature and sin
+have upon you, then you will not be content with anything less than
+the incarnate God who stoops from heaven to bear the burden of your
+sin, and to take it all away. If you want to understand why He laid
+aside His garments and took the servile form of our manhood, the
+appeal of man's sin to His love and the answer of His Divine
+condescension are the only explanation.
+
+Again, let me remind you that there is no cleansing without Christ.
+Can you do it for yourselves, do you think? There is an old proverb,
+'One hand washes the other.' That is true about stains on the flesh.
+It is not true about stains on our spirits. Nobody can do it for us
+but Jesus Christ alone. He kneels before us, having the right and the
+power to wash us because He has died for us. Kings of England used to
+touch for 'the king's evil,' and lay their pure fingers upon feculent
+masses of corruption. Our King's touch is sovereign for the corruption
+and incipient putrefaction of our sin; and there is no power in heaven
+or earth that will make a man clean except the power of Jesus Christ.
+It is either Jesus Christ or filthiness.
+
+If I might pass from my text for one moment, I would remind you of the
+episode which immediately follows, and suggest that if Jesus Christ is
+not cleansing us He is nothing to us. 'If I wash thee not, thou hast
+no part in Me.' I know, of course, that it is possible to have
+partial, rudimentary, and sometimes reverent conceptions of that Lord
+without recognising in Him the great 'Fountain opened for sin and for
+uncleanness.' But I am sure of this, that there is no real, living
+possession of Jesus Christ such as men's souls need, and such as will
+outlast the disintegrating influences of death, unless it be such a
+possession of Him as appropriates for its own, primarily, His
+cleansing power. First of all He must cleanse, and then all other
+aspects of His glory, and gifts of His grace, will pour into our
+hearts.
+
+No understanding of Christ, then, without the recognition that
+cleansing is the purpose and the vindication of His incarnation and
+sacrifice; no cleansing without Christ; no Christ worth calling by the
+name without cleansing.
+
+IV. And so, lastly, note the pattern in this act.
+
+You will remember that it is followed by solemn words spoken after He
+had taken His garments and resumed His place at the table, in which
+there blended, in the most wonderful fashion, the consciousness of
+authority, both as Teacher of truth and as Guide of life, and the
+sweetest and most loving lowliness. In them Jesus prescribed the
+wonderful act of His condescending love and cleansing power as the law
+of the Christian life. There are too many of us who profess to be
+quite willing to trust to Jesus Christ as the Cleanser of our souls
+who are not nearly so willing to accept His Example as the pattern for
+our lives; and I would have you note, as an extremely remarkable
+point, that all the New Testament references to our Lord as being our
+Example are given in immediate connection with His passion. The very
+part of His life which we generally regard as being most absolutely
+unique and inimitable is the fact in His life which Apostles and
+Evangelists select as the one to set before us for our example.
+
+Do you ask if any man can copy the sufferings of Jesus Christ? In
+regard to their virtue and efficacy, No. In regard to their motive--in
+one aspect, No; in another aspect, Yes. In regard to the spirit that
+impelled Him we may copy Him. The smallest trickle of water down a
+city gutter will carve out of the mud at its side little banks and
+cliffs, and exhibit all the phenomena of erosion on the largest scale,
+as the Mississippi does over half a continent, and the tiniest little
+wave in a basin will fall into the same curves as the billows of
+mid-ocean. You and I, in our little lives, may even aspire to 'do as I
+have done to you.'
+
+The true use of superiority is service. _Noblesse oblige_! Bank,
+wealth, capacity, talents, all things are given to us that we may use
+them to the last particle for our fellows. Only when the world and
+society have awakened to that great truth which the towel-girded,
+kneeling Christ has taught us, will society be organised on the
+principles that God meant.
+
+But, further, the highest form of service is to cleanse. Cleansing is
+always dirty work for the cleaners, as every housemaid knows. You
+cannot make people clean by scolding them, by lecturing them, by
+patronising them. You have to go down into the filth if you mean to
+lift them out of it; and leave your smelling-bottles behind; and think
+nothing repulsive if your stooping to it may save a brother.
+
+The only way by which we can imitate that example is by, first of all,
+participating in it for ourselves. We must, first of all, have the
+Cross as our trust, before it can become our pattern and our law. We
+must first say, 'Lord! not my feet only, but also my hands and my
+head,' and then, in the measure in which we ourselves have received
+the cleansing benediction, we shall be impelled and able to lay our
+gentle hands on foulness and leprosy; and to say to all the impure,
+'Jesus Christ, who hath cleansed _me_, makes _thee_ clean.'
+
+
+
+
+THE DISMISSAL OF JUDAS
+
+'... Then said Jesus unto Judas, That thou doest, do quickly.'--JOHN
+xiii. 27.
+
+When our Lord gave the morsel, dipped in the dish, to Judas, only John
+knew the significance of the act. But if we supplement the narrative
+here with that given by Matthew, we shall find that, accompanying the
+gift of the sop, was a brief dialogue in which the betrayer, with
+unabashed front, hypocritically said, 'Lord! Is it I?' and heard the
+solemn, sad answer, 'Thou sayest!' Two things, then, appealed to him
+at the moment: one, the conviction that he was discovered; the other,
+the wonderful assurance that he was still loved, for the gift of the
+morsel was a token of friendliness. He shut his heart against them
+both; and as he shut his heart against Christ he opened it to the
+devil. So 'after the sop Satan entered into him.' At that moment a
+soul committed suicide; and none of those that sat by, with the
+exception of Christ and the 'disciple whom He loved,' so much as
+dreamed of the tragedy going on before their eyes.
+
+I know not that there are anywhere words more weighty and wonderful
+than those of our text. And I desire to try if I can at all make you
+feel as I feel, their solemn signification and force. 'That thou
+doest, do quickly.'
+
+I. I hear in them, first, the voice of despairing love abandoning the
+conflict.
+
+If I have rightly construed the meaning of the incident, this is the
+plain meaning of it. And you will observe that the Revised Version,
+more accurately and closely rendering the words of our text, begins
+with a '_Therefore_.' 'Therefore said Jesus unto him,' because the die
+was cast; because the will of Judas had conclusively welcomed Satan,
+and conclusively rejected Christ; therefore, knowing that remonstrance
+was vain, knowing that the deed was, in effect, done, Jesus Christ,
+that Incarnate Charity which 'believeth all things, and hopeth all
+things,' abandoned the man to himself, and said, 'There, then, if thou
+wilt thou must. I have done all I can; my last arrow is shot, and it
+has missed the target. That then doest, do quickly.'
+
+There is a world of solemn meaning in that one little word 'doest.' It
+teaches us the old lesson, which sense is so apt to forget, that the
+true actor in man's deeds is 'the hidden man of the heart,' and that
+when it has acted, it matters comparatively little whether the mere
+tool and instrument of the hands or of the other organs have carried
+out the behest. The thing is done before it is done when the man has
+resolved, with a fixed will, to do it. The betrayal was as good as in
+process, though no step beyond the introductory ones, which could
+easily have been cancelled, had yet been accomplished. Because there
+was a fixed purpose which could not be altered by anything now,
+therefore Jesus Christ regards the act as completed. It is what we
+think in our hearts that we are; and our fixed determinations, our
+inclinations of will, are far more truly our doings than the mere
+consequences of these, embodied in actuality. It is but a poor
+estimate of a man that judges him by the test of what he has done.
+What he has wanted to do is the true man; what he has attempted to do.
+'It was well that it was in thine heart!' saith God to the king who
+thought of building the Temple which he was never allowed to rear. 'It
+is ill that is in thine heart,' says He by whom actions are weighed,
+to the sinner in purpose, though his clean hands lie idly in his lap.
+These hidden movements of desire and will that never come to the
+surface are our true selves. Look after them, and the deeds will take
+care of themselves. Serpent's eggs have serpents in them. And he that
+has determined upon a sin has done the sin, whether his hands have
+been put to it or no.
+
+But, then, turn for a moment to the other thought that is suggested
+here--that solemn picture of a soul left to do as it will, because
+divine love has no other restraints which it can impose, and is
+bankrupt of motives that it can adduce to prevent it from its madness.
+Now I do not believe, for my part, that any man in this world is so
+all-round 'sold unto sin' as that the seeking love of God gives him up
+as irreclaimable. I do not believe that there are any people
+concerning whom it is true that it is impossible for the grace of God
+to find some chink and cranny in their souls through which it can
+enter and change them. There are no hopeless cases as long as men are
+here. But, then, though there may not be so, in regard to the whole
+sweep of the man's nature, yet every one of us, over and over again,
+has known what it is to come exactly into that position in regard to
+some single evil or other, concerning which we have so set our teeth
+and planted our feet at such an angle of resistance as that God gives
+up dealing with us and leaves us, as He did with Balaam when He
+opposed his covetous inclinations to all the remonstrances of Heaven.
+God said at last to him 'Go!' because it was the best way to teach him
+what a fool he had been in wanting to go. Thus, when we determine to
+set ourselves against the pleadings and the beseechings of divine
+love, the truest kindness is to fling the reins upon our necks, and
+let us gallop ourselves into a sweat and weariness, and then we shall
+be more amenable to the touch of the rein thereafter.
+
+Are there any people whom God is teaching obedience to His light
+touch, by letting them run their course after some one specific sin?
+Perhaps there are. At all events, let us remember that that position
+of being allowed to do as we like is one to which we all tend, in the
+measure in which we indulge our inclinations, and shut our hearts
+against God's pleadings. There is such a thing as a conscience seared
+as with a hot iron. They used to say that there were witches' marks on
+the body, places where, if you stuck a pin in, there was no feeling.
+Men cover themselves all over with marks of that sort, which are not
+sensitive even to the prick of a divine remonstrance, rebuke, or
+retribution. They 'wipe their mouths and say I have done no harm.' You
+can tie up the clapper of the bell that swings on the black rock, on
+which, if you drift, you go to pieces. You can silence the Voice by
+the simple process of neglecting it. Judas set his teeth against two
+things, the solemn conviction that Jesus Christ knew his sin, and the
+saving assurance that Jesus Christ loved him still. And whosoever
+resists either of these two is getting perilously near to the point
+where, not in petulance but in pity, God will say, 'Very well, I have
+called and ye have refused. Now go, and do what you want to do, and
+see how you like it when it is done. What thou doest, do quickly.' Do
+you remember the other word, 'If '_twere_ done when 'tis done, then
+'twere well it were done quickly'? But since consequences last when
+deeds are past, perhaps you had better halt before you determine to do
+them.
+
+II. Now, secondly, I hear in these words the voice of strangely
+blended majesty and humiliation.
+
+'What thou doest, do!' Judas thought he had got possession of Christ's
+person, and was His master in a very real sense. When lo! all at once
+the victim assumes the position of the Lord and commands, showing the
+traitor that instead of thwarting and counterworking, he was but
+carrying out the designs of his fancied victim; and that he was an
+instrument in Christ's hands for the execution of His will. And these
+two thoughts, how, in effect, all antagonism, all malicious hatred,
+all violent opposition of every sort but work in with Christ's
+purpose, and carry out His intention; and how, at the moments of
+deepest apparent degradation, He towers, in manifest Majesty and
+Masterhood, seem to me to be plainly taught in the word before us.
+
+He uses his foes for the furtherance of His purpose. That has been the
+history of the world ever since. 'The floods, O Lord, have lifted up
+their voice.' And what have they done? Smashing against the
+breakwater, they but consolidate its mighty blocks, and prove that
+'the Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters.' It has
+been so in the past, it is so to-day; it will be so till the end.
+Every Judas is unconsciously the servant of Him whom he seeks to
+betray; and finds out to his bewilderment that what he meant for a
+death-blow is fulfilling the very purpose and will of the Lord against
+whom he has turned.
+
+Again, the combination here, in such remarkable juxtaposition, of the
+two things, a willing submission to the utmost extremity of shame,
+which the treasonous heart can froth out in its malice and, at the
+same time, a rising up in conscious majesty and lordship, are
+suggested to us by the words before us. That combination of utter
+lowliness and transcendent loftiness runs through the whole life and
+history of our Lord. Did you ever think how strong an argument that
+strange combination, brought out so inartificially throughout the
+whole of the Gospels, is for their historical veracity? Suppose the
+problem had been given to poets to create and to set in a series of
+appropriate scenes a character with these two opposites stamped
+equally upon it, neither of them impinging upon the domain of the
+other--viz., utter humility and humiliation in circumstance, and
+majestic sovereignty and elevation above all circumstances--do you
+think that any of them could have solved the problem, though--
+Aeschylus and Shakespeare had been amongst them, as these four men
+that wrote these four little tracts that we call Gospels have done?
+How comes it that this most difficult of literary problems has been so
+triumphantly solved by these men? I think there is only one answer,
+'Because they were reporters, and imagined nothing, but observed
+everything, and repeated what had happened.' He reconciled these
+opposites who was the Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief, and
+yet the Eternal Son of the Father; and the Gospels have solved the
+problem only because they are simple records of its solution by Him.
+
+Wherever in His history there is some trait of lowliness there is by
+the side of it a flash of majesty. Wherever in His history there is
+some gleaming out from the veil of flesh of the hidden glory of
+divinity, there is immediately some drawing of the veil across the
+glory. And the two things do not contradict nor confuse, but we stand
+before that double picture of a Christ betrayed and of a Christ
+commanding His betrayer, and using his treason, and we say, 'The Word
+was made flesh, and dwelt among us.'
+
+III. Again, I hear the voice of instinctive human weakness.
+
+'That thou doest, do quickly.' It may be doubtful, and some of you
+perhaps may not be disposed to follow me in my remark, but to my ear
+that sounds just like the utterance of that instinctive dislike of
+suspense and of the long hanging over us of the sword by a hair, which
+we all know so well. Better to suffer than to wait for suffering. The
+loudest thunder-crash is not so awe-inspiring as the dread silence of
+nature when the sky is black before the peal rolls through the clouds.
+Many a martyr has prayed for a swift ending of his troubles. Many a
+sorrowing heart, that has been sitting cowering under the anticipation
+of coming evils, has wished that the string could be pulled, as it
+were, and they could all come down in one cold flood, and be done
+with, rather than trickle drop by drop. They tell us that the bravest
+soldiers dislike the five minutes when they stand in rank before the
+first shot is fired. And with all reverence I venture to think that He
+who knew all our weaknesses in so far as weakness was not sin, is here
+letting us see how He, too, desired that the evil which was coming
+might come quickly, and that the painful tension of expectation might
+be as brief as possible. That may be doubtful; I do not dwell upon it,
+but I suggest it for your consideration.
+
+IV. And then I pass on to the last of the tones that I hear in these
+utterances--the voice of the willing Sacrifice for the sins of the
+world.
+
+'That thou doest, do quickly.' There is nothing more obvious
+throughout the whole of the latter portion of the Gospel narrative
+than the way in which, increasingly towards its close, Jesus seemed to
+hasten to the Cross. You remember His own sayings: 'I have a baptism
+to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished.
+I am come to cast fire on the earth; would it were already kindled!'
+You remember with what a strange air--I was going to use an
+inappropriate word, and say, of alacrity; but, at all events, of fixed
+resolve--He journeyed from Galilee, in that last solemn march to
+Jerusalem, and how the disciples followed, astonished at the unwonted
+look of decision and absorption that was printed upon His countenance.
+If we consider His doings in that last week in Jerusalem, how he
+courted publicity, how He avoided no encounter with His official
+enemies, how He sharpened His tones, not exactly so as to provoke, but
+certainly so as by no means to conciliate, we shall see, I think, in
+it all, His consciousness that the hour had come, and His absolute
+readiness and willingness to be offered for the world's sin. He
+stretches out His hands, as it were, to draw the Cross nearer to
+Himself, not with any share in the weakness of a fanatical aspiration
+after martyrdom, but under a far deeper and more wonderful impulse.
+
+Why was Christ so willing, so eager, if I may use the word, that His
+death should be accomplished? Two reasons, which at the bottom are
+one, answer the question. He thus hastened to His Cross because He
+would obey the Father's will, and because He loved the whole
+world--you and me and all our fellows. We were each in His heart. It
+was because He wanted to save thee that He said to Judas, 'Do it
+quickly, that the world's salvation and that man's salvation may be
+accomplished.' These were the cords that bound Him to the altar. Let
+us never forget that Judas with his treachery, and rulers with their
+hostility, and Pilate with his authority, and the soldiers with their
+nails, and centurions with their lances, and the grim figure of Death
+itself with its shaft, would have been all equally powerless against
+Christ if it had not been his loving will to die on the Cross for each
+of us.
+
+Therefore, brethren, as we hear this voice, let us discern in it the
+tones which warn us of the danger of yielding to inclination and
+stifling His rebukes, till He abandons us for the moment in despair;
+let us hear in it the pathetic voice of a Brother, who knows all our
+weaknesses and has felt our emotions; let us hear the voice of
+Sovereign Authority which uses its enemies for its purposes, and is
+never loftier than when it is most lowly, whose Cross is His throne of
+glory, whose exaltation is His deepest humiliation, and let us hear a
+love which, discerning each of us through all the ages and the crowds,
+went willingly to the Cross because He willed that He should be our
+Saviour.
+
+And seeing that time is short, and the future precarious, and delay
+may darken into loss and rejection, let us take these words as spoken
+to us in another sense, and hear in them the warning that 'to-day, if
+we will hear His voice, we harden not our hearts,' and when He says to
+us, in regard to repentance and faith, and Christian consecration and
+service, 'That thou doest, do quickly,' let us answer, 'I made haste
+and delayed not, but made haste to keep Thy commandments.'
+
+
+
+
+THE GLORY OF THE CROSS
+
+'Therefore, when he was gone out, Jesus said, Now is the Son of Man
+glorified, and God is glorified in Him. If God he glorified in Him,
+God shall also glorify Him in Himself, and shall straightway glorify
+Him.'--JOHN xiii. 31, 32.
+
+There is something very weird and awful in the brief note of time with
+which the Evangelist sends Judas on his dark errand. 'He ... went
+immediately out, and it was night.' Into the darkness that dark soul
+went. That hour was 'the power of darkness,' the very keystone of the
+black arch of man's sin, and some shadow of it fell upon the soul of
+Christ Himself.
+
+In immediate connection with the departure of the traitor comes this
+singular burst of triumph in our text. The Evangelist emphasises the
+connection by that: '_Therefore_, when he was gone out, Jesus said.'
+There is a wonderful touch of truth and naturalness in that
+connection. The traitor was gone. His presence had been a restraint;
+and now that that 'spot in their feast of charity' had disappeared,
+the Master felt at ease; and like some stream, out of the bed of which
+a black rock has been taken, His words flow more freely. How intensely
+real and human the narrative becomes when we see that Christ, too,
+felt the oppression of an uncongenial presence, and was relieved and
+glad at its removal! The departure of the traitor evoked these words
+of triumph in another way, too. At his going away, we may say, the
+match was lit that was to be applied to the train. He had gone out on
+his dark errand, and that brought the Cross within measurable distance
+of our Lord. Out of a new sense of its nearness He speaks here. So the
+note of time not only explains to us why our Lord spoke, but puts us
+on the right track for understanding His words, and makes any other
+interpretation of them than one impossible. What Judas went to do was
+the beginning of Christ's glorifying. We have here, then, a triple
+glorification--the Son of Man glorified in His Cross; God glorified in
+the Son of Man; and the Son of Man glorified in God. Let us look at
+these three thoughts for a few moments now.
+
+I. First, we have here the Son of Man glorified in His Cross.
+
+The words are a paradox. Strange, that at such a moment, when there
+rose up before Christ all the vision of the shame and the suffering,
+the pain and the death, and the mysterious sense of abandonment, which
+was worse than them all, He should seem to stretch out His hands to
+bring the Cross nearer to Himself, and that His soul should fill with
+triumph!
+
+There is a double aspect under which our Lord regarded His sufferings.
+On the one hand we mark in Him an unmistakable shrinking from the
+Cross, the innocent shrinking of His manhood expressed in such words
+as 'I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till
+it be accomplished'; and in such incidents as the agony in Gethsemane.
+And yet, side by side with that, not overcome by it, but not
+overcoming it, there is the opposite feeling, the reaching out almost
+with eagerness to bring the Cross nearer to Himself. These two lie
+close by each other in His heart. Like the pellucid waters of the
+Rhine and the turbid stream of the Moselle, that flow side by side
+over a long space, neither of them blending discernibly with the
+other, so the shrinking and the desire were contemporaneous in
+Christ's mind. Here we have the triumphant anticipation rising to the
+surface, and conquering for a time the shrinking.
+
+Why did Christ think of His Cross as a glorifying? The New Testament
+generally represents it as the very lowest point of His degradation;
+John's Gospel always represents it as the very highest point of His
+glory. And the two things are both true; just as the zenith of our sky
+is the nadir of the sky for those on the other side of the world. The
+same fact which in one aspect sounds the very lowest depth of Christ's
+humiliation, in another aspect is the very highest culminating point
+of His glory.
+
+How did the Cross glorify Christ? In two ways. It was the revelation
+of His heart; it was the throne of His sovereign power.
+
+It was the revelation of His heart. All his life long He had been
+trying to tell the world how much He loved it. His love had been, as
+it were, filtered by drops through His words, through His deeds,
+through His whole demeanour and bearing; but in His death it comes in
+a flood, and pours itself upon the world. All His life long he had
+been revealing His heart, through the narrow rifts of His deeds, like
+some slender lancet windows; but in His death all the barriers are
+thrown down, and the brightness blazes out upon men. All through His
+life He had been trying to communicate His love to the world, and the
+fragrance came from the box of ointment exceeding precious, but when
+the box was broken the house was filled with the odour.
+
+For Him to be known was to be glorified. So pure and perfect was He,
+that revelation of His character and glorification of Himself were one
+and the same thing. Because His Cross reveals to the world for all
+time, and for eternity, too, a love which shrinks from no sacrifice, a
+love which is capable of the most entire abandonment, a love which is
+diffused over the whole surface of humanity and through all the ages,
+a love which comes laden with the richest and the highest gifts, even
+the turning of selfish and sinful hearts into its own pure and perfect
+likeness, therefore does He say, in contemplation of that Cross which
+was to reveal Him for what He was to the world, and to bring His love
+to every one of us, 'Now is the Son of Man glorified.'
+
+We can fancy a mother, for instance, in the anticipation of shame, and
+ignominy, and suffering, and sorrow, and death which she encounters
+for the sake of some prodigal child, forgetting all the ignominy, and
+the shame, and the suffering, and the sorrow, and the death, because
+all these are absorbed in the one thought: 'If I bear them, my poor,
+wandering, rebellious child will know at last how much I loved him.'
+So Christ yearns to impart the knowledge of Himself to us, because by
+that knowledge we may be won to His love and service; and hence when
+He looks forward to the agony, and contumely, and sorrow of the close,
+every other thought is swallowed up in this one: 'They will be the
+means by which the whole world will find out how deep my heart of love
+to it was.' Therefore does He triumph and say, 'Now is the Son of Man
+glorified.'
+
+Still further, He regards His Cross as the means of His glorifying,
+because it is His throne of saving power. The paradoxical words of our
+text rest upon His profound conviction that in His death He was about
+to put forth a mightier and diviner power than ever He had manifested
+in His life. They are the same in effect and in tone as the great
+words: 'I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me.' Now I want
+you to ask yourselves one question: In what sense is Christ's Cross
+Christ's glorifying, unless His Cross bears an altogether different
+relation to His life from what the death of a great teacher or
+benefactor ordinarily bears to his? It is impossible that Christ could
+have spoken such words as these of my text if He had simply thought of
+His death as a Plato or a John Howard might have thought of his, as
+being the close of his activity for the welfare of his fellows. Unless
+Christ's death has in it some substantive value, unless it is
+something more than the mere termination of His work for the world, I
+see not how the words before us can be interpreted. If His death is
+His glorifying, it must be because in that death something is done
+which was not completed by the life, however fair; by the words,
+however wise and tender; by the works of power, however restorative
+and healing. Here is something more than these present. What more?
+This more, that His Cross is the 'propitiation for the sins of the
+whole world.' He is glorified therein, not as a Socrates might be
+glorified by his calm and noble death; not because nothing in His life
+became Him better than the leaving of it; not because the page that
+tells the story of His passion is turned to by us as the tenderest and
+most sacred in the world's records; but because in that death He
+wrestled with and overcame our foes, and because, like the Jewish hero
+of old, dying, He pulled down the house which our tyrants had built,
+and overwhelmed them in its ruins. 'Now is the Son of Man glorified.'
+
+And so, brethren, there blend, in that last act of our Lord's--for His
+death was His act--in strange fashion, the two contradictory ideas of
+glory and shame; like some sky, all full of dark thunderclouds, and
+yet between them the brightest blue and the blazing sunshine. In the
+Cross, Death crowns Him the Prince of Life, and His Cross is His
+throne. All His life long He was the Light of the World, but the very
+noontide hour of His glory was that hour when the shadow of eclipse
+lay over all the land, and He hung on the Cross dying in the dark. At
+His 'eventide it was light.' 'He endured the Cross, despising the
+shame'; and lo! the shame flashed up into the very brightness of
+glory, and the ignominy and the suffering became the jewels of His
+crown. 'Now is the Son of Man glorified.'
+
+II. Now let us turn for a moment to the second of the threefold
+glorifications that are set forth here: God glorified in the Son of
+Man.
+
+The mystery deepens as we advance. That God should be glorified in a
+man is not strange, but that He should be so glorified in the eminent
+and special fashion which Jesus contemplates here, is strange; and
+stranger still when we think that the act in which He was to be
+glorified was the death of an innocent Man. If God, in any special and
+eminent manner, is glorified in the Cross of Jesus Christ, that
+implies, as it seems to me, two things at all events--many more which
+I have not time to touch upon, but two things very plainly. One is
+that 'God was in Christ,' in some singular and eminent manner. If all
+His life was a continual manifestation of the divine character, if
+Christ's words were the divine wisdom, if Christ's compassion was the
+divine pity, if Christ's lowliness was the divine gentleness, if His
+whole human life and nature were the brightest and clearest
+manifestation to the world of what God is, we can understand that the
+Cross was the highest point of the revelation of the divine nature to
+the world, and so was the glorifying of God in Him. But if we take any
+lower view of the relation between God and Christ, I know not how we
+can acquit these words of our Master of the charge of being a world
+too wide for the facts of the case.
+
+The words involve, as it seems to me, not only that idea of a close,
+unique union and indwelling of God in Christ, but they involve also
+this other: that these sufferings bore no relation to the deserts of
+the person who endured them. If Christ, with His pure and perfect
+character--the innocency and nobleness of which all that read the
+Gospels admit--if Christ suffered so; if the highest virtue that was
+ever seen in this world brought no better wages than shame and
+spitting and the Cross; if Christ's life and Christ's death are simply
+a typical example of the world's treatment of its greatest
+benefactors; then, if they have any bearing at all on the character of
+God, they cast a shadow rather than a light upon the divine
+government, and become not the least formidable of the difficulties
+and knots that will have to be untied hereafter before it shall be
+clear that God did everything well. But if we can say, 'He hath borne
+our griefs and carried our sorrows'; if we can say, 'God was in Christ
+reconciling the world to Himself'; if we can say, that His death was
+the death of Him whom God had appointed to live and die for us, and
+'to bear our sins in His own body on the tree,' then, though deep
+mysteries come with the thought, still we can see that, in a very
+unique manner, God is glorified and exalted in His death.
+
+For if the dying Christ be the Son of God dying for us, then the Cross
+glorifies God, because it teaches us that the glory of the divine
+character is the divine love. Of wisdom, or of power, or of any of the
+more 'majestic' attributes of the divine nature, that weak Man,
+hanging dying on the Cross, was a strange embodiment; but if the very
+heart of the divine brightness be the pure white fire of love; if
+there be nothing diviner in God than His giving of Himself to His
+creatures; if the highest glory of the divine nature be to pity and to
+bestow, then the Cross upon which Christ died towers above all other
+revelations as the most awful, the most sacred, the most tender, the
+most complete, the most heart-touching, the most soul-subduing
+manifestation of the divine nature; and stars and worlds, and angels
+and mighty creatures, and things in the heights and things in the
+depths, to each of which have been entrusted some broken syllables of
+the divine character to make known to the world, dwindle and fade
+before the brightness, the lambent, gentle brightness that beams out
+from the Cross of Christ, which proclaims--God is love, is pity, is
+pardon.
+
+And is it not so--is it not so? Is not the thought that has flowed
+from Christ's Cross through Christendom of what our Father in Heaven
+is, the highest and the most blessed that the world has ever had? Has
+it not scattered doubts that lay like mountains of ice upon man's
+heart? Has it not swept the heavens clear of clouds that wrapped it in
+darkness? Has it not delivered men from the dreams of gods angry, gods
+capricious, gods vengeful, gods indifferent, gods simply mighty and
+vast and awful and unspeakable? Has it not taught us that love is God,
+and God is love; and so brought to the whole world the true Gospel,
+the Gospel of the grace of God? In that Cross the Father is glorified.
+
+III. Now, lastly, we have here the Son of Man glorified in the Father.
+
+The mysteries and the paradoxes seem to deepen as we advance. 'If God
+be glorified in Him, God shall also glorify Him in Himself, and shall
+straightway glorify Him.' Do these words sound to you as if they
+expressed no more than the confidence of a good man, who, when he was
+dying, believed that he would be accepted of a loving Father, and
+would be at rest from his sufferings? To me they seem to say
+infinitely more than that. 'He shall also glorify Him in Himself.'
+Mark that 'in Himself.' That is the obvious antithesis to what has
+been spoken about in the previous clause, a glorifying which consisted
+in a manifestation to the external universe, whereas this is a
+glorifying within the depths of the divine nature. And the best
+commentary upon it is our Lord's own words: 'Father! glorify Thou Me
+with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was.' We get a
+glimpse, as it were, into the very centre of the brightness of God;
+and there, walking in that beneficent furnace, we see 'One like unto
+the Son of Man.' Christ anticipates that, in some profound and
+unspeakable sense, He shall, as it were, be caught up into the
+divinity, and shall dwell, as indeed He did dwell from the beginning,
+'in the bosom of the Father.' 'He shall glorify Him in Himself.'
+
+But then mark, still further, that this reception into the bosom of
+the Father is given to the Son of Man. That is to say, the Man Christ
+Jesus, the Son of Mary, the Brother of us all, 'bone of our bone and
+flesh of our flesh,' the very Person that walked upon earth and dwelt
+amongst us is taken up into the heart of God, and in His manhood
+enters into that same glory, which, from the beginning, the Eternal
+Word had with God.
+
+And still further, not only have we here set forth, in most wondrous
+language, the reception and incorporation, if we may use such words,
+into the very centre of divinity, as granted to the Son of Man, but we
+have that glorifying set forth as commencing immediately upon the
+completion of God's glorifying by Christ upon the Cross. 'He shall
+straightway glorify Him.' At the instant then, that He said, 'It is
+finished,' and all that the Cross could do to glorify God was done, at
+that instant there began, with not a pin-point of interval between
+them, God's glorifying of the Son in Himself. It began in that
+Paradise into which we know that upon that day He entered. It was
+manifested to the world when He 'raised Him from the dead and gave Him
+glory.' It reached a still higher point when 'they brought Him near
+unto the Ancient of Days,' and ascending up on high, a dominion and a
+throne and a glory were given to Him which last now, whilst the Son of
+Man sits in the heavens on the throne of His glory, wielding the
+attributes of divinity, and administering the laws of the universe and
+the mysteries of providence. It shall rise to its highest
+manifestation before an assembled world, when He 'shall come in His
+glory, and before Him shall be gathered all nations.'
+
+This, then, was the vision that lay before the Christ in that upper
+room, the vision of Himself glorified in His extreme shame, because
+His Cross manifested His love and His saving power; of God glorified
+in Him above all other of His acts of manifestation when He died on
+the Cross, and revealed the very heart of God; and of Himself
+glorified in the Father when, exalted high above all creatures, He
+sitteth upon the Father's throne and rules the Father's realm.
+
+And yet from that high, and, to us, inaccessible and all but
+inconceivable summit of His elevation, He looks down ready to bless
+each poor creature here, toiling and moiling amidst sufferings, and
+meannesses, and commonplaces, and monotony, if we will only put our
+trust in Him, and love Him, and see the brightness of the Father's
+face in Him. He cares for us all; and if we will but take Him as our
+Saviour, His all-prevalent prayer, presented within the veil for us,
+will certainly be fulfilled at last: 'Father, I will that they also
+whom Thou hast given Me may be with Me where I am, that they may
+behold My glory.'
+
+
+
+
+CANNOT AND CAN
+
+'Little children, yet a little while I am with you. Ye shall seek Me:
+and as I said unto the Jews, Whither I go ye cannot come; so now I say
+to you.'--JOHN xiii. 33.
+
+The preceding context shows how large and black the Cross loomed
+before Jesus now, and how radiant the glory beyond shone out to Him.
+But it was only for a moment that either of these two absorbed His
+thoughts; and with wonderful self-forgetfulness and self-command, He
+turned away at once from the consideration of how the near future was
+to affect Him, to the thought of how it was to affect the handful of
+helpless disciples who had to be left alone. Impending separation
+breaks up the fountains of the heart, and we all know the instinct
+that desires to crowd all the often hidden love into some one last
+token. So here our Lord addresses His disciples by a name that is
+never used except this once, 'little children,' a fond diminutive that
+not only reveals an unusual depth of tender emotion, but also breathes
+a pitying sense of their defencelessness when they are to be left
+alone. So might a dying mother look at her little ones.
+
+But the words that follow, at first sight, are dark with the sense of
+a final and complete separation. 'Ye shall seek Me'--and not only so,
+but He seems to put back His humble friends into the same place as had
+been occupied by His bitter foes--'as I said to the Jews, whither I go
+ye cannot come; so now I say to you.' There was something that
+prevented both classes alike from keeping Him company; and He had to
+walk His path both into the darkness and into the glory, alone.
+
+The words apply in their fullness only to the parenthesis of time
+whilst He lay in the grave, and the disciples despairingly thought
+that all was ended. It was a brief period: it was a revolutionary
+moment; and though it was soon to end, they needed to be guarded
+against it. But though the words do not apply to the permanent
+relation between the glorified Christ and us, His disciples, yet
+partly by similarity, and still more by contrast, they do suggest
+great Christian blessedness and imperative Christian duties. These
+gather themselves mainly round two contrasts, a transitory 'cannot'
+soon to be changed into a permanent 'can'; and a momentary seeking,
+soon to be converted into a blessed seeking which finds. I now deal
+only with the former.
+
+We have here a transitory 'cannot' soon to be changed into a permanent
+'can.'
+
+'Whither I go ye cannot come.' Does not one hear a tone of personal
+sorrow in that saying? Jesus had always hungered for understanding and
+sympathetic companions, and one of His lifelong sorrows had been His
+utter loneliness; but He had never, in all the time that He had been
+with them, so put out His hand, feeling for some warm clasp of a human
+hand to help Him in His struggle, as He did during the hours
+terminating with Gethsemane. And perhaps we may venture to say that we
+hear in this utterance an expression of Christ's sorrow for Himself
+that He had to tread the dark way, and to pass into the brightness
+beyond, all alone. He yearned for the impossible human companionship,
+as well as sorrowed for the imperfections which made it impossible.
+
+Why was it that they could not 'follow Him now'? The answer to that
+question is found in the consideration of whither it was that He went.
+When that bright Shekinah-cloud at the Ascension received Him into its
+radiant folds, it showed why they could not follow Him, because it
+revealed that He went unto the Father, when He left the world. So we
+are brought face to face with the old, solemn thought that character
+makes capacity for heaven. 'Who shall ascend into the hill of the
+Lord, or who shall stand in His holy place?' asked the Psalmist; and a
+prophet put the question in a still sharper form, and by the very form
+of the question suggested a negative answer--'Who among us shall dwell
+with the devouring fire; who among us shall dwell with everlasting
+burnings?' Who can pass into that Presence, and stand near God,
+without being, like the maiden in the old legend, shrivelled into
+ashes by the contact of the celestial fire? 'Holiness' is that
+'without which no man shall see the Lord.' And we, all of us, in the
+depths of our own hearts, if we rightly understand the voices that
+ever echo there, must feel that the condition which is, obviously and
+without any need for arguing it, required for abiding with God, and so
+going into the glory where Christ is, is a condition which none of us
+can fulfil. In that respect the imperfect and immature friends, the
+little children, the babes who loved and yet knew not Him whom they
+loved, and the scowling enemies, were at one. For they had all of them
+the one human heart, and in that heart the deep-lying alienation and
+contrariety to God. Therefore Christ trod the winepress alone, and
+alone 'ascended up where He was before.'
+
+But let us remember that this 'cannot' was only a transitory cannot.
+For we must underscore very deeply that word in my text 'so _now_ I
+say to you,' and a moment afterwards, when one of the Apostles puts
+the question: 'Why cannot I follow Thee now?' the answer is: 'Thou
+canst not follow Me now; but thou shalt follow Me afterwards.' The
+text, too, is succeeded immediately by the wonderful parting
+consolations and counsels spoken to the disciples, through all of
+which there gleams the promise that they will be with Him where He is,
+and behold His glory. Set side by side with these sad words of our
+Lord in the text, by which He unloosed their clasping hands from Him,
+and turned His face to His solitary path, the triumphant language in
+which habitually the rest of the New Testament speaks of the Christian
+man's relation to Christ. Think of that great passage: 'Ye are come
+unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, ... and to
+God the Judge of all, ... and to Jesus the Mediator of the new
+Covenant.' What has become of the impossibility? Vanished. Where is
+the 'cannot'? Turned into a blessed 'can.' And so Apostles have no
+scruple in saying, 'Our citizenship is in Heaven,' nor in saying, 'We
+sit together with Him in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.' The path
+that was blocked is open. The impossibility that towered up like a
+great black wall has melted away; and the path into the Holiest of all
+is made patent by the blood of Christ. For in that death there lies
+the power that sweeps away all the impediments of man's sin, and in
+that life of the risen, glorified, indwelling Christ there lies the
+power which cleanses the inmost heart from 'all filthiness of flesh
+and spirit,' and makes it possible for our mortal feet to walk on the
+immortal path, and for us, with all our unworthiness, with all our
+shrinking, to stand in His presence and not be ashamed or consumed.
+'Ye cannot come' was true for a few days. 'Ye can come' is true for
+ever; and for all Christian men.
+
+But let us not forget that the one attitude of heart and mind, by
+which a poor, sinful man, who dare not draw near to God, receives into
+himself the merit and power of the death, and the indwelling power of
+the life, of Jesus Christ, is personal faith in Jesus Christ. To trust
+Him is to come to Him, and it is represented in Scripture as
+conferring an instantaneous fitness for access to God. People pray
+sometimes that they may be made 'meet for the inheritance of the
+saints in light,' and the prayer is, in a sense, wise and true. But
+they too often forget that the Apostle says, in the original
+connection of the words which they so quote: 'He _hath_ translated us
+from the tyranny of the darkness, and _hath_ made us meet for the
+inheritance of the saints in light.' That is to say, whenever a poor
+soul, compassed and laden with its infirmity and sin, turns itself to
+that Lord whose Cross conquers sin, and whose blood infused into our
+veins--the Spirit of whose life granted to us--gives us to partake of
+His own righteousness, that moment that soul can tread the path that
+brings into the presence of God, and 'has access with confidence by
+the faith of Him.' So, brethren, seeing that thus the incapacity may
+all be swept away, and that instead of a 'cannot,' which relegates us
+to darkness, we may receive a 'can' which leads us into the light, let
+us see to it that this communion, which is possible for all Christian
+men, is real in our cases, and that we use the access which is given
+to us, and dwell for ever in, and with, the Lord.
+
+I have said that the act of faith, by associating a man with Jesus
+Christ in the power of His death and of His life, makes any who
+exercise it capable of passing into the presence of God. But I would
+remind you, too, that to make us more fit for more full and habitual
+communion is the very purpose for which all the discipline of our
+earthly life, its sorrows and its joys, its tasks and its repose, is
+exercised upon us--'He for our profit, that we might be partakers of
+His holiness.' Surely if we habitually took that point of view in
+reference to our work, in reference to our joys, in reference to our
+trials, everything would be different. We are being prepared with
+sedulous love, with patient reiteration of 'line upon line, precept
+upon precept,' with singularly varied methods but a uniform purpose,
+by all that meets us in life, to be more capable of treading the
+eternal path into the eternal light. Is that how we daily think of our
+own circumstances? Do we bring that great thought to bear upon all
+that we, sometimes faithlessly, call mysterious or murmuringly think
+of--if we dare not speak our thought--as being cruel and hard? What
+does it matter if some precious things be lifted off our shoulders,
+and out of our hearts, if their being taken away makes it more
+possible for us to tread with a lighter step the path of peace? What
+matters it though many things that we would fain keep are withdrawn
+from us, if by the withdrawal we are sent a little further forward on
+the road that leads to God? As George Herbert says, sorrows and joys
+are like battledores that drive a shuttlecock, and they may all 'toss
+us to His breast.' In faith, however infantile it may be, there is an
+undeveloped capacity, a germ of fitness, for dwelling with God. But
+that capacity is meant to be increased, and the little children are
+meant to be helped to grow up into full-grown men, 'the measure of the
+stature of the fullness of Christ,' by all that comes here to them on
+earth. Do you not think we should understand life better, do you not
+think it would all be flashed up into new radiance, do you not think
+we should more seldom stand bewildered at what we choose to call the
+inscrutable dispensations of Providence, if this were the point of
+view from which we looked at them all--that they were fitting us for
+perpetual abiding with our Father God?
+
+Nor let us forget that there was a transient 'cannot' of another sort.
+For 'flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.' So, as life
+is changed when we think of it as helping us toward Him, death is
+changed when we think of it as being, if I may so say, the usher in
+attendance on the Presence-chamber, who draws back the thin curtain
+that separates us from the throne, and takes us by the hands and leads
+us into the Presence. Surely if we habitually thought thus of that
+otherwise grim chamberlain, we should be willing to put our hands into
+His, as a little child will, when straying, into the hands of a
+stranger who says, 'Come with me and I will take you home to your
+father.' 'As I said unto the Jews ... so now I say to you, whither I
+go, ye cannot come.'
+
+Let us press on you and on myself the one thought that comes out of
+all that I have been saying, the blessed possibility, which, because
+it is a possibility, is an obligation, to use far more than most of us
+do, the right of access to the King who is our Father. There are
+nobles and corporate bodies, who regard it as one of their chief
+distinctions that they have always the right of _entree_ to the court
+of the sovereign. Every Christian man has that. And in old days, when
+a baron did not show himself at court, suspicion naturally arose, and
+he was in danger of being thought disaffected, if not traitorous. Ah!
+if you and I were judged according to that law, what would become of
+us? We can go when we like. How seldom we do go! We can live in the
+heavens whilst our work lies down here. We prefer the low earth to the
+lofty sky. 'We are come'--ideally, and in the depths of our nature,
+our affinities are there--'unto God, the Judge of all, and to Jesus
+the Mediator of the new Covenant.' Are we come? Are we day by day, in
+all the pettiness of our ordinary lives, when compassed by hard
+duties, weighed upon by sore distress--still keeping our hearts in
+heaven, and our feet familiar with the path that leads us to God? 'Set
+your affection on things above, where Jesus is, sitting at the right
+hand of God.' For there is no 'cannot' for His servants in regard to
+their access to any place where He is.
+
+
+
+
+SEEKING JESUS
+
+'... Ye shall seek Me.'--JOHN xiii. 33.
+
+In the former sermon on this verse I pointed out that it, in its
+fullness, applies only to the brief period between the crucifixion and
+the resurrection, but that, partly by contrast and partly by analogy,
+it suggests permanent relations between Christ and His disciples.
+These relations were mainly--as I pointed out then--two: there was
+that one expressed by the subsequent words of the verse, 'Whither I
+go, ye cannot come'--a brief 'cannot,' soon to be changed into a
+permanent 'can'; and there was a second, a brief, sad, and vain
+seeking, soon to be changed into a seeking which finds. It is to the
+latter that I wish to turn now.
+
+'Ye shall seek Me' fell, like the clods on a coffin-lid, with a hollow
+sound on the hearts of the Apostles. It comes to us as a permission
+and a command and a promise. I do not dwell on that sad seeking, which
+was so brief but so bitter. We all know what it is to put out an empty
+hand into the darkness and the void, and to grope for a touch which we
+know, whilst we grope, that we shall not find. And these poor,
+helpless disciples, by their forlorn sense of separation, by their
+yearning that brought no satisfaction, by their very listless despair,
+were saying, during these hours of agony into which an eternity of
+pain was condensed, 'Oh! that He were beside us again!'
+
+That sad seeking ended when He came to them, and 'then were the
+disciples glad when they saw the Lord.' But another kind of seeking
+began, when 'the cloud received Him out of their sight'; as joyful as
+the other was laden with sorrow, as sure to find the object of its
+quest as the other was certain to be disappointed. What He said in the
+darkness to them, He says in the light to us: What 'I say unto you I
+say unto all,' _Seek!_ So now we have to deal with that joyful search
+which is sure of finding its object, and is only a little, if at all,
+less blessed than the finding itself.
+
+I. Every Christian is, by his very name, a seeker after Christ.
+
+There are two kinds of seeking, one like that of a bird whose young
+have been stolen away, which flutters here and there, because it knows
+not where that is which it seeks; another, like the flight of the same
+bird, when the migrating instinct rises in its little breast, and
+straight as an arrow it goes, not because it knows not its goal, but
+because it knows it, yonder where the sun is warm and the sky is blue,
+and winter is left behind in the cold north. 'Ye shall seek Me' is the
+word of promise, which changes the vain search that is ignorant of
+where the object of its quest is, into a blessed going out of the
+heart towards that which it knows to be the home of its homelessness.
+Thus the text brings out the very central blessedness and peculiarity
+of the Christian life, that it has no uncertainty in its aims, and
+that, instead of seeking for things which may or may not be found, or
+if found may or may not prove to be what we dreamt them to be. It
+seeks for a Person whom it knows where to find, and of whom it knows
+that all its desires will be met in Him. We have, then, on the one
+side the multifarious, divergent searchings of man; and on the other
+side the one quest in which all these others are gathered up, and
+translated into blessedness--the seeking after Jesus Christ.
+
+Men know that they need, if I may so put it, four things: truth for
+the understanding, love round which the heart may coil, authority for
+the will which may direct and restrain, and energy for the practical
+life. But, apart from the quest after Christ, men for the most part
+seek these necessary goods in divers objects, and fragmentarily look
+for the completion of their desires. But fragments will never satisfy
+a man's soul, and they who have to go to one place for truth, and to
+another for love, and to another for authority, and to another for
+energy, are wofully likely never to find what they search for. They
+are seeking in the manifold what can be found only in the One. It is
+as if some vessel, full of precious stones, were thrown down before
+men, and whilst they are racing after the diamonds, they lose the
+emeralds and the sapphires. But the wise concentrate their seekings on
+the 'one Pearl of great price,' in whom is truth for the brain, love
+for the heart, authority for the will, power for the life, and all
+summed in that which is more blessed than all, the Person of the
+Brother who died for us, the Christ who lives to fill our hearts for
+ever. One sun dims all the stars; and the 'one entire and perfect
+Chrysolite' beggars and reduces to fragments 'all the precious things
+that thou canst desire.'
+
+To seek Him is the very hall-mark of a Christian, and that seeking
+comes to be an earnest desire and effort after more conscious
+communion with Him, and a more entire possession of His imparted life
+which is righteousness and peace and joy and power. According to the
+Rabbis, the manna tasted to each man what each man most desired. The
+manifoldness of the one Christ is far more manifold than the
+manifoldness of the multiplicity of fragmentary and partial aims which
+foolish men perceive.
+
+The ways of seeking are very plain. First of all, we seek if, and in
+proportion as, we make the effort to occupy our thoughts and minds,
+not with theological dogmas, but with the living Christ Himself. Ah!
+brethren, it is hard to do, and I daresay a great many of you are
+thinking that it is far harder for you, in the distractions and rush
+and conflict of business and daily life, than it is for people like
+me, whom you imagine as sitting in a study, with nothing to distract
+us. I do not know about that; I fancy it is about equally hard for us
+all; but it is possible. I have been in Alpine villages where, at the
+end of every squalid alley, there towered up a great, pure, silent,
+white peak. That is what our lives may be; however noisome, crowded,
+petty the little lane in which we live, the Alp is at the end of it
+there, if we only choose to lift our eyes and look. It is possible
+that not only 'into the sessions of sweet silent thought,' but into
+the rush and bustle of the workshop or the exchange, there may come,
+like 'some sweet, beguiling melody, so sweet we know not we are
+listening to it,' the thought that changes pettiness into greatness,
+that makes all things go smoothly and easily, that is a test and a
+charm to discover and to destroy temptation, the thought of a present
+Christ, the Lover of my soul, and the Helper of my life.
+
+Again, we seek Him when, by aspiration and desire, we bring Him--as He
+is always brought thereby--into our hearts and into our lives. The
+measure of our desire is the measure of our possession. Wishing is the
+opening of our hearts, but, alas, often we wish and desire, and the
+heart opens and nothing enters. Wishes are like the tentacles of some
+marine organism waving about in a waste ocean, feeling for the food
+that they do not find. But if we open our hearts for Him, that is
+simultaneous with the coming of Him to us. 'Ye have not, because ye
+ask not.' Do not forget, dear friends, that desire, if it is genuine,
+will take a very concrete form and will be prayer. And it is
+prayer--by which I do not mean the utterance of words without desire,
+any more than I mean desire without the direct casting of it into the
+form of supplication--it is prayer that brings Christ into any, and it
+is prayer that will bring Him into every, life.
+
+Nor let us forget that there is another way of seeking besides these
+two, of looking up to Him through, and in the midst of, all the shows
+and trifles of this low life, and the reaching out of our desires
+towards Him, as the roots of a tree beneath the soil go straight for
+the river. That other way is imitation and obedience. It is vain to
+think of Him, and it is unreal to pretend to desire Him, if we are not
+seeking Him by treading in the path that He has trod, and which leads
+to Him. Imitation and obedience--these are the steps by which we go
+straight through all the trivialities of life into the presence of the
+Lord Himself. The smallest deflection from the path that leads to Him
+will carry us away into doleful wastes. The least invisible cloud that
+steals across the sky will blot out half a hemisphere of stars; and we
+seek not Christ unless, thinking of Him, and desiring Him, we also
+walk in the path in which He has walked, and so come where He is. He
+Himself has said that if His servant follows Him, where He is there
+shall also His servant be. These things make up the seeking which
+ought to mark us all.
+
+I note that--
+
+II. The Christian seeker always finds.
+
+I pointed out in my last sermon the strange identity of our Lord's
+words to His humble friends, with those which on another occasion He
+used to His bitter enemies. He reminds the disciples of that identity
+in the verse from which my text comes: 'As I said to the Jews ... so
+now I say to you.' But there was one thing that He said to the Jews
+that He did not say to them. To the former He said, 'Ye shall seek Me,
+and shall not find Me'; and He did not say that--even for the sad
+hours it was not quite true--He did not say that to His followers, and
+He does not say it to us.
+
+If we seek we shall find. There is no disappointment in the Christian
+life. Anything is possible rather than that a man should desire Christ
+and not have Him. That has never been the experience of any seeking
+soul. And so I urge upon you what has already been suggested, that
+inasmuch as, by reason of His infinite longing to give truth and love
+and guidance and energy and His whole Self, to all of us, the amount
+of our possession of the power and life of Jesus Christ depends on
+ourselves. If you take to the fountain a tiny cup, you will only bring
+away a tiny cupful. If you take a great vessel you will bring _it_
+away full. As long as the woman in the old story held out her vessels
+to the miraculous flow of the oil, the flow continued. When she had no
+more vessels to take, the flow stopped. If a man holds a flagon
+beneath a spigot with an unsteady hand, half of the precious liquor
+will be spilt on the ground. Those who fulfil the conditions, of which
+I have already been speaking, may make quite sure that according to
+their faith will it be unto them. And if you, dear friend, have not in
+your experience the conscious presence of a Christ who is all that you
+need, there is no one in heaven or earth or hell to blame for it but
+only your own self. 'I have never said to any of the seed of Jacob,
+Seek ye My face in vain'; and when the Lord said, 'Ye shall seek Me,'
+He was implicitly binding Himself to meet the seeking soul, and give
+Himself to the desiring heart.
+
+Remember, too, that this seeking, which is always crowned with
+finding, is the only search in which failure is impossible. There is
+only one course of life that has no disappointments. We all know how
+frequently we are foiled in our quests; we all know how often a prize
+won is a bitterer disappointment than a prize unattained. Like a
+jelly-fish in the water, as long as it is there its tenuous substance
+is lovely, expanded, tinged with delicate violets and blues, and its
+long filaments float in lines of beauty. Lay it on the beach, and it
+is a shapeless lump, and it poisons and stings. You fish your prize
+out of the great ocean, and when you have it, does it disappoint, or
+does it fulfil, the raised expectations of the quest? There is One who
+does not disappoint. There is one gold mine that comes up to the
+prospectus. There is one spring that never runs dry. The more deep our
+Christian experience is, the more we shall take the rapturous
+exclamation of the Arabian queen to ourselves: 'The half was not told
+us!'
+
+And so, lastly, I suggest that--
+
+III. The finding impels to fresh seeking.
+
+The object of the Christian man's quest is Jesus Christ. He is
+Incarnate Infinitude; and that cannot be exhausted. The seeker after
+Jesus Christ is the Christian soul. That soul is the incarnate
+possibility of indefinite expansion and approximation and
+assimilation; and that cannot be exhausted. And so, with a Christ who
+is infinite, and a seeker whose capacities may be indefinitely
+expanded, there can be no satiety, there can be no limit, there can be
+no end to the process. This wine-skin will not burst when the new wine
+is put into it. Rather like some elastic vessel, as you pour it will
+fill out and expand. Possession enlarges, and the more of Christ's
+fullness is poured into a human heart, the more is that heart widened
+out to receive a greater blessing.
+
+Dear brethren, there is one course of life, and I believe but one, on
+which we may all enter with the sure confidence that in the nature of
+things, in the nature of Christ, and in the nature of ourselves, there
+is no end to growth and progress. Think of the freshness and
+blessedness and energy that puts into a life. To have an unattained
+and unattainable object, a goal to which we can never come, but to
+which we may ever be approximating, seems to me to be the secret of
+perpetual joy and of perpetual youthfulness. To say, 'forgetting the
+things that are behind, I reach forward unto the things that are
+before,' is a charm and an amulet that repels monotony and weariness,
+and goes with a man to the very end, and when all other aims and
+objects have died down into grey ashes, that flame, like the fabled
+lamp in Virgil's tomb, burns clear in the grave, and lights us to the
+eternity beyond.
+
+For certainly, if there be neither satiety nor limit to Christian
+progress here, there can be no better and stronger evidence that
+Christian progress here is but the first 'lap' of the race, the first
+_stadium_ of the course, and that beyond that narrow, dark line which
+lies across the path, it runs on, rising higher, and will run on for
+ever.
+
+  'On earth the broken arc; in heaven the perfect round.'
+
+Seek for what you are sure to find; seek for what will never
+disappoint you; seek for what will abide with you for ever. The very
+first word of Christ's recorded in Scripture is a question which He
+puts to us all: '_What_ seek ye?' Well for us, if like the two to whom
+it was originally addressed, we answer, 'We are not seeking a What; we
+are seeking a Whom.--Master, where dwellest Thou?' And if we have that
+answer in our hearts, we shall receive the invitation which they
+received, 'Come and see,'--come and seek. 'Ye shall seek Me' is a
+gracious invitation, an imperative command, and a faithful promise
+that if we seek we shall find. 'Whoso findeth _Him_ findeth life;
+whoso misseth _Him_'--whatever else he has sought and found--'wrongeth
+his own soul.'
+
+
+
+
+'AS I HAVE LOVED'
+
+'A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another: as I
+have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men
+know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another.'--JOHN
+xiii. 34, 35.
+
+Wishes from dying lips are sacred. They sink deep into memories and
+mould faithful lives. The sense of impending separation had added an
+unwonted tenderness to our Lord's address, and He had designated His
+disciples by the fond name of 'little children.' The same sense here
+gives authority to His words, and moulds them into the shape of a
+command. The disciples had held together because He was in their
+midst. Will the arch stand when the keystone is struck out? Will not
+the spokes fall asunder when the nave of the wheel is taken away? He
+would guard them from the disintegrating tendencies that were sure to
+set in when He was gone; and He would point them to a solace for His
+absence, and to a kind of substitute for His presence. For to love the
+brethren whom they see would be, in some sense, a continuing to love
+the Christ whom they had ceased to see. And so, immediately after He
+said: 'Whither I go ye cannot come,' He goes on to say: 'Love one
+another as I have loved you.'
+
+He called this a 'new commandment,' though to love one's neighbour as
+one's self was a familiar commonplace amongst the Jews, and had a
+recognised position in Rabbinical teaching. But His commandment
+proposed a new object of love, it set forth a new measure of love, so
+greatly different from all that had preceded it as to become almost a
+new kind of love, and it suggested and supplied a new motive power for
+love. This commandment 'could give life' and fulfil itself. Therefore
+it comes to us as a 'new commandment'--even to us--and, unlike the
+words which preceded it, which we were considering in former sermons,
+it is wholly and freshly applicable to-day as in the ages that are
+passed. I ask you, first, to consider--
+
+I. The new scope of the new commandment.
+
+'Love one another.' The newness of the precept is realised, if we
+think for a moment of the new phenomenon which obedience to it
+produced. When the words were spoken, the then-known civilised Western
+world was cleft by great, deep gulfs of separation, like the crevasses
+in a glacier, by the side of which our racial animosities and class
+differences are merely superficial cracks on the surface. Language,
+religion, national animosities, differences of condition, and saddest
+of all, difference of sex, split the world up into alien fragments. A
+'stranger' and an 'enemy' were expressed in one language, by the same
+word. The learned and the unlearned, the slave and his master, the
+barbarian and the Greek, the man and the woman, stood on opposite
+sides of the gulfs, flinging hostility across. A Jewish peasant
+wandered up and down for three years in His own little country, which
+was the very focus of narrowness and separation and hostility, as the
+Roman historian felt when he called the Jews the 'haters of the human
+race'; He gathered a few disciples, and He was crucified by a
+contemptuous Roman governor, who thought that the life of one
+fanatical Jew was a small price to pay for popularity with his
+troublesome subjects, and in a generation after, the clefts were being
+bridged and all over the Empire a strange new sense of unity was being
+breathed, and 'Barbarian, Scythian, bond and free,' male and female,
+Jew and Greek, learned and ignorant, clasped hands and sat down at one
+table, and felt themselves 'all one in Christ Jesus.' They were ready
+to break all other bonds, and to yield to the uniting forces that
+streamed out from His Cross. There never had been anything like it. No
+wonder that the world began to babble about sorcery, and conspiracies,
+and complicity in unnameable vices. It was only that the disciples
+were obeying the 'new commandment,' and a new thing had come into the
+world--a community held together by love and not by geographical
+accidents or linguistic affinities, or the iron fetters of the
+conqueror. You sow the seed in furrows separated by ridges, and the
+ground is seamed, but when the seed springs the ridges are hidden, no
+division appears, and as far as the eye can reach, the cornfield
+stretches, rippling in unbroken waves of gold. The new commandment
+made a new thing, and the world wondered.
+
+Now then, brethren, do not let us forget that, although to obey this
+commandment is in some respects a great deal harder to-day than it was
+then, the diverse circumstances in which Christian individuals and
+Christian communities are this day placed may modify the form of our
+obedience, but do not in the smallest degree weaken the obligation,
+for the individual Christian and for societies of Christians, to
+follow this commandment. The multiplication of numbers, the cessation
+of the armed hostility of the world, the great varieties in
+intellectual position in regard to the truths of Christianity,
+divergencies of culture, and many other things, are separating forces,
+But our Christianity is worth very little, if it cannot master these
+separating tendencies, even as in the early days of freshness, the
+Christianity that sprang in these new converts' minds mastered the far
+more powerful separating tendencies with which they had to contend.
+
+Every Christian man is under the obligation to recognise his kindred
+with every other Christian man--his kindred in the deep foundations of
+his spiritual being, which are far deeper, and ought to be far more
+operative in drawing together, than the superficial differences of
+culture or opinion or the like, which may part us. The bond that holds
+Christian men together is their common relation to the one Lord, and
+that ought to influence their attitude to one another. You say I am
+talking commonplaces. Yes; and the condition of Christianity this day
+is the sad and tragical sign that the commonplaces need to be talked
+about, till they are rubbed into the conscience of the Church as they
+never have been before.
+
+Do not let us suppose that Christian love is mere sentiment. I shall
+have to speak a word or two about that presently, but I would fain
+lift the whole subject, if I can, out of the region of mere unctuous
+words and gush of half-feigned emotion, which mean nothing, and would
+make you feel that it is a very practical commandment, gripping us
+hard, when our Lord says to us, 'Love one another.'
+
+I have spoken about the accidental conditions which make obedience to
+this commandment difficult. The real reason which makes the obedience
+to it difficult is the slackness of our own hold on the Centre. In the
+measure in which we are filled with Jesus Christ, in that measure will
+that expression of His spirit and His life become natural to us. Every
+Christian has affinities with every other Christian, in the depths of
+his being, so as that he is a great deal more like his brother, who is
+possessor of 'like precious faith,' however unlike the two may be in
+outlook, in idiosyncrasy, and culture and in creed, than he is to
+another man with whom he may have a far closer sympathy in all these
+matters than he has with the brother in question, but from whom he is
+parted by this, that the one trusts and loves and obeys Jesus Christ,
+and the other does not. So, for individuals and for churches, the
+commandment takes this shape--Go down to the depths and you will find
+that you are closer to the Christian man or community which seems
+furthest from you, than you are to the non-Christian who seems nearest
+to you. Therefore, let your love follow your kinship, and your heart
+recognise the oneness that knits you together. That is a revolutionary
+commandment; what would become of our present organisations of
+Christianity if it were obeyed? That is a revolutionary commandment;
+what would become of our individual relations to the whole family who,
+in every place, and in many tongues, and with many creeds, call on
+Jesus as on their Lord, their Lord and ours, if it were obeyed? I
+leave you to answer the question. Only I say the commandment has for
+its first scope all who, in every place, love the Lord Jesus Christ.
+
+But there is more than that involved in it. The very same principle
+which makes this love to one another imperative upon all disciples,
+makes it equally imperative upon every follower of Jesus Christ to
+embrace in a real affection all whom Jesus so loved as to die for
+them. If I am to love a Christian man because he and I love Christ, I
+am to love everybody, because Christ loves me and everybody, and
+because He died on the Cross for me and for all men. And so one of the
+other Apostles, or, at least, the letter which goes by his name, laid
+hold on the true connection when, instead of concentrating Christian
+affection on the Church, and letting the world go to the devil as an
+alien thing, he said: 'Add to your faith,' this, that, and the other,
+and 'brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness, charity.' The
+particular does not exclude the general, it leads to the general. The
+fire kindled upon the hearth gives warmth to all the chamber. The
+circles are concentric, and the widest sweep is struck from the same
+middle point as the narrow. So the new commandment does not cut
+humanity into two halves, but gathers all diversity into one, and
+spreads the great reconciling of Christian love over all the
+antagonisms and oppositions of earth. Let me ask you to notice--
+
+II. The example of the new commandment, 'As I have loved you.'
+
+That solemn 'as' lifts itself up before us, shines far ahead of us,
+ought to draw us to itself in hope, and not to repel us from itself in
+despair. 'As I have loved'--what a tremendous thing for a man to stand
+up before his fellows, and say, 'Take Me as the perfect example of
+perfect love; and let My example--un-dimmed by the mists of gathering
+centuries, and un-weakened by the change of condition, and
+circumstance, fresh as ever after ages have passed, and
+closely-fitting as ever all varieties of human character and
+condition--stand before you; the ideal that I have realised, and you
+will be blessed in the proportion in which you seek, though you fail,
+to realise it!' There is, I venture to believe, only one aspect of
+Jesus Christ in which such a setting forth of Himself as the perfect
+Incarnation of perfect love is warrantable; and that is found in the
+old belief that His very birth was the result of His love, and that
+His death was the climax of that love. And if so, we have to turn to
+Bethlehem, and the whole life, and the Cross at its end, as being the
+Christ-given example and model for our love to our brethren.
+
+What do we see there? I have said that there is too much of mere
+sickly sentimentality about the ordinary treatment of this great
+commandment, and that I desired to lift it out of that region into a
+far nobler, more strenuous, and difficult one. This is what we see in
+that life and in that death:--First of all--the activity of love--'Let
+_us_ not love in words, but in deed and in truth'; then we see the
+self-forgetfulness of love--'Even Christ pleased not Himself'; then we
+see the self-sacrifice of love--'Greater love hath no man than this,
+that a man lay down his life for his friends.' And in these three
+points, on which I would fain enlarge if I might, active love,
+self-oblivious love, self-sacrificing love, you have the pattern set
+for us all. Christian love is no mere sickly maiden, full of
+sentimental emotions and honeyed words. She is a strenuous virgin,
+girt for service, a heroine ready for dangers, and prepared to be a
+martyr if it be needful. Love's language is sacrifice. 'I give thee
+myself,' is its motto. And that is the pattern that is set before us
+all--'as I have loved you.'
+
+I have tried to show you how the commandment was new in many
+particulars, and it is for ever new in this particular, that it is for
+ever before us, unattained, and drawing faithful hearts to itself, and
+ever opening out into new heroisms and, therefore, blessedness, of
+self-sacrifice, and ever leading us to confess the differences, deep,
+tragic, sinful, between us and Him who--we sometimes think too
+presumptuously--we venture to say is our Lord and Master.
+
+Did you ever see in some great picture gallery a copyist sitting in
+front of a Raffaelle, and comparing his poor feeble daub, all out of
+drawing, and with little of the divine beauty that the master had
+breathed over his canvas, even if it preserved the mere mechanical
+outline? That is what you and I should do with our lives: take them
+and put them down side by side with the original. We shall have to do
+it some day. Had we better not do it now, and try to bring the copy a
+little nearer to the masterpiece; and let that 'as I have loved you'
+shine before us and draw us on to unattainable heights?
+
+And now, lastly, we have here--
+
+III. The motive power for obedience to the commandment.
+
+That is as new as all the rest. That 'as' expresses the manner of the
+love, but it also expresses the motive and the power. It might be
+translated into the equivalent 'in the fashion in which,' or it might
+be translated into the equivalent 'since--' 'I have loved you.' The
+original might bear the rendering, 'that ye also may love one
+another.' That is to say, what keeps men from obeying this commandment
+is the instinctive self-regard which is natural to us all. There are
+muscles in the body which are so constructed that they close tightly;
+and the heart is something like one of these sphincter muscles--it
+shuts by nature, especially if there has been anything put inside it
+over which it can shut and keep it all to itself. But there is one
+thing that dethrones Self, and enthrones the angel Love in a heart,
+and that is, that into that heart there shall come surging the sense
+of the great love 'wherewith I have loved you.' That melts the
+iceberg; nothing else will.
+
+That love of Christ to us, received into our hearts, and there
+producing an answering love to Him, will make us, in the measure in
+which we live in it and let it rule us, love everything and every
+person that He loves. That love of Jesus Christ, stealing into our
+hearts and there sweetening the ever-springing 'issues of life,' will
+make them flow out in glad obedience to any commandment of His. That
+love of Jesus Christ, received into our hearts, and responded to by
+our answering love, will work, as love always does, a magical
+transformation. A great monastic teacher wrote his precious book about
+_The Imitation of Christ_. 'Imitation' is a great word,
+'Transformation' is a greater. 'We all,' receiving on the mirror of
+our loving hearts the love of Jesus Christ, 'are changed into the same
+likeness.' Thus, then, the love, which is our pattern, is also our
+motive and our power for obedience, and the more we bring ourselves
+under its influences, the more we shall love all those who are beloved
+by, and lovers of, Jesus.
+
+That is the one foundation for a world knit together in the bonds of
+amity and concord. There have been attempts at brotherhood, and the
+guillotine has ended what was begun in the name of 'fraternity.' Men
+build towers, but there is no cement between the bricks, unless the
+love of Christ holds them together, and therefore Babel after Babel
+comes down about the ears of its builders. But notwithstanding all
+that is dark to-day, and though the war-clouds are lowering, and the
+hearts of men are inflamed with fierce passions, Christ's commandment
+is Christ's promise; and though the vision tarry, it will surely come.
+So even to-day Christian men ought to stand for Christ's peace, and
+for Christ's love. The old commandment which we have had from the
+beginning, is the new commandment that fits to-day as it fits all the
+ages. It is a dream, say some. Yes, a dream; but a morning dream which
+comes true. Let us do the little we can to make it true, and to bring
+about the day when the flock of men will gather round the one
+Shepherd, who loved them to the death, and who has bid them and helped
+them to 'love one another as'--and since--'He has loved them.'
+
+
+
+
+QUO VADIS?
+
+'Peter said unto Him, Lord, why cannot I follow Thee now! I will lay
+down my life for Thy sake. Jesus answered him, Wilt thou lay down thy
+life for My sake? Verily, verily, I say unto thee, The cock shall not
+crow, till thou hast denied Me thrice.'--JOHN xiii. 37, 38.
+
+Peter's main characteristics are all in operation here; his eagerness
+to be in the front, his habit of blurting out his thoughts and
+feelings, his passionate love for his Master, and withal his inability
+to understand Him, and his self-confident arrogance. He has broken in
+upon Christ's solemn words, entirely deaf to their deep meaning, but
+blindly and blunderingly laying hold of one thought only, that Jesus
+is departing, and that he is to be left alone. So he asks the
+question, 'Lord! thither goest Thou?'--not so much caring about that,
+as meaning by his question--'tell me where, and then I will come too';
+pledging himself to follow faithfully, as a dog behind his master,
+wherever He went.
+
+Our Lord answered the underlying meaning of the words, repeating with
+a personal application what He had just before said as a general
+principle--'Whither I go thou canst not follow Me now, but thou shall
+follow Me afterwards.' Then followed this noteworthy dialogue.
+
+The whole significance of the incident is preserved for us in the
+beautiful legend which tells us how, near the city of Rome, on the
+Appian Way, as Peter was flying for his life, he met the Lord, and
+again said to Him: 'Lord, whither goest Thou?' The words of the
+question, as given in the Vulgate, are the name of the site of the
+supposed interview, and of the little church which stands on it. The
+Master answered: 'I go to Rome, to be crucified again.' The answer
+smote the heart of the Apostle, and turned the cowardly fugitive into
+a hero; and he followed his Lord, and went gladly to his death. For it
+was that death which had to be accomplished before Peter was able to
+follow his Lord.
+
+Now, as to the words before us, I think we shall best gather their
+significance, and lay it upon our own hearts, if we simply follow the
+windings of the dialogue. There are three points: the audacious
+question, the rash vow, and the sad forecast.
+
+I. The audacious question.
+
+As Peter's first question, 'Lord, whither goest Thou?' meant not so
+much what it said, as 'I will follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest;
+tell me, that I may'; so the second question, in like manner, is
+really not so much a question, 'Why cannot I follow Thee now?' as the
+nearest possible approach to a flat contradiction of our Lord. Peter
+puts his words into the shape of an interrogation; what he means is,
+'Yes, I can follow Thee; and in proof thereof, I will lay down my life
+for Thy sake.' The man's persistence, the man's love leading him to
+lack of reverence, came out in this (as I have ventured to call it)
+audacious question. Its underlying meaning was a refusal to believe
+the Master's word. But yet there was in it a nobility of
+resolution--broken afterwards, but never mind about that--to endure
+anything rather than to be separate from the Lord. Yet, though it was
+noble in its motive, but lacking in reverence in its form, there was a
+deeper error than that in it. Peter did not know what 'following'
+meant, and he had to be taught that first. One of the main reasons why
+he could not follow was because he did not understand what was
+involved. It was something more than marching behind his Master, even
+to a Cross. There was a deeper discipline and a more strenuous effort
+needed than would have availed for such a kind of following.
+
+Let us look a little onwards into his life. Recall that scene on the
+morning of the day by the banks of the lake, when he waded through the
+shallow water, and cast himself, dripping, at his Master's feet, and,
+having by his threefold confession obliterated his threefold denial,
+was taken back to his Lord's love, and received the permission for
+which he had hungered, and which he had been told, in the upper room,
+could not 'now' be given: 'Jesus said to him, Follow thou Me.' What a
+flood of remembrances must then have rushed over the penitent Peter!
+how he must have thought to himself, 'So soon, so soon is the "canst
+not" changed into a _canst_! So soon has the "afterwards" come to be
+the present!'
+
+And long years after that, when he was an old man, and experience had
+taught him what _following_ meant, he shared his privilege with all
+the dispersed strangers to whom he wrote, and said to them, with a
+definite reference to this incident, and to the other after the
+Resurrection, 'leaving us an example, that we (not only, as I used to
+think, in my exuberant days of ignorance) should follow in His steps.'
+
+So, brethren, this blundering, loving, audacious question suggests to
+us that to follow Jesus Christ is the supreme direction for all
+conduct. Men of all creeds, men of no creed, admit that. The
+
+  'Loveliness of perfect deeds,
+  More strong than all poetic thought,'
+
+which is set forth in that life constitutes the living law to which
+all conduct is to be conformed, and will be noble in proportion as it
+is conformed.
+
+_There_ is the great blessing, and solemn obligation, and lofty
+prerogative of Christian morality, that for obedience to a precept it
+substitutes following a Person, and instead of saying to men 'Be good'
+it says to them 'Be Christlike.' It brings the conception of duty out
+of the region of abstractions into the region of living realities. For
+the cold statuesque ideal of perfection it substitutes a living Man,
+with a heart to love, and a hand to help us. Thereby the whole aspect
+of striving after the right is changed; for the work is made easier,
+and companionship comes in to aid morality, when Jesus Christ says to
+us, 'Be like Me; and then you will be good and blessed.' Effort will
+be all but as blessed as attainment, and the sense of pressing hard
+after Him will be only less restful than the consciousness of having
+attained. To follow Him is bliss, to reach Him is heaven.
+
+But in order that this following should be possible, there must be
+something done that had not been done when Peter asked, 'Why cannot I
+follow Thee now?' One reason why he could not was, as I said, because
+he did not know yet what 'following' meant, and because he was yet
+unfit for this assimilation of his character and of his conduct to the
+likeness of his Lord. And another reason was because the Cross still
+lay before the Lord, and until that death of infinite love and utter
+self-sacrifice for others had been accomplished, the pattern was not
+yet complete, nor the highest ideal of human life realised in life.
+Therefore the 'following' was impossible. Christ must die before He
+has completed the example that we are to follow, and Christ must die
+before the impulse shall be given to us, which shall make us able to
+tread, however falteringly and far behind, in His footsteps.
+
+The essence of His life and of His death lies in the two things,
+entire suppression of personal will in obedience to the will of the
+Father, and entire self-sacrifice for the sake of humanity. And
+however there is--and God forbid that I should ever forget in my
+preaching that there is--a uniqueness in that sacrifice, in that life,
+and in that death, which beggars all imitation, and needs and
+tolerates no repetition whilst the world lasts, still along with this,
+there is that which is imitable in the life and imitable in the death
+of the Master. To follow Jesus is to live denying self for God, and to
+live sacrificing self for men. Nothing less than these are included in
+the solemn words, 'leaving us'--even in the act and article of death
+when He 'suffered for us'--'an example that we should follow His
+steps.'
+
+The word rendered 'example' refers to the headline which the
+writing-master gives his pupils to copy, line by line. We all know how
+clumsy the pothooks and hangers are, how blurred the page with many a
+blot. And yet there, at the top of it, stands the Master's fair
+writing, and though even the last line on the page will be blotted and
+blurred, when we turn it over and begin on the new leaf, the copy will
+be like the original, 'and we shall he like Him, for we shall see Him
+as He is.' 'Thou shalt follow Me afterwards' is a commandment; blessed
+be God, it is also a promise. For let us not forget that the
+'following' ends in an attaining; even as the Lord Himself has said in
+another connection, when He spake: 'If any man serve Me, let him
+follow Me, and where I am, there shall also My servant be.' Of course,
+if we follow, we shall come to the same place one day. And so the
+great promise will be fulfilled; 'they shall follow the Lamb,' in that
+higher life, 'whithersoever He goeth'; and not as here imperfectly,
+and far behind, but close beside Him, and keeping step for step, being
+with Him first, and following Him afterwards.
+
+But let us remember that with regard to that future following and its
+completeness, the same present incapacity applies, as clogs and mars
+the 'following,' which is conforming our lives to His. For, as He
+Himself has said to us, 'I go to prepare a place for you,' and until
+He had passed through death and into His glory, there was no
+standing-ground for human feet on the golden pavements, and heaven was
+inaccessible to man until Christ had died. Thus, as all life is
+changed when it is looked upon as being a following of Jesus, so death
+becomes altogether other when it is so regarded. The first martyr
+outside the city wall, bruised and battered by the cruel stones,
+remembered his Master's death, and shaped his own to be like it. As
+Jesus, when He died, had said: 'Father, into Thy hands I commend My
+spirit,' Stephen, dying, said: 'Lord Jesus, receive My spirit.' As the
+Master had given His last breath to the prayer, 'Father, forgive them;
+they know not what they do,' so Stephen shaped his last utterance to a
+conformity with his Lord's, in which the difference is as significant
+as the likeness, and said, 'Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.'
+And then, as the record beautifully says, amidst all that wild hubbub
+and cruel assault, 'he fell on sleep,' as a child on its mother's
+breast. Death is changed when it becomes the following of Christ.
+
+II. We have here a rash vow.
+
+'I will lay down my life for Thy sake.' What a strange inversion of
+parts is here! 'Lay down thy life for My sake'--with Calvary less than
+four-and-twenty hours off, when Christ laid down His life for Peter's
+sake. Peter was guilty of an anachronism in the words, for the time
+did not come for the disciple to die for his Lord till after the Lord
+had died for His disciple. But he was right in feeling, though he felt
+it only in regard to an external and physical act, that to follow
+Jesus, it was necessary to be ready to die for Him. And that is the
+great truth which underlies and half redeems the rashness of this vow,
+and needs to be laid upon our hearts, if we are ever to be the true
+followers of the Master. Death for Christ is necessary if we are to
+follow Him. There is nothing that a man can do deeply and truly, in a
+manner worthy of a Christian, which has not underlying it, either the
+death of self-will and all the godless nature, or if need be the
+actual physical death, which is a much smaller matter. You cannot
+follow Christ except you die daily. No man has ever yet trodden in His
+footsteps except on condition of, moment by moment, slaying self,
+suppressing self, abjuring self, breaking the connection of self with
+the material world, and yielding up himself as a living sacrifice, in
+a living death, to the Lord of life and death. Do not think that
+'following Christ' is a mere sentimental expression for so much
+morality as we can conveniently get into our daily life. But remember
+that here, with all his rashness, with all his ignorance, with all his
+superficiality, the Apostle has laid hold upon the great permanent,
+but alas! much-forgotten principle, that to die is essential to
+following Jesus.
+
+This daily dying, which is a far harder thing to do than to go to a
+cross once, and have done with it--was impossible for Peter then,
+though he did not know it. His vow was a rash one, because the laying
+down of Christ's life, for Peter's sake and for ours, had not yet been
+accomplished. _There_ is the motive-power by which, and by which
+alone, drawn in gratitude, and melted down from all our selfishness,
+we, too, in our measure and our turn, are able to yield ourselves, in
+daily crucifixion of our evil, and daily abnegation of self-trust, and
+self-pleasing, and self-will, to the Lord that has died for us. He
+must lay down His life for our sakes, and we must know He has done it,
+and rest upon Him as our great Sacrifice and our atoning Priest, or
+else we shall never be so loosed from the tyranny of self as to be
+ready to live by dying, and to die that we may live for His sake. 'I
+go to Rome to be crucified again' were the words in which the old
+legend braced the fugitive and made a hero of him, and sent him back
+to be crucified like his Lord and to offer up his physical life, as he
+had long since offered up his self-will and his arrogance to the Lord
+that had died for him.
+
+O Lord our Father! help us, we beseech Thee, that we may be of the
+sheep that hear the Shepherd's voice and follow Him. Strengthen our
+faith in that dear Lord who has laid down His life for us, that we may
+daily, by self-denial and self-sacrifice, lay down our lives for Him,
+and follow Him here in all the footsteps of His love.
+
+
+
+
+A RASH VOW
+
+'Jesus answered him, Wilt them lay down thy life for My sake? Verily,
+verily I say unto thee, The cock shall not crow, till thou hast denied
+Me thrice.'--JOHN xiii. 38.
+
+In the last sermon I partly considered the dialogue of which this is
+the concluding portion, and found that it consisted of an audacious
+question: 'Why cannot I follow Thee now?' which really meant a
+contradiction of our Lord; of a rash vow; 'I will lay down my life for
+Thy sake'--and of a sad forecast: 'The cock shall not crow till thou
+hast denied Me thrice.' I paused in the middle of considering the
+second of these three stages, the rash vow. I then pointed out that,
+however ignorant the Apostle was of what 'following Christ' meant, he
+had hit the mark, and stumbled unknowingly upon the very essence of
+the Christian life, and an eternal truth, when he recognised that,
+somehow or other, to 'follow Christ' meant to die for Him. That is so,
+and is so always, for there is no following Christ which is not a
+'dying daily,' by self-immolation and detachment from the world, and
+from the life of sense and self. But this rash vow has to be looked at
+from a somewhat different point of view, and we have to consider not
+only the strangely blended right and wrong, error and deep truth, that
+lie in its substance, but the strangely blended right and wrong in the
+state of feeling and thought, on the part of the Apostle, which it
+represents. And taking up the dropped thread, I first deal with that,
+and then with the sad forecast which follows.
+
+So then, looking at these words as being like all our words, even the
+best of them, strangely mingled of right and wrong, good and evil, I
+find in them--
+
+I. A noble, sincere, but transient emotion and impulse.
+
+'I will lay down my life for Thy sake.' Peter meant it, every word of
+it; and he would have done it too, if only a gibbet or cross could
+have been set up then and there in the upper room. But unfortunately
+the moments of elevation and high-wrought enthusiasm, and the calls to
+martyrdom, do not always coincide. In the upper room, with its sacred
+atmosphere, it was easy to feel, and would have been easy to do,
+nobly. But it was not so easy, lying drowsily in Gethsemane, in the
+cold spring night, waiting for the Master's coming out from beneath
+the trembling shadows of the olive trees, or huddled up by the fire at
+the lower end of the hall in the grey morning, when vitality is at its
+lowest.
+
+So the sincere, noble utterance was but the expression of impulse and
+emotion which lifted Peter for a moment, and did him good, but which
+likewise, running through him, left him dry, and all the weaker
+because of the gush of feeling which had foamed itself away in empty
+words. For let us never forget that however high, noble, or divinely
+inspired emotion may be, in its nature it is transient and is sure to
+be followed by reaction. Like the winter torrents in some parched
+land, the more they foam, the more speedily does the bed of them dry
+up again, and the more they carry down the very soil in which growth
+and fertility would be possible. A rush of feeling is apt to leave
+behind hard, insensitive rock. There is a close connection between a
+predominantly emotional Christianity and a very imperfect life.
+Feeling is apt to be a substitute for action. Is it not a very
+remarkable thing that the word 'benevolence,' which means 'kindly
+feeling,' has come to take on the meaning rightly belonging to
+'beneficence,' which means 'kindly doing'? The emotional man blinds
+and hoodwinks himself, by thinking that his quick sensibility and
+lofty enthusiasm and warmth of emotion are action or as good as
+action. 'Be thou warmed and filled,' he says to his brother, and, in a
+lazy expansion of heart, forgets that he has never lifted a finger to
+help.
+
+God forbid that I should seem to deprecate emotional religion or
+religious emotion! that is the last thing that needs to be done in
+this generation. If the Churches want one thing more than another, it
+is that their Christianity should become far more emotional than it
+is, and their impulses stronger, swifter, more spontaneous, more
+overmastering, and that they should be urged by these, and not merely
+by the reluctant recognition that such and such a piece of sacrifice
+or effort is a debt that they are obliged to clear off. Their service
+will be glad service, only when it is impulsive service and emotional
+service. Dear brethren, a Christian man whose life is not influenced
+by the deepest and most fervid emotion of love to the great Love that
+died for him, is a monster. 'The Lord's fire is in Jerusalem, and His
+furnace in Zion'--is that a description of the fervour of this Church,
+or of any Church in Christendom? A furnace? An ice-house! Think of
+some deserted cottage, with the roof fallen in, and in the cold
+chimney-place a rusty grate with some dead embers in it, and the snow
+lying upon the top of it--that is a truer description of a great many
+of our churches than 'the Lord's furnace.'
+
+But the lesson to be taken from this incident before us is not the
+danger of emotion; it is rather the necessity of emotion, but with two
+provisoes, that it shall be emotion based upon a clear recognition of
+the great truth that He has laid down His life for me; and that it
+shall be emotion harnessed to work, and not wasted in words. The
+mightier the plunge of the fall, the more electrical energy you can
+get out of it, and set that to work to drive the wheels of life. Do
+not be afraid of emotion; you will make little of your Christianity
+unless you have it. But be sure that it is under the guidance of a
+clear perception of the truth that evokes it, and that it is all used
+to turn the wheels of life. 'Better is it that thou shouldest not vow,
+than that thou shouldest vow and not pay.' Better is it that emotion
+should be reticent and active than that it should be voluble and idle.
+It is a good servant, but a bad master. A man that trusts to impulse
+and emotion to further his Christian course, is like a ship in that
+belt of variable winds that lies near the Equator, where there will be
+a fine ten-knot breeze for an hour or two, and then a sickly,
+stagnating calm. Push further south, and get into the steady 'trades,'
+where the wind blows with equable and persistent force all the year
+round in the same direction. Convert impulses and emotions into
+steadfast principle, warmed by emotion and borne on by impulse.
+
+II. Again, this rash vow is an illustration of a confidence, also
+strangely blended of good and evil.
+
+'I will lay down my life for Thy sake.' As I have said, Peter meant
+it. His words are paralleled by other words, in which two of the
+Lord's disciples answered His solemn question: 'Are ye able to drink
+of the cup that I drink of?' with the unhesitating answer, 'We are
+able.' A great teacher has regarded that saying as one of 'the
+ventures of faith.' Perhaps it was. Perhaps there was as much
+self-confidence as faith in it. Certainly there was more
+self-confidence than faith in Peter's answer, and his self-confidence
+collapsed when the trial came.
+
+The world and the Church hold entirely antagonistic notions about the
+value of self-reliance. The world says that it is a condition of
+power. The Church says that it is the root of weakness.
+Self-confidence shuts a man out from the help of God, and so shuts him
+out from the source of power. For if you will think for a moment, you
+will see that the faith which the New Testament, in conformity with
+all wise knowledge of one's self, preaches as the one secret of power,
+has for its obverse--its other side--diffidence and self-distrust. No
+man trusts God as God ought to be trusted, who does not distrust
+himself as himself ought to be distrusted. To level a mountain is the
+only way to carry the water across where it stood. You can, by
+mechanism and locks, take a canal up to the top of a hill, but you
+cannot take a river up to the top, and the river of God's help flows
+through the valley and seeks the lowest levels. Faith and self-despair
+are the upper and the under sides of the same thing, like some
+cunningly-woven cloth, the one side bearing a different pattern from
+the other, and yet made of the same yarn, and the same threads passing
+from the upper to the under sides. So faith and self-distrust are but
+two names for one composite whole.
+
+I was once shown an old Jewish coin which had on the one side the
+words 'sackcloth and ashes,' and on the other side the words 'a crown
+of gold.' The coin meant to contrast what Israel had been with what
+Israel then was. The crown had come first; the sackcloth and ashes
+last. But we may use it for illustrating this point, on which I am now
+dwelling. Wherever, and only where, there are the sackcloth and ashes
+of self-despair there will be the crown of gold of an answering faith.
+When thus, as Wesley has it, in his great hymn: 'Confident in
+self-despair,' we cling to God, then we can say: 'When I am weak then
+am I strong,' 'Behold! we have no might, but our eyes are upon Thee.'
+If Peter had only said, 'By Thy help I will lay down my life for Thy
+sake,' his confidence would have been reasonable and blessed
+self-confidence, because it would have been confidence in a self
+inspired by divine power.
+
+And so, brethren, whilst utter diffidence is right for us, and is the
+condition of all our reception of energy according to our need, the
+most absolute confidence--a confidence which, to the eye of the man
+that measures only visible things, will seem sheer insanity--is
+sobriety for a Christian. The world is perfectly right when it says:
+'If you believe you can do a thing, you have gone a long way towards
+doing it.' The expectation of success has often the knack of
+fulfilling itself. But the world does not know our secret, and our
+secret is that our humble faith brings into the field the reserves
+with the Captain of our salvation at their head. Therefore a
+self-distrusting Christian can say, and say without exaggeration or
+presumption, 'I can do all things in Christ, strengthening me from
+within.'
+
+The Church's ideals are possibilities, when you bring God into the
+account, and they look like insanity when you do not. Take, for
+instance, missions. What an absurdity to talk about a handful of
+Christian people--for we are only a handful as compared with the whole
+world--carrying their Gospel into every corner of the earth, and
+finding everywhere a response to it. Yes; it is absurd; but, wise Mr.
+Calculator, counter of heads, you have forgotten God in your estimate
+of whether it is reasonable or unreasonable. Again, take the Christian
+ideal of absolute perfection of character. 'What nonsense to talk as
+if any man could ever come to that.' Yes!--as if any _man_ could come
+to that, I grant you. But if God is with him, the nonsense is to
+suppose that he will not come to it. Here is a row of cyphers as long
+as your arm. They mean nothing. Put a 1 at the left-hand end of the
+row; and what does it mean then? So the faith that brings Christ into
+the life, and into the Church, makes 'nobodies' into mighty
+men--'laughs at impossibilities, and cries, It shall be done!'
+
+Still further, here, in this rash vow, we have an underestimate of
+difficulties. There was another incident in the life of the Apostle, a
+strange replica of this one, into which he pushed himself, just as he
+did into the high priest's hall, partly out of curiosity and a wish to
+be prominent; partly out of love to his Master. Without a moment's
+consideration of the peril into which he was thrusting himself, he sat
+in the boat, and said, 'Bid me come to Thee on the water.' He forgot
+that He was heavy, and that water was not solid, and that the wind was
+high and the lake rough, and when he put his foot over the side and
+felt the cold waves creeping up his knees, his courage ebbed out with
+his faith, and he began to sink. Then he cried, 'Lord! help me!' If he
+had thought for a moment of the reality of the case, he would have sat
+still in the boat. If he had thought of what would be in his way in
+following Jesus to death, he would have hesitated to vow. But it is so
+much easier to resolve heroisms in a quiet corner than to do them when
+the strain comes, and it is so much easier to do some one great thing
+that has in it enthusiasm and nobility, and conspicuousness of
+sacrifice, especially if it can be got over in a moment, like having
+one's head cut off with an axe, than it is to 'die daily.' Ah!
+brethren, it is the little difficulties that make _the_ difficulty.
+You read in the newspapers in the autumn, every now and then, of
+trains, in that wonderful country across the water, being stopped by
+caterpillars. The Christian train is stopped by an army of
+caterpillars, far oftener than it is by some solid and towering
+barrier. Our Christian lives are a great deal likelier to come to
+failure, because we do not take into account the multiplied small
+antagonisms than because we are not ready to face the greater ones.
+What would you think of a bridge builder, who built a bridge across
+some mountain torrent and made no allowance for freshets and floods
+when the ice melted? His bridge and his piers would be gone the first
+winter. You remember who it was that said that he went into the
+Franco-German War 'with a light heart,' and in seven weeks came Sedan
+and the dethronement of an Emperor, and the surrender of an army.
+'Blessed is he that feareth always.' There is no more fatal error than
+an underestimate of our difficulties.
+
+III. Let me say a word about the sad forecast here.
+
+'Thou shalt deny me thrice.'
+
+We cannot say that poor Peter's fall was at all an anomalous or
+uncommon thing. He did exactly what a great many of us are doing. He
+could--and I have no doubt he would--have gone to the death for Jesus
+Christ; but he could not stand being laughed at for Him. He would have
+been ready to meet the executioner's sharp sword, but the
+servant-girl's sharp tongue was more than he could bear. And so he
+denied Jesus, not because he was afraid of his skin--for I do not
+suppose that the servants had any notion of doing anything more than
+amusing themselves with a few clumsy gibes at his expense--but because
+he could not bear to be made sport of.
+
+Now, dear brethren, I suppose we are all of us more or less movers in
+circles in which it sometimes is not considered 'good form' to show
+that we are Christian people. You young men in your warehouses, you
+students at the University, where it is a sign of being 'fossils' and
+'behind the times' and 'not up to date' to say 'I am a Christian,' and
+all of us in our several places have sometimes to gather our courage
+together, and not be afraid to declare whose we are. No doubt life is
+a better witness than words, but no doubt also life is not so good a
+witness as it might be, unless it sometimes has the commentary of
+words as well. Thus, to confess Christ means two things; to say
+sometimes--in the face of a smile of scorn, which is often harder to
+bear than something much more dangerous--'I am His,' and to live
+Christ, and to say by conduct 'I am His,' 'Whosoever shall confess Me
+before men, him will I also confess before My Father, and whosoever
+shall deny Me, him will I also deny.' Do not button your coats over
+your uniform. Do not take the cockade out of your hats when you go
+amongst 'the other side.' Live Jesus, and, when advisable, preach
+Jesus.
+
+But Peter's fall, which is typical of what we are all tempted to do,
+has in it a gracious message; for it proclaims the possibility of
+recovery from any depth of descent, and of coming back again from any
+distance of wandering. Did you ever notice how Peter's fall was burnt
+in upon his memory, so as that when he began to preach after
+Pentecost, the shape that his indictment of his hearers takes is, 'Ye
+denied the Holy One and the Just,' and how, long after--if the second
+Epistle which goes by his name is his--in summing up the crimes of the
+heretics whom he is branding, he speaks of their 'denying the Lord
+that bought them.' He never forgot his denial, and it remained with
+him as the expression for all that was wrong in a man's relation to
+Jesus Christ. And I suppose not only was it burnt in upon his memory,
+but it burnt out all his self-confidence.
+
+It is beautiful to see how, in his letter, he speaks over and over
+again of 'fear' as being a wise temper of mind for a Christian. As
+George Herbert has it, 'A sad, wise valour is the true complexion.'
+Thus the man that had been so confident in himself learned to say 'Be
+ready to give to every man that asketh you a reason for the hope that
+is in you, with meekness and fear.'
+
+And do you not think that his fall drew him closer to Jesus Christ
+than ever he had been before, as he learned more of His pardoning love
+and mercy? Was he not nearer the Lord on that morning when the two
+together, alone, talked after the Resurrection? Was he not nearer Him
+when he struggled to his feet from the boat on the lake, on that
+morning when he was received back into his office as Christ's Apostle?
+Did he ever forget how he had sinned? Did he ever forget how Christ
+had pardoned? Did he ever forget how Christ loved and would keep him?
+Ah, no! The rope that is broken is strongest where it is spliced, not
+because it was broken, but because a cunning hand has strengthened it.
+We may be the stronger for our sins, not because sin strengthens, for
+it weakens, but because God restores. It is possible that we may build
+a fairer structure on the ruins of our old selves. It is possible that
+we may turn every field of defeat into a field of victory. It is
+possible that we may
+
+    'Fall to rise; be beaten, to fight better.'
+
+If only we cling to the Lord our Strength, the promise shall be
+ours--whatever our failures, denials, backslidings, inconsistencies--
+'though he fall he shall not be utterly cast down, for the Lord
+upholdeth him with His hand.'
+
+
+
+
+FAITH IN GOD AND CHRIST
+
+'Let not your heart be troubled ... believe in God, believe also in
+Me.'--JOHN xiv. 1.
+
+The twelve were sitting in the upper chamber, stupefied with the
+dreary, half-understood prospect of Christ's departure. He, forgetting
+His own burden, turns to comfort and encourage them. These sweet and
+great words most singularly blend gentleness and dignity. Who can
+reproduce the cadence of soothing tenderness, soft as a mother's hand,
+in that 'Let not your heart be troubled'? And who can fail to feel the
+tone of majesty in that 'Believe in God, believe also in Me'?
+
+The Greek presents an ambiguity in the latter half of the verse, for
+the verb may be either indicative or imperative, and so we may read
+four different ways, according as we render each of the two 'believes'
+in either of these two fashions. Our Authorised and Revised Versions
+concur in adopting the indicative 'Ye believe' in the former clause
+and the imperative in the latter. But I venture to think that we get a
+more true and appropriate meaning if we keep both clauses in the same
+mood, and read them both as imperatives: 'Believe in God, believe also
+in Me.' It would be harsh, I think, to take one as an affirmation and
+the other as a command. It would be irrelevant, I think, to remind the
+disciples of their belief in God. It would break the unity of the
+verse and destroy the relation of the latter half to the former, the
+former being a negative precept: 'Let not your heart be troubled'; and
+the latter being a positive one: 'Instead of being troubled, believe
+in God, and believe in Me.' So, for all these reasons, I venture to
+adopt the reading I have indicated.
+
+I. Now in these words the first thing that strikes me is that Christ
+here points to Himself as the object of precisely the same religious
+trust which is to be given to God.
+
+It is only our familiarity with these words that blinds us to their
+wonderfulness and their greatness. Try to hear them for the first
+time, and to bring into remembrance the circumstances in which they
+were spoken. Here is a man sitting among a handful of His friends, who
+is within four-and-twenty hours of a shameful death, which to all
+appearance was the utter annihilation of all His claims and hopes, and
+He says, 'Trust in God, and trust in Me'! I think that if we had heard
+that for the first time, we should have understood a little better
+than some of us do the depth of its meaning.
+
+What is it that Christ asks for here? Or rather let me say, What is it
+that Christ offers to us here? For we must not look at the words as a
+demand or as a command, but rather as a merciful invitation to do what
+it is life and blessing to do. It is a very low and inadequate
+interpretation of these words which takes them as meaning little more
+than 'Believe in God, believe that He is; believe in Me, believe that
+I am.' But it is scarcely less so to suppose that the mere assent of
+the understanding to His teaching is all that Christ is asking for
+here. By no means; what He invites us to goes a great deal deeper than
+that. The essence of it is an act of the will and of the heart, not of
+the understanding at all. A man may believe in Him as a historical
+person, may accept all that is said about Him here, and yet not be
+within sight of the trust in Him of which He here speaks. For the
+essence of the whole is not the intellectual process of assent to a
+proposition, but the intensely personal act of yielding up will and
+heart to a living person. Faith does not grasp a doctrine, but a
+heart. The trust which Christ requires is the bond that unites souls
+with Him; and the very life of it is entire committal of myself to Him
+in all my relations and for all my needs, and absolute utter
+confidence in Him as all-sufficient for everything that I can require.
+Let us get away from the cold intellectualism of 'belief' into the
+warm atmosphere of 'trust,' and we shall understand better than by
+many volumes what Christ here means and the sphere and the power and
+the blessedness of that faith which Christ requires.
+
+Further, note that, whatever may be this believing in Him which He
+asks from us or invites us to render, it is precisely the same thing
+which He bids us render to God. The two clauses in the original bring
+out that idea even more vividly than in our version, because the order
+of the words in the latter clause is inverted; and they read literally
+thus: 'Believe in God, in Me also believe.' The purpose of the
+inversion is to put these two, God and Christ, as close together as
+possible; and to put the two identical emotions at the beginning and
+at the end, at the two extremes and outsides of the whole sentence.
+Could language be more deliberately adopted and moulded, even in its
+consecution and arrangement, to enforce this thought, that whatever it
+is that we give to Christ, it is the very same thing that we give to
+God? And so He here proposes Himself as the worthy and adequate
+recipient of all these emotions of confidence, submission,
+resignation, which make up religion in its deepest sense.
+
+That tone is by no means singular in this place. It is the uniform
+tone and characteristic of our Lord's teaching. Let me remind you just
+in a sentence of one or two instances. What did He think of Himself
+who stood up before the world and, with arms outstretched, like that
+great white Christ in Thorwaldsen's lovely statue, said to all the
+troop of languid and burdened and fatigued ones crowding at His feet:
+'Come unto Me all ye that are weary and are heavy laden, and I will
+give you rest'? That surely is a divine prerogative. What did He think
+of Himself who said, 'All men should honour the Son even as they
+honour the Father'? What did He think of Himself who, in that very
+Sermon on the Mount (to which the advocates of a maimed and mutilated
+Christianity tell us they pin their faith, instead of to mystical
+doctrines) declared that He Himself was the Judge of humanity, and
+that all men should stand at His bar and receive from Him 'according
+to the deeds done in their body'? Upon any honest principle of
+interpreting these Gospels, and unless you avowedly go picking and
+choosing amongst His words, accepting this and rejecting that, you
+cannot eliminate from the scriptural representation of Jesus Christ
+the fact that He claimed as His own the emotions of the heart to which
+only God has a right and only God can satisfy.
+
+I do not dwell upon that point, but I say, in one sentence, we have to
+take that into account if we would estimate the character of Jesus
+Christ as a Teacher and as a Man. I would not turn away from Him any
+imperfect conceptions, as they seem to me, of His nature and His
+work--rather would I foster them, and lead them on to a fuller
+recognition of the full Christ--but this I am bound to say, that for
+my part I believe that nothing but the wildest caprice, dealing with
+the Gospels according to one's own subjective fancies, irrespective
+altogether of the evidence, can strike out from the teaching of Christ
+this its characteristic difference. What signalises Him, and separates
+Him from all other religious teachers, is not the clearness or the
+tenderness with which He reiterated the truths about the divine
+Father's love, or about morality, and justice, and truth, and
+goodness; but _the_ peculiarity of His call to the world is, 'Believe
+in Me.' And if He said that, or anything like it, and if the
+representations of His teaching in these four Gospels, which are the
+only source from which we get any notion of Him at all, are to be
+accepted, why, then, one of two things follows. Either He was wrong,
+and then He was a crazy enthusiast, only acquitted of blasphemy
+because convicted of insanity; or else--or else--He was 'God, manifest
+in the flesh.' It is vain to bow down before a fancy portrait of a bit
+of Christ, and to exalt the humble sage of Nazareth, and to leave out
+the very thing that makes the difference between Him and all others,
+namely, these either audacious or most true claims to be the Son of
+God, the worthy Recipient and the adequate Object of man's religious
+emotions. 'Believe in God, in Me also believe.'
+
+II. Now, secondly, notice that faith in Christ and faith in God are
+not two, but one.
+
+These two clauses on the surface present juxtaposition. Looked at more
+closely they present interpenetration and identity. Jesus Christ does
+not merely set Himself up by the side of God, nor are we worshippers
+of two Gods when we bow before Jesus and bow before the Father; but
+faith in Christ is faith in God, and faith in God which is not faith
+in Christ is imperfect, incomplete, and will not long last. To trust
+in Him is to trust in the Father; to trust in the Father is to trust
+in Him.
+
+What is the underlying truth that is here? How comes it that these two
+objects blend into one, like two figures in a stereoscope; and that
+the faith which flows to Jesus Christ rests upon God? This is the
+underlying truth, that Jesus Christ, Himself divine, is the divine
+Revealer of God. I need not dwell upon the latter of these two
+thoughts: how there is no real knowledge of the real God in the depth
+of His love, the tenderness of His nature or the lustrousness of His
+holiness; how there is no certitude; how the God that we see outside
+of Jesus Christ is sometimes doubt, sometimes hope, sometimes fear,
+always far-off and vague, an abstraction rather than a person, 'a
+stream of tendency' without us, that which is unnameable, and the
+like. I need not dwell upon the thought that Jesus Christ has showed
+us a Father, has brought a God to our hearts whom we can love, whom we
+can know really though not fully, of whom we can be sure with a
+certitude which is as deep as the certitude of our own personal being;
+that He has brought to us a God before whom we do not need to crouch
+far off, that He has brought to us a God whom we can trust. Very
+significant is it that Christianity alone puts the very heart of
+religion in the act of trust. Other religions put it in dread,
+worship, service, and the like. Jesus Christ alone says, the bond
+between men and God is that blessed one of trust. And He says so
+because He alone brings us a God whom it is not ridiculous to tell men
+to trust.
+
+And, on the other hand, the truth that underlies this is not only that
+Jesus Christ is the Revealer of God, but that He Himself is divine.
+Light shines through a window, but the light and the glass that makes
+it visible have nothing in common with one another. The Godhead shines
+through Christ, but _He_ is not a mere transparent medium. It is
+Himself that He is showing us when He is showing us God. 'He that hath
+seen Me hath seen'--not the light that streams through Me--but 'hath
+seen,' in Me, 'the Father.' And because He is Himself divine and the
+divine Revealer, therefore the faith that grasps Him is inseparably
+one with the faith that grasps God. Men could look upon a Moses, an
+Isaiah, or a Paul, and in them recognise the eradiation of the
+divinity that imparted itself through them, but the medium was
+forgotten in proportion as that which it revealed was beheld. You
+cannot forget Christ in order to see God more clearly, but to behold
+Him is to behold God.
+
+And if that be true, these two things follow. One is that all
+imperfect revelation of God is prophetic of, and leads up towards, the
+perfect revelation in Jesus Christ. The writer of the Epistle to the
+Hebrews gives that truth in a very striking fashion. He compares all
+other means of knowing God to fragmentary syllables of a great word,
+of which one was given to one man and another to another. God 'spoke
+at sundry times and in manifold portions to the fathers by the
+prophets'; but the whole word is articulately uttered by the Son, in
+whom He has 'spoken unto us in these last times.' The imperfect
+revelation, by means of those who were merely mediums for the
+revelation leads up to Him who is Himself the Revelation, the
+Revealer, and the Revealed.
+
+And in like manner, all the imperfect faith that, laying hold of other
+fragmentary means of knowing God, has tremulously tried to trust Him,
+finds its climax and consummate flower in the full-blossomed faith
+that lays hold upon Jesus Christ. The unconscious prophecies of
+heathendom; the trust that select souls up and down the world have put
+in One whom they dimly apprehended; the faith of the Old Testament
+saints; the rudimentary beginnings of a knowledge of God and of a
+trust in Him which are found in men to-day, and amongst us, outside of
+the circle of Christianity--all these things are as manifestly
+incomplete as a building reared half its height, and waiting for the
+corner-stone to be brought forth, the full revelation of God in Jesus
+Christ, and the intelligent and full acceptance of Him and faith in
+Him.
+
+And another thing is true, that without faith in Christ such faith in
+God as is possible is feeble, incomplete, and will not long last.
+Historically a pure theism is all but impotent. There is only one
+example of it on a large scale in the world, and that is a kind of
+bastard Christianity--Mohammedanism; and we all know what good that is
+as a religion. There are plenty of people amongst us nowadays who
+claim to be very advanced thinkers, and who call themselves Theists,
+and not Christians. Well, I venture to say that that is a phase that
+will not last. There is little substance in it. The God whom men know
+outside of Jesus Christ is a poor, nebulous thing; an idea, not a
+reality. He, or rather It, is a film of cloud shaped into a vague
+form, through which you can see the stars. It has little power to
+restrain. It has less to inspire and impel. It has still less to
+comfort; it has least of all to satisfy the heart. You will have to
+get something more substantial than the far-off god of an unchristian
+Theism if you mean to sway the world and to satisfy men's hearts.
+
+And so, dear brethren, I come to this--perhaps the word may be fitting
+for some that listen to me--'Believe in God,' and that you may,
+'believe also in Christ.' For sure I am that when the stress comes,
+and you _want_ a god, unless your god is the God revealed in Jesus
+Christ, he will be a powerless deity. If you have not faith in Christ,
+you will not long have faith in God that is vital and worth anything.
+
+III. Lastly, this trust in Christ is the secret of a quiet heart.
+
+It is of no use to say to men, 'Let not your hearts be troubled,'
+unless you finish the verse and say, 'Believe in God, believe also in
+Christ.' For unless we trust we shall certainly be troubled. The state
+of man in this world is like that of some of those sunny islands in
+southern seas, around which there often rave the wildest cyclones, and
+which carry in their bosoms, beneath all their riotous luxuriance of
+verdant beauty, hidden fires, which ever and anon shake the solid
+earth and spread destruction. Storms without and earthquakes
+within--that is the condition of humanity. And where is the 'rest' to
+come from? All other defences are weak and poor. We have heard about
+'pills against earthquakes.' That is what the comforts and
+tranquillising which the world supplies may fairly be likened to.
+Unless we trust we are, and we shall be, and should be, 'troubled.'
+
+If we trust we may be quiet. Trust is always tranquillity. To cast a
+burden off myself on others' shoulders is always a rest. But trust in
+Jesus Christ brings infinitude on my side. Submission is repose. When
+we cease to kick against the pricks they cease to prick and wound us.
+Trust opens the heart, like the windows of the Ark tossing upon the
+black and fatal flood, for the entrance of the peaceful dove with the
+olive branch in its mouth. Trust brings Christ to my side in all His
+tenderness and greatness and sweetness. If I trust, 'all is right that
+seems most wrong.' If I trust, conscience is quiet. If I trust, life
+becomes 'a solemn scorn of ills.' If I trust, inward unrest is changed
+into tranquillity, and mad passions are cast out from him that sits
+'clothed and in his right mind' at the feet of Jesus.
+
+'The wicked is like the troubled sea which cannot rest.' But if I
+trust, my soul will become like the glassy ocean when all the storms
+sleep, and 'birds of peace sit brooding on the charmed wave.' 'Peace I
+leave with you.' 'Let not your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust
+also in Me.'
+
+Help us, O Lord! to yield our hearts to Thy dear Son, and in Him to
+find Thyself and eternal rest.
+
+
+
+
+'MANY MANSIONS'
+
+'In My Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would
+have told you.'--JOHN xiv. 2.
+
+Sorrow needs simple words for its consolation; and simple words are
+the best clothing for the largest truths. These eleven poor men were
+crushed and desolate at the thought of Christ's going; they fancied
+that if He left them they lost Him. And so, in simple, childlike
+words, which the weakest could grasp, and in which the most troubled
+could find peace, He said to them, after having encouraged their trust
+in Him, 'There is plenty of room for you as well as for Me where I am
+going; and the frankness of our intercourse in the past might make you
+sure that if I were going to leave you I would have told you all about
+it. Did I ever hide from you anything that was painful? Did I ever
+allure you to follow Me by false promises? Should I have kept silence
+about it if our separation was to be eternal?' So, simply, as a mother
+might hush her babe upon her breast, He soothes their sorrow. And yet,
+in the quiet words, so level to the lowest apprehension, there lie
+great truths, far deeper than we yet have appreciated, and which will
+enfold themselves in their majesty and their greatness through
+eternity. 'In My Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so,
+I would have told you.'
+
+I. Now note in these words, first, the 'Father's house,' and its ample
+room.
+
+There is only one other occasion recorded in which our Lord used this
+expression, and it occurs in this same Gospel near the beginning;
+where in the narrative of the first cleansing of the Temple we read
+that He said, 'Make not My Father's house a house of merchandise.' The
+earlier use of the words may help to throw light upon one aspect of
+this latter employment of it, for there blend in the image the two
+ideas of what I may call domestic familiarity, and of that great
+future as being the reality of which the earthly Temple was intended
+to be the dim prophecy and shadow. Its courts, its many chambers, its
+ample porches with room for thronging worshippers, represented in some
+poor way the wide sweep and space of that higher house; and the sense
+of Sonship, which drew the Boy to His Father's house in the earliest
+hours of conscious childhood, speaks here.
+
+Think for a moment of how sweet and familiar the conception of heaven
+as the Father's house makes it to us. There is something awful, even
+to the best and holiest souls, in the thought of even the glories
+beyond. The circumstances of death, which is its portal, our utter
+unacquaintance with all that lies behind the veil, the terrible
+silence and distance which falls upon our dearest ones as they are
+sucked into the cloud, all tend to make us feel that there is much
+that is solemn and awful even in the thought of eternal future
+blessedness. But how it is all softened when we say, 'My Father's
+house.' Most of us have long since left behind us the sweet security,
+the sense of the absence of all responsibility, the assurance of
+defence and provision, which used to be ours when we lived as children
+in a father's house here. But we may all look forward to the renewal,
+in far nobler form, of these early days, when the father's house meant
+the inexpugnable fortress where no evil could befall us, the abundant
+home where all wants were supplied, and where the shyest and timidest
+child could feel at ease and secure. It is all coming again, brother,
+and amidst the august and unimaginable glories of that future the old
+feeling of being little children, nestling safe in the Father's house,
+will fill our quiet hearts once more.
+
+And then consider how the conception of that Future as the Father's
+house suggests answers to so many of our questions about the
+relationship of the inmates to one another. Are they to dwell isolated
+in their several mansions? Is that the way in which children in a home
+dwell with each other? Surely if He be the Father, and heaven be His
+house, the relation of the redeemed to one another must have in it
+more than all the sweet familiarity and unrestrained frankness which
+subsists in the families of earth. A solitary heaven would be but half
+a heaven, and would ill correspond with the hopes that inevitably
+spring from the representation of it as 'my Father's house.'
+
+But consider further that this great and tender name for heaven has
+its deepest meaning in the conception of it as a spiritual state of
+which the essential elements are the loving manifestation and presence
+of God as Father, the perfect consciousness of sonship, the happy
+union of all the children in one great family, and the derivation of
+all their blessedness from their Elder Brother.
+
+The earthly Temple, to which there is some allusion in this great
+metaphor, was the place in which the divine glory was manifested to
+seeking souls, though in symbol, yet also in reality, and the
+representation of our text blends the two ideas of the free, frank
+intercourse of the home and of the magnificent revelations of the Holy
+of holies. Under either aspect of the phrase, whether we think of 'my
+Father's house' as temple or as home, it sets before us, as the main
+blessedness and glory of heaven, the vision of the Father, the
+consciousness of sonship, and the complete union with Him. There are
+many subsidiary and more outward blessednesses and glories which shine
+dimly through the haze of metaphors and negations, by which alone a
+state of which we have no experience can be revealed to us; but these
+are secondary. The heaven of heaven is the possession of God the
+Father through the Son in the expanding spirits of His sons. The
+sovereign and filial position which Jesus Christ in His manhood
+occupies in that higher house, and which He shares with all those who
+by Him have received the adoption of sons, is the very heart and nerve
+of this great metaphor.
+
+But I think we must go a step further than that, and recognise that in
+the image there is inherent the teaching that that glorious future is
+not merely a state, but also a place. Local associations are not to be
+divorced from the words; and although we can say but little about such
+a matter, yet everything in the teaching of Scripture points to the
+thought that howsoever true it may be that the essence of heaven is
+condition, yet that also heaven has a local habitation, and is a place
+in the great universe of God. Jesus Christ has at this moment a human
+body, glorified. That body, as Scripture teaches us, is somewhere, and
+where He is there shall also His servant be. In the context He goes on
+to tell us that 'He goes to prepare a place for us,' and though I
+would not insist upon the literal interpretation of such words, yet
+distinctly the drift of the representation is in the direction of
+localising, though not of materialising, the abode of the blessed. So
+I think we can say, not merely that _what_ He is that shall also His
+servants be, but that _where_ He is there shall also His servants be.
+And from the representation of my text, though we cannot fathom all
+its depths, we can at least grasp this, which gives solidity and
+reality to our contemplations of the future, that heaven is a place,
+full of all sweet security and homelike repose, where God is made
+known in every heart and to every consciousness as a loving Father,
+and of which all the inhabitants are knit together in the frankest
+fraternal intercourse, conscious of the Father's love, and rejoicing
+in the abundant provisions of His royal House.
+
+And then there is a second thought to be suggested from these words,
+and that is of the ample room in this great house. The original
+purpose of the words of my text, as I have already reminded you, was
+simply to soothe the fears of a handful of disciples.
+
+There was room where Christ went for eleven poor men. Yes, room enough
+for them! but Christ's prescient eye looked down the ages, and saw all
+the unborn millions that would yet be drawn to Him uplifted on the
+Cross, and some glow of satisfaction flitted across His sorrow, as He
+saw from afar the result of the impending travail of His soul in the
+multitudes by whom God's heavenly house should yet be filled. 'Many
+mansions!' the thought widens out far beyond our grasp. Perhaps that
+upper room, like most of the roof-chambers in Jewish houses, was open
+to the skies, and whilst He spoke, the innumerable lights that blaze
+in that clear heaven shone down upon them, and He may have pointed to
+these. The better Abraham perhaps looked forth, like His prototype, on
+the starry heavens, and saw in the vision of the future those who
+through Him should receive the 'adoption of sons' and dwell for ever
+in the house of the Lord, 'so many as the stars of the sky in
+multitude, and as the sand which is by the seashore innumerable.'
+
+Ah! brethren, if we could only widen our measurement of the walls of
+the New Jerusalem to the measurement of that 'golden rod which the
+man, that is the angel,' as John says, applied to it, we should
+understand how much bigger it is than any of these poor sects and
+communities of ours here on earth. If we would lay to heart, as we
+ought to do, the deep meaning of that indefinite 'many' in my text, it
+would rebuke our narrowness. There will be a great many occupants of
+the mansions in heaven that Christian men here on earth--the most
+Catholic of them--will be very much surprised to see there, and
+thousands will find their entrance there that never found their
+entrance into any communities of so-called Christians here on earth.
+
+That one word 'many' should deepen our confidence in the triumphs of
+Christ's Cross, and it may be used to heighten our own confidence as
+to our own poor selves. A chamber in the great Temple waits for each
+of us, and the question is, Shall we occupy it, or shall we not? The
+old Rabbis had a tradition which, like a great many of their
+apparently foolish sayings, covers in picturesque guise a very deep
+truth. They said that, however many the throngs of worshippers who
+came up to Jerusalem at the passover, the streets of the city and the
+courts of the sanctuary were never crowded. And so it is with that
+great city. There is room for all. There are throngs, but no crowds.
+Each finds a place in the ample sweep of the Father's house, like some
+of the great palaces that barbaric Eastern kings used to build, in
+whose courts armies might encamp, and the chambers of which were
+counted by the thousand. And surely in all that ample accommodation,
+you and I may find some corner where we, if we will, may lodge for
+evermore.
+
+I do not dwell upon subsidiary ideas that may be drawn from the
+expressions. 'Mansions' means places of permanent abode, and suggests
+the two thoughts, so sweet to travellers and toilers in this fleeting,
+labouring life, of unchangeableness and of repose. Some have supposed
+that the variety in the attainments of the redeemed, which is
+reasonable and scriptural, might be deduced from our text, but that
+does not seem to be relevant to our Lord's purpose.
+
+One other suggestion may be made without enlarging upon it. There is
+only one other occasion in this Gospel in which the word here
+translated 'mansions' is employed, and it is this: 'We will come and
+make our abode with him.' Our mansion is in God; God's dwelling-place
+is in us. So ask yourselves, Have you a place in that heavenly home?
+When prodigal children go away from the father's house, sometimes a
+broken-hearted parent will keep the boy's room just as it used to be
+when he was young and pure, and will hope and weary through long days
+for him to come back and occupy it again. God is keeping a room for
+you in His house; do you see that you fill it.
+
+II. In the next place, note here the sufficiency of Christ's
+revelation for our needs.
+
+'If it were not so I would have told you.' He sets Himself forward in
+very august fashion as being the Revealer and Opener of that house for
+us. There is a singular tone about all our Lord's few references to
+the future--a tone of decisiveness; not as if He were speaking, as a
+man might do, that which he had thought out, or which had come to him,
+but as if He was speaking of what he had Himself beheld, 'We speak
+that we do know, and testify that we have seen.' He stands like one on
+a mountain top, looking down into the valleys beyond, and telling His
+comrades in the plain behind Him what He sees. He speaks of that
+unseen world always as One who had been in it, and who was reporting
+experiences, and not giving forth opinions. His knowledge was the
+knowledge of One who dwelt with the Father, and left the house in
+order to find and bring back His wandering brethren. It was 'His own
+calm home, His habitation from eternity,' and therefore He could tell
+us with decisiveness, with simplicity, with assurance, all which we
+need to know about the geography of that unknown land--the plan of
+that, by us unvisited, house. Very remarkable, therefore, is it, that
+with this tone there should be such reticence in Christ's references
+to the future. The text implies the _rationale_ of such reticence. 'If
+it were not so I would have told you.' I tell you all that you need,
+though I tell you a great deal less than you sometimes wish.
+
+The gaps in our knowledge of the future, seeing that we have such a
+Revealer as we have in Christ, are remarkable. But my text suggests
+this to us--we have as much as we need. _I_ know, and many of _you_
+know, by bitter experience, how many questions, the answers to which
+would seem to us to be such a lightening of our burdens, our desolated
+and troubled hearts suggest about that future, and how vainly we ply
+heaven with questions and interrogate the unreplying Oracle. But we
+know as much as we need. We know that God is there. We know that it is
+the Father's house. We know that Christ is in it. We know that the
+dwellers there are a family. We know that sweet security and ample
+provision are there; and, for the rest, if we I needed to have heard
+more, He would have told us.
+
+    'My knowledge of that life is small,
+    The eye of faith is dim;
+    But 'tis enough that Christ knows all;
+    And I shall be with Him.'
+
+Let the gaps remain. The gaps are part of the revelation, and we know
+enough for faith and hope.
+
+May we not widen the application of that thought to other matters than
+to our bounded and fragmentary conceptions of a future life? In times
+like the present, of doubt and unrest, it is a great piece of
+Christian wisdom to recognise the limitations of our knowledge and the
+sufficiency of the fragments that we have. What do we get a revelation
+for? To solve theological puzzles and dogmatic difficulties? to
+inflate us with the pride of _quasi_-omniscience? or to present to us
+God in Christ for faith, for love, for obedience, for imitation?
+Surely the latter, and for such purposes we have enough.
+
+So let us recognise that our knowledge is very partial. A great
+stretch of wall is blank, and there is not a window in it. If there
+had been need for one, it would have been struck out. He has been
+pleased to leave many things obscure, not arbitrarily, so as to try
+our faith--for the implication of the words before us is that the
+relation between Him and us binds Him to the utmost possible
+frankness, and that all which we need and He can tell us He does
+tell--but for high reasons, and because of the very conditions of our
+present environment, which forbid the more complete and all-round
+knowledge.
+
+So let us recognise our limitations. We know in part, and we are wise
+if we affirm in part. Hold by the Central Light, which is Jesus
+Christ. 'Many things did Jesus which are not written in this book,'
+and many gaps and deficiencies from a human point of view exist in the
+contexture of revelation. 'But these are written that ye may believe
+that Jesus is the Christ,' for which enough has been told us, 'and
+that, believing, ye may have life in His name.' If that purpose be
+accomplished in us, God will not have spoken, nor we have heard, in
+vain. Let us hold by the Central Light, and then the circumference of
+darkness will gradually retreat, and a wider sphere of illumination be
+ours, until the day when we enter our mansion in the Father's house,
+and then 'in Thy Light shall we see light'; and we shall 'know even as
+we are known.'
+
+Let your Elder Brother lead you back, dear friend, to the Father's
+bosom, and be sure that if you trust Him and listen to Him, you will
+know enough on earth to turn earth into a foretaste of Heaven, and
+will find at last your place in the Father's house beside the Brother
+who has prepared it for you.
+
+
+
+
+THE FORERUNNER
+
+'... I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place
+for you, I will come again, and receive you unto Myself; that where I
+am, there ye may be also.'--JOHN xiv. 2, 3.
+
+What divine simplicity and depth are in these words! They carry us up
+into the unseen world, and beyond time; and yet a little child can lay
+hold on them, and mourning hearts and dying men find peace and
+sweetness in them. A very familiar image underlies them. It was
+customary for travellers in those old days to send some of their party
+on in advance, to find lodging and make arrangements for them in some
+great city. Many a time one or other of the disciples had been 'sent
+before His face into every place where He Himself should come.' On
+that very morning two of them had gone in, at His bidding, from
+Bethany to make ready the table at which they were sitting. Christ
+here takes that office upon Himself. The emblem is homely, the thing
+meant is transcendent.
+
+Not less wonderful is the blending of majesty and lowliness. The
+office which He takes upon Himself is that of an inferior and a
+servant. And yet the discharge of it, in the present case, implies His
+authority over every corner of the universe, His immortal life, and
+the sufficiency of His presence to make a heaven. Nor can we fail to
+notice the blending of another pair of opposites: His certainty of His
+impending death, and His certainty, notwithstanding and thereby, of
+His continual work and His final return, are inseparably interlaced
+here. How comes it that, in all His premonitions of His death, Jesus
+Christ never spoke about it as failure or as the interruption or end
+of His activity, but always as the transition to, and the condition
+of, His wider work? 'I go, and if I go I return, and take you to
+Myself.'
+
+So, then, there are three things here, the departure with its purpose,
+the return, and the perfected union.
+
+I. The Departure.
+
+Our Lord's going away from that little group was a journey in two
+stages. Calvary was the first; Olivet was the second. He means by the
+phrase the whole continuous process which begins with His death and
+ends in His ascension. Both are embraced in His words, and each
+co-operates to the attainment of the great purpose.
+
+He prepares a place for us by His death. The High Priest, in the
+ancient ritual, once a year was privileged to lift the heavy veil and
+pass into the darkened chamber, where only the light between the
+cherubim was visible, because he bore in his hand the blood of the
+sacrifice. But in our New Testament system the path into 'the holiest
+of all,' the realisation of the most intimate fellowship with heavenly
+things and communion with God Himself, are made possible, and the way
+patent for every foot, because Jesus has died. And as the communion
+upon earth, so the perfecting of the communion in the heavens. Who of
+us could step within those awful sanctities, or stand serene amidst
+the region of eternal light and stainless purity, unless, in His
+death, He had borne the sins of the world, and, having 'overcome' its
+'sharpness' by enduring its blow, had 'opened the Kingdom of Heaven to
+all believers'?
+
+Old legends tell us of magic gates that resisted all attempts to force
+them, but upon which, if one drop of a certain blood fell, they flew
+open. And so, by His death, Christ has opened the gates and made the
+heaven of perfect purity a dwelling-place for sinful men.
+
+But the second stage of His departure is that which more eminently is
+in Christ's mind here. He prepares a place for us by His entrance into
+and His dwelling in the heavenly places. The words are obscure because
+we have but few others with which to compare them, and no experience
+by which to interpret them. We know so little about the matter that it
+is not wise to say much; but though there be vast tracts of darkness
+round the little spot of light, this should only make the spot of
+light more vivid and more precious. We know little, but we know enough
+for mind and heart to rest upon. Our ignorance of the ways in which
+Christ by His ascension prepares a heaven for His followers should
+neither breed doubt nor disregard of His assurance that He does.
+
+If Christ had not ascended, would there have been 'a place' at all? He
+has gone with a human body, which, glorified as it is, still has
+relations to space, and must be somewhere. And we may even say that
+His ascending up on high has made a place where His servants are. But
+apart from that suggestion, which, perhaps, is going beyond our
+limits, we may see that Christ's presence in heaven is needful to make
+it a heaven for poor human souls. There, as here (Scripture assures
+us), and throughout eternity as to-day, Jesus Christ is the Mediator
+of all human knowledge and possession of God. It is from Him and
+through Him that there come to men, whether they be men on earth or
+men in the heavens, all that they know, all that they hope, all that
+they enjoy, of the wisdom, love, beauty, peace, power, which flow from
+God. Take away from the heaven of the Christian expectation that which
+comes to the spirit through Jesus Christ, and you have nothing left.
+He and His mediation and ministration alone make the brightness and
+the blessedness of that high state. The very glories of all that lies
+beyond the veil would have an aspect appalling and bewildering to us,
+unless our Brother were there. Like some poor savages brought into a
+great city, or rustics into the presence of a king and his court, we
+should be ill at ease amidst the glories and solemnities of that
+future life unless we saw standing there our Kinsman, to whom we can
+turn, and who makes it possible for us to feel that it is home.
+Christ's presence makes heaven the home of our hearts.
+
+Not only did He go to prepare a place, but He is continuously
+preparing it for us all through the ages. We have to think of a double
+form of the work of Christ, His past work in His earthly life, and His
+present in His exaltation. We have to think of a double form of His
+present activity--His work with and in us here on earth, and His work
+for us there in the heavens. We have to think of a double form of His
+work in the heavens--that which the Scripture represents in a
+metaphor, the full comprehension of which surpasses our present powers
+and experiences, as being His priestly intercession; and that which my
+text represents in a metaphor, perhaps a little more level to our
+apprehension, as being His preparing a place for us. Behind the veil
+there is a working Christ, who, in the heavens, is preparing a place
+for all that love Him.
+
+II. In the next place, note the Return.
+
+The purpose of our Lord's departure, as set forth by Himself here,
+guarantees for us His coming back again. That is the force of the
+simple argumentation of my text, and of the pathetic and soothing
+repetition of the sweet words, 'I go to prepare a place for you; and
+if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you
+unto Myself.' Because the departure had for its purpose the preparing
+of the place, therefore it is necessarily followed by a return. He who
+went away as the Forerunner has not done His work until He comes back,
+and, as Guide, leads those for whom He had prepared the place to the
+place which He had prepared for them.
+
+Now that return of our Lord, like His departure, may be considered as
+having two stages. Unquestionably the main meaning and application of
+the words is to that final and personal coming which stands at the end
+of history, and to which the hopes of every Christian soul ought to be
+steadfastly directed. He will 'so come in like manner as' He has gone.
+We are not to water down such words as these into anything short of a
+return precisely corresponding in its method to the departure; and as
+the departure was visible, corporeal, literal, personal, and local, so
+the return is to be visible, corporeal, literal, personal, local too.
+He is to come as He went, a visible Manhood, only throned amongst the
+clouds of heaven with power and great glory. This is the aim that He
+sets before Him in His departure. He leaves in order that He may come
+back again.
+
+And, oh, dear friends! remember--and let us live in the strength of
+the remembrance--that this return ought to be the prominent subject of
+Christian aspiration and desire. There is much about the conception of
+that solemn return, with all the convulsions that attend it, and the
+judgment of which it is preliminary, that may well make men's hearts
+chill within them. But for you and me, if we have any love in our
+hearts and loyalty in our spirits to that King, 'His coming' should be
+'prepared as the _morning_,' and we should join in the great burst of
+rapture of many a psalm, which calls upon rocks and hills to break
+forth into singing, and trees of the field to clap their hands,
+because He cometh as the King to judge the earth. His own parable
+tells us how we ought to regard His coming. When the fig-tree's branch
+begins to supple, and the little leaves to push their way through the
+polished stem, then we know that summer is at hand. His coming should
+be as the approach of that glorious, fervid time, in which the
+sunshine has tenfold brilliancy and power, the time of ripened
+harvests and matured fruits, the time of joy for all creatures that
+love the sun. It should be the glad hope of all His servants.
+
+We have a double witness to bear in the midst of this as of every
+generation. One half of the witness stretches backwards to the Cross,
+and proclaims 'Christ has come'; the other reaches onwards to the
+Throne, and proclaims 'Christ will come.' Between these two high
+uplifted piers swings the chain of the world's history, which closes
+with the return, to judge and to save, of the Lord who came to die and
+has gone to prepare a place for us.
+
+But do not let us forget that we may well take another point of view
+than this. Scripture knows of many comings of the Lord preliminary to,
+and in principle one with, His last coming. For nations all great
+crises of their history are 'comings of the Lord,' the Judge, and we
+are strictly in the line of Scripture analogy when, in reference to
+individuals, we see in each single death a true coming of the Lord.
+
+That is the point of view in which we ought to look upon a Christian's
+death-bed. 'The Master _is come_, and calleth for thee.' Beyond all
+secondary causes, deeper than disease or accident, lies the loving
+will of Him who is the Lord of life and of death. Death is Christ's
+minister, 'mighty and beauteous, though his face be dark,' and he,
+too, stands amidst the ranks of the 'ministering spirits sent forth to
+minister to them that shall be heirs of salvation.' It is Christ that
+says of one, 'I will that this man tarry,' and to another, 'Go!' and
+he goeth. But whensoever a Christian man lies down to die, Christ
+says, 'Come!' and he comes. How that thought should hallow the
+death-chamber as with the print of the Master's feet! How it should
+quiet our hearts and dry our tears! How it should change the whole
+aspect of that 'shadow feared of man'! With Him for our companion, the
+lonely road will not be dreary; and though in its anticipation, our
+timid hearts may often be ready to say, 'Surely the darkness shall
+cover me,' if we have Him by our sides, 'even the night shall be light
+about us.' The dying martyr beneath the city wall lifted up his face
+to the heavens, and said, 'Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!' It was the
+echo of the Master's promise, 'I will come again, and receive you to
+Myself.'
+
+III. Lastly, notice the Perfected Union.
+
+The departure for such a purpose necessarily involved the return
+again. Both are stages in the process, which is perfected by complete
+union--'That where I am there ye may be also.'
+
+Christ, as I have been saying, is Heaven. His presence is all that we
+need for peace, for joy, for purity, for rest, for love, for growth.
+To be 'with Him,' as He tells us in another part of these wonderful
+last words in the upper chamber, is to 'behold His glory.' And to
+behold His glory, as John tells us in his Epistle, is to be like Him.
+So Christ's presence means the communication to us of all the lustre
+of His radiance, of all the whiteness of His purity, of all the depth
+of His blessedness, and of a share in His wondrous dominion. His
+glorified manhood will pass into ours, and they that are with Him
+where He is will rest as in the centre and home of their spirits, and
+find Him all-sufficient. His presence is my Heaven.
+
+That is almost all we know. Oh! it is more than all we need to know.
+The curtain is the picture. It is because what is there transcends in
+glory all our present experience that Scripture can only hint at it
+and describe it by negations--such as 'no night,' 'no sorrow,' 'no
+tears,' 'former things passed away'; and by symbols of glory and
+lustre gathered from all that is loftiest and noblest in human
+buildings and society. But all these are but secondary and poor. The
+living heart of the hope, and the lambent centre of the brightness,
+is, 'So shall we ever be with the Lord.'
+
+And it is enough. It is enough to make the bond of union between us in
+the outer court and them in the holy place. Parted friends will fix to
+look at the same star at the same moment of the night and feel some
+union; and if we from amidst the clouds of earth, and they from amidst
+the pure radiance of their heaven, turn our eyes to the same Christ,
+we are not far apart. If He be the companion of each of us, He reaches
+a hand to each, and, clasping it, the parted ones are united; and
+'whether we wake or sleep we live _together_,' because we both live
+with Him.
+
+Brother! Is Jesus Christ so much to you that a heaven which consists
+in nearness and likeness to Him has any attraction for you? Let Him be
+your Saviour, your Sacrifice, your Helper, your Companion. Obey Him as
+your King, love Him as your Friend, trust Him as your All. And be sure
+that then the darkness will be but the shadow of His hand, and instead
+of dreading death as that which separates you from life and love and
+action and joy, you will be able to meet it peacefully, as that which
+rends the thin veil, and unites you with Him who is the Heaven of
+heavens.
+
+He has gone to prepare a place for us. And if we will let Him, He will
+prepare us for the place, and then come and lead us thither. 'Thou
+wilt show me the path of life' which leads through death. 'In Thy
+presence is fullness of joy, and at Thy right hand there are pleasures
+for evermore.'
+
+
+
+
+THE WAY
+
+'And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know. Thomas saith unto Him,
+Lord, we know not whither Thou goest; and how can we know the way?
+Jesus saith unto him, I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life: no man
+cometh unto the Father, but by Me. If ye had known Me, ye should have
+known My Father also: and from henceforth ye know Him, and have seen
+Him.'--JOHN xiv. 4-7.
+
+Our Lord has been speaking of His departure, of its purpose, of His
+return as guaranteed by that purpose, and of His servants' eternal and
+perfect reunion with Him. But even these cheering and calming thoughts
+do not exhaust His consolations, as they did not satisfy all the
+disciples' needs. They might still have said, 'Yes; we believe that
+You will come back again, and we believe that we shall be together;
+but what about the parenthesis of absence?' And here is the answer, or
+at least part of it: 'Whither I go ye know, and the way ye know'; or,
+if we adopt the shortened form which the Revised Version gives us,
+'Whither I go ye know the way.'
+
+When you say to a man, 'You know the way,' you mean 'Come.' And in
+these words there lie, as it seems to me, a veiled invitation to the
+disciples to come to Him before He came back for them, and the
+assurance that they, though separated, might still find and tread the
+road to the Father's house, and so be with Him still. They are not
+left desolate. The Christ who is absent is present as the path to
+Himself. And so the parenthesis is bridged across. Now in these verses
+we have several large and important lessons which I think may best be
+drawn by simply seeking to follow their course.
+
+I. Observe the disciples' unconscious knowledge.
+
+Jesus Christ says: 'Ye know the way and ye know the goal.' One of them
+ventures flatly to contradict Him, and to traverse both assertions
+with a brusque and thorough-going negative. 'We do _not_ know whither
+Thou goest,' says Thomas; 'how can we know the way?' He is the same
+man in this conversation that we find him in the interview before our
+Lord's journey to raise Lazarus, and in the interview after our Lord's
+resurrection. In all three cases he appears as mainly under the
+dominion of sense, as slow to apprehend anything beyond its limits, as
+morbidly melancholy and disposed to take the blackest possible view of
+things--a practical pessimist--and yet with a certain kind of frank
+outspokenness which half redeems the other characteristics from blame.
+He could not understand all the Lord's deep words just spoken. His
+mind was befogged and dimmed, and he blurts out his ignorance, knowing
+that the best place to carry it to is to the Illuminator who can make
+it light.
+
+'We know not whither Thou goest, and how can we know the way?' Was
+Jesus right? was Thomas right? or were they both right? The fact is
+that Thomas and all his fellows knew, after a fashion, but they did
+not know that they knew. They had heard much in the past as to where
+Christ was going. Plainly enough it had been rung in their ears over
+and over again. It had made some kind of lodgment in their heads, and,
+in that sense, they did know. It is this unused and unconscious
+knowledge of theirs to which Christ appeals, and which He tries to
+draw out into consciousness and power when He says, 'You know whither
+I am going, and you know the road.' Is not that exactly what a patient
+teacher will do with some flustered child when he says to it: 'Take
+time! You know it well enough if you will only think'? So the Master
+says here: 'Do not be agitated and troubled in heart. Reflect,
+remember, overhaul your stores, and think what I have told you over
+and over again, and you will find that you _do_ know whither I am
+going, and that you _do_ know the way.'
+
+The patient gentleness of the Master with the slowness of the scholars
+is beautifully exemplified here, as is also the method, which He
+lovingly and patiently adopts, of sending men back to consult their
+own consciousness as illuminated by His teaching, and to see whether
+there is not lying somewhere, unrecked of and unemployed in some dusty
+corner of their mind, a truth that only needs to be dragged out and
+cleaned in order to show itself for what it is, the all-sufficient
+light and strength for the moment's need.
+
+The dialogue is an instance of what is true about us all, that we have
+in our possession truths given to us by Jesus Christ, the whole sweep
+and bearing of which, the whole majesty and power and illuminating
+capacity of which, we do not dream of yet. How much in our creeds lies
+dim and undeveloped! Time and circumstances and some sore agony of
+spirit are needed in order to make us realise the riches that we
+possess, and the certitudes to which our troubled spirits may cling;
+and the practice of far more patient, honest, profound meditation and
+reflection than finds favour with the average Christian man is needed,
+too, in order that the truths possessed may be possessed, and that we
+may know what we know, and understand 'the things that are given to us
+of God.'
+
+In all your creeds, there are large tracts that you, in some kind of a
+fashion, do believe; and yet they have no vitality in your
+consciousness nor power in your lives. And the Master here does with
+these disciples exactly what He is trying to do day by day with us,
+namely, fling us back on ourselves, or rather upon His revelation in
+us, and get us to fathom its depths and to walk round about its
+magnitudes, and so to understand the things that we say we believe.
+
+All our knowledge is ignorance. Ignorance that confesses itself to Him
+is in the way of becoming knowledge. His light will touch the smoke
+and change it into red spires of flame. If you do not know, go to Him
+and say, 'Lord! I do not.' An accurate understanding of where the
+darkness lies is the first step to the light. We are meant to carry
+all our inadequate and superficial realisations of His truth into His
+presence, that, from Him, we may gain deeper knowledge, a firmer
+faith, and a more joyous certitude in His inexhaustible lessons. In
+every article and item of the Christian faith there is a transcendent
+element which surpasses our present comprehension. Let us be confident
+that the light will break; and let us welcome the new illumination
+when it comes, sure that it comes from God. Be not puffed up with the
+conceit that you know all. Be sure of this, that, according to the
+good old metaphor, we are but as children on the shore of the great
+ocean, gathering a few of the shells that it has washed to our feet,
+itself stretching boundless, and, thank God, sunlit, before us. 'Ye
+know the way.' 'Master, we know not the way.'
+
+II. Observe here, in the second place, our Lord's great
+self-revelation which meets this unconscious knowledge.
+
+'Jesus saith unto him: I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no man
+cometh unto the Father but by Me.' Now it is quite plain, I think,
+from the whole strain of the context and the purpose of these words
+that the main idea in them is the first--'I am the Way.' And that is
+made more certain because of the last words of the verse, which,
+summing up the force of the three preceding assertions, dwell only
+upon the metaphor of the Way; 'No man cometh unto the Father but by
+Me.' So that of these three great words, the Way, the Truth, the Life,
+we are to regard the second and the third as explanatory of the first.
+They are not co-ordinate, but the first is the more general, and the
+other two show how the first comes to be true. 'I am the Way' because
+'I am the Truth and the Life.'
+
+There are no words of the Master, perhaps, to which my previous
+remarks are more necessary to be applied than these. We know; and yet
+oh! what an overplus of glory and of depth is here that we do not know
+and never can know. The most fragmentary and inadequate grasp of them
+with heart and mind will bring light to the mind and quietness and
+peace to the heart; but the whole meaning of them goes beyond men and
+angels. We can only skim the surface and seek to shift back the
+boundaries of our knowledge a little further, and to embrace within
+its limits a little more of the broad land into which the words bring
+us. So just take a thought or two which may tend in that direction.
+
+Note, then, as belonging to all three of these clauses that remarkable
+'_I am_.' We show a way, Christ _is_ it. We speak truth, Christ _is_
+it. Parents impart life, which they have received, Christ _is_ Life.
+He separates Himself from all men by that representation that He is
+not merely the communicator or the teacher or the guide, but that He
+Himself is, in His own personal Being, Way, Truth, Life. He said that,
+when Calvary was within arm's-length. What did He think about Himself,
+and what should we think of Him?
+
+And then note, further, that He sets forth His unique relation to the
+truth as being one ground on which He is the Way to God. He _is_ the
+Truth in reference to the divine nature. That Truth, then, is not a
+mere matter of words. It is not only His speech that teaches us, but
+Himself that shows us God. His whole life and character, His
+personality, are the true representation within human conditions of
+the Invisible God; and when He says, 'I am the Way and the Truth,' He
+is saying substantially the same thing as the great prologue of this
+Gospel says when it calls Him the Word and the Light of men, and as
+Paul says when he names Him 'the Image of the Invisible God.' There is
+all the difference between talking about God and showing Him. Men
+reveal God by their words; Christ reveals Him by Himself and the facts
+of His life. The truest and highest representation of the divine
+nature that men can ever have is in the face of Jesus Christ.
+
+I need only remind you in a sentence about other and lower
+applications of this great saying, which do not, as I think, enter
+into the purpose of the context. He is the Truth, inasmuch as, in the
+life and historical manifestation of Jesus Christ as recorded in the
+Scriptures, men find foundation truths of a moral and spiritual sort.
+'Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are noble, whatsoever
+things are lovely and of good report,' He is these, and all true
+ethics is but the formulating into principles of all the facts of the
+life and character of Jesus Christ.
+
+Further, my text says He is the Way because He is the Life. On the one
+side God is brought to all hearts, and in some real sense to our
+comprehension, by the life of Jesus Christ, and so He is the Way. But
+that is not enough. There must be an action upon us as well as an
+action having reference to the divine nature. God is brought to men by
+the manifestation in Christ; and we, the dead, are quickened by the
+communication of the Life. The one phrase points to all His work as a
+Revealer, the other points to all His work upon us as life-giving
+Spirit, a Quickener and an Inspirer. Dead men cannot walk a road. It
+is of no use to make a path if it starts from a cemetery. Christ
+taught that men apart from Him are dead, and that the only life that
+they can have by which they can be knit to God is the divine life
+which was in Himself, and of which He is the source and the principle
+for the whole world. He does not tell us here what yet is true, and
+what He abundantly tells in other parts of this great conversation,
+that the only way by which the life which He brings can be diffused
+and communicated is by His death. 'Except a corn of wheat fall into
+the ground and die, it abideth alone.' He is the Life, and--paradox of
+mystery and yet fact which is the very heart and centre of His
+Gospel--His only way of giving His life to us is by giving up His
+physical life for us. He must die that He may be the life-spring for
+the world. The alabaster box must be broken if the ointment and its
+fragrance are to be poured out; and 'death is the gate of life' in a
+deeper than the ordinary sense of the saying, inasmuch as the death of
+the Life which is Christ is the life of the death which we are.
+
+And so, because, on the one hand, He brings a God to our hearts that
+we can love and trust, and because, on the other, He communicates to
+our spirits, dead in the only true death which is the separation from
+God by sin, the life by which we are knit to God, He is the Way to the
+Father.
+
+And what about people that never heard of Him, to whom that Way has
+been closed, to whom that Truth has never been manifested, to whom
+that Life has never been brought? Ah! Christ has other ways of working
+than through His historical manifestation, for there is no truth more
+plainly taught in this great fourth Gospel than this, that that Light
+'lighteth every man that cometh into the world.' The eternal Word
+works through all the earth, in ways beyond our ken, and wherever any
+man has, however imperfectly, felt after and grasped the thought of a
+Father in the heavens, there the Word, which is the Light of men, has
+wrought.
+
+But for us to whom this Book has come, for what people call in bitter
+irony 'Christendom,' the law of my text rigidly applies, and it is
+being worked out all round us to-day. 'No man cometh unto the Father
+but by Me.' And here we are, in this England of ours, and in our
+sister nations on the continent of Europe and in America, face to face
+as I believe with this alternative--either Jesus Christ the Revealer
+of God and the Life of men, or an empty Heaven. And for you,
+individually, it is either--take Christ for the Way, or wander in the
+wilderness and forget your Father. It is either--take Christ for the
+Truth, or be given over to the insufficiencies of mere natural,
+political, and intellectual truths, and the shows and illusions of
+time and sense. It is either--take Christ for your Life, or remain in
+your deadness, separate from God.
+
+III. Lastly, we have here the disciples' ignorance and the new vision
+which dispels it.
+
+'If ye had known Me, ye should have known My Father also, and from
+henceforth ye know Him, and have seen Him.' Our Lord accepts for the
+moment Thomas's standpoint. He supplements His former allegation of
+the disciples' knowledge with the admission of the ignorance which
+went with it as its shadow, and was only too sadly and plainly shown
+by their failure to discern in Him the manifestation of the Father. He
+has just told them that they did know what they thought they knew not;
+He now tells them that they did not know what they thought they knew
+so well, after so many years of companionship--even Himself. The proof
+that they did not is that they did not know the Father as revealed in
+Him, nor Him as revealing the Father. If they missed that, they missed
+everything; and for all they had known of His graciousness, were
+strangers to His truest Self. Their ignorance would turn out
+knowledge, if they would think, and their supposed knowledge would
+turn out ignorance.
+
+The lesson for us is that the true test of the completeness and worth
+of our knowledge of Christ lies in its being knowledge of God the
+Father, brought near to us by Him. This saying puts a finger on the
+radical deficiency of all merely humanitarian views of Christ's
+person, however clearly they may see and admiringly extol the beauty
+of His character and the 'sweet reasonableness' of His wisdom. They
+all break down here, and are arraigned as so shallow and incomplete
+that they do not deserve to be called knowledge of Him at all. If you
+know anything about Jesus Christ rightly, this is what you know about
+Him, that in Him you see God. If you have not seen God in Him, you
+have not got to the heart of the mystery. The knowledge of Christ
+which stops with the Man and the Martyr, and the Teacher and the
+beautiful, gentle Brother, is knowledge so partial that even He cannot
+venture to call it other than ignorance. Oh! brethren, do our
+conceptions of Him meet this test which He Himself has laid down, and
+can we say that, seeing Him, we see in Him God?
+
+And then our Lord passes on to another thought, the new vision which
+at the moment was being granted to this unconscious ignorance that was
+passing into conscious knowledge. 'From henceforth ye know Him and
+have seen Him.' We must give that 'from henceforth,' as a note of
+time, a somewhat liberal interpretation, and apply it to the whole
+series of utterances and deeds of which the words of our text are but
+a portion. And, if so, we come to this--it was in the wisdom, and the
+gentleness, and the deep truths of that upper chamber; it was in the
+agony and submission of Gethsemane; it was in the meek patience before
+the judges, and the silent acceptance of ignominy and shame; it was in
+the willing, loving endurance of the long hours upon the Cross, that
+Christ inaugurated the new stage in His revelation of God and in His
+life-giving to the world. And it is from thenceforth and thereby that
+in the man Jesus, men know and see 'the Father' as they never did
+before. The Cross and the Passion of Christ are the unveiling to the
+world of the heart of God; and by the side of that new vision the
+fairest and the loftiest and the sweetest of Christ's former
+manifestations and utterances sink into comparative insignificance. It
+is the dying Christ that reveals the living God.
+
+So, dear friends, He is your way to God. See that ye seek the Father
+by Him alone. He is your Truth; grapple Him to your hearts, and by
+patient meditation and continual faithfulness enrich yourselves with
+all the communicated treasures that you have already received in Him.
+He is your Life; cleave to Him, that the quick Spirit that was in Him
+may pass into you and make you victors over all deaths, temporal and
+eternal. Know Him as a Friend, not as a mere historical person, or
+with mere head-knowledge, for to know a friend is something far deeper
+than to know a truth. 'Acquaint thyself with Him and be at peace.'
+'This is life eternal, to know,' with the knowledge which is life and
+possession, 'Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast
+sent.'
+
+
+
+
+THE TRUE VISION OF GOD
+
+'Philip saith unto Jesus, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth
+us. 9. Jesus saith unto Him, Have I been so long time with you, and
+yet hast thou not known Me, Philip? He that hath seen Me hath seen the
+Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew us the Father? Believest thou
+not that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me? The words that I
+speak unto you I speak not of Myself: but the Father, that dwelleth in
+Me, He doeth the works. Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the
+Father in Me: or else believe Me for the very works' sake.'--JOHN xiv.
+8-11.
+
+The vehement burst with which Philip interrupts the calm flow of our
+Lord's discourse is not the product of mere frivolity or curiosity.
+One hears the ring of earnestness in it, and the yearnings of many
+years find voice. Philip had felt out of his depth, no doubt, in the
+profound teachings which our Lord had been giving, but His last words
+about seeing God set a familiar chord vibrating. As an Old Testament
+believer he knew that Moses had once led the elders of Israel up to
+the mount where 'they saw the God of Israel,' and that to many others
+had been granted sensible manifestations of the divine presence. As a
+disciple he longed for some similar sign to confirm his faith. As a
+man he was conscious of the deep need which all of us have, whether we
+are conscious of it or not, for something more real and tangible than
+an unseeable and unknowable God. The peculiarities of Philip's
+temperament strengthened the desire. The first appearance that he
+makes in the Gospels is characteristically like this his last. To all
+Nathanael's objections he had only the reply, 'Come and see.' And here
+he says: 'Oh! if we could _see_ the Father it would be enough.' He was
+one of the men to whom seeing is believing, and so he speaks.
+
+His petition is childlike in its simplicity, beautiful in its trust,
+noble and true in its estimate of what men need. He longs to see God.
+He believes that Christ can show God; he is sure that the sight of God
+will satisfy the heart. These are errors, or truths, according to what
+is meant by 'seeing.' Philip meant a palpable manifestation, and so
+far he was wrong. Give the word its highest and its truest meaning,
+and Philip's error becomes grand truth. Our Lord gently, lovingly, and
+with only a hint of rebuke, answers the request, and seeks to
+disengage the error from the truth. His answer lies in the verses that
+we have read. Let us try to follow them, and, as we may, to skim their
+surface, for their depths are beyond us.
+
+First of all, then, we have the sight of God in Christ as enough to
+answer men's longings. There is a world of sadness and tenderness, of
+suppressed pain and of grieved affection, in the first words of our
+Lord's reply. 'Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou
+not known Me, Philip?' He seldom names His disciples. When He does,
+there is a deep cadence of affection in the designation. This man was
+one of the first disciples, the little original band called by Christ
+Himself, and thus had been with Him all the time of His ministry, and
+the Master wonders with a gentle wonder that, before eyes that loved
+Him as much as Philip's did, His continual self-revelation had been
+made to so little purpose. In the answer, in its first portion, there
+lies the reiteration of the thoughts that I was trying to dwell upon
+in the last sermon, which, therefore, I may lightly touch now--viz.,
+that the sight of Christ is the sight of God--'He that hath seen Me
+hath seen the Father'--and that not to know Christ as thus showing God
+is not to know Him at all--'Thou hast not known Me, Philip.' Further,
+there is the thought that the sight of God in Christ is sufficient,
+'How sayest thou, Shew us the Father?' From all this we may gather
+some thoughts on which I lightly touch.
+
+I. The first is, that we all do need to have God made visible to us.
+
+The history of heathendom shows us that, in every land men have said,
+'The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men.' And the
+highest cultivation of this highly cultivated and self-conscious
+twentieth century has not removed us from the same necessity that the
+rudest savage has, to have some kind of manifestation of the divine
+nature other than the dim and vague ones which are possible apart from
+the revelation of God in Christ. A God who is only the product of
+inferences from creation, or providence, or the mysteries of history,
+or the wonders of my own inner life, the creature of logic or of
+reflection, is very powerless to sway and influence men. The
+limitations of our faculties and the boundlessness of our hearts both
+cry out for a God who is nearer to us than that, and whom we can see
+and love and be sure of. The whole world wants the making visible of
+divinity as its deepest want. And _your_ heart and mind require it.
+Nothing else will ever stay our hunger, will ever answer our
+questioning minds.
+
+Christ meets this need. How can you make wisdom visible? How can a man
+see love or purity? How do I see your spirit? By the deeds of your
+body. And the only way by which God can ever come near enough to men
+to be a constant power and a constant motive in their lives is by
+their seeing Him at work in a Man, who amongst them is His image and
+revelation. Christ's whole life is the making visible of the invisible
+God. He is the manifestation to the world of the unseen Father.
+
+That vision is enough--enough for mind, enough for heart, enough for
+will. There is none else that is sufficient, but this is. 'How sayest
+thou, Shew us the Father?' If we can see God it suffices us. Then the
+mind settles down upon the thought of Him as the basis of all being,
+and of all change, and the heart can twine itself round Him, and the
+seeking soul folds its wings and is at rest, and the troubled spirit
+is quiet, and the accusing conscience is silent, and the rebellious
+will is subdued, and the stormy passions are quieted, and in the inner
+kingdom is a great peace. The sight of God in Christ brings rest to
+every heart, and, Oh! the absence of the vision is the true secret of
+all disquiet. We are troubled and careful, and tossed from one stormy
+billow to another, and swept over by all the winds that blow, because
+we see not God, our Father, in the face of Jesus. 'Show us the Father,
+and it sufficeth us,' is either a puerile petition, or the deepest and
+noblest prayer of the human heart. Blessed are they who have learned
+what it is to see, and know where that great sight is to be seen!
+
+Our present knowledge and vision are far higher than that mere
+external symbol of God which this man wanted. The elders of Israel saw
+the God of Israel, but what they saw was but some symbolical
+manifestation of that which in itself is unseen and unattainable. But
+we who see God in Christ see no symbol but the Reality, and there is
+nothing more possible or to be hoped for here. Our present
+manifestation and sight of God in Christ does fall, in some ways
+unknown to us, beneath the bright hopes that we are entitled to
+cherish. But howsoever imperfect it may be, as measured against the
+perfection of the vision when we shall see face to face, and know even
+as we are known, it is enough, and more than enough, for all the
+questionings and desires of our hungering spirits.
+
+II. Our Lord goes on to a further answer, and points to the divine and
+mutual indwelling by which this sight is made possible.
+
+'Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me? The
+words that I speak unto you, I speak not of Myself, but the Father
+that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works.' There are here, mainly, two
+things, Christ's claim to the oneness of unbroken communion, and
+Christ's claim, consequently, to the oneness of complete co-operation.
+'I am in the Father' indicates the suppression of all independent and
+therefore rebellious will, consciousness, thought and action; 'And the
+Father in Me' indicates the influx into that perfectly filial Manhood
+of the whole fullness of God in unbroken, continuous, gentle, deep
+flow. These are the two sides of this great mystery on which neither
+wisdom nor reverence lead us to dilate; and they combine to express
+the closest and most uninterrupted blending, interpenetration, and
+communion.
+
+And then follows the other claim, that because of this continuous
+mutual indwelling there is perfect cooperation. This is also stated in
+terms corresponding to the preceding double representation. 'The words
+that I speak unto you, I speak not of Myself,' corresponds to, 'I am
+in the Father.' 'The Father that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works,'
+corresponds to 'The Father in Me.' The two put together teach us this,
+that by reason of that mysterious and ineffable union of communion,
+Jesus Christ in all His words and in all His works is the perfect
+instrument of the divine will, so that His words are God's words, and
+His works are God's works; so that, when He speaks, His gentle wisdom,
+His loving sympathy, His melting tenderness, His authoritative
+commands, His prophetic threatenings, are the speech of God, and that
+when He acts, whether it be by miracle or in the ordinary deeds of His
+life, what we see is God working before our eyes as we never see Him
+in any human being.
+
+And from all this follow just two or three considerations which I
+name. Note the absolute absence of any consciousness on Christ's part
+of the smallest deflection or disharmony between Himself and the
+Father. Two triangles laid on each other are in every line, point, and
+angle absolutely coincident. That humanity is capable of receiving the
+whole inflow of God, and that indwelling God is perfectly expressed in
+the humanity. There is no trace of a consciousness of sin. Everything
+that Jesus Christ said He knew to be God's speaking; everything that
+He did He knew to be God's acting. There were no barriers between the
+two. Jesus Christ was conscious of no separation--not the thinnest
+film of air between these Two who adhered and inhered so closely and
+so continuously. It is an awful assertion.
+
+Now I pray you to ask yourselves the question: If this was what Christ
+said, what did He think of Himself? And is this a Man, like the rest
+of us, with blotches and sins, with failures to embody His own ideas,
+and still more to carry out in life the will that He knows to be God's
+will? Is this a man like other men who thus speaks to us? If Jesus had
+this consciousness, either He was ludicrously, tragically,
+blasphemously, utterly mistaken and untrustworthy, or He is what the
+Church in all ages has confessed Him to be, 'the Everlasting Son of
+the Father.'
+
+III. Lastly, our Lord further sets before us the faith to which He
+invites us on the ground of His union with, and revelation of, God.
+
+'Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me, or else
+believe Me for the very works' sake.' Observe that the verb at the
+beginning of this last verse of our text passes into a plural form.
+Our Lord has done with Philip especially, and speaks now to all who
+hear Him, and to us amongst the rest of His auditors. He bids us
+_believe_ Him, and believe something about Him on the strength of His
+own testimony, or, in default of that, and as second best, believe Him
+on the testimony of His works. I gather together what I have to say
+about this point into three remarks.
+
+The true bond of union between men and Jesus Christ is faith. We have
+to trust, and that is better than sight. We have to trust _Him_. He is
+the personal Object of our faith. In all faith there is what I may
+call a moral and a voluntary element. A man believes a proposition
+because it is forced upon him, and his intelligence is obliged to
+accept it. A man trusts Christ because he _will_ trust Him, and the
+moral and voluntary element carries us far beyond the mere
+intellectual conception of faith as the assent to a set of theological
+propositions. Faith really is the outgoing of the whole man--heart,
+will, intellect, and all--to a person whom it grasps. But the Christ
+that you and I have to trust is the Christ as He Himself has declared
+Himself to us. 'Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in
+Me.' There is a bastard, mutilated kind of thing that calls itself
+Christian faith, that goes about the world in this generation, which
+believes in Jesus Christ in all sorts of beautiful ways, but it will
+not believe in Him as the Personal Revelation and making visible of
+the unseen God. Jesus Christ Himself tells us here that that is not
+the kind of faith which He invites us to put forth. If we put forth
+that only, we have not yet come to understand Him. Oh, dear friends!
+Christ as here declared to us by Himself is the only Christ to whom it
+is right to give our trust. If He be not God manifest in the flesh, I
+ought not to trust Him. I may admire Him as a historical personage; I
+may reverence Him for His wisdom and beauty; I may even in some vague
+way have a kind of love to Him. But what in the name of common sense
+shall I trust Him for? And why should He call upon me to exercise
+faith in Him unless He stand before me as the adequate Object of a
+man's trust--namely, the manifest God?
+
+And then, further, note that believing in the sense of trusting is
+seeing and knowing. Philip said, 'Shew us the Father.' Christ answers,
+'Believe, and thou dost see.' If you look back upon the previous
+verses of this chapter, you will find that in the earlier portion of
+them the key-word is 'know'; that in the second portion of them the
+key-word is 'see'; that in this portion of them the key-word is
+'believe.' The world says, 'Ah! seeing is believing.' The Gospel says,
+'Believing is seeing.' The true way to knowledge, and to a better
+vision than the uncertain vision of the eye, is faith. In certitude
+and in directness, the knowledge of God that we have through faith in
+the Christ whom our eyes have never seen is far ahead of the certitude
+and the directness that attach to our mere bodily sight; and so the
+key to all divine knowledge, and the sure road to the truest vision of
+God, is faith.
+
+Further, faith, even if based upon lower than the highest grounds, is
+still faith, and acceptable to Him: 'Or else believe Me for the very
+works' sake.' The 'works' are mainly, I suppose, though not
+exclusively, His miracles. And if so, we are here taught that, if a
+man has not come to that point of spiritual susceptibility in which
+the image of Jesus Christ lays hold upon His heart and obliges him to
+trust Him and to love Him, there are yet the miracles to look at; and
+the faith that grasps them, and by help of that ladder climbs to Him,
+though it be second best, is yet real. The evidence of miracles is
+subordinate, and yet it is valid and true. So our Lord contradicts
+both the exaggerations of past generations and the exaggerations of
+this, and neither asserts that the great reason for faith is miracles,
+nor that miracles are of no use at all. Former centuries in the
+Christian Church reiterated the former exaggeration, and thus partly
+provoked the exaggeration of this day. Let us keep the middle course:
+there is a better way of coming to Christ than through the gate of
+miracles, and that is that He should stamp His own divine sweetness
+and elevation upon our minds and hearts. But if we have not reached
+that point, do not let us kick away the ladder that may help us to it.
+'Believe Him for the very works' sake.' Imperfect faith may be the
+highway to perfection. Let us follow the light, if it be but a far-off
+glimmer, sure that it will bring us into noontide day if we are
+faithful to its leading.
+
+On the other hand, dear friends, let us remember that no faith avails
+itself of all the treasures laid up for it, which does not lay hold
+upon Christ in the character in which He presents Himself. The only
+adequate, worthy trust in Him is the trust which grasps Him as the
+Incarnate God and Saviour. Only such a faith does justice to His own
+claim. Only such a faith is the sure path to vision and to knowledge.
+Only such a faith draws down the blessing of a questioning intellect
+answered, a hungry heart satisfied, a conscience, accusing and
+prophetic of a judgment to come, cleansed and purified.
+
+To each of us Christ addresses His merciful invitation, 'Believe Me
+that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me.' May we all answer, 'We
+believe that Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God!'
+
+
+
+
+CHRIST'S WORKS AND OURS
+
+'Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on Me, the works
+that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do;
+because I go unto My Father. 13. And whatsoever ye shall ask in My
+name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 14.
+If ye shall ask any thing in My name, I will do it.'--JOHN xiv. 12-14.
+
+I have already pointed out in a previous sermon that the key-word of
+this context is 'Believe!' In three successive verses we find it, each
+time widening in its application. We have first the question to the
+single disciple: 'Philip! believest thou not?' We have then the
+invitation addressed to the whole group: 'Believe Me!' And here we
+have a wholly general expression referring to all who, in every
+generation and corner of the world, put their trust in Christ, and
+extending the sunshine of this great promise to whosoever believeth in
+Him. Our Lord has pointed to _believing_ as the great antidote to a
+troubled heart, as the sure way of knowing the Father, as the better
+substitute for sight; and now here He opens before us still more
+wonderful prerogatives and effects of faith. His words carry us up
+into lofty and misty regions, where we can neither breathe freely nor
+see clearly, except as we hold to His words. Therefore He prefaces
+them with His 'Verily, verily!' bidding us listen to them with
+sharpened attention as the disclosure of something wonderful, and
+receive them with unfaltering confidence, on His authority, however
+marvellous and otherwise undiscoverable they may be.
+
+What is it, then, that He thus commends to our acceptance? If I may
+venture a paraphrase which may at least have the advantage of being
+cast into less familiar words, it is just this, that because of, and
+after, Christ's departure from earth, He will, in response to prayer,
+work upon faithful souls in such a fashion as that they will do what
+He did, and in some sense will do even more.
+
+I. We have here the continuous work of the exalted Lord for and
+through His servants.
+
+These disciples, of course, were trembling and oppressed with the
+thought that the departure of Jesus would be the end of His ceaseless
+activity for them, on which they had depended implicitly for so long.
+Henceforward, whatever distress or need might come, that Voice would
+be silent, and that Hand motionless, and they would be left to face
+every storm, uncompanioned and uncounselled. Some of us know how
+dreary such experience makes life, and we can understand how these men
+shrank from the prospect. Christ's words give strength to meet that
+trial, and not only tell them that after He is gone they will be able
+to do what they cannot do now, and what He used to do for them, but
+that in them He will work as well as for them, and be the power of
+their action, after He has departed.
+
+For, notice the remarkable connection of the words with which we are
+dealing. 'He that believeth on Me, the works that I do shall _he_ do,'
+and the ground of that is 'because I go to My Father,' and whatsoever
+the believer 'shall ask, _I_ will do.'
+
+So, then, there are here two very distinct paths on which Christ
+represents to us that His future activity will travel; the one, that
+of doing for us, in response to our prayers; the other that of working
+on us and in us, so that our acts are His and His acts are ours. We
+may look at these two for a moment separately.
+
+Here, then, there is clearly stated this great thought, that Christ's
+removal from the world is not the end of His activity in the world and
+on material things, but that, absent, He still is a present power, and
+having passed through death, and been removed from sense, He can still
+operate upon the things round us, and move these according to His
+will. We are not to water down such words as these into any such
+thought as that the continuous influence of the memory and history of
+His past will be a present power in all ages.
+
+That is true, gloriously and uniquely true, but that is not the truth
+which He speaks here. Over and above that perpetual influence of past
+recorded work, there is the present influence of His present work, and
+to-day He is working as truly as He wrought when on earth. One form of
+His work was finished on Calvary, as His dying breath proclaimed; but
+there is another work of Christ in the midst of the ages, moving the
+pawns on the chessboard of the world, and presiding over the fortunes
+of the solemn conflict, which will not be ended until that day when
+the angel voices shall chant, 'It is done! The kingdoms of the world
+are the kingdoms of our God and of His Christ.' The living Christ
+works by a true forth-putting of His own present power upon material
+things, and amidst the providences of life. And therefore these
+disciples were not to be cast down as if His work for them were ended.
+
+Now it is clear, of course, that such words as these do demand for
+their vindication something perfectly unique and solitary in the
+nature and person of Jesus Christ. All other men's work is cut in
+twain by death. 'This man, having served his generation by the will of
+God, fell on sleep and was gathered to his fathers, and saw
+corruption,' that is the epitaph over the greatest thinkers,
+statesmen, heroes, poets, the epitaph for the tenderest and most
+hopeful. Father, mother, husband, wife, child, friend, all cease to
+act when they die, and though thunders should break, they are silent
+and can help no more. But Christ is living to-day, and working all
+around us.
+
+Now, brethren, it is of the last importance for the joyousness of our
+Christian lives, and for the courage of our conflict with sorrow and
+sin, that we should give a very prominent place in our creeds, and our
+hearts, to this great truth of a living Christ. What a joyful sense of
+companionship it brings to the solitary, what calmness of vision in
+contemplating the complications and calamities of the world's history,
+if we grasp firmly the assurance that the living Christ is actually
+working by the present forth-putting of His power in the world to-day!
+
+But that is not all. There is another path on which our Lord shows us
+here a glimpse of His working, not only for us, but on and in and
+therefore through us, so that the deeds that we do in faith that rests
+upon Him are in one aspect His, and in another ours.
+
+'The works that I do shall He do also'; because 'whatsoever ye shall
+ask I will do it.'
+
+We have not to think only of a Lord whose activity for us, beneficent
+and marvellous as it is, was finished in the misty past upon the
+Cross, nor have we only to think of a Lord whose activity for us,
+mighty and comforting as it is to all the solitary and struggling, is
+wrought as from the heights of the heavens, but we have to think of
+One who is beside us and in us and knows the hidden paths that no eye
+sees, and no foot but His can tread, into the inmost recesses of our
+souls, and there can enter as King and righteousness, as life and
+strength. This is the deepest of the lessons that He would teach us
+here. 'I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me,' and through me, if
+I keep close to Him, will work mightily in forms that my poor manhood
+could never have reached. The emblem of the vine and the branches, and
+the other emblem of the house and its inhabitants, and the other of
+the head and the members, all point to this one same thing which
+shallow and unspiritual men call 'mystical,' but which is the very
+heart of the Christian prerogative and the anchor of the Christian
+hope. Christ in us is our present righteousness and our hope of a
+future glory.
+
+And now mark that a still more solemn and mysterious aspect of this
+union of Jesus Christ and the believer is given, since it is set forth
+as resulting in our doing Christ's works, and Christ doing ours; and
+therein is paralleled with the yet more wonderful and ineffable union
+between the Father and the Son. It is no accident that in one clause
+He says, 'I am in the Father, and the Father in Me. The words that I
+speak unto you I speak not of Myself, but the Father that dwelleth in
+Me, He doeth the works'; and that in the next He says, 'The works that
+I do shall he do also'; and so bids us see in that union between the
+Father and the Son, and in that consequent union of co-operation
+between Him and His Father, a pattern after which our union with Him
+is to be moulded, both as regards the closeness of its intimacy and as
+regards the resulting manifestations in life. Christ is in us and we
+in Christ in some measure as the Son is in the Father and the Father
+in the Son. And the works that we do He does in some fashion that
+faintly echoes and shadows the perfect co-operation of the Father and
+the Son in the works that the Christ did upon the earth.
+
+All the doings of a Christian man, if done in faith, and holding by
+Christ, are Christ's doings, inasmuch as He is the life and the power
+which does them all. And Christ's deeds are reproduced and perpetuated
+in His humble follower, inasmuch as the life which is imparted will
+unfold itself according to its own kind; and he that loves Christ will
+be changed into His likeness, and become a partaker of His Spirit. So
+let us curb all self-dependence and self-will, that that mighty tide
+may flow into us; and let us cast from us all timidity, distrust, and
+gloom, and be strong in the assurance that we have a Christ living in
+the heavens to work for us, and living within us to work through us.
+
+There is no record of the Ascension in John's Gospel, but these words
+of my text unveil to us the inmost meaning of that Ascension, and are
+in full accord with the great picture which one of the Evangelists has
+drawn--a picture in two halves, which yet are knit together into one.
+'So then, after He had spoken unto them, He was received up into
+heaven, and sat at the right hand of God; and they went forth and
+preached everywhere.' What a contrast between the two--the repose
+above, the toil below! Yes! But the next words knit them
+together--'The Lord also working with them, and confirming the word
+with signs following.'
+
+II. Note, in the next place, the greater work of the servants on and
+for whom the Lord works. 'Greater works than these shall he do.' Is,
+then, the servant greater than his Lord, and he that is sent greater
+than He that sent him? Not so, for whatsoever the servant does is done
+because the Lord is with and in him, and the contrast that is drawn
+between the works that Christ does on earth and the greater works that
+the servant is to do hereafter is, properly and at bottom, the
+contrast between Christ's manifestations in the time of His earthly
+limitation and humiliation, and His manifestations in the time of His
+Ascension and celestial glory.
+
+We need not be afraid that such great words as these in any measure
+trench on the unique and unapproachable character of the earthly work
+of Christ in its two aspects, which are one--of Revelation and
+Redemption. These are finished, and need no copy, no repetition, no
+perpetuation, until the end of time. But the work of objective
+Revelation, which was completed when He ascended, and the work of
+Redemption which was finished when He rose--these require to be
+applied through the ages. And it is in regard to the application of
+the finished work of Christ to the actual accomplishment of its
+contemplated consequences, that the comparison is drawn between the
+limited sphere and the small results of Christ's work upon earth, and
+the worldwide sweep and majestic magnitude of the results of the
+application of that work by His servants' witnessing work. The wider
+and more complete spiritual results achieved by the ministration of
+the servants than by the ministration of the Lord is the point of
+comparison here. And I need only remind you that the poorest Christian
+who can go to a brother soul, and by word or life can draw that soul
+to a Christ whom it apprehends as dying for its sins and raised for
+its glorifying, does a mightier thing than it was possible for the
+Master to do by life or lip whilst He was here upon earth. For the
+Redemption had to be completed in act before it could be proclaimed in
+word; and Christ had no such weapon in His hands with which to draw
+men's souls, and cast down the high places of evil, as we have when we
+can say, 'We testify unto you that the Son of God hath died for our
+sins, and is raised again according to the Scriptures.' Nor need I do
+more than remind you of the comparison, so exalting for His humility
+and so humbling for our self-exaltation, between the narrow sphere in
+which His earthly ministrations had to operate and the worldwide scope
+which is given to His servants. 'He laid His hands on a few sick folk,
+and healed them'; and at the end of His life there were one hundred
+and twenty disciples in Jerusalem and five hundred in Galilee, and you
+might have put them all into this chapel and had ample room to spare.
+That was all that Jesus Christ had done; while to-day and now the
+world is being leavened and the kingdoms of the earth are beginning to
+recognise His name. 'Greater works than these shall he do' who lets
+Christ in him do all His works.
+
+III. Lastly, notice the conditions on which the exalted Lord works for
+and on His servants.
+
+These are two, faith and prayer.
+
+'He that believeth on Me, the works that I do shall he do also.'
+Faith, the simple act of loving trust in Jesus Christ, opens the door
+of our hearts and natures for the entrance of all His solemn
+Omnipotence, and makes us possessors of it. It is the condition, and
+the only condition, and plainly the indispensable condition, of
+possessing this divine Christ's power, that we should trust ourselves
+to Him that gives it. And if we do, then we shall not trust in vain,
+but to us there will come power that will surpass our desire, and fill
+us with its own rejoicing and pure energy. Faith will make us like
+Christ. Faith is intensely practical. 'He that believeth shall _do_.'
+It is no mere cold assent to a creed which is utterly impotent to
+operate upon men's acts, no mere hysterical emotion which is utterly
+impotent to energise into nobilities of service and miracles of
+consecration, but it is the affiance of the whole nature which spreads
+itself before Him and prays, 'Fill my emptiness and vitalise me with
+Thine own Spirit.' That is the faith which is ever answered by the
+inrush of the divine power, and the measure of our capacity of
+receiving is the measure of His gift to us.
+
+So if Christian individuals and Christian communities are impotent, or
+all but impotent, there is no difficulty in understanding why. They
+have cut the connection, they have shut the tap. They lack faith; and
+so their power is weakness. 'Why could we not cast him out?' said
+they, perplexed when they had no need to be. 'Why could you not cast
+him out? Because you do not believe that I, working in you, can cast
+him out. That is why; and the only why.' Let us learn that the secret
+of Christians' weakness is the weakness of their Christian faith.
+
+And the other condition is prayer. 'Whatsoever ye shall ask in My name
+I will do it,' and He repeats it, for confirmation and for greater
+emphasis. 'If ye shall ask anything in My name,' or, as perhaps that
+clause ought to be read with some versions, 'If ye shall ask Me
+anything in My name I will do it.'
+
+Three points may be named here. Our power depends upon our prayer.
+God's and Christ's fullness and willingness to communicate do not
+depend upon our prayer. But our capacity to receive of that fullness,
+and so the possibility of its communication to us, do depend upon our
+prayer. 'We have not because we ask not.'
+
+The power of our prayer depends upon our conscious oneness with the
+revealed Christ. 'If ye shall ask in My name,' says He. And people
+think they have fulfilled the condition when, in a mechanical and
+external manner, they say, as a formula at the end of petitions that
+have been all stuffed full of self-will and selfishness, 'for Christ's
+sake. Amen!' and then they wonder they do not get them answered! Is
+that asking in Christ's name?
+
+Christ's name is the revelation of Christ's character, and to do a
+thing in the name of another person is to do it as His representative,
+and as realising that in some deep and real sense--for the present
+purpose at all events--we are one with Him. And it is when we know
+ourselves to be united to Christ and one with Him, and representative
+in a true fashion of Himself, as well as when, in humble reliance on
+His work for us and His loving heart, we draw near, that our prayer
+has power, as the old divines used to say, 'to move the Hand that
+moves the world,' and to bring down a rush of blessing upon our heads.
+Prayer in the name of Christ is hard to offer. It needs much
+discipline and watchfulness; it excludes all self-will and
+selfishness. And if, as my text tells us, the end of the Son's working
+is the glory of the Father, that same end, and not our own ease or
+comfort, must be the end and object of all prayer which is offered in
+His name. When we so pray we get an answer. And the reason why such
+multitudes of prayers never travel higher than the roof, and bring no
+blessings to him who prays, is because they are not prayers in
+Christ's name.
+
+Prayer in His name will pass into prayer to Him. As He not obscurely
+teaches us here (if we adopt the reading to which I have already
+referred), He has an ear to hear such requests, and He wields divine
+power to answer. Surely it was not blasphemy nor any diversion of the
+worship due to God alone, when the dying martyr outside the city wall
+cried and said, 'Lord Jesus! receive my spirit.' Nor is it any
+departure from the solemnest obligations laid upon us by the unity of
+the divine nature, nor are we bringing idolatrous petitions to another
+than the Father, when we draw near to Christ and ask Him to give us
+that which He gives as the Father's gift, and to work on us that which
+the Father that dwelleth in Him works through Him for us.
+
+Trust yourselves to Christ, and let your desires be stilled, to listen
+to His voice in you, and let that voice speak. And then, dear
+brethren, we shall be lifted above ourselves, and strength will flow
+into us, and we shall be able to say, 'I can do all things, through
+the Christ that dwells in me and makes me strong.' And just as the
+glad, sunny waters of the incoming tide fill the empty places of some
+oozy harbour, where all the ships are lying as if dead, and the mud is
+festering in the sunshine, so into the slimy emptiness of our corrupt
+hearts there will pour the flashing sunlit wave, the ever fresh rush
+of His power; and 'everything will live whithersoever it cometh,' and
+we shall be able to say in all humility, and yet in glad recognition
+of Christ's faithfulness to this, His transcendent promise, 'I live,
+yet not I, but Christ liveth in me,' 'because the life which I live in
+the flesh I live by faith of the Son of God.'
+
+
+
+
+LOVE AND OBEDIENCE
+
+'If ye love Me, keep My commandments.'--JOHN xiv, 15.
+
+As we have seen in former sermons, the keyword of the preceding
+context is 'Believe!' and that word passes now into 'Love.' The order
+here is the order of experience. There is first the believing gaze
+upon the Christ as He is revealed--the image of the invisible God.
+That kindles love, and prompts to obedience.
+
+There is another very beautiful and subtle link of connection between
+these words and the preceding. Our Lord has just been saying,
+'Whatsoever ye shall ask in My name, that will I do.' Is the parallel
+wholly accidental or fanciful between the Lord who does as the servant
+asks and the servant who is to do as the Lord commands? On both sides
+there is love delighting to be set in motion by a message from the
+other side. On the one part there is love supreme which commands and
+delights to be asked, on the other part there is love dependent, which
+asks and delights to be commanded; and though the gulf between the two
+is great, and the difference between Christ's law and our petitions is
+infinite, yet there is an analogy.
+
+I pause on these words, though they are introduced here only as the
+basis of the great promise which follows, because they open out into
+such wide fields. They contain the all-sufficient law of Christian
+conduct. They contain the one motive adequate to bring that law into
+realisation. They disclose the very roots of Christian morality, and
+part of the secret of Christ's unique power and influence amongst men.
+They come with a message of encouragement to all souls despairing of
+being able to do that which they would, and of freedom to all men
+burdened with a crowd of minute and external regulations. 'If ye love
+Me, keep My commandments'--there are three points to be dwelt upon
+here--namely, the all-sufficient ideal or guide of life, the
+all-powerful motive which Christ brings to bear, and the all-subduing
+gaze of faith by which that motive is brought into action.
+
+I. We have here the all-sufficient ideal or guide for life.
+
+Jesus Christ is not speaking merely to that little handful of men in
+the upper chamber, but to all generations and to all lands, to the end
+of time and round the world. The authoritative tone which He assumes
+here is very noteworthy. He speaks as Jehovah spoke from Sinai, and
+quotes the very words of the old law when He speaks of 'keeping My
+commandments.' There are distinctly involved in this quite incidental
+utterance of Christ's two startling things--one the assumption of His
+right to impose His will upon every human being, and the other His
+assumption that His will contains the all-sufficient directory for
+human conduct.
+
+What, then, are His commandments? Those which He spoke are plain and
+simple; and people who wish to pick holes in the greatness of Christ's
+work in the world tell us that you can match almost all His precepts
+up and down amongst moralists and philosophers, and they crow very
+loud if, scratching amongst Rabbinical dust-heaps, they find something
+that looks like anything that He once said. Be it so! What does that
+matter? Christ's 'commandments' are Christ Himself. This is the
+originality and uniqueness of Christ as a moral Teacher, that He says,
+not 'Do this, that, and the other thing,' but 'Copy Me.' 'Take My yoke
+upon you and learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart.' His
+commandments are Himself; and the sum of them all is this--a character
+perfectly self-oblivious, and wholly penetrated and saturated with
+joyful, filial submission to the Father, and uttermost and entire
+giving Himself away to His brethren. That is Christ's commandment
+which He bids us keep, and His law is to be found in His life.
+
+And then, if that be so, what a change passes on the aspect of law,
+when we take Christ as being our living embodiment of it! Everything
+that was hard, repellent, far-off, cold, vanishes. We have no longer
+'tables of stone,' but 'fleshy tables of the heart'; and the Law
+stands before us, a Being to be loved, to be clung to, to be trusted,
+and whom it is blessedness to know and perfection to resemble. The
+rails upon which the train travels may be rigid, but they mean safety,
+and they carry men smoothly into otherwise inaccessible lands. So the
+life of Jesus Christ brought to us is the firm and plain track along
+which we are to travel; and all that was difficult and hard in the
+cold thought of _duty_ becomes changed into the attraction of a living
+Pattern and Example. This living and breathing and loving commandment
+is all-sufficient for every detail and complexity of human life. It is
+so by the confession of believers and of unbelievers, by the joyful
+confession of the one, and by the frank acknowledgment of many of the
+others. Listen to one of them. 'Whatever else may be taken away from
+us by rational criticism, Christ is still left, a unique Figure, not
+more unlike all His predecessors than all His followers.... Religion
+cannot be said to have made a bad choice in selecting this Man as the
+ideal Representative and Guide of humanity; nor even now would it be
+easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule
+of virtue from the abstract into the concrete than to endeavour so to
+live that Christ would approve our life.'
+
+It is enough for conduct, it is enough for character, it is enough in
+all perplexities of conflicting duties, that we listen to and obey the
+voice that says, 'Keep My commandments.'
+
+II. Now note, secondly, the all-powerful motive.
+
+Probably my text is best understood as the Revised Version understands
+it, which reads, 'If ye love Me, ye will keep My commandments,' making
+it an assurance and not an injunction. Christ speaks with the calm
+confidence that love to Him will have power enough to sway the life.
+His utterance here is not the addition of another commandment to the
+list, but rather the pointing out of how they may all be kept.
+
+The principle that underlies these words, then, is this, that love is
+the foundation of obedience, and obedience is the sure outcome and
+result of love. That is true in regard to those lower forms of love,
+which may teach us something of the operation of the higher. We all
+know that love which is real, and not simply passion and selfishness
+with a mask on, delights most chiefly in knowing and conforming to the
+will of the beloved, and that there is nothing sweeter than to be
+commanded by the dear voice and to obey for dear love's sake. And you
+have only to take that which is the experience of every true heart, in
+a thousand sweet ways in daily life, and to lift it into the higher
+region, and to transfer it to the bond that unites us with Jesus
+Christ, to see that He has invoked no illusory, but an omnipotent
+power when He has rested the whole force of His transforming and
+sanctifying energy upon this one principle, 'If ye love Me, the
+Lawgiver, ye will keep the commandments of My Law.'
+
+That is exactly what distinguishes and lifts the morality of the
+Gospel above all other systems. The worst man in the world knows a
+great deal more of his duty than the best man does. It is not for want
+of knowledge that men go to the devil, but it is for want of power or
+will to live their knowledge. And what morality fails to do, with its
+clearest utterances of human duty, Christ comes and does. The one law
+is like the useless proclamations posted up in some rebellious
+district, where there is no army to back them, and the king's
+authority from whom they come is flouted. The other law gets itself
+obeyed. Such is the difference between the powerless morality of the
+world and the commandment of Jesus Christ. Here is the road plain and
+straight. What matters that, if there is no force to draw the cart
+along it? There might as well be no road at all. Here stand all your
+looms, polished and in perfect order, but there is no steam in the
+boilers; and so there is no motion, and nothing is woven. What we want
+is not law, but power, and what the Gospel gives us, and stands alone
+in giving us, is not merely the knowledge of the will of God, and the
+clear revelation of what we ought to be, but the power to become it.
+
+Love does that, and love alone. That strong force brought into action
+in our hearts will drive out from thence all rivals, all false and low
+things. The true way to cleanse the Augean stables, as the old myth
+has it, was to turn the river into them. It would have been endless
+work to wheel out the filth in wheelbarrows loaded by spades: turn the
+stream in, and it will sweep away all the foulness. When the Ark comes
+into the Temple, Dagon lies, a mutilated stump, upon the threshold.
+When Christ comes into my heart, then all the obscene and
+twilight-loving shapes that lurked there, and defiled it, will vanish
+like ghosts at cock-crowing before His calm and pure Presence. He, and
+He alone, entering my heart by the portals of my love, will coerce my
+evil and stimulate my good. And if I love Him, I shall keep His
+commandments.
+
+Now, brethren, here is a plain test and a double-barrelled one, which
+tries both our love and our obedience with a sharp touchstone. 'If ye
+love Me, ye will keep My commandments.' That implies, first, that
+there is no love worth calling so which does not keep the commandment.
+All the emotional and the mystic, and the so-called higher parts of
+Christian experience, have to be content to submit to this plain
+test--do they help us to live as Christ would have us, and that
+because He would have us? Love to Him that does not keep His
+commandments is either spurious or dangerously feeble. The true sign
+of its presence in the heart and the noblest of its operations is not
+to be found in high-pitched expressions of fervid emotion, nor even in
+the sacred joys of solitary communion, but in its making us, while in
+the rough struggle of daily life, and surrounded by trivial tasks,
+live near Him, and by Him, and for Him, and like Him. If I live so, I
+love Him; if not, not. Not that I mean to say that in regard to each
+individual action of a Christian man's life there must be the
+conscious presence of reference to the supreme love, but that each
+individual action of the life ought to come from a character of which
+that reference to the supreme love is the very formative principle and
+foundation. The colouring matter put in at the fountain will dye every
+drop of the stream; and they whose inmost hearts are tinged and
+tinctured with the sweet love of Jesus Christ, from their hearts will
+go forth issues of life all coloured and moulded thereby. Test your
+Christian love by your practical obedience.
+
+And, on the other hand, there is no obedience worth calling so which
+is not the child of love; and all the multitude of right things which
+Christians do without that motive are made short work of by that
+consideration. Obedience which is formal, mechanical, matter-of-
+course, without the presence in it of a loving submission of the will;
+obedience which is reluctant, calculated, forced upon us by dread,
+imitated from others--all that is nothing; and Jesus Christ does not
+count it as obedience at all. This is a sieve with very small meshes,
+and there will be a great deal of rubbish left in it after the
+shaking. 'If ye love Me, keep My commandments.' The 'keeping of My
+commandments' which has not 'love to Me' underlying it is no keeping
+at all.
+
+III. And so, lastly, notice the all-subduing gaze.
+
+That is not included in my text, but it is necessary in order to
+complete the view of the forces to which Jesus Christ here entrusts
+the hallowing of life and the sanctifying of our nature; and we are
+led to refer to it by what I have already pointed out; the connection
+between the 'love' of my text and the 'believe' of the preceding
+verses. I can fancy a man saying, 'Keep His commandments? Woe is me!
+How am I to keep?' The answer is 'Love.' And I can fancy him saying
+'Love?' Yes! 'And how am I to love? I cannot get up love at the word
+of command, or by any voluntary effort.' And the answer comes again,
+'Believe!' Trust Christ, and you will love Him. Love Him and you will
+do His will. And then the question comes again, 'Believe what?' And
+the answer comes, 'Believe that He is the Son of God who died for
+you.'
+
+Nothing else will kindle a man's love than the faithful contemplation
+and grasp of Christ in that character and aspect. Only the redeeming
+Christ affords a reasonable ground for our love to Him. Here is a dead
+man, dead for nineteen centuries, expecting you and me to have towards
+Him a vivid personal affection which will influence our conduct and
+our character. What right has He to expect that? There is only one
+reasonable ground upon which I may be called to love Jesus Christ, and
+that is that He died for me, and such a love towards such a Christ is
+the only thing which will wield power sufficient to guide, to coerce,
+to restrain, to constrain, and to sustain my weak, wayward,
+rebellious, and sluggish will. All other emotions of so-called
+admiration and worship and reverence and affection for Jesus Christ
+are apt to be tepid; but this one has power and warmth in it.
+
+Here is a unique fact in the history of the world, that not only did
+He make this astounding claim upon all subsequent generations; but
+that all subsequent generations have responded to it, and that to-day
+there are millions of men who love Jesus Christ with a love warm,
+personal, deep, powerful--the spring of all their goodness and the
+Lord of their lives. Why do they? For one reason only. Because they
+believe that He died for them individually, and that He lives an
+ascended yet ever-present Helper and Lover of their souls.
+
+My brethren, that conviction, and that conviction only, as I venture
+to affirm, has power to send a glow of love into the heart which will
+move all the limbs in swift and happy obedience. That conviction, and
+that conviction alone, will melt the thick-ribbed ice of our spirits
+and will make it flow down in sweet waters. The love that has looked
+upon the Cross will be the fulfilling of the law of Him that speaks
+from the Throne. When our faith has grasped Him, as enduring that
+cross for us, then our love will be awakened to hear and to do His
+commandments.
+
+'We love Him because He first loved us,' and such love will flower and
+fruit in obedience. I shall keep His commandments when I love Him. I
+shall love Him with a love that makes my will plastic and my life a
+glad service, when by faith I grasp Him as the Incarnate Lord, 'who
+loved me and gave Himself for me.'
+
+
+
+
+THE COMFORTER GIVEN
+
+'And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter,
+that He may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of Truth; whom
+the world cannot receive, because it seeth Him not, neither knoweth
+Him: but ye know Him; for He dwelleth with you, and shall be in
+you.'--JOHN xiv. 16,17.
+
+The 'and' at the beginning of these words shows us that they are
+continuous with and the consequence of what precedes. 'If ye love Me,
+_ye_ will _keep_ My commandments, and _I_ will _pray_ ... and _He_
+will _send_.' Such is the series; but we must also remember that, as
+we have seen in previous sermons, the obedience spoken of in the
+clause before my text is itself treated as a consequence of some
+preceding steps. The ladder that is fixed upon earth and has its
+summit in heaven has for its rungs, first and lowest, 'believe';
+second, 'love'; third, 'obey.' And thus the context carries us from
+the very basis of the Christian life up into its highest reward, even
+the larger gift to an obedient spirit of that Great Spirit, who is the
+Comforter and the Teacher.
+
+And there is another very striking link of connection between these
+words and the preceding. There are, if I may so say, two telephones
+across the abyss that separates the ascended Christ and us. One of
+them is contained in His words, 'If ye ask anything in My name I will
+do it'; the other is contained in these words, 'If ye keep My
+commandments I will ask.' Love on this side of the great cleft sets
+love on the other side of it in motion in a twofold fashion. If we
+ask, He does; if we do, He asks. His action is the answer to our
+prayers, and His prayers are the answer to our obedient action. So we
+have here these points--the praying Christ and the giving Father; the
+abiding Gift; the blind world and the recipient disciples.
+
+I. Note, then, first, the praying Christ and the giving Father.
+
+'I will ask and He will give' seems a strange drop from the lofty
+claims with which we have become familiar in the earlier verses of
+this chapter. 'Believe in God, believe also in Me'; 'He that hath seen
+Me hath seen the Father'; 'If ye shall ask anything in My name I will
+do it'; 'Keep My commandments.' All these distinctly express, or
+necessarily imply, divine nature, prerogatives, and authority. But
+here the voice that spake the perfect revelation of God, and gave
+utterance authoritatively to the perfect law of life, softens and
+lowers its tones in petition; and Jesus Christ joins the rank of the
+suppliants. Now common sense tells us that apparently diverse views
+lying so close together in one continuous stream of speech cannot have
+seemed to the utterer of them to be contradictory; and I venture to
+affirm that there is no explanation which does justice to these two
+sides of Christ's consciousness--the one all divine and authoritative
+and lofty, and the other all lowly and identifying Himself with
+petitioners and suppliants everywhere--except the old-fashioned and
+to-day discredited belief that He is 'God manifest in the flesh,' who
+prays in His Manhood and hears prayer in His Divinity. The bare
+humanistic view which emphasises such utterances as these of my text
+does not, for the life of it, know what to do with the other ones, and
+cannot manage to unite these two images into a stereoscopic solid.
+That is reserved for the faith which believes in the Manhood and in
+the Deity of our Lord and Saviour.
+
+His intercession is the great hope of the Christian heart. His
+intercession is the great activity of His present exalted and glorious
+state. His intercession is no mere verbal utterance, nor the
+representation to the Father of an alien or a diverse will, but His
+intercession, mysterious as it is, and unfathomable to our poor, short
+lines and light plummets, must mean this at all events--His continual
+activity in presenting before the divine Father, as the motive and
+condition of His petition being granted, His own great work upon the
+Cross. The High Priest passes within the veil, bearing in His hand the
+offering which He has made, and by reason of that offering, and of His
+powerful presence before the mercy-seat, all the spiritual gifts which
+redeem and regenerate and sanctify humanity are for ever coming forth.
+'I will pray, and He will give,' is but one way of saying, 'Seeing
+then, that we have a great High Priest over the House of God who is
+entered within the veil, let us draw near.'
+
+But I would have you notice how, as is always the case in all
+utterances of Jesus Christ which express the lowest humiliation and
+completest identification of Himself with humanity, there is ever
+present some touch of obscured glory, some all but suppressed flash of
+brightness which will not be wholly concealed. Note two things in this
+great utterance; one, Christ's quiet assumption that all through the
+ages, and today, nineteen centuries after He died, He knows, at the
+moment of their being done, His servants' deeds. 'Keep my
+commandments, and, knowing that you keep them, I will then and there
+pray for you.' He claims in the lowly words an altogether
+supernatural, abnormal, divine cognisance of all the acts of men down
+the ages and across the gulf between earth and heaven.
+
+And the other signature of divinity stamped on the prayer of Christ is
+His certitude of the answer. 'I will ask and He will give': He puts,
+as it were, the Father's act in pledge to us, and assures us, in a
+tone of certainty, which is not merely the assurance of faith, but the
+certitude of One who is 'one with the Father,' that His prayer brings
+ever its answer. 'Father! I will that they whom Thou hast given Me be
+with Me.' How strange! How far beyond the warrantable language of man!
+And how impossible for a fisherman of Bethsaida to imagine, if he had
+not heard, that strange blending of submission and of authority which
+speaks in such words!
+
+Then, remember what I have already said, that, according to the
+teaching of this verse, taken in connection with its context, that
+which put in motion Christ's Intercessory activity, as represented in
+my text, is the obedience of a Christian man. If you obey He will
+pray, and the Father will send. So the reward of imperfect obedience
+is the larger measure given to us of that divine Spirit by whose
+indwelling obedience becomes possible, and self-surrender a joy and a
+power. And that is not merely because of the natural operation by
+which any kind of conduct tends to repeat itself in more complete
+measure, nor is it merely a case of 'to him that hath shall be given';
+as a man's arm is strengthened by exercise, and any faculty becomes
+more assured, and swift, and at the command of its owner, by use. But
+there is a distinct supernatural impartation to every obedient heart
+of divine gifts which come straight through Jesus Christ to it. He
+Himself, in this immediate context, says, 'If I depart I will send Him
+unto you,' and the true conception is that in that Spirit's gift,
+which is a reality waiting as its crown and reward upon our poor
+stained obedience, the whole Godhead is present; the Father the
+Source, the Son the Channel, the Spirit the Gift.
+
+II. And so, secondly, note what our text tells us of that abiding
+gift.
+
+'He will send another Comforter,' 'that He may abide with you for
+ever, even the Spirit of Truth.' I suppose I may take it for granted
+that most of my audience know all that need be said as to the meaning
+of this word 'Comforter.' In our present modern English it has a very
+much narrower range of meaning than its etymology would give it, and
+than probably it had when it was first used in an English translation.
+'Comforter' means a great deal more than 'consoler,' though we have
+narrowed it to that signification almost exclusively. It means not
+only one who administers sweet whispers of consolation in sorrow, but
+one who, in any circumstances, by his presence makes strong. And the
+original Greek word, of which it is the translation here, has a
+precisely analogous meaning; its original signification being that of
+'one who is called to the aid of another,' primarily as an advocate in
+a court of law, but more widely as a helper in any form whatsoever.
+And that is the idea which is to be attached to the word here:--a
+Comforter who makes strong by His presence; the Paraclete, who is our
+Advocate, Helper, Guide, and Instructor. Need I dwell upon the great
+thoughts that spring from that metaphor; how we have to look for a
+Person, and not merely a vague influence; a divine Person who will be
+by our sides on condition of our faith, love, and obedience, to be our
+Strength in all weakness, our Peace in all trouble, our Wisdom in all
+darkness, our Guide in every perplexity, our Comforter and Cherisher,
+our Righteousness when sin is strong, the Victor over our temptations,
+and the Companion and Sweetener of our solitude? The metaphors with
+which Scripture represents this great personal Influence are full of
+instruction and beauty. He comes as 'the Fire,' which melts, which
+warms, which cleanses, which quickens. He comes as the 'rushing,
+mighty Wind,' which bears health upon its wings, and sometimes
+breathes softly as an infant's breath, and sometimes sweeps with
+irresistible power. He comes as the 'Oil,' gently flowing,
+lubricating, making every joint supple, nourishing. He comes as the
+'Water of Life,' refreshing, vitalising, quickening all growth. He
+comes fluttering down as the Dove of God, the bird of peace that will
+brood upon our hearts. The predicates which Scripture attaches to that
+great Name are equally various, and are full of teaching as to the
+manner in which He is the Comforter and the Advocate. He is the Spirit
+of Holiness, the Spirit of Truth, the Spirit of Wisdom, the Spirit of
+Power, the Spirit of Love, the Spirit of a sound Mind, the Spirit of
+Sonship, the Spirit of Supplication, and of many great things besides.
+And this sweet, strong, all-sufficient Person is offered to each of
+us, and waits to enter our hearts.
+
+And, says Christ, this Strengthener and Advocate is to replace Me and
+to carry on My work. 'He will send _another_ Comforter.' Who was the
+other but the Master who was speaking? So all that that handful of men
+had found of sweetness and shelter and assured guidance, and stay for
+their weakness, and enlightenment for their darkness, and
+companionship for their solitude, and a breast on which to rest their
+heads, and love in which to bathe their hearts, all _these_ this
+divine Spirit will bring to each of us if we will.
+
+And further, our Lord tells us that this strong continuer of His
+presence will be a permanent Companion. 'He will abide with you for
+ever.' He was comforting the disciples who were trembling at the
+thought of His departure, and knowing that all the sweetness of these
+three short years had come to an end; and He says to them, and through
+them to all the ages to the end of time: 'Here is the abiding Guest,
+that nothing but your own sin will ever cast out from your hearts.'
+
+And Christ tells us how this great Spirit will do His work. He is the
+'Spirit of Truth,' not as if He brought new truth. To suppose that He
+does so, opens the door to all manner of fanaticism, but the truth,
+the revelation of which is all summed and finished in the person and
+work of Jesus Christ, is the weapon by which the divine Spirit works
+all His conquests, the staff on which He makes us lean and be strong.
+He is the Spirit by whom the truth passes into our personal
+possession, by no mere imperfect form of outward teaching which is
+always confused and insufficient, but by the inward teaching that
+deals with our hearts and our spirits.
+
+But Christ speaks, too, of the blind world. There is a tone of deep
+sadness in His words. The thought of the immense multitude of men who
+were incapacitated to receive this Strengthener steals across and
+casts a momentary shadow upon even the brightness and greatness of His
+promise. 'The world cannot receive because it seeth Him not, neither
+knoweth Him.' The 'world' is the mass of man, considered as godless
+and separate from Him, and there is a bit of the world in us all; but
+there are men who are wholly under its influence and dominion. And
+these men, says Christ, are perfectly incapable of receiving the
+teaching of this divine Comforter. Of course there are other
+operations of that Great Spirit of which we shall have to hear as we
+go on further in this context, in which His work 'convicts the world
+of sin and of righteousness and of judgment.' But what our Lord is
+speaking of here is the work of that Spirit who comes in response to
+His prayer which rises in consequence of our obedience, and who,
+coming, brings with Him strength and purity and peace and wisdom; and
+that aspect of His operations a heart that is all full and seething
+with the world is unfit to receive. It cannot see Him. Embruted
+natures are altogether incapacitated for high thoughts, for the
+perception of natural beauty, for the appreciation of art; and worldly
+men, by the very same law, are incapable of receiving this divine
+Spirit. A savage stares at the sunshine and sees nothing but a glare.
+And worldly men--that is to say, men whose tastes, inclinations,
+desires, hopes, purposes, strivings, are all bound by this visible
+diurnal round--lack the organ that enables them to see that divine
+Spirit moving round about them. Whether you have put your eyes out by
+fleshly lusts, or, as many men in this generation have done, by
+intellectual self-sufficiency and conceit, if the world, in its
+grosser or in its most refined forms, is your master, you are stone
+blind to all the best realities of the universe, and you cannot see
+the things that are. If you look out upon the history of the Church,
+or upon the present condition of Christendom, and say, 'I see no
+divine Spirit working there'; well, then, the only thing that is to be
+said to you is, 'Go to an oculist; your sight is bad. Perhaps there is
+solid land, as some of us see it, where you see only mist.' This
+generation needs the preaching of a supernatural power at work beside
+us, and among us, and until we come to believe _that_, we do not
+understand the fullness of Christ's gift.
+
+III. Then, lastly, note the recipient disciples.
+
+Observe that the order of clauses is reversed in the last part of the
+text. The world cannot receive, because it does not know. The disciple
+knows, because he receives. Possession and knowledge reciprocally
+interchange places, and may be regarded as cause and effect of one
+another. That is to say, at bottom they are one and the same thing.
+Knowledge is possession, and possession is the only knowledge. These
+disciples knew Christ in a fashion. He had just been telling them that
+they did not know Him; but so far as they did dimly grasp Him, they
+saw the Spirit--in another form, indeed, than they would hereafter
+see--but still truly, though imperfectly. Beholding the Spirit, though
+'through a glass darkly,' and cherishing their partial possession of
+Him, they will come to more, and steadfastly increase from the
+morning's twilight to the midday glory. So He says: 'He dwelleth with
+you' now, and 'He shall be _in_ you' hereafter. There is a better form
+of possession opening before them, which came at Pentecost, and has
+lasted ever since. From thenceforward we have a Spirit that not only
+stands by our sides and holds fellowship with us (for the two 'withs'
+of our text are two different words, expressing respectively proximity
+and communion), but who actually dwells in the central depths of our
+natures, and whom we thus possess more perfectly and blessedly than is
+possible to even the closest outward proximity, and the sweetest
+outward fellowship.
+
+That possession of an abiding and indwelling Spirit is the gift of
+Christ to every Christian soul, and is to be found by us all upon the
+path so plainly marked out in our text and its connections--'believe,'
+'love,' 'obey.' Then the Dove of God will flutter down upon our heads
+and nestle in our hearts, and brooding over the solemn and solitary
+sea of our chaotic spirits, will bring up from it a new world
+glistening in fresh order and beauty, and 'very good' in its Maker's
+eyes.
+
+
+
+
+THE ABSENT PRESENT CHRIST
+
+'I will not leave you comfortless; I will come to you. Yet a little
+while, and the world seeth Me no more; but ye see Me: because I live,
+ye shall live also.'--JOHN xiv. 18,19.
+
+The sweet and gracious comfortings with which Christ had been soothing
+the disciples' fears went very deep, but hitherto they had not gone
+deep enough. It was much that they should know the purpose of His
+going, whither He went, and that they had an interest in His
+departure. It was much that they should have before them the prospect
+of reunion; much that they should know that all through His absence He
+would be working in them, and that they should be assured that,
+absent, He would send them a great gift. But reunion, influence from
+afar, and gifts from the other side of the gulf were not all that
+their hearts needed. And so here our Lord gives yet more, in the
+paradoxes that, absent He will be present, unseen visible, and dying
+will be for them for ever, living and life-giving. These great
+thoughts go to the centre of their needs and of ours; and on them I
+now touch briefly.
+
+There are then in the words I have read, though they be but a fragment
+of a closely-linked-together context, these three great thoughts: the
+absent Christ the present Christ; the unseen Christ the seen Christ;
+the Christ who dies the living and life-giving Christ. Let us look at
+these as they stand.
+
+I. First, then, the absent Christ is the present Christ.
+
+'I will not leave you comfortless,' or, as the Revised Version has it,
+'desolate--I come to you.' Now, most of us know, I suppose, that the
+literal meaning of the word rendered 'comfortless,' or 'desolate,' is
+'_orphans_.' But that is rather an unusual form in which to represent
+the relation between our Lord and His disciples, and so, possibly, our
+versions are accurate in giving the general idea of desolation rather
+than the specific idea conveyed directly by the word. But still it is
+to be remembered that this whole conversation begins with 'Little
+children'; and there seems to be no strong reason for suppressing the
+literal meaning of the word, if only it be remembered that it is
+employed not so much to define Christ's relation to his brethren as to
+describe the comfortless and helpless condition of that little group
+when left by Him. They would be like fatherless and motherless
+children in a cold world. And what is to hinder that? One thing only.
+'I come to you.' 'Then, and only then, will you cease to be desolate
+and orphans. My presence will change everything and turn winter into
+glorious summer.'
+
+Now, what is this 'coming'? It is to be observed that our Lord says,
+not 'I will,' as a future, but 'I come,' or 'I am coming,' as an
+immediately impending, and, we may almost say, present, thing. There
+can be no reference in the word to that final coming to judgment which
+lies so far ahead; because, if there were, then there would follow
+from the text, that, until that period, all that love Him here upon
+earth are to wander about as orphans, desolate and forsaken; and that
+certainly can never be. So that we have to recognise here the promise
+of a coming which is contemporaneous with His absence, and which is,
+in fact, but the reverse side of His bodily absence.
+
+It is true about Him that He 'departs from' His people in bodily form
+'for a season, that they may receive Him' in a better form 'for ever.'
+This, then, is the heart and centre of the consolation here, that
+howsoever the external presence may be withdrawn, and the 'foolish
+senses' may have to speak of an absent Christ, we may rejoice in the
+certainty that He is with all those that love Him, and all the more
+with them because of the very withdrawal of the earthly manifestation
+which has served its purpose, and now is laid aside as an impediment
+rather than as a help to the full communion. We confound _bodily_ with
+_real_. The bodily presence is at an end; the real presence lasts for
+ever.
+
+I do not need to insist, I suppose, upon the manifest implication of
+absolute divinity which lies in such words as these. 'I come.' 'Being
+absent, I am present in all generations. I am present with every
+single heart.' That is equivalent to the Omnipresence of deity; that
+is equivalent to or implies the undying existence of the divine
+nature, and He that says, when He is leaving earth and withdrawing the
+sweetness of His visible form from the eyes of men, 'I come,' in the
+very act of going, 'and I am with you always, with all of you to the
+end of the ages,' can be no less than God, manifest in the flesh for a
+time, and present in the Spirit with His children for ever.
+
+I cannot but think that the average Christian life of this day wofully
+fails in the simple, conscious realisation of this great truth, and
+that we are all far too little living in the calm, happy,
+strengthening assurance that we are never alone, but have Jesus Christ
+with each of us more closely, more truly, in a more available fashion,
+and with more omnipotence of influence, than they had who were nearest
+Him during the days that He lived upon earth.
+
+Oh, brethren! if we really believed, not as an article of our creed
+which has become so familiar to us that it produces little impression
+upon us, but as a vital and ever-present conviction of our souls, that
+with us there was ever the real presence of the real Christ, how all
+burdens and cares would be lightened, how all perplexities would begin
+to smooth themselves out and be straightened, how all the force would
+be sucked out of temptations, and how sorrows and joys and all things
+would be changed in their aspect by that one conviction intensely
+realised and constantly with us! A present Christ is the Strength, the
+Righteousness, the Peace, the Joy, and as we shall see, in the most
+literal sense, the Life of every Christian soul.
+
+Then, note, further, that this coming of our Lord is identified with
+that of His divine Spirit. He has been speaking of sending that 'other
+Comforter,' but though He be Another, He is yet so indissolubly united
+with Him who sends as that the coming of the Spirit is the coming of
+Jesus. He is no gift wafted to us as from the other side of a gulf,
+but by reason of the unity of the Godhead and the divinity of the sent
+Spirit, Jesus Christ and the Spirit whom He sends are inseparable
+though separate, and so indissolubly united that where the Spirit is,
+there is Christ, and where Christ is, there is the Spirit. These are
+amongst the deep things which the disciples were 'not able to carry'
+at that stage of their development, and which waited for a further
+explanation. Enough for them and enough for us, to know that we have
+Christ in the Spirit and the Spirit in Christ; and to remember 'that
+if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His.'
+
+We stand here on the margin of a shoreless and fathomless sea; and for
+my part I venture to think that the men who talk about the
+incredibilities and the contradictions of the orthodox faith would
+show themselves a little wiser if they were more conscious of the
+limitation of human faculty, and remembered that to pronounce upon
+contradictions in the doctrine of the divine Nature implies that the
+pronouncer stands above and goes round about the whole of that nature.
+So, for my part, abjuring omniscience and the comprehension of Deity,
+I accept the statement that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
+come together and dwell in the heart.
+
+Then, note, further, that this present Christ is the only Remedy for
+the orphanhood of the world. The words had a tender and pathetic
+reference to that little, bewildered group of followers, deprived of
+their Guide, their Teacher, and their Companion. He who had been as
+eyes to their weak vision, and Counsellor and Inspirer and everything
+for three blessed years, was going away to leave them unsheltered to
+the storm, and we can understand how forlorn and terrified they were,
+when they looked forward to fronting the things that must come to
+them, without His presence. Therefore He cheers them with the
+assurance that they will not be left without Him, but that, present
+still, just because He is absent, He will be all that He ever had been
+to them.
+
+And the promise was fulfilled. How did that dis-spirited group of
+cowardly men ever pluck up courage to hold together at all after the
+Crucifixion? Why was it that they did not follow the example of John's
+disciples, and dissolve and disappear; and say, 'The game is up. It is
+no use holding together any longer'? The process of separation began
+on the very day of the Crucifixion. Only one thing could have stopped
+it, and that is the Resurrection and the presence with His Church of
+the risen Christ in His power and in all the fullness of His gifts. If
+it had not been that He came to them, they would have disappeared, and
+Christianity would have been one more of the abortive sects forgotten
+in Judaism. But, as it is, the whole of the New Testament after
+Pentecost is aflame with the consciousness of a present Christ,
+working amongst His people. And although it be true that, in one
+aspect, we are absent from the Lord when we are present with the body,
+in another aspect, and an infinitely higher one, it is true that the
+strength of the Christian life of Apostles and martyrs was this, the
+assurance that Christ Himself--no mere rhetorical metaphor for His
+influence or His example, or His memory lingering in their
+imaginations, but the veritable Christ Himself--was present with them,
+to strengthen and to bless.
+
+That same conviction you and I must have, if the world is not to be a
+desert and a dreary place for us. In a very profound sense it is true
+that if you take away Jesus Christ, the elder Brother, who alone
+reveals to men the Father, we are all orphans, fatherless children,
+who look up into an empty heaven and see nothing there. It is only
+Christ who reveals to us the Father and makes our happy hearts feel
+that we are of His children. And in the wider sense of the word
+'orphans,' is not life a desolation without Him? Hollow joys, fleeting
+blessednesses, roses whose thorns last long after the petals have
+dropped, real sorrows, shows and shams, bitternesses and
+disappointments--are not these our life, in so far as Christ has been
+driven out of it? Oh! there is only one thing that saves us from being
+as desolate, fatherless children, groping in the dark for the lost
+Father's hand, and dying for want of it, and that is that the Christ
+Himself shall come to us and be with us.
+
+II. The unseen Christ is a seen Christ.
+
+It is clear that the period referred to in the second clause of our
+text is the same as that referred to in the first, that 'yet a little
+while' covers the whole space up to His Ascension; and that if there
+be any reference at all to the forty days of His earthly life, during
+which literally, the work 'saw Him no more,' but the Apostles 'saw
+Him,' that reference is only secondary. These transitory appearances
+are not of sufficient moment or duration to bear the weight of so
+great a promise as this. The vision, which is the consequence of the
+coming, has the same extension in time as the coming--that is to say,
+it is continuous and permanent. We must read here the great promise of
+a perpetual vision of the present Christ.
+
+It is clear, too, that the word 'see' is employed in these two clauses
+in two different senses. In the former it refers only to bodily sight,
+in the latter to spiritual perception. For a few short hours still,
+the ungodly mass of men were to have that outward vision which might
+have been so much to them, but which they had used so badly that 'they
+seeing saw not.' It was to cease, and they who loved Him would not
+miss it when it did; but the withdrawal which hid Him from sense and
+sense-bound souls would reveal Him more clearly to His friends. They,
+too, had but dimly seen Him while He stood by them; they would gaze on
+Him with truer insight when He was present though absent.
+
+So this is what every Christian life may and should be--the continual
+sight of a continually-present Christ. It is His part to come. It is
+ours to see, to be conscious of Him who does come.
+
+Faith is the sight of the soul, and it is far better than the sight of
+the senses. It is more direct. My eye does not touch what I look at.
+Gulfs of millions of miles may lie between me and it. But my faith is
+not only eye, but hand, and not only beholds, but grasps, and comes
+into contact with that to which it is directed. It is far more clear.
+Sense may deceive; faith, built upon His Word, cannot deceive. Its
+information is far more certain, far more valid. I have better reason
+for believing in Jesus Christ than I have for believing in the things
+that I touch and handle. So that there is no need for men to say, 'Oh,
+if we had only seen Him with our eyes!' You would very likely not have
+known Him if you had. There is no reason for thinking that the Church
+has retrograded in its privileges, because it has to love instead of
+beholding, and to believe instead of touching. That is advance, and we
+are better than they, inasmuch as the blessing of those 'who have not
+seen, and yet have believed,' comes down upon our heads. The vision of
+Christ which is granted to the faithful soul is better and not worse,
+more and not less, other in kind indeed, but loftier in degree too,
+than that which was granted to the men who saw Him upon earth. Sense
+disturbs, faith alone beholds.
+
+'The world seeth Me no more.' Why? Because it is a world. 'Ye see Me.'
+Why? Because, and in the measure in which you have turned away your
+eyes from seeing vanity. If you want the eye of the soul to be opened,
+you must shut the eye of sense. And the more we turn away from looking
+at the dazzling lies with which time and the material universe befool
+and bewilder us, the more shall we see Him whom to see is to live for
+ever.
+
+Oh, brethren! does that strong word 'see' in any measure express the
+vividness, the directness, the certainty of our realisation of our
+Master's presence? Is Jesus Christ as clear, as perceptible, as sure
+to us as the men round us are? Which are the shadows and which are the
+realities to us? The things which are seen, which the senses crown as
+'real,' or the things which cannot be seen because they are so great,
+and tower above us, invisible in their eternity? Which world are our
+eyes most open to, the world where Christ is, or the world here? Our
+happy eyes may behold and our blessed hands may handle the Word of
+Life which was manifested to us. Let us beware that we turn not away
+from the one thing worthy to be looked at, to gaze upon a desolate and
+dreary world.
+
+III. Lastly, the present and seen Christ is living and life-giving.
+
+The last words of my text may be connected with the preceding, as the
+marginal rendering of the Revised Version shows. But it is probably
+better to take them as standing independently, and presenting another
+and co-ordinate element of the blessedness arising from the coming of
+the Christ. Because He comes, His life passes into the hearts of the
+men to whom He comes, and who gaze upon Him.
+
+Time forbids me to dwell upon that majestic proclamation of His own
+absolute and divine life, from lips that were so soon to be paled with
+death. Mark the grand 'I live'--the timeless present tense, which
+expresses unbroken, underived, undying, and, as I believe, divine
+life. It is all but a quotation of the great Old Testament name
+'Jehovah.' The depth and sweep of its meaning are given to us in this
+Apostle's Apocalypse, where Christ is called 'the living One,' who
+lived whilst He died, and having died 'is alive for evermore.'
+
+And this Christ, coming to all His friends, possessor of the fullness
+of life in Himself, and proclaiming His absolute possession of that
+life, even whilst He stands within arm's-length of Calvary, is
+Life-giver to all that love Him and trust Him.
+
+We live _because_ He lives. In all senses of the word 'life,' as I
+believe, the life of men is derived from the Christ who is the Agent
+of creation, the channel from whom life passes from the Godhead into
+the creatures, and who is also the one means by whom any of us can
+ever hope to live the better life which is the only true one, and
+consists in fellowship with God and union to Him.
+
+We shall live _as long as_ He lives, and His being is the pledge and
+the guarantee of the immortal being of all who love Him. Anything is
+possible, rather than that it should be credible that a soul, which
+has drawn spiritual life from Jesus Christ here upon earth, should
+ever be rent apart from Him by such a miserable and external trifle as
+the mere dissolution of the bodily frame. As long as Christ lives our
+life is secure. If the Head has life, the members 'cannot see
+corruption,' 'Take _me_ not away in the midst of my days: _Thy_ years
+are throughout all generations' was the prayer of a saint of old,
+deeply feeling the contrast of the worshipper's transiency and God's
+eternity, and dimly hoping that the contrast might be changed into
+likeness. The great promise of our text answers the prayer, and
+assures us that the worshipper is to live as long as does He whom He
+adores.
+
+We shall live as He lives, nor ever cease the appropriation of His
+being until all His life we know, and all its fullness has expanded
+our natures--and that will be never. Therefore we shall not die.
+
+Men's lives have been prolonged by the transfusion of blood from
+vigorous frames. Jesus Christ passes His own blood into our veins and
+makes us immortal. The Church chose for one of its ancient emblems of
+the Saviour the pelican, which fed its young, according to the fable,
+with blood from its own breast. So Christ vitalises us. He in us is
+our Life.
+
+Brethren, without Jesus Christ we are orphans in a fatherless world.
+Without Him, our wearied and yet unsatisfied eyes have only trifles
+and trials and trash to look at. Without Him, we are 'dead whilst we
+live.' He and He only can give us back a Father, and renew in us the
+spirit of sons. He and only He can satisfy our eyes with the sight
+which is purity and restfulness and joy. He and He only can breathe
+life into our death. Oh! let Him do it for you. He comes to us with
+all these gifts in His hands, for He comes to give us Himself, and in
+Himself, as 'in a box where sweets compacted lie,' are all that lonely
+hearts and wearied eyes and dead souls can ever need. All are yours if
+you are Christ's. All are yours if He is yours. And He is yours if by
+faith and love you make yourself His and Him your own.
+
+
+
+
+THE GIFTS OF THE PRESENT CHRIST
+
+'At that day ye shall know that I am in My Father, and ye in Me, and I
+in you. He that hath My commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that
+loveth Me; and he that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father, and I
+will love him, and will manifest Myself to him.'--JOHN xiv. 20, 21.
+
+We have heard our Lord in the previous verse unveiling His deepest and
+strongest encouragements to His downcast followers. These were: His
+presence with them, their true sight of Him, and their participation
+in His life. The first part of our present text is closely connected
+with these, for it gives us their upshot and consequence. Because
+Christ's true disciple is conscious of Christ's presence, sees Him
+with the eyes of his spirit, and draws life from Him, therefore he
+will know by experience the deep truths of Christ's indwelling at once
+in the Father and in His servant, and of His servant's indwelling in
+Him. Our Lord had just previously been exhorting His disciples to
+_believe_ that He was in the Father and the Father in Him; and had
+been gently wondering at the slowness of their faith. Now He tells
+them that, when He is gone, their spiritual stature will be so
+increased as that they shall _know_ the thing which, with Him by their
+side, they found it so hard to believe.
+
+The second part of our present text is the close of this whole section
+of our Lord's discourse, and in it He urges the requirement of
+practical obedience, as the sign and test of love, and as the
+condition of receiving these high and wonderful things of which He has
+been speaking. He has been unveiling spiritual blessings, which may
+seem recondite and up in the clouds, and which, as a matter of fact,
+have often been perverted into dreamy mysticisms of a most immoral and
+unpractical kind. And so He brings us sharp back again here to very
+plain truths, and would teach us that all these lofty and ineffable
+gifts of which He has been dimly speaking are to be reached only by
+the commonplace road of honest obedience and simple conformity to His
+commandments. In these last words of my text, He administers the
+antidote and the check to the possible abuses of the great things
+which He has been saying.
+
+I. Note, then, first, the knowledge that comes with the Christ who
+comes.
+
+'At that day' covers the whole period of which He has been speaking,
+between His withdrawal from the disciples and His final corporeal
+coming to judgment--that great day of which generations are but the
+moments. In it the men who love Him are to have His presence, His
+vision, His life, and because they have, 'Ye shall know that I am in
+My Father, and ye in Me, and I in you,' The principle that underlies
+these wonderful words is that Christian experience is the best teacher
+of fundamental Christian truth. Observe with what decision, and with
+what strange boldness, our Lord carries that principle into regions
+where we might suppose at first sight that it was altogether
+inapplicable. 'Ye shall know that I am in My Father.' How can such a
+thing as the relation between Christ and God ever be a matter of
+consciousness to us here upon earth? Must it not always be a truth
+that we must take on trust and believe because we have been told it,
+without having any verification in ourselves? Not so; remember what
+has gone before. If a man has the consciousness of Christ's presence
+with Him, sees Him with the true inward eye, which is the only real
+organ of real vision, and is drawing from Him, moment by moment, His
+own high and immortal life, then is it not true that this man's
+experiences are of such a sort as to be utterly inexplicable, except
+on the ground that they come from a divine source? If I have these
+experiences I know that it is Jesus Christ who gives them, and I know
+that He could not give them, if He did not dwell in God and were not
+divine. These new influences, this revolution in my being, this
+healing, constraining, cleansing touch, these calming, gladdening,
+elevating powers, these new hopes, these reversed desires, loving all
+to which I was formerly indifferent, and growing dead to all that
+formerly appealed most strongly to me; all these things bear upon
+their very front the signature that they are wrought by a divine hand,
+and as sure as I am of my own Christian consciousness, so sure am I
+that all its experiences proclaim their Author, and that Christ who
+gives me them is in God. 'Ye shall know that I am in My Father.'
+
+The New Testament, as I read it, is full at every point of the
+divinity of Jesus Christ; and many profound and learned arguments on
+that subject have been urged by theologians, and these are all well
+and needful in their places, but the true way to be sure of it is to
+have Him dwelling with us and working in us; and then what was an
+article of belief becomes an article of knowledge, and we know Him to
+be our Saviour and the Son of God.
+
+In like manner, and yet more obviously, the other elements of this
+knowledge which Christ promises here may be shown to flow naturally
+and necessarily from Christian experiences. 'That ye are in Me, and I
+in you,'--if a Christian man carries the consciousness of Christ's
+presence, and has Him as a Sun in his darkness, and as a Life-source
+feeding his deadness with life, then he knows with a consciousness
+which is irrefragable that Jesus Christ is in him, for he feels His
+touch; and he knows that he is in Christ, for he is aware of the power
+that girdles him, and in which he has peace and righteousness and all.
+
+So, dear brethren, let us learn what the Christian man's experience
+ought to be and to do for him. It should change the articles of our
+creed into elements of our consciousness. It should make all the
+fundamentals of the Gospel vitally and vividly true; and certified by
+what has passed within our own spirits We should be able to say: 'We
+have the witness in ourselves.' And though there will remain much that
+is uncertain, much in Christian doctrine which is not capable of that
+clear and all-sufficing verification; much about which we must still
+depend on the mere teaching of others, or on our own study, the
+central facts which make the Gospel may all become, by this plain and
+short path, elements of our very consciousness which stand undeniable
+to us, whosoever denies them.
+
+Such a direct way to knowledge is reasonable, is in full analogy with
+the manner by which we attain to the knowledge of everything except
+the mere external facts, the knowledge of which has arrogated to
+itself the exclusive name of 'science,' How do you know anything about
+love? You may read poems and tragedies to the end of time, and you
+will not understand it until you come under its spell for yourself;
+and then all the things that men said about it cease to be mere words,
+because you yourself have experienced the emotion.
+
+  'He must be loved, ere that to you
+  He will seem worthy of your love,'
+
+and the only way to be sure, with a vital certitude, of Christ, is to
+take Christ for your very own, and then He comes into your very being,
+and dwells there quickening, the Sun and the Life.
+
+So, dear brethren, though such certitude arising from experience,
+which in its nature is the very highest, is not available for other
+people, the fact that so many millions of men allege that in varying
+degrees they possess this certitude is available for other people, and
+there is nothing to be said by the unbeliever to this, the attestation
+of the Christian consciousness to the truth of the truths which it has
+tried. 'Whether this man be a sinner or no, I know not.' You may
+jangle as much as you like about the questionable and controversial
+points that surround the Christian revelation, I do not care in the
+present connection what answer you give to them. 'Whether this man be
+a sinner or no, I know not. One thing I know, that whereas I was
+blind, now I see.' And we may push the war into the enemy's quarters,
+and say: 'Why! herein is a marvellous thing, that you that know
+everything do not know whence this man is, and yet He has opened mine
+eyes. You want facts; there are some. You want verification; we have
+verified by experience, and we set to our seals that God is true.'
+
+'Oh but,' you say, 'this is not a fair account of the way in which
+Christian men and women generally feel about this matter.' Well, all
+that I can say about that is, so much the worse for the so-called
+Christian men and women. And if they are Christians, and do not know
+by this inward experience that Christ is divine and their Saviour,
+then there is only one of two reasons to be given for it; either their
+experience is so wretchedly superficial and fragmentary, so
+rudimentary as to be scarcely worth calling by the name or, having the
+facts, they have failed to appreciate their significance, and to make
+their own by reflection the certitudes which are their own.
+
+Brethren, it becomes every Christian man and woman to be able to say,
+'Because I have Christ with me, and see Him, and derive my life from
+Him, I know that He is in the Father, and I in Him, and He in me.' And
+if you cannot say that, it is your own grasp of Him, or your
+meditation upon what you have got by your grasp, that is painfully and
+sinfully defective.
+
+II. My text speaks of the obedience which is the sign and test of
+love.
+
+The words here are substantially equivalent to former words in the
+chapter which we have already considered, where our Lord says: 'If ye
+love Me, ye will keep My commandments.'
+
+There is, however, a slight difference in the point of view in the two
+sayings; the former begins with the root and traces it upwards and
+outwards to its fruits, love blossoming into obedience. Our text
+reverses the process, and takes the thing by the other end; begins
+with the fruits and traces them downwards and inwards to the root. 'He
+that hath and keepeth My commandments, he it is that loveth Me.' The
+two sayings substantially mean the same thing; but in the one love is
+put first as the cause of obedience, and in the other obedience is put
+first, as the certain fruit and sure sign of love. The connection
+between these and the preceding words is, as I have already pointed
+out, that our Lord here brings all His lofty promises down to the
+sharp, practical requirement of obedience, as the only condition on
+which they can be fulfilled.
+
+So note, and very briefly about this matter, how remarkably our Lord
+here declares the _possession_ of His commandments to be a sign of
+love to Him. 'He that _hath_,' a word which is generally passed over
+in our reading--'He that hath My commandments, He it is that loveth
+Me.' Of course there are two ways of having His commandments; there is
+having them in the Bible, and there is having them in the
+heart;--present before my eye, as a law that I ought to obey, or
+present within my will, as a power that shapes it. And the latter is
+the only kind of 'having' that Christ regards as real and valid. The
+rest is only preparatory and superficial. Love possesses the knowledge
+of the loved one's will. Is not that true? Do we not all know how
+strange is the power of divining desires that goes along with true
+affection, and how the power, not only of divining, but of treasuring,
+these desires is the test and the thermometer of our true love? Some
+of us, perhaps, keep laid away in sacred, secret places tattered,
+yellow, old bits of paper with the words of a dear one on them, that
+we would not part with. 'He that hath My commandments' laid up in
+lavender in the deepest recesses of his faithful heart, he it is 'that
+loveth Me.'
+
+In like manner, our Lord says, the practical obedience to His
+commandments is the sure sign and test of love. I need not dwell upon
+that. There are two motives for keeping commandments--one because they
+are commanded, and one because we love Him that commands. The one is
+slavery, the other is liberty. The one is like the Arctic regions,
+cold and barren, the other is like tropical lands, full of warmth and
+sunshine, glorious and glad fertility.
+
+The form of the sentence suggests how easy it is for people to delude
+themselves about their love to Jesus Christ. That emphatic 'he,' and
+the putting first of the character before its root is pointed out, are
+directed against false pretensions to love. The love that Christ
+stamps with His hall-mark, and passes as genuine, is no mere emotion,
+however passionate, however sweet; no mere sentiment, however pure,
+however deep. The tiniest little rivulet that drives a mill is better
+than a Niagara that rushes and foams and tumbles idly. And there is
+much so-called love to Jesus Christ that goes masquerading up and down
+the world, from which the paint is stripped by the sharp application
+of the words of my text. Character and conduct are the true
+demonstrations of Christian love, and it is only love so attested that
+He accepts.
+
+III. Lastly, notice the further and sweeter gifts of divine love and
+manifestation which reward our love and obedience.
+
+'He that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father, and I will love him,
+and will manifest Myself to him.' Two things, then, He tells us, are
+the rich rewards and sparkling crowns with which He crowns our poor
+love to Him--the love of the Father and the love of the Christ,
+separate and yet united, and the further manifestation of Christ's
+sweetness to the waiting heart.
+
+Note, as to the first, the extraordinary boldness of that majestic
+saying: 'If a man loves _Me_, My Father will love _him_.' God regards
+our love to Jesus Christ as the fulfilling of the law, as equivalent
+to our supreme love to Himself, as containing in it the germ of all
+that is pleasing in His sight. And so, upon our hearts, if we love
+Christ, there falls the benediction of the Father's love. Of course I
+need not remind you that our Lord here is not beginning at the very
+beginning of everything; for prior to all men's love to Christ is
+Christ's love to men, and ours to Him is but the reflection and the
+echo called forth by His to us. 'We love Him because He first loved
+us' digs a story deeper down in the building than the words of my
+text, which is speaking, not of the process by which a man comes to
+receive the love of God for the first time, but of the process by
+which a Christian man grows in his possession of it. That being
+understood, here is a great lesson. It is not all the same to God
+whether a man is a scoundrel or a saint. The divine love is over all
+its works, and embraces every variety of humanity, the most degraded,
+alien, hostile. But in this generation, as it seems to me, there is
+great need for preaching that whilst that is gloriously and blessedly
+true, the other thing is just as true, that to know the deepest depth
+and to taste the sweetest sweetness of the love of our Father God,
+there must be in our hearts love to Him whom He has sent, which
+manifests itself by our obedience. God's love is a moral love; and
+whilst the sunbeams play upon the ice and melt it sometimes, they
+flash back from, and rest most graciously and fully on, the rippling
+stream into which the ice has turned. God loves them that love Him
+not, but the depths of His heart and the secret, sacred favours of His
+grace can only be bestowed upon those who in some measure are
+conformed, and are growingly being conformed, to His likeness in Jesus
+Christ, and who love Him and obey Him.
+
+And, in like manner, my text tells us that if we wish to know all that
+it is possible for us here, amidst the clouds, and shadows, and
+darknesses, to know of that dear Lord, the path to such knowledge is
+plain. Walk in the way of obedience, and Christ will meet you with the
+unveiling of more and more of His love. To live what we believe is the
+sure way to increase its amount. To be faithful to the little is the
+certain way to inherit the much. And Christ manifests Himself, in all
+deep and recondite sweetness, gentleness, constraining power, to the
+men who treasure the partial knowledge as yet possessed, in their
+loving hearts and obedient wills, and who make a conscience of
+translating all their knowledge into conduct, and of basing all their
+conduct on knowledge of Him. He gives us His whole self at the first,
+but we traverse the breadth of the gift by degrees. He puts Himself
+into our hands and into our hearts when we humbly trust Him and
+imperfectly try to love Him. But the flower is but a bud when we get
+it, and, as we hold it, it opens its petals to the light.
+
+So, if 'any man wills to do His will, he shall know of the doctrine';
+and if, touched by His divine love and infinite sacrifice for me, I
+cast my poor self upon Him, and try to love Him back again, and to
+keep His commandments because I love, then day by day I shall realise
+more and more of His strong, immortal, all-satisfying love, and see
+more and more deeply into that Saviour, whose infinite beauties remain
+unrevealed after all revelation, and to know more and more of whom
+shall be the Heaven of Heavens yonder, as it is the joy and life of
+the soul here.
+
+
+
+
+WHO BRING CHRIST
+
+'Judas saith unto Him, not Iscariot, Lord, how is it that Thou wilt
+manifest Thyself unto us, and not unto the world? Jesus answered and
+said unto him, If a man love Me he will keep My words: and My Father
+will love him, and We will come unto him, and make Our abode with him.
+He that loveth Me not, keepeth not My sayings: and the word which ye
+hear is not Mine, but the Father's which sent Me.'--JOHN xiv. 22-24.
+
+This Judas held but a low place amongst the Apostles. In all the lists
+he is one of the last of the groups of fours, into which they are
+divided, and which were evidently arranged according to their
+spiritual nearness to the Master. His question is exactly that which a
+listener, with some dim, confused glimmer of Christ's meaning, might
+be expected to ask. He grasps at His last words about manifesting
+Himself to certain persons; he rightly feels that he and his brethren
+possess the qualification of love. He rightly understands that our
+Lord contemplates no public showing of Himself, and that disappoints
+him. It was only a day or two ago that Jesus seemed to them to have
+begun to do what they had always wanted Him to do, manifest Himself to
+the world. And now, as he thinks, something unknown to them must have
+happened in order to make Him change His course, and go back to the
+old plan of a secret communication. And so he says, 'Lord! what has
+come to pass to induce you to abandon and falter upon the course on
+which we entered, when you rode into Jerusalem with the shouting
+crowd?'
+
+His question is no better in intelligence, though it is a great deal
+better in spirit, than the taunt of Christ's brethren, 'If Thou do
+these things, show Thyself to the world.' Judas, too, thought of the
+simple flashing of His Messianic glory, in some visible, vulgar form,
+before else blind eyes.
+
+How sad and chilling such a question must have been to Jesus! Slow
+scholars we all are; and with what wonderful patience, without a word
+of pain, or of rebuke, He reiterates His lesson, here a little and
+there a little, and once more unfolds the conditions of His
+self-revelation, and the fullness of the blessings that He brings. He
+moulds His words so as to meet both the clauses of Judas's foolish
+question--'To us, not to the world'; and quietly tells them the
+positive conditions and the negative disqualifications for His
+self-revelation. So my text deals with two things, the crown of loving
+obedience in the possession of a fuller Christ, and the impassable
+barrier to His manifestation which unloving disobedience makes. Or to
+put it into briefer words, we have in one of the verses--first, what
+brings Christ and what Christ brings; and, in the other, second, what
+keeps away Christ and all His gifts. Now let us look at these two
+things.
+
+I. We have what brings Christ and what Christ brings.
+
+'If a man love Me, He will keep My word' (not 'words,' as our
+Authorised Version has it), 'and My Father will love him, and We will
+come unto him, and make Our abode with him.' Now notice how here, in
+the first part of this verse, our Lord subtly and significantly alters
+the form of the statement which He has already made. He had formerly
+said, 'If ye love Me, ye will keep My commandments,' but now He casts
+it into a purely impersonal form, and says, 'If a man,' anybody, not
+'you' only, but anybody--'If a man love Me, he,' anybody, 'will keep
+My word.' And why the change? Why, I suppose, in order to strike full
+and square against that complacent assumption of Judas that it was 'to
+us and not to the world' that the showing was to take place. Our Lord,
+by the studiously impersonal form into which He casts the promise,
+proclaims its universality, and says this to His ignorant questioner,
+'Do not suppose that you Apostles have the monopoly. You may not even
+have a share in My self-manifestation. Anybody may have it. And there
+is no "world," as you suppose, to which I do not show Myself. Anybody
+may have the vision if he observes the conditions.'
+
+Now I need not dwell at any length upon the earlier words of this
+text, because we have had to consider them in previous sermons on the
+former verses of this chapter. I need only remark that here, as there,
+our Lord brings out the thought that the very life-blood of love is
+the treasuring of the word of the beloved One; and that there is no
+joy comparable to the joy of the loving heart that yields itself to
+the Beloved's will. That is true about earth, and it makes the
+sweetest and selectest blessedness of our ordinary existence. And it
+is true about heaven, and it makes the liberty and the gladness of the
+bond that knits us to Him.
+
+But I would like just to notice, before I come to the more immediate
+subject of my discourse, that remarkable expression, 'He will keep My
+_word_.' That is more than a 'commandment' is it not? Christ's 'word'
+is wider than _precept_. It includes all His sayings, and it includes
+them all as in one vital unity and organic whole. We are not to go
+picking and choosing among them; they are one. And it includes this
+other thought, that every word of Christ, be it revelation of the deep
+things of God, or be it a promise of the great shower of blessings
+which, out of His full hand, He will drop upon our heads, enshrines
+within itself a commandment. He utters no revelations, simply that we
+may know. He utters no comforting words, simply that our sore hearts
+may be healed, but in all His utterances there is a practical bearing;
+and every word of His teaching, every word of His sweet, whispered
+assurances of love and favour to the waiting heart, has in it the
+imperativeness of His manifested will, and has a direct bearing upon
+duty. All His _words_ are gathered into one word, and all the variety
+of His sayings is, in their unity, the law of our lives. So much by
+way of observation on the mere language of my text. And now let us
+look at what, as He says to us here, are the rewards and crown of
+loving obedience.
+
+Christ will show Himself to the loving heart. That is true on the very
+lowest level. Every act of obedience to any moral truth is rewarded by
+additional insight. Every act of submission to His will cleanses the
+lenses of the telescope from some film that has gathered upon them,
+and so the stars look brighter and larger and nearer. All duty done
+opens out into a loftier conception of duty, and a clearer vision of
+Him. 'To him that hath shall be given.' As we climb the hill we get a
+wider view. Obedience is in all things the parent of insight.
+
+But in reference to our relation to Him, we have to do not with truths
+only, but with a Person. How do we learn to know people? There is only
+one way--that is, by loving them. Sympathy is the parent of all true
+knowledge of one another. They tell us in the foolish old proverb that
+'love is blind.' No! There is not such a pair of clear eyes anywhere
+as the eyes of love; and if we want to see into a man, the first
+condition is that we feel kindly towards him. Sympathy is the parent
+of insight into persons, as Obedience is the parent of insight into
+duty.
+
+But both of these illustrations are only imperfect preparations for
+the great truth here, which is that our loving obedience to the
+discerned will of Jesus Christ has not only an operation inwards upon
+us, but has an effect outwards upon Him. I am afraid that Christian
+people in this generation have but a very imperfect belief in the
+actual, supernatural, and, if you like to call it so, miraculous
+manifestation of Jesus Christ, His very Self, to men that love Him and
+cleave to Him. Do you believe as a simple revealed truth, plain as a
+sunbeam in such words as these, that Jesus Christ Himself will do
+something on you, and in you, and for you, if you love Him and trust
+Him; that His hand will be laid on your eyes as it was laid of old;
+that He will indeed, in no metaphor, but in reality, show Himself to
+you? I may be mistaken, but I think that too commonly it is the case,
+that even good Christian people have a far more vivid and realising
+and real faith in the past work of Christ on earth than in the present
+work of Christ in themselves. They think the one a plain truth, and
+the other something like a metaphor, whereas the New Testament teaches
+us, as plainly as it can teach us anything, that, far above all the
+natural operations of truth upon our understandings, hearts, and
+wills, there is an actual, supernatural, continuous communication of
+Christ to hearts that love Him, which leads day by day, if they be
+faithful, to a fuller knowledge, a sweeter love, a larger possession,
+of a fuller Christ. And it is this that He tells us of, to fire our
+ambition to attain, in such words as these.
+
+Brethren, one piece of honest, loving obedience is worth all the study
+and speculation of an unloving heart when the question is, 'How are we
+to see Christ?'
+
+Again, Jesus shows Himself to the obedient heart in indissoluble union
+with the Father. Look at the majesty, and, except upon one hypothesis,
+the insane presumption, of such words as these: 'If a man love Me, My
+Father will love _him_'; as if identifying love to Christ with love to
+Himself. And look at that wondrous union, the consciousness of which
+speaks in '_We_ will come.' Think of a _man_ saying that. It is
+blasphemous insanity; or else the speech of Him who is conscious of
+union with the Father, close and indissoluble and transcending all
+analogies. '_We_ will come,' together, hand-in-hand, if I may so say;
+or rather, His coming is the Father's coming. Just as in heaven so
+closely are they represented as united, that there is but one throne
+'for God and the Lamb,' so on earth so closely are they represented as
+united, that there is but one coming of the Father in the Son.
+
+And this is the only belief, as it seems to me, that will keep this
+generation from despair and moral suicide. The question for this
+generation is, Is it possible for men to know God? Science, both of
+material things and of inward experiences, is more and more unanimous
+in its proclamation; 'Behold! we know not anything'; and the only
+attitude to take before that great black vault above us is to say, 'We
+know nothing.' The world has learned half of a great verse of the
+Gospel: 'No man hath seen God at any time, nor can see Him.' If the
+world is not to go mad, if hearts are not to be tortured into despair,
+if morality and enthusiasm and poetry and everything higher and nobler
+than the knowledge of material phenomena and their sequences is not to
+perish from the earth, the world must learn the next half of the
+verse, and say, 'The only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the
+Father, He hath declared Him.' Christ shows Himself in indissoluble
+union with the Father.
+
+Lastly about this matter, Christ shows Himself to obedient love by a
+true coming. 'We will come and make our mansion with him.' And that
+coming is a fact of a higher order, and not to be confounded either
+with the mere divine Omnipresence, by which God is everywhere, nor to
+be reduced to a figment of our own imaginations, or a strong way of
+promising increased perception on our part of Christ's fullness. That
+great central Sun, if I might use so violent a figure, draws nearer
+and nearer and nearer to the planets that move about it, and having
+once been far off on an almost infinitely distant horizon, approaches
+until planet and Sun unite.
+
+Dear brethren, if we could only get to the attitude of simple
+acceptance of this as a literal truth, and believe that, in prose
+reality, Christ comes to every heart that loves Him, would not all the
+world be different to us?
+
+That coming is a permanent residence: 'We will make our abode with
+him.' Very beautiful is it to notice that our Lord here employs that
+same sweet and significant word, with which He began this wonderful
+series of encouragements, when He said, 'In My Father's house are many
+mansions.' Yonder they dwell for ever with God; here God in Christ for
+ever dwells with the loving heart. It is a permanent abode so long as
+the conditions are fulfilled, but only so long. If self-will, rising
+in the Christian heart from its torpor and apparent death, reasserts
+itself and shakes off Christ's yoke, Christ's presence vanishes. In
+the last hours of the Holy City there was heard by the trembling
+priests amidst the midnight darkness the motion of departing Deity,
+and a great voice said: 'Let us depart hence'; and to-morrow the
+shrine was empty, and the day after it was in flames. Brethren, if you
+would keep the Christ in whom is God, remember that He cannot be kept
+but by the act of loving obedience.
+
+II. Now, in the next place, my text gives us the negative side, and
+shows us what keeps away Christ and all His blessings.
+
+An unloving disobedience closes the eyes to the vision, and the heart
+against the entrance, of that dear Lord. Our Master lays down for us
+two principles, and leaves us to draw the conclusion for ourselves.
+
+The first is, 'He that loveth Me not, keepeth not My sayings.' No
+love, no obedience. That is plainly true, because the heart of all the
+commandments is love, and where that is not, disobedience to their
+very spirit is. It is plainly true, because there is no power that
+will lead men to true obedience to Christ's yoke except the power of
+love. His commandments are too alien from our nature ever to be kept,
+unless by the might of love. It was only the rising sunbeam that could
+draw music from the stony lips of Memnon, as he gazed out across the
+desert, and it is only when Christ's love shines on our faces that we
+open our lips in praise, and move our hands in service. Those great
+rocking-stones down in Cornwall stand unmoved by any tempest, but a
+child's finger, laid on the right place, will set them vibrating. And
+so the heavy, hard, stony bulk of our hearts lies torpid and
+immovable, until He lays His loving finger upon them, and then they
+rock at His will. There is no keeping of Christ's commandments without
+love. That makes short work of a great deal that calls itself
+Christianity, does it not? Reluctant obedience is no obedience;
+self-interested obedience is no obedience; constrained obedience is no
+obedience; outward acts of service, if the heart be wanting, are
+rubbish and dung. Morality without religion is nought. The one thing
+that makes a good man is love to Jesus Christ; and where that is,
+there, and only there, is obedience.
+
+  'Talk they of morals? O Thou Bleeding Lamb!
+   The grand morality is love of Thee.'
+
+'If a man love Me not, he will not keep My words.'
+
+Then the second principle is, disobedience to Christ is disobedience
+to God. 'The Word which ye hear is not Mine, but the Father's.'
+Christ's consciousness of union so speaks out here as that He is quite
+sure that all His words are God's words, and that all God's words are
+spoken by Him. Paul has to say, 'So speak I, not the Lord.' And you
+would not think a man a very sound or safe religious teacher who said
+to you, to begin with, 'Now, mind, everything that I say, God says.'
+There are no errors then, no deterioration of the treasure by the
+vessel in which it lies. The water does not taste of the vase in which
+it is carried. The personality of Jesus Christ is never, through all
+His utterances, so separated from God but that God speaks in Him; and,
+listening to His voice, we hear the absolute utterance of the
+uncreated and eternal Wisdom.
+
+Therefore follows the conclusion, which our Lord does not state, but
+leaves us to supply. If it be true that the absence of love of Him is
+disobedience to Him, and if it be true that disobedience to Him is
+disobedience to God, then it plainly follows that what keeps away
+Christ and all His gifts, and God in Him, is unloving obedience. What
+brings Him is the obedience of love; what repels Him is alienation and
+rebellion. If the heart be full of confusion, of the world, of self,
+of unbridled inclinations, of careless indifference to His bleeding
+love, He 'can but listen at the gate and hear the household jar
+within.'
+
+And so, dear friends, from all this there follow one or two points,
+which I touch very briefly. One is, that it is possible for men not to
+see Christ, though He stands there close before them. It is possible
+to grope at noonday as at midnight, to see only 'bracken green and
+cold grey stone' on the hillside, where another man sees the chariots
+of fire and the horses of fire. It is possible for you--and, alas! it
+is the condition of some of my hearers--to look upon Christ and to
+turn away and say, 'I see no beauty in Him that I should desire Him,'
+whilst the man beside yon, looking at the same facts and the same
+face, can see in Him the 'Chief among ten thousand, and the altogether
+lovely.'
+
+Another thought is, that Christ's showing of Himself to men is in no
+sense arbitrary. It is you that determine what you shall see. You can
+hermetically seal your heart against Him, you can blind yourself to
+all His beauty. The door of your hearts is hinged to open from within,
+and if you do not open it, it remains shut, and Christ remains
+outside.
+
+Another thought is, that you do not need to do anything to blind
+yourselves. Simple negation is fatal. 'If a man love not'; that is
+all. The absence of love is your ruin.
+
+And the last thought is this, that my text does not begin at the
+beginning. Jesus Christ has been speaking about manifestations of
+Himself to the loving and obedient; but there are manifestations of
+Himself made that we may _become_ loving and obedient. You can build a
+barrier over which these sweeter revelations, of which loyal love and
+docile submission are the conditions, cannot rise. But you cannot
+build a barrier over which the prior revelations to the unthankful and
+disobedient cannot rise. No mountains of sin and neglect and
+alienation can be piled so high but that the flood of pardoning grace
+will rise above their crests, and pour itself into your hearts. You
+ask, How can I get the love and obedience of which you have been
+singing the praises now? There is only one answer, brethren. We know
+that we love Him when we know that He loves us; and we know that He
+loves us when we see Him dying on His Cross. So here is the ladder,
+that is planted in the miry clay of the horrible pit, and fastens its
+golden hooks on His throne. The first round is, Behold the dying
+Christ and His love to me. The second is, Let that love melt my heart
+into sweet responsive love. The third is, Let my love mould my life
+into obedience. And then Christ, and God in Him, will come to me and
+show Himself to me; and give me a fuller knowledge and a deeper love,
+and make His dwelling with me. And then there is only one round still
+to roach, and that will land us by the Throne of God, in the many
+mansions of the Father's house, where we shall make our abode with Him
+for evermore.
+
+
+
+
+THE TEACHER SPIRIT
+
+'These things have I spoken unto you, being yet present with you. But
+the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in
+My name, He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your
+remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.'--JOHN xiv. 25, 26.
+
+This wonderful outpouring of consolation and instruction with which
+our Lord sought to soothe the pain of parting is nearing its end. We
+have to conceive of a slight pause here, whilst He looks back upon
+what He has been saying and contrasts His teaching with that of the
+Comforter, whom He has once already, though in a different connection,
+promised to His followers. He speaks of His earthly residence with
+them as being 'an abiding,' distinctly therein referring to what He
+has just said, that the Father and He will, in the future, 'make their
+abode' with His disciples. He contrasts the outward and transitory
+presence which was now nearing its end, with the inward and continuous
+presence, which its end was to inaugurate.
+
+And, in like manner, with, at first sight, startling humility, He
+contrasts 'these things,' the partial and to a large extent
+unintelligible utterances which He had given with His human lips, with
+the complete, universal teaching of that divine Spirit, who was to
+instruct in 'all things' pertaining to man's salvation. We have then,
+here, sketched in broad outline, the great truths concerning the
+ever-present, inward Teacher of God's Church who is to come, now that
+the earthly manifestation of Christ, whom the twelve called their
+'Teacher,' had reached a close. I think we may best gain the deep
+instruction which lies in the words before us, if we look at three
+points of view which they bring into prominence: the Teacher, His
+lesson, and His scholars.
+
+I. Now, as to the first, the promised Teacher.
+
+I need not repeat what I have said in former sermons as to the wide
+sweep of that word 'the Comforter,' beyond just reminding you that it
+means literally one who is called to the side of another, primarily
+for the purpose of being his representative in some legal process;
+and, more widely, for any purpose of help, encouragement, and
+strength. That being so, 'Comforter,' in its modern sense of
+_Consoler_, is far too narrow for the full force of the word, which
+means much rather 'Comforter,' in its ancient and etymological sense
+of one who, in company with another, makes Him strong and brave.
+
+But the point to which I desire to turn attention now is this, that
+this comforting and strengthening office of the divine Spirit is
+brought into immediate connection here with the conception of Him as a
+Teacher. That is to say, the best strength that God, by His Spirit,
+can give us is by our firm grasp and growing clearness of
+understanding of the truths which are wrapped up in Jesus Christ. All
+power for endurance, for service, is there, and when the Spirit of God
+teaches a man what God reveals in Christ, He therein and thereby most
+fully discharges His office of Strengthener.
+
+Then note still further the other designation of this divine Teacher
+which is here given: 'The Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost.' We
+might have expected, as indeed we find in another context in this
+great final discourse, the 'Spirit of _Truth_' as appropriate in
+connection with the office of teaching. But is there not a profound
+lesson for us here in this, that, side by side with the thought of
+illumination, there lies the thought of purity built upon
+consecration, which is the Scripture definition of holiness? That
+suggests that there is an indissoluble connection between the real
+knowledge of God's truth and practical holiness of life. That
+connection is of a double sort. There is no holiness without such
+knowledge, and there is no such knowledge without holiness.
+
+There is no real knowledge of Christ and His truth without purity of
+heart. The man who has no music in his soul can never be brought to
+understand the deep harmonies of the great masters and magicians of
+sound. The man who has no eye for beauty can never be brought to bow
+his spirit before some of those embodiments of loveliness and
+sublimity which the painter's brush has cast upon the canvas. And the
+man who has no longings after purity, nor has attained to any degree
+of moral conformity with the divine image, is not in possession of the
+sense which is needed in order that he should understand the 'deep
+things of God.'
+
+The scholars in this school have to wash their hands before they go to
+school, and come there with clean hands and clean hearts. Foulness and
+the love of it are bars to all understanding of God's truth. And, on
+the other hand, the truest inducements, motives, and powers for purity
+are found in that great word which is all 'according to godliness,'
+and is meant much rather to make us good than to make us wise.
+
+So, in this designation of the teaching Spirit as holy, there lie
+lessons for two classes of people. All fanatical professions of
+possessing divine illumination, which are not warranted and sealed by
+purity of life, are lies or self-delusion. And, on the other hand,
+coldblooded intellectualism will never force the locks of the palace
+of divine truth, but they that come there must have clean hands and a
+pure heart; and only those who have the love and the longing for
+goodness will be wise scholars in Christ's school. Your theology is
+nothing unless its distinct outcome is morality, and you must be
+prepared to accept the painful, the punitive, the purifying influences
+of that divine Spirit on your moral natures if you want to have His
+enlightening influences shining on the 'truth as it is in Jesus.' 'If
+any man wills to do His will, he,' and only he, 'shall know of the
+doctrine.' Knowledge and holiness are as inseparable in divine things
+as light and heat.
+
+And still further note that this great Teacher is 'sent by God' in
+Christ's name. That pregnant phrase, 'In My name,' cannot be
+represented by any one form of expression into which we may translate
+it, but covers a larger space. God in Christ's name sends the Spirit.
+That is to say, in some deep sense God acts as Christ's
+representative; just as Christ comes in the Father's name and acts as
+His representative. And, again, God sends in Christ's name; that is,
+the historical manifestation of Christ is the basis on which the
+sending of the Spirit is possible and rests. The revelation had to be
+complete before He who came to unfold the meaning of the revelation
+had material to work upon. The Spirit, which is sent in Christ's name,
+has, for the basis of His mission, and the means by which He acts, the
+recorded facts of Christ's life and death, these and none other.
+
+And then note finally about this matter, the strong and unmistakable
+declaration here, that that divine Spirit is a person: 'He shall teach
+you all things.' They tell us that the doctrine of the Trinity is not
+in the New Testament. The word is not, but the thing is. In this verse
+we have the Father, the Son, and the Spirit brought into such close
+and indissoluble union as is only vindicated from the charge of
+blasphemy by the belief in the divinity of each. Just as the Apostolic
+benediction, 'The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God
+the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit' necessarily involves
+the divinity of all who are thus invoked, so we stand here in the
+presence of a truth which pierces into the deeps of Deity. That divine
+Spirit is more than an influence. 'He shall teach,' and He can be
+grieved by evil and sin. I do not enlarge upon these thoughts. My
+purpose is mainly to bring them out clearly before you.
+
+II. I pass in the second place to the consideration of the Lesson
+which this promised Teacher gives.
+
+Mark the words, 'He shall teach you all things, and bring all things
+to your remembrance, whatsoever _I_ have said unto you.' Now as we
+have seen in the exposition of the words 'in My name,' the whole
+subject-matter of the divine Spirit's teaching is the life and work
+and death and person of Jesus Christ. 'He shall teach you all things'
+is wider than 'He shall bring all things which I have said to you to
+your remembrance.' But whilst that is so, the clear implication of the
+words before us is that Christ is the lesson book, of which the divine
+Spirit is the Teacher. His weapon, to take another metaphor, with
+which He plies men's hearts and minds and wills, convincing the world
+of sin and of righteousness and of judgment, and leading those who are
+convinced into deeper knowledge and larger wisdom, is the recorded
+facts concerning the life and manifestation of Jesus Christ. The
+significance of this lesson book, the history of our Lord, cannot be
+unfolded all at once. There is something altogether unique in the
+incorruption and germinant power of all His deeds and of all His
+words. This Carpenter of Nazareth has reached the heights which the
+greatest thinkers and poets of the past have never reached, or only in
+little snatches and fragments of their words. _His_ words open out,
+generation after generation, into undreamed-of wisdom, and there are
+found to be hived in them stores of sweetness that were never
+suspected until the occasion came that drew them forth. The world and
+the Church received Christ, as it were, in the dark; and, as with some
+man receiving a precious gift as the morning was dawning, each fresh
+moment revealed, as the light grew, new beauties and new preciousness
+in the thing possessed. So Christ, in His infinite significance, fresh
+and new for all generations, was given at first, and ever since the
+Church and the world have been learning the meaning of the gift which
+they received. Christ's words are inexhaustible, and the Spirit's
+teaching is to unveil more and more of the infinite significance that
+lies in the apparently least significant of them.
+
+Now, then, note that if this be our Lord's meaning here, Jesus Christ
+plainly anticipated that, after His departure from earth, there should
+be a development of Christian doctrine. We are often taunted with the
+fact, which is exaggerated for the purpose of controversy, that a
+clear and full statement of the central truths which orthodox
+Christianity holds, is found rather in the Apostolic epistles than in
+the Master's words, and the shallow axiom is often quoted with great
+approbation: 'Jesus Christ is our Master, and not Paul.' I do not
+grant that the germs and the central truths of the Gospel are not to
+be found in Christ's words, but I admit that the full, articulate
+statement of them is to be found rather in the servant's letters, and
+I say that that is exactly what Jesus Christ told us to expect, that
+after He was gone, words that had been all obscure, and thoughts that
+had been only fragmentarily intelligible, would come to be seen
+clearly, and would be discerned for what they were. The earlier
+disciples had only a very partial grasp of Christ's nature. They knew
+next to nothing of the great doctrine of sacrifice; they knew nothing
+about His resurrection; they did not in the least understand that He
+was going back to heaven; they had but glimmering conceptions of the
+spirituality or universality of His Kingdom. Whilst they were
+listening to Him at that table they did not believe in the atonement;
+but they dimly believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ; they did not
+believe in His resurrection; they did not believe in His ascension;
+they did not believe that He was founding a spiritual kingdom, a
+kingdom was to rule over all the world till the end of time. None of
+these truths were in their mind. They had all been in germ in His
+words. And after He was gone, there came over them a breath of the
+teaching Spirit, and the unintelligible flashed up into significance.
+The history of the Church is the proof of the truth of this promise,
+and if anybody says to me, 'Where is the fulfilment of the promise of
+a Spirit that will bring all things to your remembrance?' I say--here
+in this Book! These four Gospels, these Apostolic Epistles, show that
+the word which our Lord here speaks has been gloriously fulfilled.
+Christ anticipated a development of doctrine, and it casts no slur or
+suspicion on the truthfulness of the apostolic representation of the
+Christian truths, that they are only sparsely and fragmentarily to be
+found in the records of Christ's life,
+
+Then there is another practical conclusion from the words before us,
+on which I touch for a moment, and that is, that if Jesus Christ and
+the deep understanding of Him be the true lesson of the divine,
+teaching Spirit, then real progress consists, not in getting beyond
+Christ, but in getting more fully into Him. We hear a great deal in
+these days about advanced thought and progressive Christianity. I hope
+I believe in the continuous advance of Christian thought as joyfully
+as any man, but my notion of it--and I humbly venture to say Christ's
+notion of it--is to get more and more into His heart, and to find
+within Him, and not away from Him, 'all the treasures of wisdom and
+knowledge.' We leave all other great men behind. All other teachers'
+words become feeble by age, as their persons become ghostly, wrapped
+in thickening folds of oblivion; but the progress of the Church
+consists in absorbing more and more of Christ, in understanding Him
+better, and becoming more and more moulded by His influence. The
+Spirit's teaching brings out the ever fresh significance of the
+ancient and perpetual revelation of God in Jesus Christ.
+
+III. And now, lastly, note the Scholars.
+
+Primarily, of course, these are the Apostolic group but the Apostles,
+in all these discourses, stand as the representatives of the Church,
+and not as separated from it. And whilst the teaching Spirit could
+'bring to the remembrance' of those only who first heard them 'the
+words that He said unto them,' that Spirit's teaching function is not
+limited to those who listened to the Lord Jesus. The fire that was
+kindled on Pentecost has not died down into grey ashes, nor the river
+that then broke forth been sucked up by thirsty sands of successive
+generations, but the fire is still with us, and the river still flows
+near our lips, and we, too, may be taught by that divine Spirit. For
+this very Evangelist, in writing his Epistle, has at least two
+distinct references to, and almost verbal quotations of, this promise,
+when he says, addressing all his Asiatic brethren, 'Ye have an unction
+from the Holy One, and know all things.' And again, 'The unction which
+ye have of Him abideth with you, and ye need not that any man should
+teach you.'
+
+So, then, Christian men and women, every believing soul has this
+divine Spirit for His Teacher, and the humblest of us may, if we will,
+learn of Him and be led by Him into profounder knowledge of that great
+Lord.
+
+Oh! dear brethren, the belief in the actual presence with the Church
+of a Spirit that teaches all faithful members thereof, is far too much
+hesitatingly held by the common Christianity of this day. We ought to
+be the standing witnesses in the world of the reality of a
+supernatural influence, and how can we be, if we do not believe it
+ourselves, and never feel that we are under it?
+
+But whilst a continuous inspiration from that self-same Spirit is the
+prerogative of all believing souls, let us not forget that the early
+teaching is the standard by which all such must be tried. As to the
+first disciples the office of the divine Spirit was to bring before
+them the deep significance of their Master's life and words, so to us
+the office of the teaching Spirit is to bring to our minds the deep
+significance of the record by these earliest scholars of what they
+learned from Him. The authority of the New Testament over our faith is
+based upon these words, and Paul's warning applies especially to this
+generation, with its thoughts about a continuous inspiration and
+outgrowing of the New Testament teaching: 'If a man think himself to
+be spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto
+you are the commandments of the Lord.'
+
+Now from all this take three counsels. Let this great promise fill us
+with shame. Look at Christendom. Does it not contradict such words as
+these? Disputatious sects, Christians scarcely agreed upon any one of
+the great central doctrines, seem a strange fulfilment. The present
+condition of Christendom does not prove that Jesus Christ did not send
+the Spirit, but it does prove that Christ's followers have been
+wofully remiss and negligent in their acceptance and use of the
+Spirit. What slow scholars we are! How little we have learnt! How we
+have let passion, prejudice, human voices, the babble of men's
+tongues, anybody and everybody, take the office of teaching us God's
+truth, instead of waiting before Him and letting His Spirit teach us!
+It is the shame of us Christians that, with such a Teacher, we, 'when
+for the time we ought to be teachers, have need that one teach us
+again which be the first principles of the oracles of Christ!'
+
+Let it fill us with desire and with diligence. Let it fill us with
+calm hope. They tell us that Christianity is effete. Have we got all
+out of Jesus Christ that is in Him? Is the process that has been going
+on for all these centuries to stop now? No! Depend upon it that the
+new problems of this generation will find their solution where the old
+problems of past generations have found theirs, and the old
+commandment of the old Christ will be the new commandment of the new
+Christ.
+
+Foolish men, both on the Christian and on the anti-Christian side,
+stand and point to the western sky and say, 'The Sun is setting.' But
+there is a flush in the opposite horizon in an hour, as at midsummer;
+and that which sank in the west rises fresh and bright in the east for
+a new day. Jesus Christ is the Christ for all the ages and for every
+soul, and the world will only learn more and more of His inexhaustible
+fullness. So let us be ever quiet, patient, hopeful amidst the babble
+of tongues and the surges of controversy, assured that all change will
+but make more plain the inexhaustible significance of the infinite
+Christ, and that humble and obedient hearts will ever possess the
+promised Teacher, nor ever cry in vain, 'Teach me to do Thy will, for
+Thou art my God. Thy Spirit is good, lead me into the land of
+uprightness.'
+
+
+
+
+CHRIST'S PEACE
+
+'Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you: not as the world
+giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let
+it be afraid.'--JOHN xiv. 27.
+
+'Peace be unto you!' was, and is, the common Eastern salutation, both
+in meeting and in parting. It carries us back to a state of society in
+which every stranger might be an enemy. It is a confession of the deep
+unrest of the human heart. Christ was about closing His discourse, and
+the common word of leave-taking came naturally to His lips; just as
+when He first met His followers after the Resurrection, He soothed
+their fears by the calm and familiar greeting, 'Peace be unto you!'
+But common words deepen their force and meaning when He uses them. In
+Him 'all things become new,' and on His lips the conventional
+threadbare salutation changes into a tender and mysterious
+communication of a real gift. His words are deeds, and His wishes for
+His disciples fulfil themselves.
+
+I. So we have here, first, the greeting, which is a gift.
+
+'Peace I leave with you. My peace I give unto you.' We have seen, in
+former discourses on this chapter, how prominently and repeatedly our
+Lord insists on the great truth of His dwelling with and in His
+disciples. He gives His peace because He gives Himself; and in the
+bestowal of His life He bestows, in so far as we possess the gift, the
+qualities and attributes of that life. His peace is inseparable from
+His presence. It comes with Him, like an atmosphere; it is never where
+He is not. It was His peace inasmuch as, in His own experience, He
+possessed it. His manhood was untroubled by perturbation or tumult, by
+passions or contending desires, and no outward things could break His
+calm. If we open our hearts by lowly faith, love, and aspiration for
+His entrance, we too may be at rest; for His peace, like all which He
+is and has, is His that it may be ours.
+
+The first requisite for peace is consciousness of harmonious and
+loving relations between me and God. The deepest secret of Christ's
+peace was His unbroken consciousness of unbroken communion with the
+Father, in which His will submitted and the whole being of the man
+hung in filial dependence upon God. And the centre and foundation of
+all the peace-giving power of Jesus Christ is this, that in His death,
+by His one offering for sin for ever, He has swept away the occasion
+of antagonism, and so made peace between the twain, the Father in the
+heavens and the child, rebellious and prodigal, here below. Little as
+these disciples dreamed of it, the death impending, which was already
+beginning to cast its shadow over their souls, was the condition of
+securing to them and to us the true beginning of all real peace, the
+rectifying of our antagonistic relation to God, and the bringing Him
+and us into perfect concord.
+
+My brother, no man can be at rest down to the very roots of His being,
+in the absence of the consciousness that he is at peace with God.
+There may be tumults of gladness, there may be much of stormy
+brightness in the life, but there cannot be the calm, still,
+impregnable, all-pervading, and central tranquillity that our souls
+hunger for, unless we know and feel that we are right with God, and
+that there is nothing between us and Him. And it is because Jesus
+Christ, dying on the Cross, has made it possible for you and me to
+feel this, that He Is our peace, and that He can say, 'Peace I leave
+with you.'
+
+Another requisite is that we must be at peace with ourselves. There
+must be no stinging conscience, there must be no unsatisfied desires,
+there must be no inner schism between inclination and duty, reason and
+will, passion and judgment. There must be the quiet of a harmonised
+nature which has one object, one aim, one love; which--to use a very
+vulgar phrase--has 'all its eggs in one basket,' and has no
+contradictions running through its inmost self. There is only one way
+to get that peace--cleaving to Jesus Christ and making Him our Lord,
+our righteousness, our aim, our all. Your consciences will sting, and
+that destroys peace; or if they do not sting, they will be torpid, and
+that destroys peace, for death is not peace. Unless we take Christ for
+our love, for the light of our minds, for the Sovereign Arbiter and
+Lord of our will, for the home of our desires, for the aim of our
+efforts, we shall never know what it is to be at rest. Unsatisfied and
+hungry we shall go through life, seeking what nothing short of an
+Infinite Humanity can ever give us, and that is a heart to lean our
+heads upon, an adequate object for all our faculties, and so a quiet
+satisfaction of all our desires. 'Wherefore do ye spend your money for
+that which is not bread?' A question that no man can answer without
+convicting himself of folly! There is One, and only One, who is enough
+for me, poor and weak and lowly and fleeting as I am, and as my
+earthly life is. Take that One for your Treasure, and you are rich
+indeed. The world without Christ is nought. Christ without the world
+is enough.
+
+Nor is there any other way of healing the inner discord, schism, and
+contradiction of our anarchic nature, except in bringing it all into
+submission to His merciful rule. Look at that troubled kingdom that
+each of us carries about within himself, passion dragging this way,
+conscience that, a hundred desires all arrayed against one another,
+inclination here, duty there, till we are torn in pieces like a man
+drawn asunder by wild horses. And what is to be done with all that
+rebellious self, over which the poor soul rules as it may, and rules
+so poorly? Oh! there is an inner unrest, the necessary fate of every
+man who does not take Christ for his King. But when He enters the
+heart with His silken leash, the old fable comes true, and He binds
+the lions and the ravenous beasts there with its slender tie and leads
+them along, tamed, by the cord of love, and all harnessed to pull
+together in the chariot that He guides. There is only one way for a
+man to be at peace with himself through and through, and that is that
+he should put the guidance of his life into the hands of Jesus Christ,
+and let Him do with it as He will. There is one power, and only one,
+that can draw after it all the multitudinous heaped waters of the
+weltering ocean, and that is the quiet, silver moon in the heavens
+that pulls the tidal wave, into which melt and merge all currents and
+small breakers, and rolls it round the whole earth. And so Christ,
+shining down lambent, and gentle, but changeless, from the darkest of
+our skies, will draw, in one great surge of harmonised motion, all the
+else contradictory currents of our stormy souls. 'My peace I give unto
+you.'
+
+Another element in true tranquillity, which again is supplied only by
+Jesus Christ, is peace with men. 'Whence come wars and fightings
+amongst you? From your lusts.' Or to translate the old-fashioned
+phraseology into modern English, the reason why men are in antagonism
+with one another is the central selfishness of each, and there is only
+one way by which men's relations can be thoroughly sweetened, and that
+is, by the divine love of Jesus Christ pouring into their hearts, and
+casting out the devil of selfishness, and so blending them all into
+one harmonious whole.
+
+The one basis of true, happy relations between man and man, without
+which there is not the all-round tranquillity that we require, lies in
+the common relation of all, if it may be, but certainly in the
+individual relation of myself, to Him who is the Lover and the Friend
+of all. And in the measure in which the law of the Spirit of life
+which was in Jesus Christ is in me, in that measure do I find it
+possible to reproduce His gentleness, sympathy, compassion, insight
+into men's sorrows, patience with men's offences, and all which makes,
+in our relations to one another, the harmony and the happiness of
+humanity.
+
+Another of the elements or aspects of peace is peace with the outer
+world. 'It is hard to kick against the pricks,' but if you do not kick
+against them, they will not prick you. We beat ourselves all bruised
+and bleeding against the bars of the prison-house in trying to escape
+from it, but if we do not beat ourselves against them, they will not
+hurt us. If we do not want to get out of prison, it does not matter
+though we are locked in. And so it is not external calamities, but the
+resistance of the will to these, that makes the disturbances of life.
+Submission is peace, and when a man with Christ in his heart can say
+what Christ said, 'Not My will, but Thine be done,' Oh! then, some
+faint beginnings, at least, of tranquillity come to the most agitated
+and buffeted; and even in the depths of our sorrow we may have a
+deeper depth of calm. If we have yielded ourselves to the Father's
+will, through that dear Son who has set the example and communicates
+the power of filial obedience, then all winds blow us to our haven,
+and all 'things work together for good,' and nothing 'that is at
+enmity with joy' can shake our settled peace. Storms may break upon
+the rocky shore of our islanded lives, but deep in the centre there
+will be a secluded, inland dell 'which heareth not the loud winds when
+they call,' and where no tempest can ever reach. Peace may be ours in
+the midst of warfare and of storms, for Christ with us reconciles us
+to God, harmonises us with ourselves, brings us into amity with men,
+and makes the world all good.
+
+II. So, secondly, note here the world's gift, which is an illusion.
+
+'Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.' Our Lord contrasts, as it
+seems to me, primarily the manner of the world's bestowment, and then
+passes insensibly into a contrast between the character of the world's
+gifts and His own. That phrase 'the world' may have a double sense. It
+may mean either mankind in general or the whole external and material
+frame of things. I think we may use both significations in elucidating
+the words before us.
+
+Regarding it in the former of them, the thought is suggested--Christ
+_gives_; men can only _wish_. 'Peace be unto you' comes from many a
+lip, and is addressed to many an ear, unfulfilled. Christ says
+'peace,' and His word is a conveyance. How little we can do for one
+another's tranquillity, how soon we come to the limits of human love
+and human help! How awful and impassable is the isolation in which
+each human soul lives! After all love and fellowship we dwell alone on
+our little island in the deep, separated by 'the salt, unplumbed,
+estranging sea,' and we can do little more than hoist signals of
+goodwill, and now and then for a moment stretch our hands across the
+'echoing straits between.' But it is little after all that husband or
+wife can do for one another's central peace, little that the dearest
+friend can give. We have to depend upon ourselves and upon Christ for
+peace. That which the world wishes Christ gives.
+
+And then, if we take the other signification of the 'world,' and the
+other application of the whole promise, we may say--Outward things can
+give a man no real peace. The world is for excitement; Christ alone
+has the secret of tranquillity. It is as if to a man in a fever a
+physician should come and say: 'I cannot give you anything to soothe
+you; here is a glass of brandy for you.' That would not help the
+fever, would it? The world comes to us and says: 'I cannot give you
+rest: here is a sharp excitement for you, more highly spiced and
+titillating for your tongue than the last one, which has turned flat
+and stale.' That is about the best that it can do.
+
+Oh! what a confession of unrest are the rush and recklessness, the
+fever and the fret of our modern life with its ever renewed and ever
+disappointed quest after good! You go about our streets and look men
+in the face, and you see how all manner of hungry desires and eager
+wishes have imprinted themselves there. And now and then--how
+seldom!--you come across a face out of which beams a deep and settled
+peace. How many of you are there who dare not be quiet because then
+you are most troubled? How many of you are there who dare not reflect
+because then you are wretched? How many of you are uncomfortable when
+alone, either because you are utterly vacuous, or because then you are
+surrounded by the ghosts of ugly thoughts that murder sleep and stuff
+every pillow with thorns? The world will bring you excitement; Christ,
+and Christ alone will bring you rest.
+
+The peace that earth gives is a poor affair at best. It is shallow; a
+very thin plating over a depth of restlessness, like some skin of turf
+on a volcano, where a foot below the surface sulphurous fumes roll,
+and hellish turbulence seethes. That is the kind of rest that the
+world brings.
+
+Oh! dear friends, there is nothing in this world that will fill and
+satisfy your hearts except only Jesus Christ. The world is for
+excitement; and Christ is the only real Giver of real peace.
+
+III. Lastly, note the duty of the recipients of that peace of
+Christ's: 'Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.'
+
+The words that introduced this great discourse return again at its
+close, somewhat enlarged and with a deepened soothing and tenderness.
+There are two things referred to as the source of restlessness,
+troubled agitation or disturbance of heart; and that mainly, I
+suppose, because of terror in the outlook towards a dim and unknown
+future. The disciples are warned to fight against these if they would
+keep the gift of peace.
+
+That is to say, casting the exhortation into a more general
+expression, Christ's gift of peace does not dispense with the
+necessity for our own effort after tranquillity. There is much in the
+outer world that will disturb us to the very end, and there is much
+within ourselves that will surge up and seek to shake our repose and
+break our peace; and we have to coerce and keep down the temptations
+to anxiety, the temptations to undue agitation of desire, the
+temptations to tumults of sorrow, the temptations to cowardly fears of
+the unknown future. All these will continue, even though we have
+Christ's peace in our hearts, and it is for us to see to it that we
+treasure the peace, 'and in everything by prayer and supplication with
+thanksgiving let our requests be made known unto God,' that nothing
+may break the calm which we possess.
+
+So, then, another thought arises from this final exhortation, and that
+is, that it is useless to tell a man, 'Do not be troubled, and do not
+be afraid,' unless he first has Christ's peace as his. Is that peace
+yours, my brother, because Jesus Christ is yours? If so, then there is
+no reason for your being troubled or dreading any future. If it is
+not, you are mad not to be troubled, and you are insane if you are not
+afraid. The word for you is, 'Be troubled, ye careless ones,' for
+there is reason for it, and be afraid of that which is certainly
+coming. The one thing that gives security and makes it possible to
+possess a calm heart is the possession of Jesus Christ by faith.
+Without Him it is a waste of breath to say to people, 'Do not be
+frightened,' and it is wicked counsel to say to men, 'Be at ease.'
+They ought to be terrified, and they ought to be troubled, and they
+will be some day, whether they think so or not.
+
+But then the last thought from this exhortation is--and now I speak to
+Christian people--your imperfect possession of this peace is all your
+own fault. Why, there are hundreds of professing Christian people who
+have some kind of faint, rudimentary faith, and there are many of
+them, I dare say, listening to me now, who have no assured possession
+of any of those elements, of which I have been speaking, as the
+constituent parts of Christ's peace. You are _not_ sure that you are
+right with God. You do _not_ know what it is to possess satisfied
+desires. You _do_ know what it is to have conflicting inclinations and
+impulses; you have envy and malice and hostility against men; and the
+world's storms and disasters do strike and disturb you. Why? Because
+you have not a firm grasp of Jesus Christ. 'I have set the Lord always
+at my right hand, therefore I shall not be be moved'; there is the
+secret. Keep near Him, my brother; and then all things are fair, and
+your heart is at peace.
+
+I remember once standing by the side of a little Highland loch on a
+calm autumn day, when all the winds were still, and every birch-tree
+stood unmoved, and every twig was reflected on the steadfast mirror,
+into the depths of which Heaven's own blue seemed to have found its
+way. That is what our hearts may be, if we let Christ put His guarding
+hand round them to keep the storms off, and have Him within us for our
+rest. But the man who does not trust Jesus 'is like the troubled sea
+which cannot rest,' but goes moaning round half the world, homeless
+and hungry, rolling and heaving, monotonous and yet changeful, salt
+and barren--the true emblem of every soul that has not listened to the
+merciful call, 'Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden,
+and I will give you rest.'
+
+
+
+
+JOY AND FAITH, THE FRUITS OF CHRIST'S
+DEPARTURE
+
+'Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go away, and come again unto
+you. If ye loved Me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the
+Father: for My Father is greater than I. And now I have told you
+before it come to pass, that, when it is come to pass, ye might
+believe.'--JOHN xiv. 28, 29.
+
+Our Lord here casts a glance backward on the course of His previous
+words, and gathers together the substance and purpose of these. He
+brings out the intention of His warnings and the true effect of the
+departure, concerning which He had given them notice, as being
+twofold. In the first verse of my text His words about that going
+away, and the going away itself, are represented as the source of joy,
+which is an advance on the peace that He had just previously been
+promising. In the second of our verses these two things--His words,
+and the facts which they revealed--are represented as being the very
+ground and nourishment of faith.
+
+So, then, we have these two thoughts to look at now, the departed
+Lord, the fountain of joy to all who love Him; the departed Lord, the
+ground and food of faith.
+
+I. The departure of the Lord is a fountain of joy to those who love
+Him.
+
+In the first part of our text the going away of Jesus is contemplated
+in two aspects.
+
+The first is that with which we have already become familiar in
+previous sermons on this chapter--viz., its bearing upon the
+disciples; and in that respect it is declared that Christ's going is
+Christ's coming.
+
+But then we have a new aspect, one on which, in His sublime
+self-repression, He very seldom touches--viz., its bearing upon
+Himself; and in that aspect we are taught here to regard our Lord's
+going as ministering to His exaltation and joy, and therefore as being
+a source of joy to all His lovers.
+
+So, then, we have these thoughts, Christ's going is Christ's coming,
+and Christ's going is Christ's exaltation, and for both reasons that
+departure ought to minister to His friends' gladness. Let us look at
+these three things for a little while.
+
+First of all, there comes a renewed utterance of that great thought
+which runs through the whole chapter, that the departure of Jesus
+Christ is in reality the coming of Christ. The word 'again' is a
+supplement, and somewhat restricts and destroys the true flow of
+thought and meaning of the words. For if we read, as our Authorised
+Version does, 'I go away and come again unto you,' we are inevitably
+led to think of a coming, separated by a considerable distance of time
+from the departure, and for most of us that which is suggested is the
+final coming and return, in bodily form, of the Lord Jesus.
+
+Now great and glorious as that hope is, it is too far away to be in
+itself a sufficient comfort to the mourning disciples, and too remote
+to be for us, if taken alone, a sufficient ground of joy and of rest.
+But if you strike out the intrusive word '_again_,' and read the
+sentence as being what it is, a description of one continuous process,
+of which the parts are so closely connected as to be all but
+contemporaneous, you get the true idea. 'I go away, and I come to
+you.' There is no gap, the thing runs on without a break. There is no
+moment of absolute absence; there are not two motions, one from us and
+the other back again towards us, but all is one. The 'going' is the
+'coming'; the solemn series of events which began on Calvary, and
+ended on Olivet, to the eye of sense were successive stages in the
+departure of Jesus Christ. But looked at with a deeper understanding
+of their true meaning, they are successive stages in His approach
+towards us. His death, His resurrection, His ascension, were not steps
+in the cessation of His presence, but they were simply steps in the
+transition from a lower to a higher kind of that presence. He changed
+the limitations and externalities of a mere bodily, local nearness for
+the realities of a spiritual presence. To the eye of sense, the 'going
+away' was the reality, and the 'coming' a metaphor. To the eye
+enlightened to see things as they are, the dropping away of the
+visible corporeal was but the inauguration of the higher and the more
+real. And we need to reverse our notions of what is real and what is
+figurative in Christ's presence, and to feel that that form of His
+presence which we may all have to-day is far more real than the form
+which ceased when the Shekinah cloud 'received Him out of their
+sight,' before we can penetrate to the depth of His words, or grasp
+the whole fullness of blessing and of consolation which lie in them
+here. In a very deep and real sense, 'He therefore departed from us
+for a season that we might receive Him for ever.'
+
+The real presence of Jesus Christ to-day, and through the long ages
+with every waiting heart, is the very keynote to the solemn music of
+these chapters. And again I press upon you, and upon myself, the
+question, Do we believe it? Do we live in the faith of it? Does it
+fill the same place in the perspective of our Christian creed as it
+does in the revelation of the Scripture, or have we refined it and
+watered it down, until it comes to be little more than merely the
+continuous influence of the record of His past, just as any great and
+sovereign spirit that has influenced mankind may still 'rule the
+nations from his urn'? Or do we take Him at His word, and believe that
+He meant what He said, in something far other than a violent figure
+for the continuance of His influence and of the inspiration drawn from
+Him, 'Lo! I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world'? 'Say
+not in thine heart, Who shall ascend up into heaven? that is, to bring
+Christ down from above, the Word,' the Incarnate Word, 'is nigh thee,
+in thy heart,' if thou lovest and trustest Him.
+
+Then, again, the other aspect of our Lord's coming, which is
+emphasised here, is that in which it is regarded as affecting Himself.
+Christ's going is Christ's exaltation.
+
+Now observe that, in the first clause of our verse, there is simply
+specified the fact of departure, without any reference to the
+'whither'; because all that was wanted was to contrast the going and
+the coming. But, in the second clause, in which the emphasis rests not
+so much upon the fact of departure as upon the goal to which He went,
+we read: 'I go _to the Father_.' Hitherto we have been contemplating
+Christ's departure simply in its bearing upon us, but here, with
+exquisite tenderness, He unveils another aspect of it, and that in
+order that He may change His disciples' sadness into joy; and says to
+them, 'If ye were not so absorbed in yourselves, you would have a
+thought to spare about Me, and you would feel that you should be glad
+because I am about to be exalted.'
+
+Very, very seldom does He open such a glimpse into His heart, and it
+is all the more tender and impressive when He does. What a hint of the
+continual self-sacrifice of the human life of Jesus Christ lies in
+this thought, that He bids His disciples rejoice with Him, because the
+time is getting nearer its end, and He goes back to the Father! And
+what shall we say of the nature of Him to whom it was martyrdom to
+live, and a supreme instance of self-sacrificing humiliation to be
+'found in fashion as a man'?
+
+He tells His followers here that a reason for their joy in His
+departure is to be found in this fact, that He goes to the Father, who
+is greater than Himself.
+
+Now mark, with regard to that remarkable utterance, that the whole
+course of thought in the context requires, as it seems to me, that we
+should suppose that for Christ to 'go to the Father' was to share in
+the Father's greatness. Why else should the disciples be bidden to
+rejoice in it? or why should He say anything at all about the
+greatness of the Father? If so, then this follows, that the greatness
+to which He here alludes is such as He enters by His ascension. Or, in
+other words, that the inferiority, of whatever nature it may be, to
+which He here alludes, falls away when He passes hence.
+
+Now these words are often quoted triumphantly, as if they were dead
+against what I venture to call the orthodox and Scriptural doctrine of
+the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. And it may be worth while to
+remark that that doctrine accepts this saying as fully as it does
+Christ's other word, 'I and My Father are one,' I venture to think
+that it is the only construction of Scripture phraseology which does
+full justice to all the elements. But be that as it may, I wish to
+remind you that the creed which confesses the unity of the Godhead and
+the divinity of Jesus Christ is not to be overthrown by pelting this
+verse at it; for this verse is part of that creed, which as fully
+declares that the Father is greater than the Son, as it declares that
+the Son is One with the Father. You may be satisfied with it or no,
+but as a matter of simple honesty it must be recognised that the creed
+of the Catholic Church does combine both the elements of these
+representations.
+
+Now we can only speak in this matter as Scripture guides us. The
+depths of Deity are far too deep to be sounded by our plummets, and he
+is a bold man who ventures to say that he knows what is impossible in
+reference to the divine nature. He needs to have gone all round God,
+and down to the depths, and up to the heights of a bottomless and
+summitless infinitude, before he has a right to say that. But let me
+remind you that we can dimly see that the very names 'Father' and
+'Son' do imply some sort of subordination, but that that
+subordination, inasmuch as it is in the timeless and inward relations
+of divinity, must be supposed to exist after the ascension, as it
+existed before the incarnation; and, therefore, any such mysterious
+difference is not that which is referred to here. What _is_ referred
+to is what dropped away from the Man Jesus Christ, when He ascended up
+on high. As Luther has it, in his strong, simple way, in one of his
+sermons, 'Here He was a poor, sad, suffering Christ'; and that garb of
+lowliness falls from Him, like the mantle that fell from the prophet
+as he went up in the chariot of fire, when He passes behind the
+brightness of the Shekinah cloud that hides Him from our sight. That
+in which the Father was greater than He, in so far as our present
+purpose is concerned, was that which He left behind when He ascended,
+even the pain, the suffering, the sorrow, the restrictions, the
+humiliation, that made so much of the burden of His life. Therefore
+we, as His followers, have to rejoice in an ascended Christ, beneath
+whose feet are foes, and far away from whose human personality are all
+the ills that flesh is heir to. 'If ye loved Me, ye would rejoice,
+because I said, I go unto the Father; for My Father is greater than
+I.'
+
+So then the third thought, in this first part of our subject, is that
+on both these grounds Christ's ascension and departure are a source of
+joy. The two aspects of His departure, as affecting Him and as
+affecting us, are inseparably welded together. There can be no
+presence with us, man by man, through all the ages, and in every land,
+unless He, whose presence it is, participates in the absolute glory of
+divinity. For to be with you and me and all our suffering brethren,
+through the centuries and over the world, involves something more than
+belongs to mere humanity. Therefore, the two sources of gladness are
+confluent--Christ's ascension as affecting us is inseparably woven in
+with Christ's ascension as affecting Himself.
+
+Love will delight to dwell upon that thought of its exalted Lover. We
+may fairly apply the simplicity of human relationships and affections
+to the elucidation of what ought to be our affection to Him, our Lord.
+And surely if our dearest one were far away from us, in some lofty
+position, our hearts and our thoughts would ever be going thither, and
+we should live more there than here, where we are 'cribbed, cabined,
+and confined.' And if we love Jesus Christ with any depth of
+earnestness and fervour of affection, there will be no thought more
+sweet to us, and none which will more naturally flow into our hearts,
+whenever they are for a moment at leisure, than this, the thought of
+Him, our Brother and Forerunner, who has ascended up on high; and in
+the midst of the glory of the throne bears us in His heart, and uses
+His glory for our blessing. Love will spring to where the beloved is;
+and if we be Christians in any deep and real sense, our hearts will
+have risen with Christ, and we shall be sitting with Him at the right
+hand of God. My brother, measure your Christianity, and the reality of
+your love to Jesus Christ, by this--is it to you natural, and a joy,
+to turn to Him, and ever to make present to your mind the glories in
+which He loves and lives, and intercedes, and reigns, for you? 'If ye
+love Me, ye will rejoice, because I go unto the Father.'
+
+II. And now I can deal with the second verse of our text very briefly.
+For our purpose it is less important than the former one. In it we
+find our Lord setting forth, secondly, His departure and His
+announcement of His departure as the ground and food of faith.
+
+He knew what a crash was coming, and with exquisite tenderness,
+gentleness, knowledge of their necessities, and suppression of all His
+own feelings and emotions, He gave Himself to prepare the disciples
+for the storm, that, forewarned, they might be forearmed, and that
+when it did burst upon them, it might not take them by surprise.
+
+So He does still, about a great many other things, and tells us
+beforehand of what is sure to come to us, that when we are caught in
+the midst of the tempest we may not bate one jot of heart or hope.
+
+  Why should I complain
+  Of want or distress,
+  Temptation or pain?
+  He told me no less.'
+
+And when my sorrows come to me, I may say about them what He says
+about His departure--He has told us before, that when it comes we may
+believe.
+
+But note how, in these final words of my text, Christ avows that the
+great aim of His utterances and of His departure is to evoke our
+faith. And what does He mean by faith? He means, first of all, a grasp
+of the historic facts--His death, His resurrection, His ascension. He
+means, next, the understanding of these as He Himself has explained
+them--a death of sacrifice, a resurrection of victory over death and
+the grave, and an ascension to rule and guide His Church and the
+world, and to send His divine Spirit into men's hearts if they will
+receive it. And He means, therefore, as the essence of the faith that
+He would produce in all our hearts--a reliance upon Himself as thus
+revealed, Sacrifice by His death, Victor by His resurrection, King and
+interceding Priest by His ascension--a reliance upon Himself as
+absolute as the facts are sure, as unfaltering as is His eternal
+sameness. The faith that grasps the Christ, dead, risen, ascended, as
+its all in all, for time and for eternity, is the faith which by all
+His work, and by all His words about His work, He desires to kindle in
+our hearts. Has He kindled it in yours?
+
+Then there is a second thought--viz., that these facts, as interpreted
+by Himself, are the ground and the nourishment of our faith. How
+differently they looked when seen from the further side and when seen
+from the hither side! Anticipated and dimly anticipated, they were all
+doleful and full of dismay; remembered and looked back upon, they were
+radiant and bright. The disciples felt, with shrinking hearts and
+fainting spirits, that their whole reliance upon Jesus Christ was on
+the point of being shattered, and that everything was going when He
+died. 'We _trusted_,' said two of them, with such a sad use of the
+past tense, 'we _trusted_ that this _had been_ He which should have
+redeemed Israel. But we do not trust it any more, nor do we expect Him
+to be Israel's Redeemer now.' But after the facts were all unveiled,
+there came back the memory of His words, and they said to one another,
+'Did He not tell us that it was all to be so? How blind we were not to
+understand Him!'
+
+And so 'the Cross, the grave, the skies,' are the foundations of our
+faith; and they who see Him dying, rising, ascended, henceforth will
+find it impossible to doubt. Feed your faith upon these great facts,
+and take Christ's own explanation of them, and your faith will be
+strong.
+
+Again, we learn here that faith is the condition of the true presence
+of our absent Lord. Faith is that on our side which corresponds to His
+spiritual coming to us. Whosoever trusts Him possesses Him, and He is
+with and in every soul that, loving Him, relies upon Him, in a
+closeness so close and a presence so real that heaven itself does not
+bring the spirit of the believer and the Spirit of the Lord nearer one
+another, though it takes away the bodily film that sometimes seems to
+part their lives.
+
+We, too, may and should be glad when we lift our eyes to that Throne
+where our Brother reigns. We too, may be glad that He is there,
+because His being there is the reason why He can be here; and we, too,
+may feed our faith upon Him, and so bring Him in very deed to dwell in
+our hearts. If we would have Christ within us, let us trust Him dying,
+rising, living in the heavens; and then we shall learn how, by all
+three apparent departures, He is drawing the closer to the souls that
+love and trust.
+
+
+
+
+CHRIST FORESEEING HIS PASSION
+
+'Hereafter I will not talk much with you: for the Prince of this world
+cometh, and hath nothing in Me. But that the world may know that I
+love the Father; and as the Father gave Me commandment, even so I do.
+Arise, Let us go hence.'--JOHN xiv. 30,31.
+
+The summons to departure which closes these verses shows that we have
+now reached the end of that sacred hour in the upper room. In
+obedience to the summons, we have to fancy the little group leaving
+its safe shelter, as sailors might put out from behind a breakwater
+into a stormy sea. They pass from its seclusion and peace into the
+joyous stir of the crowded streets, filled with feast-keeping
+multitudes, on whom the full paschal moon looked down, pure and
+calming. Somewhere between the upper chamber and the crossing of the
+brook Kedron, the divine words of the following chapters were spoken,
+but this discourse, closely connected as it is with them, reaches its
+fitting close in these penetrating, solemn words of outlook into the
+near future, so calm, so weighty, so resolute, so almost triumphant,
+with which Christ seeks finally to impart to His timorous friends some
+of His own peace and assurance of victory.
+
+They lead us into a region seldom opened to our view, and never to be
+looked upon but with reverent awe. For they tell us what Christ
+thought about His sufferings, and how He felt as He went down to that
+cold, black river, in which He was to be baptized. 'Put off thy shoes
+from off thy feet, for the place where thou standest is holy ground.'
+So, reverently listening to the words, sacred because of the Speaker,
+the theme, and the circumstances, we note in them these things: His
+calm anticipation of the assailant, His unveiling of the secret and
+motive of His apparent defeat, and His resolute advance to the
+conflict. Let us look at these three points.
+
+I. First, we have here our Lord's calm anticipation of the assailant.
+
+'Hereafter I will not talk much with you: for the Prince of this world
+cometh, and hath nothing in Me.' One of the other Gospels tells us, in
+finishing its account of our Lord's temptation in the wilderness, that
+when Satan had ended all these temptations 'he departed from Him for a
+season.' And now we have the second and the intenser form of that
+assault. The first was addressed to desires, and sought to stimulate
+ambition and ostentation and the animal appetites, and so, through the
+cravings of human nature, to shake the Master's fixed faith. The
+second used sharper and more fatal weapons, and appealed, not to
+desire of enjoyment, or ease, or good, but to the natural human
+shrinking from pain and suffering and shame and death. He that was
+impervious on the side of natural necessities and more subtle
+spiritual desires might yet be reached through terror. And so the
+second form of the assault, instead of tempting the traveller by the
+sunshine to cast aside his cloak, tempted him by storm and tempest to
+fling it aside; and the one, as the other, was doomed to failure.
+
+Note how the Master, with that clear eye which saw to the depths as
+well as the heights, and before which men and things were but, as it
+were, transparent media through which unseen spiritual powers wrought,
+just as He discerns the Father's will as supreme and sovereign, sees
+here--beneath Judas's treachery, and Pharisees' and priests' envy, and
+the people's stolid indifference, and the Roman soldiers' impartial
+scorn--the workings of a personal source and centre of all. The
+'Prince of this world,' who rules men and things when they are severed
+from God, 'cometh.' Christ's sensitive nature apprehends the approach
+of the evil thing, as some organisations can tell when a thunderstorm
+is about to burst. His divine Omniscience, working as it did, even
+within the limits of humanity, knows not only when the storm is about
+to burst upon Him, but knows who it is that has raised the tempest.
+And so He says, 'The Prince of this world cometh.'
+
+But note, as yet more important, that tremendous and unique
+consciousness of absolute invulnerability against the assaults. 'He
+hath nothing in Me.' He is 'the Prince of the world,' but His dominion
+stops outside My breast. He has no rule or authority there. His writs
+do not run, nor is His dominion recognised, within that sacred realm.
+
+Was there ever a man who could say that? Are there any of us, the
+purest and the noblest, who, standing single-handed in front of the
+antagonistic power of evil, and believing it to be consolidated and
+consecrated in a person, dare to profess that there is not a thing in
+us on which he can lay his black claw and say--'That is mine?' Is
+there nothing inflammable within us which the 'fiery darts of the
+wicked' can kindle? Are there any of us who bar our doors so tightly
+as that we can say that none of his seductions will find their way
+therein, and that nothing there will respond to them? Christ sets
+Himself here against the whole embattled and embodied power of evil,
+and puts Himself in contrast to the universal human experience, when
+He calmly declares 'He hath nothing in Me.' It is an assertion of His
+absolute freedom from sinfulness, and it involves, as I take it, the
+other assertion--that as He is free from sin, so He is not subject to
+that consequence of sin, which is death, as we know it. Another part
+of Scripture speaks to us in strange language, which yet has in it a
+deep truth, of 'him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.'
+Men fall under the rightful dominion of the king of evil when they
+sin, and part of the proof of his dominion is the fact of physical
+death, with its present accompaniments. Thus, in His calm
+anticipation, Jesus stands waiting for the enemy's charge, knowing
+that all its forces will be broken against the serried ranks of His
+immaculate purity, and that He will come from the dreadful close
+unwounded all, and triumphant for evermore.
+
+But do not let us suppose that because Christ, in His anticipation of
+suffering and death, knew Himself invulnerable, with not even a spot
+on His heel into which the arrow could go, therefore the conflict was
+an unreal or shadowy one. It was a true fight, and it was a real
+struggle that He was anticipating, thus calmly in these solemn words,
+as knowing Himself the Victor ere He entered on the dreadful field.
+
+II. So note, secondly, in these words, our Lord's unveiling of the
+motive and aim of His apparent defeat.
+
+'But that the world might know that I love the Father, and, as the
+Father gave Me commandment, even so I do.' There may be some
+uncertainty about the exact grammatical relation of these clauses to
+one another, with which I need not trouble you, because it does not
+affect their substantial meaning. However we solve the mere
+grammatical questions, the fundamental significance of the whole
+remains unaffected, and it is this: that Christ's sufferings and death
+were, in one aspect, for the purpose that the world might know His
+love to the Father, and, in another aspect, were obedience to the
+Father's commandment. And if we consider these two aspects, I think we
+shall get some thoughts worth considering as to the way in which the
+Master Himself looks upon these sufferings and that death.
+
+The first point I note in this division of my discourse is that Christ
+would have us regard His sufferings and His death as His own act. Note
+that remarkable phrase, 'thus I _do_.' A strange word to be used in
+such a connection, but full of profound meaning. We speak, and
+rightly, of the solemn events of these coming days as the passion of
+our Lord, but they were His action quite as much as His passion. He
+was no mere passive sufferer. In them all He acted, or, as He says
+here, we may look upon them all, not as things inflicted upon Him from
+without by any power, however it might seem to have the absolute
+control of His fate, but as things which He did Himself.
+
+There is one Man who died, not of physical necessity, but because of
+free choice. There is one Man who chose to be born, and who chose to
+die; who, in His choosing to be born, chose humiliation, and who, in
+choosing to die, chose yet deeper humiliation. This sacrifice was a
+voluntary sacrifice, or, to speak more accurately, He was both Priest
+and Sacrifice, when 'through the Eternal Spirit He offered Himself
+without spot unto God.' The living Christ is the Lord of Life, and
+lives because He will; the dying Christ is the Lord of Death, and dies
+because He chose. He would have us learn that all His bitter
+sufferings, inflicted from without as they were, and traceable to a
+deeper source than merely human antagonism, were also self-inflicted
+and self-chosen, and further traceable to the Father's will in harmony
+with His own. 'Thus I do,' and thus He did when He died.
+
+Then, further, our Lord would have us regard these sufferings and that
+death as being His crowning act of obedience to His Father's will.
+That is in accordance with the whole tone of His self-consciousness,
+especially as set before us in this precious Gospel of John, which
+traces up everything to the submission of the divine Son to the divine
+Father, a submission which is no mere external act, but results from,
+and is the expression of, the absolute unity of will and the perfect
+oneness of mutual love. And so, because He loved the Father, therefore
+He came to do the Father's will, and the crowning act of His obedience
+was this, that He was 'obedient unto death, even the death of the
+Cross.' It was a voluntary sacrifice, but that voluntariness was not
+self-will. It was a sacrifice in obedience to the Father's will, but
+that obedience was not reluctant. Christ was the embodiment of the
+divine purpose, formed before the ages and realised in time, when He
+bowed His head and yielded up the ghost. The highest proof of His
+filial obedience was the Cross. And to it He points us, if we would
+know what it is to love and obey the Father.
+
+Now it is to be noticed that this motive of our Lord's death is not
+the usual one given in Scripture. And I can suppose the question being
+put, 'Why did not Jesus Christ say, in that supreme moment, that He
+went to the Cross because of His love to us rather than because of His
+love to the Father?' But I think the answer is not far to seek. There
+are several satisfactory ones which may be given. One is that this
+making prominent of His love to God rather than to us, as the motive
+for His death, is in accordance with that comparative reticence on the
+part of Jesus as to the atoning aspect of His death, which I have had
+frequent occasion to point out, and which does not carry in it the
+implication that that doctrine was a new thing in the Christian
+preaching after Pentecost. Another reason may be drawn from the whole
+strain and tone of this chapter, which, as I have already said, traces
+up everything to the loving relations of obedience between the Father
+and Son. And yet another reason may be given in that the very
+statement of Christ's love to God, and loving obedience to the
+Father's commandment as the motive of His death, includes in it
+necessarily the other thing--love to us. For what was the Father's
+commandment which Christ with all His heart accepted, and with His
+glad will obeyed unto death? It was that the Son should come as the
+Ransom for the world. The Son of man was sent, 'not to be ministered
+unto, but to minister, and to give His life a Ransom for many.' Or, as
+He Himself said, in one of His earliest discourses, 'God so loved the
+world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in
+Him should not perish.' And for what He gave that Son is clearly
+stated in the context itself of that passage--'As Moses lifted up the
+serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up.'
+
+To speak of Christ's acceptance of the Father's commandment, then, is
+but another way of saying that Christ, in all the fullness of His
+self-surrender, entered into and took as His own the great, eternal
+divine purpose, that the world should be redeemed by His death upon
+the Cross. The heavenward side of His love to man is His love to the
+Father, God.
+
+Now there is another aspect still in which our Lord would here have us
+regard His sufferings and death, and that is that they are of
+worldwide significance.
+
+Think for a moment of the obscurity of the speaker, a Jewish peasant
+in an upper room, with a handful of poor men around Him, all of them
+ready to forsake Him, within a few hours of His ignominious death; and
+yet He says, 'I am about to die, that the echo of it may reverberate
+through the whole world.' He puts Himself forth as of worldwide
+significance, and His death as adapted to move mankind, and as one day
+to be known all over the world. There is nothing in history to
+approach to the gigantic arrogance of Jesus Christ, and it is only
+explicable on the ground of His divinity.
+
+'This I do that _the world_ may know.' And what did it matter to the
+world? Why should it be of any importance that the world should know?
+For one plain reason, because true knowledge of the true nature and
+motive of that death breaks the dominion of the Prince of this world,
+and sets men free from his tyranny. Emancipation, hope, victory,
+purity, the passing from the tyranny of the darkness into the blessed
+kingdom of the light--all depend on the world's knowing that Christ's
+death was His own voluntary act of submission to the infinite love and
+will of the Father, which will and love He made His own, and therefore
+died, the sacrifice for the world's sin.
+
+The enemy was approaching. He was to be hoist with his own petard. 'He
+digged a pit; he digged it deep,' and into the pit which he had digged
+he himself fell. 'Oh, death! I will be thy plague' by entering into
+thy realm. 'Oh, grave! I will be thy destruction' by dwelling for a
+moment within thy dark portals and rending them irreparably as I pass
+from them. The Prince of this world was defeated when he seemed to
+triumph, and Christ's mighty words came true: 'Now shall the Prince of
+this world be cast out.' He would have the world know--with the
+knowledge which is of the heart as well as the head, which is life as
+well as understanding, which is possession and appropriation--the
+mystery, the meaning, the motive of His death, because the world
+thereby ceases to be a world, and becomes the kingdom of Jesus Christ.
+
+III. Lastly, notice here the resolute advance to the conflict.
+
+'Arise, let us go hence'--a word of swift alacrity. Evidently He rose
+to His feet whilst they lay round the table. He bids them rise with
+Him and follow Him on the path.
+
+But there is more in the words than the mere close of a conversation,
+and a summons to change of place. They indicate a kind of divine
+impatience to be in the fight, and to have it over. The same emotion
+is plainly revealed in the whole of the latter days of our Lord's
+life. You remember how His disciples followed amazed, as He strode up
+the road from Jericho, hastening to His Cross. You remember His
+deliberate purpose to draw upon Himself public notice during that
+dangerous and explosive week before the Passover, as shown in the
+publicity of His entry into Jerusalem, His sharp rebukes of the rulers
+in the Temple, and in every other incident of those days. You remember
+His words to the betrayer: 'That thou doest, do quickly.' These latter
+hours of the Lord were strongly marked by the emotion to which He gave
+utterance in His earlier words: 'I have a baptism to be baptized with,
+and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!' Perhaps that feeling
+indicated His human shrinking; for we all know how we sometimes are
+glad to precipitate an unwelcome thing, and how the more we dread it,
+the more we are anxious to get it over. But there is far more than
+that in it. There is the resolved determination to carry out the
+Father's purpose for the world's salvation, which was His own purpose,
+and was none the less His though He knew all the suffering which it
+involved.
+
+Let us adore the steadfast will, which never faltered, though the
+natural human weakness was there too, and which, as impelled by some
+strong spring, kept persistently pressing towards the Cross that on it
+He might die, the world's Redeemer.
+
+And do not let us forget that He summoned His lovers and disciples to
+follow Him on the road. 'Let us go hence.' It is ours to take up our
+cross daily and follow the Master, to do with persistent resolve our
+duty, whether it be welcome or unwelcome, and to see to it that we
+plant no faltering and reluctant foot in our Master's footsteps. For
+us, too, if we have learned to flee to the Cross for our redemption
+and salvation, the resolve of our Redeemer and the very passion of the
+Saviour itself become the pattern and law of our lives. We, too, have
+to cast ourselves into the fight, and to take up our cross, 'that the
+world may know that we love the Father, and as the Father hath given
+us commandment.' And if we so live, then our death, too, in some
+humble measure, may be like His--the crowning act of obedience to the
+Father's will; in which we are neither passively nor resistingly
+dragged under by a force that we cannot effectually resist, but in
+which we go down willingly into the dark valley where death 'makes our
+sacrifice complete.'
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Expositions of Holy Scripture
+by Alexander Maclaren
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE ***
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