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Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI

by Alexander Maclaren · English · Gutenberg #8381 · 719,371 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI

Author: Alexander Maclaren


        
Release date: June 1, 2005 [eBook #8381]
                Most recently updated: October 18, 2012

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE: ST. JOHN CHAPS. XV TO XXI ***




Produced by Charles Franks, John Hagerson and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team











EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D. D., Litt. D.

ST. JOHN Chaps. XV to XXI



EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D. D., Litt. D.

ST. JOHN Chaps. XV to XXI



CONTENTS


THE TRUE VINE (John xv. 1-4)

THE TRUE BRANCHES OF THE TRUE VINE (John xv. 5-8)

ABIDING IN LOVE (John xv. 9-11)

THE ONENESS OF THE BRANCHES (John xv. 12, 13)

CHRIST'S FRIENDS (John xv. 14-17)

SHEEP AMONG WOLVES (John xv. 18-20)

THE WORLD'S HATRED, AS CHRIST SAW IT (John xv. 21-25)

OUR ALLY (John xv. 26, 27)

WHY CHRIST SPEAKS (John xvi. 1-6)

THE DEPARTING CHRIST AND THE COMING SPIRIT (John xvi. 7, 8)

THE CONVICTING FACTS (John xvi 9-11)

THE GUIDE INTO ALL TRUTH (John xvi. 12-15)

CHRIST'S 'LITTLE WHILES' (John xvi. 16-19)

SORROW TURNED INTO JOY (John xvi. 20-22)

'IN THAT DAY' (John xvi. 23, 24)

THE JOYS OP 'THAT DAY' (John xvi. 25-27)

'FROM' AND 'TO' (John xvi. 28)

GLAD CONFESSION AND SAD WARNING (John xvi. 29-32)

PEACE AND VICTORY (John xvi. 33)

THE INTERCESSOR (John xvii. 1-19)

'THE LORD THEE KEEPS' (John xvii. 14-16)

THE HIGH PRIEST'S PRAYER (John xvii. 20-26)

THE FOLDED FLOCK (John xvii. 24)

CHRIST'S SUMMARY OF HIS WORK (John xvii. 26)

CHRIST AND HIS CAPTORS (John xviii. 6-9)

JESUS BEFORE CAIAPHAS (John xviii. 15-27)

'ART THOU A KING?' (John xviii. 28-40)

JESUS SENTENCED (John xix. 1-16)

AN EYE-WITNESS'S ACCOUNT OF THE CRUCIFIXION (John xix. 17-30)

THE TITLE ON THE CROSS (John xix. 19)

THE IRREVOCABLE PAST (John xix. 22)

CHRIST'S FINISHED AND UNFINISHED WORK (John xix. 30; Rev. xxi. 6)

CHRIST OUR PASSOVER (John xix. 36)

JOSEPH AND NICODEMUS (John xix. 38, 39)

THE GRAVE IN A GARDEN (John xix. 41, R.V.)

THE RESURRECTION MORNING (John xx. 1-18)

THE RISEN LORD'S CHARGE AND GIFT (John xx. 21-23)

THOMAS AND JESUS (John xx. 28)

THE SILENCE OF SCRIPTURE (John xx. 30, 31)

AN ELOQUENT CATALOGUE (John xxi. 2)

THE BEACH AND THE SEA (John xxi. 4)

'IT IS THE LORD' (John xxi. 7)

'LOVEST THOU ME?' (John xxi. 15)

YOUTH AND AGE, AND THE COMMAND FOR BOTH (John xxi. 18, 19)

'THEY ALSO SERVE WHO ONLY STAND AND WAIT' (John xxi. 21, 22)



THE TRUE VINE

'I am the true vine, and My Father is the husbandman. Every branch in
Me that beareth not fruit He taketh away; and every branch that beareth
fruit He purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit. Now ye are
clean through the word which I have spoken unto you. Abide in Me, and I
in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in
the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in Me.'--JOHN xv. 14.

WHAT suggested this lovely parable of the vine and the branches is
equally unimportant and undiscoverable. Many guesses have been made,
and, no doubt, as was the case with almost all our Lord's parables,
some external object gave occasion for it. It is a significant token of
our Lord's calm collectedness, even at that supreme and heart-shaking
moment, that He should have been at leisure to observe, and to use for
His purposes of teaching, something that was present at the instant.
The deep and solemn lessons which He draws, perhaps from some vine by
the wayside, are the richest and sweetest clusters that the vine has
ever grown. The great truth in this chapter, applied in manifold
directions, and viewed in many aspects, is that of the living union
between Christ and those who believe on Him, and the parable of the
vine and the branches affords the foundation for all which follows.

We take the first half of that parable now. It is somewhat difficult to
trace the course of thought in it, but there seems to be, first of all,
the similitude set forth, without explanation or interpretation, in its
most general terms, and then various aspects in which its applications
to Christian duty are taken up and reiterated, I simply follow the
words which I have read for my text.

I. We have then, first, the Vine in the vital unity of all its parts.

'I am the True Vine,' of which the material one to which He perhaps
points, is but a shadow and an emblem. The reality lies in Him. We
shall best understand the deep significance and beauty of this thought
if we recur in imagination to some of those great vines which we
sometimes see in royal conservatories, where for hundred of yards the
pliant branches stretch along the espaliers, and yet one life pervades
the whole, from the root, through the crooked stem, right away to the
last leaf at the top of the farthest branch, and reddens and mellows
every cluster, 'So,' says Christ, 'between Me and the totality of them
that hold by Me in faith there is one life, passing ever from root
through branches, and ever bearing fruit.'

Let me remind you that this great thought of the unity of life between
Jesus Christ and all that believe upon Him is the familiar teaching of
Scripture, and is set forth by other emblems besides that of the vine,
the queen of the vegetable world; for we have it in the metaphor of the
body and its members, where not only are the many members declared to
be parts of one body, but the name of the collective body, made up of
many members, is Christ. 'So also is'--not as we might expect, 'the
Church,' but--'Christ,' the whole bearing the name of Him who is the
Source of life to every part. Personality remains, individuality
remains: I am I, and He is He, and thou art thou; but across the awful
gulf of individual consciousness which parts us from one another, Jesus
Christ assumes the Divine prerogative of passing and joining Himself to
each of us, if we love Him and trust Him, in a union so close, and with
a communication of life so real, that every other union which we know
is but a faint and far-off adumbration of it. A oneness of life from
root to branch, which is the sole cause of fruitfulness and growth, is
taught us here.

And then let me remind you that that living unity between Jesus Christ
and all who love Him is a oneness which necessarily results in oneness
of relation to God and men, in oneness of character, and in oneness of
destiny. In relation to God, He is the Son, and we in Him receive the
standing of sons. He has access ever into the Father's presence, and we
through Him and in Him have access with confidence and are accepted in
the Beloved. In relation to men, since He is Light, we, touched with
His light, are also, in our measure and degree, the lights of the
world; and in the proportion in which we receive into our souls, by
patient abiding in Jesus Christ, the very power of His Spirit, we, too,
become God's anointed, subordinately but truly His messiahs, for He
Himself says: 'As the Father hath sent Me, even so I send you.'

In regard to character, the living union between Christ and His members
results in a similarity if not identity of character, and with His
righteousness we are clothed, and by that righteousness we are
justified, and by that righteousness we are sanctified. The oneness
between Christ and His children is the ground at once of their
forgiveness and acceptance, and of all virtue and nobleness of life and
conduct that can ever be theirs.

And, in like manner, we can look forward and be sure that we are so
closely joined with Him, if we love Him and trust Him, that it is
impossible but that where He is there shall also His servants be; and
that what He is that shall also His servants be. For the oneness of
life, by which we are delivered from the bondage of corruption and the
law of sin and death here, will never halt nor cease until it brings us
into the unity of His glory, 'the measure of the stature of the
fullness of Christ.' And as He sits on the Father's throne, His
children must needs sit with Him, on His throne.

Therefore the name of the collective whole, of which the individual
Christian is part, is Christ. And as in the great Old Testament
prophecy of the Servant of the Lord, the figure that rises before
Isaiah's vision fluctuates between that which is clearly the collective
Israel and that which is, as clearly, the personal Messiah; so the
'Christ' is not only the individual Redeemer who bears the body of the
flesh literally here upon earth, but the whole of that redeemed Church,
of which it is said, 'It is His body, the fullness of Him that filleth
all in all.'

II. Now note, secondly, the Husbandman, and the dressing of the vine.

The one tool that a vinedresser needs is a knife. The chief secret of
culture is merciless pruning. And so says my text, 'The Father is the
Husbandman.' Our Lord assumes that office in other of His parables. But
here the exigencies of the parabolic form require that the office of
Cultivator should be assigned only to the Father; although we are not
to forget that the Father, in that office, works through and in His Son.

But we should note that the one kind of husbandry spoken of here is
pruning--not manuring, not digging, but simply the hacking away of all
that is rank and all that is dead.

Were you ever in a greenhouse or in a vineyard at the season of cutting
back the vines? What flagitious waste it would seem to an ignorant
person to see scattered on the floor the bright green leaves and the
incipient clusters, and to look up at the bare stem, bleeding at a
hundred points from the sharp steel. Yes! But there was not a random
stroke in it all, and there was nothing cut away which it was not loss
to keep and gain to lose; and it was all done artistically,
scientifically, for a set purpose--that the plant might bring forth
more fruit.

Thus, says Christ, the main thing that is needed--not, indeed, to
improve the life in the branches, but to improve the branches in which
the life is--is excision. There are two forms of it given
here--absolutely dead wood has to be cut out; wood that has life in it,
but which has also rank shoots, that do not come from the all-pervading
and hallowed life, has to be pruned back and deprived of its shoots.

It seems to me that the very language of the metaphor before us
requires us to interpret the fruitless branches as meaning all those
who have a mere superficial, external adherence to the True Vine. For,
according to the whole teaching of the parable, if there be any real
union, there will be some life, and if there be any life, there will be
some fruit, and, therefore, the branch that has no fruit has no life,
because it has no real union. And so the application, as I take it, is
necessarily to those professing Christians, nominal adherents to
Christianity or to Christ's Church, people that come to church and
chapel, and if you ask them to put down in the census paper what they
are, will say that they are Christians--Churchmen or Dissenters, as the
case may be--but who have no real hold upon Jesus Christ, and no real
reception of anything from Him; and the 'taking away' is simply that,
somehow or other, God makes visible, what is a fact, that they do not
belong to Him with whom they have this nominal connection.

The longer Christianity continues in any country, the more does the
Church get weighted and lowered in its temperature by the aggregation
round about it of people of that sort. And one sometimes longs and
prays for a storm to come, of some sort or other, to blow the dead wood
out of the tree, and to get rid of all this oppressive and stifling
weight of sham Christians that has come round every one of our
churches. 'His fan is in His hand, and He will throughly purge His
floor,' and every man that has any reality of Christian life in him
should pray that this pruning and cutting out of the dead wood may be
done, and that He would 'come as a refiner's fire and purify' His
priesthood.

Then there is the other side, the pruning of the fruitful branches. We
all, in our Christian life, carry with us the two natures--our own poor
miserable selves, and the better life of Jesus Christ within us. The
one flourishes at the expense of the other; and it is the Husbandman's
merciful, though painful work, to cut back unsparingly the rank shoots
that come from self, in order that all the force of our lives may be
flung into the growing of the cluster which is acceptable to Him.

So, dear friends, let us understand the meaning of all that comes to
us. The knife is sharp and the tendrils bleed, and things that seem
very beautiful and very precious are unsparingly shorn away, and we are
left bare, and, as it seems to ourselves, impoverished. But Oh! it is
all sent that we may fling our force into the production of fruit unto
God. And no stroke will be a stroke too many or too deep if it helps us
to that. Only let us take care that we do not let regrets for the
vanished good harm us just as much as joy in the present good did, and
let us rather, in humble submission of will to His merciful knife, say
to Him, 'Cut to the quick, Lord, if only thereby my fruit unto Thee may
increase.'

III. Lastly, we have here the branches abiding in the Vine, and
therefore fruitful.

Our Lord deals with the little group of His disciples as incipiently
and imperfectly, but really, cleansed through 'the word which He has
spoken to them,' and gives them His exhortation towards that conduct
through which the cleansing and the union and the fruitfulness will all
be secured. 'Now ye are clean: abide in Me and I in you. As the branch
cannot bear fruit of itself except it abide in the vine, no more can ye
except ye abide in Me.'

Union with Christ is the condition of all fruitfulness. There may be
plenty of activity and yet barrenness. Works are not fruit. We can
bring forth a great deal 'of ourselves,' and because it is of ourselves
it is nought. Fruit is possible only on condition of union with Him. He
is the productive source of it all.

There is the great glory and distinctive blessedness of the Gospel.
Other teachers come to us and tell us how we ought to live, and give us
laws, patterns and examples, reasons and motives for pure and noble
lives. The Gospel comes and gives us life, if we will take it, and
unfolds itself in us into all the virtues that we have to possess. What
is the use of giving a man a copy if he cannot copy it? Morality comes
and stands over the cripple, and says to him, 'Look here! This is how
you ought to walk,' and he lies there, paralysed and crippled, after as
before the exhibition of what graceful progression is. But Christianity
comes and bends over him, and lays hold of his hand, and says, 'In the
name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk,' and his feet and
ankle bones receive strength, and 'he leaps, and walks, and praises
God.' Christ gives more than commandments, patterns, motives; He gives
the power to live soberly, righteously, and godly, and in Him alone is
that power to be found.

Then note that our reception of that power depends upon our own
efforts. 'Abide in Me and I in you.' Is that last clause a commandment
as well as the first? How can His abiding in us be a duty incumbent
upon us? But it is. And we might paraphrase the intention of this
imperative in its two halves, by--Do you take care that you abide in
Christ, and that Christ abides in you. The two ideas are but two sides
of the one great sphere; they complement and do not contradict each
other. We dwell in Him as the part does in the whole, as the branch
does in the vine, recipient of its life and fruit-bearing energy. He
dwells in us as the whole does in the part, as the vine dwells in the
branch, communicating its energy to every part; or as the soul does in
the body, being alive equally in every part, though it be sight in the
eyeball, and hearing in the ear, and colour in the cheek, and strength
in the hand, and swiftness in the foot.

'Abide in Me and I in you.' So we come down to very plain, practical
exhortations. Dear brethren, suppress yourselves, and empty your lives
of self, that the life of Christ may come in. A lock upon a canal, if
it is empty, will have its gates pressed open by the water in the canal
and will be filled. Empty the heart and Christ will come in. 'Abide in
Him' by continual direction of thought, love, desire to Him; by
continual and reiterated submission of the will to Him, as commanding
and as appointing; by the honest reference to Him of daily life and all
petty duties which otherwise distract us and draw us away from Him.
Then, dwelling in Him we shall share in His life, and shall bring forth
fruit to His praise.

Here is encouragement for us all. To all of us, sometimes, our lives
seem barren and poor; and we feel as if we had brought forth no fruit
to perfection. Let us get nearer to Him and He will see to the fruit.
Some poor stranded sea-creature on the beach, vainly floundering in the
pools, is at the point of death; but the great tide comes, leaping and
rushing over the sands, and bears it away out into the middle deeps for
renewed activity and joyous life. Let the flood of Christ's life bear
you on its bosom, and you will rejoice and expatiate therein.

Here is a lesson of solemn warning to professing Christians. The lofty
mysticism and inward life in Jesus Christ all terminate at last in
simple, practical obedience; and the fruit is the test of the life.
'Depart from Me, I never knew you, ye that work iniquity.'

And here is a lesson of solemn appeal to us all. Our only opportunity
of bearing any fruit worthy of our natures and of God's purpose
concerning us is by vital union with Jesus Christ. If we have not that,
there may be plenty of activity and mountains of work in our lives, but
there will be no fruit. Only that is fruit which pleases God and is
conformed to His purpose concerning us, and all the rest of our busy
doings is no more the fruit a man should bear than cankers are roses,
or than oak-galls are acorns. They are but the work of a creeping grub,
and diseased excrescences that suck into themselves the juices that
should swell the fruit. Open your hearts to Christ and let His life and
His Spirit come into you, and then you will have 'your fruit unto
holiness, and the end everlasting life.'



THE TRUE BRANCHES OF THE TRUE VINE

'I am the vine, ye are the branches: he that abideth in Me, and I in
him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without Me ye can do
nothing. If a man abide not in Me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is
withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they
are burned. If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ye shall ask
what ye will, and it shall be done unto you. Herein is My Father
glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be My disciples.'--JOHN
xv. 5-8.

No wise teacher is ever afraid of repeating himself. The average mind
requires the reiteration of truth before it can make that truth its
own. One coat of paint is not enough, it soon rubs off. Especially is
this true in regard to lofty spiritual and religious truth, remote from
men's ordinary thinkings, and in some senses unwelcome to them. So our
Lord, the great Teacher, never shrank from repeating His lessons when
He saw that they were but partially apprehended. It was not grievous to
Him to 'say the same things,' because for them it was safe. He broke
the bread of life into small pieces, and fed them little and often.

So here, in the verses that we have to consider now, we have the
repetition, and yet not the mere repetition, of the great parable of
the vine, as teaching the union of Christians with Christ, and their
consequent fruitfulness. He saw, no doubt, that the truth was but
partially dawning upon His disciples' minds. Therefore He said it all
over again, with deepened meaning, following it out into new
applications, presenting further consequences, and, above all, giving
it a more sharp and definite personal application.

Are we any swifter scholars than these first ones were? Have we
absorbed into our own thinking this truth so thoroughly and constantly,
and wrought it out in our lives so completely, that we do not need to
be reminded of it any more? Shall we not be wise if we faithfully
listen to His repeated teachings?

The verses which I have read give us four aspects of this great truth
of union with Jesus Christ; or of its converse, separation from Him.
There is, first, the fruitfulness of union; second, the withering and
destruction of separation; third, the satisfaction of desire which
comes from abiding in Christ; and, lastly, the great, noble issue of
fruitfulness, in God's glory, and our own increasing discipleship. Now
let me touch upon these briefly.

I. First, then, our Lord sets forth, with no mere repetition, the same
broad idea which He has already been insisting upon--viz., that union
with Him is sure to issue in fruitfulness. He repeats the theme, 'I am
the Vine'; but He points its application by the next clause, 'Ye are
the branches.' That had been implied before, but it needed to be said
more definitely. For are we not all too apt to think of religious truth
as swinging _in vacuo_ as it were, with no personal application to
ourselves, and is not the one thing needful in regard to the truths
which are most familiar to us, to bring them into close connection with
our own personal life and experience?

'I am the Vine' is a general truth, with no clear personal application.
'Ye are the branches' brings each individual listener into connection
with it. How many of us there are, as there are in every so-called
Christian communion, that listen pleasedly, and, in a fitful sort of
languid way, interestedly, to the most glorious and most solemn words
that come from a preacher's lips, and never dream that what he has been
saying has any bearing upon themselves! And the one thing that is most
of all needed with people like some of you, who have been listening to
the truth all your days, is that it should be sharpened to a point, and
the conviction driven into you, that _you_ have some personal concern
in this great message. 'Ye are the branches' is the one side of that
sharpening and making definite of the truth in its personal
application, and the other side is, 'Thou art the man.' All preaching
and religious teaching is toothless generality, utterly useless, unless
we can manage somehow or other to force it through the wall of
indifference and vague assent to a general proposition, with which
'Gospel-hardened hearers' surround themselves, and make them feel that
the thing has got a point, and that the point is touching their own
consciousness. '_Ye_ are the branches.'

Note next the great promise of fruitfulness. 'He that abideth in Me,
and I in Him, the same bringeth forth much fruit.'

I need not repeat what I have said in former sermons as to the plain,
practical duties which are included in that abiding in Christ, and
Christ's consequent abiding in us. It means, on the part of professedly
Christian people, a temper and tone of mind very far remote from the
noisy, bustling distractions too common in our present Christianity. We
want quiet, patient waiting within the veil. We want stillness of
heart, brought about by our own distinct effort to put away from
ourselves the strife of tongues and the pride of life. We want
activity, no doubt, but we want a wise passiveness as its foundation.

  'Think you, midst all this mighty sum
    Of things for ever speaking,
  That nothing of itself will come,
    But we must still be seeking?'

Get away into the 'secret place of the Most High,' and rise into a
higher altitude and atmosphere than the region of work and effort; and
sitting still with Christ, let His love and His power pour themselves
into your hearts. 'Come, My people, enter thou into thy chambers and
shut thy doors about thee.' Get away from the jangling of politics, and
empty controversies and busy distractions of daily duty. The harder our
toil necessarily is, the more let us see to it that we keep a little
cell within the central life where in silence we hold communion with
the Master. 'Abide in Me and I in you.'

That is the way to be fruitful, rather than by efforts after individual
acts of conformity and obedience, howsoever needful and precious these
are. There is a deeper thing wanted than these. The best way to secure
Christian conduct is to cultivate communion with Christ. It is better
to work at the increase of the central force than at the improvement of
the circumferential manifestations of it. Get more of the sap into the
branch, and there will be more fruit. Have more of the life of Christ
in the soul, and the conduct and the speech will be more Christlike. We
may cultivate individual graces at the expense of the harmony and
beauty of the whole character. We may grow them artificially and they
will be of little worth--by imitation of others, by special efforts
after special excellence, rather than by general effort after the
central improvement of our nature and therefore of our life. But the
true way to influence conduct is to influence the springs of conduct;
and to make a man's life better, the true way is to make the man
better. First of all be, and then do; first of all receive, and then
give forth; first of all draw near to Christ, and then there will be
fruit to His praise. That is the Christian way of mending men, not
tinkering at this, that, and the other individual excellence, but
grasping the secret of total excellence in communion with Him.

Our Lord is here not merely laying down a law, but giving a promise,
and putting his veracity into pawn for the fulfilment of it. 'If a man
will keep near Me,' He says, 'he shall bear fruit.'

Notice that little word which now appears for the first time. 'He shall
bear _much_ fruit.' We are not to be content with a little fruit; a
poor shrivelled bunch of grapes that are more like marbles than grapes,
here and there, upon the half-nourished stem. The abiding in Him will
produce a character rich in manifold graces. 'A little fruit' is not
contemplated by Christ at all. God forbid that I should say that there
is no possibility of union with Christ and a little fruit. Little union
will have little fruit; but I would have you notice that the only two
alternatives which come into Christ's view here are, on the one hand,
'no fruit,' and on the other hand, 'much fruit.' And I would ask why it
is that the average Christian man of this generation bears only a berry
or two here and there, like such as are left upon the vines after the
vintage, when the promise is that if he will abide in Christ, he will
bear much fruit?

This verse, setting forth the fruitfulness of union with Jesus, ends
with the brief, solemn statement of the converse--the barrenness of
separation--'Apart from Me' (not merely 'without,' as the Authorised
Version has it) 'ye can do nothing.' _There_ is the condemnation of all
the busy life of men which is not lived in union with Jesus Christ. It
is a long row of figures which, like some other long rows of algebraic
symbols added up, amount just to _zero_. 'Without me, nothing.' All
your busy life, when you come to sum it up, is made up of plus and
minus quantities, which precisely balance each other, and the net
result, unless you are in Christ, is just nothing; and on your
gravestones the only right epitaph is a great round cypher. 'He did not
do anything. There is nothing left of his toil; the whole thing has
evaporated and disappeared.' That is life apart from Jesus Christ.

II. And so note, secondly, the withering and destruction following
separation from Him.

Commentators tell us, I think a little prosaically, that when our Lord
spoke, it was the time of pruning the vine in Palestine, and that,
perhaps, as they went from the upper room to the garden, they might see
in the valley, here and there, the fires that the labourers had kindled
in the vineyards to burn the loppings of the vines. That does not
matter. It is of more consequence to notice how the solemn thought of
withering and destruction forces itself, so to speak, into these
gracious words; and how, even at that moment, our Lord, in all His
tenderness and pity, could not but let words of warning--grave, solemn,
tragical--drop from His lips.

This generation does not like to hear them, for its conception of the
Gospel is a thing with no minor notes in it, with no threatenings, a
proclamation of a deliverance, and no proclamation of anything from
which deliverance is needed--which is a strange kind of Gospel! But
Jesus Christ could not speak about the blessedness of fruitfulness and
the joy of life in Himself without speaking about its necessary
converse, the awfulness of separation from Him, of barrenness, of
withering, and of destruction.

Separation is withering. Did you ever see a hawthorn bough that
children bring home from the woods, and stick in the grate; how in a
day or two the little fresh green leaves all shrivel up and the white
blossoms become brown and smell foul, and the only thing to be done
with it is to fling it into the fire and get rid of it? 'And so,' says
Jesus Christ, 'as long as a man holds on to Me and the sap comes into
him, he will flourish, and as soon as the connection is broken, all
that was so fair will begin to shrivel, and all that was green will
grow brown and turn to dust, and all that was blossom will droop, and
there will be no more fruit any more for ever.' Separate from Christ,
the individual shrivels, and the possibilities of fair buds wither and
set into no fruit, and no man is the man he might have been unless he
holds by Jesus Christ and lets His life come into him.

And as for individuals, so for communities. The Church or the body of
professing Christians that is separate from Jesus Christ dies to all
noble life, to all high activity, to all Christlike conduct, and, being
dead, rots.

Withering means destruction. The language of our text is a description
of what befalls the actual branches of the literal vine; but it is made
a representation of what befalls the individuals whom these branches
represent, by that added clause, 'like a branch.' Look at the
mysteriousness of the language. 'They gather them.' Who? 'They cast
them into the fire.' Who have the tragic task of flinging the withered
branches into some mysterious fire? All is left vague with unexplained
awfulness. The solemn fact that the withering of manhood by separation
from Jesus Christ requires, and ends in, the consuming of the withered,
is all that we have here. We have to speak of it pityingly, with
reticence, with terror, with tenderness, with awe lest it should be our
fate.

But O, dear brethren! be on your guard against the tendency of the
thinking of this generation, to paste a bit of blank paper over all the
threatenings of the Bible, and to blot out from its consciousness the
grave issues that it holds forth. One of two things must befall the
branch, either it is in the Vine or it gets into the fire. If we would
avoid the fire let us see to it that we are in the Vine.

III. Thirdly, we have here the union with Christ as the condition of
satisfied desires.

'If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye
will, and it shall be done unto you.' Notice how our Lord varies His
phraseology here, and instead of saying 'I in you,' says 'My words in
you.' He is speaking about prayers, consequently the variation is
natural. In fact, His abiding in us is largely the abiding of His words
in us; or, to speak more accurately, the abiding of His words in us is
largely the means of His abiding in us.

What is meant by Christ's words abiding in us? Something a great deal
more than the mere intellectual acceptance of them. Something very
different from reading a verse of the Gospels of a morning before we go
to our work, and forgetting all about it all the day long; something
very different from coming in contact with Christian truth on a Sunday,
when somebody else preaches to us what he has found in the Bible, and
we take in a little of it. It means the whole of the conscious nature
of a man being, so to speak, saturated with Christ's words; his
desires, his understanding, his affections, his will, all being steeped
in these great truths which the Master spoke. Put a little bit of
colouring matter into the fountain at its source, and you will have the
stream dyed down its course for ever so far. See that Christ's words be
lodged in your inmost selves, by patient meditation upon them, by
continual recurrence to them, and all your life will be glorified and
flash into richness of colouring and beauty by their presence.

The main effect of such abiding of the Lord's words in us which our
Lord touches upon here is, that in such a case, if our whole inward
nature is influenced by the continual operation upon it of the words of
the Lord, then our desires will be granted. Do not so vulgarise and
lower the nobleness and the loftiness of this great promise as to
suppose that it only means--If you remember His words you will get
anything you like. It means something a great deal better than that. It
means that if Christ's words are the substratum, so to speak, of your
wishes, then your wishes will harmonise with His will, and so 'ye shall
ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.'

Christ loves us a great deal too well to give to our own foolish and
selfish wills the keys of His treasure-house. The condition of our
getting what we will is our willing what He desires; and unless our
prayers are a great deal more the utterance of the submission of our
wills to His than they are the attempt to impose ours upon Him, they
will not be answered. We get our wishes when our wishes are moulded by
His word.

IV. The last thought that is here is that this union and fruitfulness
lead to the noble ends of glorifying God and increasing discipleship.

'Herein is My Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit.' Christ's life
was all for the glorifying of God. The lives which are ours in
name--but being drawn from Him, in their depths are much rather the
life of Christ in us than our lives--will have the same end and the
same issue.

Ah, dear brethren, we come here to a very sharp test for us all. I
wonder how many of us there are, on whom men looking think more loftily
of God and love Him better, and are drawn to Him by strange longings.
How many of us are there about whom people will say, 'There must be
something in the religion that makes a man like that'? How many of us
are there, to look upon whom suggests to men that God, who can make
such a man, must be infinitely sweet and lovely? And yet that is what
we should all be--mirrors of the divine radiance, on which some eyes,
that are too dim and sore to bear the light as it streams from the Sun,
may look, and, beholding the reflection, may learn to love. Does God so
shine in me that I lead men to magnify His name? If I am dwelling with
Christ it will be so.

I shall not know it. 'Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone';
but, in meek unconsciousness of the glory that rays from us, we may
walk the earth, reflecting the light and making God known to our
fellows.

And if thus we abide in Him and bear fruit we shall 'be' or (as the
word might more accurately be rendered), we shall '_become_ His
disciples.' The end of our discipleship is never reached on earth: we
never so much _are_ as we are in the process of _becoming_, His true
followers and servants.

If we bear fruit because we are knit to Him, the fruit itself will help
us to get nearer Him, and so to be more His disciples and more
fruitful. Character produces conduct, but conduct rests on character,
and strengthens the impulses from which it springs. And thus our action
as Christian men and women will tell upon our inward lives as
Christians, and the more our outward conduct is conformed to the
pattern of Jesus Christ, the more shall we love Him in our inmost
hearts. We ourselves shall eat of the fruit which we ourselves have
borne to Him.

The alternatives are before us--in Christ, living and fruitful; out of
Christ, barren, and destined to be burned. As the prophet says, 'Will
men take of the wood of the vine for any work?' Vine-wood is worthless,
its only use is to bear fruit; and if it does not do that, there is
only one thing to be done with it, and that is, 'They cast it into the
fire, and it is burned.'



ABIDING IN LOVE

'As the Father hath loved Me, so have I loved you: continue ye In My
love. If ye keep My commandments, ye shall abide in My love; even as I
have kept My Father's commandments, and abide in His love. These things
have I spoken unto you, that My joy might remain in you, and that your
joy might be full.'--JOHN xv. 9-11.

The last of these verses shows that they are to be taken as a kind of
conclusion of the great parable of the Vine and the branches, for it
looks back and declares Christ's purpose in His preceding utterances.
The parable proper is ended, but the thoughts of it still linger in our
Lord's mind, and echo through His words, as the vibration of some great
bell after the stroke has ceased. The main thoughts of the parable were
these two, that participation in Christ's life was the source of all
good, and that abiding in Him was the means of participation in His
life. And these same thoughts, though modified in their form, and free
from the parabolical element, appear in the words that we have to
consider on this occasion. The parable spoke about abiding in Christ;
our text defines that abiding, and makes it still more tender and
gracious by substituting for it, 'abiding in His love.' The parable
spoke of conduct as 'fruit,' the effortless result of communion with
Jesus. Our text speaks of it with more emphasis laid on the human side,
as 'keeping the commandments.' The parable told us that abiding in
Christ was the condition of bearing fruit. Our text tells us the
converse, which is also true, that bearing fruit, or keeping the
commandments, is the condition of abiding in Christ. So our Lord takes
His thought, as it were, and turns it round before us, letting us see
both sides of it, and then tells us that He does all this for one
purpose, which in itself is a token of His love, namely, that our
hearts may be filled with perfect and perennial joy, a drop from the
fountain of His own.

These three verses have three words which may be taken as their
key-notes--love, obedience, joy. We shall look at them in that order.

I. First, then, we have here the love in which it is our sweet duty to
abide. 'As the Father hath loved Me, so have I loved you. Abide ye in
My love.'

What shall we say about these mysterious and profound first words of
this verse? They carry us into the very depths of divinity, and suggest
for us that wonderful analogy between the relation of the Father to the
Son, and that of the Son to His disciples, which appears over and over
again in the solemnities of these last hours and words of Jesus. Christ
here claims to be, in a unique and solitary fashion, the Object of the
Father's love, and He claims to be able to love like God. 'As the
Father hath loved Me, so have I loved you'; as deeply, as purely, as
fully, as eternally, and with all the unnameable perfectnesses which
must belong to the divine affection, does Christ declare that He loves
us.

I know not whether the majesty and uniqueness of His nature stand out
more clearly in the one or in the other of these two assertions. As
beloved of God, and as loving like God, He equally claims for Himself a
place which none other can fill, and declares that the love which falls
on us from His pierced and bleeding heart is really the love of God.

In this mysterious, awful, tender, perfect affection He exhorts us to
abide. That comes yet closer to our hearts than the other phrase of
which it is the modification, and in some sense the explanation. The
command to abide in Him suggests much that is blessed, but to have all
that mysterious abiding in Him resolved into abiding in His love is
infinitely tenderer, and draws us still closer to Himself. Obviously,
what is meant is not our continuance in the attitude of love to Him,
but rather our continuance in the sweet and sacred atmosphere of His
love to us. For the connection between the two halves of the verse
necessarily requires that the love in which we are to abide should be
identical with the love which had been previously spoken of, and _that_
is clearly His love to us, and not ours to Him. But then, on the other
hand, whosoever thus abides in Christ's love to Him will echo it back
again, in an equally continuous love to Him. So that the two things
flow together, and to abide in the conscious possession of Christ's
love to me is the certain and inseparable cause of its effect, my
abiding in the continual exercise and outgoing of my love to Him.

Now note that this continuance in Christ's love is a thing in our
power, since it is commanded. Although it is His affection to us of
which my text primarily speaks, I can so modify and regulate the flow
of that divine love to my heart that it becomes my duty to continue in
Christ's love to me.

What a quiet, blessed home that is for us! The image, I suppose, that
underlies all this sweet speech in these last hours, about dwelling in
Christ, in His joy, in His words, in His peace, and the like, is that
of some safe house, into which going, we may be secure. And what sorrow
or care or trouble or temptation would be able to reach us if we were
folded in the protection of that strong love, and always felt that it
was the fortress into which we might continually resort? They who make
their abode there, and dwell behind those firm bastions, need fear no
foes, but are lifted high above them all. 'Abide in My love,' for they
who dwell within the clefts of that Rock need none other defence; and
they to whom the riven heart of Christ is the place of their abode are
safe, whatsoever befalls. 'As the Father hath loved Me, so have I loved
you. Abide ye in My love.'

II. Now note, secondly, the obedience by which we continue in Christ's
love.

The analogy, on which He has already touched, is still continued. 'If
ye keep My commandments, ye shall abide in My love; even as I have kept
My Father's commandments and abide in His love.' Note that Christ here
claims for Himself absolute and unbroken conformity with the Father's
will, and consequent uninterrupted and complete communion with the
Father's love. It is the utterance of a nature conscious of no sin, of
a humanity that never knew one instant's film of separation, howsoever
thin, howsoever brief, between Him and the Father. No more tremendous
words were ever spoken than these quiet ones in which Jesus Christ
declares that never, all His life long, had there been the smallest
deflection or want of conformity between the Father's will and _His_
desires and doings, and that never had there been one grain of dust, as
it were, between the two polished plates which adhered so closely in
inseparable union of harmony and love.

And then notice, still further, how Christ here, with His consciousness
of perfect obedience and communion, intercepts _our_ obedience and
diverts it to Himself. He does not say, 'Obey God as I have done, and
He will love you'; but He says, 'Obey _Me_ as I obey God, and _I_ will
love you.' Who is this that thus comes between the child's heart and
the Father's? Does He come _between_ when He stands thus? or does He
rather lead us up to the Father, and to a share in His own filial
obedience?

He further assures us that, by keeping His commandments, we shall
continue in that sweet home and safe stronghold of His love. Of course
the keeping of the commandments is something more than mere outward
conformity by action. It is the inward harmony of will, and the bowing
of the whole nature. It is, in fact, the same thing (though considered
under a different aspect, and from a somewhat different point of view),
as He has already been speaking about as the 'fruit' of the vine, by
the bearing of which the Father is glorified. And this obedience, the
obedience of the hands because the heart obeys, and does so because it
loves, the bowing of the will in glad submission to the loved and holy
will of the heavens--this obedience is the condition of our continuing
in Christ's love.

He will love us better, the more we obey His commandments, for although
His tender heart is charged towards all, even the disobedient, with the
love of pity and of desire to help, He cannot but feel a growing thrill
of satisfied and gratified affection towards us, in the measure in
which we become like Himself. The love that wept over us, when we were
enemies, will 'rejoice over us with singing,' when we are friends. The
love that sought the sheep when it was wandering will pour itself yet
more tenderly and with selector gifts upon it when it follows in the
footsteps of the flock, and keeps close at the heels of the Good
Shepherd. 'If ye keep My commandments, ye shall abide in My love,' so
we will put nothing between us and Him which will make it impossible
for the tenderest tenderness of that holy love to come to your hearts.

The obedience which we render for love's sake will make us more capable
of receiving, and more blessedly conscious of possessing, the love of
Jesus Christ. The lightest cloud before the sun will prevent it from
focussing its rays to a burning point on the convex glass. And the
small, thin, fleeting, scarcely visible acts of self-will that
sometimes pass across our skies will prevent our feeling the warmth of
that love upon our shrouded hearts. Every known piece of rebellion
against Christ will shatter all true enjoyment of His favour, unless we
are hopeless hypocrites or self-deceived. The condition of knowing and
feeling the warmth and blessedness of Christ's love to me is the honest
submission of my nature to His commandments. You cannot rejoice in
Jesus Christ unless you do His will. You will have no real comfort and
blessedness in your religion unless it works itself out in your daily
lives. That is why so many of you know nothing, or next to nothing,
about the joy of Christ's felt presence, because you do not, for all
your professions, hourly and momentarily regulate and submit your wills
to His commandments. Do what He wants, and do it because He wants it,
if you wish that His love should fill your hearts.

And, further, we shall continue in His love by obedience, inasmuch as
every emotion which finds expression in our daily life is strengthened
by the fact that it is expressed. The love which works is love which
grows, and the tree that bears fruit is the tree that is healthy and
increases. So note how all these deepest things of Christian teaching
come at last to a plain piece of practical duty. We talk about the
mysticism of John's Gospel, about the depth of these last sayings of
Jesus Christ. Yes! they are mystical, they are deep--unfathomably deep,
thank God!--but connected by the shortest possible road with the
plainest possible duties. 'Let no man deceive you. He that doeth
righteousness is righteous.' It is of no use to talk about communion
with Jesus Christ, and abiding in Him, in possession of His love, and
all those other properly mystical sides of Christian experience, unless
you verify them for yourselves by the plain way of practice. Doing as
Christ bids us, and doing that habitually, and doing it gladly, then,
and only then, are we in no danger of losing ourselves on the heights,
or of forgetting that Christ's mission has for its last result the
influencing of character and of conduct. 'If ye keep My commandments,
ye shall abide in My love, even as I have kept My Father's
commandments, and abide in His love.'

III. Lastly, note the joy which follows on this practical obedience.
'These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain,' (or
'might _be_') 'in you, and that your joy might be full.'

'My joy might be in you'--a strange time to talk of His 'joy.' In half
an hour he would be in Gethsemane, and we know what happened there. Was
Christ a joyful man? He was a 'Man of sorrows' but one of the old
Psalms says, 'Thou hast loved righteousness ... therefore God hath
anointed Thee with the oil of gladness above Thy fellows.' The deep
truth that lies there is the same that He here claims as being
fulfilled in His own experience, that absolute surrender and submission
in love to the beloved commands of a loving Father made Him--in spite
of sorrows, in spite of the baptism with which He was baptized, in
spite of all the burden and the weight of our sins--the most joyful of
men.

This joy He offers to us, a joy coming from perfect obedience, a joy
coming from a surrender of self at the bidding of love, to a love that
to us seems absolutely good and sweet. There is no joy that humanity is
capable of to compare for a moment with that bright, warm, continuous
sunshine which floods the soul, that is freed from all the clouds and
mists of self and the darkness of sin. Self-sacrifice at the bidding of
Jesus Christ is the recipe for the highest, the most exquisite, the
most godlike gladnesses of which the human heart is capable. Our joy
will remain if His joy is ours. Then our joy will be, up to the measure
of its capacity, ennobled, and filled, and progressive, advancing ever
towards a fuller possession of His joy, and a deeper calm of that pure
and perennial rapture, which makes the settled and celestial bliss of
those who have 'entered into the joy of their Lord.'

Brother! there is only one gladness that is worth calling so--and that
is, that which comes to us, when we give ourselves utterly away to
Jesus Christ, and let Him do with us as He will. It is better to have a
joy that is central and perennial--though there may be, as there will
be, a surface of sorrow and care--than to have the converse, a surface
of joy, and a black, unsympathetic kernel of aching unrest and sadness.
In one or other of these two states we all live. Either we have to say,
'as sorrowful yet always rejoicing' or we have to feel that 'even in
laughter the heart is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is
heaviness.' Let us choose for ourselves, and let us choose aright, the
gladness which coils round the heart, and endures for ever, and is
found in submission to Jesus Christ, rather than the superficial,
fleeting joys which are rooted on earth and perish with time.



THE ONENESS OF THE BRANCHES

'This is My commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you.
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for
his friends.'--JOHN xv. 12, 13.

The union between Christ and His disciples has been tenderly set forth
in the parable of the Vine and the branches. We now turn to the union
between the disciples, which is the consequence of their common union
to the Lord. The branches are parts of one whole, and necessarily bear
a relation to each other. We may modify for our present purpose the
analogous statement of the Apostle in reference to the Lord's Supper,
and as He says, 'We being many, are one body, for we are all partakers
of that one bread,' so we may say--The branches, being many, are one
Vine, for they are all partakers of that one Vine. Of this union
amongst the branches, which results from their common inherence in the
Vine, the natural expression and manifestation is the mutual love,
which Christ here gives as _the_ commandment, and commends to us all by
His own solemn example.

There are four things suggested to me by the words of our text--the
Obligation, the Sufficiency, the Pattern, and the Motive, of Christian
love.

I. First, the Obligation of love.

The two ideas of commandment and love do not go well together. You
cannot pump up love to order, and if you try you generally produce,
what we see in abundance in the world and in the Church, sentimental
hypocrisy, hollow and unreal. But whilst that is true, and whilst it
seems strange to say that we are commanded to love, still we can do a
great deal, directly and indirectly, for the cultivation and
strengthening of any emotion. We can either cast ourselves into the
attitude which is favourable or unfavourable to it. We can either look
at the facts which will create it or at those who will check it. We can
go about with a sharp eye for the lovable or for the unlovable in man.
We can either consciously war against or lazily acquiesce in our own
predominant self-absorption and selfishness. And in these and in a
number of other ways, our feelings towards other Christian people are
very largely under our own control, and therefore are fitting subjects
for commandment.

Our Lord lays down the obligation which devolves upon all Christian
people, of cherishing a kindly and loving regard to all others who find
their place within the charmed circle of His Church. It is an
obligation because He commands it. He puts Himself here in the position
of the absolute Lawgiver, who has the right of entire and authoritative
control over men's affections and hearts. And it is further obligatory
because such an attitude is the only fitting expression of the mutual
relation of Christian men, through their common relation to the Vine.
If there be the one life-sap circling through all parts of the mighty
whole, how anomalous and how contradictory it is that these parts
should not be harmoniously concordant among themselves! However unlike
any two Christian people are to each other in character, in culture, in
circumstances, the bond that knits those who have the same relations to
Jesus Christ one to another is far deeper, far more real, and ought to
be far closer, than the bond that knits either of them to the men or
women to whom they are likest in all these other respects, and to whom
they are unlike in this central one. Christian men! you are closer to
every other Christian man, down in the depths of your being, however he
may be differenced from you by things that are very hard to get over,
than you are to the people that you like best, and love most, if they
do not participate with you in this common love to Jesus Christ.

I dread talking mere sentiment about this matter, for there is perhaps
no part of Christian duty which has been so vulgarised and pawed over
by mere unctuous talk, as that of the fellowship that should subsist
between all Christians. But I have one plain question to put,--Does
anybody believe that the present condition of Christendom, and the
relations to one another even of good Christian people in the various
churches and communions of our own and of other lands, is the sort of
thing that Jesus Christ meant, or is anything like a fair and adequate
representation of the deep, essential unity that knits us all together?

We need far more to realise the fact that our emotions towards our
brother Christians are not matters in which our own inclinations may
have their way, but that there is a simple commandment given to us, and
that we are bound to cherish love to every man who loves Jesus Christ.
Never mind though he does not hold your theology; never mind though he
be very ignorant and narrow as compared with you; never mind though
your outlook on the world may be entirely unlike his. Never mind though
you be a rich man and he a poor one, or you a poor one and he rich,
which is just as hard to get over. Let all these secondary grounds of
union and of separation be relegated to their proper subordinate place;
and let us recognise this, that the children of one Father are
brethren. And do not let it be possible that it shall be said, as so
often has been said, and said truly, that 'brethren' in the Church
means a great deal less than _brothers_ in the world. Lift your eyes
beyond the walls of the little sheepfold in which you live, and hearken
to the bleating of the flocks away out yonder, and feel--'Other sheep
He has which are not of this fold'; and recognise the solemn obligation
of the commandment of love.

II. Note, secondly, the Sufficiency of love.

Our Lord has been speaking in a former verse about the keeping of His
commandments. Now He gathers them all up into one. 'This is my
commandment, that ye love one another' All duties to our fellows, and
all duties to our brethren, are summed up in, or resolved into, this
one germinal, encyclopaediacal, all-comprehensive simplification of
duty, into the one word 'love.'

Where the heart is right the conduct will be right. Love will soften
the tones, will instinctively teach what we ought to be and do; will
take the bitterness out of opposition and diversity, will make even
rebuke, when needful, only a form of expressing itself. If the heart be
right all else will be right; and if there be a deficiency of love
nothing will be right. You cannot help anybody except on condition of
having an honest, beneficent, and benevolent regard towards him. You
cannot do any man in the world any good unless there is a shoot of love
in your heart towards him. You may pitch him benefits, and you will
neither get nor deserve thanks for them; you may try to teach him, and
your words will be hopeless and profitless. The one thing that is
required to bind Christian men together is this common affection. That
being there, everything will come. It is the germ out of which all is
developed. As we read in that great chapter to the Corinthians--the
lyric praise of Charity,--all kinds of blessing and sweetness and
gladness come out of this, It is the central force which, being
present, secures that all shall be right, which, being absent, ensures
that all shall be wrong.

And is it not beautiful to see how Jesus Christ, leaving the little
flock of His followers in the world, gave them no other instruction for
their mutual relationship? He did not instruct them about institutions
and organisations, about orders of the ministry and sacraments, or
Church polity and the like. He knew that all these would come. His one
commandment was, 'Love one another,' and that will make you wise. Love
one another, and you will shape yourselves into the right forms. He
knew that they needed no exhortations such as ecclesiastics would have
put in the foreground. It was not worth while to talk to them about
organisations and officers. These would come to them at the right time
and in the right way. The 'one thing needful' was that they should be
knit together as true participators of His life. Love was sufficient as
their law and as their guide.

III. Note, further, the Pattern of love.

'As I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man
lay down his life for his friends.' Christ sets Himself forward then,
here and in this aspect, as He does in all aspects of human conduct and
character, as being the realised Ideal of them all. And although the
thought is a digression from my present purpose, I cannot but pause for
a moment to reflect upon the strangeness of a man thus calmly saying to
the whole world, 'I am the embodiment of all that love ought to be. You
cannot get beyond Me, nor have anything more pure, more deep, more
self-sacrificing, more perfect, than the love which I have borne to
you.'

But passing that, the pattern that He proposes for us is even more
august than appears at first sight. For, if you remember, a verse or
two before our Lord had said, 'As the Father hath loved Me so I have
loved you.' Now He says, 'Love one another as I have loved you.' There
stand the three, as it were, the Father, the Son, the disciple. The Son
in the midst receives and transmits the Father's love to the disciple,
and the disciple is to love his fellows, in some deep and august sense,
as the Father loved the Son. The divinest thing in God, and that in
which men can be like God, is love. In all our other attitudes to Him
we rather correspond than copy. His fullness is met by our emptiness,
His giving by our recipiency, His faithfulness by our faith, His
command by our obedience, His light by our eye. But here it is not a
case of correspondence only, but of similarity. My faith _answers_
God's gift to me, but my love is _like_ God's love. 'Be ye, therefore,
imitators of God as beloved children'; and having received that love
into your hearts, ray it out, 'and walk in love as God also hath loved
us.'

But then our Lord here, in a very wonderful manner, sets forth the very
central point of His work, even His death upon the Cross for us, as
being the pattern to which our poor affection ought to aspire, and
after which it must tend to be conformed. I need not remind you, I
suppose, that our Lord here is not speaking of the propitiatory
character of His death, nor of the issues which depend upon it, and
upon it alone, viz., the redemption and salvation of the world. He is
not speaking, either, of the peculiar and unique sense in which He lays
down His life for us, His friends and brethren, as none other can do.
He is speaking about it simply in its aspect of being a voluntary
surrender, at the bidding of love, for the good of those whom He loved,
and that, He tells us--that, and nothing else--is the true pattern and
model towards which all our love is bound to tend and to aspire. That
is to say, the heart of the love which He commands is self-sacrifice,
reaching to death if death be needful. And no man loves as Christ would
have him love who does not bear in his heart affection which has so
conquered selfishness that, if need be, he is ready to die.

The expression of Christian life is not to be found in honeyed words,
or the indolent indulgence in benevolent emotion, but in
self-sacrifice, modelled after that of Christ's sacrificial death,
which is imitable by us.

Brethren, it is a solemn obligation, which may well make us tremble,
that is laid on us in these words, 'As I have loved you.' Calvary was
less than twenty-four hours off, and He says to us, '_That_ is your
pattern!' Contrast our love at its height with His--a drop to an ocean,
a poor little flickering rushlight held up beside the sun. My love, at
its best, has so far conquered my selfishness that now and then I am
ready to suffer a little inconvenience, to sacrifice a little leisure,
to give away a little money, to spend a little dribble of sympathy upon
the people who are its objects. Christ's love nailed Him to the Cross,
and led Him down from the throne, and shut for a time the gates of the
glory behind Him. And He says, 'That is your pattern!'

Oh, let us bow down and confess how His word, which commands us, puts
us to shame, when we think of how miserably we have obeyed.

Remember, too, that the restriction which here seems to be cast around
the flow of His love is not a restriction in reality, but rather a
deepening of it. He says, 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a
man lay down his life for his friends.' But evidently He calls them so
from His point of view, and as He sees them, not from their point of
view, as they see Him--that is to say, He means by 'friends' not those
who love Him, but those whom He loves. The 'friends' for whom He dies
are the same persons as the Apostle, in his sweet variation upon the
words of my text, has called by the opposite name, when He says that He
died for His 'enemies.'

There is an old, wild ballad that tells of how a knight found, coiling
round a tree in a dismal forest, a loathly dragon breathing out poison;
and how, undeterred by its hideousness and foulness, he cast his arms
round it and kissed it on the mouth. Three times he did it undisgusted,
and at the third the shape changed into a fair lady, and he won his
bride. Christ 'kisses with the kisses of His mouth' His enemies, and
makes them His friends because He loves them. 'If He had never died for
His enemies' says one of the old fathers, 'He would never have
possessed His friends.' And so He teaches us here in what seems to be a
restriction of the purpose of His death and the sweep of His love, that
the way by which we are to meet even alienation and hostility is by
pouring upon it the treasures of an unselfish, self-sacrificing
affection which will conquer at the last.

Christ's death is the pattern for our lives as well as the hope of our
hearts.

IV. Lastly, we have here by implication, though not by direct
statement, the Motive of the love.

Surely that, too, is contained in the words, 'As I have loved you.'
Christ's commandment of love is a new commandment, not so much because
it is a revelation of a new duty, though it is the casting of an old
duty into new prominence, as because it is not merely a revelation of
an obligation, but the communication of power to fulfil it. The novelty
of Christian morality lies here, that in its law there is a
self-fulfilling force. We have not to look to one place for the
knowledge of our duty, and somewhere else for the strength to do it,
but both are given to us in the one thing, the gift of the dying Christ
and His immortal love.

That love, received into our hearts, will conquer, and it alone will
conquer, our selfishness. That love, received into our hearts, will
mould, and it alone will mould, them into its own likeness. That love,
received into our hearts, will knit, and it alone will knit, all those
who participate in it into a common bond, sweet, deep, sacred, and
all-victorious.

And so, brethren, if we would know the blessedness and the sweetness of
victory over these miserable, selfish hearts of ours, and to walk in
the liberty of love, we can only get it by keeping close to Jesus
Christ. In any circle, the nearer the points of the circumference are
to the centre, the closer they will necessarily be to one another. As
we draw nearer, each for himself, to our Centre, we shall feel that we
have approximated to all those who stand round the same centre, and
draw from it the same life. In the early spring, when the wheat is
green and young, and scarcely appears above the ground, it comes up in
the lines in which it was sown, parted from one another and distinctly
showing their separation and the furrows. But when the full corn in the
ear waves on the autumn plain, all the lines and separations have
disappeared, and there is one unbroken tract of sunny fruitfulness. And
so when the life in Christ is low and feeble, His servants may be
separated and drawn up in rigid lines of denominations, and churches,
and sects; but as they grow the lines disappear. If to the churches of
England to-day there came a sudden accession of knowledge of Christ,
and of union with Him, the first thing that would go would be the
wretched barriers that separate us from one another. For if we have the
life of Christ in any adequate measure in ourselves, we shall certainly
have grown up above the fences behind which we began to grow, and shall
be able to reach out to all that love the Lord Jesus Christ, and feel
with thankfulness that we are one in Him.



CHRIST'S FRIENDS

'Ye are My friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you. Henceforth I
call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth:
but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of My
Father I have made known unto you. Ye have not chosen Me, but I have
chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit,
and that your fruit should remain; that whatsoever ye shall ask of the
Father in My name, He may give it you. These things I command you, that
ye love one another.'--JOHN xv. 14-17.

A wonderful word has just dropped from the Master's lips, when He spoke
of laying down His life for His friends. He lingers on it as if the
idea conveyed was too great and sweet to be taken in at once, and with
soothing reiteration He assures the little group that they, even they,
are His friends.

I have ventured to take these four verses for consideration now,
although each of them, and each clause of them, might afford ample
material for a discourse, because they have one common theme. They are
a description of what Christ's friends are to Him, of what He is to
them, and of what they should be to one another. So they are a little
picture, in the sweetest form, of the reality, the blessedness, the
obligations, of friendship with Christ.

I. Notice what Christ's friends do for Him.

'Ye are My friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.' In the former
verse, 'friends' means chiefly those whom He loved. Here it means
mainly those who love Him. They love Him because He loves them, of
course; and the two sides of the one thought cannot be parted. But
still in this verse the idea of friendship to Christ is looked at from
the human side, and He tells His disciples that they are His lovers as
well as beloved of Him, on condition of their doing whatsoever He
commands them.

He lingers, as I said, on the idea itself. As if He would meet the
doubts arising from the sense of unworthiness, and from some dim
perception of how He towers above them, and their limitations, He
reiterates, 'Wonderful as it is, you poor men, half-intelligent lovers
of Mine, _you_ are My friends, beloved of Me, and loving Me, if ye do
whatsoever I command you.'

How wonderful that stooping love of His is, which condescends to array
itself in the garments of ours! Every form of human love Christ lays
His hand upon, and claims that He Himself exercises it in a
transcendent degree. 'He that doeth the will of My Father which is in
heaven, the same is My brother and sister and mother.' That which is
even sacreder, the purest and most complete union that humanity is
capable of--that, too, He consecrates; for even it, sacred as it is, is
capable of a higher consecration, and, sweet as it is, receives a new
sweetness when we think of 'the Bride, the Lamb's wife,' and remember
the parables in which He speaks of the Marriage Supper of the Great
King, and sets forth Himself as the Husband of humanity. And passing
from that Holy of Holies out into this outer court, He lays His hand,
too, on that more common and familiar, and yet precious and sacred,
thing--the bond of friendship. The Prince makes a friend of the beggar.

Even if we do not think more loftily of Jesus Christ than do those who
regard Him simply as the perfection of humanity, is it not beautiful
and wonderful that He should look with such eyes of beaming love on
that handful of poor, ignorant fishermen, who knew Him so dimly, and
say: 'I pass by all the wise and the mighty, all the lofty and noble,
and My heart clings to you poor, insignificant people?' He stoops to
make them His friends, and there are none so low but that they may be
His.

This friendship lasts to-day. A peculiarity of Christianity is the
strong personal tie of real love and intimacy which will bind men, to
the end of time, to this Man that died nineteen hundred years ago. We
look back into the wastes of antiquity: mighty names rise there that we
reverence; there are great teachers from whom we have learned, and to
whom, after a fashion, we are grateful. But what a gulf there is
between us and the best and noblest of them! But here is a dead Man,
who to-day is the Object of passionate attachment and a love deeper
than life to millions of people, and will be till the end of time.
There is nothing in the whole history of the world in the least like
that strange bond which ties you and me to the Saviour, and the paradox
of the Apostle remains a unique fact in the experience of humanity:
'Jesus Christ, whom, having not seen, ye love.' We stretch out our
hands across the waste, silent centuries, and there, amidst the mists
of oblivion, thickening round all other figures in the past, we touch
the warm, throhbing heart of our Friend, who lives for ever, and for
ever is near us. We here, nearly two millenniums after the words fell
on the nightly air on the road to Gethsemane, have them coming direct
to our hearts. A perpetual bond unites men with Christ to-day; and for
us, as really as in that long-past Paschal night, is it true, 'Ye are
My friends.'

There are no limitations in that friendship, no misconstructions in
that heart, no alienation possible, no change to be feared. There is
absolute rest for us there. Why should I be solitary if Jesus Christ is
my Friend? Why should I fear if He walks by my side? Why should
anything be burdensome if He lays it upon me and helps me to bear it?
What is there in life that cannot be faced and borne--aye, and
conquered,--if we have Him, as we all may have Him, for the Friend and
the Home of our hearts?

But notice the condition, 'If ye do what I command you.' Note the
singular blending of friendship and command, involving on our parts the
cultivation of the two things which are not incompatible, absolute
submission and closest friendship. He commands though He is Friend;
though He commands He is Friend. The conditions that He lays down are
the same which have already occupied our attention in former sermons of
this series, and so may be touched very lightly. 'Ye are My friends if
ye do the things which I command you,' may either correspond with His
former saying, 'If a Man love Me he will keep My commandments,' or with
His later one, which immediately precedes our text, 'If ye keep My
commandments ye shall abide in My love.' For this is the relationship
between love and obedience, in regard to Jesus Christ, that the love is
the parent of the obedience, and the obedience is the guard and
guarantee of the love. They who love will obey, they who obey will
strengthen love by acting according to its dictates, and will be in a
condition to feel and realise more the warmth of the rays that stream
down upon them, and to send back more fully answering obedience from
their hearts. Not in mere emotion, not in mere verbal expression, not
in mere selfish realising of the blessings of His friendship, and not
in mere mechanical, external acts of conformity, but in the flowing
down and melting of the hard and obstinate iron will, at the warmth of
His great love, is our love made perfect. The obedience, which is the
child and the preserver of love, is something far deeper than the mere
outward conformity with externally apprehended commandments. To submit
is the expression of love, and love is deepened by submission.

II. Secondly, note what Christ does for His friends.

'Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what
his lord doeth.' The slave may see what his lord does, but he does not
know his purpose in his acts--'Theirs not to reason why.' In so far as
the relation of master and servant goes, and still more in that of
owner and slave, there is simple command on the one side and
unintelligent obedience on the other. The command needs no explanation,
and if the servant is in his master's confidence he is more than a
servant. But, says Christ, 'I have called you friends'; and He had
called them so before He now named them so. He had called them so in
act, and He points to all His past relationship, and especially to the
heart-outpourings of the Upper Room, as the proof that He had called
them His friends, in the fact that whatsoever He had heard of the
Father He had made known to them.

Jesus Christ, then, recognises the obligation of absolute frankness,
and He will tell His friends everything that He can. When He tells them
what He can, the voice of the Father speaks through the Son. Every one
of Christ's friends stands nearer to God than did Moses at the door of
the Tabernacle, when the wondering camp beheld him face to face with
the blaze of the Shekinah glory, and dimly heard the thunderous
utterances of God as He spake to him 'as a man speaks to his friend.'
That was surface-speech compared with the divine depth and fullness of
the communications which Jesus Christ deems Himself bound, and assumes
Himself able, to make to them who love Him and whom He loves.

Of course to Christ's frankness there are limits. He will not pour out
His treasures into vessels that will spill them; and as He Himself says
in the subsequent part of this great discourse, 'I have many things to
say unto you, but you are not able to carry them now.' His last word
was, 'I have declared Thy name unto My brethren, and _will declare_
it.' And though here He speaks as if His communication was perfect, we
are to remember that it was necessarily conditioned by the power of
reception on the part of the hearers, and that there was much yet to be
revealed of what God had whispered to Him, ere these men, that
clustered round Him, could understand the message.

That frank speech is continued to-day. Jesus Christ recognises the
obligation that binds Him to impart to each of us all that each of us
is in our inmost spirits capable of receiving. By the light which He
sheds on the Word, by many a suggestion through human lips, by many a
blessed thought rising quietly within our hearts, and bearing the token
that it comes from a sacreder source than our poor, blundering minds,
He still speaks to us, His friends.

Ought not that thought of the utter frankness of Jesus make us, for one
thing, very patient, intellectually and spiritually, of the gaps that
are left in His communications and in our knowledge? There are so many
things that we sometimes think we should like to know, things about
that dark future where some of our hearts live so constantly, things
about the depths of His nature and the divine character, things about
the relation between God's love and God's righteousness, things about
the meaning of all this dreadful mystery in which we grope our way.
These and a hundred other questionings suggest to us that it would have
been so easy for Him to have lifted a little corner of the veil, and
let a little more of the light shine out. He holds all in His hand. Why
does He thus open one finger instead of the whole palm? Because He
loves. A friend exercises the right of reticence as well as the
prerogative of speech. And for all the gaps that are left, let us bow
quietly and believe that if it had been better for us He would have
spoken. 'If it were not so I would have told you.' 'Trust Me! I tell
you all that it is good for you to receive.'

And that frankness may well teach us another lesson, viz., the
obligation of keeping our ears open and our hearts prepared to receive
the speech that does come from Him. Ah, brother! many a message from
your Lord flits past you, like the idle wind through an archway,
because you are not listening for His voice. If we kept down the noise
of that 'household jar within'; if we silenced passion, ambition,
selfishness, worldliness; if we withdrew ourselves, as we ought to do,
from the Babel of this world, and 'hid ourselves in His pavilion from
the strife of tongues'; if we took less of our religion out of books
and from other people, and were more accustomed to 'dwell in the secret
place of the Most High,' and to say, 'Speak, Friend! for Thy friend
heareth,' we should more often understand how real to-day is the voice
of Christ to them that love Him.

  'Such rebounds the inward ear
     Catches often from afar;
  Listen, prize them, hold them dear,
     For of God--of God--they are.'

III. Thirdly, notice how Christ's friends come to be so, and why they
are so.

'Ye have not chosen,' etc. (verse 16).

Our Lord refers here, no doubt, primarily to the little group of the
Apostles; the choice and ordaining as well as 'the fruit that abides,'
point, in the first place, to their apostolic office, and to the
results of their apostolic labours. But we must widen out the words a
great deal beyond that reference.

In all the cases of friendship between Christ and men, the origination
and initiation come from Him. 'We love Him because He first loved us.'
He has told us how, in His divine alchemy, He changes by the shedding
of His blood our enmity into friendship. In the previous verse He has
said, 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life
for his friends.' And as I remarked in my last sermon, the friends here
are the same as 'the enemies' for whom, the Apostle tells us that
Christ laid down His life. Since He has thus by the blood of the Cross
changed men's enmity into friendship, it is true universally that the
amity between us and Christ comes entirely from Him.

But there is more than that in the words. I do not suppose that any
man, whatever his theological notions and standpoint may be, who has
felt the love of Christ in his own heart in however feeble a measure,
but will say, as the Apostle said, 'I was apprehended of Christ.' It is
because He lays His seeking and drawing hand upon us that we ever come
to love Him, and it is true that His choice of us precedes our choice
of Him, and that the Shepherd always comes to seek the sheep that is
lost in the wilderness.

This, then, is how we come to be His friends; because, when we were
enemies, He loved us, and gave Himself for us, and ever since has been
sending out the ambassadors and the messengers of His love--or, rather,
the rays and beams of it, which are parts of Himself--to draw us to His
heart. And the purpose which all this forthgoing of Christ's initial
and originating friendship has had in view, is set forth in words which
I can only touch in the lightest possible manner. The intention is
twofold. First, it respects service or fruit. 'That ye may _go_'; there
is deep pathos and meaning in that word. He had been telling them that
He was going; now He says to them, 'You are to go. We part here. My
road lies upward; yours runs onward. Go into all the world.' He gives
them a _quasi_-independent position; He declares the necessity of
separation; He declares also the reality of union in the midst of the
separation; He sends _them_ out on their course with His benediction,
as He does _us_. Wheresoever we go in obedience to His will, we carry
the consciousness of His friendship.

'That ye may bring forth fruit'--He goes back for a moment to the sweet
emblem with which this chapter begins, and recurs to the imagery of the
vine and the fruit. 'Keeping His commandments' does not explain the
whole process by which we do the things that are pleasing in His sight.
We must also take this other metaphor of the bearing of fruit. Neither
an effortless, instinctive bringing forth from the renewed nature and
the Christlike disposition, nor a painful and strenuous effort at
obedience to His law, describe the whole realities of Christian
service. There must be the effort, for men do not grow Christlike in
character as the vine grows its grapes; but there must also be,
regulated and disciplined by the effort, the inward life, for no mere
outward obedience and tinkering at duties and commandments will produce
the fruit that Christ desires and rejoices to have. First comes unity
of life with Him; and then effort. Take care of modern teachings that
do not recognise these two as both essential to the complete ideal of
Christian service--the spontaneous fruit-bearing, and the strenuous
effort after obedience.

'That your fruit should remain'; nothing corrupts faster than fruit.
There is only one kind of fruit that is permanent, incorruptible. The
only life's activity that outlasts life and the world is the activity
of the men who obey Christ.

The other half of the issues of this friendship is the satisfying of
our desires, 'That whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in My name He may
give it you.' We have already had substantially the same promise in
previous parts of this discourse, and therefore I may deal with it very
lightly. How comes it that it is certain that Christ's friends, living
close to Him and bearing fruit, will get what they want? Because what
they want will be 'in His name'--that is to say, in accordance with His
disposition and will. Make your desires Christ's, and Christ's yours,
and you will be satisfied.

IV. And now, lastly, for one moment, note the mutual friendship of
Christ's friends.

We have frequently had to consider that point--the relation of the
friends of Christ to each other. 'These things I command you, that ye
love one another.' This whole context is, as it were, enclosed within a
golden circlet by that commandment which appeared in a former verse, at
the beginning of it, 'This is My commandment, that ye love one
another,' and reappears here at the close, thus shutting off this
portion from the rest of the discourse. Friends of a friend should
themselves be friends. We care for the lifeless things that a dear
friend has cared for; books, articles of use of various sorts. If these
have been of interest to him, they are treasures and precious evermore
to us. And here are living men and women, in all diversities of
character and circumstances, but with this stamped upon them
all--Christ's friends, lovers of and loved by Him. And how can we be
indifferent to those to whom Christ is not indifferent? We are knit
together by that bond. We are but poor friends of that Master unless we
feel that all which is dear to Him is dear to us. Let us feel the
electric thrill which ought to pass through the whole linked circle,
and let us beware that we slip not our hands from the grasp of the
neighbour on either side, lest, parted from them, we should be isolated
from Him, and lose some of the love which we fail to transmit.



SHEEP AMONG WOLVES

'If the world hate you, ye know that it hated Me before it hated you.
If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye
are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore
the world hateth you. Remember the word that I said unto you, The
servant is not greater than his Lord. If they have persecuted Me, they
will also persecute you; if they have kept My saying, they will keep
yours also.'--JOHN xv. 18-20.

These words strike a discord in the midst of the sweet music to which
we have been listening. The key-note of all that has preceded has been
love--the love of Christ's friends to one another, and of all to Him,
as an answer to His love to all. That love, which is one, whether it
rise to Him or is diffused on the level of earth, is the result of that
unity of life between the Vine and the branches, of which our Lord has
been speaking such great and wonderful things. But that unity of life
between Christians and Christ has another consequence than the spread
of love. Just because it binds them to Him in a sacred community, it
separates them from those who do not share in His life, and hence the
'hate' of our context is the shadow of 'love'; and there result two
communities--to use the much-abused words that designate them--the
Church and 'the World'; and the antagonism between these is deep,
fundamental, and perpetual.

Unquestionably, our Lord is here speaking with special reference to the
Apostles, who, in a very tragic sense, were 'sent forth as sheep in the
midst of wolves.' If we may trust tradition, every one of that little
company, Speaker as well as hearers, died a martyr's death, with the
exception of John himself, who was preserved from it by a miracle. But,
be that as it may, our Lord is here laying down a universal statement
of the permanent condition of things; and there is no more reason for
restricting the force of these words to the original hearers of them
than there is for restricting the force of any of the rest of this
wonderful discourse. 'The world' will be in antagonism to the Church
until the world ceases to be a world, because it obeys the King; and
then, and not till then, will it cease to be hostile to His subjects.

I. What makes this hostility inevitable?

Our Lord here prepares His hearers for what is coming by putting it in
the gentle form of an hypothesis. The frequency with which 'If' occurs
in this section is very remarkable. He will not startle them by the
bare, naked statement which they, in that hour of depression and
agitation, were so little able to endure, but He puts it in the shape
of a 'suppose that,' not because there is any doubt, but in order to
alleviate the pain of the impression which He desires to make. He says,
'If the world hates,' not 'if the world hate'; and the tense of the
original shows that, whilst the form of the statement is hypothetical,
the substance of it is prophetic.

Jesus points to two things, as you will observe, which make this
hostility inevitable. 'If the world hate you, ye know that it hated Me
before it hated you.' And again, 'If ye were of the world, the world
would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have
chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.' The very
language carries with it the implication of necessary and continual
antagonism. For what is 'the world,' in this context, but the aggregate
of men, who have no share in the love and life that flow from Jesus
Christ? Necessarily they constitute a unity, whatever diversities there
may be amongst them, and necessarily, that unity in its banded phalanx
is in antagonism, in some measure, to those who constitute the other
unity, which holds by Christ, and has been drawn by Him from 'out of
the world.'

If we share Christ's life, we must, necessarily, in some measure, share
His fate. It is the typical example of what the world thinks of, and
does to, goodness. And all who have 'the Spirit of life which was in
Jesus Christ' for the animating principle of their lives, will, just in
the measure in which they possess it, come under the same influences
which carried Him to the Cross. In a world like this, it is impossible
for a man to 'love righteousness and hate iniquity,' and to order his
life accordingly, without treading on somebody's corns; being a rebuke
to the opposite course of conduct, either interfering with men's
self-complacency or with their interests. From the beginning the blind
world has repaid goodness by antagonism and contempt.

And then our Lord touches another, and yet closely-connected, cause
when He speaks of His selecting the Apostles, and drawing them out of
the world, as a reason for the world's hostility. There are two groups,
and the fundamental principles that underlie each are in deadly
antagonism. In the measure in which you and I are Christians we are in
direct opposition to all the maxims which rule the world and make it a
world. What we believe to be precious it regards as of no account. What
we believe to be fundamental truth it passes by as of little
importance. Much which we feel to be wrong it regards as good. Our
jewels are its tinsel, and its jewels are our tinsel. We and it stand
in diametrical opposition of thought about God, about self, about duty,
about life, about death, about the future; and that opposition goes
right down to the bottom of things. However it may be covered over,
there is a gulf, as in some of those American canons: the towering
cliffs may be very near--only a yard or two seems to separate them; but
they go down for thousands and thousands of feet, and never are any
nearer each other, and between them at the bottom a black, sullen river
flows. 'If ye were of the world, the world would love its own.' If it
loves you, it is because ye are of it.

II. And so note, secondly, how this hostility is masked and modified.

There are a great many other bonds that unite men together besides the
bonds of religious life or their absence. There are the domestic ties,
there are the associations of commerce and neighbourhood, there are
surface identities of opinion about many important things. The greater
portion of our lives moves on this surface, whore all men are alike.
'If you tickle us, do we not laugh; if you wound us, do we not bleed?'
We have all the same affections and needs, pursue the same avocations,
do the same sort of things, and a large portion of every one's life is
under the dominion of habit and custom, and determined by external
circumstances. So there is a film of roofing thrown over the gulf. You
can make up a crack in a wall with plaster after a fashion, and it will
hide the solution of continuity that lies beneath. But let bad weather
come, and soon the bricks gape apart as before. And so, as soon as we
get down below the surface of things and grapple with the real,
deep-lying, and formative principles of a life, we come to antagonism,
just as they used to come to it long ago, though the form of it has
become quite different.

Then there are other causes modifying this hostility. The world has got
a dash of Christianity into it since Jesus Christ spoke. We cannot say
that it is half Christianised, but some of the issues and remoter
consequences of Christianity have permeated the general conscience, and
the ethics of the Gospel are largely diffused in such a land as this.
Thus Christian men and others have, to a large extent, a common code of
morality, as long as they keep on the surface; and they not only do a
good many things exactly alike, but do a great many things from
substantially the same motives, and have the same way of looking at
much. Thus the gulf is partly bridged over; and the hostility takes
another form. We do not wrap Christians in pitch and stick them up for
candles in the Emperor's garden nowadays, but the same thing can be
done in different ways. Newspaper articles, the light laugh of scorn,
the whoop of exultation over the failures or faults of any prominent
man that has stood out boldly on Christ's side; all these indicate what
lies below the surface, and sometimes not so very far below. Many a
young man in a Manchester warehouse, trying to live a godly life, many
a workman at his bench, many a commercial traveller in the inn or on
the road, many a student on the college benches, has to find out that
there is a great gulf between him and the man who sits next to him, and
that he cannot be faithful to his Lord, and at the same time, down to
the depths of his being, a friend of one who has no friendship to his
Master.

Still another fact masks the antagonism, and that is, that after all,
the world, meaning thereby the aggregate of godless men, has a
conscience that responds to goodness, though grumblingly and
reluctantly. After all, men do know that it is better to be good, that
it is better and wiser to be like Christ, that it is nobler to live for
Him than for self, and that consciousness cannot but modify to some
extent the manifestations of the hostility, but it is there all the
same, and whosoever will be a Christian after Christ's pattern will
find out that it is there.

Let a man for Christ's sake avow unpopular beliefs, let him try
honestly to act out the New Testament, let him boldly seek to apply
Christian principles to the fashionable and popular sins of his class
or of his country, let him in any way be ahead of the conscience of the
majority, and what a chorus will be yelping at his heels! Dear
brethren, the law still remains, 'If any man will be a friend of the
world he is at enmity with God.'

III. Thirdly, note how you may escape the hostility.

A half-Christianised world and a more than half-secularised Church get
on well together. 'When they do agree, their agreement is wonderful.'
And it is a miserable thing to reflect that about the average
Christianity of this generation there is so very little that does
deserve the antagonism of the world. Why should the world care to hate
or trouble itself about a professing Church, large parts of which are
only a bit of the world under another name? There is no need whatever
that there should be any antagonism at all between a godless world and
hosts of professing Christians. If you want to escape the hostility
drop your flag, button your coat over the badge that shows that you
belong to Christ, and do the things that the people round about you do,
and you will have a perfectly easy and undisturbed life.

Of course, in the bad old slavery days, a Christianity that had not a
word to say about the sin of slave-holding ran no risk of being tarred
and feathered. Of course a Christianity in Manchester that winks hard
at commercial immoralities is very welcome on the Exchange. Of course a
Christianity that lets beer barrels alone may reckon upon having
publicans for its adherents. Of course a Christianity that blesses
flags and sings _Te Deums_ over victories will get its share of the
spoil. Why should the world hate, or persecute, or do anything but
despise a Christianity like that, any more than a man need to care for
a tame tiger that has had its claws pared? If the world can put a hook
in the nostrils of leviathan, and make him play with its maidens, it
will substitute good-nature, half contemptuous, for the hostility which
our Master here predicts. It was out-and-out Christians that He said
the world would hate; the world likes Christians that are like itself.
Christian men and women! be you sure that you deserve the hostility
which my text predicts.

IV. And now, lastly, note how to meet this antagonism.

Reckon it as a sign and test of true union with Jesus Christ. And so,
if ever, by reason of our passing at the call of duty or benevolence
outside the circle of those who sympathise with our faith and
fundamental ideas, we encounter it more manifestly than when we 'dwell
among our own people,' let us count the 'reproach of Christ' as a
treasure to be proud of, and to be guarded.

Be sure that it is your goodness and not your evils or your weakness,
that men dislike. The world has a very keen eye for the inconsistencies
and the faults of professing Christians, and it is a good thing that it
has. The loftier your profession the sharper the judgment that is
applied to you. Many well-meaning Christian people, by an injudicious
use of Christian phraseology in the wrong place, and by the glaring
contradiction between their prayers and their talks and their daily
life, bring down a great deal of deserved hostility upon themselves and
of discredit upon Christianity; and then they comfort themselves and
say they are bearing the 'reproach of the Cross.' Not a bit of it! They
are bearing the natural results of their own failings and faults. And
it is for us to see to it that what provokes, if it does provoke,
hostile judgments and uncharitable criticisms, insulting speeches and
sarcasms, and the sense of our belonging to another regiment and having
other objects, is our cleaving to Jesus Christ, and not the
imperfections and the sins with which we so often spoil that cleaving.
Be you careful for this, that it is Christ in you that men turn from,
and not you yourself and your weakness and sin.

Meet this antagonism by not dropping your standard one inch. Keep the
flag right at the masthead. If you begin to haul it down, where are you
going to stop? Nowhere, until you have got it draggling in the mud at
the foot. It is of no use to try to conciliate by compromise. All that
we shall gain by that will be, as I have said, indifference and
contempt; all that we shall gain will be a loss to the cause. A great
deal is said in this day, and many efforts are being made--I cannot but
think mistaken efforts--by Christian people to bridge over this gulf in
the wrong way--that is, by trying to make out that Christianity in its
fundamental principles does approximate a great deal more closely to
the things that the world goes by than it really does. It is all vain,
and the only issue of it will be that we shall have a decaying
Christianity and a dying spiritual life. Keep the flag up; emphasise
and accentuate the things that the world disbelieves and denies, not
pushing them to the 'falsehood of extremes,' but not by one jot
diminishing the clearness of our testimony by reason of the world's
unwillingness to receive it. Our victory is to be won only through
absolute faithfulness to Christ's ideal.

And, lastly, meet hostility with unmoved, patient, Christlike, and
Christ-derived love and sympathy. The patient sunshine pours upon the
glaciers and melts the thick-ribbed ice at last into sweet water. The
patient sunshine beats upon the mist-cloud and breaks up its edges and
scatters it at the last. And our Lord here tells us that our
experience, if we are faithful to Him, will be like His experience, in
that some will hearken to our word though others will persecute, and to
some our testimony will come as a message from God that draws them to
the Lord Himself. These are our only weapons, brethren! The only
conqueror of the world is the love that was in Christ breathed through
us; the only victory over suspicion, contempt, alienation, is pleading,
persistent, long-suffering, self-denying love. The only way to overcome
the world's hostility is by turning the world into a church, and that
can only be done when Christ's servants oppose pity to wrath, love to
hate, and in the strength of His life who has won us all by the same
process, seek to win the world for Him by the manifestation of His
victorious love in our patient love.

Dear brethren, to which army do you belong? Which community is yours?
Are you in Christ's ranks, or are you in the world's? Do you love Him
back again, or do you meet His open heart with a closed one, and His
hand, laden with blessings, with hands clenched in refusal? To which
class do I belong?--it is the question of questions for us all; and I
pray that you and I, won from our hatred by His love, and wooed out of
our death by His life, and made partakers of His life by His death, may
yield our hearts to Him, and so pass from out of the hostility and
mistrust of a godless world into the friendships and peace of the
sheltering Vine. And then we 'shall esteem the reproach of Christ' if
it fall upon our heads, in however modified and mild a form, 'greater
riches than the treasures of Egypt,' and 'have respect unto the
recompense of the reward.'

May it be so with us all!



THE WORLD'S HATRED, AS CHRIST SAW IT

'But all these things will they do unto you for My name's sake, because
they know not Him that sent Me. If I had not come and spoken unto them,
they had not had sin: but now they have no cloke for their sin. He that
hateth Me, hateth My Father also. If I had not done among them the
works which none other man did, they had not had sin: but now have they
both seen and hated both Me and My Father. But this cometh to pass,
that the word might be fulfilled that is written in their law, They
hated Me without a cause.'--JOHN XV. 21-25.

Our Lord has been speaking of the world's hostility to His followers,
and tracing that to its hostility to Himself. In these solemn words of
our text He goes still deeper, and parallels the relation which His
disciples bear to Him and the consequent hostility that falls on them,
with the relation which He bears to the Father and the consequent
hostility that falls on Him: 'They hate you because they hate Me.' And
then His words become sadder and pierce deeper, and with a tone of
wounded love and disappointed effort and almost surprise at the world's
requital to Him, He goes on to say, 'They hate Me, because they hate
the Father.'

So, then, here we have, in very pathetic and solemn words, Christ's
view of the relation of the world to Him and to God.

I. The first point that He signalises is the world's ignorance.

'These things they will do unto you,' and they will do them 'for My
name's sake'; they will do them 'because they know not Him that sent
Me.'

'The world,' in Christ's language, is the aggregate of godless men. Or,
to put it a little more sharply, our Lord, in this context, gives in
His full adhesion to that narrow view which divides those who have come
under the influence of His truth into two portions. There is no mincing
of the matter in the antithesis which Christ here draws; no hesitation,
as if there were a great central mass, too bad for a blessing perhaps,
but too good for a curse; which was neither black nor white, but
neutral grey. No! however it may be with the masses beyond the reach of
the dividing and revealing power of His truth, the men that come into
contact with Him, like a heap of metal filings brought into contact
with a magnet, mass themselves into two bunches, the one those who
yield to the attraction, and the other those who do not. The one is 'My
disciples,' and the other is 'the world.' And now, says Jesus Christ,
all that mass that stands apart from Him, and, having looked upon Him
with the superficial eye of those men round about Him at that day, or
of the men who hear of Him now, have no real love to Him--have, as the
underlying motive of their conduct and their feelings, a real ignorance
of God, 'They know not Him that sent Me.'

Our Lord assumes that He is so completely the Copy and Revealer of the
divine nature as that any man that looks upon Him has had the
opportunity of becoming acquainted with God, and that any man who turns
away from Him has lost that opportunity. The God that the men who do
not love Jesus Christ believe in, is not the Father that sent Him. It
is a fragment, a distorted image tinted by the lens. The world has its
conception of God; but outside of Jesus Christ and His manifestation of
the whole divine nature, the world's God is but a syllable, a fragment,
a broken part of the perfect completeness. 'The Father of an infinite
majesty,' and of as infinite a tenderness, the stooping God, the
pitying God, the forgiving God, the loving God is known only where
Christ is accepted. In other hearts He may be dimly hoped for, in other
hearts He may be half believed in, in other hearts He may be thought
possible; but hopes and anticipations and fears and doubts are not
knowledge, and they who see not the light in Christ see but the
darkness. Out of Him God is not known, and they that turn away from His
beneficent manifestation turn their faces to the black north, from
which no sun can shine. Brother, do you know God in Christ? Unless you
do, you do not know the God who is.

But there is a deeper meaning in that word than simply the possession
of true thoughts concerning the divine nature. We know God as we know
one another; because God is a Person, as we are persons, and the only
way to know persons is through familiar acquaintance and sympathy. So
the world which turns away from Christ has no acquaintance with God.

This is a surface fact. Our Lord goes on to show what lies below it.

II. His second thought here is--the world's ignorance in the face of
Christ's light is worse than ignorance; it is sin.

Mark how He speaks: 'If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had
not had sin: but now they have no cloke for their sin.' And then again:
'If I had not done amongst them the works which none other men did,
they had not had sin.' So then He puts before us two forms of His
manifestation of the divine nature, by His words and His works. Of
these two He puts His words foremost, as being a deeper and more
precious and brilliant revelation of what God is than are His miracles.
The latter are subordinate, they come as a second source of
illumination. Men who will not see the beauty and listen to the truth
that lie in His word may perchance be led by His deed. But the word
towers in its nature high above the work, and the miracle to the word
is but like the picture in the child's book to the text, fit for feeble
eyes and infantile judgments, but containing far less of the revelation
of God than the sacred words which He speaks. First the words, next the
miracles.

But notice, too, how decisively, and yet simply and humbly and
sorrowfully, our Lord here makes a claim which, on the lips of any but
Himself, would have been mere madness of presumption. Think of any of
us saying that our words made all the difference between innocent
ignorance and criminality! Think of any of us saying that to listen to
us, and not be persuaded, was the sin of sins! Think of any of us
pointing to our actions and saying, In these God is so manifest that
not to see Him augurs wickedness, and is condemnation! And yet Jesus
Christ says all this. And, what is more wonderful, nobody wonders that
He says it, and the world believes that He is saying the truth when He
says it.

How does that come? There is only one answer; only one. His words were
the illuminating manifestation of God, and His deeds were the plain and
unambiguous operation of the divine hand then and there, only because
He Himself was divine, and in Him 'God was manifested in the flesh.'

But passing from that, notice how our Lord here declares that in
comparison with the sin of not listening to His words, and being taught
by His manifestation, all other sins dwindle into nothing. 'If I had
not spoken, they had not had sin.' That does not mean, of course, that
these men would have been clear of all moral delinquency; it does not
mean that there would not have been amongst them crimes against their
own consciences, crimes against the law written on their own hearts,
crimes against the law of revelation. There were liars, impure men,
selfish men, and men committing all the ordinary forms of human
transgression amongst them. And yet, says Christ, black and bespattered
as these natures are, they are white in comparison with the blackness
of the man who, looking into His face, sees nothing there that he
should desire. Beside the mountain belching out its sulphurous flame
the little pimple of a molehill is nought. And so, says Christ, heaven
heads the count of sins with this--unbelief in Me.

Ah, brother, as light grows responsibility grows, and this is the
misery of all illumination that comes through Jesus Christ, that where
it does not draw a man into His sweet love, and fill him with the
knowledge of God which is eternal life, it darkens his nature and
aggravates his condemnation, and lays a heavier burden upon his soul.
The truth that the measure of light is the measure of guilt has many
aspects. It turns a face of alleviation to the dark places of the
earth; but just in the measure that it lightens the condemnation of the
heathen, it adds weight to the condemnation of you men and women who
are bathed in the light of Christianity, and all your days have had it
streaming in upon you. The measure of the guilt is the brightness of
the light. No shadows are so black as those which the intense sunshine
of the tropics casts. And you and I live in the very tropical regions
of divine revelation, and 'if we turn away from Him that spoke on earth
and speaketh from heaven, of how much sorer punishment, think you,
shall we be thought worthy' than those who live away out in the
glimmering twilight of an unevangelised paganism, or who stood by the
side of Jesus Christ when they had only His earthly life to teach them?

III. The ignorance which is sin is the manifestation of hatred.

Our Lord has sorrowfully contemplated the not knowing God, which in the
blaze of His light can only come from wilful closing of the eyes, and
is therefore the very sin of sins. But that, sad as it is, is not all
which has to be said about that blindness of unbelief in Him. It
indicates a rooted alienation of heart and mind and will from God, and
is, in fact, the manifestation of an unconscious but real hatred. It is
an awful saying, and one which the lips 'into which grace was poured'
could not pronounce without a sigh. But it is our wisdom to listen to
what it was His mercy to say.

Observe our Lord's identification of Himself with the Father, so as
that the feelings with which men regard Him are, _ipso facto_, the
feelings with which they regard the Father God. 'He that hath seen Me
hath seen the Father.' 'He that hath loved Me hath loved the Father.'
'He that hath hated Me hath hated the Father.' An ugly word--a word
that a great many of us think far too severe and harsh to be applied to
men who simply are indifferent to the divine love. Some say, 'I am
conscious of no hatred. I do not pretend to be a Christian, but I do
not hate God. Take the ordinary run of people round about us in the
world; if you say God is not in all their thoughts, I agree with you;
but if you say that they _hate_ God, I do not believe it.'

Well, what do you think the fact that men go through their days and
weeks and months and years, and have not God in all their thoughts,
indicates as to the central feeling of their hearts towards God?
Granted that there is not actual antagonism, because there is no
thought at all, do you think it would be possible for a man who loved
God to go on for a twelvemonth and never think of, or care to please,
or desire to be near, the object that he loved? And inasmuch as, deep
down at the bottom of our moral being, there is no such thing possible
as indifference and a perfect equipoise in reference to God, it is
clear enough, I think, that--although the word must not be pressed as
if it meant conscious and active antagonism,--where there is no love
there is hate.

If a man does not love God as He is revealed to him in Jesus Christ, he
neither cares to please Him nor to think about Him, nor does he order
his life in obedience to His commands. And if it be true that obedience
is the very life-breath of love, disobedience or non-obedience is the
manifestation of antagonism, and antagonism towards God is the same
thing as hate.

Dear friends, I want some of my hearers to-day who have never honestly
asked themselves the question of what their relation to God is, to go
down into the deep places of their hearts and test themselves by this
simple inquiry: 'Do I do anything to please Him? Do I try to serve Him?
Is it a joy to me to be near Him? Is the thought of Him a delight, like
a fountain in the desert or the cool shadow of a great rock in the
blazing wilderness? Do I turn to Him as my Home, my Friend, my All? If
I do not, am I not deceiving myself by fancying that I stand neutral?'
There is no neutrality in a man's relation to God. It is one thing or
other. 'Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.' 'The friendship of the world
is enmity against God.'

IV. And now, lastly, note how our Lord here touches the deep thought
that this ignorance, which is sin, and is more properly named hatred,
is utterly irrational and causeless.

'All this will they do that it might be fulfilled which is written in
their law, They hated Me without a cause.' One hears sighing through
these words the Master's meek wonder that His love should be so met,
and that the requital which He receives at men's hands, for such an
unexampled and lavish outpouring of it, should be such a carelessness,
reposing upon a hidden basis of such a rooted alienation.

'Without a cause'; yes! that suggests the deep thought that the most
mysterious and irrational thing in men's whole history and experience
is the way in which they recompense God in Christ for what He has done
for them. 'Be astonished, O ye heavens! and wonder, O ye earth!' said
one of the old prophets; the mystery of mysteries, which can give no
account of itself to satisfy reason, which has no apology, excuse, or
vindication, is just that when God loves me I do not love Him back
again; and that when Christ pours out the whole fullness of His heart
upon me, nay dull and obstinate heart gives back so little to Him who
has given me so much.

'Without a cause.' Think of that Cross; think, as every poor creature
on earth has a right to think, that he and she individually were in the
mind and heart of the Saviour when He suffered and died, and then think
of what we have brought Him for it. De we not stand ashamed at-if I
might use so trivial a word,--the absurdity as well as at the
criminality of our requital? Causeless love on the one side, occasioned
by nothing but itself, and causeless indifference on the other,
occasioned by nothing but itself, are the two powers that meet in this
mystery-men's rejection of the infinite love of God.

My friend, come away from the unreasonable people, come away from the
men who can give no account of their attitude. Come away from those who
pay benefits by carelessness, and a Love that died by an indifference
that will not cast an eye upon that miracle of mercy, and let His love
kindle the answering flame in your hearts. Then you will know God as
only they who love Christ know Him, and in the sweetness of a mutual
bond will lose the misery of self, and escape the deepening
condemnation of those who see Christ on the Cross and do not care for
the sight, nor learn by it to know the infinite tenderness and holiness
of the Father that sent Him.



OUR ALLY

'But when the Comforter Is come, whom I will send unto you from the
Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, He
shall testify of Me: And ye also shall bear witness, because ye have
been with Me from the beginning.'--JOHN xv. 26, 27.

Our Lord has been speaking of a world hostile to His followers and to
Him. He proceeds, in the words which immediately follow our text, to
paint that hostility as aggravated even to the pitch of religious
murder. But here He lets a beam of light in upon the darkness. These
forlorn Twelve, listening to Him, might well have said, 'Thou art about
to leave us; how can we alone face this world in arms, with which Thou
dost terrify us?' And here He lets them see that they will not be left
alone, but have a great Champion, clad in celestial armour, who, coming
straight from God, will be with them and put into their hands a weapon,
with which they may conquer the world, and turn it into a friend, and
with which alone they must meet the world's hate.

So, then, we have three things in this text; the great promise of an
Ally in the conflict with the world; the witness which that Ally bears,
to fortify against the world; and the consequent witness with which
Christians may win the world.

I. Now consider briefly the first of these points, the great promise of
an Ally in the conflict with the world.

I may touch, very lightly, upon the wonderful designation of this
Champion-Friend whom Christ sends, because on former occasions in this
course of sermons we have had to deal with the same thoughts, and there
will be subsequent opportunities of recurring to them. But I may just
emphasise in a few sentences the points which our Lord here signalises
in regard to the Champion whom He sends. There is a double designation
of that Spirit, 'the Comforter' and 'the Spirit of truth.' There is a
double description of His mission, as being 'sent' by Jesus, and as
'proceeding from the Father,' and there is a single statement as to the
position from which He comes to us. A word about each of these things.

I have already explained in former sermons that the notion of
'Comforter,' as it is understood in modern English, is a great deal too
restricted and narrow to cover the whole ground of this great and
blessed promise. The Comforter whom Christ sends is no mere drier of
men's tears and gentle Consoler of human sorrows, but He is a mightier
Spirit than that, and the word by which He is described in our text,
which means 'one who is summoned to the side of another,' conveys the
idea of a helper who is brought to the man to be helped, in order to
render whatever aid and succour that man's weakness and circumstances
may require. The verses before our text suggest what sort of aid and
succour the disciples will need. They are to be as sheep in the midst
of wolves. Their defenceless purity will need a Protector, a strong
Shepherd. They stand alone amongst enemies. There must be some one
beside them to fight for them, to shield and to encourage them, to be
their Safety and their Peace. And that Paraclete, who is called to our
side, comes for the special help which these special circumstances
require, and is a strong Spirit who will be our Champion and our Ally,
whatever antagonism may storm against us, and however strong and
well-armed may be the assaulting legions of the world's hate.

Then, still further, the other designation here of this strong
Succourer and Friend is 'the Spirit of truth,' by which is designated,
not so much His characteristic attribute, as rather the weapon which He
wields, or the material with which He works. The 'truth' is His
instrument; that is to say, the Spirit of God sent by Jesus Christ is
the Strengthener, the Encourager, the Comforter, the Fighter for us and
with us, because He wields that great body of truth, the perfect
revelation of God, and man, and duty, and salvation, which is embodied
in the incarnation and work of Jesus Christ our Lord. The truth is His
weapon, and it is by it that He makes us strong.

Then, still further, there is a twofold description here of the mission
of this divine Champion, as 'sent' by Christ, and 'proceeding from the
Father.'

In regard to the former, I need only remind you that, in a previous
part of this wonderful discourse, our Lord speaks of that divine Spirit
as being sent by the Father in His name and in answer to His prayer.
The representation here is by no means antagonistic to, or diverse
from, that other representation, but rather the fact that the Father
and the Son, according to the deep teaching of Scripture, are in so far
one as that 'whatsoever the Son seeth the Father do that also the Son
doeth likewise,' makes it possible to attribute to Him the work which,
in another place, is ascribed to the Father. In speaking of the
_Persons_ of the Deity, let us never forget that that word is only
partially applicable to that ineffable Being, and that whilst with us
it implies absolute separation of individuals, it does not mean such
separation in the case of its imperfect transference to the mysteries
of the divine nature; but rather, the Son doeth what the Father doeth,
and therefore the Spirit is sent forth by the Father, and also the Son
sends the Spirit.

But, on the other hand, we are not to regard that divine Spirit as
merely a Messenger sent by another. He 'proceeds from the Father.' That
word has been the battlefield of theological controversy, with which I
do not purpose to trouble you now. For I do not suppose that in its use
here it refers at all to the subject to which it has been sometimes
applied, nor contains any kind of revelation of the eternal depths of
the divine Nature and its relations to itself. What is meant here is
the historical coming forth into human life of that divine Spirit. And,
possibly, the word 'proceeds' is chosen in order to contrast with the
word 'sent,' and to give the idea of a voluntary and personal action of
the Messenger, who not only is _sent_ by the Father, but of Himself
_proceeds_ on the mighty work to which He is destined.

Be that as it may, mark only, for the last thought here about the
details of this great promise, that wonderful phrase, twice repeated in
our Lord's words, and emphasised by its verbal repetition in the two
clauses, which in all other respects are so different--'from the
Father.' The word translated '_from_' is not the ordinary word so
rendered, but rather designates _a position at the side of_ than an
_origin from_, and suggests much rather the intimate and ineffable
union between Father, Son, and Spirit, than the source from which the
Spirit comes. I touch upon these things very lightly, and gather them
up into one sentence. Here, then, are the points. A Person who is
spoken of as 'He'--a divine Person whose home from of old has been
close by the Father's side--a Person whose instrument is the revealed
truth ensphered and in germ in the facts of Christ's incarnation and
life--a divine Person, wielding the truth, who is sent by Christ as His
Representative, and in some sense a continuance of His personal
Presence--a divine, personal Spirit coming from the Father, wielding
the truth, sent by Christ, and at the side of all the persecuted and
the weak, all world-hated and Christian men, as their Champion, their
Combatant, their Ally, their Inspiration, and their Power. Is not that
enough to make the weakest strong? Is not that enough to make us 'more
than conquerors through Him that loved us'? All nations have legends of
the gods fighting at the head of their armies, and through the dust of
battle the white horses and the shining armour of the celestial
champions have been seen. The childish dream is a historical reality.
It is not we that fight, it is the Spirit of God that fighteth in us.

II. And so note, secondly, the witness of the Spirit which fortifies
against the world.

'He shall bear witness of Me.' Now we must especially observe here that
little phrase, 'unto you.' For that tells us at once that the witness
which our Lord has in mind here is something which is done within the
circle of the Christian believers, and not in the wide field of the
world's history or in nature. Of course it is a great truth that long
before Jesus Christ, and to-day far beyond the limits of His name and
knowledge, to say nothing of His faith and obedience, the Spirit of God
is working. As of old He brooded over the chaotic darkness, ever
labouring to turn chaos into order, and darkness into light, and
deformity into beauty; so today, all over the field of humanity, He is
operating. Grand as that truth is, it is not the truth here. What is
spoken of here is something that is done in and on Christian men, and
not even through them on the world, but in them for themselves. 'He
shall testify of Me' to you.

Now it is to be noted, also, that the first and special application of
these words is to the little group listening to Him. Never were men
more desolate and beaten down than these were, in the prospect of
Christ's departure. Never were men more utterly bewildered and
dispirited than these were, in the days between His crucifixion and His
resurrection. Think of them during His earthly life, their narrow
understandings, their manifold faults, moral as well as intellectual.
How little perception they had of anything that He said to them, as
their own foolish questions abundantly show! How little they had drunk
in His spirit, as their selfish and ambitious janglings amongst
themselves abundantly show! They were but Jews like their brethren,
believing, indeed, that Jesus Christ was the Messiah, but not knowing
what it was that they believed, or of what kind the Messiah was in whom
they were thus partially trusting. But they loved Him and were led by
Him, and so they were brought into a larger place by the Spirit whom
Christ sent.

What was it that made these dwarfs into giants in six weeks? What was
it that turned their narrowness into breadth; that made them start up
all at once as heroes, and that so swiftly matured them, as the fruits
and flowers are ripened under tropical sunshine? The resurrection and
ascension of Jesus Christ had a great deal to do with the change; but
they were not its whole cause. There is no explanation of the
extraordinary transformation of these men as we see them in the pages
of the Gospels, and as we find them on the pages of the Acts of the
Apostles, except this--the resurrection and the ascension of Jesus
Christ as facts, and the Spirit on Pentecost as an indwelling
Interpreter of the facts. He came, and the weak became strong, and the
foolish wise, and the blind enlightened, and they began to
understand--though it needed all their lives to perfect the
teaching,--what it was that their ignorant hands had grasped and their
dim perceptions had seen, when they touched the hands and looked upon
the face of Jesus Christ. The witness of the Spirit of God working
within them, working upon what they knew of the historical facts of
Christ's life, and interpreting these to them, was the explanation of
their change and growth. And the New Testament is the product of that
change. Christ's life was the truth which the Spirit used, and a
product of His teaching was these Epistles which we have, and which for
us step into the place which the historical facts held for them, and
become the instrument with which the Spirit of God will deepen our
understanding of Christ and enlarge our knowledge of what He is to us.

So, dear friends, whilst here we have a promise which specially
applies, no doubt, to these twelve Apostles, and the result of which in
them was different from its result in us, inasmuch as the Spirit's
teaching, recorded in the New Testament, becomes for us the
authoritative rule of faith and practice, the promise still applies to
each of us in a secondary and modified sense. For there is nothing in
these great valedictory words of our Lord's which has not a universal
bearing, and is not the revelation of a permanent truth in regard to
the Christian Church. And, therefore, here we have the promise of a
universal gift to all Christian men and women, of an actual divine
Spirit to dwell with each of us, to speak in our hearts.

And what will He speak there? He will teach us a deeper knowledge of
Jesus Christ. He will help us to understand better what He is. He will
show us more and more of the whole sweep of His work, of the whole
infinite truth for morals and religion, for politics and society, for
time and for eternity, about men and about God, which is wrapped up in
that great saying which we first of all, perhaps under the pressure of
our own sense of sin, grasp as our deliverance from sin: 'God so loved
the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth
in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.' That is the sum
of truth which the Spirit of God interprets to every faithful heart.
And as the days roll on, and new problems rise, and new difficulties
present themselves, and new circumstances emerge in our personal life,
we find the truth, which we at first dimly grasped as life and
salvation, opening out into wisdom and depth and meaning that we never
dreamed of in the early hours. A Spirit that bears witness of Christ
and will make us understand Him better every day we live, if we choose,
is the promise that is given here, for all Christian men and women.

Then note that this inward witness of Christ's depth and preciousness
is our true weapon and stay against a hostile world. A little candle in
a room will make the lightning outside almost invisible; and if I have
burning in my heart the inward experience and conviction of what Jesus
Christ is and what He has done and will do for me--Oh! then, all the
storm without may rage, and it will not trouble me.

If you take an empty vessel and bring pressure to bear upon it, in go
the sides. Fill it, and they will resist the pressure. So with growing
knowledge of Christ, and growing personal experience of His sweetness
in our souls, we shall be able, untouched and undinted, to throw off
the pressure which would otherwise have crushed us.

Therefore, dear friends, here is the true secret of tranquillity, in an
age of questioning and doubt. Let me have that divine Voice speaking in
my heart, as I may have, and no matter what questions may be doubtful,
this is sure--'We know in whom we have believed'; and we can say,
'Settle all your controversies any way you like: one thing I know, and
that divine Voice is ever saying it to me in my deepest
consciousness--the Son of God is come and hath given us an
understanding that we may know Him that is true; and we are in Him that
is true.' Labour for more of this inward, personal conviction of the
preciousness of Jesus Christ to strengthen you against a hostile world.

And remember that there are conditions under which this Voice speaks in
our souls. One is that we attend to the instrument which the Spirit of
God uses, and that is 'the truth.' If Christians will not read their
Bibles, they need not expect to have the words of these Bibles
interpreted and made real to them by any inward experience. If you want
to have a faith which is vindicated and warranted by your daily
experience, there is only one way to get it, and that is, to use the
truth which the Spirit uses, and to bring yourself into contact,
continual and reverent and intelligent, with the great body of divine
truth that is conveyed in these authoritative words of the Spirit of
God speaking through the first witnesses.

And there must be moral discipline too. Laziness, worldliness, the
absorption of attention with other things, self-conceit, prejudice,
and, I was going to say, almost above all, the taking of our religion
and religious opinions at secondhand from men and teachers and books--all
these stand in the way of our hearing the Spirit of God when He
speaks. Come away from the babble and go by yourself, and take your
Bibles with you, and read them, and meditate upon them, and get near
the Master of whom they speak, and the Spirit which uses the truth will
use it to fortify you.

III. And, lastly, note the consequent witness with which the Christian
may win the world.

'And ye also shall bear witness of Me, because ye have been with Me
from the beginning.' That 'also' has, of course, direct reference to
the Apostles' witness to the facts of our Lord's historical appearance,
His life, His death, His resurrection, and His ascension; and therefore
their qualification was simply the companionship with Him which enabled
them to say, 'We saw what we tell you; we were witnesses from the
beginning.'

But then, again, I say that there is no word here that belongs only to
the Apostles; it belongs to us all, and so here is the task of the
Christian Church in all its members. They receive the witness of the
Spirit, and they are Christ's witnesses in the world.

Note what we have to do--to bear witness; not to argue, not to adorn,
but simply to attest. Note what we have to attest--the fact, not of the
historical life of Jesus Christ, because we are not in a position to be
witnesses of that, but the fact of His preciousness and power, and the
fact of our own experience of what He has done for us. Note, that that
is by far the most powerful agency for winning the world. You can never
make men angry by saying to them, 'We have found tho Messias.' You
cannot irritate people, or provoke them into a controversial opposition
when you say, 'Brother, let me tell you my experience. I was dark, sad,
sinful, weak, solitary, miserable; and I got light, gladness, pardon,
strength, companionship, and a joyful hope. I was blind--you remember
me when my eyes were dark, and I sat begging outside the Temple; I was
blind, now I see--look at my eyeballs.' We can all say that. This is
the witness that needs no eloquence, no genius, no anything except
honesty and experience; and whosoever has tasted and felt and handled
of the Word of Life may surely go to a brother and say, 'Brother, I
have eaten and am satisfied. Will you not help yourselves?' We can all
do it, and we ought to do it. The Christian privilege of being
witnessed to by the Spirit of God in our hearts brings with it the
Christian duty of being witnesses in our turn to the world. That is our
only weapon against the hostility which godless humanity bears to
ourselves and to our Master. We may win men by that; we can win them by
nothing else. 'Ye are My witnesses, saith the Lord, and My servants
whom I have chosen.' Christian friend, listen to the Master, who says,
'Him that confesseth Me before men, him will I also confess before My
Father in heaven.'



WHY CHRIST SPEAKS

'These things have I spoken unto you, that ye should not be offended.
They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that
whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service. And these
things will they do unto you, because they have not known the Father,
nor Me. But these things have I told you, that, when the time shall
come, ye may remember that I told you of them. And these things I said
not unto you at the beginning, because I was with you. But now I go My
way to Him that sent Me; and none of you asketh Me, Whither goest Thou?
But because I have said these things unto you, sorrow hath filled your
heart.'--JOHN xvi. 1-6.

The unbroken flow of thought, and the many subtle links of connection
between the parts, of these inexhaustible last words of our Lord make
any attempt at grouping them into sections more or less unsatisfactory
and artificial. But I have ventured to throw these, perhaps too many,
verses together for our consideration now, because a phrase of frequent
recurrence in them manifestly affords a key to their main subject.
Notice how our Lord four times repeats the expression, 'These things
have I spoken unto you.' He is not so much adding anything new to His
words, as rather contemplating the reasons for His speech now, the
reasons for His silence before, and the imperfect apprehension of the
things spoken which His disciples had, and which led to their making
His announcement, thus imperfectly understood, an occasion for sorrow
rather than for joy. There is a kind of landing place or pause here in
the ascending staircase. Our Lord meditates for Himself, and invites us
to meditate with Him, rather upon His past utterances than upon
anything additional to them. So, then, whilst it is true that we have
in two of these verses a repetition, in a somewhat more intense and
detailed form, of the previous warnings of the hostility of the world,
in the main the subject of the present section is that which I have
indicated. And I take the fourfold recurrence of that clause to which I
have pointed as marking out for us the leading ideas that we are to
gather from these words.

I. There is, first, our Lord's loving reason for His speech.

This is given in a double form. 'These things have I spoken unto you,
that ye should not be offended.' And, again, 'These things have I told
you, that when the time shall come, ye may remember that I told you of
them.' These two statements substantially coalesce and point to the
same idea.

They are separated, as I have said, by a reiteration, in more emphatic
form, of the dark prospect which He has been holding out to His
disciples. He tells them that the world which hates them is to be fully
identified with the apostate Jewish Church. 'The synagogue' is for them
'the world.' There is a solemn lesson in that. The organised body that
calls itself God's Church and House may become the most rampant enemy
of Christ's people, and be the truest embodiment on the face of the
earth of all that He means by 'the world.' A formal church is the true
world always; and to-day as then. And such a body will do the cruellest
things and believe that it is offering up Christ's witnesses as
sacrifices to God. That is partly an aggravation and partly an
alleviation of the sin. It is possible that the inquisitor and the man
in the _San Benito_, whom he ties to the stake, may shake hands yet at
His side up yonder. But a church which has become, the world will do
its persecution and think that it is worship, and call the burning of
God's people an _auto-da-fe_ (act of faith); and the bottom of it all
is that, in the blaze of light, and calling themselves God's, 'they do
not know' either God or Christ. They do not know the one because they
will not know the other.

But that is all parenthetical in the present section, and so I say
nothing more about it; and ask you, rather, just to look at the loving
reasons which Christ here suggests for His present speech--'that ye
should not be offended,' or stumble. He warns them of the storm before
it bursts, lest, when it bursts, it should sweep them away from their
moorings. Of course, there could be nothing more productive of
intellectual bewilderment, and more likely to lead to doubt as to one's
own convictions, than to find oneself at odds with the synagogue about
the question of the Messiah. A modest man might naturally say, 'Perhaps
I am wrong and they are right.' A coward would be sure to say, 'I will
sink my convictions and fall in with the majority.' The stumbling-block
for these first Jewish converts, in the attitude of the whole mass of
the nation towards Christ and His pretensions, is one of such a
magnitude as we cannot, by any exercise of our imagination, realise.
'And,' says Christ, 'the only way by which you will ever get over the
temptation to intellectual doubt or to cowardly apostasy that arises
from your being thrown out of sympathy with the whole mass of your
people, and the traditions of the generations, is to reflect that I
told you it would be so, before it came to pass.'

Of course all that has a special bearing upon those to whom it was
originally addressed, and then it has a secondary bearing upon
Christians, whose lot it is to live in a time of actual persecution.
But that does not in the slightest degree destroy the fact that it also
has a bearing upon every one of us. For if you and I are Christian
people, and trying to live like our Master, and to do as He would have
us to do, we too shall often have to stand in such a very small
minority, and be surrounded by people who take such an entirely
opposite view of duty and of truth, as that we shall be only too much
disposed to give up and falter in the clearness, fullness, and
braveness of our utterance, and think, 'Well, perhaps after all it is
better for me to hold my tongue.'

And then, besides this, there are all the cares and griefs which befall
each of us, with regard to which also, as well as with regard to the
difficulties and dangers and oppositions which we may meet with in a
faithful Christian life, the principles of my text have a distinct and
direct application. He has told us in order that we might not stumble,
because when the hour comes and the sorrow comes with it, we remember
that He told us all about it before.

It is one of the characteristics of Christianity that Jesus Christ does
not try to enlist recruits by highly-coloured, rosy pictures of the
blessing and joy of serving Him, keeping His hand all the while upon
the weary marches and the wounds and pains. He tells us plainly at the
beginning, 'If you take My yoke upon you, you will have to carry a
heavy burden. You will have to abstain from a great many things that
you would like to do. You will have to do a great many things that your
flesh will not like. The road is rough, and a high wall on each side.
There are lovely flowers and green pastures on the other side of the
hedge, where it is a great deal easier walking upon the short grass
than it is upon the stony path. The roadway is narrow, and the gateway
is very strait, but the track goes steadily up. Will you accept the
terms and come in and walk upon it?'

It is far better and nobler, and more attractive also, to tell us
frankly and fully the difficulties and dangers than to try and coax us
by dwelling on pleasures and ease. Jesus Christ will have no service on
false pretences, but will let us understand at the beginning that if we
serve under His flag we have to make up our minds to hardships which
otherwise we may escape, to antagonisms which otherwise will not be
provoked, and to more than an ordinary share of sorrow and suffering
and pain. 'Through much tribulation we must enter the Kingdom.'

And the way by which all these troubles and cares, whether they be
those incident and peculiar to Christian life, or those common to
humanity, can best be met and overcome, is precisely by this thought,
'The Master has told us before.' Sorrows anticipated are more easily
met. It is when the vessel is caught with all its sails set that it is
almost sure to go down, and, at all events, sure to be badly damaged in
the typhoon. But when the barometer has been watched, and its fall has
given warning, and everything movable has been made fast, and every
spare yard has been sent below, and all tightened up and
ship-shape--then she can ride out the storm. Forewarned is forearmed.
Savages think, when an eclipse comes, that a wolf has swallowed the
sun, and it will never come out again. We know that it has all been
calculated beforehand, and since we know that it is coming to-morrow,
when it does come, it is only a passing darkness. Sorrow anticipated is
sorrow half overcome; and when it falls on us, the bewilderment, as if
'some strange thing had happened,' will be escaped when we can remember
that the Master has told us it all beforehand.

And again, sorrow foretold gives us confidence in our Guide. We have
the chart, and as we look upon it we see marked 'waterless country,'
'pathless rocks,' 'desert and sand,' 'wells and palm-trees.' Well, when
we come to the first of these, and find ourselves, as the map says, in
the waterless country; and when, as we go on step by step, and mile
after mile, we find it is all down there, we say to ourselves, 'The
remainder will be accurate, too,' and if we are in 'Marah' to-day,
where 'the water is bitter,' and nothing but the wood of the tree that
grows there can ever sweeten it, we shall be at 'Elim' to-morrow, where
there are 'the twelve wells and the seventy palm trees.' The chart is
right, and the chart says that the end of it all is 'the land that
flows with milk and honey.' He _has_ told us _this_; if there had been
anything worse than this, He would have told us _that_. 'If it were not
so I would have told you.' The sorrow foretold deepens our confidence
in our Guide.

Sorrow that comes punctually in accordance with His word plainly comes
in obedience to His will. Our Lord uses a little word in this context
which is very significant. He says, 'When _their hour_ is come.'

'Their hour'--the time allotted to them. Allotted by whom? Allotted by
Him. He could tell that they would come, because it was as His
instruments that they came. 'Their time' was His appointment. It was
only an 'hour,' a definite, appointed, and brief period in accordance
with His loving purpose. It takes all sorts of weathers to make a year;
and after all the sorts of weathers are run out, the year's results are
realised and the calm comes. And so the good old hymn, with its rhythm
that speaks at once of fear and triumph, has caught the true meaning of
these words of our Lord's--

  'Why should I complain
    Of want or distress,
  Temptation or pain?
    He told me no less.'

'These things have I spoken unto you that ye might not be offended.'

II. Still further, note our Lord's loving reasons for past silence.
'These things I said not unto you from the beginning, because I was
with you.'

Of course there had been in His early ministry hints, and very plain
references, to persecutions and trials, but we must not restrict the
'these things' of my text to that only, but rather include the whole of
the previous chapter, in which He sets the sorrow and the hostility
which His servants have to endure in their true light, as being the
consequences of their union with Him and of the closeness and the
identity of life and fate between the Vine and the branches. In so
systematic and detailed fashion, and with such an exhibition of the
grounds of its necessity, our Lord had not spoken of the world's
hostility in His earlier ministry, but had reserved it to these last
moments, and the reason why He had given but passing hints before was
because He was there. What a superb confidence that expresses in His
ability to shield His poor followers from all that might hurt and harm
them! He spreads the ample robe of His protection over them, or rather,
to go back to His own metaphor, 'as a hen gathereth her chickens under
her wings' so He gathers them to His own breast, and stretches over
them that which is at once protection and warmth, and keeps them safe.
As long as He is there, no harm can come to them. But He is going away,
and so it is time to speak, and to speak more plainly.

That, too, yields for us, dear brethren, truths that apply to us quite
as much as to that little group of silent listeners. For us, too,
difficulties and sorrows, though foretold in general terms, are largely
hidden till they are near. It would have been of little use for Christ
to have spoken more plainly in those early days of His ministry. The
disciples managed to forget and to misunderstand His plain utterances,
for instance, about His own death and resurrection. There needs to be
an adaptation between the hearing ear and the spoken word, in order
that the word spoken should be of use, and there are great tracts of
Scripture dealing with the sorrows of life, which lie perfectly dark
and dead to us, until experience vitalises them. The old Greeks used to
send messages from one army to another by means of a roll of parchment
twisted spirally round a baton, and then written on. It was perfectly
unintelligible when it fell into a man's hands that had not a
corresponding baton to twist it upon. Many of Christ's messages to us
are like that. You can only understand the utterances when life gives
you the frame round which to wrap them, and then they flash up into
meaning, and we say at once, 'He told us it all before, and I scarcely
knew that He had told me, until this moment when I need it.'

Oh, it is merciful that there should be a gradual unveiling of what is
to come to us, that the road should wind, and that we should see so
short a way before us. Did you never say to yourselves, 'If I had known
all this before, I do not think I could have lived to face it'? And did
you not feel how good and kind and loving it was, that in the
revelation there had been concealment, and that while Jesus Christ had
told us in general terms that we must expect sorrows and trials, this
specific form of sorrow and trial had not been foreseen by us until we
came close to it? Thank God for the loving reticence, and for the as
loving eloquence of His speech and of His silence, with regard to
sorrow.

And take this further lesson, that there ought to be in all our lives
times of close and blessed communion with that Master, when the sense
of His presence with us makes all thought of sorrows and trials in the
future out of place and needlessly disturbing. If these disciples had
drunk in the spirit of Jesus Christ when they were with Him, then they
would not have been so bewildered when He left them. When He was near
them there was something better for them to do than to be 'over
exquisite to cast the fashion of uncertain evils' in the
future--namely, to grow into His life, to drink in the sweetness of His
presence, to be moulded into the likeness of His character, to
understand Him better, and to realise His nearness more fully. And,
dear brethren, for us all there are times--and it is our own fault if
these are not very frequent and blessed--when thus, in such an hour of
sweet communion with the present Christ, the future will be all radiant
and calm, if we look into it, or, better, the present will be so
blessed that there will be no need to think of the future. These men in
the upper chamber, if they had learnt all the lessons that He was
teaching them then, would not have gone out, to sleep in Gethsemane,
and to tell lies in the high priest's hall, and to fly like frightened
sheep from the Cross, and to despair at the tomb. And you and I, if we
sit at His table, and keep our hearts near Him, eating and drinking of
that heavenly manna, shall 'go in the strength of that meat forty days
into the wilderness,' and say--

  'E'en let the unknown to-morrow
  Bring with it what it may.'

III. Lastly, I must touch, for the sake of completeness, upon the final
thought in these pregnant verses, and that is, the imperfect
apprehension of our Lord's words, which leads to sorrow instead of joy.

'Now I go My way to Him that sent Me; and none of you asketh Me,
Whither goest Thou? But because I have said these things unto you,
sorrow hath filled your heart.' He had been telling them--and it was
the one definite idea that they gathered from His words--that He was
going. And what did they say? They said, 'Going! What is to become of
_us_?' If there had been a little less selfishness and a little more
love, and if they had put their question, 'Going! What is to become of
_Him_?' then it would not have been sorrow that would have filled their
hearts, but a joy that would have flooded out all the sorrow, 'and the
winter of their discontent' would have been changed into 'glorious
summer,' because He was going to Him that sent Him; that is to say, He
was going with His work done and His message accomplished. And
therefore, if they could only have overlooked their own selves, and the
bearing of His departure, as it seemed to them, on themselves, and have
thought of it a little as it affected Him, they would have found that
all the oppressive and the dark in it would have disappeared, and they
would have been glad.

Ah, dear brethren, that gives us a thought on which I can but touch
now, that the steadfast contemplation of the ascended Christ, who has
gone to the Father, having finished His work, is the sovereign antidote
against all sense of separation and solitude, the sovereign power by
which we may face a hostile world, the sovereign cure for every sorrow.
If we could live in the light of the great triumphant, ascended Lord,
then, Oh, how small would the babble of the world be. If the great
White Throne, and He that sits upon it, were more distinctly before us,
then we could face anything, and sorrow would 'become a solemn scorn of
ills,' and all the transitory would be reduced to its proper
insignificance, and we should be emancipated from fear and every
temptation to unfaithfulness and apostasy. Look up to the Master who
has gone, and as the dying martyr outside the city wall 'saw the
heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing'--having sprung to His feet
to help His poor servant--'at the right hand of God,' so with that
vision in our eyes and the light of that Face flashing upon our faces,
and making them like the angels', we shall be masters of grief and
care, and pain and trial, and enmity and disappointment, and sorrow and
sin, and feel that the absent Christ is the present Christ, and that
the present Christ is the conquering power in us.

Dear brethren, there is nothing else that will make us victors over the
world and ourselves. If we can grasp Him by our faith and keep
ourselves near Him, then union with Him as of the Vine and the
branches, which will result inevitably in suffering here, will result
as inevitably in joy hereafter. For He will never relax the adamantine
grasp of His strong hand until He raises us to Himself, and 'if so be
that we suffer with Him we shall also be glorified together.'



THE DEPARTING CHRIST AND THE COMING SPIRIT

'Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go
away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but
if I depart, I will send Him unto you. And when He is come, He will
_convince_ the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of
judgment.'--JOHN xvi. 7, 8.

We read these words in the light of all that has gone after, and to us
they are familiar and almost thread-bare. But if we would appreciate
their sublimity, we must think away nineteen centuries, and all
Christendom, and recall these eleven poor men and their peasant Leader
in the upper room. They were not very wise, nor very strong, and
outside these four walls there was scarcely a creature in the whole
world that had the least belief either in Him or in them. They had
everything against them, and most of all their own hearts. They had
nothing for them but their Master's promise. Their eyes had been dimmed
by their sorrowful hearts, so that they could not see the truth which
He had been trying to reveal to them; and His departure had presented
itself to them only as it affected themselves, and therefore had
brought a sense of loss and desolation.

And now He bids them think of that departure, as it affects themselves,
as pure gain. 'It is for your profit that I go away.' He explains that
staggering statement by the thought which He has already presented to
them, in varying aspects, of His departure as the occasion for the
coming of that Great Comforter, who, when He is come, will through them
work upon the world, which knows neither them nor Him. They are to go
forth 'as sheep in the midst of wolves,' but in this promise He tells
them that they will become the judges and accusers of the world, which,
by the Spirit dwelling in them, they will be able to overcome, and
convict of error and of fault.

We must remember that the whole purpose of the words which we are
considering now is the strengthening of the disciples in their conflict
with the world, and that, therefore, the operations of that divine
Spirit which are here spoken of are operations carried on by their
instrumentality and through the word which they spake. With that
explanation we can consider the great words before us.

I. The first thing that strikes me about them is that wonderful thought
of the gain to Christ's servants from Christ's departure. 'It is
expedient for you that I go away.'

I need not enlarge here upon what we have had frequent occasion to
remark, the manner in which our Lord here represents the complex whole
of His death and ascension as being His own voluntary act. He 'goes.'
He is neither taken away by death nor rapt up to heaven in a whirlwind,
but of His own exuberant power and by His own will He goes into the
region of the grave and thence to the throne. Contrast the story of His
ascension with that Old Testament story of the ascension of Elijah. One
needed the chariot of fire and the horses of fire to bear him up into
the sphere, all foreign to his mortal and earthly manhood; the Other
needed no outward power to lift Him, nor any vehicle to carry Him from
this dim spot which men call earth, but slowly, serenely, upborne by
His own indwelling energy, and rising as to His native home, He
ascended up on high, and went where the very manner of His going
proclaimed that He had been before. 'If _I go_ away, I will send Him.'

But that is a digression. What we are concerned with now is the thought
of Christ's departure as being a step in advance, and a positive gain,
even to those poor, bewildered men who were clustering round Him,
depending absolutely upon Himself, and feeling themselves orphaned and
helpless without Him.

Now if we would feel the full force and singularity of this saying of
our Lord's, let us put side by side with it that other one, 'I have a
desire to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better.
Nevertheless, to abide in the flesh is more needful for you.' Why is it
that the Apostle says, 'Though I want to go I am bound to stay?' and
why is it that the Master says, 'It is for your good that I am going,'
but because of the essential difference in the relation of the two to
the people who are to be left, and in the continuance of the work of
the two after they had departed? Paul knew that when he went, whatever
befell those whom he loved and would fain help, he could not stretch a
hand to do anything for them. He knew that death dropped the portcullis
between him and them, and, whatever their sore need on the one side of
the iron gate, he on the other could not succour or save. Jesus Christ
said, 'It is better for you that I should go,' because He knew that all
His influences would flow through the grated door unchecked, and that,
departed, He would still be the life of them that trusted in Him; and,
having left them, would come near them, by the very act of leaving them.

And so there is here indicated for us--as we shall have occasion to see
more fully, presently,--in that one singular and anomalous fact of
Christ's departure being a positive gain to those that trust in Him,
the singularity and uniqueness of His work for them and His relation to
them.

The words mean a great deal more than the analogies of our relation to
dear ones or great ones, loves or teachers, who have departed, might
suggest. Of course we all know that it is quite true that death reveals
to the heart the sweetness and the preciousness of the departed ones,
and that its refining touch manifests to our blind eyes what we did not
see so clearly when they were beside us. We all know that it needs
distance to measure men, and the dropping away of the commonplace and
the familiar ere we can see 'the likeness' of our contemporaries 'to
the great of old.' We have to travel across the plains before we can
measure the relative height of the clustered mountains, and discern
which is manifestly the loftiest. And all _this_ is true in reference
to Jesus Christ and His relation to us. But that does not go half-way
towards the understanding of such words as these of my text, which tell
us that so singular and solitary is His relation to us that the thing
which ends the work of all other men, and begins the decay of their
influence, begins for Him a higher form of work and a wider sweep of
sway. He is nearer us when He leaves us, and works with us and in us
more mightily from the throne than He did upon the earth. Who is He of
whom this is true? And what kind of work is it of which it is true that
death continues and perfects it?

So let me note, before I pass on, that there is a great truth here for
us. We are accustomed to look back to our Lord's earthly ministry, and
to fancy that those who gathered round Him, and heard Him speak, and
saw His deeds, were in a better position for loving Him and trusting
Him than you and I are. It is all a mistake. We have lost nothing that
they had which was worth the keeping; and we have gained a great deal
which they had not. We have not to compare our relation to Christ with
theirs, as we might do our relation to some great thinker or poet, with
that of his contemporaries, but we have Christ in a better form, if I
may so speak; and we, on whom the ends of the world are come, may have
a deeper and a fuller and a closer intimacy with Him than was possible
for men whose perceptions were disturbed by sense, and who had to
pierce through 'the veil, that is to say, His flesh,' before they
reached the Holy of Holies of His spirit.

II. Note, secondly, the coming for which Christ's going was needful,
and which makes that going a gain.

'If I go not away the Comforter will not come unto you, but if I depart
I will send Him unto you.' Now we have already, in former sermons,
touched upon many of the themes which would naturally be suggested by
these words, and therefore I do not propose to dwell upon them at any
length. There is only one point to which I desire to refer briefly
here, and that is the necessity which here seems to be laid down by our
Lord for His departure, in order that that divine Spirit may come and
dwell with men. That necessity goes down deeper into the mysteries of
the divinity and of the processes and order of divine revelation than
it is given to us to follow. But though we can only speak superficially
and fragmentarily about such a matter, let me just remind you, in the
briefest possible words, of what Scripture plainly declares to us with
regard to this high and, in its fullness, ineffable matter. It tells us
that the complete work of Jesus Christ--not merely His coming upon
earth, or His life amongst men, but also His sacrificial death upon the
Cross--was the necessary preliminary, and in some sense procuring
cause, of the gift of that divine Spirit. It tells us--and there we are
upon ground on which we can more fully verify the statement--that His
work must be completed ere that Spirit can be sent, because the word is
the Spirit's weapon for the world, and the revelation of God in Jesus
must be ended, ere the application of that revelation, which is the
Spirit's work, can be begun in its full energy.

It tells us, further, (and there our eyesight fails, and we have to
accept what we are told), that Jesus Christ must ascend on high and be
at the right hand of God, ere He can pour down upon men the fullness of
the Spirit which dwelt uncommunicated in Him in the time of His earthly
humiliation. 'Thou hast ascended up on high,' and therefore 'Thou hast
given gifts to men.' We accept the declaration, not knowing all the
deep necessity in the divine Nature on which it rests, but believing
it, because He in whom we have confidence has declared it to us.

And we are further told--and there our experience may, in some degree,
verify the statement,--that only those, in whose hearts there is union
to Jesus Christ by faith in His completed work and ascended glory, are
capable of receiving that divine gift. So every way, both as regards
the depths of Deity and the processes of revelation, and as regards the
power of the humanity of Christ to impart His Spirit, and as regards
the capacity of us poor recipients to receive it, the words of my text
seem to be confirmed, and we can, though not with full insight, at any
rate with full faith, accept the statement, 'If I go not away, the
Comforter will not come to you.'

That coming is gain. It teaches a deeper knowledge of Him. It teaches
and gives a fuller possession of the life of righteousness which is
like His own. It draws us into the fellowship of the Son.

III. Lastly, note here the threefold conflict of the Spirit through the
Church with the world.

'When He is come He will convict the world' in respect 'of sin and of
righteousness and of judgment.' By the 'reproof,' or rather
'conviction,' which is spoken about here, is meant the process by which
certain facts are borne in upon men's understanding and consciences,
and, along with these facts, the conviction of error and fault in
reference to them. It is no mere process of demonstration of an
intellectual truth, but it is a process of conviction of error in
respect to great moral and religious truth, and of manifestation of the
truths in regard to which the error and the sin have been committed. So
we have here the triple division of the great work which the divine
Spirit does, through Christian men and women, in the world.

'He shall convict the world of sin.' The outstanding first
characteristic of the whole Gospel message is the new gravity which it
attaches to the fact of sin, the deeper meaning which it gives to the
word, and the larger scope which it shows its blighting influences to
have had in humanity. Apart from the conviction of sin by the Spirit
using the word proclaimed by disciples, the world has scarcely a notion
of what sin is, its inwardness, its universality, the awfulness of it
as a fact affecting man's whole being and all his relations to God. All
these conceptions are especially the product of Christian truth.
Without it, what does the world know about the poison of sin? And what
does it care about the poison until the conviction has been driven home
to the reluctant consciousness of mankind by the Spirit wielding the
word? This conviction comes first in the divine order. I do not say
that the process of turning a man of the world into a member of
Christ's Church always begins, as a matter of fact, with the conviction
of sin. I believe it most generally does so; but without insisting upon
a pedantic adherence to a sequence, and without saying a word about the
depth and intensity of such a conviction, I am here to assert that a
Christianity which is not based upon the conviction of sin is an
impotent Christianity, and will be of very little use to the men who
profess it, and will have no power to propagate itself in the world.
Everything in our conception of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and of His
work for us depends upon what we think about this primary fact of man's
condition, that he is a sinful man. The root of all heresy lies there.
Every error that has led away men from Jesus Christ and His Cross may
be traced up to defective notions of sin and a defective realisation of
it. If I do not feel as the Bible would have me feel, that I am a
sinful man, I shall think differently of Jesus Christ and of my need of
Him, and of what He is to me. Christianity may be to me a system of
beautiful ethics, a guide for life, a revelation of much precious
truth, but it will not be the redemptive power without which I am lost.
And Jesus Christ will be shorn of His brightest beams, unless I see Him
as the Redeemer of my soul from sin, which else would destroy and is
destroying it. Is Christianity merely a better morality? Is it merely a
higher revelation of the divine Nature? Or does it _do_ something as
well as _say_ something, and what does it do? Is Jesus Christ only a
Teacher, a Wise Man, an Example, a Prophet, or is He the Sacrifice for
the sins of the world? Oh, brethren, we must begin where this text
begins; and our whole conception of Him and of His work for us must be
based upon this fact, that we are sinful and lost, and that Jesus
Christ, by His sweet and infinite love and all-powerful sacrifice, is
our soul's Redeemer and our only Hope. The world has to be convicted
and convinced of sin as the first step to its becoming a Church.

The next step of this divine Spirit's conviction is that which
corresponds to the consciousness of sin, the dawning upon the darkened
soul of the blessed sunrise of righteousness. The triple subjects of
conviction must necessarily belong to the world of which our Lord is
speaking. It must be the world that is convinced, and it must be the
world's sin and the world's righteousness and the world's judgment of
which my text speaks. How, then, can there follow on the conviction of
sin as mine a conviction of righteousness as mine? I know but one way,
'Not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which
is of God through faith.' When a man is convinced of sin, there will
dawn upon the heart the wondrous thought that a righteousness may be
his, given to him from above, which will sweep away all his sin and
make him righteous as Christ is righteous. That conviction will never
awake in its blessed and hope-giving power unless it be preceded by the
other. It is of no use to exhibit medicine to a man who does not know
himself diseased. It is of no use to talk about righteousness to a man
who has not found himself to be a sinner. And it is of as little use to
talk to a man of sin unless you are ready to tell him of a
righteousness that will cover all his sin. The one conviction without
the other is misery, the second without the first is irrelevant and far
away.

The world as a world has but dim and inadequate conceptions of what
righteousness is. A Pharisee is its type, or a man that keeps a clean
life in regard to great transgressions; a whited sepulchre of some sort
or other. The world apart from Christ has but languid desires after
even the poor righteousness that it understands, and the world apart
from Christ is afflicted by a despairing scepticism as to the
possibility of ever being righteous at all. And there are men listening
to me now in every one of these three conditions--not caring to be
righteous, not understanding what it is to be righteous, and cynically
disbelieving that it is possible to be so. My brother, here comes the
message to you--first, Thou art sinful; second, God's righteousness
lies at thy side to take and wear if thou wilt.

The last of these triple convictions is 'judgment.' If there be in the
world these two things both operating, sin and righteousness, and if
the two come together, what then? If there is to be a collision, as
there must be, which will go down? Christ tells us that this divine
Spirit will teach us that righteousness will triumph over sin, and that
there will be a judgment which will destroy that which is the weaker,
though it seems the stronger. Now I take it that the judgment which is
spoken about here is not merely a future retribution beyond the grave,
but that, whilst that is included, and is the principal part of the
idea, we are always to regard the judgment of the hereafter as being
prepared for by the continual judgment here.

And so there are two thoughts, a blessed one and a terrible one,
wrapped up in that word--a blessed thought for us sinful men, inasmuch
as we may be sure that the divine righteousness, which is given to us,
will judge us and separate us day by day from our sins; and a terrible
thought, inasmuch as if I, a sinful man, do not make friends with and
ally myself to the divine righteousness which is proffered to me, I
shall one day have to front it on the other side of the flood, when the
contact must necessarily be to me destruction.

Time does not allow me to dwell upon these solemn matters as I fain
would, but let me gather all I have been feebly trying to say to you
now into one sentence. This threefold conviction, in conscience,
understanding, and heart, of sin which is mine, of righteousness which
may be mine, and of judgment which must be mine--this threefold
conviction is that which makes the world into a Church. It is the
message of Christianity to each of us. How do you stand to it? Do you
hearken to the Spirit who is striving to convince you of these? Or do
you gather yourselves together into an obstinate, close-knit unbelief,
or a loose-knit indifference which is as impenetrable? Beware that you
resist not the Spirit of God!



THE CONVICTING FACTS

'Of sin, because they believe not on Me; Of righteousness, because I go
to My Father, and ye see Me no more; Of judgment, because the prince of
this world is judged.'--JOHN xvi. 9-11.

Our Lord has just been telling His disciples how He will equip them, as
His champions, for their conflict with the world. A divine Spirit is
coming to them who will work in them and through them; and by their
simple and unlettered testimony will 'convict,' or convince, the mass
of ungodly men of error and crime in regard to these three things--sin,
righteousness, and judgment.

He now advances to tell them that this threefold conviction which they,
as counsel for the prosecution, will establish as against the world at
the bar, will be based upon three facts: first, a truth of experience;
second, a truth of history; third, a truth of revelation, all three
facts having reference to Jesus Christ and His relation to men.

Now these three facts are--the world's unbelief; Christ's ascension and
session at the right hand of God; and the 'judgment of the prince of
this world.' If we remember that what our Lord is here speaking about
is the work of a divine Spirit through the ministration of believing
men, then Pentecost with its thousands 'pricked to the heart,' and the
Roman ruler who trembled, as the prisoner 'reasoned of righteousness
and judgment to come,' are illustrations of the way in which the humble
disciples towered above the pride and strength of the world, and from
criminals at its bar became its accusers.

These three facts are the staple and the strength of the Christian
ministry. These three facts are misapprehended, and have failed to
produce their right impression, unless they have driven home to our
consciences and understandings the triple conviction of my text. And so
I come to you with the simple questions which are all-important for
each of us: Have you looked these three facts in the face--unbelief,
the ascended Christ, a judged prince of the world, and have you learned
their meaning as it bears on your own character and religious life?

I. The first point here is the rejection of Jesus Christ as the climax
of the world's sin.

Strange words! They are in some respects the most striking instance of
that gigantic self-assertion of our Lord, of which we have had occasion
to see so many examples in these valedictory discourses. The world is
full of all unrighteousness and wickedness, lust and immorality,
intemperance, cruelty, hatred; all manner of buzzing evils that stink
and sting around us. But Jesus Christ passes them all by and points to
a mere negative thing, to an inward thing, to the attitude of men
towards Himself; and He says, 'If you want to know what sin is, look at
that!' _There_ is the worst of all sins. There is a typical instance of
what sin is, in which, as in some anatomical preparation, you may see
all its fibres straightened out and made visible. Look at that if you
want to know what the world is, and what the world's sin is.

Some of us do not think that it is sin at all; and tell us that man is
no more responsible for his belief than he is for the colour of his
hair, and suchlike talk. Well, let me put a very plain question: What
is it that a man turns away from when he turns away from Jesus Christ?
The plainest, the loveliest, the loftiest, the perfectest revelation of
God in His beauty and completeness that ever dawned, or ever will dawn
upon creation. He rejects that. Anything more? Yes! He turns away from
the loveliest human life that ever was, or will be, lived. Anything
more? Yes! He turns away from a miracle of self-sacrificing love, which
endured the Cross for enemies, and willingly embraced agony and shame
and death for the sake of those who inflicted them upon Him. Anything
more? Yes! He turns away from hands laden with, and offering him, the
most precious and needful blessings that a poor soul on earth can
desire or expect.

And if this be true, if unbelief in Jesus Christ be indeed all this
that I have sketched out, another question arises, What does such an
attitude and act indicate as to the rejector? He stands in the presence
of the loveliest revelation of the divine nature and heart, and he sees
no light in it. Why, but because he has blinded his eyes and cannot
behold? He is incapable of seeing 'God manifest in the flesh,' because
he 'loves the darkness rather than the light.' He turns away from the
revelation of the loveliest and most self-sacrificing love. Why, but
because he bears in himself a heart cased with brass and triple steel
of selfishness, against the manifestation of love? He turns away from
the offered hands heaped with the blessings that he needs. Why, but
because he does not care for the gifts that are offered? Forgiveness,
cleansing, purity a heaven which consists in the perfecting of all
these, have no attractions for him. The fugitive Israelites in the
wilderness said, 'We do not want your light, tasteless manna. It may do
very well for angels, but we have been accustomed to garlic and onions
down in Egypt. They smell strong, and there is some taste in _them_.
Give us _them_.' And so some of you say, 'The offer of pardon is of no
use to me, for I am not troubled with my sin. The offer of purity has
no attraction to me, for I rather like the dirt and wallowing in it.
The offer of a heaven of your sort is but a dreary prospect to me. And
so I turn away from the hands that offer precious things.' The man who
is blind to the God that beams, lambent and loving, upon him in the
face of Jesus Christ--the man who has no stirrings of responsive
gratitude for the great outpouring of love upon the Cross--the man who
does not care for anything that Jesus Christ can give him, surely, in
turning away, commits a real sin.

I do not deny, of course, that there may be intellectual difficulties
cropping up in connection with the acceptance of the message of
salvation in Jesus Christ, but as, on the one hand, I am free to admit
that many a man may be putting a true trust in Christ which is joined
with a very hesitant grasp of some of the things which, to me, are the
very essence and heart of the Gospel; so, on the other side, I would
have you remember that there is necessarily a moral quality in our
attitude to all moral and religious truth; and that sin does not cease
to be sin because its doer is a thinker or has systematised his
rejection into a creed. Though it is not for us to measure motives and
to peer into hearts, at the bottom there lies what Christ Himself put
His finger on: 'Ye _will_ not come to me that ye might have life.'

Then, still further, let me remind you that our Lord here presents this
fact of man's unbelief as being an instance in which we may see what
the real nature of sin is. To use learned language, it is a 'typical'
sin. In all other acts of sin you get the poison manipulated into
various forms, associated with other elements, disguised more or less.
But here, because it is purely an inward act having relation to Jesus
Christ, and to God manifested in Him, and not done at the bidding of
the animal nature, or of any of the other strong temptations and
impulses which hurry men into gross and coarse forms of manifest
transgression, you get sin in its essence. Belief in Christ is the
surrender of myself. Sin is living to myself rather than to God. And
there you touch the bottom. All those different kinds of sin, however
unlike they may be to one another--the lust of the sensualist, the
craft of the cheat, the lie of the deceitful, the passion of the
unregulated man, the avarice of the miser--all of them have this one
common root, a diseased and bloated regard to self. The definition of
sin is,--living to myself and making myself my own centre. The
definition of faith is,--making Christ my centre and living for Him.
Therefore, if you want to know what is the sinfulness of sin, there it
is. And if I may use such a word in such a connection, it is all packed
away in its _purest_ form in the act of rejecting that Lord.

Brother, it is no exaggeration to say that, when you have summoned up
before you the ugliest forms of man's sins that you can fancy, this one
overtops them all, because it presents in the simplest form the
mother-tincture of all sins, which, variously coloured and perfumed and
combined, makes the evil of them all. A heap of rotting, poisonous
matter is offensive to many senses, but the colourless, scentless,
tasteless drop has the poison in its most virulent form, and is not a
bit less virulent, though it has been learnedly distilled and
christened with a scientific name, and put into a dainty jewelled
flask. 'This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world,
and men love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil.'
I lay that upon the hearts and consciences of some of my present
hearers as the key to their rejection or disregard of Christ and His
salvation.

II. Now, secondly, notice the ascension of Jesus Christ as the pledge
and the channel of the world's righteousness--'Because I go to the
Father, and ye see Me no more.'

He speaks as if the process of departure were already commenced. It had
three stages--death, resurrection, ascension; but these three are all
parts of the one departure. And so He says: 'Because, in the future,
when ye go forth to preach in My name, I shall be there with the
Father, having finished the work for which He sent Me; therefore you
will convince the world of righteousness.'

Now let me put that briefly in two forms. First of all, the fact of an
ascended Christ is the guarantee and proof of His own complete
fulfilment of the ideal of a righteous man. Or to put it into simpler
words, suppose Jesus Christ is dead; suppose that He never rose from
the grave; suppose that His bones mouldered in some sepulchre; suppose
that there had been no ascension--would it be possible to believe that
He was other than an ordinary man? And would it be possible to believe
that, however beautiful these familiar records of His life, and however
lovely the character which they reveal, there was really in Him no sin
at all? A dead Christ means a Christ who, like the rest of us, had His
limitations and His faults. But, on the other hand, if it be true that
He sprang from the grave because 'it was not possible that He should be
holden of it,' and because in His nature there was no proclivity to
death, since there had been no indulgence in sin; and if it be true
that He ascended up on high because that was His native sphere, and He
rose to it as naturally as the water in the valley will rise to the
height of the hill from which it has descended, then we can see that
God has set His seal upon that life by that resurrection and ascension;
and as we gaze on Him swept up heavenward by His own calm power, a
light falls backward upon all His earthly life, upon His claims to
purity, and to union with the Father, and we say, 'Surely this was a
perfectly righteous Man.'

And further let me remind you that with the supernatural facts of our
Lord's resurrection and ascension stands or falls the possibility of
His communicating any of His righteousness to us sinful men. If there
be no such possibility, what does Jesus Christ's beauty of character
matter to me? Nothing! I shall have to stumble on as best I can,
sometimes ashamed and rebuked, sometimes stimulated and sometimes
reduced to despair, by looking at the record of His life. If He be
lying dead in a forgotten grave, and hath not 'ascended up on high,'
then there can come from His history and past nothing other in kind,
though, perhaps, a little more in degree, than comes from the history
and the past of the beautiful and white souls that have sometimes lived
in the world. He is a saint like them, He is a teacher like them, He is
a prophet like some of them, and we have but to try our best to copy
that marble purity and white righteousness. But if He hath ascended up
on high, and sits there, wielding the forces of the universe, as we
believe He does, then to Him belongs the divine prerogative of
imparting His nature and His character to them that love Him. Then His
righteousness is not a solitary, uncommunicative perfectness for
Himself, but like a sun in the heavens, which streams out vivifying and
enlightening rays to all that seek His face. If it be true that Christ
has risen, then it is also true that you and I, convicted of sin, and
learning our weakness and our faults, may come to Him, and by the
exercise of that simple and yet omnipotent act of faith, may ally our
incompleteness with His perfectness, our sin with His righteousness,
our emptiness with His fullness, and may have all the grace and the
beauty of Jesus Christ passing over into us to be the Spirit of life in
us, 'making us free from the law of sin and death.' If Christ be risen,
His righteousness may be the world's; if Christ be not risen, His
righteousness is useless to any but to Himself.

My brother, wed yourself to that dear Lord by faith in Him, and His
righteousness will become yours, and you will be 'found in Him without
spot and blameless,' clothed with white raiment like His own, and
sharing in the Throne which belongs to the righteous Christ.

III. Lastly, notice the judgment of the world's prince as the prophecy
of the judgment of the world.

We are here upon ground which is only made known to us by the
revelation of Scripture. We began with a fact of man's experience; we
passed on to a fact of history; now we have a fact certified to us only
on Christ's authority.

The world _has_ a prince. That ill-omened and chaotic agglomeration of
diverse forms of evil has yet a kind of anarchic order in it, and, like
the fabled serpent's locks on the Gorgon head, they intertwine and
sting one another, and yet they are a unity. We hear very little about
'the prince of the world' in Scripture. Mercifully the existence of
such a being is not plainly revealed until the fact of Christ's victory
over him is revealed. But however ludicrous mediaeval and vulgar
superstitions may have made the notion, and however incredible the
tremendous figure painted by the great Puritan poet has proved to be,
there is nothing ridiculous, and nothing that we have the right to say
is incredible, in the plain declarations that came from Christ's lips
over and over again, that the world, the aggregate of ungodly men,
_has_ a prince.

And then my text tells us that that prince is 'judged.' The Cross did
that, as Jesus Christ over and over again indicates, sometimes in plain
words, as 'Now is the judgment of this world,' 'Now is the prince of
this world cast out'; sometimes in metaphor, as 'I beheld Satan as
lightning fall from heaven,' 'First bind the strong man and then spoil
his house.' We do not know how far-reaching the influences of the Cross
may be, and what they may have done in those dark regions, but we know
that since that Cross, the power of evil in the world has been broken
in its centre, that God has been disclosed, that new forces have been
lodged in the heart of humanity, which only need to be developed in
order to overcome the evil. We know that since that auspicious day when
'He spoiled principalities and powers, making a show of them openly and
leading them in triumph,' even when He was nailed upon the Cross, the
history of the world has been the judgment of the world. Hoary
iniquities have toppled into the ceaseless washing sea of divine love
which has struck against their bases. Ancient evils have vanished, and
more are on the point of vanishing. A loftier morality, a higher notion
of righteousness, a deeper conception of sin, new hopes for the world
and for men, have dawned upon mankind; and the prince of the world is
led bound, as it were, at the victorious chariot wheels. The central
fortress has been captured, and the rest is an affair of outposts.

My text has for its last word this--the prince's judgment prophesies
the world's future judgment. The process which began when Jesus Christ
died has for its consummation the divine condemnation of all the evil
that still afflicts humanity, and its deprivation of authority and
power to injure. A final judgment will come, and that it will is
manifested by the fact that Christ, when He came in the form of a
servant and died upon the Cross, judged the prince. When He comes in
the form of a King on the great White Throne He will judge the world
which He has delivered from its prince.

That thought, my brother, ought to be a hope to us all. Are you glad
when you think that there is a day of judgment coming? Does your heart
leap up when you realise the fact that the righteousness, which is in
the heavens, is sure to conquer and coerce and secure under the hatches
the sin that is riding rampant through the world? It was a joy and a
hope to men who did not know half as much of the divine love and the
divine righteousness as we do. They called upon the rocks and the hills
to rejoice, and the trees of the forest to clap their hands before the
Lord, 'for He cometh to judge the world.' Does your heart throb a glad
Amen to that?

It ought to be a hope; it is a fear; and there are some of us who do
not like to have the conviction driven home to us, that the end of the
strife between sin and righteousness is that Jesus Christ shall judge
the world and take unto Himself His eternal kingdom.

But, my friends, hope or fear, it is a fact, as certain in the future,
as the Cross is sure in the past, or the Throne in the present. Let me
ask you this question, the question which Christ has sent all His
servants to ask--Have you loathed your sin? have you opened your heart
to Christ's righteousness? If you have, when men's hearts are failing
them for fear, and they 'call on the rocks and the hills to cover them
from the face of Him that sitteth upon the Throne,' you will 'have a
song as in the night when a holy solemnity is kept,' and lift up your
heads, 'for your redemption draweth nigh.' 'Herein is our love made
perfect, that we may have boldness before Him in the day of judgment.'



THE GUIDE INTO ALL TRUTH

'I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.
Howbeit when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will guide you into
all truth: for He shall not speak of Himself; but whatsoever He shall
hear, that shall He speak: and He will show you things to come. He
shall glorify Me: for He shall receive of Mine, and shall show it unto
you. All things that the Father hath are Mine: therefore said I, that
He shall take of Mine, and shall show it unto you.'--JOHN xvi. 12-15.

This is our Lord's last expansion, in these discourses, of the great
promise of the Comforter which has appeared so often in them. First, He
was spoken of simply as dwelling in Christ's servants, without any more
special designation of His work than was involved in the name. Then,
His aid was promised, to remind the Apostles of the facts of Christ's
life, especially of His words; and so the inspiration and authority of
the four Gospels were certified for us. Then He was further promised as
the witness in the disciples to Jesus Christ. And, finally, in the
immediately preceding context, we have His office of 'convincing,' or
convicting, 'the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment.'
And now we come to that gracious and gentle work which that divine
Spirit is declared by Christ to do, not only for that little group
gathered round Him then, but for all those who trust themselves to His
guidance. He is to be the 'Spirit of truth' to all the ages, who in
simple verity will help true hearts to know and love the truth. There
are three things in the words before us--first, the avowed
incompleteness of Christ's own teaching; second, the completeness of
the truth into which the Spirit of truth guides; and, last, the unity
of these two.

I. First, then, we have here the avowed incompleteness of Christ's own
teaching.

'I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.'
Now in an earlier portion of these great discourses, we have our Lord
asserting that '_all_ things whatsoever He had heard of the Father He
had made known' unto His servants. How do these two representations
harmonise? Is it possible to make them agree? Surely, yes. There is a
difference between the germ and the unfolded flower. There is a
difference between principles and the complete development of these. I
suppose you may say that all Euclid is in the axioms and definitions. I
suppose you may also say that when you have learned the axioms and
definitions, there are many things yet to be said, of which you have
not grown to the apprehension. And so our Lord, as far as His frankness
was concerned, and as far as the fundamental and seminal principles of
all religious truth were concerned, had even then declared all that He
had heard of the Father. But yet, in so far as the unfolding of these
was concerned, the tracing of their consequences, the exhibition of
their harmonies, the weaving of them into an ordered whole in which a
man's understanding could lodge, there were many things yet to be said,
which that handful of men were not able to bear. And so our Lord
Himself here declares that His words spoken on earth are not His
completed revelation.

Of course we find in them, as I believe, hints profound and pregnant,
which only need to be unfolded and smoothed out, as it were, and their
depths fathomed, in order to lead to all that is worthy of being called
Christian truth. But upon many points we cannot but contrast the
desultory, brief, obscure references which came from the Master's lips
with the more systematised, full, and accurate teaching which came from
the servants. The great crucial instance of all is the comparative
reticence which our Lord observed in reference to His sacrificial
death, and the atoning character of His sufferings for the world. I do
not admit that the silence of the Gospels upon that subject is fairly
represented when it is said to be absolute. I believe that that silence
has been exaggerated by those who have no desire to accept that
teaching. But the distinction is plain and obvious, not to be ignored,
rather to be marked as being fruitful of blessed teaching, between the
way in which Christ speaks about His Cross, and the way in which the
Apostles speak about it after Pentecost.

What then? My text gives us the reason. 'You cannot bear them now.' Now
the word rendered 'bear' here does not mean 'bear' in the sense of
endure, or tolerate, or suffer, but 'bear' in the sense of carry. And
the metaphor is that of some weight--it may be gold, but still it is a
weight--laid upon a man whose muscles are not strong enough to sustain
it. It crushes rather than gladdens. So because they had not strength
enough to carry, had not capacity to receive, our Lord was lovingly
reticent.

There is a great principle involved in this saying--that revelation is
measured by the moral and spiritual capacities of the men who receive
it. The light is graduated for the diseased eye. A wise oculist does
not flood that eye with full sunshine, but he puts on veils and
bandages, and closes the shutters, and lets a stray beam, ever growing
as the curve is perfected, fall upon it. So from the beginning until
the end of the process of revelation there was a correspondence between
men's capacity to receive the light and the light that was granted; and
the faithful use of the less made them capable of receiving the
greater, and as soon as they were capable of receiving it, it came. 'To
him that hath shall be given.' In His love, then, Christ did not load
these men with principles that they could not carry, nor feed them with
'strong meat' instead of 'milk,' until they were able to bear it.
Revelation is progressive, and Christ is reticent, from regard to the
feebleness of His listeners.

Now that same principle is true in a modified form about us. How many
things there are which we sometimes feel we should like to know, that
God has not told us, because we have not yet grown up to the point at
which we could apprehend them! Compassed with these veils of flesh and
weakness, groping amidst the shadows of time, bewildered by the
cross-lights that fall upon us from so many surrounding objects, we
have not yet eyes able to behold the ineffable glory. He has many
things to say to us about that blessed future, and that strange and
awful life into which we are to step when we leave this poor world, but
'ye cannot bear them now.' Let us wait with patience until we are ready
for the illumination. For two things go to make revelation, the light
that reveals and the eye that beholds.

Now one remark before I go further. People tell us, 'Your modern
theology is not in the Gospels.' And they say to us, as if they had
administered a knockdown blow, 'We stick by Jesus, not Paul.' Well, as
I said, I do not admit that there is no 'Pauline' teaching in the
Gospels, but I do confess there is not much. And I say, 'What then?'
Why, this, then--it is exactly what we were to expect; and people who
reject the apostolic form of Christian teaching because it is not found
in the Gospels are flying in the face of Christ's own teaching. You say
you will take His words as the only source of religious truth. You are
going clean contrary to His own words in saying so. Remember that He
proclaimed their incompleteness, and referred us, for the fuller
knowledge of the truth of God, to a subsequent Teacher.

II. So, secondly, mark here the completeness of the truth into which
the Spirit guides.

I must trouble you with just a word or two of remark as to the language
of our text. Note the personality, designation, and office of this new
Teacher. 'He,' not '_it_,' He, is the Spirit of truth whose
characteristic and weapon is truth. 'He will guide you'--suggesting a
loving hand put out to lead; suggesting the graciousness, the
gentleness, the gradualness of the teaching. 'Into all truth '--that is
no promise of omniscience, but it is the assurance of gradual and
growing acquaintance with the spiritual and moral truth which is
revealed, such as may be fitly paralleled by the metaphor of men
passing into some broad land, of which there is much still to be
possessed and explored. Not to-day, nor to-morrow, will all the truth
belong to those whom the Spirit guides; but if they are true to His
guidance, 'to-morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant,' and
the land will all be traversed at the last. 'He shall not speak of
Himself, but whatsoever He shall hear that shall He speak.' Mark the
parallel between the relation of the Spirit-Teacher to Jesus, and the
relation of Jesus to the Father. Of Him, too, it is said by Himself,

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