Agnosticism, Positivism and Materialism John 1:1 John outstrips Genesis. He begins the record of the world anew, but starts from a deeper starting-point. In Genesis the history of the world arises out of the God of Creation. In John there is a deeper starting-point: history commences with the God of redemption. I. This, then, is the first assertion we have to consider Redemption is older than Creation. God the Saviour is a more fundamental fact than God the Creator. Redemption was not an incidental sequel of creation, but creation was the means to work out the eternal idea of redemption. Creation was the means of carrying out the eternal idea of redeeming love. John says in his wonderful Revelation that there stood before him the Lamb slain. Slain when? 'Slain from the foundation of the world.' This world was established on sacrifice. II. The infinite reach and astounding sweep of this assertion draws our attention all the more forcibly to the uncompromising positiveness and stark dogmatism of it. There is certainly something wrong either with John or with this present generation, for the present age prides itself on being sure of as little as possible. It is typical of the age that its most pretentious system of knowledge calls itself Agnosticism, that is, 'Know-nothingism'. Another system that competes with this 'Know-nothingism,' and calls itself 'Positivism,' is first-cousin to it. These are the two systems that pretend to teach us the ways of wisdom. One glories in knowing nothing; the other boasts in knowing very little. And unfortunately the same spirit of Agnosticism has found its way, has ramified itself throughout the whole field of religious thought. It is the men that know that shake the world. How could John come to the knowledge of such a stupendous fact as this? John had only one way of obtaining this knowledge, namely, by revelation. Heaven revealed its message straight to the heart of this man. III. No less noticeable than the dogmatism and positiveness of John's assertion are the grandeur and reasonableness of it. 'In the beginning was the Word.' That is John's explanation. Can you conceive a better? The difficulties of the Christian religion are as nothing compared with the difficulties of materialism, when you begin to examine it. This fountain is inexhaustible, limitless, and worlds after worlds without end may stream forth from such a source and fount as this. IV. There is yet another marvel in John's conception of the manifestation of this Word. Is there any further revelation of this eternal Word of which John speaks? There is ample evidence that the Old Testament prophets regarded that Word as a living personality that touched their lives. Then there came One in a form like our own, a Son of man, One who was born, lived, suffered, and died on our earth. And man came into contact with Him, and said: 'The eternal has come down to men'. If that be true, and nothing is more certain in the life of man or in the history of the world, we are face to face with an astounding fact, a fact infinitely important for each one of us individually, and infinitely important for societies and nations. For this Jesus must triumph. John Thomas, Myrtle Street Pulpit, vol. iii. p. 305. References. I. 1. W. Alexander, Primary Convictions, p. 203. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 248; ibid. (5th Series), vol. v. p. 303. I. 1-5. T. Gasquoine, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlviii. p. 126. I. 1-13. Expositor (5th Series), vol. vii. p. 100. I. 1-14. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 1. I. 1-15. Ibid. vol. x. p. 61. I. 3. Bishop Galloway, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lx. p. 168. Expositor (4th Series), vol. vi. p. 75. Life and Light John 1:4 If we were asked suddenly what we thought of life, what we thought of the world in which we lived, a good many of us would answer that we do not think much about it, and possibly that would be the truest answer that many of us could give. A little work, a little recreation, a little sleep for some more, for others less, of each that seems to be for us life. And yet we are not quite satisfied. There is a lurking suspicion that life means more; perhaps a self-consciousness that, many years ago, it did mean more to us. Is there not something wrong with such a conception of life? Has the best which we can conceive of in life no other meaning than the gaining of prizes such as we worked for at school, such as the few who are more fortunate can still gain? Surely the revelation of Jesus Christ throws a light across our conception of life; it makes such an idle view of it seem dwarfed and incomplete. I. Think of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, coming to earth in the form of man, as a servant of God. Surely there is a strange reversal of all that we have regarded as chiefly desirable in life. We raise ourselves to obtain a position which shall separate us from the common run of mankind, so that they shall look up to us and admire us. But here is One Who is really the Son of God and has all the honour and glory of God, descending to earth in the likeness, and subject to all the limitations, of humanity. Nor is even that all. He adopted the trade of a carpenter a humble profession while on this earth, and was obedient unto death, and that death the death of Christ was the death of a malefactor. Can we still say that life has lost its wonder? What, then, can life and the world in which we live mean to us in this new light? Life means the development of our capacities, and the world is the sphere in which they are developed. There has come into the sphere of our activity One Who proclaims Himself to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life. He says: 'I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.' And He goes further still, for He declares that if a man keep His word he shall never see death. Is there any limit to such a possibility of development as that? II. What must this Higher Life mean to you and to me? It gives a new reality, a new meaning to everything we have and do and say, to all that we are. (a) You have physical powers. Develop them not simply as a means for your own amusement, but as a means of serving God better than you have ever done before. (b) You have intellectual powers. Develop them to that same end. Do not be content to get into a groove, so to speak, as many of us are, and stop in it. Find some other interest apart from your own daily work. It may be literature, the study of economics, or it may be music; but whatever it is, as you have opportunity, develop it to the best of your power, and you will find that it will give you an insight into the wonders of the world in which you live. It will give you comfort and support which will lead you through much drudgery and enable you to support worry and even suffering. It will open out to you countless opportunities for service to God which would otherwise be closed. (c) There is spiritual development, the development of the capacity for a knowledge of God. All our energies and powers come from Him. Our lives are surely not without incident and interest since we commenced them in the Church of Christ. Is life so full for any one of us that we can spare no time for preparation, that we can spare no time to come to receive that gift of life which God offers us, a gift that will make our day's work worth doing, that will make our daily prayers real and sustaining and give them a meaning which they can have in no other way, a gift that will make our sojourn here on earth the best preparation, the best training for better service, for a fuller and better life hereafter? References. I. 4. Brooke Herford, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvii. p. 147. Bishop Walters, ibid. vol. lx. p. 164. Newman Smyth, The Reality of Faith, p. 17. J. Huntley Skrine, Sermons to Pastors and Masters, p. 27. Life and Light John 1:4-5 I. A Great Conception of Jesus Christ. 'In Him was life.' John is not dealing with a theory, but with a fact John had pressed very closely to Him, had leaned upon His bosom and beheld His glory. There, with a clearness which forced itself upon him, was a Divine humanity. Those who assert that the incarnation of God is impossible, are bound also to assert that such a life as that of Jesus was impossible. 'In Him was life.' (1) The words point to 'life' as the ultimate fact in the world, the basis of all things else. John saw the secret of the world when he saw Jesus Christ The invisible God stood revealed revealed as a throbbing life. Thus the truth came. All things were made by Him, and without Him there was not anything made that was made. (2) Then there is the other truth, that the infinite life is in intimate contact with finite life. (3) And there is yet another truth, that the whole world is governed by a moral purpose. Since Christ is its life, it must find its unity and meaning in that life. II. The Great Purpose of the Work of Jesus Christ. 'And the life was the light of men.' It might seem at first sight as if there were a sudden descent, a weakening of the expression, in the transition from 'life' to 'light'. This feeling arises partly from failing to realise what a large thought the idea of 'light' is in the mind of the Apostle John. (1) In his writings it alternates with 'love' as an adequate designation of the rich complexity and immaculate purity of God's moral nature. When applied to man it denotes participation in the moral nature of God. (2) Then again, light takes it natural place with John as the product of life. Christ came to save men from their sins, to reconstruct the ruined nature of man, to seek and to save that which was lost; and His mightiest miracles were but fringes on the border of His real work. The life was the light of men. III. The Great Opposition to the Work of Jesus Christ. 'And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.' A strong claim is put forward in favour of the translation, 'And the darkness overcame it not'. The best English word that I can think of to express this comprehensive meaning is the verb 'To master'. The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness mastered it not The Church may have to pass through many a Gethsemane and many a Calvary yet before the purging hosts of darkness disappear. But all is well. They know not the secret place of our power, they cannot touch the Divinity which is the life of our life. John Thomas, Myrtle Street Pulpit, vol. ii. p. 85. Reference. I. 4-18. Expositor (5th Series), vol. v. p. 229. John 1:5 Judging from the main portion of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy, peace walks amid hourly pitfalls, and of slavery, misery, meanness, the craft of tyrants, and the credulity of the populace in some of their protean forms, no voice can at any time say, They are not. The clouds break a little, and the sun shines out but soon and certain the lowering darkness falls again, as if to last for ever. Yet is there an immortal courage and prophecy in every sane soul that cannot, must not, under any circumstances, capitulate. Walt Whitman, * Democratic Vistas. * References. I. 5. H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. iii. p. 1. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 322. God-sent Men John 1:6 The Lord has given to every man something which distinguishes him from every other man; find out that something; that is your business. You are not one of a mob, you have a soul, an identity, a personality of your own; you can do what nobody else can do just in the same way and in the same measure; find out what that is, and do it. That is life. You are afraid of yourself. You are very self-specialising when you are perfectly sure that nobody is within a mile of you, but the moment the next man comes near you so easily drop into cowardice, and further still drop into practical nothingness. I. There was a man sent from God, and his name was Sympathy. It is almost a woman's name; but the true man is male and female, man and woman, brother and sister, and the more woman there is in him the better for everybody. There was a man sent from God whose radiant, gentle, womanly name was Sympathy. He said as he approached our sorrow and our solitude, The Lord hath given me the tongue of the learned that I might speak a word in season to him that is weary. Cannot everybody speak a word to that man? No; sympathy is a gift; sympathy is a music carved out of a special gamut and set to vital strain and expression by the king's son. II. There was a man sent from God whose name was Encouragement, Comfort. This man has a double name, and yet both the names mean the same thing. We mistake the etymology and the religious application of the word comfort. Hardly a man in a thousand can tell us what comfort really means. He is a comforting preacher who says, Arise, shine, for thy light is come; awake, awake! get thee up into the high mountains! and who, making these grand trumpet announcements, says, For the Lord is thy strength, and the Holy One of Israel the unfailing river on whose waters of grace thou mayest evermore rely. It is a very disastrous thing to take away these passages from people who have been over-fondling them for half a century, without having the faintest idea of their real meaning. It is very sad when everybody begins to interpret without having been told to do so by Him who wrought the Word mystery, the Logos of redeeming passion. III. There was a man sent from God whose name was Insight. The difference between one man and another is that one man can do it and the other cannot. That is all. I would to God that were realised in the Church, in statesmanship, in literature, in the whole range of civilisation. The man who cannot do it may be most industrious and most painstaking and most conscientious, but he always sets the thing that he is setting upside down. It has to be set the other way, but all the philosophers since philosophy was born can never drive it into his head that his way is the wrong way. Yet he is most conscientious, and he is known in his own neighbourhood as a good man, and so amiable. Some men can see and other men cannot see. Now when a man feels that he is sent of God he is fearless. A man who is sent from God has no anxiety about resources. The true preacher never wonders what he will preach about this day month; we have nothing to do even with tomorrow. How will the work be done? By the living God. How do you know that all the world shall be covered with the knowledge of the Lord? Because the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. There is an oath at stake, and it is God's oath. Joseph Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol. i. p. 248. A Man Called John John 1:6 'What's in a name? 'says Shakespeare, 'a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.' It is no disadvantage to have a common name. You may have a common name and not be a common man. The term 'common man' needs definition. By the term 'common man' is sometimes meant a vulgar, or an uncultivated or a low-born man I mean an obscure man, an ordinary man, a man with nothing to distinguish him from a million others. Now it may be remarked that the John to whom the words refer was not a common man. He was a very uncommon man, in some respects a unique man. The principles on which John lived, and which gave him his imperishable name, are precisely those which will redeem and glorify the man called John who is here today. I. A Man called John. The word reminds us of the familiar fact that the overwhelming majority of the human race live and die in obscurity. How ought we to look at this fact that you and I are destined to live and die with unknown names, and lie in unknown graves? Well, it need not quench our ambitions, if they be worthy ambitions. (1) Obscurity does not rob any life of value and usefulness. Every crank in a machine is necessary to its work. The whole system of the universe is so perfectly balanced that every grain of dust counts. The social order is equally dependent on its feebler members. (2) Obscurity robs no life of happiness. The spirit that chafes at it does. The gnawing hunger, the restless ambition for what God has not given, will embitter and impoverish any life. II. There was a man sent from God. For the special work that he did, he was specially endowed. But yet it is absolutely true that what fitted John for his ministry will make any man called John a witness to the light and an ambassador of Christ. Let us dwell on one or two points. This John was sent from God. But so is every John. Every human spirit is the creation of God. That is the Christian doctrine of man. This truth, once realised, has a redemptive and inspiring power. If I am sent by God, my life is of some value. For He must have sent me for something. And if I am made for a purpose, then not only is it my first duty to fulfil that purpose, but the way to fulfil it is to be myself. When we realize all that this means, and all that is involved in it, it is really a transfigurement of life. III. There is, finally, the suggestion of the purpose for which the man called John is sent. It is to bear witness to the light. It is for this test that all men are sent When their souls awake they are illumined, they know themselves; the end, the possibilities, the true glory of their life. 'Hitch your wagon to a star,' said Emerson. This will glorify the commonplace by consecrating it. Keep up connection with the unseen by prayer and aspiration; you will feel heaven tugging at your heart R. Baldwin Brindley, The Darkness where God is, p. 107. References. I. 6. F. B. Meyer, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvii. p. 1. Expositor (6th Series), vol. x. p. 126. I. 7, 8, 20. Ibid. (6th Series), vol. vi. p. 147. John 1:8 Wesley, in his journal for 1764, tells of a woman at Walsall who wished to come and hear him, but dared not, as she had heard a great deal of evil about him. 'This morning,' however, she told a neighbour, 'I dreamed I was praying earnestly, and I heard a voice saying, "See the eighth verse of the first chapter of St. John". I waked and got my Bible and read, He was not that Light but was sent to bear witness of that Light. I got up and came away with all my heart.' References. I. 8. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 6. I. 8, 9. J. M. Neale, Readings for the Aged (3rd Series), p. 208. I. 9. Bishop Gore, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvi. p. 396. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 63. I. 10. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. iv. p. 166. Expositor (6th Series), vol. x. p. 154. I. 10-11. Ibid. vol. ix. p. 239. John 1:11 As to our spiritual wants, though they exist in all, they are so feeble in themselves, and so trodden under foot, and crushed by our carnal appetites and worldly practices, you might as well expect that a field of corn, over which a regiment of cavalry has been galloping to and fro, will rise up and meet the sun, as that of ourselves we shall seek food for our spiritual wants. Even when the Bread of life came down from heaven, we turned away from it and rejected it. * Even when He came to His own, His own received Him not. * A. J. C. Hare, * Guesses at Truth. * References. I. 11. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xviii. No. 1055. H. A. Thomas, Christian World Pulpit, vol. li. p. 20. C. Bradley, Faithful Teaching, p. 127. F. Bourdillon, Plain Sermons for Family Reading (2nd Series), p. 66. E. A. Bray, Sermons, vol. i. p. 22. Expositor (6th Series), vol. i. p. 376; ibid. vol. x. p. 356; ibid. vol. xii. p. 424. I. 11-13. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxi. No. 1212; vol. xxxviii. No. 2259. John 1:12 I cannot go back to search for the shadow of the mystery under its types and figures, because the substance itself is come; and I find more enjoyment of it by simply giving myself up to that which is to be had from a Christ, not as human under Jewish prophecies, but as come in the flesh, and made man in every one who receives Him. William Law ( Letter xxvii). References. I. 12. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. iii. p. 9. R. Allen, The Words of Christ, p. 173. H. D. Rawnsley, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlviii. p. 165. T. F. Crosse, Sermons (2nd Series), p. 1. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xii. No. 669 and vol. xxx. No. 1757. Expositor (6th Series), vol. v. p. 46; ibid. vol. vii. pp. 36, 272. I. 12, 13. G. P. McKay, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlv. p. 195. J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons (9th Series), p. 293. I. 13. Expositor (4th Series), vol. iii. pp. 183, 360; ibid. vol. iv. p. 412; ibid. (7th Series), vol. v. p. 209. The Word Made Flesh (For Christmas Day) John 1:14 The birth of Jesus Christ has two aspects: The Nativity itself, the most stupendous fact in history; the Incarnation, a Revelation of Eternity, the great doctrine of our religion. The birth of that little Babe in the stable of the humble inn at Bethlehem there is the event. 'The Word became flesh' there is the doctrine, and the mystery. God became Man. He took not on Him the nature of angels, yet the angels thrilled with tumults of joy at the thought of millions of sinners who would be saved. Is not that cause enough for Christmas gladness for a joy as that of the angels? The mystery itself we cannot fathom; of that we say: 'I will seek to believe rather than to reason; to adore rather than to explain; to give thanks rather than to penetrate; to love rather than to know; to humble myself rather than to speak'. And, believing it out of the thousand lessons it involves let us take this one to our hearts: the Incarnation the basis of all noble conceptions of human life; the grandeur of that human nature which God has given us; the sacredness, the majesty, the lofty privileges, the immeasurable possibilities of man. I. Look at man in the light of nature. We look upwards at the myriads of planets, and a sense of our own nothingness tempts us to think of ourselves as the creatures of a passing moment, the prey of blind forces in the blinding whirl of chance. We look downwards at the earth, wrinkled with innumerable graves the very dust composed of the decay of unnumbered organisms; and we are tempted to believe that nothing remains for us but 'dust to dust'. We look around, and, seeing the vanity and vileness of mankind, not savage tribes alone, but communities nominally Christian tainted by greed, by dishonesty besotted by drink, the bondslaves of base and brutal passions, we are tempted to despise our race our own selves. It is such thoughts that drive men into the devil's gospel of despair, and lead so many to cry wearily 'that life is not worth living'. But II. Turn from the shadows face the sun! Turn your eyes from the phenomena of evil and ruin, and behold the manger cradle of Bethlehem! Look at man in the light of the Incarnation, and see how all is changed! Jesus, Who is Christ the Lord, was the Perfect Man, the Representative Man; God as a Man with men; God, not merely revealing Himself to man, not merely uniting Himself to man, but God becoming Man. And so we take our estimate of man, not from the churl and villain, the liar and scoundrel, the selfish miser and staggering drunkard, not from the harlot and the felon, and those yet more guilty who made them what they are, but from the pure, the good, the spiritually minded. These alone are true men and women. In the light of Bethlehem's candle we see man not as he often is, but as he may be, as we trust he yet will be. III. Do not regard this lesson of the Incarnation as a mere vague trust, a mere abstract speculation. It is a belief which affects our estimate of ourselves our conduct to others. There is not one degradation of our being which does not spring from lack of self-reverence, of reverence for beings whom Christ hath redeemed, to whom He has given a right to be children of God. The Incarnation teaches us that our part is in Christ, our bodies His temple, our nature His image, our hearts His shrine. He who regards himself as akin to the beasts that perish will live as they do. He who regards himself as an immortal being, partaker of the nature which Christ wore and Christ redeemed, will aim at a noble and godly life. F. W. Farrar, * Everyday Christian Life. * The Incarnation John 1:14 Great is our Lord, and great is His power, Jesus the Son of God and Son of man. Ten thousand times more dazzling bright than the highest Archangel is our Lord and Christ. By birth the Only-begotten and Express Image of God; and in taking our flesh, not sullied thereby, but raising human nature with Him, as He rose from the lowly manger to the right hand of power, raising human nature, for Man has redeemed us, Man is set above all creatures, as one with the Creator, Man shall judge man at the last day. So honoured is this earth, that no stranger shall judge us, but He who is our fellow, who will sustain our interests, and has full sympathy in all our imperfections. He who loved us, even to die for us, is graciously appointed to assign the final measurement and price upon His own work. He who best knows by infirmity to take the part of the infirm, He who would fain reap the full fruit of His passion, He will separate the wheat from the chaff, so that not a grain shall fall to the ground. He who has given us to share His own spiritual nature, He from whom we have drawn the life's blood of our souls, He our brother will decide about His brethren. In that His second coming, may He in His grace and loving pity remember us, who is our only hope, our only salvation! J. H. Newman. John 1:14 St. Thomas Aquinas, for all his learning and holiness, feared thunder and lightning with an excessive shrinking. On all occasions, when assailed by this terror, he used to comfort himself with the sacred words: 'The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us '. St. Francis de Sales. The soul's the way. Not even Christ Himself Can save man else than as he holds man's soul; And, therefore, did He come into our flesh, As some wise hunter, creeping on his knees, With a torch, into the blackness of the cave, To face and quell the beast there take the soul, And so possess the whole man, body and soul. Mrs. Browning, * Aurora Leigh. * John 1:14 Christmas approaches, a charmed time to me. I hear its music afar off the song of the angels, the breathing of the bells, but most the Divine song from out the central glory. It has begun, it is descending in the sloping line from the Infinite a wave ebbing from the other side of the ocean to break ere long on the high shore of the world, faint with distance..... And on Christmas morn I know that they who sleep, but their hearts wake, will hear one full carol and feel the shining of the glory; but it will not stay, only the music will linger in them all day, and the glory will brood over their heart, and some Divine sentence from the lips of the King will come up every hour to make them wonder at its depth and meaning. * And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. * From James Smetham's * Journal. * References. I. 14. H. H. Scullard, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlix." p. 54. J. S. Bartlett, Sermons, p. 130. H. Storey, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lii. p. 371. A. Whyte, The Scottish Review, vol. iii. p. 525. Bishop Gore, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liii. p. 24. F. B. Cowl, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xvii. p. 572. H. Bonar, Short Sermons for Family Reading, p. 1. F. Lynch, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lv. p. 236. W. C. Wheeler, Sermons and Addresses, p. 35. S. H. Fleming, Fifteen Minute Sermons for the People, p. 138. F. G. Lee, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvi. p. 301. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vii. No. 414, and vol. xxxi. No. 1862. R. W. Church, Village Sermons (2nd Series), p. 20. Bishop Magee, The Gospel and the Age, p. 311. J. R. Illingworth, University and Cathedral Sermons, p. 181. S. Baring-Gould, Village Preaching for a Year, pt. i. p. 48. R. J. Campbell, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvi. p. 400. J. Martineau, Endeavours After the Christian Life, p. 116. R. J. Campbell, A Faith for To-day, p. 197. M. G. Glazebrook, Prospice, p. 107. Bishop Westcott, Village Sermons, p. 33. F. W. Farrar, Everyday Christian Life, p. 298. Archbishop Alexander, Church Family Newspaper, vol. xiv. p. 500. Expositor (5th Series), vol. ii. p. 187; ibid. vol. iv. p. 165; ibid. vol. ix. p. 86; ibid. (6th Series), vol. iv. p. 68; ibid. vol. vii. p. 71; ibid. vol. ix. p. 365; ibid. vol. x. p. 172. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 14. I. 14-18. Ibid. (5th Series), vol. vii. p. 42. I. 15. Ibid. (6th Series), vol. x. p. 133. I. 15-18. Ibid. (5th Series), vol. vi. p. 73. John 1:16 We read of Dr. Andrew Bonar: 'On Sabbath, the 17th of October, 1830, while quietly sitting in a room which he shared with his brothers, reading Guthrie's Trial of a Saving Interest in Christ, he began to have a "secret joyful hope," that he really believed on the Lord Jesus. The fullness and freeness of Divine grace filled his heart. " I did nothing but receive," he says. No doubt of his acceptance in Christ ever again dimmed the clearness of his faith.' Reminiscences, p. vi. References. I. 16. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xv. No. 858, vol. vii. No. 415, and vol. xx. No. 1169. A. Whyte, The Scottish Review, vol. iii. p. 525. C. S. Macfarland, The Spirit Christlike, p. 41. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 23. John 1:17 'When people read, the law came by Moses, but grace and truth by Christ, do they suppose it means that the law was ungracious and untrue? The law was given for a foundation; the grace (or mercy) and truth for fulfilment; the whole forming one glorious trinity of judgment, mercy, and truth.' In a note, appended to this paragraph from Frondes Agrestes (§ 76), Ruskin declares that all his 'later writings, without exception, have been directed to maintain and illustrate the great truth expressed in this passage.' References. I.17. M. Biggs, Practical Sermons on Old Testament Subjects, p. 10. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxi. No. 1862. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vi. p. 168. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 31. The Manifestation of the Invisible God John 1:18 Two truths are brought before us in this passage: first, that God, essential or absolute Deity, is to us, in our present state of being, invisible: secondly, that Jesus Christ is the declaration of God to men. I. God is invisible. Why is this? (1) It is naturally impossible for what is spiritual to be perceived by sense. There are powers in nature whose influence we perceive, yet themselves we never discern such as electricity and gravitation. Much more are we unable to discern the spiritual. (2) Yet an immediate mental or spiritual vision of God is both conceivable, and expressly revealed in Scripture. (3) But the invisibility of God seems necessary in our present life viewed as a state of trial. (4) The invisibility of God seems to be connected with the aspect of the present life as a state of training or discipline. II. Of the invisible God, Jesus Christ is the image or manifestation. How does Jesus manifest the Father? (1) By the constitution of His person. (2) By the moral beauty of His character and life. (3) By His sufferings and death. The noblest expression of love is that in which it assumes the form of suffering or selfsacrifice. J. Caird, The Preachers Magazine, vol. x. p. 321. ** The Revelation of God to Man ( For Trinity Sunday ) John 1:18 The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is the revelation to men of God. I. What is meant by Revelation.** Etymologically the term means the drawing aside of a veil. Now, Christians believe that all knowledge is revelation, or the drawing back of the veil. The worldling speaks of invention and discovery, but the God-fearing man calls it revelation. The worldly man would speak of radium as a discovery, but we speak of it as revelation, seeing it has been hid in the secrets of the mountains all the ages and is no secret, and never has been to God, and that God has revealed it to crown the efforts of man's research. So when I speak to you of Divine revelation I speak of the revelation of God, and not of His essential Being which only God knows; I speak of His relationship to us men for our salvation. You might say, 'Is it possible that God could reveal Himself to man?' If it were not possible that God could do it, it must either be that God could not do so, or that men could not perceive the revelation. But God can do it because He is Almighty, and man can receive it because God has created him with capacities of preception, for God is Life and Truth and Power, and man is created to receive life and truth and power. It is possible. But is it necessary? Yes: it is necessary, because, as St. Augustine says, God has created all men for Himself. Our beginning comes from God, and our end is God. II. Without Revelation. But suppose you will not have the revelation and reject it altogether, what then? There remains but one thing open to thinking man for it is only the fool that says in his heart, There is no God the speculative. And the gods of speculation are many. There are the gods of the hills and of the valleys, of the trees and of the rivers, and of the storms the gods of the clever men. The difficulty of this is, of course, that the gods of speculation are all mutually destructive, and, like the soldiers in the hosts of Sennacherib, fall upon one another and slay each other. The God we worship today is the God of revelation. No man by thought hath found out God lest any flesh should 'glory in His presence'. God, then, has discovered Himself to us. III. God's Revelation in Nature. In Nature we see, if we believe in God, God's power, His might, His wisdom, ah! and to a great extent His mind. But it is quite obvious that Nature by itself is too limited. Why, the poor poet cannot express what his soul suggests! Nature is too limited, and although we may learn from Nature God's wisdom, His power, and to an extent His mind, we could not learn from Nature His gentleness which makes us great or His tender mercy whereby we have found salvation, or His loving kindness with which He has bound our hearts. So God has revealed Himself to us in human nature, that we may learn of Him of the very nature which He gave us. The Holy Spirit, Whose work is in Nature and in man, shows you the Saviour, and the Saviour, the Son, shows you the Father, so it is written in God's Word that we have access to the Father through the Son by the Spirit. And so it is that what I started with is true, the doctrine of the Trinity is the revelation of God to man. References. I. 18. R. W. Church, Village Sermons, (2nd Series), p. 212. A. R. Ashwell, God in His Work and Nature, p. 110. F. T. Bassett, Christ in Eternity and Time, p. 29. J. Caird, Sermons, pp. 101, 121. J. D. Sinclair, The Scottish Review, vol. iii. p. 610. Expositor (6th Series), vol. iv. p. 375; ibid. vol. vi. pp. 16, 260; ibid. vol. vii. p. 408. I. 19. Ibid. (5th Series), vol. viii. p. 424. I. 19-37. Ibid. (6th Series), vol. x. p. 1. ** Holly, Yew, and Laurel ( For Christmas Eve ) John 1:20 ** In J. M. Neale's sermon for Christmas Eve, published under the title, 'Confessing and not Denying,' there is this seasonable passage: 'We confess at this time in another way. There are three things which we principally put up to show our joy, as it is written, "O all ye green things upon the earth, bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him for ever". These three things are, holly, yew, and laurel. By the holly we confess what our Lord was; by the yew we confess what we ought to be; by the laurel we confess what our Lord now is, and what we hope to be also. 'I. Holly, as we know, has sharp prickles and red berries. There is an old Christmas carol which says: The holly has a prickle As sharp as any thorn; And it was for to be crucified That Jesus Christ was born. The holly has a berry As red as any blood; And Jesus Christ did shed forth His To do poor sinners good. 'By the prickles, then, we confess His bitter life on earth, His tears, His watchings, His fastings, His weariness, His revilings; we confess that He wore a crown of thorns for our sakes; that He was fastened to the cross with nails for our sakes; that He was pierced with a spear for our sakes. By the berries we confess that He shed forth every drop of His most precious blood for us miserable sinners, and for our salvation. 'II. Then about the yew; a good man of old said: "This yew-tree may be accounted a fit emblem of a Christian. You see it hath little outside bark, only a small rind, to teach us not to make a great outside show of religion. Then it is a very lasting timber, much harder than oak, to show the soundness and sincerity of a Christian. It hath many branches, large and fair, to remind us to be plentiful in good works. It is always green and prospering, to declare unto us that a Christian should always grow and thrive in grace. Yea, green in winter and the hardest weather, to show that a Christian is best in affliction; yea, then it hath berries on it, to teach us, as then we are the best Christians, so then to bring forth most fruits of righteousness. It is a long-living and lasting tree, to be unto us a type of immortality and lasting life. 'III. And what of the laurel? In putting up that, we confess that Jesus Christ came into the world to win the victory over hell, death, and Satan; to loose the bands of sin; to ascend up gloriously into heaven leading captivity captive; and we confess that what the Captain of our salvation has done, we hope, as His good soldiers, to do also.' Sermons in Sackville College Chapel, vol. I. p. 32. References. I. 20. J. M. Neale, Readings for the Aged (3rd Series), p. 17. I. 20-22. Expositor (6th Series), vol. viii. p. 223; ibid. (4th Series), vol. v. p. 294. I. 21. Ibid. (5th Series), vol. ii. p. 81; ibid. (6th Series), vol. x. p. 17. I. 21, 25. Ibid. (4th Series), vol. i. pp. 84, 85. I. 22. S. Baring-Gould, Village Preaching for a Year, pt. i. p. 39. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. i. p. 17. I. 23. H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. ii. p. 263. C. S. Robinson, Simon Peter, p. 101. Expositor (5th Series), vol. iii. p. 365. I. 26. D. Davies, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliii. p. 194. J. Keble, Sermons for Advent to Christmas Eve, p. 373. C. Kingsley, The Good News of God, p. 87. H. Jones, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liv. p. 398. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. i. p. 25. I. 26, 27. R. W. Church, Village Sermons (3rd Series), p. 17. F. Bourdillon, Plain Sermons for Family Reading, p. 148. The Gospel According to John the Baptist John 1:29 These words of the Baptist are a strong assertion of the doctrine that the Lord Jesus Christ offered Himself as a true and proper sacrifice for the sins of the world. Let us use the text for three practical purposes: I. It may serve to direct the sinner to the source of salvation. 'Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.' Mark the sin. That is the sharpest sting wherewith your conscience pierces you, and your most earnest anxiety is to have that removed. Here, then, is one who taketh just that away. Mark, again, 'The sin of the world' ; not merely that of the Jew, or that of the generation which was alive when He was crucified, or that of any small section of humanity, but that of the world. So you may be sure that yours is included. Mark, again, 'He taketh away the sin of the world'. It is a present thing. He was bearing sin in sacrifice even as John spoke the words; and He is bearing it now in intercession before the mercy-seat on high. II. But the text may serve to stimulate the Christian to earnest gratitude. How much do we owe our Divine Redeemer? He has taken away our sin. He has given us peace with God, and imparted to us peace of conscience and joy in the Holy Ghost. And He has done all at the sacrifice of Himself. Surely, then, it becomes each of us to ask: 'What shall I render unto the Lord for all His benefits?' III. Finally, this text may serve as a pattern to the preacher of the Gospel. Indeed, the whole ministry of the Baptist is full of richest suggestiveness in this regard. Always he pointed away from himself to the Christ. If he preached repentance, it was because Christ was at hand. If he urged baptism, it was but as a symbol of that Divine ordinance which only Christ could administer. If he besought men to flee from the wrath to come, it was because that wrath was the wrath of the Lamb, and as such all the more terrible. Thus Christ was the background of all his utterances, and his great ambition was to make ready a people prepared for the Lord. Now, in all this he was an example to every preacher of the Gospel whose aim ought ever to be to proclaim faithfully and earnestly the truth as it is in Jesus. References. I. 29. R. W. Hiley, A Year's Sermons, vol. iii. p. 125. R. Flint, Sermons and Addresses, p. 196. J. A. Alexander, The Gospel of Jesus Christ, p. 48. R. M. Benson, Redemption, p. 121. E. A. Bray, Sermons, vol. ii. p. 258. J. B. Brown, The Divine Mystery of Peace, p. 42. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlv. No. 2646, and vol. xxxiii. No. 1987. A. Berry, The Doctrine of the Cross, p. 51. W. B. Selbie, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxxviii. p. 241. Expositor (4th Series), vol. v. pp. 116, 189; ibid. vol. vi. p. 29; ibid. (5th Series), vol. iv. p. 277; ibid. vol. viii. p. 283; ibid. (6th Series), vol. x. p. 320. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 40. I. 29-34. Ibid . vol. ix. p. 92. I. 31. Ibid. (7th Series), vol. v. p. 417. I. 33. Ibid. (6th Series), vol. x. p. 59. I. 35. Ibid. (7th Series), vol. v. p. 100. I. 35, 36. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxix. No. 2329. I. 35, 37, 40. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 185. I. 36. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xviii. No. 1060. I. 37. A. G. Mortimer, The Church's Lessons for the Christian Year, pt. i. p. 146. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xii. No. 702. I. 37-39. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 50. I. 37-51. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. x. No. 570. I. 38. E. A. Stuart, The New Commandment and other Sermons, vol. vii. p. 9. H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Holy-tide Teaching, p. 1. Basil Wilberforce, Sanctification by the Truth, p. 108. Expositor (4th Series), vol. iv. p. 325; ibid. (6th Series), vol. iv. p. 60; ibid. vol. vii. p. 83. I. 39. J. W. Veevers, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xix. p. 371. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xi. No. 633. Expositor (6th Series), vol. viii. p. 406. The Character of St. Andrew John 1:40 What do you know about Andrew? Some of you know everything that can be known, but taking the average Christian sleeper, what does he know about Andrew? Perhaps he did not know that Andrew was an Apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ. Very few people can name the Apostles in the order in which the names occur in the New Testament; I have never met a man who could do so. That is remarkable and painfully instructive. 'One of the two who heard John speak, and followed the Saviour, was Andrew.' Observe, he was a disciple of John the Baptist, he belonged to an earlier dispensation, but he was an open-minded man, and was prepared to accept life whencever it came. In a sense, therefore, he left John and said: 'This is the new dispensation, this the grander and broader light; many thanks to you, stern, austere Baptist; we have had some thrilling days with you, but good-bye, we follow the Messias, we follow the Lamb of God'. That was an excellent characteristic in the character of Andrew; this was a feature, prominent, gracious, and imitable; let us imitate it. I. Did Andrew do any work in the Church or in the world? Yes, he did; you know, because you have read the story. What did he do? You will be surprised to hear that he first found his own brother, and told him the Gospel. Why, your brother does not know that you go to church; your partner in business would be almost stupefied with fright if you told him that you took the Lord's Supper. We keep these things secret, and why do we never speak about them? The answer is a lie: 'Because they are so sacred we never mention them; our love to Christ is so deep, so sensitive, that not a soul in the world suspects its existence'. That is curious. 'Come all ye that fear God, and I will declare unto you what He hath done for my soul.' That is better, that is making a right use of precious things. There is a way of preaching; there is a blatant way, and there is a way self-reserved, and sweetly, musically eloquent. Andrew 'first findeth his own brother'; he said: 'We have found the Messias; come with us; let us follow up this clue, let us attach ourselves to this gracious personality'. 'He brought him to Jesus.' We bring people to catechisms, to creeds, to dogmas, to ceremonies; but Andrew could not rest until he had brought his own brother to Jesus. The two personalities touched the two hearts, entered into one another by a sacred spiritual masonry. Have we done any work of this kind? II. What more did Andrew do? That would be enough for most men to do. Yes, but he did more, and you will find the account in John vi. 8, 9: 'One of His disciples, Andrew' that is the second time his name occurs; it is; that is good 'saith unto Him' spoke unto the Lord? Yes. What did he say? The Lord had commanded that the great company should be fed; He said to Philip, 'Whence shall we buy bread, that all these people may have a crust apiece?' This He said to prove poor Philip, who was on the whole a wobbling little creature, who always had another question to ask; 'for He Himself knew what He would do'. So Christ often asks us what we think of this or that, not needing our opinions, for we cannot teach Omniscience. Well, Andrew came to the rescue in a feeble way, but it was the very best way he could do; he said: 'There is a lad here who hath five barley loaves, and two small fishes; I have been with him now, I have counted the loaves, and I have turned the fishes over with my finger, but oh, how small they are; what are they amongst so many?' Jesus said: 'They will do for a beginning, they will do to start with; make the men sit down'. And Jesus took the loaves, and when He had multiplied them by giving thanks, He distributed until all were satisfied. Now there are some men let us call them typically the Andrews of the Church who count up. what the Church appears to have; they make truthful statements, they are somewhat distinguished for statistics; they know exactly that the loaves were five and the fishes were two; on that they could take an oath. They also see the limitations of things. Well, they say, the thing is simply absurd! you are going to build a church there; they say themselves it will cost £7000, and when I ask them how much they have got in hand, they reply that they have already secured £200 towards the £7000. What a preposterous disproportion. But Jesus says when the men are operating in the right spirit and going in the right direction, Make the men sit down; that will do; the £200 means two million; there is another Church in the two hundred. Get to work, and in the multiplication of the two hundred into seven thousand, see the out-working of a gracious and most Divine miracle. That is the way most of us began our ministry. III. What more did Andrew do? That would have been a good day's work, to bring his own brother, and to point out the five loaves and the two fishes. What more do we hear about him? Well, I will tell you. 'There were certain Greeks among them that came up to worship at the feast;' they came first to Philip, and desired that he would introduce them, but Philip came and told Andrew. He said: 'You had better take up this thing; I don't know about these strangers, I am rather shy, and they are Greeks; if they had been people that come from our village I would not have minded introducing them, but they are of another nationality'. And Andrew said to Philip: 'Be a man, I will go with you, and together we will tell Jesus'. So Andrew and Philip went together, and they told Him that the Greeks had come, and they gladdened His heart. Jesus was never so surprised as He was by faith and unexpected love. He came unto His own, and His own received Him not. And when He heard that strangers were at the door, Greeks, He said, 'The hour is come that the Son of Man should be glorified'. How He multiplied the occasion, how He greatened it! This is what we should do. Who are these that fly as doves to their windows? who are these strange people that darken the sky like a flock of birds? They are the nations of the earth, pagans, unexpected and uncalculated assets of the Son of God. 'He shall have the heathen for His inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for His possession'; the islands shall wait for Him, and not a caravan shall tramp the wilderness without having His presence and His altar and His blessing. Joseph Parker. The Modesty of True Greatness John 1:40 The Lord Jesus Christ drew to Himself men of various types and of different gifts. The leading types of human character are presented in these men who formed the nucleus of the Christian Church reminding us that there is a place for every man in the Lord's service, whatever his bent and gifts. Andrew was the first, or possibly the second, disciple Jesus ever had; and it was a proof of his strength of character that before any one else had acknowledged Jesus to be Messiah, or had even suspected that He could be, he left his master, John the Baptist, and went with John, the son of Zebedee, to follow Jesus. From that day till the hour of his death he was faithful to the Lord he loved. There are two great truths worthy of prayerful consideration which appear to be exemplified by the slight records given us of Andrew's life and character. In the first place it throws light: I. On the duty of being content when others outshine us. Andrew never appears to have disgraced his position, as Peter did, and he was never deposed from it, for after the ascension of the Lord he held the same dignified place. Yet you must have noticed that he was not always, perhaps we may say he was not usually, among the most privileged. We know too little of him to say certainly why this was so. Probably there was something lacking in his nature, which made him less fit for the highest revelations and, judging from his intimacy with Philip, the head of the second group, it may well have been that there was a tendency to doubt and hesitation, which prevented his following the Lord to the loftiest summits of faith. Still, the position was a trying one. It is not easy to be content with such things as you have. Popularity and prominence are no good tests of worth. He who is the true and final judge recognises the real worth of every one, and appreciates at its fullest quiet, unostentatious service. Now let us deal with the second truth illustrated by Andrew's life: II. On quiet work in bringing others to Jesus. There is no evidence that Andrew was a great preacher, but he was one of the most successful winners of souls the world ever had. He began work directly he found the Messiah. 'He first goeth and findeth his own brother Simon.' It would be well if that example had been generally followed. But too often it is in the home we are most silent. But before we can lead others to Him we must ourselves come to Him with the promptitude and self-surrender Andrew showed, who directly John said, 'Behold the Lamb of God,' arose and followed Jesus. A. Rowland, The Burdens of Life, p. 35. The World's Benefactors John 1:40 J. H. Newman writes: 'Andrew is scarcely known except by name; while Peter has ever held the place of honour all over the Church; yet Andrew brought Peter to Christ. And are not the blessed angels unknown to the world? and is not God Himself, the Author of all good, hid from mankind at large, partially manifested and poorly glorified, in a few scattered servants here and there? and His Spirit, do we know whence It cometh, and whither It goeth? and though He has taught men whatever there has been of wisdom among them from the beginning, yet when He came on earth in visible form, even then it was said of Him, 'The world knew Him not'. His marvellous providence works beneath a veil, which speaks but an untrue language; and to see Him who is the Truth and the Life, we must stoop underneath it, and so in our turn hide ourselves from the world. They who present themselves at kings' courts, pass on to the inner chambers, where the gaze of the rude multitude cannot pierce; and we, if we would see the King of kings in His glory, must be content to disappear from the things that are seen. Hid are the saints of God; if they are known to men, it is accidentally, in their temporal offices, as holding some high earthly station, or effecting some mere civil work, not as saints. St. Peter has a place in history, far more as a chief instrument of a strange revolution in human affairs, than in his true character, as a self-denying follower of his Lord, to whom truths were revealed which flesh and blood could not discern.' References. I. 40. J. Keble, Sermons far the Saints' Days, p. 11. Expositor (4th Series), vol. iii. p. 230; ibid. (6th Series), vol. ix. p. 125. The Missionary Spirit (For St. Andrew's Day) John 1:40-41 I. A Brother's Testimony. The fact before us is most striking and instructive. Out of the three first members of the Christian Church, one at least was brought to Jesus by the private, quiet word of a relative. He seems to have heard no public preaching. He saw no mighty miracle wrought. He was not convinced by any powerful reasoning. He only heard his brother telling him that he had found a Saviour himself, and at once the work began in his soul. The simple testimony of a warm-hearted brother was the first link in the chain by which St. Peter was drawn out of the world, and joined to Christ. The first blow in that mighty work by which St. Peter was made a pillar of the Church was struck by St. Andrew's words, 'We have found the Christ'. II. The Missionary Spirit. Well would it be for the Church of Christ, if all its members were more like St. Andrew! Well would it be for souls if all men and women who have been converted themselves would speak to their friends and relatives on spiritual subjects, and tell them what they have found! How much good might be done! How many might be led to Jesus, who now live and die in unbelief! The work of testifying the Gospel of the grace of God ought not to be left to clergy alone. Thousands, humanly speaking, would listen to a word from a friend, who will not listen to a sermon. Every Christian ought to be a home-missionary, a missionary to his family, children, servants, neighbours, and friends. III. Following Christ. Let us take heed that we are among those who really follow Christ, and abide with Him. It is not enough to hear Him preached from the pulpit, and to read of Him as described in books. We must actually follow Him, pour out our hearts before Him, and hold personal communion with Him. Then, and not till then, we shall feel constrained to speak of Him to others. References. I. 40, 41. C. Bickersteth, The Gospel of Incarnate Love, p. 3. T. T. Carter, Oxford Lent Sermons for 1868, p. 97. I. 40-42. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. Luke, p. 62. John 1:41 'Mystical, more than magical,' says Carlyle in Sartor (Book iii. chap. ii.), 'is that Communing of Soul with Soul, both looking heavenward: here properly Soul first speaks with Soul; for only in looking heavenward, take it in what sense you may, not in looking earthward, does what we can call Union, mutual Love, Society begin to be possible. How true is that of Novalis: "It is certain, my Belief gains quite infinitely the moment I can conceive another mind thereof!"' References. I. 41. C. Perren, Revival Sermons in Outline, p. 281. J. Keble, Sermons for the Saints' Days, p. 1. C. S. Home, Relationships of Life, p. 31. A. P. Stanley, Sermons on Special Occasions, p. 283. C. S. Robinson, Simon Peter, p. 114. I. 41, 46, 49. Expositor (6th Series), vol. iii. p. 277; ibid. (7th Series), vol. vi. p. 288; ibid. (4th Series), vol. i. p. 83. Our Business and How to Do It John 1:42 I. Here is our business To bring men to Jesus. (1) It is the business of the preacher. Without that what is the good of it all? Our business is a failure and no failure is so complete and dreary unless we do bring men really to Christ, seeking Him as their very life, and finding in Him their joy, and their strength, and their all A new creature in Christ Jesus is the only thing worth preaching for. (2) Here is the business of the Church to bring men to Christ. Let us thank God most devoutly for all the social work that has been undertaken; and that the Churches and Society generally are being stirred to face the great social problems which press upon us. But first and foremost, our business is to bring men to Christ. (3) And because this is our business it is your business. Ask yourself today this question, 'Why am I a Christian?' It is that through you some other may find the Saviour. Nothing can keep our souls in health but seeking to bring others to the Saviour. II. The incident teaches us how to do it (1) In Andrew we have a man who has found Jesus for himself. That is his authority. Our strength for service is in our having found Jesus for ourselves. (2) Then this messenger comes fresh from communion with Jesus. He is full of it can think or talk of nothing else. His eye flashes, his face shines, his voice rings with the music of it 'Simon, we have found Christ' The best elocution is communion with Jesus Christ Get full of it, and then the message will find its way out, in tongue, and look, and attitude. (3) Look at the man himself. He was a young convert, and had no learning. He could not argue about it, and he could not preach about it all of which was a great mercy. Because he could do nothing else he had to stick to the point 'We have found Jesus'. Then again he was a man of no great ability. (4) Andrew did not wait until he could talk to a crowd. He took the message to one. The world wants something more than preaching. It wants this holy buttonholing. (5) Neither did Andrew go forth vaguely thinking that he would like to do some good and wishing that an opportunity would present itself. The hardest thing in the world to find is an opportunity for anything if you want it, the best way is to make it. 'There's Simon,' said he. I will go and find him.' In this business be business-like. Think of some one soul. Begin with the one that is next to you. M. G. Pearse, The Preacher's Magazine, vol. xi. p. 549. Nature Transformed By Grace John 1:42 St. John gives us in this verse the first sketch, as it were, of a saintly character, in which nature was transformed by grace. He sets before us a prophecy which was made to a Galilean fisherman by One who spoke with His eye on the man, his past and present, and told him what he was going to be. He was known now among men as Simon the son of Jona; hereafter in the future he shall win the name of Cephas, or the stone. I. Simon, there he stands, a man known among his fellows for certain peculiarities, noted for certain powers and defects; men knew his appearance, his voice, his powers; he was Simon and no one else. Here we have the mystery of personality. Like as we are to one another, as leaves on the same tree, we all of us have our separate personality. 'We were born originals; don't let us die copies.' God wants that particular individuality which He gave us. And He wants us to be conservative with ourselves. Simon would remain Simon, even when he became Cephas. II. But our Lord sees in this bit of humanity before Him something more than a person. (1) He sees a person with a history; he stands there with fragments of home clinging to him; he is not only Simon, but he is Simon, the son of Jona his father's son. We are face to face with the great mystery of heredity, which I will try to explain. You have inherited certain outward characteristics from your parents. But do you realise that it is equally true that we inherit moral qualities as well? It is a tremendous truth, and we cannot deny it (2) We have more than one pair of ancestors; what we inherit goes back a long way. There are all sorts of tendencies striving within us, some stronger than others, some starting from our parents, some much farther back. There is nothing fated or fixed; good and bad are striving within us; some impulses are stronger than others, but the will has to choose between them and decide. (3) But there is another power still standing behind Simon to influence and form him. We read how Philip was of Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. We are face to face with what is called environment, our surroundings. School, college, the counting-house, the business life they all reappear in the mystery of the power of environment, and exercise a powerful influence in the shaping and directing of conduct which acts upon and is reacted upon by character. (4) But the determining force with St. Peter, after all, was the call and the prophecy of Christ. 'Thou shalt be called Cephas.' He found himself suddenly the possessor of an ideal for his life, pronounced over him by an authoritative voice. W. C. E. Newbolt, Church Family Newspaper, vol. xv. p. 278. This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/expositors-dictionary/ John 2:1 Melanchthon wrote to Camerarius on January 19, 1550 'When I heard yesterday that Fasoltus had returned [from Prussia] I went to call on him, that I might ask his servant about our children [ i.e. his motherless grandchildren, who were with their father, George Sabinus, at Königsberg; and the young son of Camerarius]. The servant was away somewhere, but when your name was mentioned, Fasoltus showed me the letter addressed to you by Sabinus. I thought it better not to open it, although I beg that you will read as many as you like of those addressed to me. I hope it contains no news of death or sorrow, and with my whole heart I pray that the Son of God who, as Irenæus says, is always present with the Church, may preserve both your family and mine. He knows how great is the weakness of the human race, as we are reminded by the reading of the Gospel for today, in which it is recorded that a marriage was held in Cana, i. e. in a place of reeds [in Arundineto] as even Aurogallus interprets the word. This poor human nature is more fragile than reeds, but in this place of reeds the Son of God is present.' Corpus Reformatorum, vol. vii., col. 538. Marriage John 2:1 What destinies turn on marriage! destinies so multiplied that it is profanation to characterise a marriage as a commonplace episode. I. Marriage is a Divine institution. It was established in Eden. The Bible says much of this God-ordained rite. God founded this honourable estate, and to violate it is to rebel against the law of our Maker. Nothing is more sinister than the depreciation of marriage in some quarters today. It is an evil omen indeed. Beware of such a tendency. Nothing is more necessary for the well-being of a State than a firm adhesion to the Divineness of the ordinance of marriage. II. If this institution is to bring happiness there are laws which must be observed, qualities which must be cultivated. (1) Religion is the most urgent condition of true marriage happiness. A marriage without Jesus has an unprosperous outlook. (2) Honest and deep love is essential to a happy marriage. Love alone has the key of the treasure-house of happy marriage. (3) Fidelity is an inexorable necessity of marriage. (4) Mutuality is indispensable to a happy marriage. Once there is the shadow of suspicion, peace and joy depart. Dr. Dale admonishes against 'diminution of mutual interest' and the admonition is. seasonable. The loss of interest is the blight of love. (5) There must be a sustained expression of affection if marriage is to be a day of brightness. Queen Victoria declared that the Prince Consort was a 'lover' all through their married life. Love that is never uttered dies. (6) The homely quality we call common sense is another essential of a happy marriage. (7) Thrift, which is but an aspect of common sense, is necessary for permanent married happiness. (8) Unselfishness is a grace peculiarly needed in the state of marriage. III. I can but add a little cluster of counsels which may contribute to a noble ideal and a happy experience of marriage. Let there be no secrets between husband and wife. Scorn and dread all jealousy. Be courteous, and that always. Do not overlook any element of attractiveness in your home. Practise always the calm strong virtue of forbearance. Keep a lovely temper, or if you possess it not seek by the grace of Christ to possess it. It will help to ensure the blessedness of marriage that those who contemplate it anticipate the retrospect. Live as you will wish you had lived. Do not, like Carlyle, have to shed bitterly reminiscent tears. Read the literature of marriage. Study what the Scripture saith. Rely upon God's promised guidance. Dinsdale T. Young, Messages for Home and Life, p. 93. Reference. II. 1. Expositor (6th Series), vol. i. p. 177. John 2:1-2 Nathanael had been promised the vision of greater things in Jesus, and this opening scene of the ministry forms the first revelation of the new order which was being inaugurated. It was to be free from the narrow and arbitrary abstinence of asceticism. Unlike John the Baptist, Jesus took His disciples freely to a country wedding, as if to mark the genial spirit of His religion. The significance of the incident, in this aspect, does not need to be underlined. But it acquires additional and unsuspected emphasis if we connect it with the words immediately preceding it in the first chapter of the Gospel. There, as was suggested in an earlier series of these notes, Nathanael seems to be regarded as a better Jacob, to whom, as 'Israel' or 'seeing God,' a better union of the Divine Being is vouchsafed. Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man. The allusion is not to any appearances of angels but to the life of Christ on earth regarded as a continuous revelation and communication of God to men. ' La vie de Jésus va ȇtre comme une continuelle révélation du ciel, un commerce pareil à celui que vit Jacob dans sa fameuse vision, où les anges allaient et venaient pour accomplir les ordres de Dieu. Ce commerce a été inauguré par l'incarnation du Verbe et la descente de l'Esprit; il ne cessera plus désormais tant que durera sur la terre la manifestation du Christ. Les anges sont donc le symbole reel de l'assistance divine qui éclatera dans les miracles du Sauveur ' (Loisy). Now the interesting thing is that this Jacob, whose vision of God at Peniel is thus employed to figure forth the fuller revelation of the Son of man to Christians, was regarded by Philo as the typical ascetic. In some circles of Jewish Hellenism, ascetic discipline was held to be the supreme condition of beholding God. Anti-social rigour was the motto of the elect. The body had to be kept down, social ties broken, and all joys sternly crushed, if the soul was to attain the beatific vision of the things Divine. Philo, who voices this feeling, displays real ingenuity in interpreting Jacob's life along this line. To him 'Jacob,' says Dr. M. Friedländer (in Die religiösen Bewegungen innerhalb des Judentums im Zeitalter Jesu, 1905, pp. 256 f.), 'is the ascetic κατ’ἐξοχήυ who has to fight hard against all that is earthly, in order to attain the vision of God.' The stone on which he pillows his head at Peniel (Genesis 28:11 ) represents the rigour of life which prepares one for the sight of God. So Philo argues ( de Somn. i. 446), if the ascetic is eager in the practice of this discipline, then instead of being called Jacob the supplanter, he will be hailed as Israel ὁ θεὸυ . This association of Jacob's vision with asceticism would obviously lend point to the promise of Jesus in John 1:51 , as well as to his action in 2:2 f. The conditions of beholding God's glory were no longer to be considered as implying a strict, unsocial asceticism, which was possible only to an élite of distinguished pietists or recluses like the Therapeutæ. James Moffatt. References. II. 1, 2. R. W. Church, Village Sermons, p. 36. T. H. Ball, Persuasions, p. 39. Expositor (7th Series), vol. v. p. 475. II. 1-11. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 110. The Social Life of the Christian John 2:2 I. Christ's Example. The narrative of the marriage at Cana in Galilee shows us clearly that our Lord did not disdain the festive board. He went to the wedding-feast and took His disciples with Him. There is no reason why His disciples of today should abstain from social entertainments, but we must be quite sure that we can take Him with us. It is a matter of common experience that there are social engagements to which we are invited where, our own instinct tells us, He would not, if I may so express it, feel at home. Where the Master cannot go is no place for the disciple. II. Some Cautions. But when we go into society let us beware lest, by our own act, or by assenting to the actions of others, we may do harm. 1. Pride may come there (St. Matthew 23:6 ). 2. Vanity may come there. Vanity of dress, vanity of face, vanity of manners, vanity of conversation. Souls have been lost in society, having acquired there the habit of turning everything to account for one end self-display. 3. Charity may not come there. It comes not, or it stays not, where scandal is discussion of other men's affairs, conduct, character. 4. Even reverence may be wanting. How often has a jest pointed and winged by Scripture a ludicrous quotation, or a humorous allusion planted in some memory an association not to be lost, ruinous to the future use of a whole text or context of inspiration! III. Positive Duties. But in all watchings against evil there should be a positive striving after good. Let a high aim and a Christian motive go with us into society, and we shall not be there like men armed for self-defence or chained against offending, but rather as free and large-hearted friends, fearing no evil, because God is with us. We must go as Christians. 1. Earnest prayer for a special blessing will be the preliminary and safeguard of all. This will fulfil itself most often in undesigned and unstudied ways. A Christian man in society does not always talk of sacred things. He never forces religious conversation; but, on the other hand, he never shrinks from the avowal of distinctly Christian sentiments. More often, however, he is called rather and it is no easy duty to judge as a Christian, and to speak as a Christian, upon matters not religious. 'If any man speak,' says St. Peter, 'let him speak as it were oracles of God'; such words as have truth in them, and faith, and wisdom, however common the topics to which they appear to have regard. 2. There are many other ways in which he may speak and use influence for his Master. a. He can win others by the charm of a thoroughly Christian and therefore powerfully attractive spirit. b. Sometimes a word, or scarcely a word or his, will not only check the running down of some maligned character, but even rectify the misapprehension from which slander had started. c. Sometimes in a crowded reception-room, that which could not, without obtrusiveness, have been said at the table, has been uttered with saving power to an individual guest. The effect of a Christian man's presence in common society should be to make others feel that they were in a good atmosphere. Holy Matrimony John 2:2 Our subject to-night is holy matrimony. I fear with many young people the emphasis is not placed on the word holy, but on the word matrimony. This fact may account for so many unhappy unions, and for much of the misery in the wedded lives of the rich and the poor alike. It is very hard to get young people to realise the importance, and the solemnity of the step they are about to take, when they enter into the married state. For weal or for woe it is the most important step in life that any man or woman can take. I would therefore ask you to consider marriage, both from its heavenly and from its earthly sides. We are too apt to consider the earthly side alone. I. Marriage is a Divine institution. It was the first appointed ordinance after the creation of man. It was adorned and beautified with the presence of Christ, at the first miracle which He wrought in Cana of Galilee. Just in so far as we enter into this holy estate in the fear of God 'marrying in the Lord,' as the Apostle Paul saith in so far will we find it a state of happiness and peaceful joy. II. Marriage has its earthly or human side. Da not allow yourselves to 'drift' into it. Deep, true, honest love on both sides is the only bond that will bear the strain of married life. Such love can only be founded on character and mutual respect. It deepens and grows as the years roll on, and the faces become furrowed, and the hair whitened with the snows of many winters. Beware of secret marriages. 'Honour your father and mother' is a law that requires to be observed more than it is, where love, courtship, and marriage is in question. III. The purpose of marriage. 'It was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort that the one should have of the other both in prosperity and adversity.' Here we have the two aspects of marriage the heavenly and the earthly combined. There is to be a holy emulation between them in helping each other forward in that higher and holier life of the spirit, as well as to be a help to each other in the things pertaining to this earthly life. You remember in the Paradiso of the great Italian poet, that he (Dante) had as his leader through those happy regions his beloved Beatrice. He tells us that he only knew of his ascent into the higher and holier plains of Paradise, not by conscious motion, but by the growing beauty on the face of Beatrice. So we, too, in many a home, may trace the upward ascent of husband and children, to higher and holier heights of character, by the growing beauty, the sweet and holy influence, of wife and mother. Young men, abjure all 'low' views of marriage. Seek a good woman rather than a clever woman. T. J. Madden, Addresses to all Sorts and Conditions of Men, p. 53. References. II. 2. S. Baring-Gould, Village Preaching for a Year (2nd Series), vol. i. p. 72; ibid. vol. i. p. 105. John 2:3 On the Terrace of Envy, in the Purgatorio (13:25 f.), Dante hears voices in the air which whip the soul to generosity. One is Mary's sentence, 'They have no wine.' It is a simple and homely act of kindly forethought to save her neighbour's shame or confusion. Perhaps the suggestion is right that it is meant as a corrective of the envy with which women too often regard the lavish preparations and display made in other women's feasts. An envious woman would have a secret joy in the breakdown of the arrangements; to the Virgin's kind and neighbourly heart it only causes pain. J. S. Carroll, Prisoners of Hope, p. 188. References. II. 3. H. R. Gamble, The Ten Virgins, p. 40. II. 3, 4. H. S. Holland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlv. p. 33. II. 4. S. H. Fleming, Fifteen Minute Sermons for the People, p. 148. J. Keble, Sermons for Christmas to Epiphany, p. 407. Bishop Westcott, Village Sermons, p. 68. Expositor (5th Series), vol. vi. p. 93; ibid. (6th Series), vol. vi. p. 106. The Lesson of Obedience John 2:5 Mary, the mother of our Lord, speaks only on three occasions (in the sacred records), and those three utterances of hers are like three clear notes of a bell of metal sound, and rich. 'Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it.' Here her words reveal the disciple's perfect loyalty. But her words need some explanation. Where had she learned the necessity of men yielding this implicit obedience? Where, but in that quiet home-life at Nazareth. There she had studied Him with a love that became more and more filled with reverence; there she realised the mystery of His nature; and among other things, that there were meanings He intended to convey which could not be set forth in words, but must be displayed in action; that only by doing His will, even when it was darkest, could she and others truly come to the light which she knew was in Him. Her words here, then, were not what they may seem at first sight, the utterance of despair, but their tone is that of hope. She does not mean to say, 'We cannot know Him,' but 'He must take His own way to make us know Him, to make Himself known to us. We cannot understand His words. Let us see what He does. Let us put ourselves into action by obedience, and we shall understand Him.' Surely she struck there the note of all the best Christian experience that has come down through all the ages since. How familiar has become the simple attitude of the puzzled soul which cries: 'Lord, reveal Thyself in dealing with me; I will not hinder Thee; I will obey Thee. Whatsoever Thou sayest unto me, I will do it' In submissive acceptance of God's will we shall understand that which no mere study of His words could teach us. But yet the words of Mary here do not allow us to forget that all true waiting for Christ's self-revelation is of an active and not merely of a passive sort. 'Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it.' I. There is something to be done, in order that Jesus may show out completely what He is trying to make manifest. (This is His will in His dealings with us.) And acts become little or great only according to the degree in which God manifests Himself and works through them. It was not because she knew that they would have wine or something better, it was because her Son would surely show Himself through their obedience, if they obeyed, that Mary cared what these servants did. Our Lord, then, will not perfectly reveal Himself except in His action on and through obedient men. II. But another question comes. 'Intelligence comes by obedience; but can I obey Him till I first know what He has to say? Can I admit the right of another to bid me obey?' Now here it is necessary to distinguish clearly between 'faith' and 'sight'. Faith is the knowledge of a person; sight is the perception of a thing. To believe anyone on faith is to believe it because that person is trustworthy. To believe anything on sight is to believe it because we ourselves perceive it to be true. We see then what a perfect right one has one who knows Christ by a true experience, as Mary here to bid others obey Him, even though they know not what orders He may give. III. But it is not often that a man who seriously desires to know His will can be in doubt about it. If Jesus were at hand, you would go out and ask Him: 'Is it Thy will, O Lord, that I should do this or that?' Can you not ask Him now? Is that act right? Would He do it? Would He have it done? Will it help my soul? If the answer to these and suchlike questions is 'Yes,' and if the heart and conscience be clearly convinced, it is His bidding; it is His command as clearly as if His gracious Form stood visibly before you, and His Finger pointed to the task; and when, perhaps, the act is of itself obviously right, it is more than ever His command, just because it is the reassertion, the enforcement of essential duty. He does not make righteousness; He reveals it; and when the loving soul obeys it is conscious that it is doing at His command what it was bound to do. I know what He, there in His glory, here in my heart, wants me to do today, and, if I seek Him in prayer, I know that I shall not be mistaken in my knowledge. It is no guess of mine. It is His voice that speaks to me. In obedience to Him lies the real bond of union between this life and the life that lies beyond the grave. There obedience will be the essence and delight of life. Let us seek to do whatsoever He saith unto us now, that we may be ready for the higher duties which He will give in eternity. The late Bishop Phillips Brooks, * The Light of the World. * References. II. 5. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxix. No. 2317. II. 6. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vii. p. 262. Four Points of Good Service John 2:7 And they were wise and faithful servants. They could little have thought when they did their duty so heartily that this their good deed should be told wherever the Gospel should be preached in the whole world. They might have said, Who is this stranger that presumes to give us orders? They might have gone about their work listlessly and half-heartedly just putting in a little water, and giving themselves no further trouble. But no. 'Fill the waterpots with water. And they filled them * up to the brim.' * I. Few people seem to think what a great Christian virtue this heartiness is. 'Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.' We read the blessing of the 'true in heart' over and over again in the Psalms. Never be deceived or deceive yourselves that it does not much matter how you do little duties. The prophet says: 'If thou hast run with the footmen, and they have wearied thee, how canst thou contend with horses?' II. Learn another thing from this text. God gives us graces, according to the preparation we make for them. If these servants had only half-filled the pitchers, their master would have had only half as much wine. III. 'Draw out now.' So whatever He gives us, He gives us to this end not that we should keep it to ourselves, but that we should share it with others. Freely we have received, freely give. If He has given us time which we may spend for the good of others draw out now. If He has given us money of which we can spare draw out now. If He has given us influence draw out now. I say those servants were good servants in four particulars. First, they obeyed. 'They filled the waterpots with water.' Secondly, they obeyed heartily. 'They filled them up to the brim.' Thirdly, they did not desire to keep what they had themselves. 'He saith unto them, Draw out.' Fourthly, they did it at once. 'Draw out now,... and they bare it' J. M. Neale, Sermons in Sackville College Chapel, vol. l p. 73. Jesus Christ in the Daily Life John 2:7 I. Notice, first of all, the simplicity of the action of Jesus Christ. Men sometimes speak as if it were incumbent upon the Almighty to work His miracles before a select company of savants, who shall criticise, and then shall give their verdict as to the miracle But the miracles of our Lord Jesus Christ were no State splendours; they were not performed with a flourish of trumpets in the midst of the great city of Jerusalem. No, He commences to work His miracles here in an obscure village. (1) Are you and 1 willing to work in secret, willing to work where our work may be but little recognised? It is from the nooks and corners that will come forth some of the greatest workers, and it is there that will be found those who will turn the widow's water into wine. (2) Let us learn that Christ is as much with you in the Cana of your home life as He is in the Capernaum of business, or as He is in the Jerusalem of public service. This is the glory of our Christianity that our Christianity comes into the common daily life. II. From this miracle of our Lord I see how He comes to ennoble our joys, and I see how He comes to sanctify our sorrows. (1) He ennobles our joys. I know it is a common idea that the Lord Jesus Christ will banish all the joys of life, that the Christian must not laugh or sing, that his religion is the religion of asceticism and the desert. But oh, how different is the truth! He comes into the daily life, and He would not exclude the innocent with the harmful, the genial with the baneful. But remember this: that as you study this incident, you will see there are two or three provisos put upon the Christian's joys: (a) They must be such joys that he can invite the Lord Jesus Christ to them. (b) And then secondly, a very homely hint. The pleasures of the Christian are always in keeping with his purse, (c) Remember that Jesus Christ must be called always to the marriage. (2) He also sanctifies the sorrows. You will notice here the model prayer for the Christian when he is in any sorrow. Mary went to our Lord and said, 'They have no wine'. That was all. Learn to trust Him not to worry; but put the case before Him, and then stand ready to hear whatsoever He shall say to His servant. III. You have here also how He deals with our daily duties. (1) Whenever God is about to give us a blessing, He always prefaces it with a command. It is so here 'Fill the waterpots with water'. (2) These commands are not to be questioned. They are to be obeyed. We may not see the connection between the command and our necessity, but 'Deep in unfathomable mines He hides His sovereign will'. E. A. Stuart, The New Creation and other Sermons, vol. iii. p. 81. Reference. II. 7. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxvi. No. 1666. John 2:7-8 May the New Year be full of happy days to you! 365 in a row, like the waterpots at the marriage at Cana each of them holding a good deal, say two or three firkins apiece, and all of them filled to the brim with the water of gladness; or if any of them should be filled with the water of grief, you know One who can turn that water into wine. W. B. Robertson of Irvine (in a letter.) References. II. 8. H. S. Holland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lix. p. 66. II. 9. Bishop Gore, The New Theology and the Old Religion, p. 205. J. W. Burgon, Servants of Scripture, p. 58. II. 9, 10. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. v. Nos. 225 and 226. Bishop Gore, Christian World Pulpit, vol. li. p. 33. The Best Wine Last John 2:10 Why did this saying so impress John that it lingered ineffaceably in his memory? Was it merely because of the pleasure it evoked to hear his Master's handiwork so praised? I think there was a deeper reason. John was by nature an idealist, loving to find the abstract in the concrete. In the particular instance of the moment, he was quick to see the universal law. And it flashed on John, hearing this chairman speak, that he was speaking more wisely than he knew. Was it not true wherever Christ was active that the best wine was kept until the end? In other words, take man apart from God and always it is the worse which follows; but take God in any of His thousand energies, and always the best is kept until the end. It is on these two truths I wish to speak. I. And first on the sadder and more sombre of them. (1) Think, then, for a moment of life itself, unsustained by the hope we have in God. First comes childhood, then follows youth and opening manhood. Then come the heat and battle of mid-life, and the weakness and the weariness of age. Is this the gallant youth of long ago, this bent and tottering and palsied form? (2) Or think again of life's relationships on which the blessing of God is never sought. When character is unchastened and unpurified, how often do the years bring disappointment! (3) Once more you will think how true this is of sin. Sin is so fair and pleasant at the outset, and hides its afterward with such consummate mastery, that the reckless heart becomes an easy prey. (4) And I cannot leave this darker side of things without asking, must all that stop at death? I wish most passionately I could believe it did: but I see no reasonable ground for that assurance. If sin conceals the worse behind tomorrow, may it not conceal the worst behind the grave? II. But now I turn, and I do so very gladly, to the energies and activities of God. Wherever God in Christ is working, the best wine is kept until the end. (1) Think first of creation. First there was chaos and the formless deep: then light, and the ingathering of the waters. Then the first dawn of life in lowliest form, mounting into the power of bird and beast. And then at last came man, capable of communion with his Maker: greater, by that spark of God within him, than sun and moon and all the host of heaven. (2) The same is true in the sphere of revelation, the revelation of the Divine to men. (3) I think, too, we may apply this thought to the life of the incarnate Lord Himself. (4) Is not this true also of our Christian calling? Every act of obedience that we do gives us a new vision of His love. G. H. Morrison, The "Wings of the Morning" p. 1. References. II. 10. J. Cameron Lees, Christian World Pulpit, vol. li. p. 4. J. Keble, Sermons for Christmas to Epiphany, pp. 421 and 441. W. P. S. Bingham, Sermons on Easter Subjects, p. 178. W. H. Simcox, The Cessation of Prophecy, p. 98. II. 11. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxvi. No. 2165. H. Jones, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liii. p. 93. J. S. Bartlett, Sermons, p. 12. H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. iii. p. 16. H. S. Holland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lv. p. 49. W. H. Hutchings, Sermon-Sketches, p. 37. R. W. Hiley, A Year's Sermons, vol. i. p. 48. Bishop Magee, Sermons at St. Saviour's, Bath, p. 1. H. Alford, Sermons on Christian Doctrine, p. 82. C. J. Ridgeway, The King and His Kingdom, p. 71. Bishop Westcott, Village Sermons, p. 74. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 114. II. 12. Expositor (7th Series), vol. vi. p. 31. II. 13. Ibid. (4th Series), vol. v. p. 116. II. 13-22. Ibid. (6th Series), vol. vi. p. 197. II. 16. Ibid. vol. i. p. 386. II. 16. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 123. II. 17. T. G. Horton, Christian World Pulpit, xlvi. p. 299. G. H. Morrison, The Scottish Review, vol. i. p. 152. J. Stalker, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liii. p. 179. The Temple of His Body John 2:19 Strange words these to come from the lip of oar Lord. It is our Lord's first intimation of His coming Passion and Resurrection. I. What did our Lord Mean? He meant surely that His body was the habitation of God, through which He dwells among men and would dwell to all eternity. What was the purpose in Old Testament days both of the Tabernacle in the wilderness and of the Temple at Jerusalem? Was it just to afford to Israel a place to worship in our modern sense, a house of prayer for God's people Israel? No, that was not their primary purpose. Their primary purpose was to afford a habitation for God in which and through which He might dwell among His people. Certainly God's house was to be a house of prayer. The gracious God who dwelt with Israel was One Who kept open house for all who came to Him, but God's house was no more built primarily as a house of prayer for Him than our houses are built to be houses of prayer for us. Do we say to ourselves that it was a childish conception, that it was an idea suited for the childhood of the world, but one that has no meaning for ourselves? Do we say that God is everywhere, that He is immanent in all the world and in all human life, and that He cannot be in one place more than any other? Solomon himself told us that we could set no limit whatever to the presence of God. But he knew what I think we sometimes forget, that the omnipresence of God is no mere physical omnipresence, like that of ether of which science tells us. God's presence is ever a presence that depends on God's will. It is given as He wills, and where He wills. Solomon's prayer was that it might be given to men in that beautiful house of His as it was given nowhere else. And it is surely exactly the same thought that was in the mind of our Lord when He spoke of the temple of His body. II. What He meant was that God's Presence was there given to Man as it was given nowhere else. In Christ, our Lord God came down to the world as He had never come before. 'The Word became flesh and dwelt among us,' 'tabernacled among us,' St. John's word is. God dwelt with us in Jesus Christ as He had dwelt in the Tabernacle of old. Certainly we believe that God's presence is everywhere in the world that He has made. We Christians do not so misuse our belief in the Incarnation of our Lord as to disparage God's presence everywhere else. We look upon every lower gift of the presence of God as the promise and prophecy of the higher, and we look at the Incarnation as the climax and crown of them all. Nevertheless, we do believe that in our Lord Jesus Christ God came down to us, as He had never come before. We believe that that Divine presence which fills all the world and which nevertheless comes as God wills and where He wills is given to us in our Lord in a way absolutely unique. We believe, as St. Paul tells us, that in Him there dwells all the fullness of the Godhead under bodily conditions, and that when the Jews destroyed our Lord's body they were guilty not merely of murder, but of sacrilege, and that the destruction of their temple was a righteous penalty for their destruction of God's. This is surely the first thought we want to bring with us to the contemplation of our Lord's Passion. That body that we see there being marred and scourged and crucified is the temple of God. III. We are tempted very often to forget the Uniqueness of the Way God dwelt in our Lord Jesus Christ. Certainly it is well for us that we should find God everywhere. The immanence of God in the world and in human life was a doctrine of Christianity from the very first Certainly we can find God in Nature, and we can find God in man if we first know what God is and so know what to look for. But if we do not know God, then we shall never find God in Nature and in man as we can find Him in our Lord Jesus Christ. The iron law of Nature and the wild confusion of our human life will only obscure to us the God Who is immanent in them, and we shall never find God as we need to find Him at all. God's power and God's intelligence are manifested in Nature and in man. But God as love, God as we need to know Him, is not manifested there as we need that He should be manifested to us. John 2:19 Truly when we remember that the great stones were then pure white, that the platform above them was surrounded by four marble cloisters, one at least of which was larger and higher than York Minster; when we remember, moreover, that these cloisters embraced a building of marble and gold, approached by a porch or gateway 150 feet in height, higher, that is, than the facade of St. Peter's at Rome, we feel... the greatness of Him who so profoundly realised the nothingness of all material splendour in comparison with the things of the Spirit, that He could exclaim with deep conviction concerning this marvel of His eye: 'Destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another made without hands'. H. Rix, Tent and Testament, p. 223. References. II. 19. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vi. p. 199. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 133. II. 19, 20. Ibid. (4th Series), vol. i. p. 90. II. 19-21. J. Keble, Sermons for Easter to Ascension Day, p. 54. II. 19-22. D. Fraser, Metaphors in the Gospels, p. 257. II. 21. J. Bannerman, Sermons, p. 287. J. Monro Gibson, The Scottish Review, vol. iii. p. 76. J. B. Brown, The Divine Life in Man, p. 197. Christ's View of Faith John 2:23-24 You see the double action. How foolish we have been! We have said, Believe, and Jesus will come to you, and as it were dandle you on His knee; He will abide with you, you will have long and blessed holiday. This false doctrine has been preached too long. Let us carefully read the text, for it seems to be a text that is self-balanced. 'Many believed in His name... but Jesus.' That is strange reading; what is the meaning of that disjunctive? Surely we must have read it wrong. 'Many believed in His name... but Jesus.' When was the difficulty ever with Jesus? What has He to do with these buts and shadows and fears and sudden darkenings of the sky? It surely should have been 'And Jesus'. Yet it is not; we cannot change the 'But'; it is a chilling word. There is more than criticism in it, that is to say, more than grammatical criticism; there is another kind of criticism in it. Criticism means judgment, criticism is not an exercise in words, in grammar, in literature in any form. Criticism in the heart of it means insight, penetration, estimate of qualities, judgment. Let us read the text again. 'Many believed in His name..., But Jesus did not commit Himself unto them.' It is very instructive to know that the word 'believed' and the word 'commit,' though so different in English, are the same word in the original tongue. How then may the text be varied, if not amended? 'Many believed in His name.... But Jesus did not believe in them.' To be worth anything, faith must be mutual. Faith is not an action on one side. It is not whether we believe in Christ, but whether Christ believes in us. He stands aloof from some men; they professedly adore Him, and He says, 'I do not know you'. In Thy name we have done many wonderful works. 'I do not know you.' We have made a livelihood out of Thy name, we have delivered courses of lectures upon Thee, we have gathered great congregations to hear us lecture upon Thee and upon Thy ministry. 'I do not know you.' 'Many believed in His name.... But Jesus did not believe in them.' I. Do not let us, therefore, run away with some simple, shallow conception of what is meant by faith. Christianity is not a process of voting for Jesus, as if in the uproar and the sham of a general election. Faith means a double action. It might be expressed thus: Man believes in Jesus, and Jesus believes in the believing man. Then is the sacrament complete, the whole history is radiant with inner and outer light, and the redeemed man and the redeeming Christ walk in tender fellowship and make each other glad with a new, deep, strange gladness. How did the 'many' come to believe in him or in His name? The text tells us: 'Many believed in His name when they saw the miracles which He did'. Jesus will not have it, He will not have a toy salvation, He will not have a faith that is built upon mere mechanics, circumstances, and outward incidents. Faith is not an applauding of something outside and visible; faith is an outgoing of the whole soul, be the consequences what they may. Then is the soul of Christ satisfied, Jesus did not believe in them, 'because He knew all men, and needed not that any should testify of man; for He knew what was in man'. II. Is this a new doctrine, that Jesus Christ does not respond to faith? It is as old as the 'oldest records of the redeemed Church. When was the Church redeemed? Before it was a Church. We must get into the use of holy paradoxes if we would understand the Scriptures. 'This people draweth nigh unto Me with their mouth, and honoureth Me with their lips; but their heart' what does it matter about the heart? If the lips are singing, if there is a great noise, if there is a musical uproar, what about the heart? To God the heart is everything. 'Son, give Me thine heart,' and I will find a voice for thee; give Me thine heart and I will attune thy throat to sweet music. But there must be a gift of the heart; as I have given thee My heart, so thou must give Me thine heart. Will not God stoop to accept any kind of worship? No. What sacrifice does the Lord God Almighty require? The sacrifice of sincerity, white-heartedness, frankness of true faith. Will He stoop to accept that from a king? Yes, and from the king's peasant, and the king's lowest servant God is no respecter of persons; God abhors the sacrifice where not the heart is found. III. We think we confer an honour upon God when we believe the Gospel. As a matter of fact we do nothing of the kind; it is not in our power to confer any honour. I must ask myself some searching questions. I believe, but what does believe mean? I believe in Jesus Christ, but does Jesus Christ believe in me? I would not for the world be without a piece of furniture called a pew in a church. What will that do for me? Nothing; it may rise up in judgment against me. Suppose, then, we turn round the whole inquiry, and instead of saying, Do you believe in Jesus? we should say, Does Jesus believe in you you whited sepulchre? That would empty the church, and the sooner the better, if there be not the real soul-faith in us. Weakness cannot win the battle, insincerity cannot wear, and usefully wear, the armour of God. The man who does not draw the arrow with his soul will never smite the king. Joseph Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol. iv. p. 175. Reference. II. 23-25. H. S. Holland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxi. p. 21. The Intellectual Type John 3:1 I. The prominent feature of this man's nature was pure intellectuality the love of truth as such; a strong man, and yet a weak man; one without whom neither the Church nor the world can well do, and yet who has many failings. This man was bent more on spiritual certainty than on spiritual safety. We all know this type of man lean of visage, hungry of soul, burning with a consuming desire to unlock the riddle of the universe the devotee, often the martyr, of the intellect. These men are the thinkers of the world, not its doers; they live in the brain, not the heart or the hand. Everything must be tested, examined, reasoned out, and found to be true, before it can be acknowledged to be true; to this they will hold even though the consequence be to find themselves branded as heretics, or, worse still, even though in the meantime they have to live without a faith at all. Such is the intellectual man, and such was Nicodemus. II. What are we to say of Nicodemus and his kind? First, this, that the debt due from religion to men of the intellectual type has never been fairly acknowledged. The thinking faculty is it not the highest, in one direction, which man possesses? Every great advance in human progress, let us not forget, begins with an idea. And what a magnificent service has been rendered to religion by the great intellects of the Christian Church! Let us, therefore, not say foolish things of the intellect in relation to religion. We may be sure that till we give the mind its place in our religion, it will not be long ere both will lose their glow and vigour. III. Having vindicated the place of the intellectual man in religion, we pass on to his frailties and limitations. For these intellectual Christians have their very decided weaknesses and vices, and as soon as they get so wrapped up in their thinking as to become one-sided, they lack both emotional intensity and practical force. (1) The first danger to which they are liable is the undue exaltation of the reason as a religious faculty. Thinking, we must remember, is not the first act of the soul. Man lives first, and thinks afterwards. (2) The second weakness of men who are predominantly intellectual in temperament is their proneness to live an isolated, visionary life, to spend in thinking the time they ought to use for service, to grow out of sympathy with practical life, to stand aloof in cultured scorn from the rough, uncouth, and vulgar world. Experimental religion is the doorway into Christian theology. E. Griffith-Jones, Types of Christian Life, p. 21. John 3:1 Jesus does for Nicodemus the three things which every thorough teacher must do for every scholar. He gives him new ideas, He deepens with these ideas his personal character and responsibility, and He builds for him new relations with his fellow-men. When Nicodemus goes away from Jesus he carries with him the new truth of regeneration; he is trembling with the sense that, to make that truth thoroughly his, he himself must be a better man; and by-and-by he is seen setting himself against the current of his fellow-judges to speak a word for the Master who had spoken such educating words to him. Phillips Brooks, The Influence of Jesus, p. 178. References. III. 1. A. G. Mortimer, The Church's Lessons for the Christian Year, pt. iv. p. 282. C. Perren, Sermon Outlines, p. 307. III. 1, 2. W. H. Evans, Short Sermons for the Seasons, p. 55. C. Bickersteth, The Gospel of Incarnate Love, p. 22. H. J. Bevis, Sermons, p. 254. III. 1-8. Expositor (5th Series), vol. ix. p. 54. III. 1-12. Ibid. (6th Series), vol. vi. p. 197. III. 2. W. P. Balfern, Lessons from Jesus, p. 27. G. Trevor, Types and the Antitype, p. 193. Expositor (7th Series), vol. vi. p. 422. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 143. The Ministry of Night John 3:2-3 Three times Nicodemus is mentioned in the Gospel story. Each time the fact is mentioned that he came to Jesus by night. Why is it that this peculiar stress is laid upon the fact that Nicodemus came to Jesus by night. I think it is because John would lay emphasis upon the fact that Nicodemus had a mind that was dark with perplexity and difficulty on the great problems of the soul and of religion. He came by night because there was something in the dark obscurity of the night which answered to the condition of his own soul. But why did he come to Jesus about the difficulties? Because he had watched Jesus, he had heard His words, and he had perceived that there was a secret about Christ that he desired to understand. I. The first thing I wish you to notice, then, is that this is not an old and obsolete story; it is a new and living story, because it is a representative story. It represents two things common to mankind in all ages: the desire to discover the best kind of life, and dissatisfaction with any kind of life that is not the best. II. Nicodemus did something he went to Jesus. He did something positive, he did something that cost him much. Be sure of this, it always costs us something to come to Jesus. It is not an easy thing. But the man whose heart is really aching for peace and rest will not stop to think about what others think of him. And he must do something. He came to Jesus. And what was Christ's word to him? 'Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.' III. And now, think of what it means to be 'born again'. It means getting back to your childhood. To get back to childhood, to get the weight of sin removed, to start anew Jesus says you can. Science tells us that all that is wanted to create a new star is a start. There is the vast floating nebulæ. If it will only cohere at some little point, then the globe will begin to form, and presently you will have a star. All that you want is the point of contact, the cohering point; then the new life will begin to stir in you, and the new soul begin to grow into the starry image of Christ. W. J. Dawson, The Evangelistic Note, p. 133. The Extinction of Evil John 3:3 I. Let us consider the bearing of the doctrine of regeneration on the moral classes. Plato was inclined to believe that virtue was not really teachable, or to be acquired by any prescribed discipline, but that it was the special volition and grace of the gods; and Christ taught this truth distinctly and emphatically. The suggestion and interrogation of the Greek passes into clear revelation in the Master. 'Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.' And these words of Christ are obviously reasonable. Goodness cannot be taught any more than genius can. And do not thousands of moral men feel this to be the case? They very exactly and assiduously observe moral precepts and ecclesiastical order without ever feeling the reality of goodness, that is, the power and liberty and gladness of goodness. Whatever genius does, it does with rapture. But it is a joyless thing to write, sing, speak, paint, without force and fire. Now, multitudes of men are moral without inspiration or delight; the life of virtue is dry, dull, and irksome. But are not some men born saints? No man is born a saint; a pure and fervent heart is never the result of organisation. If we are to believe the saints themselves, they were born from above, and by the grace of God attained and perfected the shining virtues by which they were adorned. To lift us into the highest life of all, there must be a supernatural act, a breaking forth in the soul of a new Divine power and love. There is a mighty gulf indeed between the highest Pharisee and him who is least in the kingdom of God. II. The bearing of the doctrine of the text on the immoral classes. (1) Think of the power of inherited constitution. We may have no family genealogy, but the grey fathers have left their mark upon us; their story is written with more or less clearness in our constitution; bound up in our heart are the reminiscences of their weakness, their wickedness, their barbarism. We can prevent these morbid tendencies breaking forth in practical life into criminal misdeeds, but our philosophers are right in insisting that we cannot in any deep sense get rid of the tyranny of a constitution hereditarily depraved. (2) Think of the power of circumstance. Men make a grand fight with circumstances in the kingdoms of nature and society, but a sorry fight with circumstances as these menace the kingdom of the spirit; they fail most where it is exactly most desirable that they should succeed. (3) Think of the power of habit. III. Let none stay short of this great change. IV. We must remember that this change is wrought in us only through the power of God in Jesus Christ. V. Let no man despair of this change being wrought in him. VI. Let us be co-workers with God towards this new creation. W. L. Watkinson, The Transfigured Sackcloth, p. 171. Christ Preaching to an Inquiring Soul John 3:3 Our Lord had just left the Temple, whence He had driven out those who bought and sold, and He had also worked several miracles. Then He retired, probably very weary, to some quiet house in the city for the purpose of repose and rest. I. The Secret Approach. If we had been in the streets of the city we might have seen a figure creeping quietly along wherever the houses would throw a shadow (I say 'throw a shadow,' because it was Passover time, and the bright Passover moon would be shining, making the streets almost as light by night as they would be by day). At last we should have seen him stopping opposite some house which he very quietly entered. Who is this man? A great deal of the importance and the interest of the whole account depends on that. He was not one of the mere common people who were beginning to throng around our Lord to listen to His words. He was a man of great importance; he was a member of the great council of the Jews, and he was a Pharisee. You would have to think for a few minutes to realise for yourselves what would have been the result if it had been known that the great Nicodemus, the counsellor, was privately and by night seeking an interview with our Blessed Lord. When we contemplate these two within the house we have that which is of extreme interest, for we have a highly educated man seeking to know more about the Lord Jesus Christ, and we have the Lord Jesus Christ Himself preaching His own Gospel. II. His Perplexity. Now we must just look a little more closely into the character of the man. Evidently he was a very timid man. I think we see something of the character of the man in the very way he began to speak. 'Rabbi, we know that Thou art a teacher come from God, and no man can do the work which Thou doest unless God be with Him.' There was all that, but still he was a man who could not sit quiet when his conscience was telling him that his conduct was wrong. There were many others who had been touched by our Lord's actions, and touched as much as he, but who just sank back into their sloth and never took any steps. But Nicodemus's whole soul was moved, and timid though he was, he was very much in earnest. III. Dogmatic Teaching. Then just consider how our Lord dealt with the sinner, because you know that sometimes people talk as if our Lord spoke much about practice, but very little about doctrine; they speak contemptuously about doctrine, as if that were a thing that did not matter. But here you have Christ preaching His own Gospel, and preaching it to the inquiring soul. And what did He do? He took two great subjects and spoke about Regeneration and Redemption. Religious truth requires that we should be told something, but on the other hand, our own nature and our own understanding have their limits and prevent us understanding all. Should we say if we cannot understand it all that we will not accept it? That is not the way God deals with man. We are to be content to accept what He offers to us, and to seek to understand it as far as we possibly may. When Nicodemus wanted to understand all about it, our Lord turned to one of the commonest things and said, 'You do not understand that. The wind bloweth where it listeth; you cannot tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth. And so it is with this great mystery of holy baptism; so is it with every one who is born of the Spirit' The fact is that God does not satisfy curiosity; He just gives us practical knowledge; He just tells us what to do, and when we have done it, we begin to understand a little more about it. References. III. 3. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. iii. No. 130. Archbishop Lang, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliv. p. 77. D. W. Simon. Twice Born, and other Sermons, p, 1. Expositor (4th Series), vol. iii. p. 183. III. 3, 5 Ibid. (6th Series), vol. vii. p. 88. III. 3-16. Ibid. (5th Series), vol. vii. p. 106. Man's How and Christ's How John 3:4 Nicodemus represents humanity when he says, 'How can a man be born when he is old?' and the Jews represent humanity when they said in a bewildered and perplexed tone to the Saviour and about Him, 'How can this man give us His flesh to eat?' I. Nicodemus said, 'How can a man be born when he is old?' Nicodemus was stunned by the new language. Christianity has a language of its own and a gamut of its own, music peculiarly belonging to it, and incommunicable to all who do not know the secret and pine after its expression as by the urgency and sweet pressure of a most holy and irresistible instinct. Some men are now trying to rub out the peculiar language of Christianity: when they do that, they will rub out Christianity itself. Christianity has a language of its own, and a tone of its own, not the oily twang that has been ridiculed in fiction, but a tone without which it cannot express the deepest mysteries of its palpitating and self-sacrificing heart a new song, a new language, a new speech; we must get to know it if we would understand Christianity. Here is a lesson in the new language. 'How can a man be born when he is old?' Nicodemus could not on any wise put the new wine into the old bottles. The conception struck him as in part ridiculous. 'Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb, and be bora?' That is how the literalists have been spoiling the feast of wine to which God has invited us, saying, 'Eat and drink abundantly, O beloved,' and the literalist has put before us the temptation to ask literal questions and make small and petty and bewildering inquiries. The literal critic has put up before the gate of the kingdom a great 'How' How can the dead be raised? How can a man be born when he is old? How can this man give us His flesh to eat? You must break down that gate, for it is only a gate of gossamer, it is not a gate of cast or wrought iron. But man is fond of putting up gates, suggesting difficulties, and saying, 'It appeals to reason how can it be?' Poor man! New birth and new life an old idea with a new application. Christianity always links us on to the past, to the well known; Christianity always springs from a clearly defined point. You know what birth is? Yes. Christianity is the greater birth: keep your eye fixed upon birth, and then take your mind away from that starting-point, right up to a wider, more illustrious application and definition of the term. But the ruler of the Jews was stunned. That is the point; no introduction led up to the tremendous revelation; the way was not smoothed and levelled up in carefully studied gradients. 'Rabbi, we know that Thou art a teacher come from God, for no man can do these miracles that Thou doest, except God be with him. Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again' that was the stunning blow, and the ruler of the Jews fell back as if struck by the thunder of God. And so we must be thrown down before we can be taken up. No man can come into the kingdom of God easily, jauntily, after a holiday fashion, saying, 'Oh, I see it, I see it all, perfectly plain and perfectly clear'. No, no. 'Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God'; and thus Christ, so to say, with clenched fist, felled the man that would make an easy problem of Christian mysteries. II. Now we come to the second How. 'How can this Man give us His flesh to eat?' another wonder, another stroke of the great hand, an impossibility, a most rhetorical and extravagant idea. Oh, what a life the parabolist has in communing with commonplace minds! What a crucifixion Christ underwent before the Crucifixion! to have all His words misunderstood, belittled, pinned down to little unworthy meanings! The prophet has never been understood, the parabolist has always been ranked amongst men who are unusual and unmanageable. They say they cannot tell what He saith. They are perfectly correct, they cannot tell. The mischief is that they try to interpret by a dictionary what can only be interpreted by a genius by a 'genius' I mean, a spirit, a kindred spirit, a similar power of conceiving ideas and thus the great Gospel has been mangled and mutilated and ill-treated in every form by men who have tried to crush it into cast-iron expressions, not knowing that it is a sky, a fragrance, a light, a poem, a joy, a mystery. 'How can this Man give us His flesh?' Do you understand that? 'No, 1 do not; the thing is impossible, quite.' There the Man is sitting. 'Yes, I see Him.' And He says that something He holds in His hand or can give is His flesh. 'Ridiculous, absolutely impossible! He is talking riddles rather than parables, He is a propounder of conundrums. Moreover, how can any one man spread Himself over the whole world?' 'Except a man eat My flesh and drink My blood, he has no life in him.' How? do you know how? No. Can you tell how? No. What is it to eat? You are busy with the wrong word; define the word eat, and you hold the mystery. Here is one man who makes use of a wonderful expression, which may help us perhaps; he says, 'I found Thy word, and I did eat it'. I see we have been limiting the meaning of the word eat, we have thought of it in only one fleshly possibility of application. Jesus says, 'The words that I speak unto you are spirit and life'. Is there a spiritual eating? Yes, there is a spiritual eating. What does eating mean? It means appropriation, it means assimilation, it means turning something that is outside you into a life that is inside you; that is eating. Now the possibility seems to dawn upon us. Eating is individual. I never thought of that. No man can eat for another. What a revelation! Every man must eat for himself, must eat in his own way, and must eat to his own satisfaction. I cannot eat in your way, and you cannot eat in my way. There is the individuality of the faith and the individuality of the practice. Eating is not only individual, it is daily appropriation. You might miss a day, but it will lead to your health's injury. Daily appropriation; we must eat at regular times and in a regular way, and in regular measure, and according to individual capacity. I thought that eating was sitting down at a table, and tearing something to pieces with edged instruments, and applying it wholly and solely to fleshly purposes. No; to eat is to live, to eat is to pray. We must get out of the literal way of interpreting Christianity, we must get into the poetic and mystic, and we shall find great delight in so treating and enjoying the Holy Word. III. These are man's negative hows: 'How can a man be born again when he is old?' 'How can this Man give us His flesh to eat?' Now Christ has a How. Are you prepared to hear it? If man wonders, Christ is amazed as well. We meet heaven's propositions with a stare of perplexity; Christ encounters us with an aspect of unutterable bewilderment. What is the dear Lord's How? He turned round upon us once and said in words never to be forgotten for the pathos with which they were spoken we had been asking How, how, how? and Jesus turned upon us and said, 'How is it that ye have no faith?' That is the great wonder to God. Ours are little intellectual hows, but God's amazement is that we have lost the tentacles that took hold of the Divine idea and hung on as with grim death until faith conquers and is expressed in perfect sight. Do not be knocking at Christ's door, saying How, how, how? lest He open it and say, 'How how is it that ye have no faith?' References. III. 4. J. E. Wakerley, Preacher's Magazine, vol. v. p. 81. Bishop Westcott, Village Sermons, p. 82. The Trinity in Salvation (For Trinity Sunday) John 3:5 It would appear as if this glorious chapter had been chosen for the Feast of Trinity, in order that clearly and definitely there might be put before us the distinction of the three Persons in the work of human salvation. The Father loves the world, and gives His only begotten Son (ver. 16); the Son comes into the world and is lifted up on the cross, in order that all who believe in Him may have everlasting life (ver. 15); and then in this work the Holy Ghost engages, Who implants the seed of everlasting life in holy baptism, and re-creates the soul in Christ Jesus. This is very comforting, and should give us a heart joyful towards God, since we see that all three Persons, the whole Godhead, is engaged in our salvation. I. The New Birth comes from God. Nicodemus was right; the miracles of Christ were to the beholders the undeniable credentials of His mission. 'No man can do these works that Thou doest,' etc. (a) It was the recognition of Christ's power that brought Nicodemus to Christ St. John 2:23 . (b) It was this that prepared him to receive Christ's teaching. Though he had not yet the courage of his convictions, he was of willing heart to hear Christ's words. II. The New Birth is Given by the Lord Jesus Christ. 'Verily, verily, I say unto thee,' etc. Christ answers the thoughts rather than the words of Nicodemus. He had come to inquire about this new kingdom, for which he was waiting the terms of admission; but his thoughts were rather carnal than spiritual, outward rather than inward. Christ teaches (a) The necessity of Spiritual regeneration to entrance into the kingdom of God (vers. 5, 7). He shows in what this necessity lies (ver. 6). (b) Spiritual regeneration is difficult for the carnal to understand. 'Art thou a master in Israel, and knowest not these things?' (c) And if this is difficult, how much more the mysterious nature of Him Who had been in heaven and came down to be crucified? 'How shall ye believe if I tell you of these heavenly things?' mysteries higher than the new birth (vers. 13, 14, 15). III. The New Birth Recognises the Agency of the Holy Spirit (vers. 5, 7). * (a) The water of holy baptism is the outward symbol of this agency. (b) This agency, like the wind, is unseen and mysterious.* Then the whole Trinity is concerned in our salvation. The Father certifies the work of the Son, the Son the work of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit witnesses in the human heart. References. III. 5. John Watson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lv. p. 401. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. liii. pp. 30-53. Expositor (6th Series), vol. v. p. 72. III. 6, 6. T. Arnold, The Interpretation of Scripture, p. 124. III. 6. J. Keble, Sermons for Ascension Day to Trinity Sunday, p. 219. W. G. Bryan, Seven Sermons on the Sacraments, p. 40. Born of the Flesh and Born of the Spirit John 3:6-7 God is every man's Father, but it does not follow that every man who is God's offspring is therefore a son of God. The Fatherhood is often interpreted as if it involved the sonship, but it does not The Christ who reveals the Universal Fatherhood of God denies the universal sonship of men. 'As many as received Him to them gave He the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on His name.' It was a right bestowed, not a right recognized. Consistently with this teaching, the New Testament sharply divides all men into two classes the children of God and the children of the Devil. I. This distinction Christ attributes to the operation of the fundamental and universal law: 'That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit'. All living things come into being by birth. Parentage determines nature. Upon this universal law Jesus bases the universal necessity of the New Birth. The spiritual kingdom demands a quality of being not possessed by the natural man. Here again we touch a fundamental principle. Every kingdom demands as a condition of citizenship correspondence with its own quality of life. Therefore the first demand of a spiritual kingdom is a spiritual nature. II. The natural man is disqualified for a spiritual kingdom. Man is born of the flesh and needs to be born again of the spirit. The term flesh is variously used in the New Testament: (1) Of all living creatures, 1 Corinthians 15:39 ; (2) the substance of the living body, Colossians 2:1 , 2 Corinthians 4:11 , Galatians 4:13 ; (3) the life lived in the body, Galatians 2:20 , Hebrews 5:7 ; (4) natural generation, Romans 9:3 ; Romans 9:5 ; (5) the animal nature of man without suggestion of depravity, St. John 1:13 ; (6) the whole of man's human nature, Romans 8:3 , 1 John 4:2 , 1 Timothy 3:16 ; (7) ethically of life lived in the power and dominion of the flesh. In its ethical sense it (a) is the avenue of evil, St. Matthew 26:41 ; (b) incites to sin, Romans 7:18 ; Romans 13:14 , Galatians 5:16-21 , Jude 1:23 ; (c) makes captive to sin, Romans 7:14-23 ; Romans 8:6-8 ; (d) brings forth death, Romans 7:5 , Galatians 6:8 . Christ's condemnation of the flesh is threefold: (1) It cannot see the kingdom of God; (2) it cannot enter the kingdom of God; (3) it chooses evil and darkness rather than goodness and light. The mind must be enlightened, the heart renewed, and the will emancipated before we can enter the kingdom of heaven. The need of this New Birth is universal. III. What is it to be born of the Spirit? God has thrown an impenetrable veil over the beginnings and processes of life. Life is evident to the consciousness, manifest to the senses, but mysterious in its process. So it is with the life that is born of the Spirit. There are, however, some instructive negatives, and one or two positive truths revealed concerning even the process. The children of God are born, we are told, 'Not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God'. The negatives are, that no man can become a child of God by natural descent, or by any refinement, or by any aspiration of the soul. The positive truths are, that it is a birth, by the direct operation of the Spirit of God, through the agency of truth. The life is begotten in the soul by the Holy Spirit and the vehicle of communication is the Word of God. The marks of sonship are correspondence and co-operation. Every man's pedigree is declared in his conduct. S. Chadwick, Humanity and God, p. 41. Reference. III. 6, 7. J. D. Thompson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlix. p. 136. Two Aspects of the New Birth John 3:7 1. * Its Naturalness * I. The reasonableness of the New Birth as illustrated by that which appears elsewhere. (1) Thus, to take an illustration on a much lower level, almost at the bottom of the scale of existence, you find a dividing line of a very similar kind. Nothing is more familiar to us than the broad difference that separates all living things from those which are not possessed of life. The living and the dead constitute different worlds and between them is a great gulf fixed. (2) Again, higher up the scale, you have a somewhat similar example. A chasm also divides the conscious from the unconscious. Under the former are to be included not only human beings of course, but the entire sensitive creation. (3) And so is there also, to take one more example, a gulf between man and all those other existences by which he is surrounded. Here, then, are three several gaps in the scale of existence. Nor is a passage from one to the other conceivable unless by a miracle. II. Will you observe here, then, that the distinction between the natural and the spiritual is as broad and complete as any of those referred to. (1) Thus the typical man of the world is just what his name implies, that is to say, he belongs to, is part and parcel of this present world, in which we all meanwhile play our part. His roots are fastened in it; he draws his life from it; and the fruit he bears corresponds to the soil on which it grows. (2) He again who is 'of the Spirit' belongs to another world than this. The narrow walls that shut in the present have been thrown down for him, and he has found himself already in a true sense in the midst of the eternal. If now all this be true, is it not indeed the case that a very wide interval divides them? And are we not entitled to conclude that it need not be looked for that any man shall merely develop naturally into God's kingdom? The chain of evolution is broken here once more. III. See, then, the infinite service which is rendered to us here by Jesus Christ. That He was not 'of the earth, earthy,' as we are, is clear. He is 'from above, and is above all'. He descends from that upper realm of light and love that He may bring us thither again. He is the ladder let down from heaven, by which humble and trustful souls pass up from an earthly, sinful, worthless life to God and true life in Him. Two worlds are ours. One belongs to us by nature or shall we say we belong to it? To another we belong by right. But between them a great gulf is fixed. But Christ has bridged the gulf, and our salvation consists in making use of Him. Lay hold of Him by faith, and let Him lay hold of you by His Spirit, and He will create a new life within you and transfer you into a new world. A. Martin, Winning the Soul, p. 233. Marvel Not John 3:7 Every man comes into the world wrapped in an atmosphere of wonder an atmosphere from which his whole after-life is a prolonged effort to escape. This sense of wonder is not an evil thing, although it is a thing to escape from. There are three possible ways in which different minds attempt to escape from this sense of wonder. They take refuge in knowledge, or in mystery, or in ignorance. The first of these, knowledge, satisfies the sense of wonder. The second, mystery, deepens it. The third, ignorance, crushes it. Marvel not at all, says ignorance, because you cannot know at all. Marvel more, says mystery, because you cannot know more. Marvel not, says knowledge, because you know enough. Christ in our text says, 'Marvel not'. I. Marvel not as if it were unintelligible. There is nothing more unintelligible in the world than how a soul is born again. There is nothing more intelligible than that it is. We can understand the fact, however, without necessarily understanding the act. All the complaints which have been showered upon this doctrine have referred to the act the act with which we have really nothing to do, which is a process of God, the agency of the unseen wind of the Spirit, and which Jesus Himself has expressly warned us not to expect to understand. 'Thou canst not tell,' He said, 'whence it cometh or whither it goeth.' But there is nothing to frighten search in this. For precisely the same kind of mystery hangs over every process of nature and life. We do not avoid the subject of electricity because electricity is a mystery, or heat because we cannot see heat, or meteorology because we cannot see the wind. Marvel not, then, from the analogy of physical nature if, concerning this spirit of regeneration, we cannot tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth. If we care again to take the analogy from the moral and intellectual nature, the same may be said with even greater emphasis. The essence of regeneration is a change from one state to another from an old life to a new one. Now, intellectually, changes at least in some way similar are happening every day. II. Marvel not as if it were impossible. There is one thing we have little difficulty in always referring to the creating hand of God life. We call Him the Author of life, and the Author of life is a wondrously fertile Author. Well, if God can give life, He can surely add life. Regeneration is nothing in principle but the adding of more life. So there is nothing impossible in being born again, any more than there is impossible in being born at all. III. Marvel not as if it were unnecessary. (1) When men come into the world, they are born outside of the kingdom of God, and they cannot see into it. Therefore the critical value of a worldly man's opinion on religious matters is nothing. (2) Human nature demands regeneration as if it were necessary. (3) If human nature makes it necessary, much more does the Divine nature. Henry Drummond, The Ideal Life, p. 185. The Mystery of the New Birth John 3:7-8 I. In this miniature parable of regeneration Jesus reminds us of the sovereignty of the Spirit, who quickens men to newness of life. 'The wind bloweth where it listeth.' The wind is, perhaps, less trammelled than any of the forces which work in the realm of Nature. No Canute has been mad enough to defy it. It has the attribute of incomparable majesty. And such is the absolute and self-determining sovereignty of the Spirit, who comes to accomplish the miraculous change which had staggered the faith of Nicodemus. To teach this lesson Jesus personified a dumb, insensate force, and described it as choosing its own pathway. He who is Divine enough to create new life in human souls is clothed with matchless majesty; and, whilst obeying no human mandate on the one side, recognises no impossibility or finite limitation on the other. This power from God which makes for human regeneration can overpass mountains and outleap all restraints imposed upon its action by our dim vision and our blundering unbelief. 'It bloweth where it listeth.' And yet its sovereignty is not aloofness or inconstancy. The Spirit, like the wind, which is its emblem, makes for an equal distribution of the great gifts of heaven. We cannot choose its methods or prescribe its times. And this is to teach us a reverent and implicit dependence upon His holy will. II. This spirit of regeneration lends itself within certain limits to the test of experience. Like the wind, it asserts its presence by an unmistakable sign. 'Thou hearest the sound thereof.' The subtle force attests its presence by the sign it stamps upon the face of Nature. So with the movement of this life-giving Spirit in human souls. We see the tokens of its power, for they come within the range of our direct experience, although its comings and its goings are veiled in impenetrable dimness. Ruskin has said that David Cox was the first painter to put the wind into his trees. And no human life is rightly sketched for us unless we are allowed to see the Divine impulses which arise within it. With all our lugubrious realism in art and letters, I doubt whether we have yet had a single picture of true conversion presented by a master hand. It would be something to see the wind in the trees. III. The movements of this spirit of regeneration are unsearchable. A veil of dense mystery is drawn about the steps of His visitations. 'Thou canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth.' When does the Spirit first begin to work in the heart of a child? Whither is He directing the man who receives His renewing virtues? To answer such questions would be to empty eternity, past and to be, of those unutterable things which God has kept back from us. Men who are at the opposite theological poles are in equal danger of forgetting that the Spirit's renewing work is inscrutable both in its beginnings and in its illimitable outlook. References. III. 7. J. H. Jowett, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlix. p. 323. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxv. No. 1455. III. 7, 8. J. B. Mozley, University Sermons, p. 266. J. Caird, Sermons, p. 65. The Life of the Spirit-born John 3:8 It is described for us by the Lord Himself, 'The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the Spirit'. Every one that is born of the Spirit. I. So then the life of the Spirit-born is free. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and the Spirit-born follows no law but his own law. Is this a bold thing to say? No, it is the only possible way in which freedom can be expressed. But this true freedom is achieved by the sacrifice of our own will and the acceptance of God's will. When the soul truly accepts God's will its own will dies, and then it enters into the only freedom of which the human being made in the image of God is capable. We are God's free men when we accept God's will. Can we always know that will? We cannot now hear the voice that spoke to the disciples. There seems something forlorn in the words: 'The Apostles came together to consider the matter,' when we think that Christ might have been among them in His old manner, with His 'Verily, verily, I say unto you'. Yet it was not so, for He sent the New Comforter, Who was to abide with them for ever. As He fills the heart, as the heart is surrendered to His care and doctrine, it becomes jubilantly free, free as the wind that bloweth where it listeth. II. The life of the Spirit-born is a life that makes itself manifest. Thou hearest the sound thereof. Ever since Christ came and spoke and died, there has been a new force in the world. It is a force that has often been contemned, that has oftener contemned itself. And yet men have heard the sound of the wind even when it seemed to sigh in dying, and however low and hushed it has been sometimes, it has waked again, and made itself heard by the most reluctant ears. Christianity has done much to change the world and its outlook, though the complete regeneration may be far away. Thou hearest the sound thereof in the wonderful Church of Christ, in labours innumerable of love and pity, in the gradual softening of the human lot; but above all, in the lives of the saints. The world will never cease to hear the sound of the Spirit-born life; but it will not know it in its magnificence till Christ sees all the travail of His soul, in His own country, in the Day of Sheaves. III. The life of the Spirit-born is mysterious. Thou canst not tell whence it cometh, whence it came at first, whence it is renewed from day to day. On whom does it lean with all its weight, stay with all its trust, repose with all its difficulties through long, weary days and longer, wearier nights? It is on Him Who is invisible. Whence cometh it its sweet, composed energy, its unwearied, undaunted hope, its surprising sense of freshness, its meekness and lowliness, that meekness and lowliness which are the yoke of Jesus? Thou canst not tell. Thou canst tell that the springs are far withdrawn, that they are deeper springs than arise in Nature. Thou canst not tell whence it cometh. This is the mystery which only the Holy Spirit makes plain. IV. This life of the Spirit-born passes to inconceivable issues. Thou canst not tell whither it goeth. It is a life that cannot die. The rose-bush year by year brings forth its children to live their little time, and at last withers and dies like them; but the fruit never fails on that Tree Whose Root and Head is God. Over the life of the Spirit-born death has no power. We watch the tender fading glow, and feel that the sun sinks to rise. A flash of light breaks through the mist of tears, and testifies to the glory-sphere. Thou canst not tell whither it goeth when the call comes to them to leave their beloved for the Beloved. We know not the destiny of any life that is born of the Spirit. We know not to what heights the life may rise here. We know not what manner of country that is on the other side of the river. He that hath found some fledg'd bird's nest may know At first sight if the bird be flown; But what fair dell or grove he sings in now, That is to him unknown. W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, p. 243. Two Aspects of the New Birth John 3:8 II. * Its Mystery * The figure under which our Lord speaks here of the Spirit is that of the wind. And what is the most obvious feature of the wind? It is its unknowable character. When it is there we know the fact. But in itself it is viewless, trackless, impalpable. Of the working of the Spirit then, we are to understand that one thing is evident enough. The fact of its presence is apparent always. Men will 'hear the sound thereof,' and have no doubt about it. But it is another matter when they come to try to give an account of these operations to themselves. I. In endeavouring to realise this to ourselves it may be useful to turn first to the working of the Spirit on the larger scale I mean in the religious life of the world generally. There have been epochs at which His presence and power among men have been very specially manifest. (1) First of all, for example, at the birth of the Christian Church in the world. When the believers had gone forth with their new endowment it was not long till they were effecting a spiritual revolution of the most extraordinary and far-reaching kind. And what is the explanation of the stupendous fact? No ordinary causes will account for it. It was an irruption of the Divine energy in the sphere of human experience that occasioned it. (2) Or take the Reformation. No feeble efforts of any 'Reformer before the Reformation' can account for it, and no human instrument can estimate what its effects have been and will be. (3) And the same thing may be said about those revivals of true religion with which God still is pleased to bless His Church from time to time. II. Turn now to the smaller scale of the individual life. And here perhaps the most important point of all is that which our Lord signalises first. 'Thou hearest the sound thereof,' He says. The Christian life then should, in every case, be recognisable. This, our Lord implies, is a fundamental requirement of it. III. What is it, then, that ought to render the presence of the Spirit in any life so clearly recognisable as this? If we turn to the Gospel we find the answer. The Spirit of God is the Spirit of Jesus of Nazareth. (1) The Spirit of Jesus is a Spirit of unworldliness. (2) This is the second outstanding feature of the Spirit of Jesus His inward adherence to His Father in faith and love and His passionate devotion to the fulfilment of His will. (3) And once more there is, what is the other side of this, His perfectly self-forgetful interest in men. We do not after all speak as though the character of Jesus were exactly that which is to be reproduced in His followers. It is not so. It is the same Spirit which is to be found in both Him and them, but in them the Spirit will appear with a difference. For they are sinners, and no measure or degree of sanctification they shall ever have experience of in this world can ever do anything but (to their own consciousness at least) make the fact more painfully apparent. Therefore the Spirit must be in them a spirit of contrition as well. Of the genuine Christian man who is filled with the Spirit, no one can say whence he comes or whither he goes. The practical lessons that arise here then, are just these two: (a) The unmistakable quality of the Christian life, (b) Also we are made to feel the incomprehensible nature of the Spirit's working. A. Martin, Winning the Soul, p. 249. References. III. 8. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xi. No. 630; vol. xxiii. No. 1356, and vol. xxxv. No. 2067. R. W. Hiley, A Year's Sermons, vol. iii. p. 197. Christianity in Daily Conduct, p. 325. H. P. Liddon, University Sermons (2nd Series), p. 78. J. B. Mozley, University Sermons, p. 164. J. Keble, Sermons for Septuagesima to Ash Wednesday, p. 333. E. M. Geldert, Faith and Freedom, p. 27. G. H. Morrison, The Scottish Review, vol. i. p. 223. D. Fraser, Metaphors in the Gospels, p. 267. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 154. III. 9. Bishop Magee, Sermons at Bath, p. 181. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. iv. p. 206. G. W. Brameld, Practical Sermons, p. 181. III. 11. S. H. Kellogg, Preacher's Magazine, vol. iv. Hugh Price Hughes, Christian World Pulpit, vol. li. p. 161. J. Keble, Sermons for Ascension Day to Trinity Sunday, p. 332. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 436; ibid. (6th Series), vol. v. p. 106. III. 12. A. Ainger, Sermons Preached in the Temple Church, p. 180. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. ii. p. 37. A. Whyte, The Scottish Review, vol. iii. p. 637. J. C. M. Bellew, Sermons, vol. iii. p. 258. III. 13. A. B. Wilberforce, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlix. p. 314. Expositor (5th Series), vol. ii. p. 242. The Serpent Lifted Up John 3:14 The old is always becoming the new. 'As Moses... so the Son of man;' as the old, so the new; as the historical, so the prophetical. All the pattern of the spiritual temple has been shown in the mountain, and has been frayed out in shapely and significant clouds which themselves were parables. 'That the Scripture might be fulfilled.' History always has something to do more than it seems to have; it does not only record the event of the day, it redeems old subjects, old vows and oaths; it takes up what seems to be the exhausted past and turns it into the present and energetic action of the moment. As Moses, As Jonah, As Solomon, As the bold Esaias; it is always a going-back upon the sacred past and eating up the food that was there provided. Do not live too much in what we call the present; do not live upon the bubble of the hour; have some city of the mind, some far-away strong temple-sanctuary made noble by associations and memories of the tenderest kind. T. 'As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness.' What serpent was that? I have read of many serpents the serpent subtler than any beast of the field; the brazen serpent; the fiery flying serpent; that old serpent the devil. But sometimes the serpent is found in unlikely places. I thought it an unlikely place when I encountered the serpent in the garden, in Eden, in the sunny paradise in which all young life seems to open. 'The serpent in the wilderness;' that is rough rhyme; these words belong to one another; but serpent in the garden who ever suspected such a concatenation of terms? What have these terms to do with one another? Serpent I can understand as being in the hot rock or under the bushes of the wilderness, the bushes so bare and barren; but serpent in the garden! What is the size of the garden? Big as the whole life. Every life begins in a garden. Some of the gardens are poor enough, but there is a touch of garden about all infant life; the infant life itself is a bud, a piece of a garden, a green banneret that might float over a whole paradise. Can we not have a garden without a serpent? Not under the sun. Can we not have a garden without a sepulchre? No; be thankful that there is a garden round about the sepulchre. The serpent is in the garden, is in the bank, in the balance, in all the riches, in all the wine-cellars, in all the gathered luxuries. II. What is the nature of the serpent? The nature of the serpent is to destroy. It cannot rest so long as one stone of the character is upon another. The serpent cannot rest until it has poisoned the whole life. Evil never built anything; evil always pulls down, upsets, destroys. The bite of a serpent is death. May we not play with the serpent? We may not. Are there not moments when the cruel beast is not cruel? Not one. The sandwasp paralyses the beetle with his sting that he may and that his progeny may profit by the paralysis. The sandwasp does not kill the insect, but thrusts a sting into him, not fatally; the insect can still lay eggs for the advantage of the progeny of the sandwasp. It is so with many serpentine tricks; we are paralysed to be used, not today, but to be eaten in six months. III. No human power can cope with the power of the serpent, the power of evil; if help is to come it must come from above. 'O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself: in Me is thy help.' It is not in man to find a way out of his own sin; it is not in man to invent an atonement, it does not lie within the wit of man to devise a redemption that shall be thorough and universal and unchangeable. Jesus Christ is the great counteractant; He can take the poison out of our veins. I will go to Him, I will say, Is there no balm in Gilead? is there no physician there? I shall know that I am in the right direction, and no man who is in the right direction, though he has gone but one step, can ever perish. The salvation is not in some great triumph of the intellect, but in the first trust, the childlike trust, the longing, loving trust. Joseph Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol. iv. p. 12. The Serpent in the Wilderness (For Trinity Sunday) John 3:14 The Gospel for Trinity Sunday sets before us each one of the Persons in the Godhead. The Father is represented as sending the Saviour to a sinful race, the Son as coming down from heaven for man's salvation, the Spirit as working regeneration and life in the human heart In this reference to a picturesque and memorable incident in the history of Israel in their desert wanderings, our Saviour exhibits Himself as the divinely appointed Healer and Saviour of mankind. I. An Emblem of Sin. (a) The bite of the venomous serpents is a figure of the operation of sin in human nature and in human society. It is diffused in its action, rapid in its progress, painful to those affected, dangerous and deadly in its consequences. (b) The death which followed upon the bite of the serpents is emblematical of the spiritual results of the introduction of sin into the world. II. An Emblem of Redemption. (a) God's mercy appointed the remedy in both cases. It was by the command of Jehovah that Moses prepared the serpent of brass, and it was God who sent His Son that He might be the Healer and Physician of souls. (b) In both cases there was a remarkable connection between the disease and its cure. As the brazen serpent was the means of healing those bitten by the fiery flying serpents of the desert, so Christ was made in the likeness of a sinful flesh, and endured as our representative that death which is the penalty of sin. (c) The lifting up of the pole is representative of Christ's crucifixion and exaltation. The banner-staff of the wilderness is the cross of Calvary, the sign of victory and of suffering. By the lifting up, which is mentioned by the Lord here and elsewhere, is meant, first, the elevation of the Saviour upon the cross of suffering and shame, and then as an appointed result His exaltation to the throne of heaven. III. An Emblem of Salvation. (a) The publication of the news corresponds to the preaching of the Gospel; the scene of the former was the camp, that of the latter was the world. (b) The looking of the wounded Israelite towards the brazen serpent suggests the indispensable, enjoined, but not meritorious gaze of faith. (c) The healing of the bitten and dying represents the blessing of those who look unto Jesus, instantaneous and complete. Christ's Musts John 3:14 I have chosen this text for the sake of one word in it, that solemn 'must' which was so often on our Lord's lips. The expression is most frequently used in reference to the Passion and Resurrection. There are many instances in the other Gospels in which He speaks of that must. If we put these instances together, we shall get some precious glimpses into our Lord's heart and His view of life. I. Here we see Christ recognising and accepting the necessity for His death. My text, if we accept John's Gospel, contributes an altogether new element to our conception of our Lord as announcing His death. For the other three Gospels lay emphasis upon it as being part of His teaching, especially during the latter stage of His ministry. But it does not follow that He began to think about it or to see it when He began to speak about it. There are reasons for the earlier comparative reticence, and there is no ground for the conclusion that then first began to dawn upon a disappointed enthusiast the grim reality that His work was not going to prosper, and that martyrdom was necessary. If John's Gospel is a true record, that theory is shivered against this text. And why must He go to the cross? Not merely as the other evangelists put it that 'it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the prophets'. He could not be the Saviour of the world unless He was the Sacrifice for the sins of the world. II. In a second class of these utterances we see Christ impelled by filial obedience and the consciousness of His mission. 'Wist ye not that I must be about My Father's business?' That was a strange utterance for a boy of twelve. He is our great Example of spontaneous obedience which does violence to itself if it does not obey. It was instinct that sent the boy into the Temple. Thus He stands before us the pattern for the only obedience that is worth calling so, the obedience which would be pained and ill at ease unless it were doing the work of God. Religion is meant to make it a second nature. To be in fellowship with God, and to be doing His will. That is the meaning of our Christianity. III. We see in yet another use of this great 'must' Christ anticipating His future triumph. 'Other sheep I have which are not of this fold; them also I must bring, and there shall be one flock and one Shepherd.' So then, this work was beyond the cross. And whatever it was, it was to be done after He had died. It is a 'must' of destiny, a 'must' which implies the power of the cross to be the reconciliation of the world. IV. Lastly, we have Christ applying the greatest principle to the smallest duty. 'Zaccheus, make haste and come down; today I must abide at thy house.' Why must He? Because Zaccheus was to be saved, and was worth saving. What was the 'must'? To stop an hour or two on His road to the cross. So He teaches us that in a life penetrated by the thought of the Divine will which we gladly obey, there are no things too great, and none too trivial, to be brought under the dominion of that law, and to be regulated by that Divine necessity. A. Maclaren, Christ's Musts, p. 1. References. III. 14. H. Woodcock, Sermon Outlines (1st Series), p. 174. W. H. Evans, Sermons for the Church's Year, p. 237. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 63; ibid. (6th Series), vol. i. p. 119; ibid. vol. vii. p. 297. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 162; ibid. p. 171. III. 14, 15. F. B. Cowl, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xviii. p. 430. J. Keble, Sermons for the Holy Week, pp. 114, 480. C. Bosanquet, Blossoms from the King's Garden, p. 262. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. iii. No. 163. III. 14-17. Expositor (4th Series), vol. v. p. 117. III. 15-19. Ibid. (5th Series), vol. ii. p. 440. The Course of True Love John 3:16 We are not concerned to deny the immense advance in thought and knowledge, the ceaseless floods of sunlight that have poured into every region where the human mind energises. We have asserted the right and the duty of every Christian Church to follow the leadings of the Spirit; but our Gospel remains unaffected. We can preach it, if that were possible, more fully than our fathers could. That Gospel is no other than my text: 'God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life'. In expounding it I shall adopt the divisions of a celebrated preacher. We have here (1) the Lake; (2) the River; (3) the Pitcher; (4) the Draught. The Lake God so loved the world; the River that He gave His only begotten Son; the Pitcher that whosoever believeth in Him; the Draught should have everlasting life. I. The lake is the Love of God. 'God so loved the world.' It is not too much to say Christians have shrunk from the full force of this great word. They have even interpreted the words to mean the elect sinners of the world. Where they have not gone so far as that, they have stopped short of the clarion proclamation. The words 'God is Love' are not to be found in our Catechism or in our Confession. They do not occur, as far as I remember, in any of the Confessions of the Reformed Church. No matter. We go back to the supreme standard, the Word of God, and we find the mystery there. God loves the world and each soul in the world. The love of the mass is the love of the individual. Each single soul is beloved as if there were no other. There is no limitation. God loves each soul of our fallen family. The worst and the most forgotten is strained to His bosom. Is it an easy thing to say? Nobody said it till Christ said it. Even after Christ said it many of His most faithful servants have feared to repeat it. I shall never forget how Professor Elmslie, in the brief delirium before death, when his mind was wandering, came back over and over again to 'God is Love, God is Love; I will go out and tell this to all the world. They do not know it.' Can it be that God loves Nero, that He loves Judas? Can it be that God cares for saints and martyrs, whom He abandons to defeat and agony and death? One thinks of St. Bernard's question, when, absorbed in meditation, he rode by the Lake of Geneva, and said at evening, 'Has anybody seen the lake?' We have to answer, 'No man hath seen the lake at any time,' and yet we know that God's awful attributes All are but ministers of Love, And feed His sacred flame. II. For there is a River that makes glad the city of God. We know of the lake because we know of the river. God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. The course of true love never did run smooth, and the course of the Divine love ran rough indeed. We do not preach that an easy way has been thrown open, and that now the gate is no longer strait and the road no longer narrow. No, God so loved that He gave. It is not merely that He sent His Son: He did much more. He gave His Son, and as the Apostle more fully expresses it, 'He delivered Him up to the death for us all'. That was the course of the Divine love. The love of the Father is the source of the Atonement. He gave in love. Belief in the love of God has been maintained and propagated in the shadow of the cross, and only there. Apart from that, where is the proof that God is a Father and not merely a force? In the Old Testament they did not know it, though there are passages that dimly shadow it Christ came in time. The heart of the world was failing. Martyr after martyr, prophet after prophet had died without a token. He came to change the cross into a throne, and the shroud into a robe, and death into a sleep, and defeat into everlasting triumph. III. All this love may run in full flood past our door and never reach us, unless we take the pitcher 'Whosoever believeth in Him'. We all know what it is to trust and to be deceived. It is natural to trust, and we go on believing till we are surrounded by defaced and abolished idols. Human stays may fail us, but there is a moment when we give ourselves to the Divine. To trust Christ is not merely to believe with the intellect the truth about Him but to commit our hearts to His keeping. It is a committal for time and for eternity, for life and for death, to the Lord of all worlds. Then is the channel opened between the poor, narrow, needy life and the great lake of love. Then the Divine Lover has His way with the soul. IV. ' Should not perish, but have everlasting life.' What is to rescue from perishing? What is to keep the fires alive the loftiness, the unworldliness, the willingness to die, the aspirations after purity, truth, goodness? Whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish, but it goes on to say have everlasting life. It is life which is the Draught from the river of love, which, as we know, is untouched by death. Our Lord Himself worked out His promise when He died for us and rose again. W. Robertson Nicoll, The Lamp of Sacrifice, p. 244. The Heart of the Gospel John 3:16 These words explain to us the relation in which Jesus stands as Son of man, first to God and next to us. This revelation is inexhaustible in its significance. Note, however, that though these words open the gate to infinite mystery, yet they are a clear and positive statement of momentous facts. I. But our first business, any student will admit, is to obtain a clear, distinct, and full perception of the facts, of the whole facts affirmed on the authority of Jesus Christ: to arrange these facts in their causal order, and to trace their relations to other cognate facts. (1) Jesus begins with God: God Himself, God in His totality; not with His 'attributes' or 'qualities,' but with Himself in His redeeming activity. (2) The God of Love and Right is at the back of all, beneath all, above all, and before all, since God is love, and was, and will be. (3) The third fact is God's 'love of the world'. It has no exclusions. (4) The fourth fact is the advent of God into the sinful and suffering life of man, bearing it vicariously as His way of eradicating it from the heart and will of the sinner. (5) The fifth and final fact contains the eternal purpose of Jehovah in His work, and is described in the clear and catholic language, that 'whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life'. II. But we men are never content with bare facts. We ask not only what God does, but why. Three things we must never forget as to our 'theories' concerning God's method of human redemption. (1) It is not the acceptance of any 'theory' of the Atonement that 'saves,' but the soul's response to the gracious attractions of the Saviour, in passionate devotion to Him and to His righteous kingdom. (2) Nor should we shrink from admitting that a complete, faultless, adequately adjusted, and perfectly articulated statement of God's 'scheme' of human redemption for all men and for every age is impossible, and can only be approached by sustained investigation, frequent rearrangement, and strict verification. (3) And on this theme it is vital to remember that all our theories concerning the Divine action have to be expressed in the language of symbol and metaphor, and therefore we must not mistake the symbols for the facts they shadow forth, or the truths they attempt to convey. (a) For the symbols are not all of equal value as means of helping us to think accurately and clearly of God; and even those that help most require careful handling, or they open the door to mistake and mischief, (b) Moreover, symbols and theories are of different values in different eras, and to people in different stages of intellectual and ethical progress. J. Clifford, The Secret of Jesus, p. 85. The Mystery of Love John 3:16 There are three great mysteries which are conveyed in this text. This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/expositors-dictionary/ Our Lord in Work and Rest John 4:6 'Jesus being wearied with His journey, sat thus on the well.' He carried His work to the point of weariness, and He rested in readiness for new labour. It was at the noontide of the day, and He was already worn out by His effort. Thus there is authority for Christians exhausting themselves in their service. This is a world of seeking, and He was seeking souls. He sought them as men seek for wealth and power, and never grudged the pains nor spared Himself. Every day found His strength drained. Little by little life was weakened and driven back. The throbbings of His heart, the journeys of His feet, wore and wasted it. He never indulged in the thought of what might have been. He gave all that was asked of Him, and measured the nearness of His access to the Father not merely by the time He passed, but by the life He expended. The way was weary because He was bearing His cross. It was weary because, with long and clear and bitter prevision, He saw the end. He went bound in the spirit to Jerusalem, knowing the things that should befall Him there. Yet He went forth without faltering, and trod the stony path till His feet were transfixed on the cross. In His heart was a thirst for souls and a homesickness for which there was no cure but one. His death brought Him into the heart of His desires at once. I. So we see Him in rest. He sat thus on the well, tender, eager, patient, loving, ready to be found even of those who sought Him not. He had earned rest, and it is in the repose we have worked for that many of us are most selfish, and most in danger. But though He was weary He was full of peace, not passing, insecure, momentary, but unbroken and lasting. He sat on the well, and He Himself was a Well, a Well of love and pity, and life and strength. Never for an instant had He forgotten the claim of His Father, the claim of souls. Still His lamp was trimmed and bright. We behold our example in work and rest. So much we know, and Christians generally recognise that they must have fellowship with Christ in suffering if they are to be truly one with Him. They know that none but a suffering Christ can help them. Then were the disciples glad when they had seen the Lord, when they recognised Him by the secure and comforting mark of the nails. Slowly but surely the Church begins to understand that the Christian life must be sacrificial, that sanctification and tribulation are indissoluble, that they must sooner or later take the road to the terrible Jordan with Christ and be baptised with His baptism. II. It is enough that the disciple be as his Master, and the servant as his Lord. He will give us the strength we need not more, but that. Perhaps the Master Himself had no more. As His day was, so was His strength. That we know. But was it greater than His day? If we find that the day is greater than our strength we are not on the true path. Our Lord does not lay upon us what we are not able to bear, but often, and indeed always, gives us a cross of which we are sometimes weary, and from which we sometimes seem to shrink. Yet the heart may be at rest under it, at rest with Him. III. The Christian self-renunciation is not of pity, it is of love. Love which is of God and knows no turning back cannot take wing, cannot detach itself from the soul. It is in proportion as that love kindles in our heart and is blown to flame that we can share the shepherdly work of Christ and labour and rest in His service. He will give us that love if we seek it, a love which, though wounded and deceived, will pursue its painful journey in spite of repulses and heartrendings. Yet how broken are our service and love, our rest and labour! How good to have them made perfect in the place we have never been able to come at in all those years, in the city where our dreams are living and waiting for us! Meanwhile, 'Blessed and happy are they who can keep the name of Jesus always sensibly before them: taste that honey: see that sapphire: hear that music: scent that incense'. Our Lord Sitting By the Well John 4:6 He being weary. When we are weary then, we are bo far like Him. But further. This His weariness was, so to speak, the cause of one of His most wonderful doings the reason that He spoke with the woman of Samaria, and converted her, from being a grievous sinner, to be His servant and His saint. Now I do not find that His disciples were weary. He being weary sat thus on the well but they were gone into the city to buy food. It follows then that it is not always those who have most of this world's strength who are most active, who are most ready to stir hither and thither, that really do most for the service of God. I. He was weary and therein He showed Himself true man. And notice this: that His strength and His weakness were equally for our salvation. It was His strength that created us from nothing; it was by His weakness that when we had been made from nothing He redeemed us. II. He sits. Here again He left us an example. For we are so perverse that often, when it is God's will concerning us that we should bestir ourselves against our spiritual enemies, we are slothful, and will not strike a stroke for His honour. And again, when we are laid aside by Him from all active work, when He says concerning us as His prophet did of old, 'Their strength is to sit still,' then we must needs exert ourselves to work, and labour when He would have us rest. III. He sat thus by the well. This well is a type of God's grace which brings us salvation. J. M. Neale, Sermons in Sackville College Chapel, vol. i. p. 166. References. IV. 6. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xliv. No. 2570. A. Maclaren, The Wearied Christ, p. 1. W. P. Balfern, Glimpses of Jesus, p. 182. J. M. Neale, Readings for the Aged (3rd Series), p. 24. Expositor (5th Series), vol. vii. p. 419. IV. 6, 82. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 188. IV. 7. John Watson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liii. p. 200. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xli. No. 2423. Lowering the Standard John 4:7 * ; John 4:15 * Jacob's Well seems to be a reality. Modern travellers to Palestine have visited it, inspected it, measured it. They record that it is dug in the firm rock, is nine feet in diameter, was originally 105 feet deep, and, although it is now choked at the bottom, there is still about fifteen feet of water in it at certain seasons of the year. All this, if it had been necessary, serves to stamp the story of Christ and the Samaritan woman with the mark of genuineness. The scene of their conversation is naturally, and simply, and easily pictured. There is no occasion to dwell on the details. I have chosen two fragments from the whole conversation because they appear to me to contribute to and sum up the issues of the whole discussion. In order to get at the purpose and meaning of our Lord's opening request, 'Give Me to drink,' let us inquire at the outset what conditions of human life did this woman represent in our Lord's eyes. I. Whenever our Lord dealt with individuals He was in Reality dealing with Classes and with Types whom these individuals represented. Behind persons our Lord read certain conditions of life, or vocation, that had in a way helped to create the character that was confronting Him. In the person of this woman our Lord at once detected certain conditions of life which He was determined to attack. He saw in its lowest forms, of course, materialism, or what St. Paul calls carnal-mindedness, that state of mind which has been the bane of every age, and assumes different forms and shapes, which is so dominant in our own times, which attacks every class. This was the product of that over-close and exclusive absorption by the cares and duties and pursuits of the world which, in the long run, often disqualifies the mind and the understanding of men and women from any capacity for apprehending or feeling the blessings of religion. We need not deal hardly with this poor woman. She was no doubt industrious in her drudgery. She was, like so many of her kind, a product of circumstances. She was no worse than her neighbours, and our Lord had nothing but tenderness and love in His protests and rebukes. II. Two Results Proclaimed Themselves in her Character: (a) She could not rise to any sort of appreciation of spiritual things, even when they were put before her by the Son of God Himself. (b) The second product of this woman's way of looking at these things was this It lowered her whole standard of spiritual and social life. Our Lord summed it up in the tender reproach, 'Thou hast well said, I have no husband: For thou hast had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband; in that saidst thou truly'. We can hardly deny, in our own day, that the high standards of social life are fast degenerating, that departures from pure ideals do not appear sinful to so many people, and yet that the land which calls itself Christian is far less shocked than it used to be at condiditions which are a reproach to the Incarnation. Where a revivalist preacher would probably have commenced to rate her for her sins, Christ simply commences by asking her a favour. And we observe that this method of Christ's at once prevailed. The idea that she could minister to Him, or that, if she refused, her help would really be missed, had never occurred to her before. She was touched by the Divine compliment paid to her. She was still in the dark about the ministry of the living water, but at least she had felt the need, and the feeling of a need is very often the first impulse of a soul's awakening, the first impulse towards that life that it longs to possess. III. No Scene is more frequently Repeated in Modern Life than this Simple Scene at Jacob's Well. Jesus Christ and the Samaritan woman are meeting each other today. In whatever vocation of life you are, there is Jesus Christ, always taking the higher path and the truer line in that particular vocation. And He calls to you men and women to spread His kingdom there, and to make His power felt there. That is the way in which He says to you, 'Give Me to drink'. Can we answer to that cry? Have we ever really tried to answer it? Have we any sense of what the Christian calling really means? If we only really tried to answer it, the result would be that, perhaps, for the first time we should begin to realise, Who it is that saith to us, 'Give Me to drink'. We, too, might be heard to give thanks to the Christ. We should be able to pray more earnestly in His name, because we should begin to realise that there is no other name but His whereby we can be saved. References. IV. 7. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 195. IV. 7-42. Expositor (5th Series), vol. i. p. 171. John 4:9 Is there no harm in never looking farther than the worst motive that can possibly be imagined for the actions of our political adversaries? Are we to consider the opposite party as so many Samaritans; and is there nothing that we have ever heard or read which should induce us to abate our Jewish antipathy to these brethren of ours who do not worship at our temple? This is an illustration from which political bigots cannot escape. Even their own pretensions of being always in the right will only bring the instance more home to them. The Jews were right about the matter in dispute between them and the Samaritans. 'Salvation is with the Jews.' But this is never held out to us as any justification of their behaviour. From Sir Arthur Helps, * On Party-Spirit. * Our brother man is seldom so bitter against us as when we refuse to adopt at once his notions of the infinite. Sir Arthur Helps. References. IV. 10. A. Maclaren, The Wearied Christ, p. 80. B. W. Noel, Penny Pulpit, No. 1701, p. 647. C. Bickersteth, The Gospel of Incarnate Love, p. 32. Bishop Bethell, Sermons, vol. ii. p. 467. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiii. No. 782, and vol. xxxviii. No. 2277. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 204. IV. 10-14. D. Fraser, Metaphors in the Gospels, p. 278. IV. 11. G. Talalun Newton, Preacher's Magazine, vol. v. p. 241. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. 1. No. 2897. IV. 12. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vi. p. 166. John 4:13 To believe that, whatever may be the substitute offered for the righteousness of Jesus, a substitute however sparkling, yet 'whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again'; to desire truly 'to have strength to escape all the things that shall come to pass and to stand before the Son of Man,' is the one authentic mark and seal of the household of faith. Those who share in this belief and in this desire are fellow-citizens of the 'city which hath foundations'. Whosoever shares in them not, is, or is in danger of any day becoming, a wanderer, as St. Augustine says, through the 'waste places fertile in sorrow.' M. Arnold in * A Psychological Parallel. * Jacob's Well John 4:13-14 Jacob's Well is admitted to be one of the best authenticated holy places in all Palestine, and the Greek Church has it happily in possession. 'Pilgrims throng to this small inclosure, with its low-roofed house, for their entertainment, its chapel built about the well, its bushes covered with tiny pink roses; but when I was there the hour was so early that not even a patient and pathetic Russian was before me. Birds were singing above the roses. From the hospice came a young man to take me to the well. It is very deep, and he let down a wooden tray with candles stuck upon it to light up the darkness, till far below I saw a gleam of still water. As I looked, bending over the small orifice, with the silent monk beside me, I remembered those other words said here so many hundreds of years ago, "Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again; but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst".' Robert Hichens, * The Holy Land. * References. IV. 13,14. E. M. Geldart, Echoes of Truth, p. 26. IV. 14. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xv. No. 864, and vol. xx. No. 1202. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 107. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 214. IV. 15. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiii. No. 770. IV. 16. J. M. Wilson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lii. p. 195. IV. 17. C. O. Eldridge, Preacher's Magazine, vol. v. p. 317. IV. 19. J. T. O'Brien, The Nature and the Effects of Faith, p. 223. John 4:21 In Blackadder's description of a Covenanting Communion held in the fields of Teviotdale, in 1677, we find this paragraph: 'Though our vows were not offered within the courts of God's house, they wanted not sincerity of heart, which is better than the reverence of sanctuaries. Amidst the lonely mountains we remembered the words of our Lord, that true worship was not peculiar to Jerusalem or Samaria; that the beauty of holiness consisted not in consecrated buildings or material temples.' 'Here I live opposite a church,' Goethe wrote in 1782, to Frau Stein, 'which is a terrible situation for one who prays neither upon this nor upon that mountain, and who has no prescribed hour for worshipping God.' References. IV. 21. Expositor (6th Series), vol. iv. p. 288. IV. 21-24. Ibid. vol. i. p. 377. IV. 22. J. Clifford, The Christian Certainties, p. 31. Expositor (5th Series), vol. vii. p. 333. IV. 23. R. W. Dale, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvii. p. 214. U. R. Thomas, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlix. p. 234. Expositor (4th Series), vol. x. p. 288; ibid. (6th Series), vol. ix. p. 468. IV. 23, 24. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xii. No. 695. M. J. Savage, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liii. p. 249. J. Baines, Twenty Sermons, p. 1. E. A. Bray, Sermons, vol. i. p. 400. IV. 24. N. H. Marshall, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxx. p. 321. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 44; ibid. (6th Series), vol. viii. p. 195. John 4:24 'I have often thought that the benefits of true silence are far too little sought after, even by those religiously disposed; and this I do not say as a Quaker, but as one who has some little experience of the necessity of having the human nature brought into subjection before God, in order to render Him acceptable worship. It is in the stillness of all flesh that we must approach the Father of Spirits. God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth. And wherever you may be in future, or however circumstanced, you will feel the comfort of sometimes uniting in this solemn silence, if it were only for a very short time.' Rachael Gurney, to her newly-married sister, Mrs. Fowell Buxton, Gurneys of Earlham, ii. p. 166 f. John 4:24 Compare Major Hume's remarks in his volume Through Portugal (pp. 300-801), as he viewed the Roman temple and the Catholic cathedral side by side at Evora. 'The great cathedral I have just left is as empty and silent now as the temple to the unknown God before me. In successive ages surely the same old yearning is re-born for direct appeal and nearer personal access to God, free from the trammels and man-made mediations with which all creeds in time burden the simplicity of their faith.... As the thirst for equal direct appeal for all souls overthrew the gods of the temple, so the same longing empties the great fane that has departed from the serene sincerity of the age that founded it; and thus the gods do come and go, whilst God lives on for ever.' References. IV. 25. Expositor (6th Series), vol. ii. p. 393; ibid. vol. x. p. 9. W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, p. 297. IV. 25, 29, 42. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 83. IV. 27-30. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxviii. No. 1678. IV. 28. W. G. Horder, Christian World Pulpit, vol. 1. p. 197. IV. 29. H. Allen, Penny Pulpit, No. 1632, p. 101. IV. 31-38. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxii. No. 1901. IV. 32. A. Maclaren, The Wearied Christ, p. 1. C. O. Eldridge, Preacher's Magazine, vol. viii. p. 372. Expositor (5th Series), vol. v. p. 447. The Dedication of the Will John 4:34 It has been a matter of controversy time out of mind which is the true well-spring of religion; and to this question, which is fresh in every age, there are two answers which demand attention. On the one hand there are many reverent thinkers who trace the roots of religion to the reason. It is because we are reasonable beings that we know the infinite reason, which is God. On the other hand, there have been many thinkers who have denied this primary place to thought It is not from reason that religion springs, they tell us; it is from the deeper region of the feelings. I. When we turn to the word of Jesus Christ, and to its translation in apostlic doctrine, we discover that neither thought nor feeling is laid at the foundation of religion. 'My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me;' the well-spring is in the region of the will. The first thing is the dedication of the will; the response of a free man to a great God; the yielding of self to that imperious claim which is made by the loving Father in the heavens. Of all men the most hopeless in Christ's sight was the irresolute and undecided person; the man who refused to take a spiritual stand, and who was contented aimlessly to drift. It is further notable in this connection that Jesus never overpowered the will. It was His glory to empower it, but to overpower it He scorned. II. We might further illustrate Christ's emphasis on will by some of the relationships in which He sets it. (1) Think first of its relationship to action. It is not the action in itself that Jesus looks at; He has a gaze that pierces deeper than the action. He sees at the back of every deed its motive, and that is the measure of value in His sight. (2) Or think of the relationship of will to knowledge if you want to know how Christ regarded will. 'If any man willeth to do His will, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God.' Let a man refuse to submit his will to God, and the gateway of truth is closed to him for ever. (3) Or think of the relationship of will to fellowship man's spiritual fellowship with his Redeemer. That friendship is not based on fellow-feeling; it is based, according to Christ, on fellow-will. III. In the life of Christ this is the crowning glory a will in perfect conformity with God's. He is our Saviour and our great example because of that unfailing dedication. The will is the very citadel of manhood. To be a Christian that must be yielded up. G. H. Morrison, The Wings of the Morning, p. 154 References. IV. 34. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vi. No. 302. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ix. p. 163; ibid. (5th Series), vol. v. p. 136; ibid. (6th Series), vol. iv. p. 223; ibid. (7th Series), vol. vi. p. 33. White Already John 4:35 Our Lord here teaches the ripeness of the world for the highest blessing; He declares that the spirits of men are ready for ingathering into the Church of God. Men everywhere are religious that is, they have a certain religiousness of nature; they have religious ideas, capacities, instincts, aspirations. Not only, however, is religious capacity present; there is in all men a felt need for the truths, the grace, and the hope of the Gospel. But, whilst we grant all this, we often fail to believe in the immediate readiness of mankind for the salvation that is in Christ; we suppose that much has to be done before we can hope to see men saved. This spirit of doubtfulness and postponement our Lord rebukes: 'I say unto you, The fields are white already'. Let us observe several cases in which our Lord's rebuke applies today. I. Take the conversion of the young. Go to them at once with a spiritual appeal, and expect the spiritual effect II. Take the conversion of the masses. (1) Take such of the masses as are ignorant. What do they want? Education, say many. But on trial it turns out very differently; the people intellectually despicable discover a spiritual faculty of the utmost acuteness. (2) Take such of the masses as are worldly. (3) Take such of the masses as are vicious. How readily Christ found the missing chord in publicans and harlots! The rationalistic critic is sorely puzzled because Christ addresses the loftiest and most spiritual utterances to a sinful sensual woman, and on that ground he declares the narrative is not literal; but here is a great truth that Christ wished His Church to learn that the guiltiest men and women are able to apprehend the sublimest truths, truths which convict, truths which save. III. Take the conversion of the sceptical. Whilst you sometimes doubt your belief, is not the atheist compelled to doubt his doubts? Speak not so much to the sceptic as to the man. IV. Take the conversion of the savaye portion of our race. 'The isles wait for His law.' V. Take the conversion of the world at large. The world waits for the Church to go in and gather the living corn. Where there are no external signs of Christ's action He moves along subtle lines of influence, and gives to souls in dark places Divine susceptibilities and desires. W. L. Watkinson, The Blind Spot, p. 83. References. IV. 35. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xii. No. 706. C. Perren, Sermon Outlines, p. 163. J. Farquhar, The Schools and Schoolmasters of Christ, p. 74. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vi. p. 442; ibid. (7th Series), vol. v. p. 3. IV. 35-38. D. Fraser, Metaphors in the Gospels, p. 112. IV. 36, 37. H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 1546, p. 1. The Double Joy John 4:37 I. 'One soweth, and another reapeth.' That is one of those old harvest proverbs, which leap to light, no matter where we turn in the affairs of man. It is the inequality of things which stirs the irony of the cynic. It would seem that part of the world's gain must come repeatedly from people who are in advance of their age. Theirs it is to strike out fresh methods or ventilate new ideas; yet often, so far as regards credit, they are superseded by inferior men who, with less originality, possess the knack of exploiting such ideas and carrying them into practice. The pioneer must apparently yield now and then, in fame and name, to one who is able to put the last touch to what he finds already more than half-completed, be it in science, or in politics, or in commerce, or in religion. In the glow of the harvest, the sower is too apt to be forgotten, and his work ignored. II. 'One soweth, and another reapeth.' It is, however, the consoling aspect of this truth to which our Lord seeks to direct the mind. The encouragement is this: that for sower as well as for reaper there is a joy, and a joy larger than purely personal success. Both contribute to a long, sure process. There is a slow continuity in Providence which links together the efforts of all who co-operate in a work, rendering each at once a dependent upon his predecessors and a contributor to posterity. III. Wise and becoming is it for every age to be reminded alike of its debt to the foregoing generation and of its responsibility to the next. The one thought saves it from the selfishness of pride, the other from the selfishness of disappointment. The success and strength of any age must go back, could we but realise it, to unhistorical characters, to men and women who made a conscience of doing sound work quietly, of foregoing applause; of making sacrifices, for example, on behalf of their children, and of denying themselves in many ways in order to let their charges or their offspring be fitted for the work of life. All such, in the home or society, sow for the unseen. IV. The parent and the teacher offer very conspicuous cases of this law. For even when they live to see the success of child or pupil, the young person is often unconscious of the extent of his debt to these early influences, and his recognition of them must be at the best inadequate. V. Every individual who allies himself with the cause of God, unselfishly labouring on behalf of his Church and generation, is truly a sower. He benefits those who come after him as well as those who live round Him. References. IV. 37. W. J. Mitchell, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lviii. p. 102, and vol. xlviii. p. 282. Bishop Welldon, The Gospel in Great Cities, p. 194. IV. 37, 38. F. W. Macdonald, Christian World Pulpit, vol. li. p. 131. John 4:38 As the corn laws, on the currency; as the amelioration of the criminal code, on Catholic emancipation he was not one of the earliest labourers or quickest converts. He did not bear the burden and heat of the day; other men laboured, and be entered into their labours. Bagehot on * Sir Robert Peel. * References. IV. 38. F. Hastings, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvi. p. 131. J. Crossfield, A Book of Lay Sermons, p. 49. IV. 39. Bishop Lightfoot, Cambridge Sermons, p. 212. IV. 39-42. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xviii. No. 1053, and vol. xlv. No. 2623. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vi. p. 120. IV. 41, 42. R. Allen, The Words of Christ, p. 124. John 4:42 The office of authority in religion is essentially educative. Like every good teacher, it should labour to make itself superfluous. The instructor should not rest content till his pupil says, 'Now, I believe, not on thy saying, but because I see and know for myself. References. IV. 42. Bishop Boyd-Carpenter, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvi. p. 18. IV. 43-54. Expositor (6th Series), vol. viii. p. 268. IV. 44. Ibid. (4th Series), vol. iii. p. 186; ibid. (5th Series), vol. vi. p. 339. IV. 46. Ibid. (4th Series), vol. v. p. 443. IV. 46-53. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxi. No. 1865. IV. 48. J. Keble, Sermons for the Sundays after Trinity, p. 278. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vi. p. 317. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vi. p. 353. IV. 49. R. W. Hiley, A Year's Sermons, vol. ii. p. 217. IV. 60, 51. Charles Brown, God and Man, p. 66. IV. 60-53. Ibid. p. 66. IV. 53. R. Higinbotham, Sermons, p. 109. IV. 54. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 223. V. 1. Expositor (4th Series), vol. vii. p. 136. V. 1-9. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiii. No. 744. V. 2. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vii. p. 133. *** Bethesda* , the House of Mercy John 5:2-3 ** I. I ask you to look, first, at that sad, sick crowd. There was gathered a 'great multitude of impotent folk, blind, halt, withered'. That is a parable of humanity, looked at from the highest point of view, and considered in the deepest reality of their condition. The world is a sad world; but that is not the deepest thought about it. (1) Men are sinners, and therefore they are sorrowful. (2) The disease is universal. (3) This disease is unconscious. My notion of what I am is by no means infallible; and these consciences of ours the more need they have to speak, the less they do speak. They tell us that the electric light, brilliant as it is, is the worst possible thing to put into a lighthouse in a fog. And the light of conscience gets wonderfully obscured by the fogs that rise from the undrained swamps of our passions. II. Notice where this sad crowd is housed. Do you know what Bethesda means? 'House of Mercy'; perhaps so named to commemorate some benefactor that had built the portico; more probably to suggest to the poor sick creatures a gleam of hope from the thought that God had love and care for them. (1) We are gathered, as they were, in the House of Mercy. Carlyle, in one of his bursts of melancholy, said, speaking about the Deity as he conceived Him, 'And He has done nothing!' He has done something. He has opened 'a fountain for sin and for uncleanness'. (2) The thought that we are there explains the sadness which is the ground-tone of human life, because righteous love cannot but punish where sin has disturbed the relation between Him and men. III. Note the vain expectation of healing. It is no use telling me what to do unless you give me the power to do it. And I want to know where is the power; where, in all the teachings that fill the world? Nowhere, except in the one word of the Great Master. IV. Note the Healer who comes to them that cannot come to the healing. (1) Jesus Christ drew near to this man. His attention was not attracted by any call from him. (2) Does not that teach us the spontaneous love of Jesus Christ to sinful men? (3) And does not the incident suggest to us, too, the individualising knowledge and appeal of Christ to each heart? He loves all because He loves each. (4) Does not this incident teach us, too, the one condition that He requires from us for His healing power to operate upon us? 'Wilt thou be made whole?' Christ cannot heal unless we will; He cannot but heal if we will. And then comes the commandment. 'Arise! take up thy bed and walk.' He gave him the power to walk; and, in the effort, the limbs were restored to their vigour, and motion was possible once more. The world is gathered round the fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness. It is not intermittent, like its prototype in the miracle, but evermore His blood avails for us. A, Maclaren, Triumphant Certainties, p. 263. The Angel of the Pool John 5:2-3 Learn to be as the Angel, who could descend among the miseries of Bethesda without losing his heavenly purity or his perfect happiness. Gain healing from troubled waters. Make up your mind to the prospect of sustaining a certain measure of pain and trouble in your passage through life; by the blessing of God this will prepare you for it it will make you thoughtful and resigned without interfering with your cheerfulness. It will connect you in your own thoughts with the Saints of Scripture, whose lot it was to be patterns of patient endurance; and this association brings to the mind a peculiar consolation. View yourselves and all Christians as humbly following the steps of Jacob, whose days were few and evil; of David, who in his best estate was as a shadow that declineth, and was withered like grass; of Elijah, who despised soft raiment and sumptuous fare; of forlorn Daniel, who led an angel's life; and be light-hearted and contented, because you are thus called to be a member of Christ's pilgrim Church. Realise the paradox of making merry and rejoicing in the world because it is not yours. J. H. Newman, from the sermon on * Scripture a Record of Human Sorrow. * References. V. 2-5. H. Bonner, Sermons and Lectures, p. 213. V. 2-9. C. F. Aked, The Courage of the Coward, p. 135. V. 4. J. T. O'Brien, The Nature and the Effects of Faith, pp. 153, 175, and 197. V. 5-8. S. Baring-Gould, Village Preaching for a Year, vol. ii. p. 174. V. 5-9. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxviii. No. 2269. V. 6. C. Bickersteth, The Gospel of Incarnate Love, p. 41. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xvi. No. 955. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ix. p. 215; ibid. (6th Series), vol. vi. p. 365. V. 8. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxi. No. 1211. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 235. V. 11. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxv. No. 1479. V. 13. J. Martineau, Endeavours After the Christian Life, p. 89. The Pardon of Sin John 5:14 The pardon of sin is a part a very important part of the expulsion of sin. The power of sin is not gone because the sin is forgiven. On the contrary, it will continue to exist and trouble us long after we have had, and been quite conscious that we have had, forgiveness from the guilt of sin up to a certain period, when that sin shall be destroyed. Pardon leads to conquest. The pardon of sin goes a great way to the conquest of sin; and we shall never do battle with sin very effectually until we have been, and feel that we have been, forgiven. Among other reasons for this I will mention three. I. The Condemnation of Sin cannot go without Something of the Sin going too. We often speak of the power of the blood of Jesus Christ to pay the debt, and to cancel the consequences of sin. But this is not the way in which it is generally stated in the Bible. There it is, 'Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the' what? not the punishment, but the 'sin of the world'. 'The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin.' Observe, it is the actual sin. If the actual punishment is removed, so also is the transgression itself; they stand or move together. II. The Man who has Tasted the Peace of God's Forgiveness is in a much better condition to encounter and overcome the corruptions of his own heart The secret of all success is confidence; the secret of all confidence is composure; the secret of all real composure is a heart at rest with God. Therefore, if a forgiven man has found a resting-place, the energy is greater; nay more, in that man, by the character of his pardon, a union has taken place between his soul and Christ: there could not be pardon without it III. A Spring of Action is Set at Work in the Heart with which nothing else can compare. He has a Saviour, and he knows it, a real, felt, personal Saviour; and that Saviour loves him, and he loves that Saviour. And from that moment self-denial, effort, achievements are possible, easy, pleasant, necesary, which before that, and without that, would have been, and were, perfectly impossible, and perfectly inconceivable to that man's mind. 'Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto the. John 5:14 In his volume on Shakespearean Tragedy (p. 386), Professor Bradley observes that when Shakespeare wrote Macbeth he felt deeply the ' incalculability of evil that in meddling with it human beings do they know not what. The soul, he seems to feel, is a thing of such inconceivable depth, complexity, and delicacy, that when you introduce into it, or suffer to develop in it, any change, and particularly the change called evil, you can form only the vaguest idea of the reaction you will provoke. All you can be sure of is that it will not be what you expected, and that you cannot possibly escape it.' References. V. 16. H. E. Manning', Sin and its Consequences, p. 67. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 439. V. 16,17. H. E. Manning, Sin and its Consequences, p. 33. The Sacredness of Work John 5:17 Work is the law of God's universe: it has stamped upon it the seal of God's approval: nay, more, it is the principle of God's own life, for does not Christ Himself tell us: 'My Father worketh hitherto (or, better, as in the Revised Version, even until now), and I work'? We must work if we would live. And that being so, it is surely for us a question of a very direct and practical kind, In what spirit we should regard our work? And what I want is to try and see whether we cannot find in our text a principle and a spirit which may help us all as working men and women. I. Work, let us clearly recognise, is in itself a blessing, and not a curse. We know that it is so for ourselves. What is it but work that calls forth a man's best faculties and trains and invigorates those powers which would otherwise lie dormant and useless? And the idle man is not only the useless, he is also the miserable man. It is a striking thought of an old Latin poet, when, in describing the punishments of the lower world, he makes one of the heaviest of these to consist in this that a man shall be condemned to do nothing. II. But work is not only the original law of our being, in obedience to which we find true happiness, it is also, as the words of our text clearly indicate, a Divine law. Jesus taught that as Son of God He was only obeying the law of God's own life 'My Father worketh hitherto (or even until now), and I work'. It is a truth easy to illustrate. The first revelation regarding God which meets us in the Bible is God the Creator, God calling all things into being by the word of His power. And no sooner is the work of Creation finished than the work of Providence begins. And still more wonderfully is this continual working of God displayed in Redemption. It is a very significant fact, too often lost sight of, that of the short two-and-thirty or three-and-thirty years that comprised the whole of the Saviour's earthly life, only two or three were devoted to His public ministry, while thirty were passed in the quiet seclusion of the carpenter's home at Nazareth, where, as soon as He was able, the youthful Jesus worked with His own hands in Joseph's shop, and earned His daily bread in the sweat of His brow. III. And so, when we pass to our own work, whatever that work may be, if we would only realise that it too has been given us by God to do, and that we can do it as to Him, what a difference it would make! Let us press forward in the Spirit which regards all work as noble and sacred in the sight of God. G. Milligan. Some Features of Christ's Working John 5:17 It is characteristic of the Christian Gospel that its Saviour should be a worker. In the old world it was a thing for slaves, and serfs, and strangers, not for freeborn men. Hence work and greatness rarely went together; and nothing could be more alien to the genius of paganism than a toiling God. Jesus has changed all that. It was a revolution when Jesus taught 'God loves'. But it was hardly less revolutionary when He taught 'God works'. And He not only taught it, He lived it too. I. Looking back upon the work of Jesus, what strikes me first is the magnitude of His aim compared with the meanness of His methods. He claims a universal sovereignty. He runs that sovereignty out into every sphere. He is to be the text in moral questions. He is to shape our law and mould our literature. He is the Lord of Life. He is the king and conqueror of death. Will He not need stupendous methods if He is ever to achieve an aim like that? And it is then the apparent meanness of His methods strikes us. Had He a pen of fire? He never wrote a line, save in the sand. Had He a voice of overmastering eloquence? He would not strive, not cry, nor lift up His voice in the streets. It is a simple lesson for every man and woman who seeks to serve in the true Christian spirit. Meanly surrounded, he should be facing heavenwards. II. Once more, as I look back upon the work of Jesus, I find there untiring labour joined with unruffled calm. With all its stir, no life is so restful as the life of Jesus. There are two dangers that, in these bustling times, beset the busy man. One is, that he be so immersed in multifarious business that all the lights of heaven are blotted out. That is the one extreme: it is the danger of the practical mind. But then there is the other: it is the mystic's danger. It is that, realising the utter need of fellowship with God, a man should neglect the tasks that his time brings him, and should do nothing because there is so much to do. But all that is noblest in the mystic's temper, and all that is worthiest in the man of deeds, mingled and met in the service of our Lord. III. Again, I find in Christ's work a mission for all joined with a message for each. We cannot afford, in these days, when all the tendency is toward the statistics of the crowd we cannot afford to despise that great example. Pray over that sweet prayer of the Moravian liturgy: 'From the desire of being great, good Lord, deliver us'. IV. Lastly, as I look back upon the life of Christ I see in it seeming failure joined with signal triumph. O heart so haunted by the sense of failure, remember that. G. H. Morrison, Flood-Tide, p. 209. References. V. 17. H. S. Holland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlix. p. 389. W. Alexander, Primary Convictions, p. 187. John Thomas, Concerning the King, p. 19. V. 17-27. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 245. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 326; ibid. vol. iii. p. 134. V. 18. Ibid. (6th Series), vol. iv. p. 284. V. 19. Ibid. (4th Series), vol. ix. p. 213; ibid. (6th Series), vol. vii. p. 287. V. 20. Ibid. (5th Series), vol. vii. p. 64. V. 21-28. Ibid. vol. iv. p. 165. Christ, the Judge John 5:22 We are very familiar with many aspects of Christ as the Sufferer, the Saviour, the Sympathiser, the King on His throne, and so on; but perhaps this particular aspect of Christ, Christ the Judge, may not be very familiar to you. Let us take up three points. I. Christ's position on the judgment-seat. I suppose the essential thing in the judgment is that our entire character and performances in this world will be subjected to a thorough revision, and our place in Eternity determined accordingly. And there is another element, perhaps, which is essential; it is that the proceedings are to be made public. But what I want to emphasise is, that on that occasion Jesus Christ is to be on the judgment-seat. We call it the judgment of God, and so it is; but the Divine wisdom and justice will embody themselves on that occasion in the Son. II. And, now, secondly, the bearing of this on His Divinity. There is no feature of the religious thought of the present day more conspicuous than the attention given to the life of Christ, and never since He was on earth has the life of our Lord been studied as in the present century. But there is a danger of being so occupied with what is human in Him as to see nothing else. 'The Son of man shall come in the 'glory of His Father, with His angels, and then shall He reward every one according to his works.' Does that strike you as the description of a mere man? He is going to judge the world. Can you conceive of a mere man doing that? Why, do we not all make a hundred blunders in estimating the value of our own conduct? But that day there must be no blunders, because the issues are far too terrible, for one's station and degree in Eternity are to be determined; and I say that no one can or ought to decide who has not more knowledge and wisdom than any mere man. III. And now, its connection with His humanity. The Son of man is to occupy the position of Judge on that day because the redeeming love of God revealed itself in His human form, and it is by that attitude and behaviour of thought that men are to be ultimately justified or condemned. The test by which it is to be decided who are the elect of the human race, fit to survive, and who are to be cast away, is their responsiveness or irresponsiveness to the redeeming love of God, revealed to man in Christ Jesus. J. Stalker, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliii. p. 310. References. V. 22. H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 1637, p. 141. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. i. p. 121. Expositor (4th Series), vol. vi. p. 76. V. 24. R. F. Horton, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lx. p. 289. J. Keble, Sermons for Easter to Ascension Day, p. 365. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxviii. No. 1642. Expositor (7th Series), vol. vi. p. 163. V. 24, 25. Ibid. (4th Series), vol. i. p. 203; ibid. vol. x. p. 287. V. 24-29. Ibid . (6th Series), vol. iii. p. 310. V. 25. Ibid. vol. ii. p. 62; ibid. vol. x. p. 295; ibid. (6th Series), vol. ix. p. 322. V. 25-29. Ibid. (5th Series), vol. x. p. 380. V. 27. G. A. Sowter, From Heart to Heart, p. 151. Expositor (5th Series), vol. ii. p. 173. V. 28, 29. Bishop Bethell, Sermons, vol. L p. 270. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xv. No. 896. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. pp. 131, 132, 205; ibid. vol. ii. p. 62; ibid. (5th Series), vol. vi. p. 250. V. 30. C. Perren, Revival Sermons in Outline, p. 257. J. Martineau, Endeavours After the Christian Life (2nd Series), p. 41. Expositor (6th Series), vol i. p. 26. V. 30-47. Ibid. (4th Series), vol. v. p. 403. V. 31. Ibid. vol. iii. p. 56. V. 32-47. C. Perren, Revival Sermons in Outline, p. 207. V. 33. Expositor (5th Series), vol. i. p. 202. The Burning and the Shining John 5:35 That there must be burning before there can be shining, that we must suffer in order to serve, is a commonplace of Christianity. Our Lord, from the beginning to the end, was the great Exemplar of suffering. He did not heal the hurt of His poor people slightly. He was despised and rejected and betrayed and forsaken and scourged and mocked and crucified, and made a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men. His name is our strong tower; and it is our strong tower because, as in the ancient parable, in the midst of it there is a wine-press. The name of Jesus, we repeat, is the tower of His people, because He trod the wine-press alone, and of the people there was none with Him. He ascended His throne by a rising stair of pain, and the final step was the hardest. Even so it must be with His people. When He had entered the last of His fields, He warned them, saying, 'Greater works than these shall ye do.... In the world ye shall have tribulation.' According to the quaint old illustration, flax is a scorching crop. It burns, according to the Latin phrase, the land from which it is taken, and even so the fine linen which is the righteousness of the saints involves the terrible expenditure of the soil from which the flax springs. I. Are we then to say, as some have been tempted to say, that the Christian is permitted to join in the work of redeeming love, that the voluntary dedicated suffering of man or woman is accepted of God in addition to the oblation of the Lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world? Some have thought that St. Paul pointed to this when he said, 'I fill up that which is lacking of the afflictions borne by Christ'. We know that this cannot be. Jesus is the one sacrifice offered for sins for ever. Else how was it that, when the last, roughest passage of His life came, He demeaned Himself so strangely? How was it that, when He who had been holy, harmless, and undefiled, who had followed God as a dear child without once swerving or once looking back, came to travel through the ravines and defiles of death, He could not say, as so many of His redeemed people have said, 'I will fear no evil'? How was it that, when He came to the last terrible hand-to-hand struggle with Satan, He almost asked the old question, 'Doth my Father yet live?' It was because He had taken upon Him the weight of our sins, because He stood as the substitute of His guilty people before God. He wore the crown of thorns as a fair mitre, when, as our Eternal High Priest, He offered up the evening sacrifice of the world. II. But it is true, nevertheless, that the saints must and do fill up that which is lacking of the afflictions borne by Christ. It is true that there is a certain weight of weariness and woe which must be accumulated ere there is enough, ere sorrow and sighing flee away. It is true that Christ really participates in the sufferings of His people. What every member bears is borne by Him. In all our afflictions He is afflicted. If we burn with fire divinely kindled and upward pointing, we shall sooner or later shine. We shall in a true sense work together with Christ in the redemption of the world. II. There must then be the burning and the shining, for the shining can never be unless there is first the burning. It is good to know this, for it gives a purpose to pain. 'I cried to Thee, O Lord, and unto Thee I made supplication. " What profit is there in my blood?"' What profit? If we only knew that, the pain might be borne proudly and lightly. If we knew that sooner or later we might shine, we might burn patiently. We might put sacrifice into our work willingly, and without sacrifice it will come to nought. A great saint has said that the sentence, ' That will do,' has done more harm than any other in the English language. Work done without pain will not last, will not shine. After we have done the will of God we shall receive the promise. Let us not think that necessarily the burning and the shining go together, but let us be sure that the shining will come at the last. Blessed are they who know it while they are burning, who can not only rejoice as they look back, but can be glad in the very moment of the intensest pressure of the pain, who can understand that when they seem to be weakest they are strongest, and who can put away from them the temptations of the Adversary. However this may be, we know that they shall shine at last. They that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament and as the stars for ever and ever. We know the symbols of love, of peace, of satisfaction, of rest in the keeping of that time and everlasting Feast of Tabernacles whereof it is written, 'The tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them'. We know the assurance that sorrow and suffering are not to be found in that country, neither weariness nor tears nor shame. But all our imaginings, even when helped by the promises, fail us; and it is well that we should go bound in the spirit to the heavenly Jerusalem, not knowing the things that shall befall us there. What we do know is that the Source of Grace is the same there and here. The Tree of Life stretcheth its branches over the Sea of Glass, and its boughs to the River of Death. W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, p. 257. References. V. 35. H. Varley, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lv. p. 228. J. M. Neale, Sermons for Some Feast Days in the Christian Year, p. 123. V. 36. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vii. p. 74. V. 39. H. H. Henson, Godly Union and Concord, p. 224. W. H. Evans, Sermons for the Church's Year, p. 267. H. H. Henson, The Value of the Bible, p. 22. J. R. Bennie, The Eternal Life, p. 13. W. M. Sinclair, Words from St. Paul's, p. 1. J. Smith, The Integrity of Scripture, p. 72. W. H. Brookfield, Sermons, p. 205. G. Trevor, Types and the Antitype, p. 1. Expositor (7th Series), vol. vi. p. 53. V. 39, 40. H. H. Henson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lx. p. 385. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 16. V. 39, 45. Ibid. p. 83. The Authority of the Will John 5:40 Our Lord in making His appeal to the Jews points to the evidence that should be enough to convince them. He first refers to the evidence of John the Baptist, whom they profess to believe to have been a man of God and a prophet. And further, our Lord appeals to their own Scriptures which they reverenced and made an idol. And yet they rejected their Saviour wilfully, almost malignantly. That this should be so, that man should have such terrible power seems the great mystery of our life; and yet it cannot be otherwise if we are to remain men. This place and power of human will we must recognise. I. In practical ethics there is nothing beneath or beyond the will. We may do an act against our judgment, and against what we admit should be our will, against the better part of our nature; but all the same the will is the responsible agent of the act. When Romeo went to the old apothecary to purchase poison, without disguising that the poison was for an illegal object, Shakespeare makes the apothecary give the poison for the sake of the reward, using this very temptation we are discussing as a salve to his conscience, 'My poverty and not my will consents'. Nay, it was against his conscience, against his better judgment, but not against his will. The temptation was too strong for his will; and the selling of the poison to be used for suicide * was his will. * II. So all-important is the will in the moral judgment of a man that we can say as an unerring test that according to the character of the will is the character of the life. The philosopher Kant implied this when he declared that there is nothing good in the world but a good will, and nothing evil in the world but an evil will. III. What is it makes a will good or evil? And how is this good will to be acquired? A good will is, in Bible language, a will 'conformed to the will of God'. This is the psychology of the Christian life. 'It is a God who worketh in you to will.' The will that is so given to God, and kept by God, and filled by God, is safe, and grows into strength and beauty. Hugh Black, Edinburgh Sermons, p. 55. References. V. 40. A. G. Mortimer, The Church's Lesson for the Christian Year, pt. ii. p. 291. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. i. No. 52, and vol. xxii. No. 1324. Expositor (7th Series), vol. v. p. 100. John 5:40 One of Richard Cameron's most fervid sermons was preached from this text. It includes the following appeal: 'Now for you that are saying this "It is true, it is not easy to bring folk to Christ. I have had a profession for many years," ye say, "and yet, I fear, I have never yet come to Christ". But I say our Lord is here this day saying, "Will ye take Me, ye that have a lie so long in your right hand?" There may be some saying, "If I get or take Him, I shall get a cross also". Well, that is true. But ye will get a sweet cross. Thus we offer Him unto you, in the parishes of Auchinlech, Douglas, Crawfordjohn, and all ye that live thereabout And what say ye? Will ye take Him? Tell us what ye say, for we take instruments before these hills and mountains around us that we have offered Him to you this day. Angels are wondering at this offer: they stand beholding with admiration that our Lord is giving you such an offer this day.' References. V. 41. Expositor (7th Series), vol. v. p. 85. V. 42. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. iv. p. 109. V. 43-45. Expositor (5th Series), vol. vii. p. 151. V. 44. C. S. Home, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlv. p. 229. C. G. Finney, Penny Pulpit, No. 1635, p. 125. Bishop Creighton, The Heritage of the Spirit, p. 73. Bishop Gore, Christian World Pulpit, vol. 1. p. 65. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxi. No. 1245. Expositor (6th Series), vol. viii. p. 274. V. 46. Ibid. vol. xi. p. 345. V. 45, 47. E. T. J. Merrimer, Sermons Preached at Lyme Regis, p. 209. Faith Self-enlarging John 5:46 A man does not believe his own creed until he is prepared to add to it. The creed must be of the quality of the man. Man is always adding to himself. Man changes, creed changes, but changes by enlargement, evolution, ever-increasing light and adequacy and tenderness; it does not change eccentrically or capriciously, but it moves in a great sequence of expansion, a movement towards the throne. Be progressive, therefore, and do not you imagine or represent that the creed or the statement of the creed is final. Men might have rested in Moses; there was a point of rest even in that great legislator; you could not add a tomorrow to his today, the tomorrow must come along the track of the gloom of the night, and must set itself in the eastern sky according to the decree of an unchangeable progress: but the change does come. I. Had ye believed in Sin you would have believed in the Atonement. A man's heterodoxy does not begin at the Atonement, the heterodoxy began with a false conception of the sin. No man can be a theologian who has not been burned with a sense of guilt, reddened with blushes of inexpressible shame, torn to pieces in his very soul by self-accusation and self-torment. If we suppose that the Atonement is a mere idea, or theory, or suggestion to which a man may come along an intellectual line and say that he has thought about it and considered it, and upon the whole he has come to certain conclusions upon it away! That man cannot speak the word Atonement, much less explain it or form an opinion about it; it is not along such lines that men reach the agony of the cross. The point to be kept steadily in mind is this, that one belief necessitates another, that faith grows towards more faith in the degree in which it is originally true, intelligent, and sincerely held. We are not holding a cold white cinder out of which all the fire has gone, but we are entrusted with a living coal from the living altar, a great self-evidencing fact and movement in experience and in history. II. Had ye believed in agnosticism ye would have believed in God, and had ye believed in God ye would have believed in agnosticism. Is not that paradoxical? Far from it; it is by keeping close company with Jesus Christ that we begin to know that God is unknowable, that He has kept some things wholly to Himself, that there is no searching of His understanding, and that He can only be knowable by condescension and by revelation. God is unknowable, but God has the power to make Himself known in the degree in which our capacity can receive Him. III. Keep steadily in mind what the purpose of this meditation is, namely, to show that a right belief at the beginning compels a man to add to that belief everything that is kindred and cognate to its own quality and its own purpose. Thus the great religion of the Bible takes into itself by an absorption vindicated by fact and by spiritual righteousness all that is true, beautiful, musical, benevolent, philanthropic; it will not allow one daisy to fall out of its lap, and it has accommodation enough for the planets. Know that your first faith is right, because you are growing in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. IV. Have we faith? The spirit of faith longs for more worlds for faith to conquer. Lord, increase our faith; give us vision after vision of Thy loveliness and Thy majesty, and give these visions to us, not in response to our vanity, intellectual or moral, but in response to an earnest desire to know somewhat more of the vastness of Thy kingdom, and the beneficence of Thine empire. Joseph Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol. i. p. 122. References. VI. Expositor (4th Series), vol. iii. p. 417; ibid. vol. vi. pp. 36, 77; ibid. vol. ix. p. 132. VI. 3. Ibid. p. 302. VI. 4. Ibid. vol. v. p. 118; ibid. (7th Series), vol. v. p. 10. The Gospel Feast John 6:5 I. From the beginning, the greatest rite of religion has been a feast; the partaking of God's bounties, in the way of nature, has been consecrated to a more immediate communion with God Himself. For instance, when Isaac was weaned, Abraham 'made a great feast,' and then it was that Sarah prophesied: 'Cast out this bondwoman and her son,' she said, prophesying the introduction of the spirit, grace, and truth which the Gospel contains, instead of the bondage of the outward forms of the Law. Again, it was at a feast of savoury meat that the spirit of prophecy came upon Isaac, and he blessed Jacob. In like manner the first beginning of our Lord's miracles was at a marriage feast, when He changed water into wine; and when St. Matthew was converted he entertained our Lord at a feast At a feast, too, our Lord allowed the penitent woman to wash with tears and anoint His feet, and pronounced her forgiveness; and at a feast, before His Passion, He allowed Mary to anoint them with costly ointment, and to wipe them with her hair. Thus with our Lord, and with the Patriarchs, a feast was a time of grace; so much so, that He was said by the Pharisees to come eating and drinking, to be 'a winebibber and gluttonous, a friend of publicans and sinners'. II. And next, in order to make this feasting still more solemn, it had been usual at all times to precede it by a direct act of religion by a prayer, or blessing, or sacrifice, or by the presence of a priest, which implied it. Thus when Melchizedek came out to meet Abraham, and bless him, 'he brought forth bread and wine'; to which it is added, 'and he was the priest of the Most High God'. III. And next let this be observed, that the descriptions in the Old Testament of the perfect state of religious privilege, viz. that under the Gospel which was then to come, are continually made under the image of a feast, a feast of some special and choice goods of this world, corn, wine, and the like; goods of this world chosen from the mass as a specimen of all, as types and means of seeking, and means of obtaining, the unknown spiritual blessings, which 'eye hath not seen nor ear heard'. And these special goods of nature, so set apart, are more frequently than anything else, com or bread, and wine, as the figures of what was greater, though others are mentioned also. Now the first of these of which we read is the fruit of the tree of life, the leaves of which are also mentioned in the prophets. The tree of life was that tree in the Garden of Eden, the eating of which would have made Adam immortal; a Divine gift lay hid in an outward form. The Prophet Ezekiel speaks of it afterwards in the following words, showing that a similar blessing was in store for the redeemed: 'By the river, upon the bank thereof, on this side, and on that side, shall grow all trees for meat, whose leaf shall not fade, neither shall the fruit thereof be consumed. It shall bring forth new fruits according to his months, because their waters they issued out of the sanctuary; and the fruit thereof shall be for meat, and the leaf thereof for medicine.' Like to which is St. John's account of the tree of life, 'which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations'. And hence we read in the Canticles of the apple-tree, and of sitting down under its shadow, and its fruit being sweet to the taste. Here then in type is signified the sacred gift of which I am speaking; and yet it has not seemed good to the gracious Giver literally to select fruit or leaves as the means of His invisible blessings. He might have spiritually fed us with such, had He pleased for man liveth not by bread only, but by the word of His mouth. His Word might have made the fruit of the tree His sacrament, but He has willed otherwise. The same wonderful feast is put before us in the book of Proverbs, where Wisdom stands for Christ 'Wisdom hath builded her house,' that is, Christ has built His Church; 'she hath hewn out her seven pillars, she hath killed her beasts, she hath mingled her wine (that is, Christ has prepared His Supper), she hath also furnished her table (that is, the Lord's Table), she hath sent forth her maidens (that is, the priests of the Lord), she crieth upon the highest places of the city 'Whoso is simple, let him turn in hither; as for him that wanteth understanding, she saith to him, Come, eat of My Bread and drink of the Wine which I have mingled,' which is like saying, 'Come unto Me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will refresh you'. Like which are the Prophet Isaiah's words: 'Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money, come ye buy and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price'. And such too is the description in the book of Canticles: 'The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grapes give a good smell'.... 'Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, I will get Me to the mountain of myrrh, and to the hill of frankincense.'... 'I have gathered My myrrh with My spice, I have eaten My honeycomb with My honey, I have drunk My wine with My milk; eat, O friends, drink, yea drink abundantly, O beloved!' In connection with such passages as these should be observed St. Paul's words, which seem from the antithesis to be an allusion to the same most sacred Ordinance: 'Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess, but be filled with the Spirit,' with that new wine which God the Holy Spirit ministers in the Supper of the Great King. J. H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. vii. p. 167. References. VI. 5. J. Keble, Sermons for Lent to Passion-tide, p. 309. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. ii. p. 96. VI. 5, 6. Expositor (7 th Series), vol. vi. p. 359. VI. 5-7. Ibid. (4th Series), vol. i. p. 79. VI. 6. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxvii. No. 1605. VI. 7. T. F. Crosse, Sermons, p. 121. VI. 8. F. W. Farrar, Everyday Christian Life, p. 264. VI. 9. J. G. Tatley, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lix. p. 251. H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Sunday Sermonettes for a Year, p. 37. VI. 10. Expositor (7 th Series), vol. v. p. 378. VI. 10-12. A. Ainger, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lx. p. 55. VI. 11. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxvii. No. 2216. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 261. Superabundant Provision John 6:12 This is one of the passages on which the Revised Version throws considerable light It corrects the general impression that the Apostles were bidden to gather up the fragments which the multitudes had left in the places where they had been sitting. The translation 'Gather up the broken pieces that remain over' helps us to picture the Apostles carefully gathering the superabundant provision their Lord had made, and of which the satisfied multitudes could not make use. They were pieces which the Lord Himself had blessed and broken, and which lay at His feet, an evidence of His bounty. This interpretation of the command suggests, as we shall see, deeper thoughts than the mere duty of thrift and careful avoidance of waste. I. The Miracle Recalled. In order the better to grasp the significance of the command, it is necessary to recall a few matters connected with the miracle of the feeding of the multitude which give it point When our Lord and His disciples had first come in sight of the great company of people, He had inquired of Philip, who was a native of the district, 'Whence are we to buy bread that these may eat?' When we place side by side the four accounts we have of this miracle, it seems as though the rough calculation of two hundred pennyworth of bread that Philip had made when Jesus first consulted him had been a subject of discussion amongst the Twelve during the day. No sooner had Jesus given the command, 'Give ye them to eat,' than they say to Him, 'Shall we go and buy two hundred pennyworth of bread? 'This was an amount altogether beyond their means, and their question was evidently intended to prove to their Master the impossibility of fulfilling His command. The Master gently rebukes such calculations, and bids His disciples turn their eyes from the multitudes to take stock of their own resources. He does not send them to buy what they cannot provide the money to pay for; He only asks them to bring to Him what they know they possess. Possibly they imagined that when their Lord knew the poverty of their provision He would relieve them of the responsibility of obedience to His, as they regarded it, impossible command. At least, they appear to have come and only told Him the amount of their resources, and He had to send them again to bring them to Him. When their meagre gifts are in the hand of the Christ we get the solution of the problem; for 'Five barley loaves and two small fishes' in His hands can do more than two hundred pennyworth of bread, even if that amount could have been purchased. When will the Church fully entrust her Lord with all the resources she possesses, and cease to calculate that she requires at least 'two hundred pennyworth of bread' before she can attempt to satisfy the needs of a hungering world? II. The Significance of the Text. We can now better appreciate the significance of our text 'Gather up the broken pieces which remain over that nothing be lost'. At the outset there was no thought on the part of the disciples of the possibility of a superabundant supply. They were busy calculating what might be 'sufficient'. When Christ breaks the loaves and fishes, we may be sure there will be an ample provision for all. He Himself teaches us that in this miracle we may learn of Him as the Bread of God which came down from heaven that He might give life unto the world. His body has been broken and His blood shed, and in Him there is an abundance of inexhaustible supply, not for our needs alone, but also for the needs of the whole world. III. A Safeguard against Presumption. This command to 'gather up' is a safeguard against presumption. The disciples might have argued that, having One with them Who can so marvellously supply bread in the wilderness, all necessity for care and forethought on their part was removed. No, each one must take his basket, his wallet, and fill it from this abundant provision. Christ never exercises His miraculous powers where men by prudent thought can secure provision for themselves from His supplies. Gather Up the Fragments John 6:12 It is only the continuity of miracles that divests them of exceptional interest You know man is so constituted that it is the unusual which attracts his attention. We require to be startled before we will observe. The bread we have eaten today is as directly and divinely the product of the activity of the evolver of the word Father, Who was incarnate in the Son of Mary, as the loaves with which, as I verily from my soul believe, He did feed these five thousand beside the Lake of Galilee. Only usage has spun cobwebs round our thoughts, and we have forgotten that there is a soul in all things, and that soul is God. I. This miracle is a powerful appeal to our confidence. As to that providence which exists behind the processes of nature it teaches us that that which men call God is not an aggregation of abstract attributes, or an impersonal creative force, but a living, sympathising, and undefinable Being, full of human compassion and missionary spirit, to whom we owe all, and who changes not. II. This miracle is a picture lesson given to you to teach that God has His certain reward for you if you have the courage to go a single step out of your way to show that you trust even where you do not understand. 'He Himself knew what He would do;' and He always does. He will still work what men call miracles, to nourish your spirit and soul and body, for He is constrained by the fullness of His love to be your providence. III. 'Gather up the crumbs that nothing be lost' It is the call to man to bestir himself to break out of his indulgent self-sufficiency; to cany himself forth into what may sometimes be sneeringly called by religionists of a certain school, the economics of salvation; to labour to prevent the hideous waste in God's fair world of the religious and physical resources; to multiply bread for the starving millions; to be inculcating habits of self-control, thrift, and uprightness by constantly in season and out of season fighting against the food waste and the vices of the masses of the people. And I think the injunction might be fairly taken, just as it stands, as the Divine authorisation of the earnest labours of those who are striving in every way to increase, to improve, and to extend the education of the race. IV. As the Christ is man's ideal of God, do you not see that this injunction, 'Gather up the fragments that nothing be lost,' is the expression of an unchanging attitude of the magnificence, the unity of the Intelligence whence we all come? He cannot tell me to do a thing that He is not willing to do Himself; and the command is a protest against all the narrow, degrading notions of the wastefulness of God. Basil Wilberforce, The Preacher's Magazine, vol. vii. p. 5. References. VI. 12. Basil Wilberforce, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvi. p. 337. C S. Home, The Soul's Awakening, p. 227. T. Arnold, Christian Life: Its Hopes, p. 216. W. G. Horder, Christian World Pulpit, vol. 1. p. 221. S. Baring-Gould, Village Preaching for a Year (2nd Series), vol. ii. p. 209. W. G. Rutherford, The Key of Knowledge, p. 108. J. Tolefree Parr, The White Life, p. 121. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 261. The Prophecies of Jesus John 6:14 The study of the prophecies of Jesus Christ would do very much to establish our faith, for the vast majority of these prophecies have been wondrously fulfilled. To-day I want to bring before you some of the fulfilled prophecies of Jesus Christ His prophecies with regard to the Jew, His prophecies with regard to the world, and His prophecies with regard to the Church. I. Now with regard to the Jews our Lord Jesus Christ gave forth three very special prophecies. (1) First of all, He foretold the fall of Judaism as a religion. In the twenty-first chapter of St. Matthew, after His parable of the wicked husbandmen, He asks, in the fortieth verse, His hearers: 'What will the lord of the vineyard do unto those husbandmen?' And 'They say unto Him, He will miserably destroy those wicked men and will let out His vineyard unto other husbandmen, which shall render Him the fruits in their seasons'. And then in the forty-third verse, Jesus said, 'True, the kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof. The same truth is told in the miracle of the blasted fig-tree. (2) Then, secondly, He proclaimed the destruction of Jerusalem as a city, and of the temple as a sanctuary. In the twenty-third chapter of St. Matthew, and the thirty-seventh verse 'O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.' The temple was to be no more a sanctuary; God had forsaken it. And so with regard to the city. In the twenty-fourth chapter and the second verse, Jesus said unto them, 'See ye not all these things? Verily, I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down.' II. This brings us to the second of His prophecies that we would mention, His prophecies with regard to the world. He says, I am the Messiah, but I am not coming to bring peace: there is going to be war, there is going to be famine, there is going to be pestilence. You My own disciples will be persecuted, some of you will grow cold, many of you will be offended. III. And then, lastly, there is His prophecy with regard to the Church. Instead of the Jewish religion, there is to be what Jesus Christ says is the kingdom of God. (1) It is to be universal. (2) This kingdom of God was to be spiritual. (3) He proclaimed that those who were admitted into this kingdom would be admitted as individuals and not as a nation. (4) This kingdom was to be very mixed; it is not to be as the future kingdom, when the Son of man will gather out of it everything which doth offend, but in this kingdom there will be tares and wheat, there will be good fish and bad, there will be wise and foolish virgins, there will be faithful and slothful servants. E. A. Stuart, The One Mediator and other Sermons, vol. xi. p. 129. References. VI. 14. Bishop Ellicott, Christian World Pulpit, vol. li. p. 22. F. St. John Corbett, The Preacher's Year, p. 61. G. Trevor, Types and the Antitype, p. 181. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. pp. 84, 85. VI. 14, 15. Ibid. (6th Series), vol. iv. p. 381. VI. 16. W. Landels, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlviii. p. 211. S. Baring-Gould, Village Preaching for a Year (2nd Series), vol. i. p. 166. R. W. Dale, Fellowship with Christ, p. 192. Expositor (4th Series), vol. v. pp. 25, 186; ibid. (5th Series), vol. iv. p. 34. VI. 15, 16. Lord William Cecil, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lviii. p. 344. VI. 15-17. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sack-mile College Chapel, vol. ii. p. 222. VI. 15, 28, 30. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 83. Dark And Jesus Not Yet Come John 6:17 Who are they of whom this is said? Of His Apostles this is written. Of them that had continued with Him in His temptations, of those to whom He had appointed a kingdom as His Father had appointed to Him. Thus, if He allowed this trouble to happen to them, though He loved them, so He may to us, though He loves us. I. It is a dark world this in which we live! There is so much in which we cannot see God's hand. 'And Jesus was not yet come to them.' No, but He will. All those troubles He sends to lead us to Him. II. What were the Apostles doing when He thus came to them. They were going where He would have them go. 'Rowing,' says one of the Evangelists; 'toiling in rowing,' says another. If they had not been labouring in His service, He would never have come to their assistance. So with us. Let us only be doing His will, let us only be toiling onward in the path He has marked out for us, and it may be at the fourth watch, it may be at the very darkest it may be when we have done our utmost that He will come to us. 'When Israel is in the brick-kiln,' says the Jewish proverb, 'then cometh Moses.' When we are in the deepest distress, then will come our true Moses, Jesus Christ, to be a defence to the oppressed, even a refuge in due time but not before the due time of trouble. J. M. Neale, Sermons in Sackville College Chapel, vol. i. p. 201. References. VI. 17. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. li. No. 2945. C. Perren, Revival Sermons in Outline, p. 192. J. M. Neale, Readings for the Aged (3rd Series), p. 38. Expositor (4th Series), vol. vi. p. 250; ibid. (6th Series), vol. iv. p. 219. VI. 18. Ibid, vol. vii. p. 295. VI. 19, 20. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture S t. John, p. 269. VI. 20. W. P. Balfern, Glimpses of Jesus, p. 221. VI. 21. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in a Religious House, vol. ii. p. 475. VI. 22-24 Expositor (6th Series), vol. iii. p. 139. Seeking for Jesus John 6:24 These words sound like a snatch of a poem; they almost sing. 'Seeking for Jesus' on the very smallest invitation they would fall into joyful, ennobling music. As originally applied, they are small enough, and limited enough, but they are so beautiful that they cannot be shut down to small measures and applications. We know right words when we hear them; there is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding. We know whether a song has fallen from some poor tree or from some open window in heaven; the song awakens all in us that is Divine, and all in us that is kindred to itself. There is common prayer, there is common song; there is worship that belongs to every kindred and people and tongue under the whole heaven. I. The other words that are beautiful in this twenty-fourth verse are 'Jesus was not there'. Then who was there? Nobody; it was a kind of gathering-place of emptiness; the little crowd that was there needed centralisation, uplifting into Divine form and Divine meaning. How one soul makes a place, how the absence of that soul destroys the temple without any promise of its being rebuilt. When the people saw that Jesus was not there they turned their backs, and said, 'It was for Jesus we came, we are seeking Jesus; we will take the first boat, the first train, the first opening, and be off'. (1) I would apply the same test to every social institution. They have made a number of little institutions outside the Church, institutions that have no reference whatever to the inner sanctuary. They are going in various ways to convert the world to their opinions, they are going to reconstruct society, they are going to play with time, re-arranging and distributing its twenty-four hours. They never mention the name of Jesus; then they will never succeed. (2) I would apply the same test to the Church. I am not to be taken in by names; I go further than the label, I want to know the contents, and who has analysed them, who has compounded them, who is responsible for them; and if I do not find Jesus there, I leave the Church, though it be big as a mountain and radiant with merely phosphorescent splendour. If Jesus is not in the sermon, leave the preacher, and at the door cry, Shame! The sermon exists for Jesus, not Jesus for the sermon; the sermon is nothing if it be not filled from end to end, through and through, and even to 'Finally' with the spirit and with the love of Jesus. II. Then, secondly, never forget that it was the habit of Jesus to appear to His disciples 'in another form'. 'After that He appeared unto His disciples in another form;' after that He appeared to two of them as they were walking in the green lanes or in the shaded paths; after that He appeared to them multitudinously, so that five hundred people saw Him all at once, and saw Him altogether, so that nobody else imagined that he had seen Him but each individual man; and then He appeared unto them in another form, and then without form. III. Note the encouraging attitude of these people. They were seeking for Jesus. 'What think ye? will He come to the feast?' What does it matter? the feast will go on whether He is here or not. Yes, in a certain mechanical sense the feast may go on so, but if He is not here it will be a poor feast. Seeking for Jesus may be treated as an assurance that seeking is finding. 'Seek, and ye shall find:' this is always true, but pre-eminently and most poignantly true in the case of the personality of Jesus Christ the Lord. If you want to find Christ here today, He is seated next you; if you really go to the house of God to find Jesus, you will discover Him in all the sanctuary in the corners, in the roof, in the floor, in every daisy, and in every lamp. You get what you seek for. This is largely true in everything, it is absolutely true in the case of Jesus Christ. IV. Seeking is itself a blessing. They who understand such things say that the great delight is in the hunting, not in the killing; they who understand such things say that they engage in this sport and in that for the sake of the sport itself, not that they want to kill any poor, fish or any poor creature of the field. Without following out that analogy at all, we still come back to the great fundamental truth that in seeking Christ we get Christ's blessing; in going to the house of God we put ourselves in a right relation to spiritual benediction. I repeat, I have found Him in unexpected places. I have found Him often in the garden, I have seen Him often in the little creatures of the air that come roaming over God's garden to find what honey they can collect. I have desired to be as one of them. They do not elicit the poison, they elicit the honey; they have come for a given purpose, and that purpose is realised. So it must always be with my going to the garden of the house of God. I have come there to find Jesus, and have never missed Him when my spirit has been really sincere, determined. Joseph Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol. vi. p. 30. References. VI. 24. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xvi. No. 947. VI. 25. Expositor (6th Series), vol. x. p. 449. VI. 25, 26. C. Bradley, Faithful Teaching, p. 197. John 6:26 The perpetual chagrin of his life was the obstinate refusal of those on whom he had helped to shower wealth and plenty to hear what he had to say on the social ideals to which their wealth should lead. Morley's Life of Cobden, ch. xxxviii. References. VI. 26. A. L. N., Christian World Pulpit, vol. 1. p. 109. W. H. Evans, Short Sermons for the Seasons, p. 30. Expositor (4th Series), vol. iv. p. 164; ibid. (6th Series), vol. xii. p. 431; ibid. (7th Series), vol. vi. p. 51. VI. 26, 27. J. H. Jowett, British Congregationalist, 12th September, 1907, p. 218. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vi. p. 354. VI. 26-58. Ibid. (5th Series), vol. viii. p. 87. VI. 27. D. Fraser, Metaphors in the Gospels, p. 290. VI. 27-29. C. Brown, God and Man, p. 127. VI. 28. Bishop Boyd-Carpenter, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlv. p. 372. VI. 28, 29. W. G. Horder, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvi. p. 102. A. Maclaren, The Wearied Christ, p. 69. O. Bronson, Sermons, p. 60. T. Arnold, Christian Life: Its Hopes, p. 263. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 280. VI. 29. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxvi. No. 1521. A. P. Stanley, Canterbury Sermons, p. 90. VI. 30. Expositor (7th Series), vol. vi. p. 66. VI. 32. Bishop Welldon, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liv. p. 277. F. B. Cowl, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xvii. p. 239. J. Keble, Sermons for Septuagesima to Ash Wednesday, p. 259. J. Learmount, The Examiner, 7th June, 1906, p. 565. The Indispensable Christ John 6:35 Christ had but recently fed the multitude by the miraculous multiplication of the barley loaves and fishes, and in consequence a large number flocked to Him, doubtless desiring to witness a repetition of His wonderful power. But He seeks not to win men to Himself by these methods, and hence proceeds to rebuke their impure and unstable enthusiasms. He knows full well how undependable is mere admiration, and is too well acquainted with men not to know how readily they respond to the appeal of mere novelty. And in rebuking them He makes it clear that in His feeding of the hungry there was not merely direct alleviation of need, but deeper illustration of a truth which He had already proclaimed, and to which He sought to win them. For His philanthropies are but mirrors of His larger and more lasting ministries to the souls of men, and He would have them learn that there are more important things in life than the physical, more eternal provision than the bread that perisheth. But His words are misinterpreted, and they begin to dispute with Him, comparing Him with Moses, and His provision with the manna which their fathers had eaten in the wilderness. Christ, however, brings the dialogue to an end with this explicit statement, declaring Himself to be the Bread of Life, the antitype of which the manna in the wilderness was but the foreshadowing. He alone can feed and nourish true life, for He alone is its Author. And no lesson is more important, either for them or for us, than this one. I. His declaration surprises us at first sight with its assumption of universal hunger. He, as it were, takes it for granted that all men are hungry, and on this postulate announces Himself as the One who can meet their needs. Now this fact of hunger does not need to be proven, for every one is conscious of its truth and force in himself. It often needs, however, to be interpreted, and this Christ is ever doing. He is constantly seeking to interpret to men the longings of their souls, which are explicable only in the light of His loving interest Hunger for the highest, for the best and truest life, is itself a sign of saving relationship with God. The man who has no hunger and is conscious of no needs has neither knowledge of himself nor of God. And Christ announces Himself to all who are conscious of it as the Bread of Life, the complement of all need, in Whom alone are all these things found for which we variously hunger. Love, peace, security, progress are all secured and assured to us only in Christ, and to follow them apart from Him is to chase a mere will-o'-the-wisp. II. It is significant that throughout Christ's ministry He uses ordinary things things whose meaning is easily understood in order to convey the deepest truths concerning Himself. Everybody knows what bread is. Its nature and its taste, as well as our common need of it, are known to all; and it is surely characteristic of Christ that He should seek to reveal Himself in terms easily and commonly apprehensible. He says in effect, 'Just as you cannot live without bread, so you cannot truly live without Me'. III. In this homely figure Christ makes exceedingly plain also the method by which He is to be appreended. As a man eats bread so that its powers of nourishment and constituents of strength become part of his physical frame, so does Christ communicate Himself to the one who receives Him into heart and life by constant appropriation of faith. It just means that He imparts His life unto us, and incorporates His strength with the soul who will receive Him. The man who eats of the Bread of Life is the one who testifies that 'Christ liveth in me'. But let it not be forgotten that, simple though these words sound in which He declares Himself to be the Bread of Life, the cost by which His gratuitous offer is made to man can never be calculated. For the grain must be cut down, ground between millstones, and subjected to the burning of fire before it can be made bread for the hungry. And His sufferings we can but dimly understand by such illustration. He is not nor could be the Bread of Life, apart from the Garden, the Cross, and the Tomb. J. Stuart Holden, The Pre-Eminent Lord, p. 93. The Bread of Life John 6:35 The figure under which Christ here speaks of Himself and His relation to men has a profound significance of its own. What it suggests about that relation is its inwardness. For He is bread, and bread means support, sustenance, new tissue, fresh life. And what we are to learn here is, that Christ is ready to incorporate Himself with us, to enter into and become part and parcel of us, and so to communicate to us that eternal life which is the life of our life always. I. It is not the body only that needs to have its strength continually replenished from without (1) Take the mind of man, for instance; it cannot feed upon itself. The strongest thinkers are the profoundest students of the books of nature and life always. (2) Similarly with the life that is higher than this. The soul too has its cravings which must be met, unless its energies are to grow feeble and to decay. And here, let us note in passing, is the great difference between the religion of the Bible and all other religions. How full of contentment the men of the Bible are! It is because they have had bread given them from heaven to eat This is the meaning of Revelation. 'He satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with goodness.' II. In the offer itself now, there is implied, for one thing, this: (1) That in Christ there is made available for us that Divine supply which is the strength and life of the soul. (2) It surely is not without significance that in the discourse in which His theme is Himself as the bread of man's life our Lord should hint so frequently, and not obscurely, at His death. His 'flesh' is to be given for the life of the world. In truth, there is always a process through which life of any kind must pass before it can become life in anyone else. Our daily bread so far as that which we spiritually live by is truly and directly found in Christ was bought at the price of wrestling, tears, and blood. III. We have thus far been assuming that there was no difficulty at all about the partaking of this Bread. Nevertheless it is not just evident what it means, and we should be thankful that in His great discourse Christ gives us some light upon this matter also. He does so by pointing to the analogy of Himself in His laying constant hold upon the life of the Father. 'As the living Father,' He says, 'hath sent Me, and I live by the Father, so he that eateth Me, the same shall live by Me.' His followers' relation to Him is to be what His was to the Father. It is important that we should carry away with us the sense of the strength and the satisfaction which this Bread which has come down from heaven is able to give to the soul. (1) First the strength, for if Christ be a man's strength, what is there that ought to be impossible to him? (2) And next, the satisfaction it gives, the deep and unfailing satisfaction. A. Martin, Winning the Soul, p. 99. John 6:35 Then I saw from that saying, He that cometh unto Me shall never hunger, and he that believeth on Me shall never thirst, that believing and coming was all one; and that he that came, that is, ran out in his heart and affections after salvation by Christ, he indeed believed in Christ. Bunyan, * Pilgrim's Progress. * Christ the Life John 6:35 The self-revelations of Jesus Christ come to us with comfort and hope; they come to us perfectly naturally and easily from His own lips. Having once heard of His eternal self-existence, we naturally want to know what He has to say to us who are just here today and gone tomorrow. So it is that with great comfort we listen to these assertions: 'I am the Bread of Life,' 'I am the Light of the world,' 'I am the Resurrection and the Life,' 'I am the true Vine,' 'I am the Door,' 'I am the good Shepherd' assertions which it would have been absolutely impossible for any mere human being to have made. I. Christ the Life. Let us look at the simplest assertion of all, 'I am the Bread of Life'. What comfort it brings us! Life why, that is just what we all want; life even in its poorest form of physical existence. We all long to go on living. We dread the day when death shall loose the ties of life and when we shall be plunged into what seems to some men to be the unknown. Christ stands as a witness, as a guarantee, to supply the purest form of life to all those who ask Him for it. He did not fling His assertion 'I am the Bread of Life' into the air. The men who were listening to Him at that time were themselves the recipients of His bounty. The larger number of them had stood starving on the hill-side but a day or two ago, and He then, by His own power, had stopped their famine. They recognised that at any rate He could do that, and because He could do that He was worthy to be their King. And so they found afterwards that when men wanted life they found it at His hands. He was not like a great teacher, like Moses or Jeremiah, who points out two paths the path of life on the one hand, and the path of death on the other and bids men choose between them. He pointed to Himself as the Life. There was an absolutely new declaration that had never been heard before. It was not to some fount or source of life somewhere or other to be found to which He could give men a direction, but He Himself was the source, the spring, the fount of life. In Him was life, and men had found it to be so. The hand of Jesus Christ, the word of Jesus Christ, brought life. II. Intellectual Life. But, after all, physical existence is only the poorest form of living. We do not know how to live until we have got beyond that. Erasmus was quite right when he said that, after all, books were necessaries; clothes, and he might have added food, were only luxuries. We cannot live without thought How pathetic it is to see those tired and jaded with the routine of work rushing back to their homes in the cars and 'buses, nearly all of them engrossed in a world of their own which comes and springs from some little book they hold in their hands. Intellectual life is, after all, not the perfect life. Yet how wonderfully He Who proclaimed Himself as the Bread of Life supplies this. There were plain men like St. John the fisherman simple, plain men with ordinary common; lace minds but what wonders He did for them! How their minds expanded! Even Seneca, with all his wisdom and education, could not write a book showing such political insight as the book which St. John wrote, the book of Revelation; or St. Paul, the narrow Pharisee as he was to start with, one whose whole mind was filled and occupied with the numberless little duties that fitted his sect. How was it possible for a mind so narrow, so small as that was, to expand into that giant intellectual mind, which still commands the admiration of the ages. He was able to see what no man of his time saw, the unity of the human race in Jesus Christ III. The Life of Life. But intellectual life is not the highest life. We might well bum all our books, give up all our libraries for that fullest life which is the life of life. Man is not, after all, so much born to think as he is born to love. It was Disraeli who enounced the truth, as he enounced many others, that love was the primal fount of man's existence. That life, too, He supplies. No one supplies the life of love as He did. He, too, is the fount of love, and it is to Him we come when we are seeking the highest fellowship that earth affords, the fellowship of husband and wife. At His hands we seek His crowning blessing that may make the love we bring Him worthy of the love of which He tells in His Word. IV. But will these Things Abide? After all there is death. Death shatters the mind; death breaks and separates these closest and most intimate links and ties. Has He anything to say to that? It was one of His most significant actions, proclaiming that He was indeed not only the Life, but the Resurrection and the Life. He is able to assure us that, though there is so much against it, yet He proclaims Himself in the midst of our sorrows, in the very deepest of our miseries, to be the Resurrection and the Life, One Who can bring back all those ties which He has formed here on earth, and give them a new perfection in His heavenly kingdom. References. VI. 35. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xix. No. 1112. H. Allen, Penny Pulpit, No. 1639, p. 157. C. Bickersteth, The Gospel of Incarnate Love, p. 149. John 6:37 This Scripture also did now most sweetly visit my soul, and him that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out. Oh, the comfort that I had from this word, in no wise! as who should say, by no means, for nothing, whatever he hath done. ... I saw that to come aright was to come as I was, a vile and ungodly sinner, and to cast myself at the feet of mercy, condemning myself for sin. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, p. 214. References. VI. 37. E. M. Geldart, Echoes of Truth, p. 272. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. x. No. 599; vol. xxx. No. 1762; vol. xl. No. 2349; vol. li. No. 2954; and vol. lii. No. 3000. G. H. Morrison, The Return of the Angels, p. 294. VI. 37-40. J. E. Page, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xvii. p. 328. VI. 38-62. Expositor (4th Series), vol. iii. p. 369. Impersonal Resurrection John 6:39 'Raise up at the last day' is a phrase repeated four times in this chapter, vv. 39, 40, 44, 54. The neuter gender of the pronoun is used. Why? Everything that His Father had given our Lord is here viewed as a whole, a kingdom, although it includes individuals mainly. There will be a glorious resurrection of things as well as persons. I. The Significance of His Providence will be shown in the Resurrection. This discourse was suggested by the miracle of the loaves and fishes. He says, 'Gather up the fragments that nothing be lost'. Every fragment of His providential dispensations will be gathered up in 'that day,' and each item His providential dealings with men will appear as something not to be lost. We are in danger of losing these fragments now. The varied experiences of life combine the apparently trivial with its great issues. Men are accustomed to attach vast importance to great events, and its lesser incidents are thought little of. But the King of glory, although proprietor of all things, is a great economist, and the Resurrection will include a vindication of His dealings with men in all the petty details of life. Life is now surrounded with mystery. We are like miners working in the dark beneath the surface of visible things, yet co-workers with God, and ever contributing to His glory if faithful, glorifying the Son of God by submitting to His Providence even when we do not understand its meaning. And when we are brought above ground, so to speak, into the light of Resurrection, there will be raised with us a clear indication and vindication of the Providence of God in our lives. II. The Bearing: of the Material Miracles upon the Spiritual Life will also be shown in the Resurrection. This most spiritual address of our Lord's was based upon a material miracle. Men do not see the spiritual meaning of the miracles which occur in every life just now, but although much of what may be termed sidelight may be thrown upon them in this life, yet the full effulgence of heavenly light will not shine upon them until that last day. Eternal light is needed for the full exposition of eternal truth. St. Paul says that the Rock which followed Israel was Christ. In a manner which we now know not of, it will be seen in that day how the Christ has followed the life of every believer in all its details. And the miracles in that life (and who has not experienced such?) will be manifested in all their spiritual meaning and bearing upon eternity. III. The Full Testimony of Christ's Work will be shown in the Resurrection. We have referred to two classes of these works: His general Providence and His miracles. 'The works that the Father hath given Me to accomplish bear witness of Me, that the Father hath sent Me.' 'If ye believe not Me, believe the works.' In these days the testimony of these works seems to be obscured, but He 'will raise it up at the last day'. 'When the Son of man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?' Whether or not, there will be a glorious revelation of the meaning of those works as a testimony to the well-beloved Son. 'I must work the works of Him that sent Me while it is day, for the night cometh.' But the duration of that night is limited, and it will be followed by a yet more glorious day. The Day of Resurrection will be a Day of Revelation. Then shall His works in the whole world bear convincing testimony to the power and authority of the Christ a testimony which shall convict every gainsayer. And as the Resurrection body will be infinitely more glorious than the natural body, so will the Resurrection testimony to the works of the Christ be infinitely more glorious than anything offered to Him during His earthly ministry. References. VI. 39. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 61; ibid. vol. vi. p. 304. VI. 39, 40. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xix. No. 1117. VI. 41-65. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlvi. No. 2706. John 6:42 Familiarity, if it does not breed contempt, at least does away with surprise, and we look for God in the startling. If we can account for a thing, we at once conclude that God had nothing to do with it. We keep Him as a last resort for events otherwise inexplicable. The result is that the wiser we grow and the more things we have an explanation for, the less we think of God and the further we banish Him from His own world. Dr. H. S. Coffin, The Creed of Jesus, p. 168. References. VI. 44. J. Keble, Village Sermons on the Baptismal Service, p. 46. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. iv. No. 182. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 66. Drawing and Coming John 6:44-45 Two thoughts are suggested by the text The Father's part in human salvation. Man's part in his own salvation. I. The Father Drawing. The doctrine of Christ is that God draws men by teaching. What then is teaching? To bring truth in contact with the mind, the heart, the conscience. But what truth? The two great fundamental truths which we are commissioned to teach are Man's ruin by sin. Man's redemption by Christ Jesus. (1) The Father teaches these fundamental truths by His book, the Bible. (2) The Father teaches by the preaching of His Word. (3) The Father draws by teaching in opposition to compulsion. (4) The Father draws by teaching in opposition to legal enactments. (5) The Father draws by teaching in opposition to acting simply on the emotional nature. The life, the death, the resurrection, the intercession of Christ Jesus, brought home to the heart by the teaching of the Holy Spirit is that which draws. II. Man Coming. 'Every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto Me.' What does this coming mean? (1) If you would come aright, you must come as servants, to obey Him, to serve Him, to take His yoke upon you, to receive His mark, His seal, and so become His covenant servants for ever. (2) You must come as subjects, to accept His Lordship, to submit to His Kingship, and to swear allegiance to Him for ever. (3) You must come as learners. (4) Above all, you must come to Him as sinners, lost, ruined through sin, crying in the bitterness of your soul, To Thee, lost and undone, for aid I flee, Lord, save me or I perish. Before we come to Christ, we must learn of the Father about ourselves who we are, what we are, what we need, our lost and undone condition. We must then learn of the Father about Christ, that He has been made unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption, (a) Salvation begins with God. The Father, who sends Jesus for souls, draws each soul to Jesus. (b) Man may resist God's drawing, (c) Persistent resistance will issue in God withdrawing Himself, (d) Seeing that this will be the result of continued resistance, yield yield now. Richard Roberts, My Closing Ministry, p. 181. References. VI. 44, 45. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xl. No. 2386. VI. 46. C. Bradley, The Christian Life, pp. 163, 176. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlv. No. 2606. VI. 47. Ibid. vol. xxviii. No. 1642. VI. 47, 48. Ibid. vol. xlvi. No. 2706. VI. 47-54. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 203. VI. 47-57. T. T. Munger, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliv. p. 49. The Bread of Life John 6:48 Bread of Life! Is there then bread of death? Certainly in this chapter, and in other passages of the New Testament, we have got great and striking contrasts that stir up in our minds such a suggestion. Here the true bread is spoken of in contrast to the meat that perisheth, to the manna which their fathers did eat and are dead. I. Now the essential thought of our Lord's great discourse here, is that He Himself is the Bread of Life that came down from heaven. He brings to man's life, yea! to man's death, a life which death cannot touch. Did you never think that it is very strange that men are always trying to give an account of Jesus? They will not, and cannot leave Jesus alone, not even those who deny His claims. Every new idea, every new theory that lays hold of man's mind, has to be applied to Jesus, to account for Him if possible, as if He could be accounted for on ordinary principles of man's thought. Our ordinary principles are not applicable; human nature, environment, education, life's opportunities, all put together cannot account for Jesus. The New Testament gives the right account He came down from heaven, He is the bread of God to the souls of men. II. A moment's reflection will show us that nearly everything that really lives must live on bread from heaven. Without a measure of it all life pines and dies. The very flowers of the field have to be so fed. And so it is with man born of flesh, and rooted in the earth. He has a certain nourishment to draw from thence. And what the sun in the heavens is to the flower, so Jesus, the Sun of Righteousness, is to the spirits of men. He is the bread of which if they eat they shall reach their true destiny and never die. III. Now, it is clear, from the analogy of common food and its use, that all must personally partake if they are to live. We are to become partakers of the Divine nature. We must become participants; we must assimilate His spirit, His life; we must eat Now, what is the great difficulty with us, and perhaps with most men, here? The great difficulty is lack of appetite appetite for Christ and spiritual things. D. L. Ritchie, Peace the Umpire and other Sermons, p. 67. References. VI. 48. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxiii. No. 1940. VI. 48-50. Expositor (5th Series), vol. viii. p. 93. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 289. VI. 48-61. D. Fraser, Metaphors in the Gospels, p. 290. VI. 60. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 61. Bread for the Hungry (For Christmas) John 6:51 The Bible is a book of promise. There are many good things for man because God is good. He is ready to give, He loves to bless. He cannot indeed always do it. He has to deny, He has to chastise; but denial and chastisement may prove to be the truest and most needful gift. God's will towards His people is to give and to bless, and He has always greater and better gifts in store. I. Man's Need. The Bible shows man as he is a creature of need. As an infant he walks into life with needs; and as he grows his needs grow with him. Day by day he needs the bread by which flesh and bones and blood are kept going. He is hungry and thirsty; he needs food and raiment and other bodily things. There are other needs, the nobler and deeper needs of his mind and the needs of his heart, longing for enjoyment of love. Contained far within the depths of his being, in his conscience, in his spirit, are the needs for something more, which food and drink and worldly affections do not satisfy; needs which hardly understand themselves until the man hears about God and he begins to feel that he needs God. Thus is the Bible a book of promise from God, Who answers the need of every man. II. God's Supply. The message of Christmas is the answer, and we find it written: 'I am the Living Bread which came down from heaven, that a man should eat thereof and not die'. The speaker is Jesus Christ, Whose birthday we keep this day. It is a wonderful answer to the great needs of the world. The cry goes up to God, and God answers by sending a little Child 'Unto us a Child is born'. Man is hungry, man has need, and the Child is God's supply the Bread of God for his need. This is the message of Christmas Christ, the supply of man's needs. III. Christ truly Gives Bread to His People; but by His example we see that He only feeds man's bodily needs through what He does in supplying the needs which are higher and deeper. To those of us who are in bodily need He says, 'Come unto Me; come, buy for yourselves wine and milk without money and without price'. But we have other needs besides bread, and He has other and better gifts for us. Come to Christ, the Bread of life, and feed upon Him. References. VI. 61. R. W. Church, Village Sermons (2nd Series), p. 246. VI. 61-71. Expositor (7th Series), vol. vi. p. 118. John 6:52 In describing her continental tour or mission during 1856-1857, Eliza Gurney tells of one meeting at Annonay with the local dissenters in their chapel. 'One of the Darbyists rose and said he felt bound to testify against the ministry of women, referring the people to chapter and verse in the Bible to prove they were forbidden to speak. Having borne his testimony, which he did in no very Christian spirit, he walked out of the meeting, which remained as quiet as possible, being wholly unmoved by what he said. It was strange that at that very moment my mind was dwelling on the enmity of the carnally-minded Jews to the spiritual nature of the Gospel dispensation: How can this man give us His flesh to eat? etc., and in connection with it the conversation of our Lord with the woman at Jacob's Well, her leaving her water-pot and going into the city to preach Christ, and that many of the Samaritans believed because of her word' (see The Gurneys of Earlham, vol. ii. p. 315 f.). References. VI. 63. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. i. p. 208. H. M. Butler, Harrow School Sermons (2nd Series), p. 21. H. Alford, Sermons on Christian Doctrine, p. 294. R. Winterbotham, Sermons on the Holy Communion, p. 12. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ix. p. 41. VI. 63-66. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxii. No. 1288. P. L. Watchurst, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xix. p. 206. VI. 64. J. M. Whiton, Beyond the Shadow, p. 233. VI. 65. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxv. No. 1460. VI. 66. H. H. Scullard, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlix. p. 64. R. Winterbotham, Sermons on the Holy Communion, p. 20. H. Bell, Sermons on Holy Communion, p. 22. J. M. Neale, Sermons on the Blessed Sacrament, p. 44. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vii. p. 368. Living the Life of Jesus John 6:57 From the words of our text we may infer that what the Father was to Jesus, Jesus is willing to be to you and to me. Everything that Jesus said of His relationship to the Father, we may say of our relationship to Jesus. I. The first truth to which I wish to call your attention is this: Our Saviour might have lived an independent life. He was the Holy One before He stooped to us and laid aside the use of the attributes of His Godhead. During His human life He might at any moment have availed Himself of His Divine attributes, and might have lived His human life in the power of them. II. Our Lord Jesus might have lived an independent life, and Satan was always urging Him to do it Straight from the river Jordan Jesus was led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. The first thing the devil said to Jesus was: 'Thou art the Son of God. Thou hast all power. Now use that power for Thyself, and make those stones bread.' That was the crucial point in our Lord's life, and He said: 'No; I am going to be a dependent human being. If My Father does not feed me, I will die of hunger.' When our Lord said that, He at once definitely refused to live the independent life which would have been possible, and elected to live a life of constant dependence upon the Father. III. Again, look at our Lord's life. (1) In His birth God the Father gave Him life. And Jesus in dying said: 'Father, receive My life'. (2) So in the plan of our Lord's life (3) Jesus also depended on the Father for His words. (4) Then as to His miracles. (5) So also about His will. (6) We know, too, that He sought * the Father's glory. * IV. If our Lord chose this life of dependence out of all possible lives that He might have lived, does it not seem wisest, most blessed, most Christlike, for you and me to give up living the independent life in the flesh and to begin from this moment to depend upon Christ as Christ depended upon God? V. The Saviour's method may be ours. There are two possible methods. Our Lord might always have been crucifying His human nature; but He chose the second method and the better one that of living a life of perfect communion with God by the Holy Ghost. How can Jesus become to me what the Father was to Jesus? (1) We must be quiet; we must wait. (2) Be sure to make Jesus the first of everything. (3) Make the glory of Jesus your aim. (4) Meet God's will in every circumstance. (5) Reckon on God. F. B. Meyer, The Soul's Ascent, p. 229. References. VI. 67. A. T. Lyttelton, College and University Sermons, p. 131. Bishop Moule, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liv. p. 196. T. Arnold, Christian Life: Its Hopes, p. 271. Expositor (5th Series), vol. i. p. 406. VI. 68. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. ii. p. 16. VI. 69. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 25. VI. 62, 63. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. iii. p. 46. Words of Life John 6:63 Whatever may be said about the originality of our Lord's teaching, it is certainly unique in the spiritual force that inheres in it and accompanies its proclamation. I. Note the matchless influence of the Gospel upon Christendom at large. The ruling civilisations of today have their rootage in the faith of Christ. We are told that the Greeks furnished 'the whole framework of modern civilisation'. From them we inherit our legal code, our theories of government, our artistic and literary ideals, our philosophical conceptions, and our genius in arms, commerce, and colonisation. But if Greece furnished the 'framework,' Christianity brought the spirit, the life, the compelling energy, without which the framework of civilisation would have been little more than a mockery. The revival of national life is usually associated with the republication of the Gospel of God. God's Word in Christ is the life of the soul, and the life of nations. II. The quickening influence of Gospel truth on the individual. (1) Think of His revealing words. The words of our Lord are searchlights, revealing the man to himself with startling clearness and power. (2) Think of His converting words. John Stuart Mill relates that at one time he fell into a state of deep melancholy, lost all interest in life, and was fast sinking into despair, when the reading of Wordsworth restored the freshness of His soul, revived his interest in things, and made life worth living. But who can restore the soul and make all things new like our sovereign Master? (3) Think of His strengthening words. (4) Think of His comforting words. III. Let us be sure that we receive this Word into our heart, and give it full sway in the regulation of our life. IV. To students of religious truth, I wish to say, Give revelation itself the chief place in your studies. When face to face with nature, Constable tried to forget that he had ever seen a picture; in some such fashion should we approach revelation, contemplating directly the thoughts of God, unprejudiced and undisturbed by the thoughts of men. (1) Take care that the study of the literary aspects of revelation does not obscure for you its spiritual signification. When Sir Humphry Davy returned from Paris, he was asked what he thought of the picture galleries. He replied, 'The finest collection of frames that I ever saw'. Delighted with the gilded margin, he missed the masterpiece. It is possible to become so absorbed with the literary setting of revelation that we virtually forget the redeeming God and His treat salvation. (2) As teachers and preachers, let us keep in close daily touch with Christ and His Word. W. L. Watkinson, The Supreme Conquest, p. 174. References. VI. 63. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xi. No. 653, and vol. xlvi. No. 2677. W. F. Shaw, Sermon Sketches for the Christian Year, p. 74. E. Bayley, Sermons on the Work and Person of the Holy Spirit, p. 71. J. W. Houchin, The Vision of God, p. 49. R. J. Wardell, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xix. p. 489. Archbishop Alexander, Church Family Newspaper, vol. xiv. p. 500. Expositor (5th Series), vol. vi. p. 254. VI. 64. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. 1. No. 2898. Expositor (6th Series), vol. xii. p. 249. John 6:65 Evidences of Christianity! I am weary of the word. Make a man feel the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the self-knowledge of his need of it; and you may safely trust it to its own evidence remembering only the express declaration of Christ Himself: No man cometh unto Me, unless the Father leadeth him. Whatever more is desirable I speak now with reference to Christians generally, and not to professed students of theology may in my judgment be far more safely and profitably taught, without cankering or the superstition of infidel antagonists, in the form of Ecclesiastical history. Coleridge, * Aids to Reflection. * References. VI. 66. H. S. Seekings, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xvii. p. 174. VI. 66, 67. W. H. Harwood, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvi. p. 276. VI. 66-68. T. Binney, King's Weigh-House Chapel Sermons, p. 27. VI. 66-69. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxviii. No. 1646. G. W. Brameld, Practical Sermons, p. 209. VI. 67. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. 1. No. 2914. VI. 67, 68. L. Davidson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lii. p. 197. W. C. Wheeler, Sermons and Addresses (2nd Series), p. 210. C. D. Bell, The Name Above Every Name, p. 15. VI. 67-70. T. Arnold, Christian Life: Its Hopes, p. 155. Alternatives John 6:68 'To whom shall we go?' The discourse is upon Alternatives. Who is the other man? What is the other book? If we turn our backs upon Thee, Thou Son of God, where is the life? Always ask for alternatives; always ask for a constructive side of things. There are many men who can find fault; few who can build. Better build a wall than destroy a faith. Stick to this one question, and you will come out all right. 'Lord, to whom shall we go?' I. We might live the animal life: we might be so many animals. Do you want me to labour that point, or do you instantaneously say you could not for a moment consider the alternative of mere animalism? Do not be in a great hurry about this. 'Animal' is really a word which signifies a living thing; there is no baseness or foulness about the word animal. We ourselves are partly animal. But by 'the animal life' is in this connection meant some low, base, vicious form of life, the trough life, the flesh life. 'He that soweth unto the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption.' Will you consent to unman and dehumanise yourselves so far as to be mere animals? II. What is your second alternative? 'Will you live,' says the tempter, 'as I do?' 'How do you live?' 'I live the secular life.' Have you ever studied secularism? It has its dogmas, its opinions, its canons, and its narrow philosophy. Live the secular life, take an interest in the newspapers, in the news of the day; just rise in the morning to read what was done yesterday, and get through your time as well as you can. This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/expositors-dictionary/ John 7:17 Romanes, Thoughts on Religion, pp. 167-168. 'He that doeth My will shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God.' Were it not for that text I think I should sometimes sit down 'astonished,' and pray to die and get it all cleared up. From a letter of Kingsley (in 1845). References, VII. 17. Bishop Winnington-Ingram, Under the Dome, p. 28. Hugh Black, Christian World Pulpit, vol. 1. p. 38. H. Drummond, The Ideal Life, p. 297. F. C. Spurr, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lx. p. 228. F. Bourdillon, Plain Sermons for Family Reading, p. 1. John Watson, The Inspiration of Our Faith, p. 133. D. W. Simon, Twice Born and other Sermons, p. 34. J. H. Jowett, The Examiner, 3rd May, 1906, p. 420. Expositor (6th Series), vol. iv. p. 219; ibid. vol. viii. p. 212. VII. 19. Ibid. (4th Series), vol. i. p. 16. VII. 24; Ibid. (5th Series), vol. vii. p. 278. VII. 26, 40-43. ibid. vol. i. p. 83. VII. 27. Phillips Brooks, The Mystery of Iniquity, p. 277. Expositor (6th Series), vol. x. p. 408. VII. 30-33. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 17. VII. 30-36, 40-52. Ibid. vol. i. p. 391. VII. 31. A. M. Fairbairn, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liii. p. 232. VII. 33, 34. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 299. VII. 34. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. iv. p. 213. VII. 35. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vi. p. 298. VII. 37. A. G. Mortimer, The Church's Lesson for the Christian Year, pt. iv. p. 294. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxi. No. 1875. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 50; ibid. (5th Series), vol. vi. p. 226; ibid. (6th Series), vol. viii. p. 447. VII. 37, 39. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 310. VII. 37-39. F. Hall, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvi. p. 404. D. Fraser, Metaphors in the Gospels, p. 278. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 122; ibid. vol. iv. p. 167. From Strain to Rest John 7:38 The characteristic of our age is strain; and it is certainly as perceptible in the Church as in the world. We live in such publicity, among such a thronging crowd of tidings, that there is little repose left in our lives. Fresh impressions constantly strike the brain and the heart, so that we are fretted, worn, and peace-less. Now, while the Gospel makes room for honest weariness weariness in work, not of it it will not tolerate our modern distraction. If Christ promised and left any gift, that gift was peace; and those who have not proved His word there may be ignorant of it everywhere. There are deeps in Scripture to supply all our need till the probation of the Church militant has reached its appointed end. The causes of the present religious strain are twofold; the anxieties growing from within, and those pressing from without. I. Looking inward, it cannot be said that the Christian temper of the times is indolent. Many are working up to the limit of their power, and some even beyond it. The Churches are constantly assuming fresh burdens. New services and societies are being added to those in existence, till now the Christian worker finds hardly a day sometimes hardly an hour unclaimed. Christians are beset by remonstrances and appeals to give more and to do more, and they are not unwilling to respond. But too often even obedience leaves them harassed and fretful. Though they have wearily abdicated leisure, their toils bring them no rest, and they find it hard to see the fruits of their selfsacrifice. But our Lord said, 'He that believeth on Me, as the Scripture saith, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water'. In other words, there should come from the faithful an energy streaming forth like rivers flowing eastward, westward, northward, southward. Theirs should be a life which fills the world with blessing as quietly as the sunrise. It should and it might be like His own life, for its secret is such an indwelling of the Spirit as He Himself possessed. None breathed so deeply of the Holy Ghost as Christ did, and so His life was calm at the heart, for all its outward tumult. II. It is by saving ourselves that we save others, and only so. Work out your own salvation: that is our first business. It is indeed the one business of life which is ours, our own. Nor could anything be shallower than the notion that this is selfish work. It is by working out our own salvation that we are able to work out the salvation of others. The Gospel is not like a spell or nostrum which produces its effects through any one who commands it. It is not a power of miracle which may belong to a man whatever his spiritual condition. He that believeth on me out of him shall flow rivers of living water. To be filled with the Holy Spirit is to be filled with power. III. Life in the Spirit reverses and counteracts the forces of disintegration and decay. How busy these are, and how ready are we to yield to them! How soon we close the door give over hoping confess ourselves of the older generation with our best work past But in Christ our youth is renewed like the eagle's. Time flows on, bringing his appointed signs. But grey hairs and diminished strength bear false witness against us if we are filled with the Holy Ghost. Whatever the past has been, the future may be better. If it has been barren and faithless, there is time to repair it; if it has been full of trust and labour, the time to come may be marked by faith more peaceful and labour more abundant. Age need touch our spirits as little as it touched the young angels in the holy grave, and life before God may be an ascent from height to height till we appear at last in Zion. W. Robertson Nicoll, Ten Minute Sermons, p. 87. References. VII. 38. J. H. Jowett, The Examiner, 31st May, 1906, p. 636. Expositor (6th Series), vol. v. p. 64. VII. 38, 39. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxviii. No. 1662. Expositor (5th Series), vol. v. p. 141. VII. 39. Ibid. (4th Series), vol. ii. pp. 61, 279; ibid. vol. vi. p. 368. VII. 40. Ibid. vol. i. pp. 84, 86. VII. 40-62. Ibid. vol. v. p. 296. VII. 41. Ibid. (6th Series), vol. iii. p. 17. VII. 42. Ibid. vol. v. p. 89. VII. 43. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlvii. No. 2710. VII. 44. J. Flanagan, Man's Quest, p. 130. VII. 46-62. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vii. p. 141. The Originality of Jesus John 7:46 I. The style of Christ's teaching. There are at least two characteristics which at once suggest themselves the words of Jesus are simple and pictorial. And this is as it should be if His Gospel be for the people without distinction. To clothe great thoughts and revelations of transcendental truths the 'heavenly things,' as Jesus named them in simple words is at once the pinch and power of the pulpit. You will have observed Christ's fondness for pictures, tropes, and figures. But the moral benefit of this peculiarity of style must not be overlooked. It is grimly hinted at in the sibylline words 'that seeing they may see and not perceive' words themselves fashioned after the manner of the parables in which light and shade compete for the mastery. II. The spirit of Christ's teaching. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this element, for as He claims that His words are the Father's, it is necessary that the Spirit of God should breathe through them. 'My teaching is not Mine but His that sent Me' (John 7:16 ). If we start from the doctrine that the Word was God, we feel no surprise at such sayings as 'the Word was full of grace and truth,' and endued with measureless supply of the Spirit of God; we expect that He shall speak of His own intuitively, out of a conscious fullness of life, love, and power. Let us then see how far this expectation is warranted and realised by an inquiry into the various modes in which the Spirit of God manifests itself in our Lord's words. (1) The first is sympathy. 'Tis His sympathy that gives Jesus His unique and marvellous power over souls. (2) Another characteristic is His tenderness, described by Faber in one of his hymns 'huge tenderness'. Whether He is our Shepherd, Saviour, Father, or Friend, this one indispensable quality endears Him to us. (3) Consider next His earnestness of spirit. The nature and worth of the work on hand may and does account for this trait; the work is salvation to be accomplished for man, in man, and through man. (4) But to crown all, His spirit betrays marvellous hopefulness, amounting even to optimism both in work and deed. III. The matter of the Saviour's speech will lead us to the verdict of the officers sent to take Him, 'Never man so spake'. (1) His speech is above all original. I think I include all that is to be said on this head when I say in a word God speaks when Christ speaks. (2) There is, too, a tone of authority in all He says. Jesus was more than the Reformer of an obsolete religion. He was the founder of the eternal religion of humanity. (3) I need hardly dwell on its suitableness for all time. The fact remains to this hour there is not a human need for which there is not a Divine remedy. (4) Lastly, He speaks direct to the conscience and 'Never man so spake'. J. B. Meharry, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lv. p. 187. References. VII. 46. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xvi. No. 961. K. C. Anderson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlviii. p. 137. F. B. Cowl, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xvii. p. 286. The Evidence That Counts John 7:48 * ; Luke 7:22 * I. Let me say first that our faith demonstrates itself as it satisfies our instincts. In other words, the faith of Jesus Christ today is authenticated by human experience. You may talk for a year up in the clouds, but come down to earth, and talk to men who know something about it, and they declare to you that in Jesus Christ they have found a satisfaction for their conscience they never found before; that in His fellowship they have realised that peace which passeth understanding; that this faith has implanted in them a great conviction that purifies their whole nature, and constrains them to daily obedience to the commands of righteousness. They will tell you it has satisfied their instinct for futurity; it has given them a great and blessed hope that lifts them above trouble, above despair. It is not a question for disputation by idle theorists; it is a question of experience. Nature is a great witness chamber, where everything testifies for itself. What is the Church? It is another great witness chamber where men high and low, rich and poor, young and old, bear their personal testimony to the power and to the grace and to the preciousness of Jesus Christ. And their witness is true. There can be no perjury here, no illusion here. When you get a million men from one generation to another to bear witness, surely it is worth a cart-load of the chatter of criticism and speculation. To-day Jesus Christ does not send you to the academic representatives to know what they think. He sends you to men with understanding, consciousness, heart, who have proved these things. 'Ye are My witnesses,' says Christ. He is authenticated in the witness of the sacramental host. II. Then there is another great source of demonstration. Jesus Christ not only satisfies human instinct, but the cross of Jesus Christ transforms human character. There must be reality in that which transforms character. You cannot change a man with a myth. 'Go and tell John the blind see, and the deaf hear, and the lame walk, and the lepers are cleansed, and the dead raised.' III. Christianity not only satisfies the instinct of humanity, it not only transfigures character, but it prompts glorious service and sacrifice. Do not forget that. 'Go and tell John you see these works of amelioration and blessing; that I sacrifice Myself for the degraded and the lost.' Dear brethren, is not that what the Church of God is doing today? If you were to take the Church of God out of this world, where would the great ministers to humanity be found? What are these critics of the Church of God? What do they do? They mark time! They waste ink and paper! What is the Church doing? Why, in a thousand ministries of compassion and mercy in this land and in all lands it gives its gold, its blood, that it may uplift men and bring them to a better life and make a better race. That is a thousand times better than all the chaff of the summer-time threshing floor of mere talkers, and critics, and dreamers. Sacrifice, service something that is real, that is expensive: that is the demonstration. We have a whole army of talkers, we have whole regiments of critics. We have no need of them! They are wasting time. While the theorist speculates and dreams, all the time the Christian Church is instructing the ignorant, leading the erring to the Cross, pointing the dying to a grander life, breaking the clod, sowing the seed, and reaping the harvest of the redeemed and sanctified humanity into the garner of God. W. L. Watkinson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxxviii. p. 177. References. VII. 39. Expositor (7th Series), vol. vi. p. 103. VII. 47. Ibid. (5th Series), vol. i. p. 94. John 7:48-49 Nothing is more galling to the merely respectable than to be brought in contact with religious ardour. R. L. Stevenson. John 7:49 It is unworthy a religious man to view an irreligious one either with alarm or aversion; or with any other feeling than regret and hope and brotherly commiseration. Carlyle. References. VII. 49. Expositor (5th Series), vol. iv. p. 267; ibid. (6th Series), vol. vii. p. 91; ibid. (7th Series), vol. vi. p. 518. VII. 51. F. B. Cowl, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xviii. p. 333. VII. 52. Expositor (6th Series), vol. iv. p. 280; ibid. vol. viii. p. 219. VII. 53. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. lii. No. 3003. D. Macleod, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lx. p. 125. H. S. Seekings, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xviii. p. 327. Expositor (4th Series), vol. iv. p. 325; ibid. (5th Series), vol. i. p. 10. The Homing of the People John 7:53 * ; John 8:1 * Our text shows us the homeless Christ. His disciples had their houses to go to, houses perhaps of mud and clay, but homes in spite of that But with that infinite separateness, as it has been called, which ever and anon fell upon all His relations, Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. But Christ had an earthly home once, and not very long before. He had His home in Joseph's cottage, and as He was supposed to be the Son of Joseph, no doubt He was used to call that home 'My father's house'. It was very humble, but all we can read or imagine shows that it must have been very happy. The Holy Child cast the mantle of His own radiance over all His surroundings. He grew in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man. When the time came, He took His share in the bearing of the burden, and at last perhaps He bore it altogether. It seems as if when Joseph died He became the Head of the house, and His own hands ministered to His necessities, and the necessities of those who were with Him. The hands that were in after days to touch the little children in their innocence and the harlots in their filth, that were to carry the reed of scorn, that were to be nailed on the tree, were hands worn and soiled by labour. But I say that the home was happy. We have a most revealing glimpse in the words of Mary when He had just left her. She said at the marriage, 'Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it'. He had been subject to them, but they had been subject to Him, though unconsciously; they were all at the touch of His fingers. Our Saviour homes His people He is their homemaker in the house, in the Church, in heaven. I. First comes the home where father, mother, children dwell together. Every thoughtful observer has perceived that in our times many things threaten the home, and that the home must be defended at all hazards by the Christian Church. The family is to Jesus the indispensable unit Its foundation is laid in His pure, severe, and final law of marriage. The home is not to be at the mercy of uncontrollable temper, or of unbridled and shifting desires. It is to be the refreshment of all who live in it, their blessedness, their peace, their reward, and their discipline their discipline in forbearance and in self-respect. Now, there cannot be a home without a house, and multitudes of our people have to live in houses which cannot be turned into homes, dens where self-respect and decency and humanity are continually outraged. It is well that the Church has been called on to confront the problem. No doubt the Church has taken on a look of unreality and misdirected energy. There has been for years little observable contact between ecclesiastical and theological discussions and the human needs of modern life. It has been said too truly that to the vast majority of those who were most concerned in the social question, the Christ of the Churches has become an object of complete indifference, if not of positive scorn. Christ is honoured as a human, unmysterious leader of the poor, utterly removed from the tradition and the creeds of Christian worship. The Church has to retrieve the lost ground, and that in many ways. Already a beginning has been made, already we perceive that we have to take part in legislation and administration. Already it is perceived that Christian men are doing Christian work when they devote themselves in Councils and in Parliament to the cause of social reform. We have also to break up the huge aggregations of poverty in our great cities that are unrelieved by the presence and example of the well-to-do. The first duty of many Christians is to make their homes among the poor, and until this duty is more generally fulfilled, progress will lag. But while giving the fullest place to this duty, the Church has to go far beyond it. The problem is not solved in the least if we have houses and nothing but houses. The house must be turned into a home, and it may be that the more house the less home. We can see it not seldom in human life. The little house where the young couple were so happy and so poor is exchanged for the mansion, but the mansion is not half so much home as the cottage was. If we could lodge each family in London in a palace, London might be further from God than she is now. For a home you must have a homemaker, and when the Church sends forth home-makers, she is working surely for the homing of the people. Christians must never forget, as the public mind becomes more and more engrossed with economics, that reformers have had their day and done their work, but Christ Jesus and He alone still gives new life. He is not primarily the deviser of a social system, but the quickener of the individual. Instead of regeneration by organisation, He offers regeneration by inspiration. He sees life changed, shaped, and glorified by the life of God, and regards the future of society with a splendid and unfaltering hope. Without Him no social changes will make the burden of loss lighter or the fountain of tears less bitter. II. The Church is to be also the home of the people. For many, for most, the Church is a second home; but for a multitude it is all the home they can have. Cardinal Newman has written beautifully on the Church as a Refuge for the Lonely. 'My house,' said Jesus, 'shall be called a house of prayer for all,' not a house of preaching, nor a house of philanthropy, nor a house of amusements, but a house of prayer. All men are capable of prayer, and growth in grace is a growth in knowledge of what the life of prayer may come to be. 'My house is a house for all.' III. One word on the home above. When we have homed the people in the earthly home and in the Church, our work is not done. They are to be homed at last with Christ. Your own Bishop Simpson of America once was preaching on heaven, and suddenly electrified the audience by a cry of his fatherly heart. 'Oh,' said he, 'what would heaven be to me without my Willie?' It is not that the bereaved would have them back. They will never know earthly cares and fears. They are 'thrice three times walled in emerald from our mortal mornings grey'. But we are indeed strangers and pilgrims on the earth, men and women for whom life is full of deaths, little deaths and great deaths. But what of it if through them the summer land calls us to its bosom, and if Christ is waiting to receive us to Himself in the land where homes are safe. W. Robertson Nicoll, The Lamp of Sacrifice, p. 205. References. VIII. 1. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. lii. No. 3003. J. Stevenson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliii. p. 133. H. S. Seekings, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xviii. p. 327. C. D. Bell, Hills that Bring Peace, p. 287. VIII. 1, 2. D. Macleod, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lx. p. 125. VIII. 1-11. Expositor (5th Series), vol. i. p. 10; ibid. vol. ii. pp. 405, 409, 421; ibid. (6th Series), vol. xi. p. 161. VIII. 2. Ibid. (4th Series), vol. viii. p. 302. VIII. 6. J. Wills, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxx. p. 403. VIII. 10, 11. R. Higinbotham, Sermons, p. 96. VIII. 11. Lyman Abbott, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlix. p. 188. C. Bickersteth, The Gospel of Incarnate Love, p. 51. Bishop Boyd-Carpenter, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liv. p. 33. F. W. Aveling, ibid. vol. liii. p. 211. John 8:11-12 See what the Light said of Himself, John viii. 11 and 12: 'Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more. Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth Me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.' These two verses ought never to have been severed. Their meaning consists in their union; the 'neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more,' the sanctifying forgiveness of God manifested in Christ is the light of life, and he that seeth it hath the life. Precisely the same idea of the light is given in the first chapter of the first epistle of John, fifth verse, 'God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth from all sin' (the intervening matter in the sixth and beginning of the seventh verses is merely a commentary on the words, God is light). The light consists in the forgiving holy love. Erskine of Linlathen. Christ the World's Light John 8:12 We can almost imagine the scene which suggested these words, or at least helped to give them their significance. He had come to the Temple in the early morning, just before sunrise. As He waited and taught, the sun arose. Quickly the splendour of the morning spread over earth and sky. And as the Saviour watched this transformation scene He lifted Himself up, and looked in the faces of those who were questioning Him, and spoke this memorable word, 'I am the light of the world'. I. It was a magnificent word, a stupendous word. There are only two possible conclusions to which we can come concerning such words as these. They are either the wildest words of audacity and self-deluded egotism that human lips ever uttered, or they are the language of One who was set far above all human criticism and judgment by His real and unmistakable Divinity. No wonder that the men who listened to Him were either filled with indignation or inspired with reverential awe. And no middle course has ever been possible for long. We have ever to make our choice, and most of us have made it to our heart's rest and joy. II. He declares here that He Himself is the light. And that is the truth or fact which has always impressed the world and stamped itself on the hearts of believers. It is not so much His words, His moral teachings, His matchless sayings, that have thrown light upon the world's darkness and illumined the obscure path which man treads, but His person and all He was and did and suffered. Life is illumined throughout in the glory of the Incarnation. III. Is He not now as He always was the light and life of men? And what sure hope can the world have concerning its future, save in the light of promise which shines from Him? We dare not cast the horoscope of the future unless we see His shining beyond. IV. And He is to us indeed the only clear light of life. For apart from Him everything that is most precious in life, everything that makes up the heart's chief treasures and possessions, is doubtful, uncertain, obscure; nay, as the dusky, baseless fabric of a dream. The light which streams from Him is all-pervading in our lives. It gives another and higher meaning to every labour and duty; it breaks like sunlight upon every dark night of life and makes sudden morning. J. G. Greenhough, Christ in Modern Life, p. 88. References. VIII. 12. A. G. Mortimer, The Church's Lessons for the Christian Year, pt. iv. p. 305. F. D. Maurice, Sermons, vol. iv. p. 203. Archbishop Lang, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvi. p. 310. T. D. Barlow, Rays from the Sun of Righteousness, p. 22. Brooke Herford, Courage and Cheer, p. 138. W. H. Dallinger, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lv. p. 52. R. W. Church, Village Sermons (3rd Series), p. 46. C. Bickersteth, The Gospel of Incarnate Love, p. 155. E. H. Hopkins, The Record, vol. xxvii. p. 767. Hugh Price Hughes, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvi. p. 161. C. Vince, The Unchanging Saviour, p. 162. J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons (9th Series), p. 242. D. Fraser, Metaphors in the Gospels, p. 16. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 216; ibid. (6th Series), vol. vii. p. 141. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 319. VIII. 12-20. Ibid. vol. iii. p. 54. VIII. 15. Ibid. (5th Series), vol. viii. p. 277. VIII. 18. L. D. Bevan, Christ and the Age, pp. 113,135. VIII. 19. Expositor (6th Series), vol. x. p. 180. VIII. 20. T. Sadler, Sunday Thoughts, p. 152. Expositor (6th Series), vol. viii. p. 269. VIII. 21. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. viii. p. 111. VIII. 24. J. Keble, Sermons for Lent to Passion-tide, p. 357. VIII. 25. Expositor (5th Series), vol. v. p. 1; ibid. (7th Series), vol. vi. p. 371. VIII. 28. H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 1699, p. 631. VIII. 29. F. A. Noble, Christian World Pulpit, vol. 1. p. 164. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xx. No. 1165. G. Campbell Morgan, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lix. p. 179. VIII. 30. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 33. VIII. 30, 31. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 330. VIII. 30-32. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxvii. No. 2191. The Ideal of True Individuality John 8:31-32 Our Lord Jesus Christ continually appealed to men as individuals, one by one. He knew what was in man; He met man face to face, and claimed him for His own. It is quite true, and it must never be forgotten, or we lose a very great deal of what He designed for us, that He provided, for those who should follow Him, the Divine home and shelter of the Church, that He made the perfection of the Christian character attainable only in the corporate and living union of the Brotherhood which is His Body, the union, part by part, with Himself. It is quite true that to His Spirit, through the teaching of His Apostles and Saints, we owe the perfected ideal of citizenship, the grandest thing the world can ever know, transmuting the idea of world-empire into the richer truth of 'the whole Body fitly framed and knit together by that which every joint supplieth, according to the working in due measure of each several part, making increase of the Body unto the edifying of itself in love'. But there is no contradiction between this and the ideal of true individuality; and Christ constantly, in all His teaching, through all His life on earth, up to the end even on the cross itself appealed to each man as free and unique and inestimably precious in himself. He loved His own individuality, and so He loved them unto the end. I. And as He loved, He appealed to them by, and He taught them to value, the imperishable gift of individual freedom, and with that the inalienable sacredness of every human soul. All things are yours; Christ's religion is a religion of light; there is nothing He has which He would keep back from you. He sets it all before us; He calls us each, one by one, to come forward and take it, to see with our own eyes, handle with our own hands, the priceless treasures of truth. So He urged, again and again, with insistent earnestness and unhesitating certainty, that we must be bold, and original, and genuine; that we must seek truth with undivided wills, and righteousness with a true hunger and thirst. It is only those who thus seek that will be rewarded; it is only they who can attain. The divided will, the half-hearted search these are doomed to inevitable failure. Man can only reach his true freedom if he seeks it with his whole heart, if his model is the supreme honesty, even to the death, of Christ the Son of God. 'If ye abide in My word, then are ye truly My disciples, and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.' II. Some think that today the greatest danger lies in unchecked individuality. If it were so and it is a danger timid ages always fear, and ours is a very timid age yet it is a danger Christ would have us run. When the world opens before each of us, when new thoughts come ana new difficulties arise, He certainly would not have us be afraid. He would have us sure in our own souls. That is a point on 'the human outlook' which we must not dare to ignore. Let me use the words of one of our scientific teachers; he calls them 'a personal caution'. As to our own souls, we are fully responsible. We can at least control them. III. That is Christ's message to the young. But a time comes to most of us when we find that life is not what we thought it was it is infinitely more difficult, and there are many things which we once thought simple, or never thought about at all, for which we can now find no explanation. Yet if you are trying to discover your true self you will distrust all simple explanations, because you will see the complexity of truth. You will not be atheist, or what people once called agnostic, because you will see that these are positions of intellectual and moral darkness. You wish to know the truth, and your very wish makes you certain it can be known. You are confident that your own self can work out into something truer and better, and that the truth you seek will give you full freedom for yourself. And you will see as your knowledge grows that 'scepticism narrows the real problem' and avoids facing facts as they are. There are still many to whom it may be said, 'There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy,' and it is our business, if we are truth-seekers, to see those things face to face. IV. The search for truth is, like all those great quests the romancers tell of, by a perilous path strewn with failures and beset with tragic deaths. It is so in natural science, in politics, in art; it is so not a whit less in religion. The man has crippled himself, has made success impossible, who forgets that his prayers, his communions, his repentances, his deep and wondering thoughts of God were, with all their imperfections, by far the finest, and the most serious, and the truest things he knew. They, those thoughts, those experiences, went down to the foundations of his individuality, to the real heart of his life. He must take them with him if he is to find truth and be free. Religion, as Bishop Creighton said, 'is not one out of many explanations of life: it is life itself. No man will ever find truth who loses the sense of awe and reverence; no man will ever be free who has not to the full a deep feeling of responsibility for all he learns and does and is. There are some lessons, if we are to go through with this quest, we must never forget; and the chief of them is the lesson of the life of Jesus Christ. Many things we may have to leave behind. Often we may have to stand alone. But the deep principle of those great words can never fail us: 'If ye abide in My word, then are ye truly My disciples, and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free'. W. H. Hutton, The Guardian, 17th March, 1911. References. VIII. 31. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlv. No. 2650. Expositor (6th Series), vol. ix. p. 39. VIII. 31-36. Ibid. (4th Series), vol. iii. p. 292. VIII. 31-69. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlv. No. 2652. John 8:32 He is the freeman whom the truth makes free, And all are slaves beside. There's not a chain That hellish foes confederate for his harm Can wind around him, but he casts it off With as much ease as Samson his green withes. Cowper, The Task (The Winter Morning Walk: 732 f; see the whole passage). John 8:32 One of the properties of this liberty is the ability to think about all kinds of things and find God in them. Anything but this is bondage of spirit; and, let alone the harm it does to the body, it binds the soul so that it cannot grow. St. Teresa. John 8:32 But there is yet a liberty unsung By poets, and by senators unpraised, Which monarchs cannot grant, nor all the powers Of earth and hell confederate take away; A liberty which persecution, fraud, Oppression, prisons, have no power to bind; Which whoso tastes can be enslaved no more. 'Tis liberty of heart, derived from Heaven, Bought with His blood who gave it to mankind, And sealed with the same token. It is held By charter, and that charter sanctioned sure By the unimpeachable and awful oath And promise of a God. His other gifts All bear the royal stamp that speaks them His, And are august, but this transcends them all... There is paradise that fears No forfeiture, and of its fruits He sends Large prelibation oft to saints below. Of these the first in order, and the pledge And confident assurance of the rest, Is liberty; a flight into His arms, Ere yet mortality's fine threads give way, A clear escape from tyrannising lust, And full immunity from penal woe. Cowper, The Task (v.). References. VIII. 32. B. J. Snell, The New Age, 6th December, 1894. E. M. Geldart, Echoes of Truth, p. 195. H. D. Rawnsley, Church Family Newspaper, vol. xiv. p. 68. John Thomas, Concerning the King, p. 84. J. Caird, Lay Sermons, p. 21. Expositor (4th Series), vol. iii. p. 183; ibid. vol. ix. p. 221. VIII. 33. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 341. VIII. 33-39. Ibid. (5th Series), vol. iv. p. 178. VIII. 34. B. J. Snell, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliii. p. 54. The Freedom of the Pure John 8:34-36 The Jews felt acutely their sad political state; they writhed under foreign dominion, and again and again broke out into rebellion, seeking an external freedom by casting off the hated Roman yoke. Yet the essential slavery is interior; political coercion may imprison the body or intellectual error degrade the mind, but the most abject and fatal bondage by far is that of the soul under the dominion of ignorance, passion, and wilfulness. Let us attempt to show the real nature of this deeper tyranny, and how the truth and grace of Jesus Christ give the captive soul sweet relief I. The Bondage of the Mind. This is one source and method of the essential slavery, the bondage of the mind being the tyranny of materialism. The love that never finds an object, the genius that never finds a sphere, and the greatness that never finds a mission, suggest a pathos beyond that of martyrdom; but life that fails to find God is the most terrible experience of all. We must be governed from above or from below, and according to the rule to which we submit ourselves are we free or enslaved. Christ emancipates us from the thraldom of materialism by opening our eyes to the spiritual universe, harmonising us with its law and filling us with its power. II. The Bondage of the Will. All see what an awful tyranny sin is when it has once become the habit of life. It is this bitter consciousness of an ignoble compulsion that spoils human life even when it abounds most in the elements of happiness. Christ ensures freedom by delivering men from the deceits and passions which betray and stultify the will. This is true liberty to will the good; so to will that we may do it, and to do it with such sympathy and mastery that we find our heaven in the doing of it; and with this freedom Christ makes His people free. III. The Bondage of the Conscience. The commission of sin defiles the conscience, and conscience degrades us into convicts and cowards. At the bottom of all our pessimism, abjectness, and hopelessness is the consciousness of sin and guilt. By imparting the sense of forgiveness and purifying the conscience from its stains, does Christ first break the fetters of the soul. Instead of looking for the fundamental, final freedom in more propitious circumstance, let us expect it from within in the deeper regeneration of the soul itself. Then all life shall be worked out in love and power. W. L. Watkinson, The Bane and the Antidote, p. 227. References. VIII. 34-36. T. Barker, Plain Sermons, p. 12. VIII. 35. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 350. VIII. 36. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. x. No. 565. Bishop Gore, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlix. p. 145. J. Keble, Sermons for Lent to Passion-tide, p. 346. Expositor (5th Series), vol. ix. p. 92; ibid. (6th Series), vol. vi. p. 404. VIII. 37. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xliv. No. 2584. VIII. 37-42. Expositor (4th Series), vol. vi. p. 455. VIII. 38. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xliv. No. 2560. Expositor (6th Series), vol. iii. p. 125. VIII. 39. J. O. Dykes, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlix. p. 193. VIII. 40. W. H. Simcox, The Cessation of Prophecy, p. 295. What Jesus Said About His First Coming John 8:43 'Back to Jesus 'is the watchword of a growing and influential school today. There is a great deal in the cry, and in the drift of thought which it represents, with which every wise Christian must be in sympathy. But it covers very different tendencies. In some cases it means reverent submission to Jesus Christ, and acceptance of all His words. In some cases it is associated with a very free and arbitrary handling of the Gospels, which substantially results in the rejection, as not genuine, of all Christ's sayings that point in the direction of His supernatural origin or Divine power. The underlying motive in such cases is the wish to get away from the epistles back to the supposed simpler teaching of the Sage and Saint of Nazareth. Now I want to go 'back to Christ'; and to collect what He Himself said about His mission. If Jesus said about Himself and His work what the Gospels unanimously report Him to have said, or anything like it, then the doctrines of Paul, and Peter, and the Epistle to the Hebrews, and John, are the only adequate explanation, and they are but the explanation, of His claims. I. These sayings give us Christ's own estimate of His heavenly origin and worldwide significance. We find in these sayings clear indications of the worldwide significance which, in Christ's consciousness, attached to Himself and His work. II. I find in these sayings collectively our Lord's conception of the purposes of His coming. (1) Salvation, or the communication of life, or the flooding of the world with light, are the purposes, as Jesus saw them, of His coming. To deal with a humanity so full of desperate needs, and so utterly incapable of any kind of self-help, was the problem which this audacious young Rabbi grappled, and said He had solved. (2) In this declaration of purpose there lies the clearest consciousness of non-participation in that universal condition. (3) His tremendous claim to be able to save the world in the full sense of delivering from all moral and physical evil, and endowing with all moral and physical good, is verified by facts. III. Note, from these collective sayings, our Lord's conception of the manner in which the purpose of His life was to be discharged. The calling of sinners to repentance, and the bearing witness to the truth, fall mainly under the ministering which He did upon earth. Sending fire on earth is, as His own words abundantly show, only possible as the result of His giving His life a ransom for many. Unless we take the ransom as the chief part of the manner by which He saves the world, we do not go 'back to Christ,' nor accept His own estimate of Himself. IV. I find in these collective sayings our Lord's prevision of the issue of His work. Purpose is one thing, result is altogether another. The mission had but one intention, but it has a twofold consequence; because man's free will comes in, and even infinite Love could not ensure that all men should accept the ransom from captivity, or all should be enkindled by the leaping fire of the Divine Spirit. Let me urge on you to take Christ's words, and to take them all. A. Maclaren, Triumphant Certainties, p. 128. References. VIII. 42. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxi. No. 1267. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 363. VIII. 43-47. Expositor (5th Series), vol. vi. p. 440. VIII. 44. T. F. Crosse, Sermons (2nd Series), p. 168. Expositor (5th Series), vol. viii. p. 149; ibid. (6th Series), vol. viii. p. 35. VIII. 46. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. ix. No. 492. F. St. John Corbett, The Preacher's Year, p. 64. S. Baring-Gould, Village Preaching for a Year, vol. i. p. 238. R. J. Campbell, New Theology Sermons, p. 66. Expositor (5th Series), vol. ii. p. 166; ibid. (6th Series), vol. iv. p. 282; did. vol. vii. p. 419. VIII. 46, 47. G. W. Brameld, Practical Sermons (2nd Series), p. 93. VIII. 48. H. Bushnell, Christ and His Salvation, p. 278. Expositor (4th Series), vol. x. p. 362. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 374. VIII. 48-51. Ibid. (5th Series), vol. viii. p. 381. John 8:49 When the Jews accused our Saviour of having a devil, He simply answered, 'I have not a devil'. If you are accused of any great or scandalous fault, of which you know that you are not guilty, answer simply and quietly to that effect. St. Francis de Sales. Christ Our Life John 8:51 I. Christ's Antipathy to Death. What a startling statement it is! There is nothing, I think, in all our Lord's utterances more striking than the persistent aversion to death which breathes through them; so that it has been said with truth that death is the one natural fact, the one human experience, to which Christ showed antipathy. And why, we may ask, did He take up this attitude towards death, which is an incident as unfailing and as natural as the return of old age? If He declined to speak of death as death, it was because He saw through it, because He knew its true nature, and ever looked on beyond it to that higher and fuller life of which it is intended to be the portal. He is told that the daughter of Jairus is dead, but He declares that she is only asleep. And so again, when the news was brought to Him of the death of His friend at Bethany, He put the hated word from Him and declared that Lazarus was only sleeping; and He would not change the phrase till the dullness of the disciples compelled Him. It is clear enough that He aims at teaching a new mode of thought and speech in regard to the close of man's earthly life. The early believers, taught by the Resurrection of the Lord, treasured this new term with deepest gratitude and devotion. They always spoke of physical death as sleep. Now were this the only service which Jesus Christ had rendered, had He done no more for us than to give us the right to substitute this word 'sleep' for 'death,' would He not have been among the greatest benefactors of mankind? II. He is the Life. But now let us go on to see what it is that ensures our right thus to think of death. In the words of the text, just as at the grave of Lazarus, our Lord sets Himself forth as the guarantee that death is not what it seems. How is it that union with Christ and obedience to Christ put us beyond the reach and power of death? Through Christ life has become a ruling power. He stands in the midst of humanity for an eternal reality, and He came that man might know it and embrace it. If they believe in Him, if they are grafted into Him and assimilated to Him, then they acquire His right to overlook death, to face it as an unreal experience, a transition not a state, a gain not a loss, an expansion not an extinction of power. III. Life in Christ a Present Thing. And we need to be perpetually reminded that this life in and through Christ is a present thing. Men relegate it to the future. They talk about going to heaven or to hell as if the whole issue lay outside present experience. But Christ has set forth salvation as a life, an eternal thing which begins now and here. And does not this thought light up our Lord's words? Already through obedience to Him the outer life may be quickened which will pass unscathed through the change of death day by day. If we are living unto Him, the seed of eternity and truth and love and purity may be sown within us, and bear fruits which will suffer no blight in the chill passage of the grave. Our Lord reminds us that the one thing that differentiates men both here and hereafter is obedience to His law. He knows who are His, who are keeping His sayings, who are living in His spirit, and who therefore have in them the charm of that life which shall endure, and over which the grave shall have no power. But some, perhaps, will say, Is this all real? Are you not making too light of that great fact of death? Did not Christ die, and do not we die even if we have believed in Him ever so truly, and served Him ever so faithfully? Yes. In one sense Christ did die. But He carried with Him that which lighted up the darkness. He bore into the other world a Divine principle of being which could not undergo dissolution, and He tells us that we shall do the same On one condition He offers to make death as harmless a thing to you and me as it was to Him. He says, Come to Me, believe in Me, follow Me, feed upon Me, live by Me, and you shall be scatheless, you too shall have the secret of immortality, you shall see through the terrors of death and decay as I have done and shall defy them. In you as in Him spiritual life shall triumph gloriously over physical death. References. VIII. 61. J. J. Blunt, Plain Sermons, p. 27. W. Unsworth, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xi. p. 513. J. Bunting, Sermons, vol. ii. p. 290. VIII. 61-53. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxvi. No. 2169. VIII. 63. E. A. Stuart, The Great High Priest and Other Sermons, vol. xii. p. 145. Expositor (6th Series), vol. iv. p. 178. VIII. 56. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlv. No. 2652. Expositor (4th Series), vol. v. p. 28. The Brevity of Our Lord's Life John 8:57 The story of Jesus is the story of a young man's life, and I want to see what lessons of encouragement and inspiration there may be for us in the fact that He who changed the entire course of history and revolutionised the world died when He was not yet fifty years old. 'Thou art not yet fifty years old,' said these scoffing and incredulous Jews, and that speaking from the purely human point of view was the tragedy of it. I. Christ died young. He was only some thirty-two or thirty-three years of age when they nailed Him to the cruel tree. Now, the death of the young always comes upon us with a shock and a jar. We resent it. We are aggrieved by it It offends our sense of the fitness of things. Death in our minds is associated with ideas of decay. It is the weak and the decrepit and the old who are the fit subjects for death. The days of our years are three score years and ten, and if death comes before, we feel in a certain way robbed and defrauded of what is our rightful due. 'Above all,' says Bacon in his essays, 'believe it, the sweetest canticle is Nunc Dimittis , when a man hath obtained worthy ends and expectations.' Yes, when a man has lived his life, and obtained his desires, and filled out his days, he can say with Simeon: 'Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace according to Thy word'. In such a case death loses all its repulsiveness and becomes kindly, genial, gracious. But Death is grim and terrible when he takes the young for his prey. We feel that death has no business with youth. 'Take me not away in the midst of my days,' cries the Psalmist. And that from the human point of view was the tragedy of our Lord's end. He was cut off before His prime; He was not yet fifty years old! Yes, from the purely human standpoint it seemed a terrible mistake, tragedy pure and simple, that Jesus should die so young. And yet there was no mistake about it He died when He was not yet fifty years old, but there was nothing premature or untimely about His dying. This brief life, this life that only reached the threshold of manhood, was the only full, rounded and perfect life the world has ever known. This Man who was not yet fifty years old, who died when so young, looking back, was able to say, 'It is finished'. And this is the truth I would seek to impress upon you there is never anything premature or untimely about the death of a Christian. We allow ourselves to think so and sometimes to say so, because to our poor mortal intelligence it looks as if they were taken away in the midst of their usefulness. But the words 'premature' and 'untimely' ought really to have no place in the Christian man's vocabulary. To use them is to forget that it is in God's hands our breath is. He orders our path and our lying down, and He doeth all things well. It is also to forget that men serve Him yonder as well as here. II. 'Thou art not yet fifty years old,' said these scornful Jews, and that was the wonder of it. For already He had stirred Palestine as it had never been stirred before. All Judea and Galilee were in a ferment because of Him. Wherever He went the multitudes thronged about Him. Not one of the prophets not even the greatest of them, John the Baptist had ever created the excitement Jesus did. And He had done all this in an incredibly short space of time. He was not even yet fifty years old. But the work Jesus did in Palestine is only a tiny section of the work which He has accomplished in the world. III. 'Thou art not yet fifty years old,' said the Jews, and surely that is the inspiration of it. A young Man, and yet what a work! A young Man, but what a record! A young Man, but what an achievement! The young Christ! How the thought of Him ought to appeal to our hearts, and especially to those of us who are young ourselves! Blaise Pascal had penned his Thoughts and written his Provincial Letters before he was forty. James Renwick had done a stupendous work in the cause of the reformed religion in Scotland before he died on the scaffold at Edinburgh at twenty-six. But the young Man who did the mightiest work was He who died upon the cross when as yet He was not fifty years old! But what an appeal there is in His life! What an appeal to lofty service, to high endeavour! J. D. Jones, The Gospel of Grace, p. 73. References. VIII. 58. T. Arnold, The Interpretation of Scripture, p. 156. Expositor (5th Series), vol. iii. p. 452. VIII. 59. H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Holy-tide Teaching, p. 22. J. Keble, Sermons for Septuagesima to Ash Wednesday, p. 343. J. Keble, Miscellaneous Sermons, p. 476. IX. Expositor (6th Series), vol. x. p. 294. The Birth-mark John 9:1 The text is 'from his birth'; that is to say, from the very moment of his first breathing; something he brought into the world with him and which is, so to say, part of him, is the very signature of Providence upon his personality. Let us get to these fundamental realities and regions, and we may go away from God's altar quiet, calm, confident; because we recognise that the Divine sceptre is over us, the Divine Spirit is in us, the cloud of indication marks the midday, and the fire of indication makes the night glow with strange gleaming. I. 'From his birth'. This applies to all talents. It is said, we brought nothing into this world. We know the rough outward sense in which these words are perfectly true; and yet we brought everything with us, we brought the germ, the plasm of everything we are and have. That would be the deeper meaning of the text We repeat the words, we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain that we can carry nothing out. Only in their external and passing sense are these words true. We also could say, we brought everything we have into this world, and we cany out or this world everything we have made of them according to the grace and providence of God or our own misbehaviour. The reference in the first literal sense of the term is to mere clothing. But really and truly we were clothed, not by the clothier, but by God. We accept the resurrection in the very death. Let me repeat, this applies to all talents. The painter was born a painter, the preacher was a preacher before he fully looked his mother in the face, he began before he slept in the cradle. We are all, as to our members, faculties, destinies, written in the book of God away ages and centuries before arithmetic mumbled her poor figures. In proportion as we realise this thought we become strong men, so strong as to be tranquil, so strong as to live outside the line of panic. If we realised that we are what we are from birth, we should begin to pray, we should begin to know the joy and the music of thankfulness; we should get rid of all envy and murmuring and discontent If you made yourself, well, you are entitled to complain because some man had more skill than you had in making himself; you may jostle him, and sneer at him, and disparage him; but if God made you, if you are part of a great scheme of things, if individuality is to be wrought up into multitudinous-ness and harmony, then let us be quiet and accept God's destiny. Repose upon the great doctrine of Divine election and call. God sends no man into the world without something to begin with. The talents were distributed in eternity; we open our eyes to read in the blue heavens our destiny. If you were not born to be a great merchant, accept the position into which you can throw your energies, and be as great as you can within your own limitations. II. 'From his birth,' Our daily life was fixed before we breathed. We say this or that man has great success in daily life; we must inquire further into the meaning of these terms. It may be that the man is working out some deep scheme of providence. That scheme may go in one of two ways, upward or downward; it may be a sign of God's approval, or it may be a method of Divine testing, that the quality of the man may be revealed to himself. I do not treat daily success in life from an atheistic point of view. Depend upon it, if any man is in a great position in any section of life there is something behind him, if that position be enduring, which accounts for it. You see the great Prime Minister of your country, whatever politics his may be, and you instantly think that the man put himself into that position, and you sing out of hymn books and go to churches and make them empty by your very presence; you exclude God from the State, from the great fabric of civilisation. And every man knows that the Prime Minister who is not of his own politics is a fool and a criminal; of course everybody knows that But if the Prime Minister is of the critic's own politics he is about the divinest creature the Lord ever created. Poor souls! we have no God, but an image on the open and soiled page. We do not recognise that all men, except in cases of obvious self-degradation, are under the Divine government and benediction. If they would but accept what they are from birth! What a thing it is, as I have just said, to have such a conception of life as to be saved from envy, from murmuring, and bitter complaining! The Bible addresses itself to that possibility. Once a sweet voice wholly musical said to the ages, 'Fret not thyself because of evildoers'. 'I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree; yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not, yea, I sought him, but he could not be found.' Why murmur? What has the man you envy got? He has got strong-rooms paved up to the very roof with gold, and every sovereign is set on edge. Is he happy? To that inquiry I cannot return a very definite answer. He certainly does not look happy. What about his sons? One of them rotted away before his very eyes; another of them he sent abroad, and he limits the expatriated prodigal to a few shillings a week. Ah, there is more in that strong-room than gold, there is a worm between each of the two sovereigns, a poisonous, undying, gnawing worm; and you are happier, though you buy your bread by the loaf and hail the travelling man that you may purchase your daily fire from his waggon. Until we know all things we know nothing; we must know the whole before we can know the part. Things are variously distributed. I am told by botanists that some flowers have their fragrance, not in the flower but in the root. Until, therefore, I know the root I cannot pronounce any sound judgment about the blossom or the flower. Some trees have their fragrance, the same botanist tells me, not in their foliage but in their bark; there, by that nostril into which God breathed the breath of life, you can detect the election and purpose of God, He made the bark odorous, and He made some flowers almost wholly fragrant a fragrance that gives itself away to the toiling winds and floats off to make others happy and hopeful. III. The thought that we are what we are from birth, and that God is behind all things, is the true secret of fortitude and patience. It is not the secret of fatalism. Fatalism is dead, inert, careless; fortitude is alert, alive, sensitive, feeling everything, and feeling God most of all. 'Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.' But there are some deep graves, there are great gashes across the heart; there is bitterness in the water, there is a kind of poison in the bread: what is your answer to that? The answer is, 'Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid'. If God says that, through his Son, to the living suffering human heart, that heart at once is mailed, protected, secured from the enemy. Lord, increase our faith! God works vital changes in us. Here is a man who says, 'Once I was blind, now I see'. You were blind from birth? Quite true, and I was also dead in trespasses and sins, but God has intervened, something has happened, the greater law has involved the lesser law, and behold it reigns in grace and is as the chief blossom in the garden of God. By the grace of Christ we take new views, we share new responsibilities, we are new men; we only do new works because we are new workers. If this doctrine could be instilled into us it would make us new in every relation of life It will be difficult for any preacher, I care not what his age or his power, to convince some people that they cannot do anything for themselves in this matter of regeneration and the new manhood in Christ Jesus. There is nothing so difficult to get rid of as a prejudice, except it be a superstition, which indeed is another form of prejudice. The man thinks that he can do something for himself; then he cannot really be in God. 'Just as I am without one plea;' that must be my condition if I am to be received truly into the household of God. I was not born in the household of faith, but I can be adopted into that household by the miracle of the cross. That is the Gospel we have to preach to every creature; it is adapted to the necessity of every creature, it appeals to the experience of every creature, it receives the confirmation of every creature who has entered into this mystery of transformation, not a mere metamorphosis as to form, but a new creation by an inward and spiritual force. How the man blind from his birth forgets the darkness of the past? and revels in the coming summer! Let us talk for a moment to the man who was blind from his birth. What do you remember of the past? we may ask him. His answer is: 'I remember nothing; darkness has no record, chaos has no history'. What do you remember since you came into the light of Christ? may be our second question. Then with what spiritual animation is His face alight; His memory is full of the holiest, sweetest reminiscences; they are His property, His treasure, the bank He keeps in heaven. You are not to grieve yourself over what you used to be in your old days. Remember, that where sin abounded, grace did much more abound. You are not to be always introspecting in relation to your own spiritual condition; you are to be looking unto the hills whence your help came, and every now and then in the soft light clouds you will see an image like unto the Son of man. Joseph Parker. References. IX. 1. J. Keble, Miscellaneous Sermons, p. 475. Expositor (5th Series), vol. i. p. 230. IX. 1-3. A. Ainger, Sermons Preached in the Temple Church, p. 153. IX. 2. R. J. Campbell, British Congregationalist, 5th September, 1907, p. 195. IX. 2-3. C. Vince, The Unchanging Saviour, p. 178. IX. 3. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxix. No. 2309. IX. 3-4. Ibid. vol. xxix. No. 1754. Jesus Our Example In Work John 9:4 I. In studying our Lord's life we cannot but be struck with the fact that it was a life of work; that He Who came into this world, not only to redeem us, but to be our example, recognises both in word and deed the duty of labour. (1) The first lesson these words teach us is, surely, the dignity of labour. Work belongs not only to our fallen state, not only to man in his state of innocency, but even to the life of God. 'My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.' (2) Then following close upon this first thought, and indeed flowing from it, is another the difficulties of work in our life on earth. This indeed is the result of sin. Our Lord teaches us not only that work now is difficult, but that the difficulties must be met, the cross must be borne; for our Lord knew what it was to work and to see no fruit of His labour. (3) To take only one more lesson in regard to work from our Lord's life the importance of preparation, or the relation between preparation and the result of labour. II. And, now to apply some lessons of our Lord's life to our own work. (1) We learn from our last point the need of discipline as a preparation for all effective work the instrument needs to be prepared, the tool to be sharpened; and when the instrument has been rendered perfect, the tool keen, every touch works wonders. (2) Another lesson, scarcely less important the need of thoroughness in our work. One great lesson Ruskin has tried to teach, that good work is 'work that tells the truth'. III. There are three principles of work which we may especially learn from our Lord's example. (1) The motive of work. A man's work will be judged by its motive. What was the motive of our Lord's work? We have just heard 'to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to finish His work'. (2) The spirit of work. The secret of our Lord's work, of our Lord's life, humanly speaking, was the life of prayer which He led. Do your work in the spirit of prayer. (3) And then lastly the end of work. Work which is done for an earthly end will pass away with the world; work which is done for God and for eternity will follow us into the world beyond, will follow us to the Judgment Seat of Christ, where we shall give account of how we have used the talents committed to our charge. How short is our work-time in this world! A. G. Mortimer, Lenten Preaching, p. 118. Christ and the Man Born Blind John 9:4 Sharp, clear, and well defined, five characters stand out before us in this chapter. I. In the first place, we have our blessed Lord Himself. He stands before us as a worker, as a model for all workers. (1) Mark His majesty. (2) His devotion to His work. His whole soul yearned to benefit His fellow-men, and therefore 'I must work'. (3) And then, thirdly, see His love. How glorious is the King of Israel today! How grandly majestic! How devotedly loyal to Him that sent Him! And how gently loving to the outcast and to the sad! II. Very different is the next character in the chapter. His disciples! Oh, how far short they fall of the Master! As soon as they saw the blind man they turned to the Master and said, 'Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?' They thought here was an excellent opportunity of getting some information on a very difficult subject. There is such a thing as religious curiosity. The devil says: Here is a blind man, let us speculate. Jesus Christ said: Here is a blind man, let us work. III. In the third character is brought before us poor, miserable, shuffling characters, the parents of this man. They knew that he now saw, but instead of giving the praise of their devotion to Emmanuel who had healed him, they tried to shuffle out of all responsibility, and they said: 'We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; but by what means he now seeth we know not: or who hath opened his eyes, we know not; he is of age, ask him'. Ah, do we not sometimes see this? Instead of boldly standing up for what we know is right and true, we try to shuffle off the responsibility on others' shoulders. IV. The fourth character need not detain us long. It is one we all scorn and despise. These hypocrites who, although a manifest miracle had been wrought in their midst, were so prejudiced that they would not enter into faith by this door which had been opened for them. V. Last of all, there is the blind man himself. Here we have a symbolical picture put before us but a picture which we have every right to treat as symbolical of spiritual blessing, for our Lord takes advantage of the healing of this blind man to speak about spiritual blindness and about spiritual sight. The blind man is symbolical of the unbelief that is produced by sin he cannot see. The Lord could heal the man born blind, and He can heal you. But He will heal you by very simple means. E. A. Stuart, His Dear Son, and other Sermons, vol. v. p. 9. John 9:4 Dr. Annesley, one of whose daughters was the mother of John Wesley, entered his pulpit for the last time, saying, 'I must work while it is day,' and died with ecstatic exclamations on his lips. 'I have no doubt nor shadow of doubt all is clear between God and my soul. He chains up Satan; he cannot trouble me. Come, dear Jesus! the nearer the more precious and the more welcome. What manner of love is this to a poor worm! I cannot express a thousandth part of what praise is due to Thee. We know what we do when we aim at praising God for His mercies. It is but little I can give, but Lord help me to give Thee my all. I will die praising Thee, and rejoice that there are others that can praise Thee better. I shall be satisfied with Thy likeness satisfied, satisfied. Oh, my dearest Jesus, I come.' The old register of St. Leonard's, Shoreditch, for December, 1696, has this entry: 'Samuel Annesley was buried the seventh day, from Spittle Yard'. John 9:4 Compare the closing words of A Candid Examination of Theism, written by Mr. G. J. Romanes in 1876 during his agnostic phase: 'Forasmuch as I am far from being able to agree with those who affirm that the twilight doctrine of the "new faith" is a desirable substitute for the waning splendour or the "old," I am not ashamed to confess that with this virtual negation of God the universe to me has lost its soul of loveliness; and although from henceforth the precept to "work while it is day," will doubtless but gain an intensified force from the terribly intensified meaning of the words that "the night cometh when no man can work," yet when at times I think, as I must think at times, of the appalling contrast between the hallowed glory of that creed, which once was mine, and the lonely mystery of existence as now I find it, at such times I shall ever feel it impossible to avoid the sharpest pang of which my nature is susceptible.' John 9:4 I must home to work while it is called day; for the night cometh when no man can work. I put that text, many a year ago, on my dial-stone, but it often preached in vain. Sir Walter Scott. John 9:4 At this time I observed upon the dial-plate of his watch a short Greek inscription, taken from the New Testament, νὺξ γὰρ ἔρχεται , being the first words of our Saviour's solemn admonition to the improvement of that time which it allowed us to prepare for eternity: 'The night cometh when no man can work'. Boswell's * Life of Johnson. John 9:4 * In life we are strangled between two doors, of which the one is labelled Too Soon, the other * Too Late. * Barbey d'Aurevilly. References. IX. 4 Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiii. No 766, and vol. xvi. No. 943. W. S. Perry, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lii. p. 214. R. Allen, The Words of Christ, p. 149. J. R. Miller, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xviii. p. 369. J. T. Bramston, Fratribus, p. 60. J. C. M. Bellew, Sermons, vol. i. pp. 63 and 73. R. Flint, Sermons and Addresses, p. 264. E. B. Pusey, Oxford Lent Sermons, 1868, p. 69. J. Keble, Sermons for Lent to Passion-tide, p. 367. C. D. Bell, The Power of God, p. 184. T. Arnold, The Interpretation of Scripture, p. 164. J. J. Blunt, Plain Sermons (2nd Series), p. 142. W. J. E. Bennett, Sermons Preached at the London Mission, 1869, p. 167. D. Fraser, Metaphors in the Gospels, p. 305. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vi. p. 442. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 1. IX. 5. Ibid. (7th Series), vol. v. p. 12. IX. 6-7. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxiii. No. 1977. IX. 6. A. G. Mortimer, The Church's Lessons for the Christian Year, pt. iv. p. 316. IX. 6, 7- W. Friend, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liv. p. 314. J. R. Miller, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xviii. p. 369. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 11. IX. 19-24. Expositor (4th Series), vol. v. p. 295. IX. 21. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxiv. No. 1393. W. Brock, Midsimmer Morning Sermons, p. 110. IX. 22-41. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vi. p- 35. Personal Testimony John 9:25 Such was the answer returned by the man who had been blind from his birth to the Pharisees before whom the excited neighbours had dragged him to give an account of his cure. The whole of this scene, the cure itself and the debate which followed it, is full of spiritual meaning. I. As to the Cure. It was avowedly wrought with a spiritual object, intended to be typical, prophetic, for our Lord prefaced it with that great utterance which went far beyond the immediate case, 'I am the Light of the World,' and He followed it up by not less significant words, 'For judgment I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind'. The spiritual, not the physical, was uppermost in His mind. The bestowal of sight was indeed to the man a priceless boon, but the immediate boon, the gift of a faculty hitherto withheld, was, after all, secondary and subordinate. It was the token of a deeper benefit, the sign and token of a greater illumination, to proclaim to the world the reality of that virtue which can come forth from Christ alone to pour light divine on the darkened soul. In that man, the enemies of Christ were confronted with a witness whom they could indeed insult and excommunicate to their hearts' content, but could not explain away, and we behold in him the witness of a far higher influence than that which those gainsayers called in question. II. The Absolute Certainty of this Man. We know that when the eye is sound, when it is properly sensitive to light, so that wherever there is light you can see, no demonstration is needed to prove that light is light. Nothing can add to the evidence of the senses. Given light and the seeing eye, and in the outer world of sense you have at once certainty. And in the spiritual world, when the light of Divine truth falls upon the single eye there is certainty True, there is also mystery. We cannot comprehend the very nature of Him from Whom the light comes. We may not understand the mechanism of the secret process by which we see light and the object on which it falls, but the act of vision admits of no doubt. We are certain that the light is light, we are certain that we see it, and that is all that is needed for action. III. It has often been said of other Evidences that their Value is Variable. That which satisfies one age, that which appeals to one type of intellect, cannot be trusted to satisfy another. There are volumes of apologetics which in their day did good service but are now quite out of date, theological curiosities laid up on unvisited shelves, and as useless in present controversies as the artillery of the Middle Ages would be upon the modern field of battle. IV. But there is one Line of Defence which can never be Antiquated , and for this reason, that Christianity is not a philosophy to be commended and proved to the intellect, but a life to be lived. Therefore it is that the evidence of the healed man is the same for all time. So stupendous a spiritual revolution as that which the Church of Christ brought about is not to be explained like the spread of a philosophy. It must have been due to a Power which is not of this world. References. IX. 25. C. H. Kelly, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lix. p. 176. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. li. No. 2955. IX. 29. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. iv. p. 250. IX. 30. J. Clifford, The Christian Certainties, p. 201. C. Perren, Sermon Outlines, p. 278. IX. 30-34. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 449. IX. 31. J. Keble, Sermons for Sundays after Trinity, pt. i. p. 468. E. A. Bray, Sermons, vol. i. p. 341. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. li. No. 2950. IX. 32. Ibid. vol. xviii. No. 1065. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 31. A Vital Question John 9:35 What is it to believe on the Son of God? It just consists in hearing God's testimony, receiving God's gift, and living on Him from day to day. I. Seeing that God's Word bears testimony to His Son Jesus Christ, receive that testimony: for 'he that hath received His testimony hath set to his seal that God is true' (John 3:33 ). Now, what is the testimony? See 1 John 5:10-11 : 'He that believeth not God hath made him a liar; because he believeth not the record that God gave of His Son. And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.' II. The next matter is to receive Him as the gift of God. III. Then go on from day to day living on Christ, whom you have received, and in whom you have believed, confiding to Him all your troubles, leaning on Him in all your difficulties, coming to Him in every time of need, trusting in Him always. IV. Now faith in the Son of God cannot be too simple, definite, individual, and childlike. People make great mistakes on this subject. (1) To believe that you love the Lord Jesus Christ very much is not to believe on the Son of God. (2) To believe that Christ died for you personally is not to believe on the Son of God. (3) There are those who argue thus: 'I cannot see clearly in the Bible that I have an interest in Christ'. To believe in your interest in Christ is one thing, to believe on. the Son of God on the warrant of God's testimony is quite another. It is as you believe on the Son of God you will come into the enjoyment of realising your interest in Him. It is by believing the fact of His interest in me I come to realise that I have an interest in Him. Marcus Rainsford, The Fullness of God, p. 193. Dost Thou Believe? John 9:35 This is a very grave and solemn question, which it would be well for every man to answer for Himself. It was asked of the man that was born blind, whose eyes our Lord had opened miraculously. The answer of the man was in the form of another question: 'Who is He, Lord, that I may believe?' I. It is a Vital Question. It is a vital question because 'What think ye of Christ? 'is the question which God asks, and it comes sooner or later to us all. When our Lord came into this world, the Jews came to Him and said, 'What must we do to work the works of God?' and He said: 'This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him Whom He hath sent'. This, then, is the first step; this is the first requirement. I can never be a Christian until, coming to God, I believe. II. It is a Personal Question. 'Dost thou believe on the Son of God'? Religion is altogether a personal thing. If he believes he believes in his soul, and the soul is the man. Therefore it is his own affair. Religion is his own personal question with God, and this, as when our Lord asked it, is the great personal question with the soul and the conscience: 'Dost thou believe on the Son of God?' Note what George Whitefield wrote once, long ago, upon the window pane with a diamond ring. He had been staying in the house of a rich man over night, but he recognised that there was no Saviour acknowledged in that house of wealth and luxury. In the morning he was a very early riser, and before he left his room he wrote in large characters upon the centre pane of glass in the bedroom these four words, one above the other: 'One thing thou lackest!' And when the guest was gone the wife came along the corridor off which all the beautiful bedrooms opened, and the door of this bedroom was open. It was a beautiful room. The rooms had names: there was the white room, for a bride when she came; there was the green room and the red room, and this was the blue room in which George Whitefield had slept. She went in at the open door and looked around at the splendid furniture everything in keeping, everything in good taste. She looked at the window. She read on the window, 'One thing thou lackest!' She was transfixed; she read it again and again. She was glued to the ground, and at last she went for her husband. He went up to the window and read it. Then she called her two daughters beautiful girls, twins and it was read by both. They all read it the father, the mother, and the twin sisters 'One thing thou lackest!' And God through that window pane brought them all to Christ. That window pane was the book through which their hearts were all touched and changed, and they were brought to believe in Jesus Christ. References. IX. 36. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxvi. No. 2141, and vol. lii. No. 3008. Expositor (6th Series), vol. xii. p. 246. IX. 35, 36. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. i. p. 146. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xviii. No. 1088. IX. 35-38. Ibid. vol. xlvi. No. 2667. The Soul's Vision and Hearing of Jesus John 9:39 We have, in our Lord's interview with this sturdy blind man, a very remarkable exception to His usual methods. Generally, He was Himself reticent about His Messiahship, and enjoined silence concerning it on those who believed it. Here He devotes Himself to bringing this man up to the confession that He is the Christ, and makes to him one of the only two articulate utterances claiming Messiahship which fell from His lips, in addition to those confided to the immediate circle of His disciples. I. We see here the kind of people to whom Christ delights to make frank revelations of Himself. Take this man before us as an illustration. (1) He is sturdy, absolutely sincere, not to be cajoled, or brow-beaten, or tempted, or coaxed into saying a single word beyond what He knew, but standing firmly, on bis own two feet, on the solid basis of experienced fact, and refusing to be tempted one hair's-breadth beyond that. (2) Note again, how this man was faithful to the growing light as it dawned upon him. He passed through three stages in his notions about Jesus Christ. 'The man called Jesus' 'a prophet' one 'from God' on these convictions he stands, and nothing will shake him. The lesson from these facts is that, if we want Christ to be on frank, confidential terms with us, we must hold faithfully by whatsoever we already see to be the will and the message of God, and we must be lovingly prepared to accept whatever Jesus Christ says, whether it confirms or contradicts our present prejudices or opinions, and to 'follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth'. II. How does Christ show Himself to such people? (1) 'Thou hast seen Him.' He gave you the eyes to see; now He has given you the Christ to look at. He gives us eyes to see, and He gives us Himself to behold. (2) Further, 'Thou hast both seen Him, and it is He that talketh with thee'. The word that is used here in the original conveys not only the idea of speech, but of familiar, frank conversation, such as two friends might have with one another. Christ has not fallen dumb, He is still the Incarnate Word, and His very life's energy, so to speak, is to impart Himself. III. The glad certitude and deepened faith that result from Christ's speech and the sight of Him. Get, as we all may if we like, that first-hand familiarity of personal intercourse with Christ, and see Him, as we may if we will, and we shall not want any more arguments and logical defences of our faith. A. Maclaren, Triumphant Certainties, p. 119. Blindness and Judgment John 9:39 That is the comment which presents itself to Jesus, as He thinks over this episode of the healing of the blind man. While the blind man had reached belief, the Pharisees had become hardened in unbelief. Christ's words still remain true, and have a meaning for us now. I. The Pharisees and the man whom they cast out may alike be taken as exemplifying at the present day the strange paradox of Jesus, which still holds good about blindness and sight in things spiritual, that those who see not eventually see, while those who see are made blind. It still remains true that in respect of our reception or rejection of His message our Lord came into this world for judgment. Christ's object in coming was not to judge but to save. But though judgment was not a motive, it was a necessary result of His coming. Do not let us suppose that we can altogether escape responsibility for our beliefs on the ground of the difficulty which we feel about the evidence. Christ says, 'If thou canst believe'. He does not wish us to force ourselves to believe against the protests of our reason. It is with the heart that man believeth unto righteousness. The contrite heart, the purified affections, the spirit of unselfishness, the struggle against evil, the consecration of the will, the longing for goodness and God these are the gifts which we must have before we can attain true spiritual insight. The judgment, as He describes it, turns entirely on the distinction between loving good and loving evil. II. It is not difficult nowadays to find examples of both these classes of people. (1) There are still people who in some respects resemble the Pharisees. Like the Pharisees they feel a pride in their intellectual superiority to the average man. Like the Pharisees, they say, We see. But is it uncharitable to suggest that in some respects they are all the while really blind? Blind because the organ of the spiritual vision has become impaired in them. (2) What a contrast it is to turn to the opposite type of character, which begins by not seeing and eventually comes to see. Still there are in the world simple, humble-minded natures, the little children whom our Saviour bids us resemble, the babes to whom the Father reveals those things which He has hidden from the wise and prudent. H. G. Woods (Master of the Temple), Church Family Newspaper, vol. xv. p. 492. References. IX. 39. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxx. No. 1798. W. R. Inge, All Saints' Sermons, 1905-1907, p. 1. Expositor (5th Series), vol. vi. p. 328. John 9:41 'Spain sleeps on,' says Buckle, 'untroubled, unheeding, impassive, receiving no impressions from the rest of the world, and making no impressions upon it. There she lies.... And what is the worst symptom of all; she is satisfied with her own condition. Though she is the most backward country in Europe, she believes herself to be the foremost-References. IX. 41. Expositor (5th Series), vol. vi. p. 230. X. 1-10. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vi. p. 33. X. 1-16. Ibid. vol. i. p. 466; ibid. vol. xi. p. 60. X. 1-18. Ibid. vol. iii. p. 471. To Him the Porter Openeth John 10:3 We read in the parable of the Good Shepherd that 'to Him the porter openeth'. We have read before that the sheep in the true fold are protected by a living guardian, for Christ is the Door as well as the Shepherd that is, Christ and Christ alone of all true shepherds is His own authority. The shepherds under Him, if they are true, all come in His name, and speak by His warrant, and teach what He has taught them. But He stands alone. The porter is the Holy Spirit, Who, as Westcott says, acts through His appointed ministers in each case. We have then to consider the work of the Holy Spirit as opening the door to Christ, and that work falls under two great divisions. I. 'To Him the porter openeth.' It was God the Father through the Holy Spirit who opened always, and still opens the door to Christ. (1) Long before the Redeemer appeared in this world, the Holy Spirit opened for Him the door of prophecy. Whatever criticism may do in elucidating the prophecies, we know that the Old Testament throbs and thrills throughout with the promise of the Redeemer. The Old Testament is full of the Christ to be. It is a book of yearnings, of expectation, of assurance, and when we read it as Christ read it, then and then only can we understand what it means. Beginning at Moses, and He could not begin earlier, the Risen Lord expounded in psalm and prophecy, in vision and in parable, the revelation of Himself, till they who heard Him found their hearts aflame. (2) It was the porter who opened for Him the doors of breath. The immaculate body of the child Jesus was the creature of the Holy Ghost. The angel said to the Virgin, 'The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God'. When the royal hour of time, 'the clear sapphire hour of manifestation,' at last arrived, the Holy Spirit was fulfilling His promises, and opening the door. It was the porter that opened to the young child when the angels, the star, the shepherds, the wise men gathered round Him. Our Lord was really and truly of the substance of His mother, and that which was born of a woman is brother to us. But it was by the Holy Ghost that He became Incarnate. (3) It was the Holy Ghost Who opened for Him the gate of His public ministry. The heavenly voice cried, 'This is my beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased'. The Holy Ghost descended upon Christ when He was baptised in Jordan. (4) It was the Holy Ghost Who had opened the portals of life to the Lord Jesus, Who also opened for Him the portals of death. When the time came when the good Shepherd was fain to give His life for the sheep, the Holy Spirit opened for Him the gate of righteousness. (5) Even as the Holy Spirit had opened for Jesus that gate of righteousness which was the door of death, so He opened for Him the gate of Resurrection. (6) When our Lord rose from the dead He tarried with His disciples forty days in a strange inviolate tranquillity, in which no enemy moved to hurt Him. Then when He had strengthened, taught, and calmed them the porter opened for Him the doors of glory. 'Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in.' II. At Pentecost, when the disciples were gathered together with one accord in one place, suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. They heard that God had made that same Jesus whom they had crucified both Lord and Christ, and when they heard they gladly received the Word. And the same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls. Thus the Holy Spirit again opened the door to Christ by sign and wonder and miraculous gift. To Christ the porter opened three thousand hearts. And it is thus that the history of the supernatural Church redeemed by the blood of the Lamb has continued and will continue. W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, p. 217. The Shepherd and the Sheep John 10:3 These words touch on the profoundest truths concerning the relation of the loving soul to its Lord. They emphasise the essentially personal nature of the union between Christ and men. I. Notice the individualising knowledge of the shepherd. He calls us each by name. II. Notice the individual response of the sheep. Religion is essentially a personal thing. There must be (1) Personal faith. (2) Personal love. (3) Personal obedience. III. Notice the resulting society. 'There shall be one fold.' A. Maclaren. John 10:3 The faintest wish to be better, the feeblest troubling about our spiritual state, is the first distant echo of the Shepherd's voice, 'calling us by our name'. It is an earnest that He has begun to seek us, and will not rest till He has found us and borne us home on His shoulder rejoicing. Father Tyrrell, Nova et Vetera, p. 193. John 10:3 'Both in a celestial and in a terrestrial sense,' says Carlyle in his essay on Boswell's Johnson, 'we are a. Flock, such as there is no other: nay, looking away from the base and ludicrous to the sublime and sacred side of the matter (since in every matter there are two sides), have we not also a Shepherd, "if we will but hear His voice"? Of those stupid multitudes there is not one but has an immortal soul within him; a reflex and living image of God's whole universe.' References. X. 3. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xl. No, 2359. John Kelman, Ephemera Eternitatis, pp. 14, 21. X. 4. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vi. p. 242. G. Body, The Good Shepherd, p. 51. X. 5. W. F. Shaw, Sermon Sketches for the Christian Year, p. 59. X. 6. Expositor (6th Series), vol. i, p. 235. Christ the Door John 10:7 * ; John 10:9 * What a very homely comparison! What can you think of less picturesque and more commonplace than the door into a sheep-fold a rough, uncouth, weather-beaten door, which anyone may batter upon and slam. And yet our Lord uses this humble figure to explain what He is to those who believe in Him. I. The Test of the True Shepherd is that He makes use of the door, the right door. No man is a true shepherd who does not point men to Jesus Christ, who does not point men always, for everything, to Jesus Christ. II. He is the Door of the Sheep as well as the Door of the Shepherd. The test of being one of the Lord's sheep is that you know your way through the door into the fold. Sheep-folds are an absolute necessity in the East. The night-fold is needed to save the sheep from the ravages of the wild beasts and to shelter them from the bitter cold winds. The day-fold is equally necessary to give them shelter from the burning heat of the sun, to give them a place where they can lie down and take their rest. God has a flock a beautiful flock, the sheep of His pasture. Every one is marked with His secret mark, every one belongs to Him; God makes Himself responsible, a surety and a guarantee for their preservation and well-being. He keeps the roll; He protects them; He supplies all their need. And what is the name of that flock? It is the Church of Christ, the invisible, the mystical Body of Christ, not the visible Church of Christ. a. He is the door of escape. b. He is the door of access, the door through which we enter in. Jesus Christ brings us into blessing. III. Two very Simple Questions: c. Do you believe honestly that Jesus Christ is the door? Are you depending all your hopes of present grace and future glory on Jesus Christ? There is no other door besides. d. Have you entered in through Christ the door? It is not enough to know the door, to rejoice in Gospel preaching, to look through the door and see how secure the promises make the children of God. Enter in with a cry of faith, enter in by the restfulness of faith, enter in by the preparation of faith, enter in by just taking Christ as the door. References. X. 7. G. Body, The Good Shepherd, p. 70. H. Macmillan, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvii. p. 264. C. Perren, Sermon Outlines, p. 174. Expositor (4th Series), vol. x. p. 129. X. 7-9. T. F. Crosse, Sermons, p. 238. C. Bickersteth, The Gospel of Incarnate Love, p. 159. John 10:8 Some fresh light has been recently thrown upon this extremely difficult word. The difficulty lies partly in the historical reference of the words (to Pharisaic teachers? or false messiahs?), and partly in the fact that even when any such reference can be established it seems to leave a tinge of harshness in the saying. Two suggestions may be made. One is that the words refer to premature and external efforts made by priests and others to realise the function of a mediator between God and man. The true shepherd comes at the dawn to lead the sheep out to their pasture; at the dawn, not before the dawn. It is a note of the Shepherd's calling that He comes at the proper moment as Paul puts it, when the fullness of the time came. Nothing about Him partook of the arbitrary, hasty character which attached to those who worked on their own initiative, without waiting for any Divine monition. In this light, the words would mean: 'As many as have come to the flock, from the beginning, not waiting for the Good Shepherd's time, nor associating themselves with Him, but pressing forwards to rule mankind by the short methods of constraint. But, while this explains the ἦλθον πρὸ ἐμοῦ the other phrase, κλέπται καὶ λῃσταῖ suggests that this prematureness was not due to a disinterested miscalculation. One function of Jesus as the true and good Shepherd was to lead believers out of the Jewish fold into the new and wider relations which assured them of His personal care and unselfish love. Thus, especially if, with Mr. H. T. Purchas (in Johannine Problems and Modern Needs, p. 78 f.), we connect chap. x. with chap. ix. (where the blind man is excommunicated by the Jewish authorities and then received by Jesus), we get a fresh and fit interpretation of the words. They mean: 'All that came before Me, with the object of drawing people out of the Jewish fold, are thieves and robbers. This would refer to attempts on the part of Grecian religion and philosophy.' James Moffatt. The Open Door John 10:9 I. He is entrance, or the door open. It is beyond question that the first application of Jesus here is to the Church and the kingdom, and that he looks upon Himself as the door of the fold of God, wherein is to be gathered all those who have received His Spirit, whether they be the sheep of this or other folds; for other sheep He has, and them He must also bring, and they must all enter by one door, and there shall be one flock and one Shepherd. But there are others which suggest themselves to our minds. A door is a means of communication. (1) Christ is the open door by which God has come into humanity, by whom God holds communication with the spirits of men. But it is just as true to say that He is the door by which we go to God, and by which we hold communication with God. (2) He is the door, the door open, by which we hold the best communication with one another. It is in Him that man best knows what brotherhood means. II. He is the door of safety, or the door shut. We shut and bar the door against the night, the cold, the storm, and the robber. Between us and the storm, and the night, and the robber there is the barred door. That is what Christ is to men. Jesus is safety for those who are shut within; but what of those who are shut without? We know that there is a too late. III. He is pasture, or the door free and yet guarded. Not only are we safe behind Him, the door in the night of peril, but we can go in and out The door is free to us, and yet guarded against danger. Where do all the saints feed? in Christ. Hugh Price Hughes, in his last will and testament, wrote: 'Put on my tombstone, 'Thou, O Christ, art all I want'. A simple Gospel truth this; but it is these simple truths that quicken and gladden. D. L. Ritchie, Peace the Umpire and other Sermons, p. 32. Christ the Door John 10:9 I. Observe what it is that any man finds on entering the fold of Christ in the due and rightful manner. To begin with He finds safety. What exactly was He thinking of when He said the words? It is impossible to tell. He does not explain Himself at all, perhaps intending by the very vagueness of His language to suggest how manifold is the spiritual danger to which we foolish men are exposed in this world. At any moment from many a quarter men may be assailed by all sorts of evil things; while with regard to all of them it is true that if any man have Christ between him and those things he is safe. But let us fix on one of these dangers only. It is 'the wrath of God abiding on 'the impenitent and unbelieving. The doom of the righteous God pronounced on sin is one of the great elements in existence we have to reckon with. The Shepherd has been smitten for the sheep. Our Saviour long ago drew the doom that lay upon the world into Himself, and exhausted it for all who will accept what He did as done for them. II. The next blessing is indicated in the words that follow. Once His followers have fairly entered the fold and found shelter, they may 'go in and go out and find pasture'. Here, then, there is suggested very clearly, for one thing, the freedom of the Christian life. Believers, as some one writing on the passage has said, 'are not under lock and key'. The sacred sphere and the secular are alike open to them. But take this rather in another light. If we are to interpret the figure strictly, then the fold of this Shepherd must stand for the Church, and the space outside for the world. And while it is right enough to say that the believer has perfect freedom to pass from the one to the other at will, it may, perhaps, be more profitable to reflect upon the service he renders by doing so. What the world perennially requires and craves, whether consciously or not, from the Church is the infusing into all its varied life of the Spirit of Christ. The way in which the Church of Christ fulfils its great service of breathing its own life and spirit or rather the Life and Spirit of the Lord into the world at large is by sending forth men strong in that spirit to do the world's work On the other hand, there is in the world that which the Church lacks and requires always. III. Such then is the role assigned here to the followers of Christ. They are to play the part of mediators between the Church and the world. But it is only right to note in closing the benefit they reap to themselves. His sheep go in and out, He says, 'and find pasture'. It is true that Christ undertakes to provide for all our inward necessities. But at the same time we must ourselves take the steps that are needful. It is in the free participation in life in all its interests that the souls of men are nourished and made strong. A. Martin, Winning the Soul, p. 281. References. X. 9. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlvii. No. 2752. C. Perren, Sermon Outlines, p. 324. J. Keble, Sermons for Ascension Day to Trinity Sunday, p. 323. A Scotch Preacher, The Strait Gate, p. 51. Walter C. Smith, Sermons, p. 18. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 24. X. 9, 10. J. D. Thompson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvii. p. 404. X. 9-11. D. Fraser, Metaphors in the Gospels, p. 316. The Abundant Life John 10:10 I. Jesus came. All other messengers of God and all other men are sent. There was a man sent from God whose name was John. And that is the explanation of the lives of us all, and of our presence here in this world. We are here, and there is nothing we are more conscious of than that we had no choice in our coming. Jesus came. And it is this voluntariness that marked all His life, this conscious freedom of personal choice, that gives to His life such pathos and dignity, that makes His humility and love so amazing, that invests His vicarious death with such awe and grandeur. The only compulsion that was upon Him was the compulsion of love. II. Jesus came bringing life. His own explanation of Himself was that He came from God, the fountain of life, and had life in Himself. It is also the explanation which those who tarried with Him as His close companions give. He had life in Himself, and has life to give to men. The great thief of man's life is sin. Sin is the great destroyer. Jesus is the great enricher. III. But Jesus came bringing life to a city of death. We speak about the struggle for life, whether it be our own life or the life of others. Why a struggle? With whom or with what do we wrestle, from whom do we flee? Death. The effort of every man's life is to outrun death, to keep as long as he can out of reach of its clammy clasp and blighting breath. The world is a hungry graveyard, and time the city of death to which Jesus came bringing life. IV. Jesus came bringing life to a city of death where men long for life. Man hates death; those who rush to it by suicide are pitied as insane; and the Bible in all that it says of it, minors man's thought and feeling. V. Here, therefore, there is a message for the two classes into which the world can always be divided, for those who know Christ and those who do not, for those who have tasted of His spirit and want more, for those who do not have it and evidently do not want it. (1) The message to those who are yet away from Him and under condemnation is: Christ came, bringing life. (2) Then there is a message for Christians. He wants us to have an opulent life. He comes to give abundant life. But this abundant life does not come by haphazard. The spiritual world is an ordered world, and we have the abundant life in measure as we strike the roots of our life deep into Christ's spirit; and as we receive abundantly the dews of His grace we shall be fat and flourishing, we shall bring forth much fruit, our leaf also shall not wither, and whatsoever we do shall prosper. D. L. Ritchie, Peace the Umpire and other Sermons, p. 43. John 10:10 God surely did not create us, and cause us to live, with the sole end of wishing always to die. I believe in my heart, we were intended to prize life and enjoy it, so long as we retain it. Existence never was originally meant to be that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is becoming to me, among the rest. Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, chap. xxii. References. X. 10. J. L. Brooks, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliii. p. 409. W. F. Shaw, Sermon Sketches for the Christian Year, p. 77. R. F. Horton, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliv. p. 360. Archbishop Magee, The Gospel and the Age, p. 155. J. Stalker, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlv. p. 347. Joseph Parker, The Gospel of Jesus Christ, p. 166. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xx. No. 1150. Bishop Welldon, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lv. pp. 22 and 254. Lyman Abbott, ibid. vol. lx. p. 98. J. M. Wilson, Contributions to Religious Thoughts, p. 207. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 61. X. 11. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. li. No. 2919. H. S. Holland, Vital Values, p. 141. C. A. Berry, Vision and Duty, p. 23. S. Gregory, How to Steer a Ship, p. 44. F. St. John Corbett, The Preacher's Year, p. 81. C. Bosanquet, Tender Grass for the Lambs, p. 86. C. Perren, Revival Sermons in Outline, p. 147. T. F. Crosse, Sermons, p. 198. C. Kingsley, The Good, News of God, p. 247. R. M. Benson, Redemption, p. 280. C. Bickersteth, The Gospel of Incarnate Love, p. 163. Expositor (4th Series), vol. x. p. 134; ibid. (7th Series), vol. v. p. 159. John 10:11-12 The study of the great Greek and Roman moralists of the Empire leaves upon my own mind a strong conviction that the fundamental difference between heathenism of all shades and Christianity is to be discovered in the doctrine of Vicarious Sacrifice, that is to say, in the Passion of our Lord.... The old logicians used to say that everything should be defined per genus et differentiam . Christianity is a religion; this is its genus , this it has in common with all other religions. It is the religion of Vicarious Sacrifice, or of the cross, this is its differentia ; in this addition lies the peculiar nature which makes it what it is, and distinguishes it from every other member of the same class. Dr. Bigg, preface to * The Task of the Church under the Roman Empire. * Reference. X. 11-15. Expositor (4th Series), vol. vi. p. 423. The Hireling Shepherd John 10:12 The picture of the hireling shepherd is introduced just when the allegory has reached its highest point of thought and uttered its noblest message: 'The Good Shepherd layeth down His life for the sheep'. That is the last heroism of faithfulness, the final seal of sacrifice; the unutterable, convincing tragedy of love. Suddenly our gaze is turned to another scene. Still we are among the sheep-folds. Still a shepherd is keeping watch. And, lo! a gaunt and hungry wolf leaps into the flock before their shepherd's eyes. And in a moment the shepherd drops his heavy staff, wraps his long outer garment about his waist, and flees for his life. And the wolf has its cruel will of the deserted sheep. Surely Jesus set this shameful picture of the coward shepherd fleeing like the wind with the snarl of the wolf in his ears just where He did set it against a fair background of courage, love, and sacrifice to warn us against unfaithfulness in life's high task, and to teach us what manner of men we must be if we are to do that task as it should be done. I. 'The hireling fleeth because he is an hireling.' How those words get brought down through our work into our character! How they search the hidden springs of action in human life! And we do not submit willingly to the searching. We are prone to believe that there is a good deal of chance work in life, and that much that we say and do (chiefly, be it said, our least creditable words and deeds) has but a very slight and casual relation to what we really are. How often men salve their consciences for something not quite true in speech, or just in action, by assuring themselves that after all they are in the main truthful and just in character! How they silence the judgment of conscience on their evil ways by singing the praises of their good disposition! And this is a perilous and even disastrous way of making life's reckonings. Character, be it good or bad, is the determining force of action. That is the law of service. And to acknowledge this is vital to that profound moral and spiritual amendment that is the secret of all good works. II. 'The hireling fleeth because he is an hireling.' But that is too often the last reason he gives to himself or to anyone else for his flight, and so he goes on being an hireling. His explanation of his action is that he was taken by surprise, or that he was tired (forgetting, by-the-by, that he was not too tired to run), or that he had not a reliable weapon in his hand, or that he went to seek help. The only thing he will not say is that he ran away because he is a poor, mean-spirited fellow, who tries to get as much as he can out of life, and to give as little as possible in exchange for it. The hireling is an hireling till the day he dares to take into his soul the bitter shame of calling himself one. And in that very confession he becomes something better than the thing he has confessed himself to be. III. Perhaps a word or two may be permitted concerning the suddenness of this man's temptation. I think that Jesus meant us to find some emphatic significance in this feature of the story. The spontaneous things in life have the longest history. The thing that responds to the spur of the moment is the habit of the years. Half the value of character-building would be swept away if it were not a fact that a man is gloriously or shamefully himself in the moment when he must act without deliberation. What he does in that moment is the real resultant of his character, though it may give the lie to his ideal. A man suddenly called upon to act may do the wrong thing, and yet do his duty. The saints make mistakes. A brave shepherd may make a tactical error, but only a hireling runs away from a wolf. We talk about a man rising to an occasion, but in the last deep truth of things that is a shallow and misleading phrase. No man ever rose to an occasion. If he meets the great occasion and deals with it as it should be dealt with, it is because he is living all the while on the level of that occasion. The most that the largest occasion can do for us is to give us an opportunity of being what we are. It cannot by the magic of its swift demands make us in a moment what we ought or ought not to be. IV. The hireling is contrasted with the Good Shepherd in that the bond between the hireling and his work was a bond of selfishness and not a bond of love. The hireling works simply for wages. He is the picture for all time of the utter incompetence of selfishness to perform the great task of life. No ideal lends one glint of glory to the hireling's work. No enthusiasm makes it throb with sweet strong life. No hidden springs of sacrifice make the doing of it of some lasting worth to the toiler himself, or to the world in which his toil lies. And, worst of all, in the thing hardest to do and most worth doing, amid the precious pains and perils when it would so often seem God bids us find life's most precious opportunities, the hireling the man with the inadequate motive fails his trust and his Master, and flees for his life, not knowing that in that flight every step is taking him farther away from the few things worth saving the price of his conscience, the cleanness of his soul, the power to look in the face of the Great Shepherd of the sheep. P. C. Ainsworth, The Pilgrim Church, p. 235. References. X. 12. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vii. p. 287; ibid. (7th Series), vol. v. p. 3. X. 12, 13. Ibid. (5th Series), vol. vii. p. 20. X. 14. A. G. Mortimer, The Church's Lessons for the Christian Year, pt iv. p. 327. R. W. Hiley, A Year's Sermons, vol. i. p. 219. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. i. p. 334. The Personal Knowledge of Jesus John 10:14-15 Let us consider the beautiful ideal which our blessed Lord would set before us as His normal manner of leading His sheep on into the knowledge of His Person. 'He calleth His own sheep by name and leadeth them out.' Before the leading there is the calling. I know no one who has opened out this chapter of St. John more beautifully than Dr. Liddon in one of his Easter sermons. He tells us that in these parables our Lord gives us three pictures of His ministry to His people, which are all borrowed from the life of the oriental shepherd; there is the morning ministry, the midday ministry, and the ministry of eventide. I. It is with the first of these that we are now concerned. All through the night many flocks have been resting in one fold. The morning dawns, and the shepherd of one of the flocks comes to the entrance of the fold to collect his sheep; he comes to lead them forth to the cool waters and the green pastures, and with this purpose he calls each sheep by name, and first one and then another answers, and comes out of the crowd of sheep, until his whole flock is gathered round him. Ideally, it is in the early morning that the Lord comes. We may take the history of Samuel as an illustration, and think of him as a child growing up in the tabernacle, only, 'as yet, he knew not the Lord'; then suddenly there came the call of God, which was met by the response, 'Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth'. So, in the normal development of Christian life, it is early in life's morning that the Lord comes to call His sheep with a personal, individual call. II. With conscious power of volition there comes self-will. The sheep breaks away and wanders from Christ's flock; but the Shepherd never forsakes it, He goes after it into dark valleys and up the steep mountains it may be for long years. The realisation of this truth is our strength as Christian workers; we know that when we plead with some wanderer the Good Shepherd is pleading more effectually within the rebellious heart. In dealing with the most hardened sinner, we know that we have a Friend on our side working within the citadel of the soul; for Jesus not only seeks His sheep by the ministries of His Church in every evangelistic agency of the present day, He seeks them also by His inner workings within their spirit. In every case, whether conversion is a remembered crisis or not, Christians are brought into the same position so far as this all alike are called into a life of conscious union with Jesus. III. 'I am known of Mine!' Here is a sure test. 'Am I His?' is the inquiry of some anxious soul. The answer must depend upon the response to another question, 'Do I know Him? Can I say, "I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear; but now mine eye seeth Thee"?' The question is not do I know about Jesus, but do I know * Him? * George Body, The Good Shepherd, p. 36. References. X. 14, 15. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxii. No. 1877. T. K. Cheyne, Christian World Pulpit, vol. 1. p. 202. John Thomas, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxx. p. 227. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 34. X. 15. Expositor (4th Series), vol. v. p. 119. The Other Sheep John 10:16 The Master here suggests that there are certain sheep who are safely folded. The cross widened the horizon of our Lord's thoughts, and when He thought of the cross, He thought not only of those sheep whom He had been shepherding for those three and a half years, but He thought also of those other sheep. 'Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold.' They were still wandering away upon the mountains, they knew nothing about this Good Shepherd. His voice had not yet reached them. We do not hear so much of the horrors of heathenism in the present day as our fathers did, but in the early days it was this that called forth the earnestness of the Christian Church; it was the pity for the heathen world. Now Jesus Christ says: 'There are other sheep, and them I must bring'. You remember what that Divine compulsion implied to Jesus Christ. It implied Gethsemane, it implied Calvary, for 'I must bring them; even though it cost Me death upon the cross, I must bring them'. And now He says to His church, 'As My Father hath sent Me, even so send I you'. 'Surely if you are Mine, you must bring them.' And how? I. First of all, there must be the self-humiliation of Bethlehem. Jesus Christ became one with ourselves. He took our nature upon Him. He came as Man. We must go down to the very lowest, we must go down to the most degraded, because we know not but what these degraded ones are Christ's sheep. II. There must be the patience of Nazareth. Oh, those thirty years! how He must have yearned to go forth to the world! But He waited on. And if there is one thing which missionary history teaches us more than another, it is this: Patience. III. There must be the devotion and prayerful ness of His ministry. How unceasingly did He go about His work! And so if the Church would win these other sheep there must be this same union in service and devotion towards God. There must be the self-surrender of Gethsemane. Ready to go anywhere, ready to do anything. There must be the selfsacrifice of Calvary. And now here is the promise, 'They shall hear My voice'. There shall be success. E. A. Stuart, The True Citizen and other Sermons, vol. ix. p. 201. John 10:16 'One fold and one Shepherd' was the note of early Christendom. The Shepherd is still one and knows His sheep; but the folds are many; and, without condemning any others, I am of opinion that it is best for us all that we should all of us be jealous for the honour of whatever we have and hold as positive truth, appertaining to the Divine Word and the foundation and history of the Christian community. W. E. Gladstone. References. X. 16. G. Body, The Good Shepherd, p. 26. H. H. Henson, Godly Union and Concord, p. 126. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxix. No. 1713. Bishop Winnington-Ingram, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liii. p. 317. S. Parkes Cadman, London Signal, No. 35, p. 1. A. P. Stanley, Sermons on Special Occasions, p. 169. J. Keble, Sermons for Easter to Ascension Day, p. 314. H. M. Butler, Harrow School Sermons (2nd Series), p. 1. Expositor (5th Series), vol. x. p. 404. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 40. The Law of Harvest John 10:17 In these words Christ enunciated a principle which in His own life and by His death He expanded and illustrated. The one saying of His which is unrecorded in the Gospels but quoted elsewhere, is to the effect that 'it is more blessed to give than to receive,' and this states the law of His own life and that also of His followers. The worthiest ideal of life is not to get but to give, and in this Christ has for ever left us an example in the following of which we may recover God's original purpose for us, and find truest and deepest joy. I. There is something in His simple statement, 'I lay down My life,' which for ever makes it impossible to doubt the voluntariness with which He undertook and carried out the task of the world's redemption. His death was not, as is often affirmed, a mere object-lesson of the love of God without propitiatory significance. Still less was it merely the inevitable end of a life lived out of touch with the current ideas of the day, and hence but an example of moral heroism. The cross is gruesome as a pulpit, but glorious as an altar. And it was as to an altar that He willingly went, sustained by the consciousness that He laid down His life 'for the sheep'. Calvary was not a costly mistake, but the glorious consummation of a plan embraced in its entirety from the beginning. II. But, beyond His delight in the Father's will, there was a further compensation to Christ for all the pain of His redeeming sacrifice 'the joy that was set before Him'. This was the joy which He here expresses as taking His life again. There is delight inherent in the doing of all noble deeds, which is as a sustaining power to the one who stands alone. There is deep joy, too, in the very act of alleviating misery and pain. But such was not the joy which took the Saviour 'as a lamb to the slaughter'. His was the anticipated delight of calling forth by His very sacrifice such responsive love as should secure for Him undisputed sway over the lives of His loved ones. He laid His life down that He might take it again in other souls souls gratefully yielded to Him in such completeness as that He should dwell in them and continue through them His work of blessing the world. Wherever a sinful heart recognises Him as Saviour and gladly receives Him as Sovereign, there He realises 'the joy that was set before Him'. III. And all that may be said in this respect with regard to Him may be said with equal force with regard to His followers. He has left them an example that they should follow His steps, and in some sense every Christian is a re-incarnation of His Spirit. 'Till Christ be formed in you 'is the objective toward which all the ministries of His grace unite, and as this the possible increasingly becomes the actual in our experience, so the law of His life shall be the law of ours. J. Stuart Holden, The Pre-Eminent Lord, p. 13. God's Love for Jesus John 10:17 I. 'The Father loveth Me,' Jesus says. Why? 'Because I lay down My life.' So note, first, that * in His dying Jesus Christ is free. * That is the thought filling His whole mind just now. He asserts it clearly enough, although without dwelling on it, in this verse; He returns to and amplifies it in the next. When His hour came, the hour of lonely pain and sorrow, He met its coming willingly. The flock was in danger; for its deliverance the Good Shepherd had appeared; so, duly, the ransom-life was paid. It was His own act and deed. It was the fruit of personal choice. When it was open to Him to choose otherwise, He chose thus, going to Calvary in sacrifice that kept back nothing. It is in the choice of a redeeming death that the mighty passion of His love is seen. Remember, it was not obvious that He should love us. Nothing in the Christian religion is obvious in that poor sense. If when we stand before the dying Lord at Calvary, our instinct is to say, 'Of course!' we betray ourselves as blind and cold as to its central, holiest meaning. Redemption is not to be lightly assumed, as the blessings of health or commerce or civilisation may be; it is a wondrous miracle, which nothing but Jesus' love and power will make credible. II. Note, secondly, how Jesus clung to God's love in the darkness. His calm assured sense of the Father's love, one feels, is almost startling; outward appearances were so utterly against it The shame and suffering yet to come, the agony and death, the dim foreboding of desolation which was crueller torment than them all this was in Christ's mind as He spoke, and He shrank from it No doubt moments came when He all but longed for the cross to arrive more quickly, and a triumphant vision of its completed harvest gladdened Him; but alongside of that went a shrinking and a haunting fear. 'Like the pellucid waters of the Rhine and the turbid stream of the Moselle, that flow side by side over a long space, neither of them blending discernibly with the other, so the shrinking and the desire were contemporaneous in Christ's mind.' Sometimes the pain and reluctance grew nearly unendurable, and then, as in the sweat of blood, soul and body were wrung with anguish. And yet, as here and in other scenes, Jesus was able to look up, out of the very midnight of feeling, and grasp the faithful, unchanging love of God. III. Again we see here how God values selfsacrifice. It was as if the Father perceived a new reason for loving Christ in His acceptance of the cross. Strange things have been said by theologians as to Christ in His Passion having drunk the cup of God's wrath, wrath directed against Him personally; but this text scatters all such fancies like mists of dawn before the sun. Never did God love Jesus more than just then. He had loved Him before, 'ere the worlds began to be'; but that ineffable love was magnified and enriched now, as Christ prepared to die, and the great full heart of God overflowed at the sight of His wondrous sacrifice for a world of sin. IV. Note, lastly, that the surrendered life is restored. 'I lay down My life, that I may take it again.' For the sacrifice made by Jesus was not the casting away of a precious thing for ever; it was a stage, rather, in its perfect realisation. He died to rise to a completer life, and to raise the world along with Him. Free in parting with life, He was free also in resuming it. So in due time, He took it out of death's grasp, and as the great conqueror of the tomb flung back its seeming victory. And just as a diver sinks beneath the waves, to rise again to the upper air bearing the gems he went to seek, so Jesus Christ came back from death, not empty-handed, not alone, but bringing many sons unto glory. H. R. Mackintosh, Life on God's Plan, p. 171. References. X. 17. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxv. No. 2117. Expositor (4th Series), vol. x. p. 52. The Shepherd's Power Over His Life John 10:17-18 The Good Shepherd said, 'Therefore doth My Father love Me, because I lay down My life, that I might take it again. No man taketh it away from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.' This tremendous claim is more forcible in the original than it is even in the translation. I the pronoun is emphatic in the exercise of My personal will, I lay down My life with a clear end in view that I may not 'might' take it up again. No man taketh it away. No man could. I have authority, right, power to take it again. The Good Shepherd was raised from the dead by the God of Peace. That is one side of the truth. But it is also true that He rose by His own power, through the exercise of His own will in His own right. So He laid down His life. He was not murdered against His will. He did not pass away through the exhaustion of the powers of nature. It is not enough to say that He was willing to die. The full truth is that in His freedom He willed to die and to die for the sheep. This power rested on His sinlessness. The Victim was immaculate. Our lives are forfeited, but this life had passed stainless through every trial, and so He had a right to lay it down, and a right to take it again. I. Consider what is involved in the claim of Jesus to take up His life. Doubtless the primary reference is to His Resurrection. He took up His life very early in the morning of the third day. But the words cover a wider field than that of the Resurrection. He was able at every moment of His earthly days to lift His life and hold it against the smiting shafts of light, and have no fear. 'Which of you convicteth Me of sin?' He was in the fullest sense That awful independent of tomorrow, Whose yesterdays look backward with a smile. Perhaps the hardest thing in a preacher's experience is that he cannot take up his life. He can ask his hearers to follow him as far as he follows Christ, and that is but a little way. We fully believe that many are kept from the ministry because they think that they cannot translate into daily life that ideal of thought and care and purity revealed in the New Testament. They shrink under the thought of their far-reaching and radical shortcomings. They might be content to be ignorant of much that their hearers know, so long as they were sure of the one Gospel that is needful. But it is another thing when they reflect on their inconsistencies. Sometimes we might even say that all that is best in any unregenerate or regenerate nature bids them keep in the background and hold their peace. And yet it has pleased God that the treasure should be in earthen vessels. It has pleased God to lay necessity on frail and tempted natures to enter the ministry of reconciliation. Better to have this heartache than a conscience that has been drugged with anodynes, or burnt out with caustics. These fears, these yearnings, these agonies are laid to rest by the cross. II. Again and again the preachers of redemption have desired to lay down their lives for the brethren. Moses sought this boon, David sought it, Paul sought it, and others of less degree in multitudes have thrilled with the same desire. They have longed if it might so be to be accursed from Christ for their brethren. But One alone among the sons of men could lay down His life. The Good Shepherd had power to lay it down, because He was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. The sheep have died for the Shepherd many and many a time. From St. Stephen to the last martyr in China the sheep have given their lives for the Shepherd. But it was in quite another manner that the Shepherd gave His life for the sheep. His life availed. He died instead of them; they could not die instead of Him. Great even in human life is the power, the majesty, the wealth of sacrifice. But no sacrifice avails to take sin away save the sacrifice of the Undefiled. III. It will be seen that Christ and His Apostles looked at sin from the point of view of the spiritual world, and the law obtaining therein. To them and to all Christians sin is the greatest of all evils, even irrespective of its injurious effect upon man. The primary mischief in it is the insult done to God. It is this view that explains the Atonement, and the heart of Christianity is taken out when the Atonement is obscured. It is to the novelists rather than to the preachers that we have to go nowadays for that note of warning which rings through all the Bible. By what right does anyone assure the sinner of comparative immunity in time and in eternity? We can understand thoughtful men who have rejected Christianity saying: 'There may be heaven; there must be hell'. It is better to take heed, and blessed is he who is not ashamed of Christ's sternest words. Perhaps the most striking close of any novel is the last sentence in Dumas' amazing story, The Vicomte de Bragelonne. D'Artagnan, the brave musketeer, is called to die. He takes leave of his comrades, including the traitor Aramis, with whom he had not quarrelled, in words which represented many things. 'Athos, Porthos, farewell till we meet again! Aramis, adieu for ever!' W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, p. 171. References. X. 17, 18. H. Alford, Sermons on Christian Doctrine, p. 223. X. 18. Expositor (5th Series), vol. iv. p. 423; ibid. vol. v. p. Ill; ibid. vol. vii. p. 222; ibid. (6th Series), vol. iii. p. 471. X. 20. Ibid. vol. iv. p. 285. X. 22. S. Gregory, How to Steer a Ship, p. 12. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 200. X. 22, 23. A. P. Stanley, Sermons on Special Occasions, p. 16. H. J. Bevis, Sermons, p. 98. X. 23. H. Bonar, Short Sermons for Family Reading, pp. 48, 56. John 10:22-24 The evangelist perhaps implies that it was an aggravation of these bitter controversies that they should have been forced on the great Teacher under such conditions, and that the keenness of the winter gave edge to the malignity which beset Jesus Christ on every side. T. G. Selby, Ministry of the Lord Jesus, pp. 304, 305. Tell Us Plainly John 10:24 I. All speech has its limitations, and the plainer the speech the narrower are those limitations. A plain truth is necessarily a small truth. If you are determined to say a plain thing you must be content to say a very little thing. If plainness is your one object you are committed to a fragmentary conception of truth. Of course, I am speaking of the world of abiding spiritual realities. You can summarise all the outward facts of life. You can put exact account of the weather into a sentence. And wherever it is possible to be terse and concise and sharply definite, it is our duty to try to be so. In our concrete life, amid all outward things, most of us would be better understood if we said less. The things of the hour demand a plainness of speech that befits the definition and brevity of the hour. It is our duty to put a thing into a nutshell if it is no bigger than a nut But when we try to put illimitable truth into a nutshell, we leave a good deal of it out. And that which we may think we have stated we have probably misstated. Limitation is own brother to perversion. History tells us that it has never been more than a few steps from the shrine of the partly true to the shrine of the wholly false. II. But if you leave the last word of the Jews' plea out of your reckoning, the plea itself is still a pitiably blind and vain one. 'If Thou art the Christ, tell us.' That appeal, as it stands, reveals an utter ignorance of the way the truth advances in the earth and makes its conquests in the souls of men. That advance and conquest are not made essentially by means of words. The truth depends strangely little upon verbal statement. The two great bonds of social life are justice and love. Look at these things. Consider the very terms of their existence. Honour, one of the loveliest blooms of justice, dwells in silence. It is an unutterable thing. To try to state it is to make it something less than it is. To explain it is to make it impossible. To fling it about in gusts of words, as men have flung it, is to reduce it, as men have reduced it, to a mere fiction, void of all that is vital and binding. Without honour life at its best is impossible. But honour is the last thing that is mentioned among honourable men. The knowledge of a thing comes not by the telling thereof. No man was ever told anything finally worth knowing. No hearsay ever broke the silence of life's inner room. It is not by means of the utterances, the assertions, the dictations and definitions and reasonings of them that teach that ever any man gained one truth for the everlasting succour of his soul. The hours that bring the truth into a man's soul are hours when the truth stands before him, in all its radiant beauty too fair to need adorning, in all its splendid strength too strong to need support, in all its final and irresistible simplicity too simple to be interpreted. And the question of how many and how luminous these hours shall be we each decide for ourselves. Jesus Christ came to kindle that light of truth for us in every hour and place of life. He has made all the hours luminous for the humble and obedient heart In Him the eternal truth is always with us. III. Jesus stood in the world open-armed. He called to men amid their burdens, toils, and sorrows, amid the very things that confuse the mind, and crush hope and enterprise, and make for indifference and despair. And it follows that He must be life's simplest and most easily found fact for us all. There must be some perfectly simple point of contact between every human life and the Divine Saviour. And there is. We need but to accept the verdict of our conscience, the ultimatum of our human weakness, the sorrow that waits for every sinful soul in the dreadful quietness of life, and, lo! our trembling hands have touched the Christ, and if we will let Him He will hold us fast for evermore and lift us surely up to all the light and love of God. Percy Ainsworth, The Pilgrim Church, p. 40. References. X. 24. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 83; ibid. vol. v. p. 25; ibid. (6th Series), vol. viii. p. 269; ibid. vol. x. p. 300. The Voice of the True Shepherd John 10:27 'My sheep hear My voice.' This was true in the days of His flesh, and it is still and for ever true. It is the cardinal fact of mysticism. The Great Shepherd of the sheep does not say, 'My sheep hear My words,' or 'My sheep read My words'. True, we have His utterances in the Holy Scriptures, and not one jot or tittle of these can pass. But the words would be little if we had not beside the words the voice of the Living Teacher. Says Fénélon: 'Without the actual inspiration of the Spirit of grace, the inward teacher ana soul of our souls, we could neither do, will, nor believe good. We must silence every creature, we must silence ourselves also to hear in a profound stillness of the soul these inexpressible thoughts of Christ. The outward word of the Gospel itself without this living efficacious word within would be but an empty sound.' The vital truth of Christianity is that Christ still speaks in the soul that will heed and hear Him. I. To have heard that voice on earth how great the wonder would have been! To have heard that dear 'Verily, verily,' in a world distracted and confused how unspeakably blessed would have been the rest that followed! For when He said, 'Verily, verily,' doubts and reasonings and questions and sorrows fell down at His feet as dead. That 'Verily, verily,' opened the secrets of heaven and the mysteries of the Father. They who heard it built upon the rock, and their house could not be shaken. 'Verily, verily' these words coming from Him Who is faithful and true stood like great pillars at the porch of love's holy temple. II. The voice of the True Shepherd is heard in warning, and calling, and entreaty, and pleading, as He goes forth to seek the sheep. By great and terrible things the Shepherd often accomplishes the work of salvation. Wind and fire and earthquake have their place in the Shepherd's labour, but it is not the final place. In the end it is the still small voice that speaks, and woos, and wins. In the Reconciliation, says one, there are no blows, nor beats of drum, nor bolts of tempest; love is the captain of this bloodless war. The manner of Living Love is gentleness. Our eyes have seen our teachers, but they have sought in vain to bring us back. We have seen them, father, teacher, friend, minister. They have shown us the right way, but we would not take it. But the unseen Teacher speaks, and we hear the word behind us. As we try to flee away from it, it pursues. The word is Return, Return, Return. III. The voice of the True Shepherd speaks for the comfort, the consolation, the assurance of the sheep still making their way through the earthly wilderness. The Shepherd calls us to disregard the clashing and clamant voices of the world. He says of the souls that are entangled in the here and now, 'My sheep hear My voice. I say unto you' and if we hear that, our troubles are ended. How shall we hear the voice of the True Shepherd? We must be fain to hear it. We must hush the soul into a deep stillness, the stillness of expectation and prayer. In John Woolman's Journal, one of the most beautiful books in the world, we read how he received the Divine communication. 'I went to meetings in an aweful frame of mind, and endeavoured to be inwardly acquainted with the language of the True Shepherd.' 'There was a care on my mind so to pass my time that nothing would hinder me from the most steady attention to the voice of the True Shepherd.' Speaking of a journey to Newport, he writes: 'We went through much labour in this town, and now, in taking leave of it, though I felt close inward exercise to the last, I found inward peace, and was in some degree comforted in the belief that a good number remained in that place who retain a sense of truth, and that there are some young people attentive to the voice of the heavenly Shepherd'. When he was on his journey to London, he wrote: 'My mind was turned towards Christ the heavenly Counsellor, and feeling at this time my own soul subjected, my heart was contrite before Him'. Thus John Woolman lived and died in a deep inward peace, of which he said, 'When our minds entirely yield to Christ, that silence is known which followeth the opening of the last of the seals'. In this silence nought is heard but the voice of the True Shepherd. W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, p. 225. References. X. 27. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xvii. No. 995. X. 27, 28. H. Alford, Easter-tide Sermons, p. 62. X. 27-30. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxv. No. 2120. The Perseverance of Believers John 10:28 * ; Romans 11:29 * I believe in Perseverance because I believe in the Sovereignty of God, and I believe in the Sovereignty of God because I see it in history and experience. And thus I am persuaded that it is impossible for a true believer, since he is in the grip of God's purpose of grace, ever to fall away and at last be lost. It is Sovereign Grace that first moves us to repent and believe, and it will carry us invincibly through all weakness and disloyalty to the final consummation. This faith is a splendid encouragement, yet it is open to serious criticism, and I wish now to consider the main objections which have been urged against it, and to show that, as it seems to me, they spring from misunderstanding of the doctrine. I. The doctrine, it is alleged, is contradicted by experience. Have we not all known men who lost their early faith and relapsed into irreligion? Yes, and it would be a poor evasion to suggest that there never was any reality in their faith, and that they did not fall from grace inasmuch as they had never been in it. My answer is that we must distinguish between falling from grace and backsliding. A believer, by reason of indwelling sin, is liable to the latter witness David and Peter and all the saints in every generation; but, by reason of the faithfulness of God, he is ensured against the former. When Cromwell was dying, he was troubled. 'Tell me,' he said to a minister who stood by his bed, 'is it possible to fall from grace?' 'No,' was the reply, 'it is not possible.' 'Then,' said the dying man, 'I am safe, for I know that I was once in grace.' Yes, 'once in Him, in Him for ever thus the eternal covenant stands'. This is theology, but it is poetry too, as all true theology is, since, as Boccaccio says, 'theology is nothing else than the poetry of God'. I cannot, I will not believe that any soul that has been pursued with importunate prayers and earned in faith's loving arms to the feet of Jesus, will at the last be an outcast from the Father's House. 'Go thy way,' said the man of God to Monica as she wept for her erring Augustine; 'it cannot be that the son of those tears should perish.' II. It is objected that it is a perilous doctrine, fostering a spirit of security. What need to watch and strive if our salvation be assured? This is a perversion of the doctrine, and it is nothing new. When St. Paul preached Justification by Faith apart from Works, there were some who said: 'Let us continue in sin that grace may abound; let us do evil that good may come.' 'What does it matter,' says the monk in Pascal's Provincial Letters, 'by what way we enter Paradise? As our famous Father Binet remarks: "Be it by hook or by crook, what need we care if we reach at last the Celestial City?"' And there is a sort of logic in this argument, but it does not stand the test of experience. In the home of my childhood I used to watch the ships passing up the beautiful Firth, laden with the merchandise of far-off lands; and it was a brave sight as they came proudly into port with their white wings spread and their flags flying in the breeze. But once I witnessed a spectacle which touched my imagination and is still vivid in my remembrance. It had blown a heavy gale, and a hapless barque had been caught by the tempest outside the Firth. She was loaded with timber, and when the hold was full, they had piled more on the deck, making her top-heavy. The gale smote her, and she capsized. She did not sink, for the timber kept her afloat; she simply 'turned turtle,' and swam keel uppermost. A flotilla of tugs went to the rescue and towed her in this poor plight up the Firth. When she got into shoal water, her masts touched the bottom, and the divers went down and cut them adrift Then she was righted, and lay a dismasted, water-logged hulk. She got into harbour, but it was a pitiable home-coming. Would the crew have been content had they foreseen it. Would they have said: 'Be it by hook or by crook, what need we care if we reach at last the harbour?' And who would be content to reach heaven after this fashion just saved and no more? For my part I would rather perish outright. I want 'an abundant entrance'. I want to sail into the harbour with my sails spread and my flag flying. And I am sure that it is thus that Christ would have it. David Smith, Man's Need of God, p. 69. John 10:28 This text is frequently quoted in the letters of Melanchthon, and in his later years it was probably his favourite verse of Scripture. On 4th March, 1546, soon after Luther's death, he wrote to Frederick Myconius, pastor of the church at Gotha, who was very ill and nearing his end: 'Dearest Frederick, Those most sweet words of the Son of God have often comforted me in great sorrows: "None shall pluck My sheep out of My hand". Do not let us search for any other definition of the sheep, but let us be content with that interpretation which Christ gives us when He calls "sheep" those who hear and love the Gospel. Such we surely are. Let us therefore have a sure hope amidst all the dangers of this life and in death that our Shepherd the Son of God is present with us as our Guardian and Defender. Now that Luther has been called away from this mortal life, heavier cares and toils come upon me besides my sorrow. May the Son of God, the true Shepherd, not leave us orphans.' C. R. vol. vi. No. 3406. Luke Cranach the Younger drew a very striking portrait of Melanchthon on his death-bed (1560). The inscription includes these words: Postrema verba ejus fuerunt: Nemo rapiet oves meas ex manu mea (John 10 ). If this verse was not actually the last utterance of Melanchthon, it was repeated by him often, and on the day of his death it was one of the passages recited at his bedside by his friends. References. X. 28. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xii. No. 726, and vol. xviii. No. 1056. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 61. X. 29. A. B. O. Wilberforce, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlviii. p. 88. X. 30. C. S. Macfarland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lx. p. 133. R. J. Campbell, Sermons Addressed to Individuals, p. 297. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 99. X. 34. Ibid. (6th Series), vol. viii. p. 272. X. 36. C. D. Bell, The Name Above Every Name, p. 30. J. Smith, The Integrity of Scripture, p. 34. X. 36. W. G. Horder, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lv. p. 38. Expositor (6th Series), vol. iv. p. 6. X. 37, 38. F. D. Maurice, Sermons, vol. v. p. 129. X. 38. J. Hammond, Harvest and Flower Sermons, p. 1. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vi. p. 356. X. 39. Ibid. vol. i. p. 195. X. 39-42. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxii. No. 1924, and vol. xlix. No. 2818. X. 41. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vi. p. 33. Bethany John 11:1 One of Robert McCheyne's sayings is still remembered in Collace (the scene of the early ministry of Dr. Andrew Bonar): 'Bethany was known in Scripture not so much as Bethany, but as the town of Mary and her sister Martha'. I wonder who in this place gives the name by which it is known in heaven? It will not be known there as Collace, but as the town of perhaps some bedridden believer up in the hills. Reminiscences of Dr. Andrew Bonar, p. 8. References. XI. 1. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 182. XI. 1-4. C. Bosanquet, The Consoler and the Sufferer, p. 1. XI. 3. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxvi. No. 1518. T. F. Crosse, Sermons, p. 100. S. H. Fleming, Fifteen Minute Sermons for the People, p. 85. XI. 4. Ibid. p. 89. The Loved Family John 11:5 St. John never would have made this statement unless the love of Jesus had been most marked and well known. And there may be families upon the earth at this present moment of whom the same statement may be made. We all of us feel what an honour it would be if our own family were such an one And it is to be noticed that into that family circle Jesus entered, during the last few days of His earthly career, night after night It was His one place of rest. It was the only place where He received one iota of consolation. I. Lazarus. In Bethany, Simon the leper lived, and he gave a feast a feast during such a week of sorrow. What made Simon's feast memorable was that Lazarus was present, and 'Mary anointed the feet of Jesus'. The guests must have looked at the man who had been dead and buried for four days, and they must have wondered. They must have gazed at him in awe. You will note how reticent the narrative is. A fabrication would have told us something of the unseen world into which for a time Lazarus had been ushered. Let me here say with emphasis that the very clearest evidence that can be given does not necessarily create faith. The resurrection of Lazarus was not denied it could not be denied there were too many witnesses to this astounding fact; yet, when the Pharisees heard of it they hated Jesus the more, and they planned His death. II. Mary. From Lazarus let us turn to Mary. Mary seems to have been the only person upon the face of the earth with the least knowledge of the approaching death of Jesus. She, who loved to sit at His feet, learned more than Peter and John and James of the Apostles. And Mary's action was singular. She came beforehand to anoint His body for the burying. And so she poured the precious ointment over His feet and, stooping over, wiped them with her hair, as evidence, not only of service and love, but of faith. But Judas cared nothing for Mary's faith. Wicked men are rebuked for attempting to hinder in the slightest degree the zeal of those who love and serve our blessed Saviour. They can use their arguments against the followers of Jesus going to church, they can sneer at district visitors trying to afford some little consolation in the midst of sorrow, they can laugh at self-denial as shown on behalf of our missionary enterprise. It seems to me that there should come to them, if only they are students of that blessed book which is free and open to all, the peremptory words of our Master: 'Let her alone'. III. Martha. Now let us turn to the personality of Martha. It was her habit to think of and to help others; it was her home characteristic, and the characteristic is here to be noted in the house of her neighbour, Simon the leper. She would do all in her power to give Jesus full honour at the feast. And Jesus loved her, just as He loved Mary and Lazarus. Her responsive love was service, while Mary's was contemplation and meditation at the feet of Jesus. Martha was like St. Paul: Mary resembled St. John. References. XI. 5. W. H. Parsons, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvi. p. 294. C. S. Home, Relationships of Life, p. 31. J. Keble, Sermons for the Sundays After Trinity, p. 299. Preacher's Magazine, vol. x. p. 362. Expositor (6th Series), vol. viii. p. 125. XI. 5, 6. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 74. XI. 5-7. C. Bosanquet, The Consoler and the Sufferer, p. 17. Therefore John 11:6 Therefore surely there is no more amazing illative conjunction in literature than this Therefore. He loved the two sisters, and therefore stayed away from them. They were in deep trouble and His presence might prevent the stroke from falling, 'If Thou hadst been here, my brother had not died,' was the spontaneous cry of each of them (v. 21, 32), therefore He did not go! He had the intelligence, He knew their grief, He foresaw what was coming, He loved them, and therefore He withheld His help, remained away till the blow had come, and only went to find them bereaved and to mingle His tears with theirs. Can it be a misprint this Therefore a mistranslation, a defect in the MS.? No; we turn to the Greek Testament, we examine the variants. There is no room for this explanation. Was the original writer careless or inexact? Ought he to have said: 'Now Jesus did not love Martha and Mary, and therefore He abode two days'? Or ought he to have used an adversative, instead of an illative conjunction? Might it not have been: 'Jesus loved Martha and Mary, and yet he abode two days'? Or, perhaps, better still, should it not read: 'He loved them, but was unable to come for two days'? Are we not to think that He was anxious to come at the earliest moment that He did come at the earliest moment, but obstacles and hindrances occurred? He was delayed and only arrived breathless at the last moment, to find He was too late? No, the calm narrative is before our eyes; the Therefore is imperturbable. We cannot, we may not, alter it; we must accept it. But if it is there and is to be taken as the considered thought of the evangelist, who is laying bare for us the movement of Christ's mind, this unexpected and improbable Therefore may become the clue to our troubled life. I see a gleam of light, I begin to interpret things which have puzzled me by it. Because He loved Martha and Mary He stayed away and let their brother die. Because He loved them He led them through that sorrow, the sharp anguish of the death, the dull misery of the burial, the thought of the body decomposing in the tomb. This permission of sorrow and death and bereavement came from His love for them! This may explain much Jesus is not only as a man to us, He is also as God. Here we light on the mystery which has almost daily puzzled us. He loved me, and therefore He let me stumble down the dark and broken way, not holding out to me a hand. He loved me, and therefore He let my powers decay, my light be quenched, my success halt, my life sink down broken and contemned. He loved me, and therefore He took from me the desire of my eyes, the one who was more than life to me. He loved me, and therefore He gave me long years of sickness and suffering, hopes which had no realisation, purposes which could never be fulfilled. What, then, is the explanation of the Therefore? The ills we dread are good for us, the preliminaries and the occasions of the greater blessing. We had not known the Resurrection but for death, nor understood the rapture of restoration but for loss. This Therefore carries us to the explanation even of the ultimate and tormenting difficulty, the existence of evil, man's first disobedience, the struggle and the travail of human life. Why do we not admit that of this, and of all, we have the solution, if we read this paradoxical conjunction aright? He loved us, therefore He permitted all this to be. Robert F. Horton, Christian World, 24th November, 1910. References. XI. 6. J. G. James, British Congregationalist, 23rd August, 1906, p. 81. XI. 8-10. C. Bosanquet, The Consoler and the Sufferer, p. 33. The Number of the Hours John 11:9 I want to use these words as a lamp to illumine some of the characteristics of the Lord. For they seem to me to irradiate first, the earnestness; second, the fearlessness; and third, the fretlessness of our Saviour Jesus Christ. I. First, then, their light on the earnestness of Christ. What first arrests us, reading the life of Jesus, is not His strong intensity of purpose. It is only gradually, and as our study deepens, that we feel the push of that unswerving will. We slowly discern the pressure of a mighty purpose moving without a swerve towards its goal. For that whole-hearted zeal were many reasons which it does not fall to me to touch on here. But one was the certain knowledge of the Lord that there were only twelve hours in His day. It is always very wonderful to me that Christ thus felt the shortness of the time This child of eternity heard with quickened ear the muffled summons of the fleeting hours. Most men, as Professor Lecky says, are afraid to look time in the face. II. In the next place, our text illuminates Christ's fearlessness, and that indeed is the textual meaning of it, for it was when the disciples were trying to alarm Him that Jesus silenced their suggestions so. It is always a source of buoyant strength when a man comes to see that his way is ordered. But remember, according to the Master's doctrine, our times are fixed as surely as our ways; and if we are here with a certain work to do, which in the purposes of God must be fulfilled, no harm can touch us, nor is there power in death, till it draws to sunset and to evening star. And just here we ought to bear in mind that the true measurement of life is not duration. We live in deeds, not breaths it is not time, it is intensity that is life's measurement. III. Then lastly, our text illuminates Christ's fretlessness. For never was there a life of such untiring labour that breathed such a spirit of unruffled calm. Every day was thronged with incident or danger. Yet through it all, with all its stir and movement, there is a brooding calm upon the heart of Christ that is only comparable to a waveless sea asleep in the stillness of a summer evening. All that God calls us to, and all that love demands is fitted with perfect wisdom to the twelve hours. Therefore be restful; do not be nervous and fussy; leave a little leisure for smiling and for sleep. G. H. Morrison, The Wings of the Morning, p. 236. Walking in the Light John 11:9 In order to get the full force of these words the first great principle in them is this: I. He who walks with God walks in the day. II. He who walks in the light of God walks with unerring certainty of step. III. He who walks in the light of God shall stand firm before all temptation. IV. He who walks in the light of God shall be upheld in the midst of sorrows and dangers. A. Maclaren. Reference. XI. 10. Bishop Welldon, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliv. p. 109. John 11:11 'I have seen in more than one Christian heart,' says Fere Gratry, 'that gloomy and obstinate courage which accepts death. But it seems to me that this is not heroism in its highest beauty. It is the somewhat peevish heroism of the Apostle Thomas who cried out, when he heard that Lazarus was dead: "Let us also go, that we may die with Him". I prefer that radiant and Divine cheerfulness which says: "Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go that I may awake him out of sleep." References. XI. 11. S. Cox, Expositions, p. 428. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. ii. p. 198. J. C. M. Bellew, Christ in Life, Life in Christ, p. 180. XI. 11-15. C. Bosanquet, The Consoler and the Sufferer, p. 49. XI. 12. Expositor (6th Series), vol. x. p. 136. XI. 14, 15. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. x. No. 585. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 297. St. Thomas John 11:16 I. The first thing which stands out high and clear as a beacon of hope for all time is this, that one of Christ's friends was a doubter. If it had not been for this, we might have been carried away by the popular idea that doubt in itself is wicked, and that instead of bravely facing doubts, and laying the spectres of the mind, we were meant to stifle the free play of our reason, and, as people say, 'just believe'. II. But to safeguard this, we must notice that Thomas, to use a phrase of Plato's, 'doubted well'. (1) He realised what was involved in his doubts: there was not a grain of affectation about him. Doubt does not lose Christ's friendship, but flippancy, conceit, and levity undoubtedly do. (2) Thomas doubted well because he was loyal, not only to Christ but to the Church. (3) He wants light. There is a way of seeking for truth which does not want to find it. 'What can be better than seeking for truth?' asked a Secularist lecturer. 'Why, finding it,' was the obvious retort; and we may all take whether we think so as the true test of good or bad doubt. III. If the doubter doubts well, Christ is prepared to offer proofs. (1) There is nothing wrong with the documents which He puts into our hands they have been tested again and again, and subjected to the fiercest light, but they have come out more clearly today than ever. (2) But we are not dependent solely on the documents. What originated this extraordinary fact in history called the Christian Church? You may be certain that if the last that was seen of Christ was on the cross of Calvary, then it would have been the last that would have been seen of the Christian Church. (3) And so again with Sunday. How did a body of Jews, conservative beyond all things, change their holy day from Saturday to Sunday? There is no explanation, and there never has been any explanation, except that something happened on the Sunday, so extraordinary and so transcendent, as to throw every other day entirely into the shade. (4) And so again, what became of the Lord's body? Only two sets of people could have had it the disciples or the Jews. If the disciples had it, then they must have hidden it and proclaimed a lie, which every critic in the world declares to be impossible. If the Jews had it, why did they not produce it and confound the story of the disciples? If neither had it, what else can we think but that it was the same body, glorified and transfigured, which convinced even Thomas of its reality, and was seen by five hundred people in broad daylight on a mountain? IV. But what has Thomas still to say, and what does he say today? (1) First and let religious people take note of it he says that 'Christians are so inconsistent; that this belief ought to mean so much and does mean so little; that Christians are just as uncharitable, just as apt to use sharp practice, just as hard at a bargain as other people'; and there is no doubt about it, that the greatest argument against Christianity is a bad Christian. (2) 'He can't be wrong whose life is in the right' Yes! but is his life in the right? and if it is, does he imagine he owes nothing to the great ideals and lofty standards produced in Europe by eighteen centuries of Christianity? (3) Lastly, 'a man is not responsible for his belief. But do you think that likely? Do you think it likely that the Great Sun should arise in the heavens, and man not have the power to see it. The soul has an eye like the body, only even more delicate and sensitive, and we are as responsible for seeing with the one as with the other. Bishop Winnington-Ingram, Christ and His Friends, p. 60. St. Thomas the Apostle John 11:16 This was the devoted resolution of St. Thomas directly our Lord had given the word to His little company to return into Judea, quite well knowing that the position in that district had become so bitter, that not only had His enemies threatened His life, but had even attempted to take it. But now His friend Lazarus had fallen sick and died, and there was something in that which showed Christ that it was His duty to return to Judea whatever the result. He knew He was doing nothing rash in returning to Judea amongst His enemies. The work presented itself for Him to do, it was a work of God, and it had to be done. He knew that the issue of this would be, in some most emphatic way, to the glory of God, but He was unable to communicate this to His disciples. To them it appeared impossible that it could end in anything but despair. These levelheaded men were beginning to count the cost of following Jesus Christ they had been realising how much it meant. There comes a cost greater than they expected they see failure and death reach first their Master, and then themselves. Their first thought seems to have been for their Master. But presently, perhaps when they saw Christ's resolve was made, their bearing showed signs of fear for themselves, and this makes Thomas revive their courage by saying, 'Let us also go, that we may die with Him'. I. A Lost Faith. It is not easy to mistake the meaning of these words. It meant that the faith of this disciple in Christ was dead at that moment. Something remained to him, something which he could not break away from, something which, for its own sake, was worth quietly and ingloriously going to meet death for it was the person of Jesus Christ, and in the wreck of His fondest hopes, in the overwhelming disappointment and shame at the failure of what had been full of the promise of success, this disciple of Jesus remained true. He was ready, therefore, to offer to Christ devotion and loyalty to their farthest limits even to the sacrifice of life, a sacrifice of life with no glory or grandeur attaching to it save an unseen and unknown glory. II. Deliverance by Self-sacrifice. This hardly seems to be a counsel of despair. We have here a real example for all Christ's followers in days of darkness and difficulty. We are confused and disappointed, and a darkness looms around and ahead. It becomes more difficult to engage in prayer and worship, and the people who were so sure of God's Word, once such a world of comfort, once such a rich source of inspiration, find its voice sounds uncertain. Once so Divine in tone and teaching, it now becomes more and more obscure. At such times there is only one thought that can lead to the light again out of darkness. The real help is selfsacrifice. 'Let us also go, that we may die with Him.' Only when we are ready with set faces to go right into the heart of the struggle, only when we are ready to go on sacrificing more and more only then can we hope that to us will come the light, the power. With the spirit of self-sacrifice only let it be real the darkness will pass away. References. XI. 16. W. E. Barton, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lii. p. 307. C. Bosanquet, The Consoler and the Sufferer, p. 33. Expositor (4th Series), vol. x. p. 135. Ibid. (6th Series), vol. vi. p. 174. XI. 17. Ibid. vol. ix. p. 316. XI. 17-27. C. Bosanquet, The Consoler and the Sufferer, p. 64. XI. 20. J. M. Neale, Sermons on some Feast Days in the Christian Year, p. 30. XI. 21-39. Expositor "(6th Series), vol. iv. p. 236. XI. 22. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxviii. No. 2249. XI. 24-26. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxx. No. 1799. A Story of the Catacombs John 11:25 Henri Perreyve, in a letter written from Rome in 1856, tells of his visit to the Catacombs. M. de Rossi, superintendent of the excavations then being made in the subterranean vaults, called the attention of the party to a threefold inscription placed on the walls by some pilgrim of the fourth or fifth century, who had loved a woman named Sophronia. 'What was her relation to the poor pilgrim? His mother? his sister? his wife? his betrothed?... However it may have been, that unknown Christian went for the purpose of soothing his grief, or of praying for her whom he had lost, to visit the Catacombs of St. Calixtus. On reaching the first winding paths of the underground region, he stopped and wrote on the wall these words: Sophronia, vivas in pace [Sophronia, mayest thou live in peace], then he continued his pilgrimage. He reached further on the subterranean room where rest the bodies of twelve Popes. for which search had long been made, and which M. de Rossi recently discovered. Here he was constrained to pause once more, to kneel down and pray. Then, recalling the memory of that dear soul amidst the sacred names of the Popes of the third century... he wrote a second time with trembling hand the beloved name: Sophronia, vivas in Domino [Sophronia mayest thou live in the Lord]. He then resumed his walk and turned towards a neighbouring room in which archæology and piety have had the good fortune to discover the tomb of St. Cecilia. For the last time, the memory of his angel returned to him; but now, emboldened by hope, doubting no longer the efficacy of his prayer, and piercing with eye of faith and love into the secret place of heaven, he wrote firmly: Sophronia dulcis, semper vivis in Domino Sophronia semper in Domino [Dear Sophronia, thou livest for ever in the Lord for ever in the Lord].' References. XI. 25. A. T. Pierson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliii. p. 72. F. B. Cowl, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xvii. p. 189. J. W. Boulding, Sermons, p. 251. B. J. Snell, Sermons on Immortality, p. 56. J. M. Whiton, Beyond the Shadow, p. 31. C. Bickersteth, The Gospel of Incarnate Love, p. 172. D. L. Moody, The Fulness of the Gospel, p. 98. W. H. Brookfield, Sermons, p. 117. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ix. p. 135. Saving Faith John 11:25-26 Salvation by faith is the greatest of all Christian ethics; it is also the most novel and original. There can be no doubt that Christ put it in the forefront of all His teaching. Manifestly, the first question to be asked is: What is Belief, in the Christian sense of the term? I. Belief, in the Christian sense of the term, is reliance upon the intuitions rather than upon the reason. With the heart man believes unto righteousness. Put to the test, we refuse to be governed wholly by our reason, and we refuse every day. A man who never thought or acted, save upon the full consent of his reason, would be a sorry creature, and his life a dismal spectacle. There is a logic of the heart which is stronger than the logic of the reason. No logic of the reason could justify George Eliot, who had repudiated Christianity as vigorously as Harriet Martineau, in reading Thomas a Kempis all her life, and having the immortal meditations of the old monk beside her bedside as she died; but the logic of the heart justified her, and we love her for submitting to it. It is not argument but intuition that makes the Christian believer. Faith is a venture, the venture of the soul, in opposition to the reason. II. All belief in the Christian sense narrows itself down to belief in the spiritual nature of man, and of the universe. To Martha, Christ puts one question and submits but one article of faith: 'He that believeth in Me, though he die, yet shall he live: believest thou this?' Believeth thou what? That Lazarus even now is something more than decaying dust in the charnel-house. It all hinges there is Lazarus, is man, only so much matter liable to disruption and dispersion, or is he spirit? There is but one real issue to be fought: it is between faith and unfaith, the material or the spiritual nature of man. Decide that, and all is decided. It is because Christ thus narrows belief to this single issue that He simplifies it too. The thing that saves a man is belief in his own soul. How far that belief may go, or what it may include, will vary; but the abiding and invariable factor of belief is this belief in man as a creature with a soul. But it will follow as a matter of course, that in believing large things we shall also be enabled to believe lesser things. Christ continually taught that knowledge comes through faith; we do not know in order to believe, but we believe in order that we may know. W. J. Dawson, The Evangelistic Note, p. 273. The Resurrection and the Life John 11:25-26 These words were spoken by Jesus in the presence of death. Before we consider the practical lessons of our text, let us notice two general truths it clearly conveys. They are expressed in the first two words of the sublime declaration. 'I am,' said Jesus, 'the Resurrection and the Life.' 'I' Jesus emphatically gathered up into His own Person the blessing He was about to bestow. It was this investing by Jesus of His words with a personal character which gave to them a new meaning and force. In the declaration of Jesus there is no vagueness, no uncertainty. With all its simplicity, it is still the most comprehensive and far-reaching statement which man had yet received. For and this is the second truth to which I wish to refer Jesus does not hold out this risen life as a far-away promise of what is to come to men after death. Three very practical lessons we may learn from the truths we have been considering. I. We are bid no longer to fear death. Left to himself, man cannot but dread the hour of dying. We cannot, indeed, expect it would be unnatural to do so that belief in Christ will at once take away all fear of death; but who does not feel that it casts over its terrors a new and soothing light? The dark valley still lies before us, but there is light upon the path. II. We learn not to sorrow too much for departed friends. They are not dead, but gone before. The great truth of the Resurrection, Christ's living testimony to His words, tells us of the new life in which our loved ones already share. It is little, indeed, that we know of that life impossible for us to picture to ourselves the state or the occupations of those who have already entered upon it. Over the future God has cast a veil, which it is not for us in our curiosity to try to raise. Of this only we may be sure, that those who sought communion with Jesus upon earth are enjoying still higher communion now. III. We have a solemn warning to prepare even now for the future that awaits us. There is no fact more certain than the fact of death: no law which more surely embraces all men within its scope than 'It is appointed unto men once to die' (Hebrews 9:27 ). And how we shall meet death when it comes, and what shall be in store for us hereafter, depend upon our lives and conduct now. G. Milligan, The Divine Artist, p. 217. References. XI. 25, 26. H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. i. p. 285. XI. 26. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxvi. No. 1568. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 61; ibid. (5th Series), vol. vii. p. 284. XI. 26, 27. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 81. XI. 28. C. Perren, Revival Sermons in Outline, p. 137. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xx. No. 1198. XI. 28-38. C. Bosanquet, The Consoler and the Sufferer, p. 80. XI. 29. S. Baring-Gould, Village Preaching fora Year, vol. ii. p. 29. XI. 30-45. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 91. XI. 33. Expositor (5th Series), vol. iii. p. 217. XI. 33-38. Ibid. (6th Series), vol. i. p. 200. Why Jesus Wept At the Grave of Lazarus John 11:35 This is the shortest verse in the Bible, at all events in our English Version, and it is one of the most familiar and most affecting; but have you ever noticed what a problem it presents? Why did Jesus weep? It is no wonder that Martha and Mary and the friends who had come to comfort them concerning their brother should weep as they stood beside his grave; but why should Jesus share their sorrow and mingle His tears with theirs? He knew what He had come thither to do. He had come to dry the tears of the mourners and fill their hearts with gladness by bringing their dear dead back to life. Why then should He weep, knowing what would presently come to pass? I. Why did Jesus weep at the grave of Lazarus? Was it simply because His compassion was so quick and tender that He was touched even by unreasonable sorrow? It may be so, but there is a deeper reason for those tears of Jesus. He knew what the eternal world is and what glory lies behind the veil; and He did not weep because Lazarus was done with life and its gladness and sunshine; no, but because His friend had passed 'to where, beyond these voices there is peace,' and He must summon him back, must fetch the wanderer who had got home out once more into the weary wilderness. And His tears say to us: 'Oh, if you only knew the glory which lies behind the veil and which I know so well since I dwelt there from everlasting; if you only knew that radiant world of rest and peace and joy, you would never wish your dead back in this dark world of toil and tumult and sorrow; you would rejoice that they are at home with God.' II. Our Lord asks us to make a double venture of faith in view of the dark and solemn mystery of Death and the Hereafter. (1) He asks us, on the one hand, to trust in the Providence of God. You, poor mother, sitting here with your desolate heart and thinking of the fresh grave out in the cemetery and the empty crib at home, consider what might have been had your child remained with you. There are worse sorrows than death, and perhaps he has been taken away from the evil to come. It is all so dark to us, but God knows, and Jesus asks us to trust God and believe in the wisdom and goodness of His appointments. (2) He asks us to accept His assurance that, if we be His, there awaits us, in the undiscovered country whither we are hastening, an undreamed-of glory, 'things which eye saw not, and ear heard not, and which entered not into the heart of man whatsoever things God prepared for them that love Him'. David Smith, Man's Need of God, p. 81. Jesus At the Grave John 11:35 A strong man's tears are always sacred. They are symbolical of much, and the fountains from which they spring are hardly to be unearthed without profanity. Yet since this is recorded of the Son of man, we are surely at liberty to let our thoughts play around it and to gather from it what we may. I. To begin with, then, shall we not say that Jesus wept here for pity of the frailty of man. Of course He does not stand alone in this feeling; all serious men share it with Him more or less, and the profoundest souls feel it deeply. The great literatures of the world are all shadowed by the sense of the shortness of man's life on earth, and the most moving poetry in particular vibrates to this deep undertone. And naturally, for the fact goes deep into human existence, and shapes and colours it all through. II. Again, let us say that Jesus wept here for sympathy with the sorrow of man. For His was not the only heart that grieved for Lazarus's loss, nor even, in some respects, the heart that grieved most. The gift of tears is a greater one than we are apt to think. It is a merciful provision of the Maker whereby man may gain relief for a bursting heart. Sometimes by reason of joy, more commonly for grief, the man is beside himself, and does not regain his self-composure till his surcharged feeling has found vent in the grateful relief of tears. It is a human necessity this, a gentle accommodation to man's frailty, and the Saviour so human was He was not ashamed to yield to it. III. Once more we can, I think, detect another source from which sprang the Saviour's tears. Tears start to the eyes of man for pity and for sorrow. True, and for anger also. And as He beheld the dolorous evidences of Death's grim power, we shall hardly go wrong if we say that Christ wept tears of indignation for the grievous wrong that had been done to man. We are not to suppose that death, as we know it, formed originally any natural and necessary stage in man's career. How it would have gone with him in this matter had he maintained his innocence, we, of course, do not know; yet that he would have been spared the kind of experience he now is subject to seems inevitable. Death entered into the world by sin. Jesus felt the deep wrongousness of the usurper's rule. The anarchy that had invaded human life stirred His soul to its lowest depths: the wrong under which man bled, and earth became a charnel-house, wrought Him to a Divine fury, the more deep because so calm; and the scalding tears that fell from Him measured the intensity of the internal protest He had lodged and the resolve He had taken that He would yet abolish death, and set His brethren free. Christ's is no impotent pity, it is a pledge of deliverance. A. Martin, Winning the Soul, p. 265. The Tears of Jesus John 11:35 The Scriptures speak much on the subject of tears, and often emphasise the sacredness of weeping. It would be worth while to go through the Bible and notice all those who are brought in weeping; and one thing that you would learn very distinctly by such a study would be this: that weeping belongs to true manliness not less than to true womanliness. There are at least three occasions on which our Lord is said to have wept, and I think we may say that His tears were different on these different occasions. I. The Tears of a Friend. Our text tells us that at the grave of Lazarus, Jesus wept. It shows how human He was, perhaps more than any incident of His career; at least more directly and instantly it brings this out than almost any incident of His career. Though He was the Son of God He never wrapped Himself up in a garment of stoical indifference; and still He is the same, yesterday, and today, and for ever. But we may draw from it another inference, I think, and that is that He does not expect us to put on the garment of stoicism which He never wore Himself, when our Lazarus is dead and is carried out to the cold and lonely grave. There are many things that will never be seen by eyes that have not been salved with tears. II. The Tears of the Sufferer. The second occasion on which our Lord shed tears was the scene in Gethsemane. I do not think it is said in any of the Gospels that mention that scene that our Lord shed tears, but there can be no doubt, I think, that it is to this scene the Epistle to the Hebrews refers when it says: 'In the days of His flesh, when He had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears'. The tears in Bethany were for others; but those in Gethsemane were for Himself. His pain was due to the collision of His will with the Divine will. Or shall we rather say His tears were the sign of the reconciliation of His will to that of His Father. If there had been nothing but collision hard, unbending collision He would not have wept; He would have hardened Himself against His Father's will. But His tears were the indication of reconciliation, they were the sign and the sacrament of peace. We, too, have our tears of pain. III. The Tears of a Redeemer. The third occasion on which Jesus is said to have wept was the most triumphant hour of His life, outwardly at least. As He was entering Jerusalem for the last time, a great crowd of sympathisers met Him at Bethany, and brought Him in triumph into the city. But when He reached the brow of Olivet, from which Jerusalem could be seen down below, He halted, and when He beheld the city He wept over it. You might call them the tears of a patriot. Or you might call them the tears of a philanthropist. But I think the best name for these tears are the Redeemer's tears. It was His estimate of the soul; it was His clear vision of the eternal doom to which these people were going forward; it was the sorrow of the Saviour's heart for people that would not be saved, that made Him weep. There is one kind of tears that Jesus never wept. These are the tears of penitence. J. Stalker, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliv. p. 154. John 11:35 There is a melancholy which enervates, but there is also one that tempers fine souls to keenness and action. It is easy to discriminate the weak sentimentality of Sterne from true, noble pathos, that does not nurse its tears, but wipes them away that it may see to help. Jesus wept, but what succour followed! Dr. John Ker, Thoughts for Heart and Life, p. 125. References. XI. 35. U. R. Thomas, Christian World Pulpit, vol. 1. p. 199. C. Bosanquet, Blossoms from the King's Garden, p. 200. W. J. Hills, Sermons, and Addresses, p. 21. E. A. Bray, Sermons, vol. i. p. 1. J. J. Blunt, Plain Sermons (2nd Series), p. 57. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxv. No. 2091. Expositor (6th Series), vol. i. p. 199. XI. 36. F. Lynch, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lix. p. 205. XI. 37. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxiii. No. 1944. Caves John 11:38 The Bible is full of caves, and we have taken too little notice of them either in our imagery or in our doctrine. The caves are a rich field for preachers if preachers were awake; the caves are a species of moral harvest-field and fine sentiment with many a seam of true poetry running through their darksome folds. I Let us read Genesis 23:19 : 'And after this, Abraham buried Sarah his wife in the cave.... And the field, and the cave that is therein, were made sure unto Abraham for... a burying-place.' Are more people going to die? Why not let the era of death close with the wife of Abraham? The cave now is turned into a casket, and in that casket is a stone most precious; the cave is no longer a cave, it is in very deed a jewel-case, a casket, a place wherein is hidden a life that loves and a life that seemed to begin another life thousands and millions thick in its numbers, too big for any cage, yet that cage should be the beginning of nations. In a sense we may all be landholders. No foot of land do I possess, nor want to possess, except in one melancholy instance. How little land we want at the last! The grave to the Christian is a key; he never goes to the grave without taking the key with him. 'I have the keys of the invisible, the grave, and the dead; I am the Resurrection and the Life.' II. We shall hear more about this cave if we turn to Genesis 49:29 . Old Israel charged his boys, as we should call them, and said unto them: 'I am to be gathered unto my people; bury me with my fathers in the cave that is in the field of Ephron the Hittite'. This is the definition clause of the will, and all definition clauses in deeds and wills and legal documents of all sorts should be very explicit; so the dying old man continues: I mean 'the cave that is in the field of Machpelah' you remember Machpelah 'which is before Mamre, in the land of Canaan' the cave 'which Abraham bought with the field of Ephron the Hittite for a possession of a burying-place'. There is law, before your legal instruments were thought of. You owe everything to Moses, but you are too mean in soul to confess it. You are willing to go back to certain Roman bandits, and to say that law is built largely upon Roman conceptions. And where did Roman conceptions come from? Largely from the Pentateuch. Moses is the father of all lawyers; he builds on the rock, he shows examples that cannot fade with yellowing time. And there they buried Abraham, quoth Israel, and they buried Sarah his wife; in the same cave I buried Isaac and Rebekah; and there I buried Leah. The purchase of the field and of the cave that is therein was from the children of Heth. Caves are beginning to be historical, yet poetical; we shall find flowers in caves. III. There is a very historical cave mentioned in 1 Samuel 22:1 : 'David therefore departed thence, and escaped to the cave Adullam'. That cave may be partly known to those unbiblical souls who are only politicians. What is this cave of Adullam, historically and symbolically interpreted? It is the assembly, I had almost said the Church, of the disaffected. Every one has something to be thankful for; every one has a reason for not going into the cave of Adullam. IV. There is a cave mentioned in 1 Kings 18:4 : 'It was so, when Jezebel cut off the prophets of the Lord, that Obadiah' a man who feared the Lord greatly 'took an hundred prophets, and hid them by fifty in a cave, and fed them with' all the luxuries he had, fed them with 'bread and water'. No man knows how sweet and good bread and water may be until he is driven before the fury of a terrific persecution and is made to feel that the necessaries of life are its real luxuries. Do something for those who are persecuted by the Jezebels of the day. V. There are other caves, wonderful caves. 'They wandered about in dens and caves of the earth.' These are our supposed ancestors; we who have every comfort are supposed to be in the line of heredity which connects us with men of what I cannot but regard as another breed, a holier, diviner quality, and we ought to interrogate ourselves as to whether we have any right to be in this pulpit or that pulpit, or under this roof or under that roof, and whether we are in the succession of men who hazarded their lives for the Lord Jesus. Joseph Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol. vii. p 232. References. XI. 38, 39. H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 1550, p. 33. Archbishop Magee, Sermons at Bath, p. 48. XI. 39. Bishop Winnington-Ingram, Under the Dome, p. 158. XI. 39-44. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xviii. No. 1052. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 297. XI. 39-46. C. Bosanquet, The Consoler and the Sufferer, p. 96. The Vision of the Glory John 11:40 I. The glory of God can be seen by men. II. The glory of God is seen by Faith. Faith is the eye of the soul. III. Christ's gentle persuasives to Faith. Notion Martha's wavering which shows how confidence may fluctuate Christ puts His own word before her. The object of Faith is Himself. A. Maclaren. The Prayer At the Resurrection of Lazarus John 11:41-42 I. The Prayer Gesture. First comes a gesture the uplifted eyes to heaven; and then He prayed the prayer which we have for our text When the prayer is finished He faces Lazarus in the tomb and cries in a loud voice, 'Lazarus, come forth'. Watch this sheeted form bound so tight that if he would he could not bend, stands straight upon his feet, swaying, doubtless, to and fro. Then Jesus turned to those who stood around and said, 'Loose him and let him go'; as if to say, 'I have done my part; I have raised him from the dead; you can unloose him; you can get these bands off, and take this sheet off. This is your work.' I do not believe in all the ministry of Jesus there is a more striking incident than this great miracle. It is more than a miracle: it is a parable and a prophecy; it is a prophecy in that it holds up to us the hope of the future resurrection of our bodies. It is a parable in that it sets forth the magnitude, of the scheme of redemption. It teaches that all mankind everywhere is dead in trespasses and sin; there is absolutely no power by which man can save himself; by which he can lift himself from the grave of his sin; Jesus, and Jesus alone, is the resurrection power for the dead soul. With one word spoken a soul is redeemed and a grave is robbed of its victim. Then comes the development of the soul; after the soul has been saved, there is the afterwork of making it free, which is the work in which man himself must co-operate with God. II. The Prayer Itself. This prayer is one of the prayers of thanksgiving, and it serves to set forth three great essential truths. (1) The first is this: that Jesus had already been praying over this matter. 'I thank Thee, Father, that Thou heardst Me.' Jesus unquestionably is referring to a prayer experience in the past. Perhaps it was at the time when He first received news of Lazarus's sickness. He prayed and God gave Him the assurance of the answer to His prayer. When He started over across the Jordan back to Judea to the home of Mary and Martha and Lazarus, He had the full assurance that Lazarus was to be raised from the dead. (2) And then it is also suggestive of His unwavering confidence in His unity with His Father. 'I know that Thou hearest Me always.' The life of Jesus as we find it revealed in the four Gospels is one constant submission to the will of His Father. He says: 'I do always the things that please Him'. If we go back to the twelfth year of His lite we find Him in the Temple setting forth the fact that the will of His Father is His first consideration, and if we go to the last day of His life, yonder in the Garden of Gethsemane, we find Him setting forth the same truth: 'Nevertheless, not My will, but Thine be done'; there is a constant co-operation between His will and the will of His Father, and He knew the final issue at the grave of Lazarus because He knew that His will and the Father's were one. (3) He prayed also that those about Him might know, as He said, 'That the Father had sent Him'. It is for this reason that in this prayer we see Him in the outset lifting His eyes towards heaven as much as to say, 'Yonder is My source of strength and power'. I believe in psychological law. I believe that it is a great science. I believe that we are now just upon the verge of comprehending it I believe that in the days to come it is to be recognised as one of the great laws of nature. But I do not believe that the power of Jesus was obtained in any sense by psychological law. He was the author of psychological law, and there is a vast difference between one being the slave of a law and the subject of it He was the author of the law, and therefore its master. Jesus Himself was the power. With His will He could change the course of planets, conserving all the laws that govern them. With one stroke of His hand He could turn the earth and change day into night. And so, with respect to the miracles of Jesus. Jesus Himself is the great miracle-working power, and He need not subject Himself to any law save the law of Himself. He was a perpetual walking miracle wherever He went. And so Jesus prays this prayer in order that those who stand round about Him may see that He is depending not upon any law of science, not upon any peculiar manipulation of spirits, not upon the operation of any psychological principle: He is praying this prayer that He may show them that it is because of the fact that He is one with His Father and His Father is one with Him; that He has the power to raise the dead. Len G. Broughton, The Prayers of Jesus, pp. 71-80. References. XI. 41,42. A. E. Belch, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xix. p. 348. XI. 42. W. J. Danson, The Evangelistic Note, p. 79. XI. 43, 44. Archbishop Magee, Sermons at Bath, p. 87. C. Bickersteth, The Gospel of Incarnate Love, p. 60. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxx. No. 1776, and vol. xliv. No. 2664. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 98. XI. 47. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlvii. No. 2736. Expositor (4th Series), vol. v. p. 119. XI. 47, 48. H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 1603, p. 161. XI. 47-50. W. H. Simcox, The Cessation of Prophecy, p. 278. Unwarrantable Interferences John 11:48 I. There are times when we must leave God alone. (1) There is a sphere where God is sovereign. It is the sphere of action. It is the realm of life. And there it is wisdom, it is peace, just to let God alone to have His way with you. It is one secret of a strenuous life. I have known young men curse when they fell ill. I have known fathers whose hearts turned hard as adamant when the angel of death stooped down and kissed their children. O follower of Christ, let God alone. Perhaps it is kinder to bring the rod upon thy back than to put the jewelled ring upon thy finger. (2) I believe, too, that there is a wider sense in which we are called to let God alone. For I am conscious in the religious life of our time of a certain fretful anxiety and unrest, and the absence of a quiet and solemn dignity that gave a grandeur to our father's piety. There is an irreligious anxiety for God. II. There are times when we must let men alone. Where does it come in in human life? We shall take a Gospel incident and see. I find Christ sitting at Simon the leper's table, and the woman who was a sinner is kneeling there, and she has broken the alabaster box, and is pouring the precious ointment on the feet of Jesus. And the disciples murmur and are indignant 'Might not this ointment have been sold for three hundred pence and given to the poor?' 'Let her alone,' says Jesus, 'Why trouble ye the woman? She is serving with a service of her own, moved by the passion of an all-pardoning love; there is one work, there is one character for her, there is another service and another life for you.' And that is one glory of the Gospel. It does not crush men into one common mould, but it gives the freest play to individuality, and perfects and crowns each struggling soul apart. It is not because I want to be original, it is because I want to be a Christian, that I say to all murmuring disciples, Let me alone, I have my box to break, it is not yours. I just want to say this in closing. The hour may come when God lets us alone. It is not by a desperate career, and it is not by one black and awful deed that a man shall sin away the grace of God. It is by the silent hardening of our common days, the almost unnoticed tamperings with conscience; it is by that the spiritual dies, it is by that men become cast-away. Better the harshest discipline than that. G. H. Morrison, Flood-Tide, p. 136. References. XI. 48. Expositor (6th Series), vol. v. p. 121. XI. 49. W. R. Inge, All Saint's Sermons, 1905-1907, p. 30. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 87. XI. 49, 50. A. M. Fairbairn, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvi. p. 113. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 107. XI. 49-51. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 88. XI. 60. Bishop Winnington-Ingram, The Men who Crucify Christ, p. 38. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 61; ibid. (5th Series), vol. v. p. 27. XI. 51, 52. Ibid. (4th Series), vol. vi. p. 299; ibid. (7th Series), vol. v. p. 110. XI. 54-67. Ibid. vol. v. p. 296. XL 55. Ibid. vol. v. p. 387; ibid. (5th Series), vol. vi. p. 113. Will He Not Come to the Feast? John 11:56 'What think ye, that He will not come to the feast?' Of course He will. You are bidden today to His table to commemorate that great deliverance that Jesus Christ wrought out for you upon the cross, and through the rended tomb, you are bidden to the table to re-consecrate yourselves to the service of your risen Lord. 'What think ye then, that He will not come to the feast?' Far, far hence be that unworthy thought. I. He will come, in the first place, because of His own most true promise that 'Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there, am I in the midst of you'. We are drawing near to His table, but He is the Host. He would not act so discourteously to His guests as to be absent when He bids us to come to His table. Besides, He is not only the Host, but He is the meat and the drink of our spiritual life. II. Our feast would have no meaning if He did not come. If He were not here, there would be no blessing in our gathering together. There would be no joy if He were not here. Why, if He be absent we may indeed hold a Good Friday service all the year round. We may hang our churches in black; nay, there would be no use our entering into the House of God at all unless we knew that He would be amongst us. III. When, then, He comes to the feast, what are we to do? (1) We must admit Him. 'If any man will open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and He with Me.' Oh, why keep we Him waiting outside? (2) And when we admit Him, we must serve Him. In the very next chapter you will see that He came to the feast, and there they made a great supper for Him, and Martha served. And we, too, would wish to serve Him, we, too, would put ourselves at His disposal, we, too, would willingly stand as servants of the Lord ready to do His bidding. And not we will serve Him, but He will serve us. IV. And if He comes to the feast we must give Him to eat. 'Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.' Have you anything to set before Him if He comes to the feast? He will feed upon the fruits of the Spirit, produced in your life the fruits of the Spirit, which are love, joy, peace. If He comes to your feast, then lean upon His breast: pillow your aching head upon His heart of love; tell Him all your secrets: ask Him those things which you do not understand. And, then, constrain Him to abide. E. A. Stuart, The New Creation, and other Sermons, vol. in. p. 177. References. XII. 1. Expositor (6th Series), vol. x. p. 130. XII. 1-3. H. Bonar, Short Sermons for Family Reading, p. 368. XII. 1-8. Marcus Dods, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvi. p. 341. J. Laidlaw, Studies in the Parables, p. 161. XII. 1-11. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 119. XII. 3. John Watson, The Inspiration of our Faith, p. 11. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vii. p. 117. XII. 4. Ibid. (4th Series) vol. i. p. 18. XII. 6. Ibid. vol. iii. p. 221; ibid. (6th Series), vol. viii. p. 426; ibid. vol. xii. p. 469. Mixed Motives John 12:9 These words may be read with marked and suggestive differences of emphasis. 'Not for Jesus' sake only 'would seem to be the natural emphasis; 'Not for Jesus' sake only ' would seem to convey another suggestion and meaning. I. Take the words thus: 'Not for Jesus' sake only,' though that might be the principal reason, but also for another reason, namely, that they might see the man whom Jesus Christ had raised from the dead. They did not want to exclude Jesus, but they wanted to see some one else. So they went for a double motive. How difficult it is in life to come squarely down on one simple direct motive or purpose! The subject, therefore, may well be Mixed Motives coming not for one reason, but for another reason, and for a third reason that may not take upon itself the form of words that other reason that always lies back of everything, that will not come to the front, that influences the whole intellectual and spiritual movement, and is yet an unconfessed or unavowed reason. Then what wonder that we should be the subjects of mixed motives in relation to the Christian religion when we act under mixed motives in our own household economy, in the whole circle of friendship, in the whole position and activity of commercial life, in political life, and in all the spheres and aspects of human development. Now let us apply this test to everything in life, and we shall find how merciful God is in taking us at our best For example, in making a Christian profession we do not always make it 'for Jesus' sake only'. There are many reasons why some men attach themselves to the Church. A man may be in the Church and out of it at the same time; the soul may be far away from the very altar at which the knees are bent. We are here today, as on every other day, under the influence of divers feelings, mixed feelings, and God knows where the manhood is weakest and where it is strongest. Throw yourselves into the hands of God, and even your imperfect prayers and professions may be completed according to the scale of God's benevolence. So it is in the matter of general Christian service. Who dare analyse his motives for preaching? Who dare analyse his motives for opening the doors, lighting the lamps, and helping in the general economy of the Church? None. We are in this respect as in others, wounds and bruises and putrefying sores. We dare not analyse our own motives; we sometimes, so to speak, slur them over, encouraging, it may be, the best of them, but still being profoundly conscious of the worst of them. My dear brother, engaged in any department of Christian service, preaching, or music, or visiting, or writing books, or doing anything whatsoever, take heart of grace in this thought, that God knows all about it. It is better to fall into the hands of God than into the hands of men. When you hear the voices of hostile criticism do not be too much cast down by it; there is another voice God grant that we may hear it! saying, well done so far, try again, you have not yet attained, but keep on pressing toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ; though you are faint, yet be pursuing, and though there may steal in upon your most spiritual moments some secular anxieties and degradations, leave all to God, and He will be just, gracious, and tender exceedingly. II. The people went 'Not for Jesus' sake only'. Observe that 'only'; there is a saving point even in that solitary word. They went to see Jesus and to see Lazarus also; we might read the text thus, and escape the whole idea of mixed motive as in any sense weakening or degrading spiritual life; but the text is not read in that easy way, it has in it a hesitation, a point of doubt, a curious and inexplicable uncertainty as to the motive, so that if you had detained some of these people and said to them, 'Now, answer distinctly and directly, for what purposes have you come? from a single and unmixed motive?' no man could tell. The question ought not, indeed, to be put by man; there are some questions that should be spoken only by the lips of God. It is God that searches the heart, it is God that knows the weight of the prayer, it is God that knows how many tears there are in the psalm, how many sighings and groanings in the poor sobbing prayer; it is therefore not for man, whatever his dignity, his name, his profession, or his function, to ask certain great penetrating spiritual questions. We answer to God: that we are in the house of God itself is a good sign, to be anywhere near the temple of God is a hopeful indication of anxious religious progressive life. Why did you open the Bible? You cannot give a simple crystal reason that has in it no speck or flaw, but the very fact that you did open the Bible is itself a hopeful sign. Why go to that book where all is about God and truth and life, and duty and responsibility, and sin and redemption and immortality? Perhaps you did not go to it very lovingly, you went to it under some measure of constraint: do not vex yourself with such a question as that, you did go to the Book, the book-form of the Jesus, the Bible-form of the cross, and mayhap in the opening of its pages, though you had no intent of it, you may have come upon the very Christ who is the jewel of the Book, the Sun of that grey sky. References. XII. 9. Expositor (6th Series), vol. x. p. 173. XII. 10. Ibid. (4th Series), vol. iii. p. 87. XII. 12, 13. W. J. Hills, Sermons and Addresses, p. 29. W. J. Brock, Sermons, p. 273. XII. 12-26. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John p. 125. XII. 13. Bishop Winnington-Ingram, The Men who Crucify Christ, p. 48. Expositor (4th Series), vol. vi. p. 130. XII. 16. W. R. Hutchings, Sermon Sketches (2nd Series), p. 1. XII. 16. J. Keble, Miscellaneous Sermons, p. 417. XII. 19. John Thomas, Myrtle Street Pulpit, vol. iii. p. 317. XII. 20. Expositor (6th Series), vol. ix. p. 127. XII. 20, 21. G. A. Sowter, From Heart to Heart, p. 159. XII. 20-22. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vi. p. 175. XII. 20-24. Ibid. p. 298. Seeing Jesus John 12:21 This is, in the first place, the cry of the scholars and the students of the world. We sometimes feel inclined to be annoyed, angry, with scholars or students who put before us some different reading or account than we are accustomed to. But do let us do them justice. Although often they make a mistake, for the last fifty years what the scholars and the students of Europe have been trying to do is to see Jesus: it is to get back behind what they think later traditions, what they think accretions on the old faith, what they think disfigurements in art; back to the real Jesus, the real Jesus who walked the streets of Jerusalem and climbed the hills of Galilee. 'Sir, we would see Jesus,' is the cry of the modern student today. So it is the cry of this great multitude in our city. I have lived for nine years in the poor parts of London; and I stand here, to bear witness that among the people themselves I have never heard a word against Jesus Himself, except in the lips or through the lips of some professional Secularist lecturer; I have never heard a word uttered among the poor people against Jesus Himself, though in their minds they are constantly contrasting church or chapel with Jesus Himself, and they seem to say to us: 'Stand aside; sometimes you misrepresent Him. Hush your quarrels about doctrine, hush your quarrels and disputes about Church government. We would see Jesus. Stand out of our way; we want to see Him with our own eyes.' I. To see Jesus and to be Jesus to the world is the absolute vocation for which every one of us was born. I mean, when you look into the trouble which God has taken with the world; when you think over what was the object of the Incarnation the astounding Incarnation which we take so lightly, we who have been taught it since childhood; when you ask why it was that God revealed the first great mystery, what there was behind the veil, and showed Himself in the Person, in the faith of Jesus Christ; why it was that He had to lie upon the cross and pour out. His precious blood; why He rose again and broke the powers of death; why the great windows of heaven opened again, and down came the falling of the Holy Ghost; why to barbarous Britain was sent in the power of the Spirit the Christian Church; why in fullness of time you were born upon this planet and in this generation, and were baptised into that Christian Church, and many of you confirmed in it and received Communion in it? there is only one answer: that the object of being alive at all, the whole point of being a breathing, living person on this globe, is that you may see and be Jesus in the world. II. But, you say, How am I to see Jesus? It is true what you say, He is far off. I come to church; I have not given up religion; but He is far off from me; how am I to see Jesus? And we look to see what those, for there are thousands upon thousands of such, who clearly see Him every day, to whom He is clearly the greatest reality in life, you look to see how they manage it. I know two young men both brilliant, one a brilliant scholar, both University men, and both still young, who are quite certain in their own minds that they have had a vision quite independently of Jesus Christ, and in consequence of which they are both ordained, and are probably two of the most powerful preachers in the Church of England. But apart from any question of a vision, what is it that those whom we know, among the poor, quite as much as among the educated, who clearly see Jesus, what is it which has enabled them to see? I notice, as I study them, three things. First, an immense belief in the Holy Ghost They really believe that the Holy Spirit takes of Christ and shows Him to us. I notice next a touching study of the photographs of Jesus Christ in the Bible I have, as one of my dearest relics, the well-thumbed, well-used Bible of Bishop Wilkinson himself, and the very marks in it, the very appearance of it shows how he was down with these photographs on his knees whenever he could, looking at the five photographs, the four Gospels, and the Epistles of St Paul, the five photographs of his Master. And then, next, I notice about them a desire to put every thought into capacity with Christ. These are the secrets of seeing Jesus; and not one of these things is impossible with us. The Holy Ghost has no favourites. Every layman, every woman can kneel down; the Holy Ghost, hovering over them, longing to sanctify them, will show them Jesus if they ask. In other words, prayerful dependence upon the Holy Ghost is possible for every one. Bishop Winnington-Ingram, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxxvii. p. 97. We Would See Jesus John 12:21 I want to ask you why it is that we should desire to see Jesus. I. He Wishes Us to See Him. In the first place because the whole tenor of Scripture makes it plain that He wishes us to do so. Surely He who said 'Look unto Me and be saved, all ye ends of the earth,' and blamed His ancient people because they looked not to the Holy One of Israel surely we cannot expect Him to have changed in this respect Who can doubt that He will welcome everybody who strives to see Him as He is? II. He is Now on the Throne of Grace. And the second reason why we should desire to see Jesus is that He is now seated on the throne of grace, whereas one day we must see Him seated on a throne of judgment. You may depend upon it that, if ever you and I are to die in peace, it can only be on the ground of having seen Jesus us our sanctification, righteousness, and redemption. As we pass through life we see many people and things, and these all impress our characters; but what if, when we come to the dark valley at last, we have never seen Him Who alone can safely guide us through the dark valley? III. A View of the Saviour Transforms the Soul. A third reason why we should desire to see Jesus can be stated thus: Because a view of the Saviour transforms our souls and moulds them into His likeness. 'Beholding as in a glass' which means, strictly speaking, one of the blurred mirrors of the ancients 'the image of the Lord, we are changed into the same image from glory to glory even as by the Spirit of the Lord'. As I read my Bible I find a hundred instances of the operation of this law. I find in the Old Testament when Moses had been forty days and nights in communication with Almighty God he had to veil his face before the people. If you turn to the New Testament you will find that a view of the Saviour produces moral and spiritual, as well as physical, results. How else can you account for the fact that when the rulers of the Jews beheld St. John and St. Peter, and took note of their boldness, they immediately said, 'These men have been with Jesus and they have learnt of Him'. Or again, we read how Stephen cried,' Behold, I see the heavens opened and Jesus standing at the right hand of God'. What was the result on the dying martyr? Unconsciously he at once framed himself to the example of the Saviour, and prayed for the forgiveness of his murderers. If you want to live the Christ life strive to see Jesus and study His character. IV. Is the Desire Capable of Fulfilment? Is this desire to see Jesus capable of fulfilment in our present state, and, if so, how? The promise I want particularly to speak of is, 'He that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father... and I will manifest Myself to him'. 'If a man love Me,' said our Lord, 'He will keep My words, My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make our abode with him.' This shows that the vision is made to the heart and soul, and it is made to the man who walks steadily in the path of obedience. Do not lose sight, of the condition. We must cultivate that holiness without which, we are told, no man shall see the Lord. Each one of us has an enemy whose ceaseless object it is to hinder us from seeing Jesus. 'The God of this world hath blinded the eyes of them that believe not, lest the light of the glorious Gospel of Christ should shine into their hearts.' What light that throws on the fact that too often our desire to see Jesus is not gratified. Do not put this matter off till a more convenient season. Seek Him earnestly very earnestly in the pages of His Holy Word, where He does reveal Himself, and if only you do this persistently and believingly you must succeed. John 12:21 'You take a journey to Olympia to see the famous statue by Phidias,' says Epictetus, 'and you all think it a misfortune to die without having seen things like that. But when you need take no journey, when a man has God's works before him wherever he is, will you not desire to see and understand them? Will you not perceive either what you are, or what you have been born for, or why you have received the faculty of sight? But, you may say, there are disagreeable and troublesome things in life. And are there none at Olympia? Are you not scorched, crushed by the crowds, wet by the rains, dinned with noise and clamour and the rest of it? Yet, I imagine, you set off these against the splendour of the spectacle, and so put up with them. Well then, and have you not got faculties to make you to bear life's chances? Have you not been endowed with greatness of soul, with manliness, with endurance?' References. XII. 21. R. J. Campbell, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvi. p. 385. G. Matheson, The Scottish Review, vol. ii. p. 162. H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Holy-tide Teaching, p. 48. R. J. Campbell, A Faith for To-day, p. 167. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vi. p. 235. XII. 22. Ibid. (4th Series), vol. v. p. 120. XII. 23. H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, p. 216. XII. 23, 24. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. liii. No. 3024. Undeveloped Lives John 12:24 In every corn of wheat that finds no congenial soil there are undeveloped possibilities of harvest; and that suggests to me the question that often vexes us, the question of undeveloped lives. Perhaps it is in the presence of early death that the thought reaches us with its full pressure. For the tragedy of early death is not its suffering: it is the blighted promise and the hope that is never crowned. I scarcely wonder that in wellnigh every cemetery you shall see a broken column as a monument. It is hardly Christian, but it is very human, and I do not think God will be hard on what is human. Wherever death is there you have mystery. But in the death of the young the mystery is doubled. The great mystery of the early grave is the sorrow of undeveloped lives. One of the first things to arrest me in Christ Jesus is His influence in developing the lives He touched. Jesus touched nothing which He did not adorn. What, then, were the great forces Jesus used in developing undeveloped life? I. The first was His central truth that God is love. We all know how love develops character. That was the first power that Jesus used. He said to a repressed and fearful world, 'God loves you'. II. But there was another power that Jesus used. It was the human instinct of self-surrender. It is the glory of Jesus that He called self-surrender into the service of our self-development. III. Lastly, and this is the crowning inspiration, our Lord expanded life into eternity. Our life shall go on developing for ever, under the sunshine and in the love of God. I know no thought more depressing, as life advances, than the thought that all effort is to be crushed at death. But if death is an incident and not an end, if every baffled striving shall be crowned, if 'All, I could never be, All, man ignored in me,' is to expand into actuality when I awake, I can renew my struggle after every failure. It is that knowledge, given us by Jesus, that has inspired the development of Christendom. G. H. Morrison, Sunrise: Addresses from a City Pulpit, p. 84. Life Out of Death John 12:24 I. We must die to ourselves in order to receive life from Christ. II. The life of the Christian is a daily dying. III. The death of the Christian is the road to a nobler life. A. Maclaren. John 12:4 The missionary Krapf, after the death of his beloved wife on the coast of East Africa, wrote home to the Committee of the Church Missionary Society: 'Tell our friends at home that there is now on the East African coast a lonely missionary grave. This is a sign that you have commenced the struggle with this part of the world, and as the victories of the Church are gained by stepping over the graves of her members, you may be the more convinced that the hour is at hand when you are summoned to the conversion of Africa from its eastern shore.' References. XII. 24. H. Bonar, Short Sermons for Family Reading, pp. 168 and 175. T. G. Bonney, Death and Life in Nations and Men, p. 20. H. Jeffs, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxii. p. 44. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 165. The Sacrificial Symbolism of Nature John 12:24-25 In the first of these verses the great Teacher indicates the need there is for His own vicarious death; and in the second, He asserts a practical principle which must have its place in the lives of His followers, a principle which borrows its crowning sanction and its energising motive from His own death. I. Jesus affirms a necessary connection between His own death and the triumph of His cause: 'Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone'. 'Much fruit' The metaphor points to the vast discipleship which shall yet gather round His person, and respond to the spirit of His matchless life. Jesus did not desire a nominal discipleship, however influential and widely extended. There must be moral oneness, the sense of a common life, participation in the same great experience. (1) This saying does not directly raise the abstract question of the nature or necessity of a redemptive sacrifice, but it implies the human mind is so constituted that some such doctrine is a primary demand in any system which aims at deep and worldwide success. (2) The need that Jesus should die to vivify others with the principles of His own life does not rest only upon the constitution of the human mind, but has its Divine side also. God could not bless, accept, and sanctify a sinful world, bringing it into mystic union with Himself, apart from the processes of an atoning death. II. Jesus lays aside the symbolism of the seed-corn, and states a plain principle of sacrifice through which the lives of the disciples must be conformed to His own. Whilst affirming a common law of surrender for Himself and His disciples, Jesus in no sense obliterates the stupendous dividing line between His sacrifice and the self-abnegation of those whom He fills with His spirit. Redemption was a solitary act to which one holy and unspotted Being alone was equal, and we are neither called upon nor competent to lay down our lives to redeem men. Vivified by Christ's death and made to share His spirit, we ourselves must become a seed-corn, and go into the darkness and humiliation of the earth, to continue for others the life we ourselves have received. We must sacrifice the lower allurements to taste the higher joy and blessedness of our Lord. References. XII. 24, 25. D. Fraser, Metaphors in the Gospels, p. 328. XII. 24-26. Expositor (6th Series), vol. iv. p. 226. XII. 25. H. Bonner, Sermons and Lectures, p. 133. Expositor (5th Series), vol. iv. p. 460. Following Christ John 12:26 I want to deal with the missionary life from this point of view: that the missionary life gives an opportunity for the exactest imitation of the life of our Lord Jesus Christ I want then to put before younger men the nobility of the missionary call. Now, you have in this verse these three things: the missionary call, the missionary promise, and the missionary reward. I. You have the missionary call. 'If any man serve Me.' If you want to follow Christ exactly, the missionary life gives you opportunities for so doing which you cannot have elsewhere. (1) Notice, first of all, the call to follow Christ implied in some cases the giving up of every other calling. As Jesus Christ called the disciples from all their secular calling, so the missionary is called from all his secular calling to go forth and to follow Christ. (2) Or again. In another instance the call to follow Christ was a call to leave all earthly wealth. (3) The call to follow Christ implies, in some cases, the leaving of friends and family, and those whom you hold most dear. (4) The call to follow Christ is sometimes a call to self-denial. II. And what are the promises? The promises are many. (1) In the first place, you read in the fourth chapter of St. Matthew, and in the nineteenth verse, that if we follow Him He will make us to become fishers of men. There will be result to our labours. (2) Then our Lord promises that if we follow Him, and give up all earthly wealth, we shall have treasure in heaven. (3) And then we are told that if we give up friends to follow Christ we shall have in this world brothers and sisters and friends, even an hundred-fold, as well as life in the world to come. (4) But the greatest promise is that which you have here in this verse, that 'Where I am, there shall also My servant be'. III. The missionary reward. 'If any man serve Me, him will My Father honour.' You will not expect to find much honour here. We have not yet learned to honour our missionary brethren as we ought. But the honour will be hereafter. E. A. Stuart, Elisha's Call, and other Sermons, vol. viii. p. 129. References. XII. 26. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. viii. No. 463; vol. xlii. No. 2449; vol. xlv. No. 2651; and vol. 1. No. 2874. Bishop Gore, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlix. p. 209. J. H. Holford, Memorial Sermons, p. 204. Expositor (6th Series), vol. x. p. 185. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 131. XII. 27. H. Bonar, Short Sermons for Family Reading, p. 108. Expositor (5th Series), vol. x. p. 333. The Prayer for Strength John 12:27-28 There are three great fundamental suggestions in this prayer: First, the suggestion of the humanity of Jesus. Second, the mission of Jesus. Third, the identification of Jesus with His Father. I. The Humanity of Jesus. First, the humanity of Jesus; and we will get it in part by coupling the introductory statement, 'My soul is troubled' with 'Save Me from this hour'. In the use of this word 'trouble' we get a glimpse of the humanity of Jesus. There are people who say that trouble is sin, but that is because they confuse trouble with worry. It is one thing to be troubled. It is another thing to worry. Jesus was both God and man. He was a perfect man, and He was all God. There were times in His life when He divested Himself of His Godship in order that He might show the world the life of perfect man, and there were times in His life when He divested Himself of His humanity, that He might show the world all of God. And in order that we may properly interpret the life of Jesus we have to keep carefully in mind this very delicate line of separation between His humanity and His Deity. In this connection Jesus is speaking as a perfect man. We need not expect to get to a place in our life as Christians where we will be free from trouble. If we are not troubled when we look upon the sin that Jesus faced, then there is something radically wrong with our heart and life. Why was Jesus troubled? He was troubled because of what He saw. He saw a picture of the world's sin. He saw blighted humanity, and it troubled Him. He was troubled because He saw what we cannot see. He saw through the eye of Deity what was ahead. He saw the cross. II. Trouble v. Worry. A woman came to me and said: 'Pastor, my son is unsaved, and is as wicked a boy as ever lived. I have been praying in great agony over him, but, thank God, I have come to the place now where I am not troubled one whit about him or anything that he does.' I said: 'If you speak the truth you reveal the saddest condition of the human heart that can possibly be revealed. You reveal two things: that you have lost the mother-heart and God pity a boy who has a mother without a mother-heart; and you reveal the fact besides that you do not know the passion of Jesus.' Jesus looked out into the future and saw Gethsemane; and I think the thing that He saw in Gethsemane that weighed heaviest upon His heart, that troubled Him most, was the non-concern of His disciples. Then, too, He saw the cross; and Jesus was a man even though He was God; and the cross with all its hideousness cut to the core of His heart. He felt all the disgrace, the humiliation, the shame, the jeers, the sneers and the mocking of the mob, and it troubled Him. Now in that troubled moment Jesus prays, 'Father save Me from this hour'. What hour? Why, the hour that is ahead; the hour of His lonesomeness in Gethsemane, the hour when He shall sweat drops of blood, the hour when He is to conquer His will to the will of God, the hour of the cross where He is to pay the price of the world's sin. 'Father, save Me from this hour of suffering.' III. Christ's Mission. Jesus came to this earth for what? To teach men how to live a perfect life? Yes, in part; but that is not the main mission upon which He came. Just the mission upon which Jesus came is set forth in this second declaration of His prayer, 'For this cause came I unto this hour'. What hour? The hour of the cross; the hour in which the penalty of the sins of the earth are to be met by the atoning work of the cross of Calvary. That is the hour, and that is the mission that brought Christ to this earth, not to live, but to die. When He came from heaven to this earth, He was occupied with one thought the cross; and all through His life from the first day until the day when He was nailed upon it, the cross stood out before Him as the one thing for which He had come to this earth. If we have left out the cross, on which the penalty of the sins of the world was nailed with Jesus, we have left out the one supreme purpose that Jesus had in His earthly ministry. IV. The Father was resigned to the cross, but more than that, He was identified with it He agreed with the Son, and in it He and His Father were one. It was not a mere submission; it was the voluntary going of Father and Son to the cross, paying the penalty for the world's sin. Jesus and the Father were one It must be so in order that their glory may be equal. If it were not so the Father is seen and the Son is lost, or the Son is seen and the Father is lost. Hence Jesus prayed, 'Father, glorify Thy name'. 'Blend Thy name with the glorification of the Son, that the glory of the Son and the Father may be one.' Len G. Broughton, The Prayers of Jesus, p. 91. References. XII. 27, 28. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. i. p. 274. XII. 28. G. A. Johnston Ross, The Baptist, vol. lxxi. p. 650. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xvi. No. 909, and vol. xxiv. No. 1391. W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, p. 137. Spiritual Analysis John 12:29 1. There are many things to which we can give lower or higher meanings, and we see how clearly this is illustrated in the scene from which I have taken our text. There came a voice from heaven: it was the voice of God. And to some it was nothing but the roll of thunder, there was nothing miraculous or supernatural about it; but to others, gifted with finer sense, and among them it may be the shepherds who had been on the hills at Bethlehem, there was something in the sound that was inexplicable unless it had fallen from the lips of angels. It was the same note that struck on every ear. It was not the same note that struck on every heart. At the back of all we see and hear there is our character, and our character reacts on everything that reaches it. Now I might illustrate this truth in many spheres. (1) Let me ask you to think of the world of Nature. It is the same world to every one of us, yet to every one of us how different it is. To a poet there is a voice in every breeze, sermons in stones, books in the running brooks; but to Eugene Aram, cursed with a sense of guilt, every branch in the forest seemed to point a finger, and every zephyr whispered of detection. One world yet some will call it a machine, and others will find it instinct with Divinity. (2) Or turning from Nature we might think of human life, the common life we are all leading. It is very surprising, when you get deep enough, to discover the oneness of all human hearts. But then the strange thing is that men should take that life, that common stock and harvest of experience, and should view it so differently and give it such different colourings as it passes through the alembic of their characters, that for one man life becomes a glory and for another man life becomes a curse. (3) Then I often think of our text and of its bearings when I read the Gospel-story of the life of Jesus. What a moral test and touchstone was that life take some of His great miracles and see what happened. 'He casteth out devils by Beelzebub,' the scribes said; and His friends and relatives said, 'He is beside Himself. But the common people when they saw the miracles, immediately glorified the God of Israel. II. It is when we give such things their higher meaning that we are nearer to the truth. Now I ask you to observe in the passage of our text that none of the bystanders gauged the voice correctly. Whose was the voice that spake? It was the voice of God. The chances are that in nine-tenths of our judgments, you and I like these Jews are quite astray. But whatever you are judging, lean to the nobler side. If it is thunder or angels, vote you for the angels. G. H. Morrison, The Unlighted Lustre, p. 198. References. XII. 29. R. Collyer, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liv. p. 104. C. F. Aked, The Courage of the Coward, p. 187. XII. 31. C. F. Aked, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvii. p. 197. J. M. Whiton, Beyond the Shadow, p. 165. Expositor (5th Series), vol. x. p. 224. XII. 31, 32. G. Campbell Morgan, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lx. p. 69. XII. 31-33. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxix. No. 2338. The Magnetism of the Uplifted Lord John 12:32 I. Our Lord declares that it is in the energy of His transcendent sacrifice that His personal magnetism is to be found. The energy of His love as displayed in His life, compared with the energy of His love as displayed in His death, is as dispersed sunshine compared with focussed sunshine, sunshine concentrated in a burning heat. And it is this focussed sacrificial energy of His death, 'The lost pregnant syllable of God's great utterance of love,' which our Lord declares is to be the ministry of attraction, by which all men are to be drawn to Him. There is nothing like that magnet (1) Test it by the individual testimony. Nothing so overcomes the deathly and the deadly in men as 'the preaching of Jesus Christ and Him crucified'. (2) Test the energies of this magnet by the testimony of history as to what is the power which has most conspicuously swayed great masses of mankind. No one has ever moved the multitudes except the men with the magnet of the uplifted Lord. II. In the energies of this sacrificial Christ we are not only to find the dynamic of redemption, but the secret of human brotherhood. If men are drawn to Him they will be drawn nearer to one another. The secret of brotherhood is found in common nearness to the Lord. J. H. Jowett, The British Congregationalist, 9th May, 1907, p. 438. The Attraction of the Cross John 12:32 We shall do well to consider the appeal which the cross has made to the world; to see why it is that in all ages when Christ has called to His disciples to follow Him, they have joyfully responded to the summons which has drawn them to share His cross and to be partakers of His sufferings. The Christ of Thorwaldsen, beautiful as it is, the tender Christ of Leonardo's art, do not make the same appeal as the outstretched arms of the Crucified. No royal diadem of gold and precious stones is so venerable as the Crown of Thorns. No imperial throne is so magnificent as the rugged wood of the cross. The power of the Crucified is still living. May we reverently inquire, as far as we may, what is the secret of this power, why it is that Christ has only to ask for disciples, and disciples come to Him? What is the secret of His attraction? What is the magnetic power of His appeal? I. It is surely, first of all, the appeal of sympathy. It is in the face of a suffering world that the cross is raised. It has been said that our Blessed Lord never experienced human sickness. It may well be that the Lamb without spot and blemish might not experience this sign of human imperfection. But He did feel and did bear the extremity of physical, mental yes, even spiritual pain, so that His sympathy is literally the suffering with those towards whom He exercises His tender love: and this is wide and far-reaching. 'The infinite goodness has arms so wide,' says the great poet, 'that it receives all who turn to it.' Did we but know it, there is many a soul sick with anguish, even amidst the joyous brightness of this world's fairest scene. If it be hid away it is no less there, on which that suffering face looks down, and which that tender appeal alone can reach. 'Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' II. But the appeal of the Crucified is also the appeal of power. The supreme appeal of the cross is the Divine atonement for sin. Christ draws all sinners unto Him by an exhibition of power which triumphs over the malice of sin, and by a system of grace which abounds in fuller volume where sin did much more abound. III. But it is only right to say, of course, with the Apostle, that the appeal of Christ crucified is to certain men only a stumbling-block and foolishness. The figure which demands our adoration is the figure of a homeless man, stripped and naked, utterly poor. No wonder it was an offence, the Jews wanted an earthly king, and the Greeks wanted some one who at least would start a Republic or write an Utopia, and they were not prepared for a beggar or a propounder of paradoxes. And yet this is the lesson which dominates the religion of the Crucified. 'To gain one's life is to lose it: to lose our life is to find it.' The great appeal is made in sympathy and in power, and men find that behind the paradox there is peace, that poverty is the true riches, shame the abiding glory, and sorrow the truest joy. W. C. E. Newbolt, The Church Times, 10th April, 1908, p. 494. The World's Magnet John 12:32 I. Christ upon the cross is the pledge of the fellowship of all mankind of men as men. We say commonly that all men are brethren as descended from a common father brethren as heirs of a common nature brethren as condemned to a common death. Much more are they brethren for whom Christ died. II. Not only is Christ crucified the point of union of mankind. In a more peculiar sense He is the centre of Christendom. For this let us thank God heartily. And exactly as our faith is lively and our hope steadfast, when we are brought face to face with error, sorrow will take the place of anger, love will take the place of bitterness, zeal will take the place of strife. We shall not cherish the truth which we hold less fervently, we shall not hate the falsehood which Christ hates less sincerely, but withal we shall rejoice to know that beyond and below all our differences there lies this foundation which none can shake, even Christ crucified. We shall hail this beginning as the sign of a glorious future when His promise shall have a full accomplishment. III. Christ crucified, Who is the bond of mankind, the bond of Christendom, is in a yet closer sense for us the bond of this His family here assembled to seek His presence and to commemorate His death. Bishop Westcott, Village Sermons, p. 128. References. XII. 32. J. Fleming, C hristian World Pulpit, vol. xlix. p. 261. J. Keble, Sermons for the Holy Week, p. 173. J. B. Brown, The Divine Mystery of Peace, p. 42. A. C. Laidlaw, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlviii. p. 156. C. Bickersteth, The Gospel of Incarnate Love, p. 167. A. M. Fairbairn, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlix. p. 225. G. T. Newton, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xii. p. 340. A. Stewart, Eden and Gethsemane, p. 11. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. iii. No. 139, and vol. xiii. No. 775. G. H. Morrison, Scottish Review, vol. i. p. 589. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. i. p. 214. C. S. Home, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxvii. p. 4. W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, p. 263. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. pp. 62, 65; ibid. vol. x. pp. 117, 134. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 140. XII. 32, 33. C. Perren, Revival Sermons in Outline, p. 338. J. J. Blunt, Plain Sermons, p. 203. A. Ainger, Sermons Preached in the Temple Church, p. 62. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxix. No. 1717. XII. 33. J. Bowstead, Practical Sermons, vol. ii. p. 58. XII. 34. R. J. Campbell, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvi. p. 385. Ibid. A Faith for To-day, p. 167. Expositor (5th Series), vol. vi. p. 375; ibid. (6th Series), vol. v. p. 74. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 150. XII. 35. W. H. Evans, Sermons for the Church's Year, p. 1. Expositor (5th Series), vol. viii. p. 372; ibid. (6th Series), vol. ix. p. 233. XII. 35, 36. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 162. XII. 36. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xli. No. 2413. XII. 37. Expositor (5th Series), vol. x. p. 64; ibid. (6th Series), vol. vii. p. 71. XII. 37-41. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxi. No. 1844. XII. 38. Expositor (6th Series), vol. v. p. 369. XII. 39-41. H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 1619, p. 1. XII. 40. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 20; ibid. vol. ii. p. 372; ibid. (6th Series), vol. x. p. 362. John 12:43 'I have been tired with the applause of the world,' said Mrs. Fry towards the end of her career, 'and none knows how great a trial that has been, and the deep humiliation of it; and yet I fully believe it is not nearly so dangerous as being made much of in religious society. I have sometimes felt it was not so dangerous to be made much of in the world as by those whom we think highly of in our own society.' John 12:43 Undue solicitude about popular estimation is a weakness against which all real Christians must guard with the most jealous watchfulness. The more you can retain the impression of your being surrounded by a cloud of witnesses of the invisible world, to use the Scripture phrase, the more you will be armed against this besetting sin for such it is though styled the last infirmity of noble minds (Wilberforce to his son Samuel). References. XII. 44-60. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vii. p. 141. XII. 45. J. Johns, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xix. p. 356. XII. 47. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. i. p. 121. W. R. Inge, All Saints' Sermons, 1905-1907, p. 1. XII. 47, 48. H. P. Liddon, Sermons Preached on Special Occasions, p. 138. Christ and His Mission John 12:49 I. There was no uncertainty in the mind of Jesus Christ. The Evangelist John tells us distinctly that He knew that He had come from God and went to God. He Himself said, when nigh death, that He was going to Him that sent Him. II. He had come from God, and had come from God with a great purpose attached to His life. If we may say it reverently, He was God's great Missionary, the one 'sent' of God, the one commissioned of God to enter the dark places of the earth. One of the chief and prominent traits in John's portrait of the Master is of One with a great mission attached to His life. God had sent Him into the world; not by force that would be to rob Him of His glory. Christ was not forcibly compelled to enter this world; His was a voluntary sacrifice. The Father sent Him, but it was also love which drew Him love for men. III. And what was this mission? There are various ways in which we can express it, but there is one broad expression which we may give to this mission, and it is to save the world, to redeem humanity. All He was, all He spoke, all He did, all He suffered, contributed to give to His life the great character of Saviour. IV. Is there this mission attached to our lives? Yes. He was greater and holier than we; but, nevertheless, His mission is ours. He saves men through men. J. Alford Davies, Seven Words of Love, p. 108. The Self-sacrifice of Love John 13:1 It would seem that the washing of the disciples' feet and the institution of the Holy Communion were closely connected. Both of these actions belong to the region, as we should say, of unsupernatural actions; but they are symbolic, they are parables in action, pregnant with deep spiritual meaning, for both are revelations of the selfsacrifice of love. We see the Lord there at the last meal, fortified no doubt beforehand by prayer during those quiet hours of preparation, forgetting now His own suffering that was to come in the knowledge of His disciples' need, thinking and acting now, not for Himself, but for them. Our Lord did the menial act, and then explained to His disciples what it was that He had done. Among men the slave washes the feet of the guest; but it is not so with God. I. The Highest Love is that which Stoops most Lowly. It was because of, not in spite of, His Godhead that Jesus Christ made Himself a servant His doing so is not Divine condescension. Men might call it condescension, but it is the Divine expression of itself. The Son of man came not to be ministered to, but to minister, and in ministering He showed He was Divine. I wonder whether we fully grasp the significance of this as applied to ourselves, that the truly Divine thing in us, the truly Divine in man, does not lie in our power and authority and greatness, as men count greatness, but in the stooping to act as servants, the washing of one another's feet service not power, responsibility not privilege. That is it. The one movement which lifts a man to true nobility, to true divinity, is the movement which brings him down to the needs and sufferings of his fellow-men. God in Jesus Christ measures the value of the gift, not by the amount of its size, but by the amount that is left when it is given. II. It was at this Last Meal that Jesus instituted the Sacrament of His Love ; that, wishing to leave behind Him some token whereby those that knew Him might be constantly kept in remembrance of His love, He gave to them as a gift the bread and wine, telling them to take it from Him, to eat and drink His Body and His Blood, and whensoever they so did to do it in remembrance, in loving remembrance, of Him. As He gave it, so it stands today, the Holy Communion, the Saviour's legacy of love, the thing of which He commanded and requested, 'Do this'. Many things He asked us to do for ourselves and for one another, but this one thing He asks us to do for Him. 'Do this in remembrance of Me.' We cannot turn away from that request, so touching, so appealing in itself, uttered at the very moment when all other human ties were about to be severed between Him and those He loved. This new link He gave to bind the disciples at all times to Him. Is there any one outward act of love which we can do more telling in its evidence of accepted love than this when, in response to that downward coming of the Eternal Son of God to strengthen and sustain us, we lift our hearts unto the Lord? References. XIII. 1. J. Keble, Sermons for the Sundays after Trinity, p. 451. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiv. No. 810, and vol. xl. No. 2377. R. J. Campbell, The Examiner, 14th June, 1906, p. 577. Expositor (4th Series), vol. v. p. 183; ibid. vol. vi. p. 129. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 170. The Motives of Christ John 13:1-3 The principle of motives as the test by which a character is to be judged is in full view of the Evangelist when he writes these three verses. His purpose is to describe Jesus Christ in His motives, to represent to us the springs of His action, and the fountains of His speech during the last days of His earthly pilgrimage. Six of these motives he depicts for us in these verses, and so brings us into fellowship with Jesus Christ as to help us to know Him: in His habit as He lived, in the soul of Him, in the aims by which He was governed, and in the forces which made Him what He was, and enabled Him to do what He did, and say what He said. These six motives then what are they? I. The first clearly is this That Jesus Christ is conscious that the hour towards which His thought has been directed again and again is now about to strike. This is really His last hour, and all the possibilities of His earthly life, of His life on this side of death, must be crowded into it. Men condense when they know they are going to die: men concentrate when they hear the ticking of the clock for their last hour. So there comes a concentration, an election of the very best, as the soul judges the best, of that which is really dearest to the heart. It is this pressure that Jesus Christ is now feeling. II. This motive is made wonderfully more operative by the recognition that, in this last hour of His, He is to fight His final and decisive battle. III. There is also in Christ as a working idea and conviction, the consciousness of a commission. Jesus Christ is sustained as He faces the tragedy of Gethsemane and Calvary by the consciousness that He came forth from God, that He is God's witness, has a Divine mandate, and therefore is bound to carry it out. IV. Jesus is also conscious that God never sends a soldier to fight without equipping him: that the resources of those who labour in God's name and for God's glory are godlike: they are exhaustless. V. It is love that is the strongest and most potent motive of all in the action and speech of Jesus Christ. And here it is central to John's statement, 'for Jesus having loved His own which were in the world, He loved them unto the end'. VI. There is yet one other motive suggested by John. It is the imperilled position of these men, 'Having loved His own which were in the world '. He was going out of it: soon He would ascend to His Father. They are in the world. Does not John indicate to us there the way in which the coming perils of the disciples inflamed the affection of the Christ, and become a fresh force in Him for His selfsacrifice, and a fresh controlling influence as to His acts and as to His words? References. XIII. 1-5. F. L. Wiseman, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvii. p. 349. XIII. 1-17. Expositor (4th Series), vol. vii. p. 300. XIII. 2. Ibid. vol. i. p. 18. XIII. 3. W. H. Evans, Sermons for the Church's Year, p. 309. J. H. Jowett, British Congregationalist, September 6, 1906, p. 133. XIII. 3-5. W. E. Barton, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lii. p. 403. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxv. No. 1499. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 180. XIII. 4. G. Hill, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliv. p. 230. Expositor (6th Series), vol. iii. p. 396. XIII. 4, 5. H. S. Holland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. li. p. 345. A. Maclaren, After the Resurrection, p. 182. XIII. 4-6. W. P. Balfern, Glimpses of Jesus, p. 210. XIII. 5. C. Stanford, The Evening of our Lord's Ministry, p. 21. XIII. 6. J. S. Bartlett, Sermons, p. 247. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xi. No. 612. John 13:7 The words suggest the consideration of the place of authority in teaching. They convey the lesson contained in the saying 'oportet discentem credere'. In different ways and degrees it is true of us all. We are all beholden for what we know to assistance external to ourselves. The principle is clearly stated, and rightly balanced in the words of the inhabitants of Sychar to the Samaritan woman, 'Now, we believe, not because of thy speaking, for we have heard for ourselves'. The words of these simple people express for us the necessary correction which the saying ' oportet discentem credere ' requires, by adding the saying that should accompany it, ' oportet edoctum judicare '. The men of Sychar were beholden to the woman in the first instance for telling them, but afterwards they could judge for themselves. The truth is not merely true because we have been told it, but our own faculties know it to be so. Bishop Edward King, The Love and Wisdom of God, p. 170. The Interpreting Influence of Time John 13:7 The words of the text have special and primary reference to the meaning of the washing of His disciples' feet by our Lord. The 'hereafter' of the text, therefore, is the 'hereafter' of a few minutes. There was in it, as it was originally used by the Lord Jesus, no direct allusion to the future life, though the principle applies, with even greater force, to the hereafter that is beyond the grave; and my purpose is to set before you the meaning of the principle itself, the area which it covers, and the influence which it should exert upon us in our daily lives. I. First let us look at the principle itself. Briefly expressed, it is that the difficulties of the present are often explained by the lapse of time, so that what may be hard to unravel today may be easily disentangled after a few months, or it may be years, have gone. (1) There is something in the very fact that an event is past which enables us to understand it better than we did when it was happening. When we are in the midst of any movement, we are too close upon it to judge of it aright, and so we either overestimate its importance, or fail to recognise its full significance. (2) But while this interpreting result may be produced by the lapse of time taken merely by itself, it is intensified by what that passing of the present into the past may bring. (a) Thus, for one thing, it brings a growth in the individual's own intelligence, which helps him to an explanation of what before was difficult, (b) Still again time carries in it the educating influence of experience, and that contributes to the better understanding of what was obscure in the past. (3) Finally, here we must remember that the lapse of time gives opportunity to the individual for the enjoyment of the teachings of God the Holy Spirit. II. Now let us look at the area which this principle covers. (1) It applies first to the mysteries that are found in Scripture. As the years revolve, the mystery may diminish, and may finally disappear; or at least cease to trouble us. (2) But the principle in the text applies also to the dispensations of God's providence. There are few of us past middle age who cannot attest the truth of my declaration when I say that in the 'afterward' of our trials we have had their interpretation. III. What may we learn from this subject in our daily life? (1) It may well teach us patience. (2) It encourages us to combine hope with our patience. There is an explanation coming, therefore we may be the better upheld as we wait for it. I have dealt with the text as relating to the hereafter of time. But true as it is in that, its original application, it is even more so of the hereafter of eternity. The dark things which time has left unillumined will be brightened in eternity. References. XIII. 7. A. S. Geden, Preacher's Magazine, vol. v. p. 385. H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Holy-tide Teaching, p. 136. J. A. Alexander, The Gospel of Jesus Christ, p. 34. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxii. No. 1293. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in a Religious House, vol. i. p. 166. John Kelman, Ephemera Eternitatis, pp. 254, 260. XIII. 8. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xvi. No. 926. J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons (9th Series), p. 318. XIII. 10. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. ii. p. 127. H. Bonar, Short Sermons for Family Reading, p. 87. D. Fraser, Metaphors in the Gospels, p. 341. XIII. 12. Expositor (7th Series), vol. vi. p. 57. XIII. 12-15. Expository Sermons on the New Testament, p. 120. XIII. 12-20. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vii. p. 142. Jesus Christ As Master John 13:13 I. Jesus Christ has proved to be the Master in this world, because He can produce the greatest effects by the simplest means and out of the most unpromising material. When Christ came to the world, if I may so say, there was a philosopher who was in possession, the great Greek philosopher Plato. What did he say? He said: 'Bring me your best minds, your most intellectual souls, all the first-class material in the world, and I will show you what I can do with it'. But what is the use of that to the average man who is not first-rate, intellectually speaking? Jesus Christ was distinct from every other philosopher and teacher, from the fact that He said: 'Bring me your worst, and I will show you what I can do with it'. Jesus Christ stands acknowledged as the Master because of what He can make out of other people's leavings. Why, till Jesus came no one ever thought of seeking in the gutters to make saints; it is not the sort of place you expect to look for them in. But that is where Jesus found them. II. All power lies in being mastered by Christ. Do you remember what Paul said? He said: 'I was apprehended that I might apprehend'. Do you know what the word 'apprehend 'means? To lay hold of, to grip. No minister ever grips a congregation who is not first of all gripped by God. And that is what we want for all power does lie in being mastered by Jesus Christ. C. S. Horne, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxx. p. 268. John 13:13 All that I have wrote for near thirty years has been only to shew that we have no master but Christ. William Law. Reference. XIII. 13. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vii. p. 83. Character and Creed John 13:13-14 'Master and Lord' that is what the disciples called Jesus; that is what men call Him still. This is the great fact of history. Take Christ for what you will, define His person as you please, there is nothing to parallel the universal homage paid to Him. To one paying his first visit to the Continent there is nothing, perhaps, more impressive than this, that everywhere men call this Jesus 'Master and Lord'. And if we look at our own land, amid whatever conflicting signs, the same fact of the sovereignty of Christ grows more and more unmistakable to all clearsighted observers. Look outside the Churches, and the facts are even more significant. But I need not go outside our own lives. In all our days there is a difference because, if not we ourselves, at least, the family, the community of which we are members, has learned to call Christ 'Master and Lord'. What does Christ say to them that so name Him? I. He accepts the title; 'Ye call Me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am'. Mark that calm, unhesitating acceptance of these great names, and consider what it means. There are two strands interwoven all through the life of Christ; humility the most perfect and beautiful, such as the world had never known before, and side by side with it the most tremendous self-assertion. No man, however great or good, ever spoke concerning himself as Jesus did. II. But Christ further declared and this is what I want specially to emphasise that they that confessed Him as 'Master and Lord 'thereby placed themselves under manifold moral obligations; 'Ye call me Lord and Master... and ye ought '. We may disregard for the moment the particular duty mentioned by Christ; the point to catch is this, that while it is right to call Christ 'Master and Lord,' it is not enough so to name Him; we cannot stop there. If we call Him 'Master and Lord,' then 'we ought '; you may fill in the blank a hundred ways, but remember, the confession carries the obligation along with it. We Christians cannot too often or too sharply remind ourselves of the moral obligation which is the other half of faith. We call Christ 'Master and Lord'; is His great 'ye ought' sounding through our souls? No man's theology is safe that is not brought into constant contact with actual life. Is there anything the Church so urgently needs today as the filling-up of this gap between what we profess and what we are? Oh, the mock homage that is paid to Christ! G. Jackson, Table Talk of Jesus, p. 67. References. XIII. 13, 14. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. ii. p. 111. XIII. 14. J. Martineau, Endeavours after the Christian Life, p. 16. Expositor (4th Series), vol. x. p. 133. The Imitation of Jesus John 13:15 'Imitation 'is not the first nor the last, nor the deepest word of the Christian Gospel. Indeed, the imitation of Jesus is itself possible only as a result of some more vital process. Nevertheless, imitation has its place among the Christian duties. 'Be ye imitators of God, as beloved children,' says St. Paul. 'imitators of me, even as I also am of Christ.' I. The great fact to be kept steadily in mind is this, that the standard of life set before us in the New Testament is to be found not in a code of laws, but in a character. 'We are called,' says Dean Church, 'to the study of a living Person, and the following of a living Mind.' It is not the letter, but the spirit of Christ's life which is binding upon us. Do I need to spend one moment in proving, or rather in affirming, Christ to be the Perfect Example? Alone of all the sons of men He was without sin. His was a perfection full-orbed and complete, lacking nothing. II. How, then, can we imitate Christ? How can we become like Him. (1) If we would grow like Christ we must know what Christ was like. To your Gospels! ye Churchmen and Churchwomen, to your Gospels! One meeting a week less and one chapter a week more may not be a rule for everybody, but there are multitudes of Christian people in whose spiritual health that simple change of diet, honestly followed out, would soon work wonders. (2) If we would grow like Christ we must keep Him steadily before us. We grow like those we live with, those we love; every day beholding we are transformed; and the same law holds here. We must be with Christ, we must learn what He is like is that all? is there no more to be said? Then can I never be like Him. I follow that life through all 'the sinless years that breathed beneath the Syrian blue,' till my whole soul throbs with the wonder of it But imitate it how can I, I with my weakened will, my besetting sins? There is the great problem, not the ideal, but its realisation. He Who is our Example is also our New Life. It is the indwelling Christ Who alone can make possible the Imitatio Christi . G. Jackson, Table Talk of Jesus, p. 141. Service to Man John 13:15 The Perfect Elder Brother, who taught us that love to God was the true impulse of service to man, laid down a standard by which all efforts to remove the burdens that weigh down humanity should be tested. Once only, in the course of His ministry, did He say, 'I have given you an example'; it was when He knelt down on the floor of the upper chamber and washed His disciples' feet. No action of His was trivial or without an educative purpose, and in the features of this incident He suggests that the Christian worker who would ameliorate the condition of his fellow-men, must be humble, helpful, without respect of persons, and thorough. I. The first Divine requirement is humility. The trail of self self-gratification, self-commendation, self-assertion lies potent over much amateur remedial work, but 'He took upon Himself the form of a servant'. II. The second necessary characteristic of the would-be reformer is real helpfulness, not fussy, useless activity; a real need was met by the action in the upper chamber. III. His amazing revelation of grace and patience in washing the feet of the traitor, Judas rebukes the common tendency of Church workers to select amongst the poor and the unfortunate such as are grateful and attractive, and to withhold their ministrations from the coarse and the ungrateful. IV. His action in the upper chamber was marked by thoroughness. The true discerning worker for God and humanity will be thorough. Basil Wilberforce, Feeling after Him (2nd Series), p. 134. The Perfect Example John 13:15 There are moments in our existence which we are bound to call our better moments. Our thoughts are centres in better things, and we are less wrapped up in the commonplace things of life. If we grant this, what is our need at such times? I suppose it is a need of becoming better. No doubt there are some people who never feel this need, but surely they are very few. Surely in nearly every life there comes the time when this need of moral improvement is felt. I. It is Necessary for us to have some Ideal. Many of us have felt the influence of some strong and good character, of some one into whose life we could look in times of doubt to see what our hero would have done if he had been placed in like circumstances. It may be that in the character there were many faults which were apparent to the eyes of the all-seeing God, but in those early days we could not detect them. To us everything seemed good and true and had left upon us a lasting influence. II. A Man Needs a Perfect Ideal, a character in which no fault can be detected to show him what real, true human goodness can do. If we had asked the question, 'Where is such ideal perfection to be found before the birth of Christ?' what would the answer be? If we look to Noah or Moses, or to such great men as Socrates or Cicero, though their characters may often seem to come very near to perfection, still all of them had some fault, and some of them very great faults, but in Jesus Christ no fault is found, and the beauties of His character take their place in due proportion. He alone can satisfy our longing for a perfect ideal. III. If Jesus Christ is the Perfect Man, then the four Gospels are the Most Sacred and Precious Books that we have. Each Evangelist has set forth the character of our Saviour in a different light; different but all in perfect harmony. They show so clearly our Lord as they knew Him personally, or as they knew of Him from the lips of others. No circumstance of our Lord's life is dwelt upon to illustrate His greatness; no effort is made to draw attention to the beauties of His character; it is as though they felt it was needless or even wrong to draw attention by word of theirs to that which shows out so clearly and so palpably. The narrative of the Holy Gospels gives us the example and the model by which we Christians should model our lives. As a great man has said, these Gospels bring back to you the living image of that Holy Man so entirely that you would see less of Him if you saw Him with your own eyes. Let us then study these Gospels with zeal and patience! References. XIII. 15. H. D. M. Spence, Voices and Silences, p. 209. W. H. Evans, Sermons for the Church's Year, p. 263. A. R. Henderson, The Examiner, 31st May, 1906, p. 533. Expositor (5th Series), vol. vi. p. 380. XIII. 16. Rid. (7th Series), vol. vi. p. 286. John 13:17 Happiness is a great love and much serving. Olive Schreiner. References. XIII. 17. H. Alford, Sermons on Christian Doctrine, p. 331. XIII. 18. R. J. Campbell, New Theology Sermons, p. 151. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 21. XIII. 20. J. M. Whiton, Summer Sermons, p. 71. XIII. 23. A. M. Fairbairn, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvi. p. 97. C. Perren, Sermon Outlines, p. 316. E. A. Stuart, The New Creation and other Sermons, vol. iii. p. 137. XIII. 23-26. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxiv. No. 2052. XIII. 26. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 18; ibid. (6th Series), vol. vii. p. 121. XIII. 27. A. Maclaren, The Wearied Christ, p. 286. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 190. XIII. 27-29. W. C. Wheeler, Sermons and Addresses, p. 92. XIII. 30. G. H. Morrison, Flood-Tide, p. 200. XIII. 31. J. E. Page, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xvii. p. 420. XIII. 31, 32. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 199. XIII. 32. A. Barry, The Doctrine of the Cross, p. 67. XIII. 33. R. W. Church, Village Sermons (3rd Series), p. 353. J. Keble, Sermons for the Holy Week, p. 91. Expositor (6th Series), vol. viii. p. 442. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 210; ibid. p. 217. A New Commandment John 13:34 Christ revealed a new idea of man and a new idea of God. His love offered a new measure of greatness 'Love one another as I have loved you'. What is the love demanded of us in this generation? I. Our love must be thinking love. Thought and love must go hand in hand. II. Love is sharing. Whatever good thing we have found to be the best for ourselves is that which our neighbours must also have. Our advantages confer on us no privilege; they give us no right to command; they are simply ours to share. S. A. Barnett, Church Family Newspaper, vol. xv, p. 390. John 13:34 To restore a commonplace truth to its first uncommon lustre, you need only translate it into action. But to do this, you must have reflected on its truth. Coleridge. References. XIII. 34. Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvii. p. 166. W. M. Sinclair, Words from St. Paul's (2nd Series), p. 196. H. H. Henson, Godly Union and Concord, p. 153. E. A. Stuart, The New Commandment and other Sermons, vol. vii. p. 121. Expositor (4th Series), vol. x. p. 50. XIII. 34, 35. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. li. No. 2936. H. H. Henson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lx. p. 305. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 226. XIII. 35. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlv. No. 2650. Expositor (6th Series), vol. x. p. 32. John 13:35 If it be asked whether any person is a good man, it is not asked what he believes or what he hopes but what he loves. Augustine. John 13:35 Love he sent to bind The disunited tendrils of that vine Which bears the wine of life, the human heart. Shelley. Reference. XIII. 36. F. St. John Corbett, The Preacher's Year, p. 99. John 13:36-37 His dream was still of an individual discipleship and an individual martyrdom, in the pride of which he was too willing to draw himself away from his fellow-disciples, and to forget altogether the world which he had to help to save. Hort, The Way, The Truth, and The Life, p. 8. John 13:37 It was the habit of Savonarola's mind to conceive great things, and to feel he was the man to do them. Iniquity should be brought low; the cause of justice, purity, and love should triumph; and it should triumph by his voice, by his work, by his blood. In moments of ecstatic contemplation, doubtless the sense of self melted in the sense of the unspeakable, and in that part of his experience lay the elements of genuine self-abasement; but in the presence of his fellow-men for whom he was to act, preeminence seemed a necessary condition of his life. George Eliot. References. XIII. 37. J. Keble, Sermons for the Holy Week, p. 36. XIII. 37, 38. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 235. XIII. 38. F. E. Paget, Helps and Hindrances to the Christian Life, vol. i. p. 142. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 243. John 14 In the narrative of Sir Walter Scott's last days at Abbotsford, Lockhart tells how one morning he had his chair wheeled 'into the library, and placed by the central window, that he might look down on the Tweed. Here he expressed the wish that I should read to him, and when I asked from what book, he said: "Need you ask? There is but one?" I chose the fourteenth chapter of St. John's Gospel; he listened with mild devotion.' Reference. XIV. Expositor (4th Series), vol. v. p. 290. The Sum and Substance of the Christian Faith John 14:1 I would ask you to regard those words 'Ye believe in God, believe also in Me' as containing in their short and simple phrase the whole sum and substance of the Christian faith. There are many religious controversies going on at the present day, but those pure words from our Lord to His disciples at the most solemn and critical moment of His life concentrate the whole of His Gospel in that short sentence. I. The Force of this Saying of Our Lord's lay in the introductory words, 'Let not your heart be troubled'. Every Jew was familiar with the sayings, 'We will not fear though the earth be moved. God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.' Whatever trust of whatever kind men put in God they are called upon by our Lord to put in Him. You will observe the extraordinary and peculiar personal character which is given to our faith by this appeal. The essence of our Christian faith consists in our being in Jesus Christ. We realise that the essence of our faith should consist in putting in that Personal Human Being, Jesus Christ, exactly the same kind of faith as the Jew put in God, as we ourselves put in God the Father. II. By Means of a Personal Belief in Jesus Christ. we are brought into immediate communication and contact with Him. We are called upon to believe not in a past, not in a distant, but in a present Christ. Our Lord Jesus Christ came into the world to claim every human being as His follower and as His believer. The one supreme issue in life is Do you believe in Jesus Christ as you believe in God, do you submit to Him and trust Him? III. When a Man Realises that He is the Living God, then the Love of Jesus Christ becomes the strongest and most active force in a man's life. How many a man has been saved from sin by the remembrance that Christ loves him! The great trouble of life is that we have not realised our Lord Jesus Christ as a living person always near us. IV. His Appeal is surely the Most Beautiful and Sincere in all the World. He makes it not merely because of His Christian personality, not merely in consequence of that love which His words and His acts must needs arouse in us; it is because it is the appeal of one who shed His blood in substantiation of the statements and the claim He made. It is a claim written in blood. And that is the foundation of His appeal, 'If ye believe in God believe also in Me'. V. Christ Asks us to Believe in Him as our Saviour. 'If any man sin,' said St. John, 'we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous.' Is that not the most wonderful thing that can be said to any congregation? The Consolation of Christ John 14:1 I. It is marvellous indeed that the Lord Jesus should think of any other than Himself at such a time as this. His own awful burden of sorrows is pressing upon Him as never before. Over Him hung the black shadow of that dreadful death. Here in the upper room He sits at the last supper. And now it is that the face, so sad, so troubled, looks around on the little company. There is a great silence. We wait expecting the sorrowing Saviour to appeal to them for constancy and sympathy. But instead of that He forgets Himself. His thought is only of them. Towards them His heart goes out in eager tenderness, and yearning over them with an infinite pity He saith: 'Let not your heart be troubled'. Of one thing now let us be perfectly sure nothing can ever make our Lord forget us. II. If we turn from the Master to the disciples the words seem equally strange. For them trouble seemed to be the only fitting thing. Let not your heart be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in Me. What did it mean? It meant this: 'Yes, all is black and dreadful, but do not let it drive you from Me Come near to Me trust in Me. In spite of all, find in Me your strength and refuge.' There never is, there never can be, any dark and awful revelation which is to drive us away from Him. III. Once again turn the words and see in them the two sides of this great trouble. The disciples saw one side only, and were troubled indeed. The Lord Jesus saw the other, and said: 'Let not your heart be troubled: believe in God: believe also in Me'. They saw only one side of the mystery the grief, the loneliness, the shame, the agony. But the blessed Lord stood and saw the other side the glory that should follow. Well might He whisper: 'Let not your heart be troubled: neither let it be afraid'. M. G. Pearse, Naaman the Syrian, and other Sermons, p. 197. The God of Christian Faith John 14:1 The word used here by our Saviour and translated 'be troubled 'does not signify any kind of sadness and sorrow, nor are we to understand that it is either desirable or possible to banish all sadness and sorrow from the mind of any son of man under the conditions that prevail upon this earth. The word used by Jesus signifies to be agitated, perplexed and thrown into confusion. Let us examine more closely the truth that faith in God will save us from a troubled or distracted heart; and then it will be important to note that faith in God involves faith in Jesus Christ. I. That faith in God will save us from a troubled or distracted heart. 'Belief in God' is a 'living belief that rules the life. The God in whom Jesus requires belief is not any shadowy kind of God, but definitely the God of the Hebrews an ethical God, possessing (a) Righteousness, the central idea among the Jews. (b) Wisdom, the necessary accompaniment of perfect righteousness. (c) Love, a characteristic that was only germinal in the Old Dispensation, yet sufficiently revealed to necessitate its further unfolding. Living belief in such a God requires living sympathy with His ethical Life. It is the God within us, having become the life of our Life, that becomes the motive-power of our life's course, and the assurance of eternal glory. II. But our consideration of this subject is very incomplete until we examine the further suggestion made by our text that belief in God involves belief in Jesus Christ. 'Believe in God and believe in Me.' The juxaposition of the clauses is awe-inspiring. There is a clear claim put forward by Christ that His disciples shall repose in Him the same absolute, unquestioning, unlimited faith that they repose in God. We are not asked to believe in God and in some one that is not God. The latter would be ridiculously unnecessary after the former. Nor are we asked to believe in two gods, as some superficial theologians sarcastically aver. God is one. He is one ethically and therefore metaphysically, for the ethical is the heart of the metaphysical. It is only in the God revealed in Christ that man can find final stability and rest. It is far less a matter of the intellect than of the heart. You may plead that you cannot help your intellectual bias, but you can help your moral condition. For this, at any rate, you are responsible; and to reject God in Christ is to reject the true moral ideal for human life. John Thomas, Myrtle Street Pulpit, vol. ii. p. 61. References. XIV. 1. S. H. Fleming, Fifteen Minute Sermons for the People, p. 126. T. Sadler, Sunday Thoughts, p. 126. H. S. Seekings, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xix. p. 226. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiii. No. 730. Expositor (5th Series), vol. iii. p. 219; Ibid. vol. vi. p. 472. A. Maclaren, Eospositions of Holy Scriptures St. John, p. 253. XIV. 1, 2. E. M. Geldart, Echoes of Truth, p. 260. XIV. 1-3. R. S. Simpson, The Scottish Review, vol. vii. p. 387. XIV. 1-4. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxix. No. 1741. C. Stanford, The Evening of our Lord's Ministry, p. 72. Many Mansions John 14:2 I. Christ in these words is clearly speaking of the intermediate state. 'My Father's house' was the name which He gave to the Temple. He draws an analogy between the earthly and the heavenly sanctuary. The Temple had 'many mansions,' which were used for a threefold purpose (a) I need not say that the Temple was a place of worship. (b) Just as the Mosque of St Sophia, in Constantinople, is not only a place of worship, but also a Mohammedan college, so the Temple was a great school of instruction, (c) The Temple, like the Vatican, which with its many chambers is the dwelling of the Pontifical household, was the home of a priesthood. II. I now call your attention to a simple argument from Nature founded on the words: 'I go to prepare a place for you'. Everywhere in the natural world we see a wonderful adaptation, even in the lowest forms of organic life, to their surroundings. When we consider this universal law of adaptation in the world of Nature, we see that the higher the state of organic life the more careful is the provision for the wants, the comfort, the happiness of the creature. If, then, the 'intermediate state' be a higher and nobler stage of existence than this, the 'God of preparations 'will provide for the saints in heaven 'mansions' perfectly adapted to their present condition. J. W. Bardsley, Church Family Newspaper, vol. xv. p. 960. Many Resting-places John 14:2 What is a mansion? What is the meaning of the word mansion as it fell from those gracious lips? Is the word translated mansion a familiar word in the New Testament? Does it occur frequently, and introduce its subtle music into the common language of the day? Or is it a peculiar word, sparsely occurring on the radiant pages of the new revelation? What is a mansion? It would be difficult, you would reply, to say in one word what it is, but it indicates, greatness, fineness, a surrounding estate, an environment of forest or of sea it may be; certainly a mansion is something great, noble, hospitable, having Welcome written in capitals of gold over every portal. Is that your notion of mansion? It is not the notion of the text. How often does the word occur in the New Testament? Only twice. Where is the other place of occurrence? In this chapter: 'Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love Me, he will keep My words: and My Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our mansion with him, our abode with him.' The same word, but so domestic, so accessible, so homelike, so utterly unlike the definition which has just been tendered to us and which in the name of Christ we reject. Our abode, our manse, mansion, dwelling-place, resting-place, our hotel, our guest-chamber. That brings the text very near us, so near us that our nostril can inhale its fragrance, and our eyes though dim with age may catch at least an outline of its charming beauty. Manse is defined as a clergyman's dwelling-place; it is the beginning of mansion. In My Father's house are many manses. Manse, mansa in low Latin, a farm, a farm with a field or two, an agricultural place of corn and orchards and gardens. In My Father's house are many stopping-places, resting-places, refreshment-rooms, places where the soul can eat and drink and go many days in the strength of this Divine recuperation. In My Father's house are many abodes, many places where you can stop for a night or two, many hostelries on the sweltering road and the uphill journey; places above whose front doors is, Halt, and rest, and receive the welcome of the Divine love. I. We have, first of all, the home idea abodes. Where abidest thou? Lord, abide with me: abide with us, for the day is far spent; and He went in to abide with them, to make them for a moment, as it were, His abode; and He turned their simple home into one of God's mansions, manses, farms by the way; and they were glad of it; the house was never the same again to them as it was that quiet evening; it burned into a new identity, it glowed into a more infinite and tender significance. The Gospel is full of domesticity. Jesus liked to go into people's houses. What if this Man of the home life, who had no home of His own, turned in His inmost heart tenderly and appreciatively to the idea of people living in roofed houses, each with a fire of its own, each with a pillow built against the inroads of weariness? Lifting up the whole idea of our domestic life, He said, In My Father's house are many refreshment-rooms, many resting-places, many abodes; you need not walk too far at a time, because if you know the road, under the direction of the Holy Spirit, the moment you are weary there is the hostelry, immediately there on your right hand, in front of you; and lo! you knew it not. This is God's way; He prepares the hostelry, He gets things ready for the travellers, He builds homes as well as the heavens. II. Then we have the pilgrim idea. The picture is that of a man on a journey; the road may be uphill, it may be hot, dusty, difficult; Jesus says, In My Father's house there are many stopping-places, why not stop at one now? And how welcome is the idea of resting when we are consciously and helplessly weary! In My Father's house are many manses, calling-houses, resting-places; tarry for the night; the earlier you rise tomorrow the more certainly shall I know that your rest has been refreshing, and, being refreshed with God's rest, you want to be going, and to declare plainly that you seek a country; you say, My rest is not here, but yonder, over the river. III. There are many suitable hotels on the journey of life, every one of which has been appointed by Christ and provided by Christ, furnished, enriched, and made suitable, comfortable by Christ. Do not build any hotel of your own. In My Father's house are many resting-places, places where you can sit down and refresh yourselves. (1) There is one very commodious hotel where I live most of my time; I have never seen anything like it before; it is called the Bible hotel. (2) There is another manse on the road which is less and less frequented. It is a fine old building, though. We used to call it the Sabbath-house. It is in a sad state of dilapidation now. (3) Here is a very excellent refreshment-room on the road you are travelling, and it is not so well frequented as it used to be. It is called the Prayer-manse; that is the manse, mansion, mansa, farm, where people talk to God. Is not that an extraordinary idea? They do not see Him with the eyes of the body, but I watched the people in that hotel many a time, and they are so quiet, so serene; their eyes burn with a strange light, they clasp their hands, they turn heads upward to the heavens, and they speak into it what seems to be an infinite vacuity; but, having done so, they rise and ask for the enemy and dare him to his face. They are more than conquerors through Him who loved them. Joseph Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol. i. p. 259. Life After Death John 14:2 A candle does not go out when you blow it out, it does not really go out, it passes into another sphere, scientists tell us; and if the candle does not go out, is the personality likely to go out? Why, there was the Bishop of Lincoln, writing two days before he died letters of farewell quite himself, without much pain at the end, sending me a beautiful message which I shall treasure all my life, dictating it, quite himself, in mind, brain, loving heart, everything; do you mean to suppose that he has gone out, that he has ceased to exist? If the candle does not go out, personality cannot go out. Now, as I think over with you what the good news amounts to I mean when you have got it it almost paralyses you by its glory. But when you quietly think it over, and think what the secret amounts to I think you will find it amounts to five things. I. The first, of course, is that there is the Happy Land, this place of peace beyond the veil. II. Secondly, we shall be the same in the other world. Five minutes after death you will be exactly the same person as five minutes before. As a matter of fact, death makes no difference whatever to a person. The real terror of death is that it is no change at all. If five minutes after death you are the same as five minutes before, you are living in a fool's paradise if you think death is going to change you from sinner into saint. You have to be changed before death, 'He that is holy, let him be holy still;' 'and he that is filthy, let him be filthy still.' Therefore, we make a mistake about death if we think it is going to change us from sinner into saint. But, on the other hand, what a comfort to know that that dear friend is the same on the other side, still loving us, still caring for us, still praying for us, still the same to us! Why, it is everything. III. Then, thirdly, as we turn over the secret, we become certain that in that world beyond the grave there will be a growth in character. I mean, people often say, and it is a real difficulty, 'My friend, So-and-So, he was not very good and was not very bad; certainly not at all fit at once to go and join with the saints and the angels in Paradise'. Your conscience says: 'Well, I do not think so yet'. I do not feel myself ready, you say. 'If I was to die to-night I should feel I might be redeemed, restored, forgiven, but I should feel that I wanted a great deal of preparation to go and live for ever in the presence of the holy angels among the holy saints.' And that is the truth underlying what is called purgatory. When you have all the teaching about the cleansing fires brought in, it is, of course, to meet the obvious difficulty that our friends do not seem ready, and we do not seem ready. But there is another fire which makes people grow, better than the fire spoken of, of purgatory, and that is the glorious sunshine of Paradise. I fully believe that your little child and your friend are growing; we do not stop growing. If we stop growing, we stop living. But what we believe is what I believe is that in the sunlight of Paradise we go on at the feet of Jesus growing in grace, growing in character, and getting more and more fit to spend eternity in heaven. And we believe that there will be glorious growth in grace, knowledge, purity, holiness, in the life beyond the grave. IV. Then, fourthly, 'It is better,' said St. Paul, 'to depart and be with Christ, far better'. He did not seem to mind dying at all. And it certainly is a fact, as far as I can understand the secret, that the first person we shall see in the other world is Jesus Christ Himself. Do remember that Jesus Christ Himself with the marks of the cross in His hands and His feet. V. Then, fifthly, I believe it is revealed to us that in that Happy Land not far, far away (I do not believe it is far, far away, I believe that Happy Land is much nearer than we think; we cannot see it because it is behind the veil), but in that Land, that Happy Land, there will be no more trial, and no more pain, and no more sorrow, and no more temptation at all; and there you have the secret. 'In My Father's house are many abiding places, and if it were not so I would have told you.' Now the question is, how is this secret affecting us? What effect has it on you, my brother, or on you, my sister? There is no good coming here singing pretty hymns about the other world, no good coming to the service and just going away again. The question is: Here is this revealed secret of God brought to us through the ranks of the enemy by our Rescuer; what effect has it upon your life and mine? Bishop Winnington-Ingram, C hristian World Pulpit, vol. lxvii. p. 385. The Frankness of Jesus Christ John 14:2 I have wondered most of my life why Christ spoke these words at the time He did. They seem unsatisfactorily explained, whether connected with the first clause of the phrase or the last clause. Dr. Marcus Dods comments: 'Had there been no such place and no possibility of preparing it, He necessarily would have told them, because the very purpose of His leaving was to prepare a place for them'. Somehow this does not find me. Neither is Dr. John Ker, also a writer of genuine insight, much more satisfactory. He says: 'There might be some misgivings in their minds, and these words are thrown in to quiet them. Had you been deceiving yourself with falsehood, I should have felt bound to undeceive you.' It is along these tracks that most of the explanations run. But should we not rather say that Christ spoke these words with a smile? 'If it were not so, I would have told you. You know My way by this time. It has been My wont to check and thwart and dash your hopes. Things you desired, things you believed, things you dreamt of mightily I have told you over and over again that they were not so. Now you are right at last. You thought that there were many mansions in the Father's house. You clung to that faith when the rest went. I knew it all the time, and I never said a word to contradict you, because it was a true and sure hope, truer and surer and sweeter than you knew. If it had not been so, I would have told you; but it is so. This time you may let your hearts go free; beyond death there are no disappointments.' If I am right, the passage expresses the perfect and lifelong frankness of Christ. I. Let me recall a few of Christ's words, words which reveal that frankness of truth wherein we put our trust. At the very budding and beginning of His career He said: 'Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for My sake'. He warned one who would follow Him of the hazards he was running. 'Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay His head.' He told the children of the bride-chamber that the days of mourning would come when the bridegroom was taken away from them. He said that He came to send a sword through the closest and dearest earthly ties. His disciples saw Him pass that sword through His own relationships. 'Who is My mother or My brethren? Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is My brother, and My sister, and mother.' He declared that His disciples would be hated of all men for His name's sake. He rejected, to the marvel of His disciples, those who seemed to promise best, those who might have brought to the little company worldly influence and wealth. When He sent the rich young ruler away, the disciples asked, and no wonder, 'Who then can be saved?' He told them, when the time came, that He would soon perish in Jerusalem. He was to suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed. They thought that His kingdom was to come in Jewry, come in a crash of splendid triumph; but it was not so. They dreamed that when that kingdom came they would sit near Him on His throne; but He warned them that the exaltation could not be, unless they drank of His cup and were baptised with His baptism of fire. His destiny was the cross, and they also had to be cross-bearers in His train. One by one down went tower and temple, all the earthly city of their thoughts and hopes. But the heavenly hope which was in their minds also, that survived. The new Jerusalem was no dream. If it had been, He would have told them, as He had told them in unwelcome and darkening words many a time, that their hopes were vain, that their realisation could never be. Now at least and at last they were right. 'In My Father's house are many mansions: I go to prepare a place for you.' II. Christ thus throws forward their hopes on heaven. He warns them that on earth for the few years they lingered their lot was to be hard and bitter enough. And yet, speaking always with the rigidity and the exactness as well as the frankness of truth, He tells them that even here and in this world there are to be great alleviations, rich compensations. When Peter said, 'Lo, we have left all and have followed Thee,' Jesus answered and said: 'Verily, I say unto you, there is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands for My sake and the Gospel's, but he shall receive an hundred-fold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life.' This is the compression of Christ's teaching on reward, and it is well that we should understand it. None of the saints, it has been said, has found starvation instead of love, and the saying is true and faithful. However rich we may once have been in earthly love, and however poor we may be today, we may be a hundred times richer if only the heart is open for the entrance of the Infinite and Living Love. And a hundred times more land? How can that be? What is it to possess land or to possess anything material? We can only possess what we can appropriate. A possession is good only as it ministers to our good. A millionaire buys a huge library, and hires a librarian at a small salary. To the millionaire the books are pieces of furniture. The librarian has a secret thirst for knowledge, and every book is in its measure a helper and friend. He takes down Milton, and feels the morning freshness and the summer heat of Comus . He puts Shakespeare to the question. The great poets and prophets and consolers of the race bring him their message. Who possesses the library? Does not the librarian possess it a thousand times more than the millionaire? So when we are related to God as dear children we possess everything. One point has to be specially emphasised. The reward of fidelity is here defined by Christ as immediate and not deferred. The persecution and the possession go together. Sometimes there are visible crowns laid on heads that have grown grey in the service of great causes. Much more often crowns do not come. There is but little glory in ordinary triumphs. There is much ignominy in public honour. There is much apathy in the world's fidelity and much fickleness in its love, and on these we are never to set our hearts. The persecutions and the peace go together. Without the one we shall never know the full depth of the other. But here, as elsewhere, Christ throws the stress on the other life. The best paraphrase of this verse is Luther's, 'If the devil with his tyrants hunt you out of the world, you shall still have room enough'. As Bunyan put it, 'Children, the milk and honey are beyond this wilderness'. III. We see, then, that what Christ cared for supremely was not quantity, but quality. He did not seek to gather a multitude who followed Him for the loaves and fishes, mercenaries who would flinch at the critical hour. He knew that these would in the long-run weaken His Church, chill its life and ardour and courage, put it to shame before the world. He left very few believers behind Him, but they were the small transfigured band whom the world could not tame. Even if but one man is faithful to a cause, that cause is not lost However dark the skies may be, there is a rift in the darkness, and that rift will widen and conquer. Men of one mind and one purpose, single-hearted and faithful, and visibly without care or fear, will in due time bring others round them. A glowing centre of fire will subdue the black mass to itself. IV. We learn from these words to trust Christ more than ever, to trust His silences as well as His promises. Golden is the speech of Christ: golden also is His silence. Let us go forth, therefore, unto Him without the camp bearing His reproach. Let us esteem the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt Let us give all for love, and count the world well lost Let us count the cost and pay it, pay it in obedience to an impulse which in its turn is obedient to reason, to the exalted, the transfigured, the unworldly reason. In the great words of Lessing, 'He who does not lose his reason in certain things has none to lose'. W. Robertson Nicoll, The Lamp of Sacrifice, p. 155. John 14:2 Faith must be allowed its place in facing the problems of the future life. For the time being the disciples are required to depend, not so much on what they can see and feel and apprehend, as upon what their Master knows. With humble, pathetic, painstaking persuasion, He solicits their trust in His personal truth and fidelity. 'If it were not so, I would have told you.' The fact that Jesus never repudiates the hopes which rise within the heart of Peter and James and John, and in our heart no less, is a proof that should content us, for Jesus is one who never misled a follower, even by silence. References. XIV. 2. R. J. Campbell, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvii. p. 68. J. Keble, Sermons for Ascension Day to Trinity Sunday, p. 72. J. S. Bartlett, Sermons, p. 86. E. W. Shepheard-Welwyn, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lx. p. 317. W. H. Hutchings, Sermon Sketches, p 168. H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Sunday Sermonettes for a Year, p. 97. T. F. Crosse, Sermons (2nd Series), p. 163. H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. i. p. 366. S. H. Fleming, Fifteen Minute Sermons for the People, p. 129. R. W. Church, Village Sermons (2nd Series), p. 176. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlvii. No. 2751. Phillips Brooks, The Mystery of Iniquity, p. 171. R. J. Campbell, A Faith for To-day, p. 331. Expositor (4th Series), vol. vi. p. 209; ibid. (5th Series), vol. iv. p. 156. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 263. XIV. 2, 3. C. Bosanquet, Blossoms from the King's Garden, p. 185. J. Bateman, Sermons Preached in Guernsey, p. 172. C. F. Aked, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lviii. p. 21. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 272. XIV. 3. F. E. Paget, Helps and Hindrances to the Christian Life, p. 216. XIV. 4-7. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 281. Christ the Way, the Truth, and the Life John 14:6 I. Christ is the way, for He recovers man from his godless wandering. The metaphor views man in the light of his practical obliquities. A few false and fatal steps have served to separate him from the fountain of eternal good. Sin hides the Father's face. It sweeps us on its mighty and insidious current beyond reach of the Father's house. A way is that which makes movement in some specific direction possible. Movement towards God is impossible without the work of Jesus Christ the Mediator. Jesus Christ brings together in His own person the two most distant objects the whole circle of the universe can contain. God dwelling in unapproachable light, and man wallowing in guilt, worldliness, transgression. II. Christ is the truth, for He recovers man from his godless error. The metaphor looks upon man from his intellectual side. Men are estranged from God in their thinkings, 'alienated from the life of God by reason of the ignorance that is in them'. Christ answers our intellectual need. 'He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.' Scientific truth puts us into intelligent relation with the world of established scientific fact Historic truth put us into intelligent relation with the facts that have determined the growth of particular types of government and civilisation. Sociological truth puts us into intelligent relation with the facts that have moulded the social life of mankind. Jesus Christ puts us into intelligent relation with all the vital facts of God's being and nature and government. III. Christ is the life, inasmuch as He raises men from their godless insensibility and death. He is the great life-centre. He stands forth in the midst of the universe to counterwork the disintegration and decay that set in when the tie binding all life to its first centre was ruptured by transgression. Our shrinking at death will be best cured by the Divine love and friendship of which Jesus the Mediator is the minister in our hearts. IV. Christ's words present a corrective to all distracted faith. He asks from His followers concentrated thought and attachment and expectation. All saving prerogative, all teaching wisdom, all ennobling inspiration, are gathered into His own person. The text also suggests a warning against all low and dishonouring views of the Saviour's work and person. In these words Christ expressly puts Himself between God and the souls of all mankind. That I May Know Him John 14:6 The fullness of the precious words of our text can probably never be taken in by man. He that attempts to unfold them does little more than scratch the surface of a rich soil. I. The Way. Christ is 'the Way' the way to heaven and peace with God. He is not only the guide, and teacher, and lawgiver, like Moses; He is Himself the door, the ladder, and the road, through Whom we must draw near to God. He has opened the way to the tree of life, which was closed when Adam and Eve fell, by the satisfaction He made for us on the cross. Through His blood we may draw near with boldness, and have access with confidence into God's presence (Ephesians 3:12 ). II. The Truth. Christ is 'the Truth' the whole substance of true religion which the mind of man requires. Without Him the wisest heathen groped in gross darkness, and knew nothing rightly about God. Before He came even the Jews saw 'through a glass darkly,' and discerned nothing distinctly under the types, figures, and ceremonies of the Mosaic law. Christ is the whole truth, and meets and satisfies every desire of the human mind. III. The Life. Christ is 'the Life' the sinner's title to eternal life and pardon, the believer's root of spiritual life and holiness, the surety of the Christian's resurrection life. He that believeth on Christ hath everlasting life. He that abideth in Him, as the branch abides in the vine, shall bring forth much fruit. He that believeth on Him, though he were dead, yet shall he live. The root of all life, for soul and for body, is Christ. For ever let us grasp and hold fast these truths. John 14:6 The way which He left trodden in the earth, the way which is Himself, was not a means of flight from a strange and hostile waste, but the token and the instrument of universal Divine care and use. It was the highway, the way which bore witness to the King's authority, and gave free movement as well as guidance to the King's servants, when they went forth to do His work or came home to His presence. The disciples who followed Him in such a way, or walked in Him as such a way, were by it brought into relations of intercourse and affection with all that surround them, while they were at the same time led to see it stretching forth into all ages and all worlds. Hort. John 14:6 That the Son should say, 'I am the way, no man cometh unto the Father but by Me,' teaches us that so nship alone deals with fatherliness as fatherliness; that we must * come to God as sons, or not come at all. * McLeod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, p. 299 f. References. XIV. 6. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. v. No. 245; vol. xvi. No. 942, and vol. li. No. 2938. W. M. Sinclair, Christ and our Times, pp. 137, 153. J. T. Stannard, The Divine Humanity, pp. 23, 36, 51. N. D. Hillis, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lv. p. 250. F. B. Cowl, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xvii. p. 285. E. M. Geldart, Echoes of Truth, p. 118. Bishop Gore, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lix. pp. 249, 271. C. Bickersteth, The Gospel of Incarnate Love, p. 177. E. W. Attwood, Sermons for Clergy and Laity, p. 154. E. J. Lyndon, Preacher's Magazine, vol. x. p. 132. J. Binney, King's Weigh-House Chapel Sermons, p. 1. H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Holy-tide Teaching, p. 106. J. Aldis, Penny Pulpit, No. 1710, p. 719. J. R. Illingworth, University and Cathedral Sermons, p. 21. J. W. Boulding, Sermons, pp. 191, 207, 231. E. A. Bray, Sermons, vol. i. p. 66. C. J. Ridgeway, The King and His Kingdom, pp. 112, 123, 137. Expositor (4th Series), vol. x. p. 129. XIV. 6, 7. J. B. Brown, The Divine Mystery of Peace, p. 21. XIV. 7. Bishop Westcott, The Incarnation and Common Life, p. 375. Expositor (6th Series), vol. x. p. 181. XIV. 8. R. C. Cowell, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xviii. p. 225. G. H. Morrison, The Scottish Review, vol. i. p. 561. D. W. Simon, Twice Born and other Sermons, p. 60. D. W. Simon, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliv. p. 259. XIV. 8, 9. H. S. Holland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvi. p. 72. Bishop Creighton, The Heritage of the Spirit, p. 129. H. P. Liddon, Sermons on Some Words of Christ, p. 311. Bishop Lightfoot, Cambridge Sermons, p. 129. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vi. pp. 161, 260. XIV. 8-11. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 291. The Unrecognised Christ John 14:9 We do not consider enough the wonderful patience of Christ in His training of the Twelve, as He prepared the little patch of soil for the seed. How often it could be said even of His teaching, 'They understood not His saying'. It was not unbelief so much as Spiritual obtuseness. Our Lord was seeking to comfort them at His approaching departure. Thomas asked for fuller information when the Master spoke about going somewhere which He calls the Father's house. Part of Christ's reply was that to know Himself was to know the Father also. 'And from henceforth,' He added, 'ye know Him and have seen Him.' Philip's request shows that he did not understand the inference of these words; for he interrupted with the prayer, 'Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us'. It was a spiritual density and obtuseness on Philip's part, a want of insight; but when we charge this on Philip are we not made to pause by the thought of our own obtuseness? History is full of instances of the ultimate importance of the little, unregarded, unrecognised events, and of the ultimate triviality of some of the things that bulked large in men's eyes. I. If this is true of events in our personal and national life, how much more true and more common are mistakes in the far subtler region of spiritual judgment. Thus it is far harder to know persons from this point of view than to estimate events. The finer a man is in temperament and the more exceptional he is in nature and character and endowments, the more readily is he misunderstood or neglected. II. And what shall we say of the same charge of obtuseness made against us with regard to Christ? It is a charge that can be made against His Church as well as against His word. He is the unrecognised Christ still. Can His heart feel no pang that He should have been so long time with us, so long exercising His redemptive ministry and men do not know Him? III. Yet it is not all an unhappy thought, however much self-reproach we may have for our obtuseness. There is comfort and sweet content in the thought that the love of Christ is not dependent on our complete recognition of Him. There is comfort in the thought that though we are blind to Him, though we are intermittent in our thought of Him and fickle in our love, He is the same yesterday, today, and for ever. Hugh Black, Edinburgh Sermons, p. 164. The Patient Master and the Slow Scholars John 14:9 I. This question of our Lord carries in it a great lesson as to what ignorance of Christ is. Not to know Christ as the manifest God is practically to be ignorant of Him altogether. II. These words give us a glimpse into the pained and loving heart of our Lord. (1) I think we shall not misunderstand the tone of this question if we see in it wonder, pained love, and tender remonstrance. (2) But there is more than that, there is complaint and pain in the question the pain of vainly endeavouring to teach and vainly endeavouring to help, vainly endeavouring to love. (3) But this question reveals not only the pain caused by slow apprehension and unrequited love, but also the depth and patience of a clinging love that was not turned away by the pain. III. This is a piercing question addressed to each of us. A. Maclaren. John 14:9 We think there is a touch of impatience in the, 'Have I been so long time with you?' Our conscience puts the impatience there, but that does not make it really there. There is weariness, keen regret, pathetic longing, heart-sickening hope deferred in it 'So long time, and yet?' But the love of Christ has a length quite as marvellous as its breadth and depth and height. So long time! And yet He went on and explained all over again the matter which had puzzled Philip.... So long time with you and me, and yet! and yet! We look at ourselves and repeat, 'Yes, Lord, and yet!' And He answers, 'And yet I will not leave thee, I am here still. End the long, long, long time of wearisome waiting, and let us have no "yet" between us more.' Henry Sloane Coffin, The Creed of Jesus, pp. 279, 280. John 14:9 A son may reveal a father in two ways; either by being like him so entirely in his image as to be justified in saying, He that hath seen me hath seen my father or by manifesting a constant reverential, loving trust, and thus testifying that the father is worthy of such trust. Jesus revealed the Father in both these ways. J. Erskine, The Spiritual Order, p. 250. References. XIV. 9. James Orr, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlv. p. 245. Bishop Westcott, Village Sermons, p. 236. H. D. Rawnsley, Church Family Newspaper, vol. xiv. p. 287. XIV. 10. H. Jones, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvii. p. 188. XIV. 11. C. S. Macfarland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvi. p. 115. A. G. MacKinnon, The Scottish Review, vol. iv. p. 132. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ix. p. 390. Going to the Father John 14:12 You can unlock a man's whole life if you watch what words he uses most. Did you ever notice Christ's favourite words? They are such words as these: world, life, trust, love. But none of these was the greatest word of Christ. His great word was new to religion. That word was Father. The world's obligation to the Lord Jesus is that He gave us that word. Not one man in a hundred, probably, has a central word in his Christian life; and the consequence is this, that there is probably nothing in the world so disorderly and slipshod as personal spiritual experience. Now the thing which steadied Christ's life was the thought that He was going to the Father. If we take this principle into our own lives, we shall find its influence tell upon us in three ways: I. It explains life. What is my life? Whither do I go? Whence do I come? these are the questions which are not worn down yet, although the whole world has handled them. To these questions there are but three answers. (a) The poet tells us, and philosophy says the same, only less intelligibly, that life is a sleep, a dream, a shadow. Whither am I going? Virtually the poet answers, 'I am going to the Unknown'. (b) The atheist's answer is just the opposite. Whither am I going? 'I go to dust,' he says; 'death ends all.' And this explains nothing. (c) But the Christian's answer explains something. Where is he going? 'I go to my Father.' This is not a definition of his death there is no death in Christianity; it is a definition of the Christian life. Now this explains life. It explains the two things in life which are most inexplicable (1) For one thing, it explains why there is more pain in the world than pleasure. (2) And why there is so much that is unexplained. II. It sustains Life. Take even an extreme case, and you will see how. Take the darkest, saddest, most pathetic life of the world's history. That was Jesus Christ's. See what this truth practically was to Him. It gave Him a life of absolute composure in a career of most tragic trials. This is the Christian's only stay in life. It provides rest for his soul, work for his character, an object, an inconceivably sublime object, for its ambition. III. It completes Life. It is quite clear that there must come a time in the history of all those who live this life when they reach the Father. When they are yet a great way off, the Father runs and falls on their neck and kisses them. On this side, we call that Death. It means reaching the Father. 'Pray moderately,' says an old saint, 'for the lives of Christ's people.' Pray moderately. We may want them on our side, he means, but Christ may need them on His. There are three classes to whom these words come home with a peculiar emphasis: (1) They speak to those who are staying away from God. 'I do not wonder at what men suffer,' says Ruskin, 'I wonder often at what they lose' (2) They speak, next, to all God's people. (3) And this voice whispers yet one more message to the mourning. Did death end all? Is it well with the child? It is well. The last inn by the roadside has been passed that is all, and a voice called to us, 'Good-bye! I go to my Father.' Henry Drummond, The Ideal Life, p. 77. Greater Works (For Hospital Sunday) John 14:12 Did the Saviour really mean it? That His followers in the centuries to come were to do increasingly greater works than He, the Son of God, was then doing? This, then, is our theme Christ's prophecy of the greater works of His followers and the conditions of its fulfilment. One of the great motives of our Lord, and one great feature of His work, was the alleviation of the physical ills and pains of life. He did great and wondrous works. How stands the fulfilment of His prophecy? Is it true that greater works than these are done today? I. The Witness of the Hospital. Watch the line of children as they are carried crippled and helpless into the surgical ward of a great hospital, then see them a few weeks later pass out straight in limb, rejoicing. Diseases most dreaded and horrible are, through the marvels of inoculation, losing half their terror. Is it not a fact, then, a fact in which the Saviour Himself must most of all rejoice, that in the hospitals of our land are performed in one week more cures, many times more, than are recorded as done by our dear Lord during His whole life? At the back of all the hospitals, and medical science, and surgery, stands the Christ. From Him came and still comes the great efficient motive. His birth, His teaching, His life, stand in vital relation to the great modern movement of nursing and healing. A really great physician must be a really great man, with the doors of his mind and heart open Godward as well as man ward. II. The Witness of Accumulated Knowledge. The other condition of progress in beneficent works is the appreciation of the value of accumulated knowledge. The opening of blind eyes and the unstopping of deaf ears were but the parables of His greater work the giving of spiritual light and truth to men. His death upon the cross typified the uplift with which the sacrifice of His life would draw all men to Him. He left a body of followers devoted, pure, and true, and best of all with a conviction that whatever Christ may have done or they might do in the conversion of men, the purification of society, and the renewal of spiritual life, the world was bound to see far greater works than theirs. Think for a moment what century after century, generation after generation of Christian teaching, nurture, and experiences have done. The little baby born this morning has already within him the precious inheritance of generations of Christian civilisation, Christian homes, and Christian standards. As he develops his whole conception of life and character is higher than that of a few generations back. III. The Witness of Character. And finally character, though it be partly inherited, partly the accumulation of spiritual experience, is sustained only by personal faith in Christ. No husband can be saved by his wife's religion. No woman can be saved by her religious ancestry. Each one must turn to the Master and with simple life follow Him. And to him who believeth who can tell the increase of hope, character, and noble works that will come to us and our children as the generations pass on? Thoughts on God's Greatness John 14:12 The great weakness of our religious life is that we so inadequately apprehend the greatness of God; and the consequence is that we are feeble in our religious life all round. We are feeble in our prayers, feeble in our hopes, feeble in our expectations, feeble in our faith, and therefore feeble in our efforts. It is pitiable how the children of God will be so unlike their Father, so ungenerous, so petty, so jealous, so careless about the reputation of others. I. Yes, it would make all the difference; for those who walk with God become themselves great, and it is impossible to walk with God and keep petty insincerities, petty jealousies, and petty untruths. Therefore there will be a change, a complete change, in many a life, if we really rise and live in the greatness of God. II. And secondly, the miracles in the Bible will become natural. We many of us remember how hard it was to believe in the miracles at first. But the difficulty and the mistake was that we did not rise high enough into the right atmosphere of the greatness of God. You will find in a book to which I have written a preface for Lenten reading, by Canon Holmes, Prayer and Action, you will find a simple illustration which will appeal to schoolboys. He pictures a cricket match, and the ball, by the law of gravitation, driven towards the boundary and certain at last to fall; but at full speed a man, rushing with outstretched hand, catches the ball just in time and, without breaking the law of gravitation, changes the issue of the match. He asks this simple but far-reaching question: Is it conceivable that a man, God's viceroy, by his very will can modify without breaking one of God's laws, and God not be able to do the same? You have only to make the statement to see the absurdity and the pettiness of the position. No, when once one believes in the greatness of God, then, while one thanks God deeply for working by fixed laws because what science calls the uniformity of nature faith calls the fidelity of God working for His children's good by laws that we have learnt to call the laws of nature; while we acknowledge that, we hold it absurd not to believe that when it comes to the great Incarnation to which the attention of the whole world has been called, that God Himself, by a higher law than the one we know (not against that law at all, but by a higher law which cuts our observed uniformity in nature at an unexpected angle), by that higher law, that God should do an act, do a deed which we can only partially understand. I believe because I believe in the greatness of God, in the wonderful signs and miracles of the New Testament. III. Then, thirdly, we shall expect miracles to take place today in the church where we worship. I was speaking in the Midlands lately, and a middle-aged lady who was staying in the house where I was, said kindly in the evening, 'You did help me, Bishop, by your sermon today'. I said, 'I am very glad; it is very encouraging to be told when one helps anyone. But,' I added, 'would you mind telling me in what way I helped you? 'Why,' she said, 'I am in middle life, and I had got accustomed to think that my character and habits were set; there I was, good or bad. I could not be altered. But your sermon convinced me that I could be altered, that I could be altered for the better.' Now that simple remark just shows where one is wrong. We expect nothing and we get nothing. According to your faith be it unto you. But we have no faith. We think we have arrived at the position of the average man or woman, and we remain so. Yet if we believe this glorious truth, if we believe in the greatness of God; if we believe that He is a being of spiritual power and moral greatness, then the tremendous truth comes home that you can be made into a saint of God; that you can be changed, changed from a selfish person into an unselfish one. IV. Fourthly, we must expect to do miracles. I know that seems to some here almost blasphemous presumption. But it is not blasphemous to claim the promise of God. It is not blasphemous to rise to what God expects us to be and to do. 'He that believeth on Me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do, because I go unto the Father.' V. Lastly, if we believe in the greatness of God we shall not fear death. Is it not true that many of us, even those who call themselves Christians, are all our lifetime subject to bondage, bondage of the fear of death? We are born into the other world as quietly and peacefully as we were born into this. Lazarus was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom. 'Make to yourselves friends by means of the mammon of unrighteousness, that when it shall fail they may receive you into everlasting habitations.' It is a picture of outstretched hands to receive you as you pass into the other world. Bishop Winnington-Ingram, Christian World Pulpit, 15th March, 1911. References. XIV. 12. Caleb Scott, Christian World Pulpit, vol. 1. p. 117. R. J. Campbell, British Congregationalist, 22nd August, 1907, p. 155. The Eclipse of Miracle John 14:12-13 We have here three things: a parallel, a contrast, and the secret of the contrast. I. The text presents us with a parallel. Christ teaches that there shall be a relation of likeness or identity between His own personal works and the works carried on by believing disciples after His departure. 'He that believeth on Me, the works that I do shall he do also.' The first living relation in Christ's works was with the Father. They were a continuous testimony of the Father to the Son before the world. 'The Father that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works.' The second living relation embodied in Christ's works was with the Holy Spirit. The third living relation in Christ's works was with man. He promises that if we will only make our faith all that He wants, He will bring our poor, struggling life up to the level of His own majestic life in its faith-creating influence and efficiency. II. The text contains a contrast. There is to be a splendid advance in the character of the believer's achievements, an advance that will make them transcend even the Lord's own personal works amongst men. 'Greater works than these shall he do.' Christ had always thought more of the moral elements and relations in His works and those of His disciples, than of the merely miraculous. Let us try to get a little further insight into Christ's estimate of the two different types of work. (1) The physical conditions that constituted Christ's works miraculous are often realised in connection with spiritual work upon a much more commanding scale. (2) The spiritual works effected by believers in Jesus Christ bring about that conviction which is the great end of miracle by more effective methods. (3) Our work transcends miracle because the spirit, which is the special sphere touched by it, is more delicately sensitive than the body, which is the sphere in which miracle was wrought. (4) The spiritual works it is the believer's high privilege to do outshine Christ's personal miracles, because spiritual work is the key to the final destruction of all physical evil and disability at the last day. III. The text points out the secret of this contrast between Christ's works and those of His favoured followers. The secret has a Divine and a human side. (a) Christ's presence at the right hand of the Father is the pledge and sign that sin has been dealt with, man's unfitness to receive these high and holy gifts has been taken away, the burden which crushed human nature into impotence removed, and the Father's hand opened to His reconciled people in more than its ancient wealth of blessing, (b) This secret of transcendent power has an earthly as well as a heavenly side. 'And whatsoever ye shall ask in My name, that will I do.' The manifestation of all the energies of the Divine can only come through the believing request of the disciples. (1) Let us never forget the dignity and beneficence of all spiritual work. It is a nobler manifestation of power than miracle, and will exalt those who are its instruments in a yet higher degree. (2) This promise suggests the plenary character of the Pentecostal endowment. Christ makes His own miracles the patterns of our spiritual works. (3) These words suggest the obligation resting upon us to maintain unbroken communion of spirit and life with Jesus Christ. Christ's wonder-working power arose within Him, as the expression of His complete union with the Father. 'The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father do.' This lofty power pledged to us must come in precisely the same way. References. XIV. 12-14. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 301. XIV. 13. S. Baring-Gould, Village Preaching for Saints' Days, p. 109. XIV. 14. H. S. Holland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liii. p. 113. H. M. Butler, Harrow School Sermons, p. 276. XIV. 16. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxii. No. 1932. Expositor (6th Series), vol. ix. p. 37; ibid. vol. x. p. 175. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 312. XIV. 16. W. G. Holder, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lii. p. 330. J. Johns, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xviii. p. 418. S. H. Fleming, Fifteen Minute Sermons for the People, p. 185. R. W. Church, Village Sermons (2nd Series), p. 201. Bishop Wilberforce, Sermons, p. 1. G. W. Brameld, Practical Sermons, p. 131. J. B. Brown, The Divine Mystery of Peace, p. 65. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xviii. No. 1074. Bishop Winnington-Ingram, A Mission of the Spirit, p. 190. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. i. p. 389. J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons (9th Series), p. 107. J. M. Neale, Readings for the Aged (4th Series), p. 131. C. Stanford, The Evening of our Lord's Ministry, p. 93. British Congregationalist, 31st May, 1906, p. 545. XIV. 16, 17. R. J. Campbell, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvii. p. 36. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. iii. p. 62. Spurgeon, ibid. vol. i. No. 4. R. J. Campbell, A Faith for To-day, p. 283. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 320. XIV. 16-18. R. J. Campbell, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxi. p. 294. XIV. 17. J. J. Blunt, Plain Sermons (2nd Series), p. 122. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiii. No. 754, and vol. xxxv. No. 2074. John 14:18 This was one of the favourite texts of Melanchthon. He quoted it with deep feeling after the death of Luther. See especially his letters of 19th February and of 1st March, 1546. On the latter date he wrote to Justus Jonas: 'On this journey, when I was alone and my grief broke forth anew, I thought of our miseries, of the guidance of the Church and the University, and of our orphaned state. Amid these thoughts I support myself with the words of the Son of God, οὐκ αφήσω ἡμᾶς ὀρφαυοὺς .' References. XIV. 18. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. Hi. No. 2990. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. i. p. 369. Ibid. Readings for the Aged (3rd Series), p. 85. XIV. 18, 19. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 330. XIV. 19. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xvii. No. 968, and vol. li. No. 2953. B. J. Snell, Sermons on Immortality, p. 40. J. Baines, Twenty Sermons, p. 193. H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. i. p. 251. R. J. Campbell, City Temple Sermons, p. 161. Expositor (7th Series), vol. vi. p. 426. XIV. 19, 20. T. Arnold, Christian Life: Its Hopes, p. 321. The Brightness of the Day of Christ John 14:20 * ; John 16:23 * Some thoughts are suggested by the phrase 'that day,' used by our Lord to describe the period between Pentecost and the Return. It seemed to the disciples, as He spoke, that it was to be ushered in by a harsh and lowering dawn and a bitter east wind. But He assured them that it was to be a day of growing brightness. We who live in it are often blind to this: ignorant of its work and its reward. The work of this day is, in brief, study and prayer: the result is to be unity and peace. I. 'In that day ye shall ask Me no questions.' He would no more be at their side to solve their problems. But instead of His visible presence they were to have the illumination of the Holy Ghost. Their life would be lighted by His teaching. This meant advance in privilege. There are better things than external infallibilities and authorities. These are withdrawn. Nor are we left with puzzles that yield to ingenuity, or prizes to be attained by a few giant steps. The wealth of revelation in word and deed is not increased. No new word remains to be spoken; and as we cannot add, it is at our peril if we take away. But the further the mine is worked, the richer is the lode. Under the Divine teaching we begin to understand what it is truly to possess the unsearchable riches of Christ We learn what the real proportions of truth are, as the Spirit takes of the things that are Christ's and glorifies them. Christ shall give thee light, is the promise for all that day. II. The conditions of this schooling are not easy. Our teacher exacts patient study, complete docility, and the earnest effort to bring life up to the level of knowledge That will be impossible unless we pray, and unless prayer is answered. And so the day is to be a day of prayer fulfilled. Prayer is properly and representatively the action of religion. Is it true that the faith and practice of prayer are growing in the Church? If so, all is well. But if prayer in any of its elements is dying, nothing will make up for its loss. No knowledge of the letter of Scripture, no keenness of speculative thought, no enlarged benevolence will take its place. Prayer is not merely petition, but petition and importunity are of its essence. Prayer is an exacting and difficult work to nature. It is easy only in full view of the great redemptive sacrifice. III. Disciples thus loyal and prayerful would be one. As believers advance in knowledge of the Son and the Father they will come nearer to unity, and the unity of believers means the conviction of the world. The prayer of the High Priest for all believers in all the day is still lifted: ' That they all may be one; as Thou, Father, art in me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world 'may believe that Thou hast sent me'. This is far more than a mere moral unity; it is, as Westcott says, in some mysterious mode which we cannot distinctly apprehend a vital unity. IV. To the Church of the future will also come the manifestation beyond question of Christ's supernatural peace. This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/expositors-dictionary/ Christ's Appropriations John 15 We shall find some jewel sentences in the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel according to John. The expressions shortly to be quoted may be designated the Appropriations of Christ. He seemed to c aim certain things, ideas, principles, emotions, as peculiarly His own. Christ may be said to be before us now as a great proprietor, talking so clearly, though not too loudly, of the things which belong to Himself. The governing word is 'My'. He goes as it were around the whole circle and places His claiming finger upon all the riches and all the greatnesses, including the comforts, of the whole heaven. I. 'My Father' (ver. 8). What a personal appropriation, what a claim to the whole fatherhood of God! Has this any natural similitude? Each little playing child on the roadside might say, 'My sun,' because the sun is so big and so impartial. I have seen the sun kissing a weed. Jesus said that God poured out His rain upon the just and the unjust, and His sunshine upon those who were far from Him. So He is Christ's Father, that He may be our Father. II. 'My commandments' (ver. 10). That is a different tone. We never thought of commandments in connection with Jesus Christ. But when we really look into the whole matter we find that Jesus Christ spake more commandments than ten. We misinterpret the Christ; we think that He dealt only in benedictions and comforting assurances; we do not sufficiently realise that Jesus Christ really delivered the ten commandments with additions. This Man is not other than a King. He says, My kingdom, The kingdom of God, The kingdom of heaven; and 'kingdom' means order, law, unity, responsibility. Who ever thinks of the Church as a kingdom, a government, having a King, a throne, a law? Yet that is the right conception of the Christian idea III. 'My joy' (ver. 11). Why, He looks so sad! It is only the sad man that can be really happy; the lightsome, frivolous creature, all froth, never knew what happiness was. cannot know. Effervescence grows nothing. He looks so sad. That is because He is so loving, because He has such a quick and complete apprehension of all the conditions under which man lives. Look how He looks. He pities plenteousness more than He pities poverty; He loves humility, He hates pride. To enter into Christ's joy is the great purpose of the ministry of the Holy Ghost in the heart. There is nothing superficial in the joy of Christ; it is as a spring that comes up out of the rocks, a tonic handed to us from the fountain of blessedness. IV. 'My name' (ver. 16). 'Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in My name.' That is the way to open the Father's heart; there is no other way. Not to bathe our prayer in the name of Jesus is to forget the true nature of prayer; it is to come with wild cries and ungoverned and undisciplined desires of our own. The Priest's name makes the prayer; we have an High Priest. Priest is a great word in human language; priest is a term filled with noble ideas; we may have perverted and degraded the name, but that is our doing. Man degraded Eden; sin degrades everything. But the word priest, taken out of its history in which it has become impaired and debased, is a great word, and Jesus Christ is not ashamed to wear the title; it becomes Him as a diadem. V. 'My name's sake '(ver. 21). The disciples were to be persecuted for Christ's name's sake, because the persecutors knew not Him that sent the Son of God. But there is another use of the word which is most edifying and most pathetic. 'My name's sake;' in another case He says, 'For My sake'. Here we come upon the supreme motive of spiritual action. If we were doing things for Christ's sake, all things would be under our feet, and we would have to stoop to touch the dignities of earth. We do not realise our privileges, we forget that we are sons of God; it has escaped our memory that we are a royal generation and a nation of priests unto God. Joseph Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol. v. p. 127. References. XV. 1. C. Stanford, The Evening of our Lord's Ministry, p. 133. XV. 1, 2. G. Body, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lv. p. 171. S. H. Fleming, Fifteen Minute Sermons for the People, p. 40. XV. 1-4. C. Bickersteth, The Gospel of Incarnate Love, p. 181. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 1. XV. 1-5. D. Fraser, Metaphors in the Gospels, p. 347. XV. 1-7. Expositor (6th Series), vol. x. p. 369. XV. 1-8. Ibid. vol. vi. p. 405. XV. 2. G. Bellett, Parochial Sermons, p. 110. S. H. Fleming, Fifteen Minute Sermons for the People, p. 44. S. Baring-Gould, Village Preaching for Saints' Days, p. 100. H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. ii. p. 247. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiii. No. 774. Expositor (7th Series), vol. v. p. 4. XV. 3. Ibid. (5th Series), vol. ii. p. 24. XV. 3, 4. J. Keble, Village Sermons on the Baptismal Service, p. 272. XV. 4. Archbishop Temple, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lii. p. 88. F. D. Maurice, Sermons, vol. v. p. 249. H. Arnold Thomas, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lv. p. 328. XV. 4, 5. G. Body, ibid. vol. lv. p. 134. XV. 4-7. Ibid. vol. lv. p. 179. Nothing or Everything John 15:5 * ; Phi 4:13 * Both these passages deal with the same theme. The one gives us the pregnant words of the Master to His disciples, the other the words of a great and abundantly useful disciple and apostle concerning his Master. The one in a negative form, the other in a positive, gives us the secret of the Christian's power. The one tells us that, apart from a certain experience, nothing is possible to us. The other, that in that experience there has been discovered and proved the fact that all things can be done. I. We can do a great many things apart from Christ and that vital union with Him of which this chapter treats; indeed we could do some things, perhaps, better and more easily apart from this condition than if we fulfilled it. But if we are to keep strictly to the word of the Lord, we are compelled to say of all the things that we could do thus, 'they are nothing'. For example, I suppose it is possible for us to achieve what is generally recognised as success in life apart from Christ. A man might even make a large fortune, and, in certain circumstances, it would be easier to make a fortune severed from Christ than united to Him. And in the same way, men might make a great reputation apart from Christ; all the honour which the world has to give it might bring and lay at their feet. And yet we must say, if we are to stick to the text, that under those circumstances fortune and honour and reputation are nothing, and the man who holds them holds nothing. A man might also acquire a vast amount of knowledge apart from Christ. But having in view God's conception of human life and the Divine purpose respecting it, we are led irresistibly to the conclusion that that which he has acquired through years of study, all his store of learning, is nothing. Life has failed of its purpose, it has been lived in vain. That is to say, the purpose of our being here is that we shall be fitted for living with God for ever; and none of the things that I have mentioned can give any of us that fitness. They all fade into nothingness compared with holiness. That is the supreme end of life, and 'without holiness no man shall see the Lord'. II. Coming a little nearer to the heart of things, we shall recognise the truth of these words. Take two of the things on which, perhaps, our hearts are set (1) First the conquest of sin and selfishness. The secret of failure in many cases, where people sincerely strive against selfish and sinful habits, is that they strive by themselves, and as a matter of self-interest. When men can think of Jesus Christ as being a perfectly real person, looking with holy mercy on sinful men, stretching out His hands to help them, taking some of those who were reputed to be the worst to His heart; when they can think of Him as the Friend of sinners, and strive against selfishness for His sake and in the assurance of His knowledge and sympathy, the striving becomes a different thing, more thorough, more hearty, and far more effectual. (2) Take a second Christian ambition to do good. We are here to do good. To exercise a holy influence over those around us, to lead some of them into the new life. It is difficult to see how any one can possess spiritual life in the smallest degree without cherishing this ambition. There is hardly so great a joy on earth, even if there is anything half so precious, as the consciousness that you have' helped men to a better life; just as there is no greater remorse, when the conscience is awakened, than the conviction that you have led others astray. But that great happiness, the happiness of leading people from the darkness into the light, from carelessness and unbelief into a living and earnest faith, is impossible apart from Christ. It is not the clever people, nor people in high station, as such, that exert the greatest influence for good over their fellows, it is the good people, and the good people are those who live in fellowship with Christ. To sum up: there are things which we think we can do apart from Christ. According to His teaching, they amount to nothing. There are other things which we know cannot be done apart from Him. There is nothing that ought to be done, that is worth doing, that cannot by fellowship with Him be accomplished. Charles Brown, Light and Life, p. The Union of Christ and the Believer John 15:5 The vine was a national emblem, like our rose, thistle, or shamrock, or like the lily of France. One of Isaiah's most striking parables was the Parable of the Vineyard. He compared Israel to a vineyard planted by the Lord, protected and cultivated, but which brought forth only wild grapes, and was condemned and destroyed. Now Jesus takes up the old parable to make it a parable of the new covenant with heaven. It was just His way of teaching, and must have reminded the disciples of the days when they walked with Him in Galilee and heard Him endow with spiritual meanings the corn and the mustard seed. And then from the window of that upper room, made sacred for ever by the institution of the Sacrament of the new Church, Jesus shows them this vine planted in the city, and assures them that although Israel has failed, and as a nation must fail, yet the sympathy of God's protecting love for His people holds good. I. The Union of Christ and the Believer. The great thought here is perhaps the deepest thought of all the Christian religion: the most essential truth of the reality of the union of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, with His believers, called Christians. He is the vine and the vine is no good without the branches and we are the branches. The anxious disciples may say, 'We cannot live without Thee'; and He answers, 'But ye shall not live without Me. As the branches of that climbing tree live by the life that springs from its root, so shall you live by My life in you. Ye cannot see the sap that flows from the stem into the branches, neither shall ye see Me with your eyes, but yet shall feel the power of My life. Your union shall be closer than ever; a vital union. But oh, beware! lest you be separated from Me in spirit like that dead branch. Let not the world tear you from Me, for then you would be as that branch that dies.' II. The Branches bear Fruit. The full beauty of this paragraph appears when we realise that the branches are as necessary to the stem as the stem is to the branches. The branches bear fruit, so that from Christ grew the Church. Your faith and life spring from His life, your Divine power to do good comes from Him, and God proves His confidence in us by entrusting to us, wholly and entirely without any reservation, the fulfilment of His purpose on earth. He bids us do the work that Jesus did in the world, aye! and greater work, because Jesus could only do them one at a time in one country. We can do them always, everywhere. Each of us is then the appointed minister of Christ. Thus the parable is complete, for it shows us God planting Christ in the world, and bringing forth from Christ His Church and giving to His Church the Divine life of His Son, and training the Church to do His work; and it shows us ourselves having the Divine life abiding in Christ, enabled to work out God's purposes and to attain, at last, His ends. There cannot be any fruit unless He sends it. John 15:5 During a recent visit to the Benedictine Monastery of Beuron, the German Emperor told the abbot how he had answered Prof. Delitzsch of Berlin, who had endeavoured for an hour to demonstrate that Christ was not Divine. After he had finished, the Emperor said: 'Professor, have you ever said to your students, "I am the vine, you are the branches"?' 'No, your majesty.' 'Do you think that before your time a professor ever said it?' 'No, your majesty.' 'In future, will professors ever address their students in such a way.' 'Assuredly not.' 'Well, professor, because no teacher can or will speak as Christ spoke, I believe that Christ was not merely a man, but the true God.' John 15:5 If He is sought, not as a residuary solace because life has failed, or only as holding the keys of a dim and distant future, but as Himself the Life and eternal life, He will open hidden springs of life in the desert within and the deserts around, that what remains of the three-score years and ten may be moulded into a living form, fair in His eyes and fit for His service Hort. John 15:5 Christ never regarded Himself as a representative exhibition of human triumph. He never said or implied: 'See what I have done; you can do it too'. That is foreign to His whole utterance. What He did say was, 'without Me ye can do nothing'. T. J. Hardy, The Gospel of Pain, p. 183. John 15:5 A Christ not in us is the same thing as a Christ not ours. William Law. References. XV. 5. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vi. No. 345, and vol. xxvii. No. 1625. D. G. Davies, Sermons by Welshmen, p. 236. F. A. Noble, Christian World Pulpit, vol. 1. p. 152, and vol. lv. p. 121. W. L. Alexander, Sermons, p. 25. G. Jackson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lix. p. 59. Expositor, (4th Series), vol. ix. p. 42. Abiding in Christ John 15:5-7 'Abide in Me.' The words proclaim a warning against spiritual vagrancy, against intermittent consecration, against a spasmodic religious life. There are some people who visit Christ. There are others who abide in Him. To the one class religion is a temporary expedient: to the other it is a permanent principle. 'Abide in Me.' What is meant by abiding in Christ? I. To abide in Christ is to maintain our belief in Him. I am to take the claims of Christ: His statements concerning His prerogatives and rights; His teachings concerning God and man, and life and duty; His Gospel concerning sin and forgiveness, and the dynamics of holiness; His warning concerning the direful issues of unrepented wrong; I am to take them and exalt them into the dignity of beliefs, immediate and operative factors in my daily life. It is belief that creates 'abiding'; mere opinion consorts with vagrancy. Opinion is a mental judgment; belief is mental judgment applied. To believe in Christ is the secret of abiding. II. To abide in Christ we must preserve the means of our attachment. There are certain ministries which have been appointed as channels of grace, through which man's fellowship with God may be strengthened and enriched. (1) The ministry of prayer. (2) The ministry of public worship. III. What would be the fruits of 'abiding'? (1) Fullness of living. 'The same beareth much fruit.' When the Divine and the human interpenetrate, the fructifying powers are enormously increased, and the tree of the individual bears all manner of fruits. (2) 'Ask whatsoever ye will, and it shall be done unto you.' 'Whatsoever ye will.' A thoughtless interpretation of that great word has plunged many souls into profound bewilderment and pain. Things have been asked, and they have not been given. What is the explanation? The offer has been seized, but the conditions ignored. What are the conditions? 'If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you.' What shall be the practical outcome of this meditation? Let us begin the 'abiding'. In his Novum Organum Bacon gives utterance to a conviction which shall express the purpose of this concluding appeal: 'The question whether anything can be known is to be settled not by arguing but by trying'. 'Abide in Me.' Try it; try it; and you shall find the issue in fruitful and abundant life. J. H. Jowett, Apostolic Optimism, p. 225. References. XV. 5-8. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 10. XV. 6. Expositor (6th Series), vol. x. p. 445. XV. 7. E. H. Eland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lii. p. 357. J. Keble, Sermons for Easter to Ascension Day, p. 474. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxiv. No. 2002. R. J. Campbell, City Temple Sermons, p. 185. Phillips Brooks, The Mystery of Iniquity, p. 296. Alfred Rowland, The Exchanged Crowns, p. 165. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 41. XV. 8. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlv. No. 2650. XV. 9. Ibid. vol. xxxiii.,No. 1982, and vol. xli. No. 2444. XV. 9-11. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 20. XV. 10. F. C. Spurr, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvii. p. 203. Expositor (6th Series), vol. ix. p. 37. Christian Joy John 15:11 There is something touching in the words 'My joy,' as in the parallel words of the same address 'My peace'. They shed a light upon His Divine life. That joy of which the Saviour spoke was like the echo of the joy of heaven, and He wished it to remain with His disciples. I. Christian Joy is Grateful. Let me indicate two or three elements of this joy which the Saviour willed, as His last boon, to give to His disciples. The first of them shall be that Christian joy is ever grateful. Nothing is more striking, I had almost said more saddening, than to see how the children of the world enjoy themselves in their dissipations, and never once stay to inquire by Whom it is, or for what purpose, that so much happiness is vouchsafed to them; but in the Bible it is ever gratitude which appears as a mark of the Christian character. 'Be ye thankful' 'In everything give thanks.' 'Would you know,' says William Law, the author of The Serious Call, ' who is the greatest saint? It is not he who prays most or fasts most; not he who gives most alms or is most eminent for temperance, chastity, or justice. He it is who is always thankful to God, who wills everything that God willeth, who receives everything as an instance of God's goodness, and has a heart always to praise God for it.' II. Christian Joy is Diffusive. Again, Christian joy sanctified joy is and must ever be diffusive. The Saviour Himself would not keep His joy to Himself. 'That My joy,' He says,' might remain in you.' The Christian character is like the candle that sheds light around it even though it be wasted in the shedding. III. Christian Joy is Solemnising. Once again, Christian sanctified joy is a solemnising thing. We are apt to think of joy as if it were something to be used in mere wanton merriment, but in truth as there is nothing to the devout soul more humbling than success, so there is nothing more solemnising than joy. 'Take my word,' says St Augustine, 'true joy is a serious matter.' It is serious because of its contrast with the distress of the many thousands of people who are God's children as surely as we are. And joy, Christian joy, is serious too, because the root of it is submission to the holy will of God. We receive at His hands what we call good; shall we not also receive what we call evil? After all, He who knows best will give the best And the joy is serious, I think, because of its proximity to that sorrow which, like joy itself, perhaps even more than joy itself, is an abiding feature of human life. But in the sorrows and bereavements of life we are not as those who have no hope. And ever for the Christian soul there springs up light in the darkness. His joy is eternal, as Christ Himself is eternal. It transcends even the sorrow of the grave. The Joy of Christ John 15:11 I. Abiding in Christ gives us His joy for ours. II. His joy in us abides. III. His abiding joy grows in us. A. Maclaren. References. XV. 11. J. Clifford, The Secret of Jesus, p. 133. Newman Smyth, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvi. p. 134. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. li. No. 2935. H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. ii. p. 280. J. T. Stannard, The Divine Humanity, p. 72. G. Body, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lv. p. 200. Expositor (6th Series), vol. i. p. 193; ibid. vol. iv. p. 8. The Great Love of Christ John 15:12 Let us consider Jesus Christ as the perfect example of human love. I. The love of Christ is shown in His perfect Self-forgetfulness. (1) Love to men made Him forget His own bodily necessities. (2) Love made Him forget His own sorrows. (3) Love made Him forget His own agonies. II. The love of Christ is shown in His perfect lowliness. III. The love of Christ 'is shown in His long-suffering bearing of men's offences against His love. IV. Christ's love is shown in His persistent efforts to raise and save the worst. A. Maclaren. References. XV. 12. Bishop King, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvii. p. 69. Expositor (4th Series), vol. x. p. 48; ibid. (6th Series), vol. ix. p. 227 XV. 12, 13. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 28. XV. 12-14.__ R. W. Church, Village Sermons, p. 85. John 15:13 Compare Landor's remarks on Byron. 'He could comprehend nothing heroic, nothing disinterested. Shelley, at the gates of Pisa, threw himself between him and the dragoon, whose sword in his indignation was lifted and about to strike. Byron told a common, some time afterwards, that he could not conceive how any man living should act so. "Do you know, he might have been killed! and there was every appearance that he would be!" The answer was, "Between you and Shelley there is but little similarity, and perhaps but little sympathy; yet what Shelley did then, he would do again, and always. There is not a human creature, not even the most hostile, that he would hesitate to protect from injury at the imminent hazard of life." "I cannot understand it," cried Byron. "A man to run on a naked sword for another!"' John 15:13 There are a hundred thousand Malays in Perak, and some more in other parts of the Peninsula; and the white man whose interest in the race is strong enough, may not only win confidence but the devotion that is ready to give life itself in the cause of friendship. The Scripture says, 'There is no greater thing than this'; and in the end of the nineteenth century that is a form of friendship all too rare. Fortunately this is a thing you cannot buy, but to gain it is worth some effort. F. A. Swettenham, Malay Sketches, chap. 1. References. XV. 13. W. B. Barton, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lii. p. 307. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xix. No. 1128, and vol. lii. No. 2986. Expositor (4th Series), vol. x. p. 134. Friendship with God John 15:13-15 I. Let us think of the significance of this word friendship as describing the central fact of the religious life. We are more accustomed to use the word fatherhood as describing the relation between God and man, and the ideas connoted by that word are large and precious. Yet fatherhood carries with it some ideas which gradually fade out as the spiritual relation becomes more perfect. The idea of authority and submission are suggested by it. The father naturally and rightfully commands, and the child obeys. The relation may not be servile, but it is one of recognised inequality. It is this to which Jesus refers when He says: 'No longer do I call you servants; for the servant knoweth not what his master doeth: but I have called you friends'. How often is it necessary for the wisest parents to adopt courses of conduct which their children cannot fully understand! But the right relation between parents and children always steadily and rapidly progresses toward the mutuality of friendship, and is completed and perfected in friendship. The crown of love is a genuine friendship. The essence of the Christian revelation is the friendship of God for men and the infinite desire on the part of God for the friendship of men. II. If this is the whole of the religious life to know God as our friend and the friend of all men and to enter into that mutual friendship with which He evermore seeks to bless us then other things will surely follow. We cannot be friends with Him who is the friend of all, unless we are friends with all. 'To come into friendship with God,' says Prof. King, 'is really to share His life: but the very life of God is love, self-giving, pouring Himself out into like loving relations to all men. The Second Commandment thus inevitably grows out of the first. A deepening friendship with God, therefore, includes right relations with men: the religious life is ethical in its very nature and from the start. And thus, once more, it is seen to be impossible to come into right personal relation to God, and not at the same time to come into right relation to all moral beings.' No friendship can be of any great value to us unless it is a mutual friendship. Washington Gladden, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxi. p. 278. Jesus Our Example: In Friendship John 15:13-15 What sacred thoughts are bound up in that word 'friendship'! Friendship is one of the great powers which God has given us to meet the storms of life, to stimulate us to effort in the path of duty. And yet, friendship often has its dangers. I. Let us look at some of the ways in which friendship is helpful, see how they are illustrated in our blessed Lord's life, and then examine how far they may be found in our own friendships. (1) And first the sympathy of friendship: how sweet it is! what a marvellous power, enabling men to face the difficulties and to endure the trials of life. (2) And then there is not only sympathy, but the encouragement of friendship. (3) Then the stimulating power of friendship, of fellowship in thought and work! II. Then there is another side of life the sorrows and difficulties of life in which friendship helps to comfort and to console us. (1) In the hour of bereavement, when all life seems dark, when our affections are bleeding from the wounds they have received, how great is the comfort of the friend, who says but little, but shows by the pressure of the hand, by the tone of the voice, by the look of the eye, that he realises our sorrow and suffers with us. We find something like this in our Lord's life when they came and told Him and His Apostles of the death of John the Baptist, then our Lord shows His sympathy with their sorrow and says, 'Come ye apart into a desert place and rest awhile'. (2) Again, in matters of difficulty, how often we need advice! and whose advice are we so likely to seek as the advice of a good friend? (3) Again there are times in friendship when we not only have to give advice which is unpalatable, but when we have even to rebuke. When our Lord helped Peter as he was sinking beneath the waves, when He calmed the storm at His Apostle's prayer He rebuked them. III. But what is the power on which all friendship is based? love! that Divine power which is the salvation of society, of the world; that power which holds society together in its lawful relationships; and one of these relationships is friendship unselfish love, self-sacrificing love; as our Lord said, 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend'. A. G. Mortimer, Lenten Preaching, p. 130. References. XV. 14. W. J. Hills, Sermons and Addresses, p. 55. R. W. Church, Village Sermons (2nd Series), p. 110. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxvi. No. 1552. The Friends of Christ John 15:14-15 Can Christ have friends? Is he not lifted so absolutely above us as to make all talk of friendship impossible? And the question brings us face to face with the whole difficulty of the conditions of our Lord's life on earth. I. Was He a real man, as well as God? Had He a man's heart not only a man's sympathy, but a man's need of sympathy; did He have friendship and value it, and return it as we do? Look at three points only. (1) His real growth in wisdom. How keen we have often been to explain away all the Bible language which speaks of Him as acquiring knowledge by His use of human faculties 'coming to know this,' 'asking this,' 'looking round in the press' how unreal it all is if it was only a kind of drama he was acting! (2) And so again with the Temptation. Make Him a real man and you have a fight going on before your eyes which should hearten the most depressed man or woman in their most besetting temptation. (3) Consider His need of sympathy. Surely there is only one possible answer to our first question. Christ was a real man as well as God; it is a really human life we are watching: He was a real boy, a real young working man, a real son to His mother, a real friend to His friends. II. Then is He the same today? And in answer we hear the dear saying which has cheered thousands down the ages through weeks of suffering and years of temptation, 'Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and for ever'. (1) Take first His work in our own souls. He wants us to enter into what He is doing. (2) He would like to make us friends in His plans for the advance of His kingdom. (3) Christ has today as profound a pity for suffering as He ever had. III. What difference does it make to our religious lite today? What has all this to say to us? We are to aim at growing more into sympathy with Jesus Christ. We are to try and enter into the mind of Christ on different points. (1) What does He think of sin? He hates it, He loathes it as something horrible, unnatural, offensive to God; and yet how familiar we get with it, by what soft names we call it; let us try to gain our Friend's point of view of sin. (2) We must try to gain our Friend's passion for holiness. (3) Let us aim at true sympathy with Jesus Christ by sharing His cross. (4) Let us show that we are not ashamed to follow a crucified Saviour. Bishop Winnington-Ingram, Christ and His Friends, p. 1. References. XV. 14, 15. G. W. Brameld, Practical Sermons, p. 195. XV. 14-17. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 38. The Friends of Christ John 15:15 I. Without Christ men are slaves. II. Christ makes us friends instead of slaves. III. Christ's friends are also His slaves. Love makes us belong to Him. Love yields a more implicit obedience than aught besides. IV. Christ's slaves are free from all other bondage. A. Maclaren. References. XV. 15. Lyman Abbott, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvi. p. 125. W. L. Alexander, Sermons, p. 102. C. Bradley, The Christian Life, p. 223. The Purpose of Friendship with Christ John 15:16 I. We have here the foundation of the friendship between Christ and His people. He begins the Friendship. 'We love Him because He first loved us.' II. The purpose of this friendship. The great end of Christianity is to make us fruitful. III. The great gift by which the purpose of the Friendship is secured. The friends of Christ are fitted to bring forth fruit because they have the privilege of prayer. A. Maclaren. John 15:16 In the mystery of that eternal marriage by which Jesus and we become as one soul, who made the first advances? Who took the first steps? Who was always constant in His longing, I might almost say in His wooing? Who never grew weary of loving with an infinite delicacy and also with an infinite patience? Who, but Jesus Christ, our Master and Lord? It was not we who chose Him, but He Himself chose us. He preserved us, followed us on the paths where our hearts often strayed; His hand was ever ready where there was a precipice, or where death was lurking. To what can we compare this excess of love? What possible image can we form of this generosity. Would the King who sought a wife among the daughters of the poor, attain to the summit-height of this truth? Lettres de l'Abbé Perreyve (edition of 1903), pp. 245, 246. John 15:16 The Christian prays 'in the name of Jesus'. The authority of Jesus moves him to prayer.... Three things are comprised in this. In the first place, the object of prayer is determined. I pray for what communion with Jesus brings ma It brings me faith and love. That is really the chief object of prayer.... Prayer in the name of Jesus renders intelligible to us, secondly, that we should pray together and work together for each other. Christ worked for His Church; so he who lives in communion with Him prays for the Church of Jesus Christ, for all the individuals who belong or should belong to it Here, too, faith and love are the real object of His prayer. Thirdly, prayer in Jesus' name assures us that our prayer is heard. Christ wills that faith and love exist, and Christ is almighty. R. Seeberg, Fundamental Truths of the Christian Religion, pp. 296-298. References. XV. 16. J. E. Page, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xvii. p. 466. W. H. Evans, Sermons for the Church's Year, p. 155. J. Martineau, Endeavours After the Christian Life, p. 34. Bishop E. King, The Love and Wisdom of God, p. 230. XV. 18-20. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 49. John 15:19 Compare the closing words of Dante's fourth epistle to Cino da Pistoia: 'I entreat thee, dearest brother, to exercise patience against the darts of Nemesis. Read, I pray thee, the remedies for fortuitous circumstances that are provided us as by a father to his sons by that most famous of philosophers, Seneca; and of a truth, let not that slip from your memory, "If ye were of the world, the world would love his own".' References. XV. 20. Expositor (7th Series), vol. vi. p. 286. XV. 21-25. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 58. John 15:22 In the eighth circle of the Inferno, Dante sees Caiaphas and the rest of the Sanhedrim being trampled on by hypocrites (23:109 f.). 'In every age since the crucifixion the hypocrites of the Christian religion have trampled in contempt on Caiaphas and his companions in this crime, not knowing that they themselves are partakers of the self-same spirit... That those arch-hypocrites have no mantles may mean that as they crucified Christ naked, in like nakedness they are themselves crucified; and perhaps also it has some reference to our Lord's own words on the eve of His death: "If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin; but now they have no cloak for their sin." Probably it is this which constitutes the special heinousness of the hypocrisy of Caiaphas and his accomplices it was hypocrisy naked and undisguised. Christ seems to indicate in more places than one that His enemies knew the justice of His claims, and their special guilt was that they had deliberately sinned against this knowledge.' J. S. Carroll, Exiles of Eternity, pp. 837, 338. References. XV. 22. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. iv. No. 194. J. Keble, Sermons for the Sundays After Trinity, p. 385. XV. 25. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. ii. No. 89. The Testimony of His Enemies John 15:25 I want to look at Jesus Christ, not through His friends' eyes, but through the eyes of enemies and ill-wishers. I want to ask what qualities arrested them, no matter how they were travestied or torn, as they saw the deeds, or listened to the words, of this perplexing personage from Galilee. I. Well, the first thing the enemies bear witnesses to is the reality and courage of His comradeship They looked on Jesus as an enemy, and they have taught the world He was a brother. 'He is the friend of publicans and sinners' that was the charge which they were always hurling. II. Then once again we gather from His enemies that He impressed them as a genial man. For you remember another charge they hurled at Him, 'Behold a gluttonous man, and a winebibber'. Any charge more villainously false it would be impossible for malice to conceive. Probably they only half-believed it, although they used it in their campaign of calumny. Yet am I thankful it has been preserved, and preserved, too, by the lips of Christ Himself, for through the vileness of it we discern a truth that is far too precious to let die. It is this that the enemies have borne their witness to that Jesus was not ascetic and austere. He was no Baptist in his robe of hair shunning the pleasant intercourse of men. He was genial. He loved a kindly company. He sat and was happy at the social board. He moved among them not with a face of gloom. He moved among them with a face of gladness. The bitterest foe would never have said that about Isaiah or about Jeremiah. The vilest slanderer would have been laughed at had he ventured so to speak of John the Baptist. And the very fact that men so spake of Jesus, and found an audience who would listen to them, is a witness of unequalled value to His gladness and His geniality. III. Once more, we have the testimony of His enemies to the reality of His power in working miracles. To me there is nothing more significant than that in the whole record of the Gospel. There is a deal of talk on the miracles today. There are many to whom the miracles are stumbling-blocks. There is something lawless in these displays of power to many who have been trained as we have been. Now I am not going to-night into that subject. It is too great to be treated by the way; but I want to suggest to you two considerations which seem to me of singular importance. (1) The first is that those who knew Christ best never express amazement at a miracle. It is always the people who are amazed at miracles, never any of the twelve disciples. (2) Christ's enemies did not deny His miracles. They never said, 'He does not cast out devils'. They said, 'He casteth out devils by Beelzebub'. Now, would not they have denied them if they could? Were not the miracles a mighty trumpet-blast? Cannot you image how the news would spread, and be the talk beside a hundred hearths? And yet these miracles that drew the crowd, and awed the reckless, and thrilled a thousand hearts, these never once in the whole Gospel-story were denied by the bitterest enemy of Christ. He casteth out devils by Beelzebub. They had to admit, you see, the casting out. It would have been their triumph to dispute it. There is not a trace they ever tried to do so. And what I say is, that that bitter taunt, which blights the motive yet cannot touch the fact, is one of the strongest of all the lesser arguments that the miracles of Jesus Christ were real. IV. Then once again I gather from His enemies something of the intensity of Christ. They went to see Him, and they went to listen to Him, and they said, 'He hath a devil, and is mad'. There are two charges the enthusiast has to bear. Sometimes he is drunk, and sometimes mad. On the day of Pentecost it was the one. With Paul as he stood before Festus it was the other. And so when the enemies of Christ stood by, and smiled and shrugged, and said, 'The man is mad,' it only tells us what a fire was burning, and what an intensity was glowing there. V. His enemies witness to His trust in God. That was the last taunt they flung at Him. It was the bitterest, and it was the truest. 'He trusted in God,' they cried when He was crucified. G. H. Morrison, The Return of the Angels, p. 245. References. XV. 26. Bishop Winnington-Ingram, Under the Dome, p. 172. E. W. Attwood, Sermons for Clergy and Laity, p. 192. R. Allen, The Words of Christ, p. 12. E. Bayley, Sermons on the Work and Person of the Holy Spirit, pp. 139, 201, 241. S. Baring-Gould, Village Preaching for a Year (2nd Series), vol. i. p. 261. XV. 26, 27. J. J. Blunt, Plain Sermons (2nd Series), p. 290. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 67. J. Stuart Holden, The Pre-Eminent Lord, p. 205. Expositor (6th Series), vol. iv. p. 20. The Head Corner-stone John 15:26-27 The significance of the choice of this passage from St. John as the Gospel for this day can hardly be mistaken. The Collect speaks of God having built His Church upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, 'Jesus Christ Himself being the head corner-stone'; and in our text our Lord distinctly assures us that it is the work of the Spirit of Truth to testify of Him. Christianity centres in a Person Jesus Christ Himself. We need on this day to think of these great doctrinal questions. I. Our Lord's Testimony to the Holy Ghost. He speaks of Him as a Person. He is 'the Comforter' Who is to come; He is One 'sent' and 'proceeding'; He is One Whose office it is to 'testify'. These are not words that can be used of a mere influence or inward feeling. So to interpret them is to contradict common sense, and to strain the meaning of plain language. Reason and fairness require us to understand that it is a personal Being Who is here mentioned, even He Whom we are justly taught to adore as the Third Person in the blessed Trinity. Again, our Lord speaks of the Holy Ghost as One Whom He 'will send from the Father,' and One 'Who proceedeth from the Father'. These are deep sayings, no doubt, so deep that we have no line to fathom them. The mere fact that for centuries the Eastern and Western Churches of Christendom have been divided about their meaning should teach us to handle them with modesty and reverence. One thing, at all events, is very clear and plain. There is a close and intimate connection between the Spirit, the Father, and the Son. Why the Holy Ghost should be said to be sent by the Son, and to proceed from the Father, in this verse, we cannot tell. But we may quietly repose our minds in the thought expressed in the Athanasian Creed that 'in this Trinity none is afore or after other: none is greater or less than another'. 'Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Ghost.' Above all, we may rest in the comfortable truth that in the salvation of our souls all three Persons in the Trinity equally co-operate. It was God in Trinity Who said, 'Let Us create,' and it is God in Trinity Who says, 'Let Us save'. II. The Witness of the Apostles. Just as the Holy Ghost was to testify of Christ, so also the Apostles were to 'bear witness,' and as we think of the lives of St. Simon and St. Jude we see how thoroughly they fulfilled their work. It is St. Jude who, in his impressive Epistle, bids us contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints, and let us remember that the position of the Apostles is that which, in a certain sense, every true Christian must fill as long as the world stands. We must all be witnesses for Christ We must not be ashamed to stand up for Christ's cause, to speak out for Christ, and to 'contend earnestly' for the truth of Christ's Gospel. We must boldly confess our Master on every opportunity. So doing, we shall walk in the steps of the Apostles; so doing we shall be 'joined together in unity of spirit by their doctrine,' and become, by God's good grace, 'an holy temple, acceptable unto' Him. References. XV. 27. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlvii. No. 2709. Bishop Westcott, Disciplined Life, No. 9; ibid. The Incarnation and Common Life, p. 209. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 111; ibid. (6th Series), vol. i. p. 391. XVI. 1. E. M. Geldart, Faith and Freedom, p. 71. XVI. 1-6. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 78. XVI. 2. E. J. Boyce, Parochial Sermons, p. 157. XVI. 5. S. Baring-Gould, Village Preaching for a Year (2nd Series), vol. i. p. 233. R. J. Campbell, Sermons Addressed to Individuals, p. 5. XVI. 6. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ix. p. 136. Why Christ Must Depart John 16:7 I. The first thing to strike one is the way Jesus took to break the news. It was characteristic. His sayings and doings always came about in the most natural way. Even His profoundest statements of doctrine were invariably apropos of some often trivial circumstance happening in the day's round. So now He did not suddenly deliver Himself of the doctrine of the Ascension. It leaked out, as it were, in the ordinary course of things. II. Notice His reasons for going away. Why did Jesus go away. (1) The first reason is one of His own stating. 'I go away to prepare a place for you.' And the very naming of this is a proof of Christ's considerateness. The burning question with every man who thought about his life in those days was Whither is this life leading? The present, alas! was dim and inscrutable enough, but the future was a fearful and unsolved mystery. So Christ put that right before He went away. But that does not exhaust the matter. Consider the alternative. If Christ had not gone away, what then? We should not either. (2) Another reason why He went away was to be very near. It seems a paradox, but He went away really in order to be near. The visible Incarnation must of necessity be brief. Only a small circle could enjoy His actual presence, but a kingdom like Christianity needed a risen Lord. (3) Another reason why He went away although this is also a paradox was that we might see Him better. When a friend is with us we do not really see him so well as when he is away. We only see points, details. Christ is the most gigantic figure of history. To take in His full proportions one must be both near and far away. The same is true of all greatness. (4) He went away that we might walk by faith. The strongest temptation to every man is to guide himself by what he can see, and feel, and handle. (5) But the great reason has yet to be mentioned. He went away that the Comforter might come. And yet Christ did not go away that the Spirit might take His place. Christ is with us Himself, He is with us and yet He is not with us, that is, He is with us by His Spirit. The Spirit does not reveal the Spirit. He speaks not of Himself, He reveals Christ. III. Finally, if all this was expedient for us, this strange relation of Jesus to His people ought to have a startling influence upon our life. These three great practical effects at least are obvious. (1) Christ ought to be as near to us as if He were still here. (2) Then consider what an incentive to honest faithfulness this is. Christ was sure of us: He felt the world was safe in our hands. He was away, but we would be Christs to it; the Light of the world was gone, but He would light a thousand lights, and leave each of us as one to illuminate one corner of its gloom. (3) lastly, He has only gone for a little while. So we wait till He come again we wait till it is expedient for Him to come back. Henry Drummond, The Ideal Life, p. 61. The Expediency of Christ's Departure John 16:7 The Master was gone; a cloud had received Him out of their sight. We might quite have expected that the disciples would have returned with hearts overwhelmed with sorrow. But no. In the twenty-fourth chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke, and in the fifty-second verse, we read that 'They returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the Temple, praising and blessing God'. This was a magnificent triumph of faith. They had just seen the Master enter the cloud, but they believed that, beyond that cloud, that ascending body was greeted by ten thousand times ten thousand angels, and conducted up to the very central Throne of the Universe. And further, they had this assurance, that this same Jesus was soon to come back again. I think you will be able to admire this triumph of faith on the part of the disciples all the more when you realise how difficult it is for ourselves to believe that it is expedient for us that Jesus Christ should have gone away. We sometimes imagine what a glorious thing it would have been to have had the continued bodily presence of our Lord here on earth! We can imagine, if we would allow imagination to run riot, not only what a joy, but also what a power in our work the continued presence of Christ would be! And yet we can see that it would never have done. I. We can see, that Jesus Christ being truly man, as far as His humanity was concerned, could only inhabit one certain place; and therefore it would have been necessary, if we wanted to have communion with Him, to travel to His residence; if He had been in Jerusalem or upon the Mount of Olives, to have flocked thither. By His ascension into heaven Jesus Christ has terminated the carnal and visible, and he has established the spiritual and the true. II. It is expedient for us because it lifts our thoughts up above earth and earthly things. If Christ is risen, then we, too, must rise and set our affections upon the things above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God. Lay hold of this great truth, that whereas the Incarnation shows you that Jesus Christ cares if or all earthly things, yet at the same time the Ascension lifts you up into a higher and purer life. You must see that Christ comes by His Incarnation to bless and sanctify our earthly life, but He wants to unite us to His Father above that we may be living in communion with our God in heaven. E. A. Stuart, The Communion of the Holy Ghost and other Sermons, vol. x. p. 33. References. XVI. 7. H. Alford, Easter-tide Sermons, p. 92. J. Keble, Sermons for Easter to Ascension Day, p. 406. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. x. No. 674, and vol. xxviii. No. 1662. H. M. Butler, Harrow School Sermons, p. 50. W. F. Shaw, Sermon Sketches for the Christian Year, p. 63. R. W. Hiley, A Year's Sermons, vol. i. p. 242. T. Whitelaw, Preacher's Magazine, vol. v. p. 228. R. W. Church, Village Sermons (2nd Series), p. 162. H. P. Liddon, Sermons on Some Words of Christ, p. 325. Bishop Boyd-Carpenter, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lix. p. 345. H. P. Liddon, University Sermons, p. 288. Archbishop Plunket, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvi. p. 24. W. H. Evans, Sermons for the Church's Year, p. 130. J. C. Hare, The Mission of the Comforter, p. 1. C. O. Eld ridge, Preacher's Magazine, vol. iv. p. 223. T. F. Crosse, Sermons (2nd Series), p. 82. H. E. Manning, Sin and its Consequences, p. 3. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in a Religious House, vol. i. p. 94. A. M. Fairbairn, Christian World Pulpit, 'vol. lxi. p. 330. John Kelman, Ephemera Eternitatis, p. 138. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 348; ibid. (7th Series), vol. v. p. 500. XVI. 7, 8. W. H. Green, The Record, vol. xxvii. p. 564. J. J. Blunt, Plain Sermons (2nd Series), p. 266. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 89. XVI. 7-9. F. W. Farrar, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlv. p. 392. The Holy Spirit Reproving the World John 16:8 'When He is come, He will reprove.' When He, that is, who is the Spirit of Truth is come, He will reprove or convict. That He who is to reprove is the Spirit of Truth, and that He is to reprove by conviction, suggests at once that it is of no mere arbitrary exercise of authority of which I desire to speak, and of no mere blind obedience, but rather of attention to reasonable reproof, and of the need of corrective discipline. I. If I am right in my inference, there is at the present time in the world both a too great unwillingness to be corrected, and also a too great unwillingness to correct. This is perhaps partly due to the impatience which is a natural result of the hurrying age in which we live. The rise of the great commercial world in the present century has spread a spirit of competition over us all. It is indeed a new and marvellous manifestation of the secret forces which an Almighty Father has prepared to promote the brotherhood of man, but, like all other forces in the hand of man, it may be used injuriously. A desire for quick results, and rapid exchange, leads us naturally to impatience under correction, and tempts us to give up too quickly some of those higher treasures, the excellence of which time and experience would show. We cut down the vine and plant another instead of pruning it Another and wider-reaching cause of our dislike of reproof or corrective discipline will be found in the prominence of pleasure. II. God in Christ, by the power of the Divine nature, wrought out in His manhood all that was necessary to reconcile God to man; and God in Christ, through the life-giving Humanity, is working out in man's nature all that is necessary to reconcile man to God. Thus the satisfaction and the justice and holiness of God is a reality; but in both we pass beyond the limits of mere human reasoning, and must be content to acknowledge with the Apostle, 'O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out!' In part our difficulties in recent years have arisen from the attempt to retain the old words of the Christian faith, but to explain them by a rationalistic meaning. We must remember that the Christian faith implies not only an object of belief but an act of believing; and both are a gift from God. In part also we have brought difficulties upon ourselves by not considering the whole counsel of God as He has made it known to us, but by choosing what appears to be a simple and easier way. Thus the doctrine of the Atonement has been considered apart from the mysteries of the Incarnation and the Church, and so the effect of God's redeeming love upon man, and of man's share in his reconciliation with God, have been unduly forgotten, till at last that one mysterious act which made man's reconciliation possible is regarded as derogatory of man's greatness and possible perfection. III. 'Though He were yet a Son, learned He obedience by the things which He suffered.' Nay more, 'I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me'. If we are to be conformed to His likeness, there must be self-mastery, self-denial, and the spirit of self-sacrificing love. Of the nine fruits of the Spirit, the first and the last are ἀγάπη and ἐγκράτεια . The world has become entangled by the abundance of the good things which it possesses. The work that we ask of you in your day is to go forth to show men by your words and by your example wherein man's truer happiness lies to show men, as well as teach men that it is more blessed to give than to possess that selfishness is the ruin of self; that the full happiness of each is to be found in the happiness of all; that 'if one member is suffering, all in their measure must suffer with it'; that mankind is a brotherhood: nay more, that mankind is intended to be one body, even the Body of Christ, and every one of us members in particular. Bishop Edward King, The Love and Wisdom of God, p. 83. The Moral Witness of the Church John 16:8 Concerning righteousness it is to that great word that we pass on today. The office of the Holy Spirit was to convict the world concerning righteousness. No doubt some historical significance attaches to the phrase. Jesus Christ had come to a nation which had had distinct thoughts about righteousness, which had aimed at righteousness, which had found it in the sphere of law and ceremonial; and He had told the Jew that his righteousness was a dead thing because it lacked heart and impulse and motive and sincerity. The Pharisees, we must constantly remind ourselves, were the religious and respectable element in the nation, its orthodox teachers, its chosen representatives of piety and devotion. And Jesus called them 'whited sepulchres'; 'God knoweth your hearts,' He cried in that flame of indignation which the sight of the Pharisees seemed always to quicken in Him; and solemnly He warned His own disciples that unless their righteousness exceeded the righteousness which they saw about them they would never enter the Kingdom of God. The Pharisee had failed, had drawn upon himself the fiery rebuke of Christ, because he had a false ideal of righteousness from the first. Why was he righteous? Why did he aim at righteousness? Partly, it may be, from blind obedience to a law about which he had never thought in a large, human way, but still more out of regard for appearances. Like many church-people and church-goers today, he cared for a certain reputation. He fasted, he prayed, he gave alms that he might be seen of men. He was contented with the shows and shams and unrealities of things. He lived for the world's opinion, and apart from the world's opinion righteousness would have had no charm, no meaning, no fascination for him. I. And Jesus stands there, first in the shadow of the cross and then in the glory of the Risen and Ascended Life, to tell us that righteousness is wholly independent of the opinion of the world, that it has a Divine beauty and eternal vitality of its own, that righteousness, in a word, is life. II. When we lift our eyes and watch Him go to the Father and see Him no more, and yet know in our hearts that He is still here when we think of what once a human life has been in power and loveliness, set like a star for our feet to follow, though we cross the world to reach it can we wonder if He calls us to something more than compromise and mediocrity? Like the world, we shall be convicted concerning righteousness if we have nothing better than the world's thoughts and desires. Righteousness in the Gospel is compared with salt and fire; and salt stings and fire burns you cannot hope to be always pleasant and popular if you mean to be a follower of Christ The great prophets of Israel, who dreamed of Christ but knew Him not, were, I should imagine, the most unpopular men who ever lived. They had no smooth and easy path in their antagonism to the world; and yet it was they who kept alive and handed on to us the torch of faith. And it is such today that we greatly need among us men and women who can be strong and independent; who can show moral vitality and enthusiasm and imagination; who can bring to the service of Church and State principle and high-mindedness; who will not let their life, their one chance of living, be lost in 'eddies of purposeless dust,' or drift, aimless and meaningless, along the stream of time. III. And this righteousness, whether we think of it or not, is here in our midst, once and for all, a great and shining ideal, since He passed our way with His pitiful eyes and radiant face. We cannot escape it; we cannot deny it It is here, for our undying inspiration or our perennial rebuke. It is here, 'a glory like one pearl; No larger, though the goal of all the Saints'. This is what a Man has been; this is how a Man has lived and died. And when we set it in contrast with the standards of the world we see the greatness of the moral claim it makes upon us. Righteousness, we shall do well to remember, is in the Greek only another word for justice. Who can question in our social life the need of justice justice, that rare, that half-forgotten virtue? Are we just to those from whom we differ in matters of politics or religion? are we just, above all, to the poor by whom we live and to whom we owe so great an obligation? The clothes you wear they were woven and made by the hands of the poor. The church in which you worship it was the poor that laid its deep foundations and reared its pinnacles. The bread you eat was sown and gathered and harvested and kneaded by the poor. The books and newspapers that you read were printed by the poor. When you go your journeys, it is the nerve and skill and patience of the poor that speed you to your work that drive the express train against the north wind all night, or keep the ship's helm steady in the darkness and the storm. We owe them, therefore, in simple justice, a great debt And I do not see how we can hope to arrive at a really happy and stable social order until justice takes the place of so-called charity in our normal attitude to those who do so much for our happiness and our life. IV. But more, righteousness means also truth truthfulness, honour, integrity, sincerity in speech and action. It means that reality of life and thought which enables a man to win the confidence of others, which enables him to pierce through the shows of the world and see things as they are. V. And in the claim of righteousness I hear also at the present day the call to a greater simplicity of life. In an age of pleasure and luxury, when the growing demands for ease and comfort leave but too little room for the high adventures of faith and heroism, the Church is set as a witness to something divinely simple, austre, disciplined, unworldly the Church, and especially its clergy, and above all its Bishops. 'Be ye not conformed to this world,' was the challenge of St. Paul; are we not conformed to the world if our daily life our dress, and food, and occupations, and habits of living show no traces of the cross, are in practically no respect different from those of men and women who never make our tremendous profession; if the self-discipline and self-devotion which distinguished the old Puritans of our history on the one side and the Tractarians on the other pass like a cloud, and leave no mark in us, their degenerate successors? The Church is the lamp of righteousness that is to shine in the dimness of the world. It is the forge of heroism, the home of Saints, the storehouse of high aspiration and of serious resolve. It is something remote, consecrated, set apart. It bears the oriflamme of a Christ Whose watchwords are those of simplicity and truth, of liberty and justice. He has gone to the Father, and we see Him no more; yet He lives still, and it is in the grace and power of His victorious life that we find, each one of us, the secret of our own righteousness. S. A. Alexander, The Guardian, 18th March, 1910. Conviction of Sin John 16:8 God, when He made man, made man a spirit, but He gave to man a body, a glorious body, to be the obedient servant of his spirit, so that he might work out the Divine will in this material world. But man, preferring the lower to the higher nature, allowed the servant to become the master, and the animal sensibilities to lord it over and to stamp down the Divine in his nature. Alas! again and again we meet with men who say, 'Wherein have we offended?' and therefore the first thing which God has to do is to convince man of sin. Now He seems to me to try and do this by three forces. I. There is, first of all, the force of conscience. But, alas! powerful as is the force of conscience, it was not enough to convict men of sin. (1) Because conscience speaks in a still, small voice. Amid the din and glitter of the world, with all the multitudinous voices of our fellow-men constantly dinning in our ears, the voice of conscience is sometimes unheard. (2) And then, conscience, unless it is regarded, grows weaker and weaker. You want another power than the power of conscience, you want a power that you cannot play with, a power that you cannot change, that you cannot alter, that you cannot drug, you want some power outside yourself. II. Therefore God makes use of a second power to convict men the power of His law. In the third chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, and in the twentieth verse, the Apostle says, 'By the law is the knowledge of sin'. But the law is not sufficient, powerful as is this force, to convict men of sin. (1) Because the law appeals to fear. The law would make men avoid sin not because of its hatefulness in itself, but because of the pains and penalties which this sin will bring. (2) And then, also, by its very nature the law deals with outward acts; it does not deal with the heart. III. We need a third force. 'When He' the Spirit of truth 'is come, He will convince the world of Sin'. How does the Holy Spirit convict of sin? (1) It lifts up Christ. But that is not all. Not even the perfect life of Jesus shown you by the Holy Spirit will convict you of sin. (2) The Holy Spirit goes further; the Holy Spirit shows you the Father's love, shows you Christ upon the cross; it bids you remember that God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. There is no other power which will convince a man of sin. E. A. Stuart, The One Mediator and other Sermons, vol. xi. p. 137. References. XVI. 8. F. W. Macdonald, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvi. p. 120. H. P. Liddon, Sermons on Some Words of Christ, p. 342. E. Bayley, Sermons on the Work and Person of the Holy Spirit, p. 25. Bishop Winnington-Ingram, A Mission of the Spirit, p. 37. XVI. 8, 9. J. C. Hare, The Mission of the Comforter, p. 31. E. Bayley, Sermons on the Work and Person of the Holy Spirit, p. 273. W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, pp. 13, 21. XVI. 8-10. Ibid. p. 207. J. C. Hare, The Mission of the Comforter, p. 73. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. i. p. 414. XVI. 8-11. F. Harper, Preacher's Magazine, vol. iv. p. 225. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxix. No. 1708. J. C. Hare, The Mission of the Comforter, pp. 110, 138. W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, p. 197. Expositor (4th Series), vol. vi. p. 319. John 16:9 All the words, institutions, and judgments of God are levelled against sin, either that it may not be committed, or that it may be abolished. Wesley. References. XVI. 9-11. H. Bushnell, Christ and His Salvation, p. 98. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 99. The Divine Teacher and His Message John 16:12 There seems from one point of view something almost infinitely sad about these words of our Lord. You know that they are among His last words, spoken either in the upper room, or, more probably, on the way to the Garden of Gethsemane. His ministry in the world was over. He had withdrawn from it to the inner circle of His own. And He had not been talking long to them before it became perfectly clear that they were bewildered by His words. Pained and puzzled, partly incredulous, partly uncomprehending. And He had to stop, to keep the burden of His message on His own heart. He could not communicate Himself to them as He had desired to do. When He spoke they did not listen, or they listened without taking in. And the Master had to keep back what He had intended to impart 'I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now'. I. Consider what led up to this saying of our Lord? Significantly enough, the verse comes between the two sections of the chapter which deal with the Holy Spirit. And that had partly puzzled them. What did they want, if I may put their feelings in this way, what did they want with the Comforter? Who could ever be to them what their Master had been? Why should He go away, when they had learned to love Him, and had left all for His sake, and had learned to lean upon Him? He had been their sun and shield, and what should they do when He was gone? How can you or I in our stricken hours understand the necessity of any good being taken away from us? We can see today, of course, that the Christ in spiritual presence with His disciples was far more and more precious than the Christ in bodily presence, but they could not see it then, and probably we should not have seen it if we had been in their place. II. Note the principle contained in these words of our Lord. (a) And first of all there is the sympathetic gauging of the mental and spiritual condition of His pupils. Every true teacher will have that characteristic, and the Divine Teacher has it pre-eminently. (b) We can limit and frustrate the purposes of Christ by our attitude and our condition. The progress of a learner, or one who professes to be a learner, in school or business depends not only on the teacher, it really depends much more on himself. And this is entirely true in the spiritual realm. No teacher, not even the Divine Teacher Himself, can give you more than you are able or willing to receive. III. Observe our Lord's patience with those incapable of receiving His teaching. He can never tell them face to face now the things that He intended to say. He is going away with them unsaid. But He is not going to shut the door of opportunity. The text is followed by 'Howbeit'. In days to come there may be the desire which does not now exist. Then though He is absent, the Spirit will be at hand to bring to memory the things of Christ to take of the things of Christ which they were now unable to receive and show them to them. So our Master is exceedingly gracious and patient. He stands at the door and knocks. 'Has waited long, is waiting still,' as our hymn says. Tarrying for His slow and reluctant disciples, and in infinite grace waiting for their mood of willingness, that He may return and impart His blessing. Charles Brown, God and Man, p. 136. The Persistent Influence of First Ideas John 16:12 Capacity must determine revelation. That is the vital principle enshrined in my text. The food is to be adopted to the system, the doctrine to the years. We neglect that principle at our peril. I. If this is to be the principle of instruction, if we are to recognise the law of reserve in our declaration of truth, if the harder teachings must be kept for the maturer years, it is of infinite importance that the simpler teachings be scrupulously true. Alongside the principle of reserve this second principle must be given an equal place, that nothing must be taught in childhood which will need to be unlearnt in manhood. We cannot exaggerate the intensity of first impressions; they bite deep into the mind and are almost ineffaceable. The first impressions persist through the life. Our teaching must assume the need of subsequent expansion; it must never assume the need of subsequent expulsion. II. Now, of these simple, germinal teachings, the most vitally important are the conceptions of the being and character of God. Where do our children obtain their first ideas of God? Sometimes from a picture. Sometimes from a hymn. III. What, then, shall be our first and elementary teachings about God? What shall be the character of the earliest revelations? (1) They should be brimming with soft and inviting sunshine. (2) When we have taught the little lives what God is, I know of nothing more exceedingly precious than to teach them how to recognise God's touch. We may tell them that in the inner and unseen life of each there is something called thought, and something called feeling, and something called will, and that when the great and unseen God comes near to us He dwells especially round about these three, and that in these three we may recognise His presence and feel His touch. How may we know the touch of God in our thought? Cannot we tell our children that when they engage in the worship of the sanctuary, or when they pray in the privacy of their own home, or when they are walking in the common way, in school or at play, and find a little thought giving place to a larger thought, a self-seeking thought yielding to a brother-seeking thought, it is the touch of the Lord God. How may we know the touch of God in our feeling? When malice changes into goodwill, when envy is transformed into unselfish rejoicing, when irritable-ness becomes a cordial patience, when the waters sweeten, and vulgar passion of any kind is refined into exquisite love, we may know that the great God is at work in the wells of our being, and by all these evidences may we recognise His touch. How may we know the touch of God in our wills? Let this be our beginning. When the sense of weakness yields to the sense of power, and when in the presence of duty "I can't" gives place to "I can," and "I can" ripens into "I will," we may be assured it is the touch of the Lord. J. H. Jowett, Apostolic Optimism, p. 126. References. XVI. 12. Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliii. p. 10. W. C. Wheeler, Sermons and Addresses, p. 172. J. C. Houchin, The Vision of God, p. 49. C. Brown, God and Man, p. 136. S. A. Brooke, Sermons (2nd Series), p. 294. Expositor (4th Series), vol. x. p. 121; ibid. (6th Series), vol. i. p. 467; ibid. vol. vii. p. 93; ibid. vol. viii. p. 24. XVI. 12, 13. Bishop Welldon, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lx. p. 232. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. ii. p. 64. XVI. 12-14. Bishop Wordsworth, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlviii. p. 244. XVI. 12-15. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 110. The Earthly Life of the Holy Ghost John 16:13 I. The coming of the Holy Ghost was no mere isolated event in the history of the kingdom of God; it was a great epoch, the opening of a new era in the life of man, the ushering in of a new dispensation. No operation of the Divine power can ever be determinable in itself. It has in it of necessity the element of continuous duration. (1) Even the primal work of Creation, although pictured for us in poetic language which suggests the idea of completion and conclusion, was not so much a finished work as an initial impulse, of which the creative energy should extend and operate through all the coming ages, ever renewing the face of earth, and perpetuating the life of the creatures which find on it their dwelling-place from generation to generation. (2) So it was also in the Incarnation of the Son of God. The union of the two natures in His Divine Person was not a mere fact in history. It was the initiation of a new purpose of love, by which not only humanity itself, but its individual members, should be brought into closer union with the living God. (3) And so it is with the coming of the Holy Ghost. He did not come as one that would come and go. He came to stay, to abide with us for ever. Although never within sight, He is never out of call. He came not to die for us, but to live with us. He was to be the interpreter of the Divine truth. II. The history of the Church of Christ has furnished a continuous illustration of the fulfilment of Christ's promise. We see it in the gradual growth and development of Christian doctrines and of Christian worship. From age to age we can hardly fail to trace in the development of Christian faith and Christian life the overruling guidance of the Holy Ghost, directing the minds of men to some particular aspect of the truth, according as His infinite wisdom and love discerned a convenient season or foresaw some coming; need. III. It may be well for us to consider one or two directions in which the Church of Christ at the present time, and we its makers, need more especially the guidance of the Holy Spirit (1) Take, for instance, the question stirring in so many hearts, and more and more from year to year, the question of the unity of the Church of Christ and the reunion of its divided branches. (2) There are other questions. To take but one instance: who is not conscious of the ever widening and deepening desire among all sorts and conditions of men and women to gain some knowledge of the condition and the experience of those who are hidden from us by the drapery of death, who have passed into some inner mansion of the Fathers house? Everywhere our people are asking what are their relations to the departed; what community of spiritual fellowship is possible between them; what intercourse of thought or of feeling; what personal affection; what mutual knowledge, above all what reciprocity of prayer? On all these questions the Word of God is very remarkably silent, and we can hope for no further revelation to enlighten our minds and comfort our hearts; but in the words of our Lord and His Apostles, and in the instincts of the enlightened consciences, and in the aspirations of sanctified hearts, there are suggestions and intimations which need only to be fully and readily understood to shed light upon the dimness, or even the darkness of that hidden world, and to guide both our thoughts and our prayers into the way of peace. And the Holy Spirit will not fail us. Archbishop Maclagan, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxviii. p. 5. References. XVI. 13. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. i. No 50. J. Keble, Sermons for Easter to Ascension Day, p. 396. Archbishop Maclagan, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lii. p. 1. E. A. Bray, Sermons, vol. i. p. 303. T. F. Crosse, Sermons, p. 182. E. H. Hopkins, The Record, vol. xxvii. p. 797. C. E. Beeby, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lv. pp. 97, 132. John Kelman, Ephemera Eternitatis, p. 150. Expositor (5th Series), vol. i. p. 189. XVI. 13,14. H. Emmerson, A Book of Lay Sermons, p. 109. W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, p. 59. XVI. 14. E. Griffith-Jones, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvii. p. 120. C. Perren, Revival Sermons in Outline, p. 255. E. Bayley, Sermons on the Work and Person of the Holy Spirit, pp. 139, 201. A. R. Ashwell, God in His Work and Nature, p. 94. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. viii. No. 465, and vol. 1. No. 2907. W. Alexander, Primary Convictions, p. 302. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vii. p. 94. XVI. 14,16. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxvii. No. 2213, and vol. xl. No. 2382. A Little While John 16:16 The disciples did not know what our Lord meant. Our Lord heard their reasonings, and He came and explained to them that 'little while'. I. The 'Little While' Yet it is not so easy for us to understand it perfectly, and we must reason with ourselves even as the disciples did. Some people have thought that our Lord merely meant that there should be a spiritual seeing of Him, and that in that spiritual seeing they should have perfect rest and perfect joy; that Christ should be all in all to them. But can we limit it in that way? Our Lord was speaking of the time when the Jews should rejoice because He, the great Destroyer of the peace of Jerusalem, the One Who attacked all the corruptions of the Jewish Church, was hanged upon the cross. Did the disciples see Him? Was not that a little time? Did He not rise again on the third day, did He not at once appear to them? So that we have an explanation of the first little while perfectly clear to our minds and thoughts. It was simply this, the world rejoiced because the Christ was dead; the disciples wept because the Christ was dead. They looked upon Him now, they saw Him with them, they heard His words, and He had told them that a little while hence He would be passing away, and they should see Him no more. Is not that the explanation of the first little while? II. God's 'Little While'. But when we come to the second 'little while,' there is a difficulty as to what our Lord meant. He was to go to the Father, vet do we not see Christ now? The disciples saw Him as He rose from the dead. We, too, see Him upon that cross which is our glory, and He is to us the living One, because He was the dead. When He rose from the grave He only proved to us that the Father accepted His sacrifice, and because He had borne the sins of many and made intercession for the transgressors, therefore He had come out victorious with a victory that would last for ever and ever. Christ is to us a source of constant blessing, the source of all our consolation. He lives in our faith, and, if we have any hearts, He lives in our love, He lives in our life. So when the disciples saw Him again their joy was full, because they knew that Christ had risen. And their joy was to remain that which no one could take from them; it was to last for ever. So it has ever been; and all the greatest and most devout thinkers upon this verse have been of opinion that the 'little while' in which Christ promised to be seen again is the 'little while' of God which lasts on in the Christian Church until Christ shall come again. There was a little while, and He was hidden; there is this little while, and he lives with us, in us. III. The Sight of Christ. So, too, do we not see Christ? What do we mean by saying at the end of our prayers, 'Through Jesus Christ,' unless we see Him? It is, indeed, a sight of faith, but it is the sight the Spirit gives us of all the love, power, beauty, and work of Christ. Let us ask God the Holy Spirit to paint for us the living Christ more perfectly, to show us the praise of that endless love, and to cast His bright beams upon our own reading concerning the blessed Lord. It is just so that we must pass the little while here until there comes, in the soft shades of night, the Voice which says 'Come up hither,' and we go and meet our Lord in the bright beams of His own light. The Ascended Lord John 16:16 I. The Ascension of the Lord is a help to the true vision of Him. II. The Christian life on earth is one of joy in the risen Lord. III. The Christian life is a course of instruction from an inward Teacher. IV. The Christian life is a course of fulfilled desires and abundant gladness. A. Maclaren. References. XVI. 16. F. St. John Corbett, The Preacher's Year, p. 85. W. P. S. Bingham, Sermons upon Easter Subjects, p. 76. Bishop Westcott, Village Sermons, p. 166. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. iii. p. 356. XVI. 16-18. H. S. Holland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liv. p. 17. XVI. 16-19. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 120. The Point of Perplexity John 16:18 That is a point in the history of the soul which often passes without recognition. We are great on infidels, we deliver courses of lectures upon blatant and vulgar infidelity; some men have made their reputation along those lines. And others are great on triumphant faith; some ready skilful writers have written hymns of victory for the use of the Church in its highest mood. We thank God for such poets and prophets. But the we-cannot-tell period has that period any lyrist, any poet of high and worthy aim? We are all now and then in the we-cannot-tell period, and has any man arisen to turn our cannot-tell into some kind of joyous and hopeful psalm? Will you kindly suspend your lectures to absentee infidels, and come to these poor souls who are fumbling and groping and crying, We cannot tell whether this should be, or that should be, or whether we are now going exactly to the right or somewhere to the left. What a field there is unoccupied for the souls in the cannot-tell period! We dare not mention it even in prayer; and yet here we are with all these problems round about, all these great unsolved enigmas; yet we would like to know what the answer is. I. 'We cannot tell what He saith;' we come to the point of perplexity. It may be thus, or it may be so; what thinkest thou, John, James, Peter? are you all silent? So am I. 'A little while, and ye shall see Me: a little while, and ye shall not see Me, because I go unto the Father.' What is this that He saith? we cannot tell what He saith. We are at the cannot-tell period. No infidels are we and no doubters; it is still He that wondrous pronoun that gathers into its ample meaning and its glowing love all the nouns that have ever represented Him in the grammar of history. What is this that He saith? we cannot tell what He saith. It is still He, the living, beautiful One, the brother-sister, the man-woman of the race, who carries the crown and a cross; for He is the Lord that saved the world. Many of us are at this point, we cannot explain the words of Jesus; we are glad that many of them are yet without explanation: we have no confidence in those people who know all about it, as they would vulgarly say. We want to have knowledge enough to make us silent; we want to know enough that we may pray in a humble tone. II. There are Scriptures we can hardly read, let them alone for the time being; there are other Scriptures that we can only partially explain, and we go to them now and then to see if the buds be opening and if we can inhale fresh fragrance in the King's garden; there are other passages that mothers can speak to children, and children can understand by their hearts, and in these passages we revel and triumph and hold sweet sacrament. Why do you not confine yourselves to those things that you can really take hold of and apply and profit by? Why will you be endeavouring to read books you cannot read? Let them alone; not for ever, mayhap, but for the time being, and keep to your psalm, your sweet Jesus words, to the smile of the Master, to the encouragement of the Apostles. I hope some day some strong man, who is ready to be slain by the Church, will arise, and read us the Bible by the distribution of progressive steps, so that we shall end with Moses, and thus understand what Moses meant, go back to roots and origins and plasms, and thus interpret the Old Testament by the New and the New by the Old, and find that they are the same sacrament, and the same Testament, and the same covenant with the souls of men. III. Now how did Jesus Christ treat this point of perplexity? First of all, He did not rebuke it; He said, What ye know not now ye shall know hereafter; I keep a great school known by the name Hereafter, and you will be promoted to that higher school in due time; do not expect to do everything in twelve hours, do not expect to do everything within the little span of your, life; hereafter ye shall see, hereafter ye shall know; I have many things to say unto you, but you could not bear them now; why, you could not even hear them now, you would not understand them now; for My revelation is gradual and progressive, it is like the path of the just man, shining more and more unto the perfect day, and we forget that we ever saw the grey, cold time of winter. He does not do away with the point of perplexity; He says, it is good for you to have this puzzle, work away at that in the meantime; do not be impatient, do not tear the organ to pieces in order to see where the music comes from, and do not be taking up the roots of the flowers to see how the roots are getting on. Simply wait; O, wait upon the Lord, wait patiently for Him, and He will come with the morning star. Yes, Jesus Christ satisfies perplexity with a promise; Not now, but in another time. Joseph Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol. in. p. 194. What Is This John 16:18 There is a discipline in bewilderment You have not lost religion because you cannot explain it, and you are profited by many a sermon you do not understand. What wild men they are who suppose that everything goes through the channel of the understanding, and that no man is scholarly or learned who does not know five-and-twenty alphabets and all their lore. There is a discipline of bewilderment. The disciples said, We cannot understand this talk: today He says something that appears to be very clear, and yet there is a great cloud upon it before we have time to consider what it is. 'What is this that He saith unto us, A little while, and ye shall not see Me; and again a little while, and ye shall see Me: and, Because I go to the Father?... What is this that He saith, A little while? We cannot tell what He saith.' To-day we are lost, but in an infinite ocean of truth and love and suggestion. I. We should pause here and there in the great teaching of the sweet One, and ask, What does this really mean? We should apply this inquiry to many of the scenes in Christ's life and to not a few of His words. He spake in riddles, He talked in parables, He dreamed in metaphors. Unless we are of the same mental breed we cannot follow Him, we do not belong to His kith, He does not speak our mother-tongue. Hence it is that some are wise and some are foolish in the things of the kingdom of heaven; that which is poetry to one man is prose to another, and that which is prose in some instances may be burning, throbbing poetry in others. All things are not the same things to two people; each takes his own view, each has his own God. Perhaps we have lost a great deal of the true theology by supposing that there is only one God, in the sense that all men must take the same view of Him or be lost. There is only one God that is the glory of the Christian religion but in how many phases does He reveal Himself, to how many ministries in the heart does He appeal, at what various points He knocks if haply the door may be opened and entrance effected. II. There is discipline in bewilderment. Many people find heterodoxy in it. Many persons think that religion consists of clear views. What is a view? and what are clear views? and what are the chances of clear views in grey days and cloudy times, and times of unrest to the soul, and sadness because of sin, and hopelessness because the last door we battered at did not open? We measure ourselves by false standards, and we especially measure others by standards of our own creation. We may be singing the same great truth in a thousand different tunes. It is not the tune but the truth, not the rhyme but the hymn that we should be careful and anxious about. III. It is marvellous at how many places we may stop and say, 'We know not what He means, what He saith'. We have been with Him, the disciples might have said, now a year, two years, and three years, and He has given us hints that He is going away, and yet in all those days He never asked a man amongst us to pray for Him. Two or three of us have gone up mountain-paths step for step with the Son of God; we have seen the wrinkles of sorrow deepen His cheeks, we have seen His eyes melt in tears, but He never called Peter or James or John, and said unto one of them, 'Ask all the others to join you in praying for Me' never. Who was this Son of man? who is this Majesty who asks no prayer on His own account, yet who prays for His enemies, and dries the tears of others' sorrows? Jesus Christ never rebuked anybody for merely intellectual errors. He expected them; intellectual errors must attach themselves to finite thinking. Jesus Christ did not pay any attention whatever to mere opinions as simple products of an undisciplined and unchastened intellect. He did not say, 'Be good enough to show me your theological statement, and I will see whether you are right or wrong'. As if any man could be either right or wrong by a written certificate of anything whatsoever. He cared for the heart, He looked into the soul, He offered the soul cleanness, and I will follow Him. It is good to be where Jesus is. Joseph Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol. vi. p. 2. Reference. XVI. 18-26. Expositor (6th Series), vol. ix. p. 297. Unspoken Inquiries John 16:19 He saw their lips shape into a question. But they dare not go any further. This presents Christ to us in a most interesting and pathetic aspect. He knows the unspoken prayer blessed be God! There are prayers we dare not put into words; there are wonders and problems to which we dare not give expression. We do not know one another sufficiently, or we would know that behind many an utterance of faith there is a deep moan of unbelief. We put our best selves forward on many occasions, and we do so without pretence or conceit; we try to think ourselves into better selves, and in advance we speak the great words we shall one day speak as part of the current experience and reality. Sometimes we store our prayers; they are the prayers that are going to be answered in a month, perhaps next year; we have many entries into the execution of which we have not yet come. We have pledged to meet the Lord under a hawthorn bush, in a wide, green field, in some little bay by the sea that nobody knows of but ourselves. We must not be taken just at the moment as always realising the high triumphs which we venture to express in words; they are the triumphs that are going to be, the victories of the long-coming tomorrow. We can only enter into these mysteries and eternities by prolonged, deep long-suffering and long-torturing experience. The happiness is that Jesus Christ knows all about this; He knows the questions we would like to ask, how many they are, how urgent. This is the comfort, that Jesus knows every one of them. Let us witch Him coming along; He may interpret our attitude and give it words. The Lion of the tribe of Judah hath the power to open all seals; He may rend the seal of our ignorance and our agonising desire. Let us tarry awhile here and there. Jesus will find us out, and we can so look that He will understand the expression, and so kind is He that He may find words for our silence and our distress. I. Jesus finds us sitting by the grave, and He knows that we are desirous to ask Him, and we dare not So we can only look; but what a look it is! how it tears the heavens in twain, how it pleads with the eloquence of miserable silence! He pauses, He draws near; He also looks as well as we do; there is a masonry of facial expression; He knows the meaning of the dumbness, and knows that it is the biggest eloquence we ever poured out of our lips, and yet we dare not but restrain the growing flood lest we should grieve Him by unintentional impiety. Dare you ask Him? You are on terms of great familiarity with this Jesus who is now almost bending over us dare you tell Him our desire? The grave is so little, and it is the first grave we ever dug in our house; it is the burial-place of a little flower. I am desirous to ask Him why the flower ever budded; I am desirous to ask Him how He thinks we can partake of the sacrament of silent misery when we go back this summer afternoon to our lonely home. Can Jesus reach a case like mine? you say. Yes, He can; there is nothing we ever suffered that He has not suffered, only a thousand times more intensely in all that strains the very nerves of the soul. If any one else has suffered this, I have already divided my misery; find me my companion-sufferer; Jesus knows that I am desirous to ask Him, and perhaps through this companion He may send me an answer: O come thou, sent by the Son of God. You do not know how much of real comfort and strength you would part with if you asked all your questions in plain words. There is a comfort in reservation; reticence has its own sanctuary into which it retires as into a deeper self-preservation. Sometimes misery is the very jewel of joy. II. If we review the whole scheme and economy of life, there are many things we would like to ask Jesus. How is it that this man prospers, and he never prays? How is it that I have to make all my life a hard study so as to keep out of debt and misery, and I try to pray? Jesus knows that I am desirous to ask Him; I want to know about the mystery of the Divine going, I want to know why the garden of the atheist brings forth flowers abundantly, and the garden of the suppliant has not a single flower within its four borders. I should like to ask my Lord that question, but I do not know how to put it; I might imperil my own faith by inquiring into the metaphysics of other people's unbelief. Oh, if He would start the subject I would tell Him about twenty whose lives are complete mysteries as viewed from a Christian standpoint; they bet and gamble and swear, and riot and revel and dance, and cannot get through their money. I would tell Him then of the poor woman who cannot make money enough to pay her rent. If He would begin the subject! He may do some day; then I will venture upon it, and embrace the opportunity of having all my doubts cleared up, and I will be glad to have some Divine illumination upon the plan of Providence. Meanwhile I am an Asaph with a song he dare not sing, a harp he dare not use, a question he may not ask. III. The very desirousness to ask is a proof of the existence of some faith in the soul. That is a delightful and most vital point. Our very perplexities may be evidences of our faith. If we had no faith, who would care to ask any questions about this chaotic, tumultous world. IV. Unasked questions need not mar believing prayers. After all, the unasked questions may not be necessary to the edification of the soul. God may educate us by not allowing us to tell everything we want to tell. Self-control is the last result of true power. Not to ask may be to ask. Sometimes not to pray may be the best prayer. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the Church. Oh, if He would begin! He will some day, and it will be a long day, a day without an evening star. References. XVI. 20. J. Keble, Sermons for Easter to Ascension Day, p. 335. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. lii. No. 2983. R. J. Campbell, City Temple Sermons, p. 74. XVI. 20-22. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxiv. No. 1442. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 131. XVI. 21. J. M. Neale, Sermons for the Church Year, vol. ii. p. 29. XVI. 21, 22. D. Fraser, Metaphors in the Gospels, p. 360. Comfort in Sorrow John 16:22 I. In this text and in the surrounding verses and chapters indeed, Jesus Christ is a minister to human sorrow. How gentle He is in all these verses! We ought to have them in the memory of the heart; they would strew summer flowers on the way from the house to the grave, ay, and back again. But we are men, poor, brokenhearted men, so cold is the bereaved air, so lonely the solitary footfall on the house stair, and all things breathe, if they breathe, a sigh of conscious orphanage. What word can help us in that dread moment? No word so lovely as the word of Christ spoken in view of the heartache of men, 'I will see you again'. Oh, write that on every tombstone, 'I will see you again'; write it in the chamber where the separation took place, that awful unwed-ding that was murder, 'I will see you again'; write it on the pillow where the poor head sank in its exhaustion, final and complete as to the body. Oh, thou angel, who hast a pen and dost write things for men to read, write upon that tomb, 'I will see you again'. There is no finality in the sorrow which is experienced by those who love the Lord of Immorality; then every moment is immortal in its ideality, its suggestion, and its ineffable solace. Who will write this upon the little child's tombstone? Oh, those little tombstones! I always go to the children's section of God's acre, the stones that are almost flowers, that will be flowers presently in the warmer summer that is promised to the soul. Write on your dear little child's tombstone, if with invisible ink, write it so that your own heart can see it, 'I will see you again'. How long? That is the question of unbelief; it is the question which we all ask, but really it is not the question of living, loving faith. 'Again:' how long? and I hear amid the aisles of the eternal infinite Church, where the saints gather for their matins, 'For there is no night there... for ever with the Lord'. II. Who is it that talks about coming again? Who is it that says, 'Let not your heart be troubled '? Who is it that says, 'Sorrow shall be turned into joy'? What was His qualification for touching upon the subject at all? Sometimes we feel that a speech is being well handled by the speaker; he knows it, he has passed through all that it means so far as that is possible within the compass of time. At other moments we feel that the speaker does not know his theme; it is not in him a well of water; he can only speak about it, his language never breaks into music. What was Christ's qualification for addressing the sorrow of the world? It was complete. Taking the Scriptures prophetically and experimentally, and treating them with the idealism which is justified of history and experience, we know that Jesus is the sufferer who holds the only answer to the enigma of sorrow. What do I hear respecting Him? He is 'a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Oh, let me see Him! This is the man I long for and have been seeking for; I have prayed my heart out to the heavens that I might catch some sight of His figure. This is He; He is a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Then His voice would be soft with tears. It is. He will not look hardly at me as if He were a severe judge, looking at the crimes and sins which my poor soul represents. No; He will look with eyes of light and love and pity; why, hear me: 'Jesus wept'. That is His qualification. Come, see if there is any sorrow like unto My sorrow. Sorrow only can speak to sorrow. You know by the voice whether the sympathiser has suffered. The want of suffering cannot be concealed; the presence of suffering turns the occasion of sympathy into a sacrament, where there is bread and blood-wine and all the solace of the infinite heart. III. Ye shall be sorrowful, said the dear man-woman Christ, the brother-sister Jesus; ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy, I will see you again, in many a way, in many a dream, in many an event degraded into an accident, in many a junction of circumstances which you thought was manipulated and consummated by the skill of man, but which was originated and determined in heaven; I will see you again. The spring helps the blood; the May-blossom does not lay its finger on the pulses of the world but quickens them; then we are conscious that even yet in these graveyard hearts there may be primroses typifying resurrection. Here is the promise; do not abate it, do not modify it, do not allow a frivolous disposition or any austere temptation to rob you of your Divine estate; ye are sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy. What does Paul say about sorrow? He follows his Master always and most steadily, and he may have at least some echo if not an original tone. He said, lifting up himself for a moment's relaxation and with a smile on his face, 'As sorrowful, yet always rejoicing' (2 Corinthians 6:10 ). What a mixture! what a reality! It is the very reality of our own experience. What is the sub-tone? 'Sorrowful' What is the other tone. 'Rejoicing.' Are you in the night? Yes, but the night is full of stars, talking stars, flashing, descending, spiritual stars. How often we can only see the darkness, not the jewels that glitter on its robe! References. XVI. 22. R. J. Campbell, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liii. p. 403. S. Baring-Gould, Village Preaching for a Year (2nd Series), vol. i. p. 225. R. W. Church, Village Sermons (3rd Series), p. 324. J. Keble, Sermons for Easter to Ascension Bay, pp. 345, 355. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xliii. No. 2525. John 16:23 Last night, after seeking out this Saint and that, methought, Why not applie unto the Fountain Head? Maybe these holie Spiritts may have Limitations sett to the Power of theire Intercessions at any Rate, the Ears of Mary-mother are open to alle. Soe I beganne, Eia mater, fons amoris .... Then methoughte: But I am only asking her to intercede I'll mount a Step higher still.... Then I turned to the greate Intercessor of alle. But methoughte, Still he intercedes with another, although the same. And his owne saying was, In that Day ye shall ask me nothing. Whatsoever ye shall ask in my Name, he will give it you. Soe I did. Miss Manning's * Household of Sir Thomas More. * References. XVI. 23. W. P. S. Bingham, Sermons on Easter Subjects, p. 189. The Record, vol. xxvii. p. 508. W. H. Evans, Short Sermons for the Seasons, p. 138. J. Keble, Sermons for Easter to Ascension Day, pp. 445, 482. S. Baring-Gould, Village Preaching for a Year (2nd Series), vol. i. p. 243. J. N. Bennie, The Eternal Life, p. 84. XVI. 23, 24. T. F. Crosse, Sermons, p. 39. R. C. Trench, Sermons New and Old, p. 184. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 140. XVI. 24. W. H. Evans, Short Sermons for the Seasons, p. 134. C. G. Finney, Penny Pulpit, No. 1562, p. 129. J. Keble, Sermons for Easter to Ascension Bay, pp. 436, 456, 466. XVI. 25. J. J. Blunt, Plain Sermons (2nd Series), p. 277. Bishop Westcott, Village Sermons, p. 186. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in a Religious House, vol. i. p. 85. Expositor (6th Series), vol. i. p. 235. XVI. 25-27. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 150. XVI. 26, 27. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlviii. No, 2800. W. M. Sinclair, Difficulties of our Bay, p. 136. XVI. 27. R. J. Campbell, City Temple Sermons, p. 173. XVI. 28. A. P. Stanley, Canterbury Sermons, p. 350. F. T. Bassett, Christ in Eternity and Time, p. 67. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 159. XVI. 28-33. S. Hall, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlv. p. 5. XVI. 29-32. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 168. XVI. 30. A. G. Brown, Christian World Pulpit, vol. li. p. 26. XVI. 31, 32. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. i. p. 246. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxviii. No. 2271, and vol. liii. No. 3052. Loneliness John 16:32 A deep sense of loneliness was one of the sorrows which the Son of man endured for us throughout His earthly life. Such loneliness is the lot of every one who is in advance of his generation, and therefore it pressed most heavily upon our Lord. Therefore we find Him seeking so often communion with the Father in prayer. I. The Loneliness of the Cross. But as the end drew near, we gather from the text that His affectionate human nature shrank from that hour of intense and utter loneliness, and He finds unfailing comfort in the abiding presence of the Father. It is true that in one awful sense He could not be alone, even when His friends fled and forsook Him, for at His trial when He stood before Pilate He would hear a thousand voices crying harshly for His blood, and see a thousand faces turned to Him; but when there is no sympathy between the individual and the multitude the loneliness of a large crowd is more painful and more absolute than that of a desolate mountain range, or even of the Great Sahara. Now each life that is brought into harmony with that of the Divine Master will reproduce, more or less, His sorrows, and generally the more faithfully that life is followed the more will the sorrows be intensified. We see in the life of St Paul the working out of this principle. His personality was strongly marked, and his isolation proportionately great. He led and maintained a ceaseless struggle for the liberty of the Gospel. His missionary labours brought the same consequence. Yet, from his own testimony we know that he was not alone, for the Lord stood by him. II. The Loneliness of Human Life. So far we have considered the loneliness which results from taking up the cross; but we must not forget that there is the loneliness which is a condition of human life, apart from religion. We have all experienced this in our own lives, or witnessed it in others. We must have felt it when we have visited houses where death has lately entered. We have realised that between ourselves and the mourners there was a great gulf which we could not cross! They were cut off from us in their grief! We could speak heartfelt words of sympathy, yet we knew that in their anguish they were alone that all we did or said left them still alone. This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/expositors-dictionary/ John 17 During his last illness John Knox was accustomed to hear each day the seventeenth chapter of St. John's Gospel, a chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians, and the fifty-third of Isaiah. On the last day of his life (Monday, November 24, 1572) a little after noon, 'he caused his wife to read the fifteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, of the Resurrection, to whom he said, "Is not that a comfortable chapter?" A little after, "Now, for the last, I commend my soul, spirit, and body (pointing upon his three fingers) into Thy hands, O Lord!" Thereafter, about five hours, to his wife, "Go, read where I cast my first anchor!" And so she read the seventeenth of St. John's Evangel.' "Glorify Thy Son." John 17:1 J. M. Neale writes on this passage: '"Glorify Thy Son'. But, you will say, how wonderful a prayer is this! If it had been, Deliver Thy Son Deliver my soul from the sword Save me from the lion's mouth that would have been what we should have expected. But now our dear Lord, going down into the depth of shame, about to be scourged and mocked and to hang naked on the cross between heaven and earth, to pray " Glorify Thy Son!" Yes, and St. John tells us the same thing in another place. He reminds us how Isaiah said, "He was despised and rejected of men: a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and we hid as it were our faces from Him; He was despised, and we esteemed Him not" and it then goes on, "These things said Esaias, when he saw His glory". We should have said, when he saw His shame. But just as we think an earthly general more glorious when he is in the heat of the battle, covered with blood and sweat and dust, than when he is clothed in purple and in fine linen, and in the midst of his triumph, so our Lord in one sense was more glorious when He was lifted on the cross than ever I say it with all reverence when He rose from the dead. '"Glorify Thy Son." This prayer, no doubt, also looked on to Easter. The Lord, like Abraham, lift up His eyes, and saw the place of His glory afar off; He, on that Thursday evening, saw the day of suffering, Friday: and the day of rest, Saturday, and the day of glory, Sunday. "Glorify Thy Son," when He shall hang on the cross; when even then, His enemies shall confess Him a king, by putting on Him a purple robe, and bowing the knee before Him, and by setting a writing over the cross "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews"; and when the thief shall acknowledge Him to be God, "Lord, remember me when Thou comest into Thy Kingdom". "Glorify Thy Son," when He shall rest in the grave, according to that saying, "His rest shall be glorious"; when He shall descend into hell; when He shall tell glad tidings to the spirits in prison. "Glorify Thy Son," when He shall burst the bars of death, because it is not possible that He should be holden of them; when He shall be the death of death, and the destruction of hell; when He shall arise again and become the first fruits of them that sleep. "Glorify Thy Son," when He shall ascend back to Thee, and having spoiled principalities and powers shall make a show of them openly, triumphing over them; when He shall open the way for millions to go up to that place, whence He came alone.' Sermons in Sackville College Chapel, vol. i. p. 176. References. XVII. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ix.. p. 99. XVII. 1. C. Kingsley, The Good News of God, p. 12. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxv. No. 1464. H. C. G. Moule, The High Priestly Prayer, pp. 15, 22. C. Stanford, The Evening of our Lord's Ministry, p. 151. XVII. 1, 2. H. C. G. Moule, The High Priestly Prayer, p. 30. XVII. 1-3. J. Clifford, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liii. p. 74. XVII. 1-4. Expositor (6th Series), vol. iv. p. 282. XVII. 1-19. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 187. XVII. 1-26. Len G. Broughton, The Prayers of Jesus, p. 109. XVII. 2. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. x. No. 566. C. J. Ridgeway, The King and His Kingdom, p. 80. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. i. p. 182. Expositor (6 th Series), vol. vi. p. 246. Life and Light John 17:3 These great words are among the profoundest sayings of our Lord. They were spoken by the Son of God, not to Jews or Gentiles, not to human friends or foes, not to the disciples privately or the multitude openly, but directly to God the Father. Let us inquire: I. What is this eternal life? (1) In its nature. It is not simply endless existence, or everlasting duration. It is something nobler, diviner far. We may form some idea of what eternal life is by looking at its opposite spiritual death. When Christ comes to men He finds them in a state of death moral, spiritual death and this consists in enmity against God. The first mission of Christ is to destroy this carnality, to put to death this enmity, to uproot this principle of evil and cast it out. Then, when the power of sin is broken and its rule overthrown, grace enters and reigns. When this great moral change takes place, man is brought under the dominion of a new principle of life. He is renewed in the spirit of his mind. This is what the Bible calls eternal life. (2) Eternal life in its source. How does man become possessed of this life? It is not in man inherently; e is not born with it. The Father hath given the Son authority to bestow this life on all who believe. (3) Eternal life in its practical development When love to God becomes the ruling passion, the controlling principle in the soul, it will reveal itself in the life, touch its possessor at all points, mould his character, and inspire him at every step and in every action. A father sometimes so impresses his character on his child that you cannot fail to see the father reproduced in the child. So when Christ becomes our life by the indwelling spirit, His character is reproduced in us. II. What is the relation between the possession of eternal life and knowing God and Jesus Christ? Some understand the words to mean, that to know God and Jesus Christ is eternal life, or that eternal life consists in knowing the true God and Jesus Christ. This is undoubtedly true in a very important sense, but it is not the truth taught by the text. The meaning is not that we become possessed of the life by knowing God and Christ, but that we gain the highest knowledge of God in Christ by possessing eternal life. The knowledge spoken of does not refer to the intellect or understanding. It is heart knowledge, not head knowledge; spiritual, not intellectual. In order to know God in this higher sense, you must realise the energies of the Holy Spirit renewing your nature and making you like God. This knowledge of God in Christ is progressive, because the eternal life within us is progressive. Richard Roberts, My Closing Ministry, p. 140. References. XVII. 3. W. M. Sinclair, Christ and our Times, p. 91. J. A. Alexander, The Gospel of Jesus Christ, p. 629. R. W. Hiley, A Year's Sermons, vol. iii. p. 334. J. Sadler, Sunday Thoughts, p. 298. R. W. Church, Village Sermons, p. 140. J. S. Bartlett, Sermons, p. 119. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xli. No. 2396. Expositor (5th Series), vol. vii. p. 39; ibid. (6th Series), vol. x. p. 358. Our Work John 17:4 We are each of us sent here by God for a purpose in His good providence, some purpose tending to His glory. What, then, is this work from God in general terms? I. Our Work here is the Formation of our Character. That is true of all of us. The many sayings of the wise, which so soon become commonplaces, about this life of ours on earth being a place of probation, a state of trial, mean just this, that our natural instincts and natural desires and dispositions are given to us by God as so much material out of which we, for Him, have to fashion our character. This rough material, you may say, is just the warp and woof by means of which we are to make a texture for the great house of God. II. But that does not Exhaust it. We all have work for others, all of us. Some of us have been entrusted with the most noble and most exacting task, that of bringing up a family in the discipline of Christ, and it is always well for parents to remind themselves that this commission from God is a duty that will not perform itself; but whether we have children or not, every one here has somebody of whose conscience they are the keepers, people who depend on them for guidance, people with whom their word, their pattern weighs, people whom we are day by day moulding into our own likeness our pupils, our apprentices, our clerks, our employés, our juniors. There they are depending upon us, and I say, that should be recognised as part of our lifework for God. III. There is that Work by which we take our place in the Commonwealth here; this, too, is work for God, because the powers that be are ordained by God, and this should be work for God's glory. Most of you remember, I expect, that wonderful poem of Tennyson, 'The Northern Farmer,' and how the northern farmer consoles himself on his death-bed with the thought that while the parson, year in year out, had done nothing, had read nothing but one sermon a Sunday, he, for his part, had 'stubbed Thurnaby wäaste'. Well, it was a righteous boast so far as he was concerned. There was something he had done 'something attempted, something done' before the night came and he could work no longer. The world was better that he had been born into it. He had left his mark; some waste place had been reclaimed by him, and that satisfaction in work rightly undertaken and successfully carried through, that is a happiness that gives very great good. IV. What are the Helps and what are the Hindrances to our Work in Life? Just two. (a) Time is a help, but time is also a hindrance. When we are young especially, time stretches away before us so endlessly long that there seems nothing that we could not do in such length of days, and yet because time seems so endless it slips away without being used, like water that runneth apace. Tomorrow and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Well then, if our time is in our own control and some time is in the control of every one of us the way to make time minister to our life's work is to take more exact account of it. Time then is a help God has given us to do His work. (b) The second is our circumstances health if it is health, sickness if it is sickness, riches or poverty, our position in society, our chances; these things may hinder us as much as they may help us. The whole power of adverse circumstances to hinder a man has been compressed into that sentence in the book of Proverbs, 'The fool saith, there is a lion in the path'. That means that circumstances only hinder us as long as we are afraid of them. If you go up to your lion you find, like Bunyan's Pilgrim, that it is chained. Consider this: If all our circumstances were as easy as we should like them, what would become of the virtue of the world? If there were no more danger left in life, what would become of courage? Experience teaches us that what we call adverse circumstances are only God's medicines to fashion in us a strong heart. References. XVII. 4. A. G. Mortimer, The Church's Lessons for the Christian Year, pt. iii. p. 19. Archbishop Plunket, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvii. p. 326. F. de W. Lushington, Sermons to Young Boys, p. 100. G. D. Herron, Christian World Pulpit, vol. li. p. 56. H. C. G. Moule, The High Priestly Prayer, p. 37. W. J. Henderson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lii. p. 164, and vol. lvii. p. 106. C. Vince, The Unchanging Saviour, p. 331. F. E. Paget, Helps and Hindrances to the Christian Life, p. 210. Expositor (4th Series), vol. vi. p. 75. XVII. 4, 5. J. Keble, Sermons for Ascension Day to Trinity Sunday, p. 82. XVII. 5. H. C. G. Moule, The High Priestly Prayer, p. 44. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 144; ibid. (5th Series), vol. ii. p. 252; ibid. vol. iii. p. 452; ibid. vol. iv. p. 261. XVII. 6. H. C. G. Moule, The High Priestly Prayer, p. 51. XVII. 7. Basil Wilberforce, Sanctification by the Truth, p. 1. XVII. 7, 8. H. C. G. Moule, The High Priestly Prayer, p. 58. XVII. 8-11. John Kelman, Ephemera Eternitatis, p. 155. XVII. 9. J. Bannerman, Sermons, p. 177. H. C. G. Moule, The High Priestly Prayer, p. 65. XVII. 9, 10. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxii. No. 2331. XVII. 9-11. F. de W. Lushington, Sermons to Young Boys, p. 30. XVII. 10. H. C. G. Moule, The High Priestly Prayer, p. 72. XVII. 11. P. T. Forsyth, Christian World Pulpit, vol. 1. p. 225. J. Keble, Sermons for Ascension Day to Trinity Sunday, p. 21. H. C. G. Moule, The High Priestly Prayer, pp. 79, 86, 93, 100. Archbishop Temple, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvi. p. 241. XVII. 11, 12. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxix. No. 1883. H. C. G. Moule, The High Priestly Prayer, p. 107. XVII. 12. S. Cox, Expositions, pp. 331, 348. J. J. Blunt, Plain Sermons (2nd Series), p. 256. R. J. Campbell, New Theology Sermons, p. 164. Expositor (4th Series), vol. iv. p. 167; ibid. (6th Series), vol. xii. p. 107. XVII. 13. H. C. G. Moule, The High Priestly Prayer, p. 114. What Is a Saint? (For All Saints' Day) John 17:14 This is All Saints' Day, and these words are spoken of the saints by the Lord: 'They are not of the world'. What a condemnation of the world! I. What is a Saint? To this question two answers may be given, each of them a true answer. And the first answer is the answer of the New Testament. (a) Every baptised person is a saint. If you read St. Paul's Epistles you will find that this is his constant use of the word. Even where he writes in stern reproof of those who by open sin, or by selfish jealousies, or by careless conduct are marring the unity of the Church, injuring the cause of Christ, he yet insists on addressing them all as saints. Every baptised person who is not practically denying his baptism by open sin or careless indifference, is in a real sense a saint of God. That is his ideal, that is his possibility, that, to use the Scripture phrase, is his calling. (b) We must go on to speak of a change which has passed over language. This is not what we mean when we commonly speak of a saint, when we think of the Church calendar of saints, when we commemorate solemnly, as on this day, all the saints. In the infancy of the Church, when persecution from without was the strongest safeguard against lukewarmness and hypocrisy within, then it was far more easy and natural to speak as if every Christian who dared to bear the dangerous and hated name of Christian were really responding to his vocation, recognising his privilege and living up to his ideal. But when the world became so inextricably mingled with the Church, as our Lord in His parable of the wheat and the tares taught us that it would shortly become, and as, in fact, we see today, then it seemed a kind of outrage, an outrage upon truth itself, to call every baptised man a saint, and the use of the word became narrowed and reserved, quite rightly, to those to whom the Church was prepared to point, as fulfilling the ideal which was set before all her children, those who were in some striking way types and patterns of the saintly life. II. What is this Saintly Character? What is the distinguishing and essential characteristic of a saint? I answer in the words of the text, in the words of Christ Himself, twice repeated in this chapter, 'They are not of the world'. (a) They come from the world. First of all in the sixth verse we read, 'I have manifested Thy name unto the men which Thou gavest Me out of the world'. Here is a description of the origin of the saints. They come from the world. They are men and women like ourselves, not superior beings with superior powers to our own. (b) They are in the world. And then again, in the eleventh verse, 'I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to Thee. Holy Father, keep through Thine own Name those whom Thou hast given Me.... I pray not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that Thou shouldest keep them.' Here we learn the sphere and the environment of the saintly life. It is in the world, moving up and down with other men, as our Lord went about among them; fulfilling the various responsibilities of daily life as for thirty years our Lord fulfilled them simply in the home of Nazareth, in the world, trained by its joys as well as by its suffering. (c) They are for the world. And once again we learn not only the region and the sphere of the saints from our Lord's Word, but we learn also their mission. 'As Thou hast sent Me into the world, that the world may believe, that the world may know.' That is to say, they not only have a nature in common with the world and a place in the world, but they have both of these for a great purpose. They are from the world and in the world because they are for the world. Here again is a corrective to false ideals of saintliness. That is not Christian saintliness which merely shuns the world and hides itself lest it should soil its robes with the touch of common men and common things. Mere asceticism is not a qualification for a place among the saints. Christ was not ascetic, and it is in the light of His own life that we must interpret the words, 'Ye are not of the world even as I am not of the world'. That is Christian saintliness which moves among men as the servant of all, living for others, believing that all are called to be saints, and helping on their lives towards their great ideal. References. XVII. 14. J. M. Gibbon, Christian World Pulpit, vol. li. p. 296. H. C. G. Moule, The High Priestly Prayer, pp. 122, 129. XVII. 14-16. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 197. The Splendid Isolation John 17:15 The evil that is in the world. It is everywhere narrowing, blinding, defiling, destroying. How are we to be kept in a world like this? God saves His people from within rather than from without; and it is to this interior Divine action that we must look for our salvation. He makes us invincible through the soul. I. God protects His people from the evil that is in the world by giving to them an instinct of peril. Volumes have been written upon the marvellously keen sense of danger with which many of the inferior animals are endowed. But even before we come to animals vegetable life sometimes displays a curious appreciation of peril and a manifest shrinking from it. It seems as though God had given even to inferior life a prophetic sense; it is not delivered to sudden destruction. In this exquisite admonitory instinct lies the salvation of the irrational world, for to be forewarned is to be forearmed. Now God gives to all sincere men a similar instinct for moral peril 'a sensibility of sin, a pain to feel in near'. Men are not saved by their cleverness; that usually brings them into trouble: they are safeguarded by their sensibility. The bloom on a peach, the naturalist tells us, is of the very first consequence to its life and perpetuation; and the best thing about any of us men and women is the fine bloom on our mind, our conscience, our feeling it is more effectual for our salvation than walls of granite or gales of brass. II. God protects His people through the energy of health. Sound organic health is the prime antiseptic. We are not kept free from deadly infections by disinfectants, fumigations, and quarantines, but by the force of the heart, the richness of the blood, the lustre of the eye, and the rose upon the cheek. Now all this is particularly true in relation to the children of God: they are safe from within. A wise Christian will not unnecessarily expose himself to peril; there is no justification for unwatchfulness and presumption; yet let us not think too much about surroundings, neighbourhoods, and atmospheres. A robust soul is safe anywhere. Spring flowers spring in pestilential marshes. III. Finally, God saves His people through the power of faith. The apparent environment of a believer is not always his real environment. To the carnal eye he is girded about with worldliness, unbelief, immorality; but in fact his faith creates his real environment. Faith secures the right conditions, reveals the right ideals, pours around the soul the heavenly influences in which alone it can live and thrive. The saint walks by faith, not by sight. W. L. Watkinson, The Blind Spot, p. 151. What Is Worldliness? John 17:15 Not abstraction from the world, but protection from the evil. Our redemption is to be accomplished, not by changing our locality, but by changing the conditions of the heart. I. What is this world, this ever-present worldliness? We shall never apprehend its significance by dwelling merely in the realm of external conduct, and classifying acts in the two categories of white and black. Conduct will never be safely and faithfully guided by mere attention to labels. Our Puritan forefathers regarded the eating of a mince-pie as an act of abject profanity. It is possible to avoid all the things labelled 'worldly,' and yet to remain incorrigibly worldly, to be steeped through and through with the spirit of this present evil world. II. Is it possible for men to be in the world and to remain undefiled? Jesus of Nazareth did it. 'Oh, yes,' you say, 'but Jesus was a simple peasant, living among the sweet simplicities of village life.' I am not so sure of the accuracy of our common description of village life, of its sweet and undefiled simplicities. No more terrible and appalling concentration of nastiness is to be found anywhere than in many an English village. Jesus remained undefiled in a world abounding in subtle infection and seduction. What is the spiritual content of that great promise but this that they who 'dwell in the secret place of the Most High 'shall be proof against all things noisome and noxious and venomous. III. Purity even in the defiling ways of the world is a grand possibility; how can we make it a glorious achievement? If we are to be protected against the pestilence that walketh in darkness, we shall have to be possessed by a plenitude of spiritual life. How is that defensive life to be gained? 'This is life... to know Jesus.' If life is to rise within us like a well it must be because of our intimate fellowship with the Christ. J. H. Jowett, Apostolic Optimism, p. 47. References. XVII. 15. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. i. No. 47; vol. xl. No. 2355, and vol. xlvi. No. 2703. H. C. G. Moule, The High Priestly Prayer, p. 136. George Adam Smith, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliv. p. 44. R. W. Hiley, A Year's Sermons, vol. iii. p. 234. J. T. Bramston, Fratmbus, p. 164. J. Monro Gibson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. li. p. 316. H. Allen, Penny Pulpit, No. 1563, p. 137. J. Bunting, Sermons, vol. ii. p. 1. J. H. Jowett, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lv. p. 136. E. H. Eland, ibid. vol. lxi. p. 334. Expositor (6th Series), vol. i. p. 369. John 17:16 'It seems little to be perceived,' says De Quincey in his essay on Charles Lamb, 'how much the great Scriptural idea of the worldly and the unworldly is found to emerge in literature as well as in life. In reality, the very same combinations of moral qualities, infinitely varied, which compose the harsh physiognomy of what we call worldliness in the living groups of life, must unavoidably present themselves in books. A library divides into sections of worldly and unworldly, even as a crowd of men divides into that same majority and minority. The world has an instinct for recognising its own; and recoils from certain qualities when exemplified in books, with the same disgust or defective sympathy as would have governed it in real life. From qualities, for example, of childlike simplicity, of shy profundity, or of inspired self-communion, the world does and must turn away its face towards grosser, bolder, more determined, or more intelligible expressions of character and intellect; and not otherwise in literature, nor at all less in literature, than it does in the realities of life.' References. XVII. 16. H. H. Scullard, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvii. p. 233. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. ii. No. 78. J. H. Jowett, The Examiner, 5th July, 1906, p. 652. XVII. 16, 17. H. C. G. Moule, The High Priestly Prayer, p. 143. XVII. 17. E. Bersier, Sermons in Paris, p. 41. C. D. Bell, The Saintly Calling, p. 101. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxii. No. 1890. Bishop Westcott, The Incarnation and Common Life, p. 175. XVII. 17-19. Expositor (6th Series), vol. iv. p. 1. XVII. 18. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxvi. No. 2144. XVII. 18, 19. H. C. G. Moule, The High Priestly Prayer, p. 150. The Sanctifying of the Teacher John 17:19 I. The deeds and words of Christ are universal, and every order or profession of men can find itself in them. The men and women of learning, the order whose task it is to know and make known, do find themselves in the words 'For their sakes I sanctify self'. Our task is self-culture in things of the mind; but it is self-culture not for the sake of self, but for their sake, those others whom our knowledge shall enable to know, our own immediate scholars it may be, or our own country and race. Here is the basis of our life as the people of learning, those who know, a university: our reason for being is the intellectual good of others, those who will have light upon the ways of life through us. For their sakes we are to sanctify, that is, to consecrate, hallow, offer up to the Divine ourselves. The Incarnate Son of God, as priest who would offer sacrifice, makes in these words the offering of His life to the Father. In this act, as in all, the disciple must be as His Master, and by imitation of the Christ allow the Christ to be incarnate in him. We disciples, who are the men and women of knowledge, are to let the Christ be incarnate in our profession and way of life even thus: we are to offer up for their sake, those others, our student labour, our teacher skill. We must be victor, if God grant it, in the encounter in which knowledge is won, and our scholars must watch us and see our way. We must alike in the act of learning and teaching be men of selfsacrifice, of self-dedication; giving ourselves to the truth in God, that by the touch of our self-giving these, our youngers, may have power to sacrifice themselves and know what we have known. II. It is the vision of the Learned Life lived as a Christ-life, of the Incarnation enacted in the profession of those who know. It is a true and sober certainty that in the profession of the Tradition of Knowledge we may each work out a little part of the work of Christ: our profession may be a mode of that activity by which man fills up what is behind, not, it may be, of the afflictions, but of the travail of Christ Jesus. It, too, is a redemption of the world through sacrifice: the world is by us to be won back from that evil of which the names are ignorance, error, blindness, incompetence, by the self-giving of those who hold the good thing committed to us, the light of science, art", experience, of sacred and of secular knowledge. But the redemption will only be through sacrifice. For their sakes we must sanctify ourselves. J. Huntley Skrine, Sermons to Pastors and Masters, p. 58. The Consecration of Jesus John 17:19 In his instructive and profound book on the Religion of the Semites, Dr. Robertson Smith quotes, as containing the deepest conception of the Atonement, these words of our Lord, uttered as He knelt in prayer by the altar of the supreme sacrifice: 'For their sakes I consecrate Myself, that they also may be consecrated in truth'. Besson writes in his spiritual letters: 'It is in His Passion that the Saviour shows Himself, like the sun at midday, in all the ardour of His love'. And in the shadow of the cross, He who had schooled Himself daily to the repression of feeling spoke the secret of His life and death. He interpreted His whole work as a consecration in the power of love. On the cross He consecrated Himself as the atoning sacrifice the absolute oblation for the sins of the whole world. Here is the first aspect of the cross; its witness to the deep necessity of expiation, to the completeness of Christ's offering for sin. Before the death of Christ came His life, and that was a long selfsacrifice. It was willingly surrendered hour by hour till all the years were full. Then it was completed consummated in death. The consecration was for love of His friends, and it meant not merely self-surrender, but also self-purification. As Bishop Lightfoot has said, it implied the sanctification as well as the chivalry of friendship. For a sacrifice on God's altar must be without blemish. 'The Divine Μωμοσκόπος (I am employing the image of two apostolic fathers) scrutinises the victim with His piercing eye, lays bare the most secret thoughts and intents of the heart, detects the hidden faults which unfit him for a sacrificial victim.' So Christ's pastoral care and religious fellowship began and continued till He was laid at last a pure sacrificial offering on the altar of friendship. I. The great need of our time is a real consecration, and this must be a consecration after the same manner. II. In the first instance our duty is to those round us, and among the most favoured children of the world we may find many who, in respect of spiritual care, are as destitute as a man in a lighthouse. A generous friendship may only injure them; it is a consecrated friendship that may save them. A loving parent will not merely save money for his children; he will sanctify himself for their sakes. He will remember that he stands to them as the ideal of goodness and truth, he will realise the awful obligation implied in their pure belief about him, he will remember that he cannot take his own life without taking theirs. What unutterable loss if Christ had even for one moment failed to sanctify Himself! History tells us how wealth, in its hour of danger, has enlisted and exalted the priest, has made haste to shuffle on the cloak of hypocrisy. But no man can in any degree contribute to the salvation of society who does not purify himself. The gift is nothing without the giver. Consecration without sanctification is impossible. W. Robertson Nicoll, Ten Minute Sermons, p. 235. The Ministry of Holy Orders (An Ordination Sermon) John 17:19 There are many thoughts which must present themselves to a Christian mind in a ceremony so special and so sacred as an ordination, but I shall limit myself wholly or mainly this morning to one. Before the Bishop lays his hands upon you, suffer me to remind you that, as is your privilege, so, too, is your responsibility; as you are called to the most sacred office among men, so must you set yourselves with unfaltering purpose to elevate and consecrate your personal lives. 'For their sakes,' says the Saviour in the text, 'for their sakes I sanctify Myself.' Such was His holiness, His prerogative of sanctity, yet even this He would not claim or use for Himself; it was His, that He might in a measure transmit it as a sacred influence to others, even to those disciples whom He had trained to be the evangelists of the world. 'For their sakes,' He says, 'I sanctify Myself, that they also may be sanctified through the truth'. I. All Christian ministry is a reflection of the one perfect Divine ministry which once illuminated the world. He, who then came upon the earth, 'not to be ministered unto, but to minister,' was and described Himself as being 'the Truth'. He came to bear witness to the truth; every one that was of the truth heard His voice. Between the absolute truth impersonate in Jesus Christ and all individual truthful souls there was, and is, a communion of spiritual sympathy. But the paramount credential of His truth was His sanctity. To the Christian conscience many things may seem possible, but one is impossible it is impossible that Jesus Christ should lie. All that He says about Himself is, and must be, true. You and I have been called to a ministry not unlike His. In our ears, as in the Apostles' of old time, echoes the sacred declaration, 'As My Father hath sent Me, even so send I you'. We are witnesses and commissioners of the truth. II. A clergyman, in the very nature of his office, is one who should aspire to raise his life above the level of ordinary men. He is set apart by a special act of consecration. He accepts nay, he voluntarily seeks orders which are called holy; he professes that he is moved to seek them by the Spirit of God. He takes upon himself the solemn responsibility of teaching his fellow-men from year to year and from week to week what lives they ought to live. The very dress he wears should remind him that he more than other men needs clean hands and a pure heart, nor should he ever, I think, so far put off that dress as in appearance to discard or disown his clerical character. The very title of 'reverend' which men give him, however conventionally, in addressing him should stamp upon his heart the conviction that to be reverend is properly to be worthy of reverence. III. It will be an incalculable help to you in holy orders that you should lift yourselves nearer to heaven for the sake of so lifting your congregation. 'For their sakes I sanctify Myself,' said the Saviour. Try to sanctify yourselves, then, for your people's sake; do something that it is hard to do, and do it constantly, that you may walk in His footsteps. You can scarcely estimate as yet what a strength you will gain in the cause of temperance if you are a teetotaler, or in the cause of purity if you are a celibate, or in the cause of philanthropy if you are known to be regardless of personal gain. The motto, as it were, which I would leave with you for your future ministry shall be that moving Scriptural phrase, 'the beauty of holiness'. Not to be holy alone, although that is an arduous and almost an awful task, but by the beauty of a personal life to make a sinful world enamoured of the holiness which is in Jesus Christ and flows from Him; that is the supreme ideal of the Christian ministry. Bishop Welldon, The Gospel in a Great City, p. 114. Christ Sanctifying Himself John 17:19 I. Let us think of Jesus Christ sanctifying Himself for our sakes. The word 'sanctify' here does not mean what we understand by making holy Jesus Christ was ever holy. Just as in the Old Testament sundry things were set apart for God's use and service, consecrated by being separated for God, thus Jesus Christ speaks of Himself here as sanctified. There are three aspects in which we may look at this life of surrender to the will of God. (1) Think of Christ accepting the condition of utter dependence upon the Father. (2) See, again, how for our sakes He sets Himself apart, concealing His greatness and glory that He may become perfectly one with us. (3) This sanctification, this setting apart, is through the truth. He is set apart by the truth, girt and held by it. II. Consider His desire for our sanctification. Do you see that life finds its very meaning and worth in this surrender of ourselves for the sake of others? It is the devoted life that is the expanded and enlarged life. We must go out of ourselves to possess ourselves. The fullest life of all and the richest is ours when we set ourselves apart for the service of the Lord Jesus Christ III. How then may this sanctification be curs? This surrender is not to be vague and indefinite. As the train glides along so easily because its wheels are on the fixed and rigid iron rails, so in this setting apart of ourselves for the service of the Lord Jesus Christ we must ever get on the lines which He has laid down. (1) First, a life of simple dependence upon the will of God. (2) Then, too, we are to surrender ourselves to Him for the welfare of others, even as He set Himself apart for us. IV. This life is to be kept sanctified, separate, set apart by the truth. It means a stern, rigid, unfaltering loyalty to Jesus Christ Sanctified by the truth means this one thing to be true to Jesus Christ. M. G. Pearse, The Gentleness of Jesus, p. 89. References. XVII. 19. Archbishop Lang, A Lent in London, p. 186. W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, p. 347. XVII. 19-21. C. S. Macfarland, The Spirit Christlike, p. 71. XVII. 20. W. M. Sinclair, Simplicity in Christ, p. 3. J. Bannerman, Sermons, p. 177. A. Duff, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlv. p. 40. C. J. Vaughan, The Prayers of Jesus Christ, p. 105. XVII. 20, 21. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xii. No. 668. H. C. G. Moule, The High Priestly Prayer, p. 157. J. N. Bennie, The Eternal Life, p. 29. F. de W. Lushington, Sermons to Young Boys, p. 114. R. Flint, Sermons and Addresses, p. 11. XVII. 20-22. E. H. Bickersteth, Thoughts in Past Years, p. 229. XVII. 20-26. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 203. XVII. 21. T. Binney, King's Weigh-House Chapel Sermons (2nd Series), p. 294. H. C. G. Moule, The High Priestly Prayer, p. 164. Expositor (6th Series), vol. v. p. 300. XVII. 21, 22. C. Bigg, The Spirit of Christ in Common Life, p. 222. XVII. 21-23. H. S. Holland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlv. p. 406. H. C. G. Moule, The High Priestly Prayer, p. 171. XVII. 22. J. R. M. Mitchell, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliv. p. 11. XVII. 22, 23. W. C. Smith, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliv. p. 241. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxv. No. 1472. J. A. Robinson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lv. p. 173. R. W. Dale, Fellowship with Christ, p. 304. XVII. 23. O. Bronson, Sermons, p. 97. Expositor (5th Series), vol. v. p. 33. XVII. 23, 26. Ibid. (6th Series), vol. x. p. 33. XVII. 24. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. iv. No. 188; vol. xxxii. No. 1892, and vol. xl. No. 2376. H. C. G. Moule, The High Priestly Prayer, pp. 175, 185, 192. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in a Religious House, vol. i. p. 123. Expositor (5th Series), vol. ix. p. 300. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 206. XVII. 25. H. C. G. Moule, The High Priestly Prayer, p. 206. Expositor (6th Series), vol. x. p. 358. The Righteous Father Revealed By Christ John 17:25-26 These great words form a part of the High Priestly prayer of our Divine Lord offered immediately before his Gethsemane agony. The fact that they are the closing words of that wonderful prayer invests them with profound and solemn meaning. I. Our Lord announces Himself as the revealer of the Divine name. 'I have declared, or made known unto them Thy name, and will make it known.' II. The purpose for which Christ Jesus revealed the Divine name. 'That the love wherewith Thou hast loved Me may be in them, and I in them.' (1) The Father's love is confiding. 'The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into His hand' (John 3:35 ). (2) The Father's love was communicative. 'The Father loveth the Son and sheweth Him all things that Himself doeth' (John 5:20 ). (3) The Father's love was distinguished for its constancy. (4) The Father's love to the Son was a love of complacency, of holy delight, of unqualified approval. Strive to obtain a worthy conception of the Father's love to the Son in its height, depth, intensity and constancy, and then judge yourself by this lofty standard. Richard Roberts, My Jewels, p. 207. References. XVII. 25, 26. F. J. A. Hort, Village Sermons in Outline, p. 42. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxiii. No. 1378. H. C. G. Moule, The High Priestly Prayer, p. 199. XVII. 26. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxviii. No. 1667. H. C. G. Moule, The High Priestly Prayer, p. 213. E. A. Stuart, Church Family Newspaper, vol. xiv. p. 752. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 210. XVIII. 1, 2. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlviii. No. 2767. XVIII. 1-8. G. Body, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlv. p. 193. XVIII. 4. Expositor (5th Series), vol. i. p. 193; ibid. (6th Series), vol. iii. p. 472. XVIII. 6-9. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 219. XVIII. 8. C. Bosanquet, The Consoler and the Sufferer, p. 161. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlv. No. 2616. XVIII. 8, 9. Ibid. vol. xii. No. 722, and vol. xl. No. 2368. XVIII. 10. J. W. Burgon, Servants of Scripture, p. 79. Expositor (5th Series), vol. ix. p. 118. XVIII. 11. R. F. Horton, The Hidden God, p. 99. J. Stalker, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvi. p. 264. C. Bosanquet, The Consoler and the Sufferer, p. 177. S. McPhail, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lix. p. 404. XVIII. 12, 13. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlix. No. 2820. XVIII. 13. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 88. XVIII. 15. Ibid. vol. iv. p. 330. XVIII. 15-27. G. Jackson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lviii. p. 284. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 230. XVIII. 16, 17. Expositor (5th Series), vol. vi. p. 82. XVIII. 18. Ibid. (4th Series), vol. iii. p. 226; ibid. (5th Series), vol. i. p. 461. XVIII. 19-23. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlix. No. 2820. The Candour of Christ John 18:20 Among the attributes of our Redeemer's speech one which arrests attention is its candour. In our text our Lord lays claim to a great openness, and it is a claim which cannot be disputed. Of course this candour of our Lord and Master was always at the service of His love. It was the instrument of a pure and perfect sympathy which knew that there were seasons to be silent. We may trace this candour of our Lord in many spheres. I. In His treatment of those who came to Him. He scorned to disguise the truth about the future from those who sought an entrance to His kingdom. He never hides, from those who wish to serve Him, that right in the path of the future is a cross. And this is the candour not of indifference but of love, which shrinks from the least appearance of deception, and will have no man say, in bitter moments, that he was tricked into discipleship by guile. II. Again we note the candour of our Lord in the charges which He hurled against the Pharisees. In the whole range of human utterance there are no more deadly or awful accusations. There is a deep sense in which it was Christ's candour that brought Him at last to His death upon the cross. There are times in every life when it takes a certain courage to be quiet. To every man and woman there comes seasons when the path of duty is the path of silence. But remember if it takes courage to be quiet, it also may call for courage to be frank. And when the heart is sensitive and tender, and shrinks instinctively from causing pain, the duty of candour becomes doubly difficult. All that ought to be borne in mind when we consider the candour of our Lord. III. Again we note the candour of our Lord in saying that there were things He did not know. Think, for example, of the account He gives of the final coming of the Son of man. Having described that hour, our Saviour adds that He does not know that hour 'Of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the Son, but the Father'. It seems to me that such a splendid candour, with all the inevitable risks it brought, is a mightier argument for trusting Christ than many which the theologians adduce. Those who know most are always the most ready to tell you frankly what they do not know. IV. Then the last sphere in which I note this frankness is in His intercourse with His disciples. There is no friendship worthy of the name for the man who wraps his nature in reserve. What is the response this should evoke from us? Charles Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby says: 'Among men who have any sound and sterling qualities, there is nothing so contagious as pure openness of heart'. Christ, then, opens His heart to you; will you not respond by opening yours to Him? G. H. Morrison, The Wings of the Morning, p. 55. References. XVIII. 20, 21. C. Bosanquet, The Consoler and the Sufferer, p. 192. XVIII. 24. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlix. No. 2822. XVIII. 25. J. R. Miller, Preachers Magazine, vol. xix. p. 83. XVIII. 26. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxv. No. 2106. XVIII. 28-40. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 236. XVIII. 33-38. Expositor (5th Series), vol. vii. p. 218. Reality in Religious Inquiry John 18:34 That makes all the difference in the world. How do we come to ask questions? what is the occasion or the motive of our inquiry? Are we mere gabblers and gossipers, or are we thinkers and students? Do we ask questions which other people have prompted, or do we ask only the questions of our own heart? Here, as ever, Jesus Christ is the teacher and the example. Pilate entered into the judgment hall again, and called Jesus and said unto Him, Art Thou the king of the Jews? Jesus answered him, How did you come to ask this question? have you any real deep interest in the inquiry? or have you only picked up the rumour of the day? does the question come from your tongue or from your heart? tell me that, and I will answer. Thus He sits in His heavens, and every day talks in the same grand frank manner. Jesus does not answer the gossip of the ages, the new attacks that are made upon His name and upon His kingdom, the clever sallies and the bitter sneers He heeds not; but if any soul will come to Him sunk right down in penitence and brokenheartedness, and say, Lord, I want to know what this means; wilt Thou tell me? oh, let me lay my weary head for one moment on Thy lap and sob out all that is in my troubled heart! then Jesus will stay the sun, and the moon shall hang over Ajalon till the great colloquy is complete in the man's redemption. I. When coming to church only bring your own questions with you; do not trouble with other people's business until your own is settled, and when you have found an answer to your own doubt and fear, then go out and find some other man, and tell him that if he wants the same balm he must go to the same Gilead. This would abbreviate conversation, this would stop many theological reviews; this would do a world of good by first doing a world of mischief amongst the poor petty things that are set up against the incoming of the kingdom of God. Beware of those people who have reduced life to an illegitimate science of explanations. It will be a poor religion that can be explained, a poor little withered, shrivelled sky that you can get under your plaster ceiling. II. We want personal experience, personal testimony, personal affirmation. That was the great power of apostolic preaching. When the Apostle Paul stood up anywhere he always said, Men, brethren, and fathers, I It was a right royal egotism, a magnificent audacity in personality; the man told what he was, what he is, how he came from the was to the is, and it was a great turnpike of facts, personal and well-attested incidents; and so clear, ample, definite was the testimony that before you could disbelieve the argument you must destroy the character of the man. That was preaching, and under it men used to rise from their seats, which they never do now; under such apostolic preaching men were pricked to the heart, and they cried out that would be indecorous now. We have run theology into a science, and piety into a decorum. When men want to know the truth because there is a pain in their hearts they will surely get that truth, God will not deny such dumb prayers. He looks down upon all who come to His house, and He says in effect, Here is a man whose very muteness is eloquence; here is a soul whose look is consecration; here is a brokenhearted inquiry, the tears shall be turned into a chrism, the tears shall be turned into waters of baptism and shall fall again in great blessing on the troubled and bleeding heart. III. When men went to Jesus He always put to them this question, or He always operated as if He presupposed the individuality and consequent reality of the appeal. Once a man crept into his house by night, and he was detained there until the morning. You may depend upon it Jesus saw in him something worthy of attention. The man was deferential, more than deferential, he was truly reverent, and he said, Master, we know that Thou art a teacher sent from God, for no man can do these miracles miracles with this peculiar quality and accent, these miracles that Thou doest except God be with him. Miracles that require testimonials are poor miracles, but when men recognise in the miracles their own testimonials, the quality being so rich, and the purpose of their being wrought so beneficent, then there will be a great incoming to see and to testify the wonders and the realities of the kingdom of God. Nicodemus was kept all night; he heard such a sermon as no other man ever heard; the sermon has, blessed be God, been published for the instruction and edification of the world. I wonder how many of us could repeat that sermon by heart? There is no way over that sermon into the blank desert land of infidelity; it is so rich, so utterly comely, so spiritual, so comforting and sustaining; it brings with it such a great light and such a glorious redemption that when it has ceased we wonder that such music should ever come to an end. He who has read the interview of Christ with Nicodemus cannot be an infidel, does not want to be one; he finds in it enough for intellect, heart, imagination, and the immediate claim and responsibility of life. References. XVIII. 34. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlv. No. 2624. Joseph Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol. ii. p. 146. Expositor (6th Series), vol. x. p. 277. The Kingdom of Christ John 18:36 These words are not merely the rejection of one alternative, they are the affirmation of another. There is a kingdom of which Jesus Christ claims to be the Ruler, but it is not an earthly one. He refuses to leave His Judge under a mistaken impression. It is remarkable that all four Evangelists give us in almost the same language the question of Pilate and the answer of Christ as to the Kingship of our Lord. Art Thou a king? or Art Thou the king of the Jews? gets the reply, 'Thou sayest it' in other words, 'Thou sayest right. I am a king.' What seemingly strange contrasts in mental attitude may be noticed in Jesus Christ! In His daring declaration of His official position we catch a very different note from that struck when He is acknowledging the loneliness or difficulty of His everyday life. Is it the same Person Who says at one time, 'The Son of man hath not where to lay His head,' and at another makes the great declaration, 'To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise,' in response to the cry of 'Lord, remember me when Thou comest into Thy kingdom'? The boldness of Jesus Christ in His official capacity is remarkable. He is labouring to win the world, yet He adopts means calculated to repel the worldling. What attraction could there be to any self-seeking listener in the words 'My kingdom is not of this world'? The immediate result must surely be to make all to whom the things of earth are precious turn away from One Who in effect says that there is no temporal glory to be gained by enlisting under His banner. 'He that will come after Me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me.' The only thing that seems to be assured to the subject of the kingdom of Christ is that if he is loyal he shall suffer at the world's hands. Jesus Christ showed, indeed, in the whole of His scheme for this world's betterment what one writer calls a 'prodigious originality'. I. How unlike are His methods to those used by ordinary people who desire influence, and, indeed, to those recommended by some of the shrewd ones of the earth! Jesus Christ makes no attempt to win popular favour. Time and again He has opportunities which He seems almost of set determination to reject He receives worldly advice from those who have thrown in their lot with Him; He repels it with indignation, going so far in one case as to tell St. Peter that. He regards his counsel as proceeding from Satan himself. Again, He will not ask for national patronage or protection for His teaching, or for its exponents. His attitude in the judgment-hall is that which He imposes upon His followers. Instead of allowing an appeal to the then mistress of the world, the Roman Empire, He ostracises His disciples. The days are to come when 'Whosoever killeth' a Christian 'shall think that He doeth God a service'. None of those ties which bind men together are to be used for the advancement of Christianity. Nay, the faith of our Lord is to be the innocent cause of disunion between members of the same household; the crucified Saviour has a sword in His hand. Nor shall the Faith be propagated by the great ones of the earth. The army of Christ is captained by a few fisherfolk, and the weak are chosen to confound the strong. Still, there is absolute confidence as to victory. No deep-laid plans, no long debates, no council of war distinguish the ushering in of the new kingdom. The demand of Jesus Christ for recognition as the example and the King of humanity is decisive and unqualified. It is, indeed, Pilate himself who, all unknowingly, acts as herald of the new Monarch when He brings Jesus before the people and cries: Behold the man, Behold your King. Had it been a worldly Empire that was desired, the means used no doubt would have been different. It was to be a kingdom truly a kingdom in the world assuredly but not a kingdom of the world. The new Sovereign was to lead His subjects to regard what to the worldly was precious as unworthy of the citizens of the heavenly kingdom. All the poor motives actuating humanity were to be enriched by a willing subjection to a new set of ideals, the laws of the new Monarch. II. We find, however, that there is no forcing of the world into obedience. The sword of the King is not to be used in order to coerce into subjection, but in order to cut down the obstacles impeding the progress of humanity on its way to the kingdom of heaven. Jesus Christ has no room in His Empire for slaves. Those who accept His sovereignty must do so of their own free will. They are to be inspired to do so by the realisation, through knowledge of the King, that he supplies in His personality the demands of our loyalty. 'My kingdom is not of this world.' It does not originate in this world, it is not inspired by worldly ideals. Would you be subjects of it you must get above the world. With this feeling in the soul, humanity can soon realise that Christ is its King. But until there is this longing for the unworldly there cannot be the readiness to subjection to Christ. It is too much the habit of Christian teachers today to assume that by earthly means you can change hearts. Our Lord wins not by careful instruction, not by the world's means, but by the persuasion of His personality. Assuredly the kingdom of Christ is not of this world. Earth has neither the power nor the love to accomplish such results as He attained. But in order to win men to loyalty, to nerve to heroism, to stimulate in effort, to raise above the world, the methods of Christ are true ones. Man only lives when he has learned the beauty of losing his life for what is noble. Man is then only useful to the world when he is not of the world. Man is only man when he has got ideals which lift him up beyond his worldly self: Unless above himself he can Exalt himself, how poor a thing is man. To do the right in an unworldly way is, after all, the Christlike attitude. Does not this help us to see the usefulness of all faithful and unselfish labour? How strange, for instance, it is to think of antagonism between the Christian and the man of science! The searcher after truth in any field is a partner with, and at the same time a subject of, Jesus Christ. There is no one who with unworldly motive is giving himself to such study as may make clearer to men the mind of the Almighty who is not doing Christlike work. To Jesus was confided the grandest of all tasks the subjection of mankind to a life of high ideals, the raising of human nature to a heavenly atmosphere, to the acceptance of the sovereignty of the Crucified. So long as work, of whatever kind, is being done on such lines the worker is one who has indeed a kingdom, but whose realm is above and beyond this world. H. Russell Wakefield, The Guardian, 18th November, 1910. John 18:36 As Christianity appeared amid the imperial civilisation of Rome, so now, amid the chaos of modern civilisation, music starts forth on a similar mission. Each exclaims, 'My kingdom is not of this world'. Wagner. John 18:36 Christ's kingdom was not of this world. Not only did the manner of His death annihilate the aspirations of all who had hoped for a temporal Messiah, but it is clear from the silence or brevity of pagan writers that the whole series of events which culminated in the Crucifixion passed unnoticed by the Roman world, and were for the public of the day of no political importance. Christianity could never have attained its spirituality, its adaptability to all climes and races, had it been connected with any particular form of government or society. But in the history of Mohammedanism all these conditions were reversed. The temporal success of the founder has proved ultimately the failure of his system as a worldwide religion. He was not crucified. On the contrary, it is eminently characteristic of him that he declined to believe that Christ suffered this punishment, evidently considering that God could not have allowed so great a Prophet to perish so ignaminiously. Sir Charles Eliot, Turkey in Europe, p. 164. References. XVIII. 36. F. Paget, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvi. p. 245. R. J. Wardell, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xix. p. 28. J. Clifford, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliii. p. 280. J. B. Mozley, University Sermons, p. 1. J. M. Gibbon, Christian World Pulpit, vol. li. p. 296. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. iv. p. 310. XVIII. 36-39. C. Bosanquet, The Consoler and the Sufferer, p. 224. The Divine Power of the Cross John 18:37 The question was put in scornful incredulity, perhaps in jest: the answer was a solemn and emphatic affirmative. In the days of His popularity He had refused to be made a king. He had never called Himself a king. In the hour of His deepest humiliation, when everything seemed lost except His goodness, He was most of all the King. He knew then, what we know now, that His real kingship would come from His cross, that His true crown would be woven out of these thorns and nails and spears, and that in the hours of utter weakness and shame would be laid the foundations of His worldwide throne of power. I. To take any sort of general survey of Christendom is to see that it is the cross power of Jesus which has given Him dominance and supremacy in the thoughts of men, that His sufferings have lifted Him into kingship. Pass through any of those lands where the Romish Church holds sway, and you meet at every turn with symbols and figures of the Crucified. I do not say that all this cruel realism is beautiful, or that these often vulgar representations of His physical agony appeal to our highest sense of reverence. I only emphasise this fact, that in all these lands it is the cross which holds men's minds and a sacrificial love which constrains their worship. Nor is it greatly otherwise in Protestant lands, though we use few or no pictures and images to stimulate faith's sluggish imagination. Ever on the horizon of our devotions nay, in the very centre of our worship there is a cross. II. Again, when we try to estimate the Saviour's power over the thoughts, emotions, and actions of men, we fix our eyes once more upon the cross, and there begin, continue, and end. The charm of His human personality has swayed and enraptured a few minds, but the mass of men have been melted and overpowered by the mystery of His sacrifice, and the pathos of His tears. Truly, it is Calvary that has made Him king. III. And now when we ask the secret of this power we are baffled. It is for the most part inscrutable. We can but see this much that it draws the human heart to it with irresistible force, because there (1) the heavy-laden conscience of the world finds deliverence. (2) Again, the cross has drawn the human heart because continually have men felt that it brought God down into the sphere of human sorrows and made Him an inseparable part of the pangs and griefs of His afflicted children. (3) And, lastly, the cross is slowly drawing the whole world to it because the world in its deepest and truest thoughts is more and more discerning and feeling that only in the spirit of the cross, in the thoughts and ideals and motives of the cross and the spread of these things through the mass of human life, can there be any hope of the regeneration of humanity and the renewal of the world. J. G. Greenhough, The Cross in Modern Life, p. 14. References. XVIII. 37. Bishop Stubbs, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlv. p. 129. H. H. Almond, Sermons by a Lay Head Master, p. 130. S. A. Tipple, The Admiring Guest, p. 15. W. E. Chadwick, The Record, vol. xxvii. p. 1012. W. Mair, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lii. p. 26. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xviii. No. 1086; vol. xlix. No. 2826. J. Keble, Sermons for the Holy Week, p. 57. Walter C. Smith, Sermons, p 182. John 18:38 But what is truth? 'Twas Pilate's question put To Truth itself, that deigned him no reply. And wherefore? will not God impart His light To them that ask it? Freely 'tis His joy, His glory and His nature, to impart. But to the proud, uncandid, insincere, Or negligent enquirer, not a spark. Cowper. References. XVIII. 38. A. G. Mortimer, The Church's Lessons for the Christian Year, pt. ii. p. 330. Bishop Winnington-Ingram, The Men who Crucify Christ, p. 20. J. Gasquoine, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlv. p. 132. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxviii. No. 1644. S. A. Brooke, Sermons (2nd Series), p. 294. Expositor (5th Series), vol. vi. p. 359. XVIII. 40. G. W. Brameld, Practical Sermons, p. 117. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. x. No. 595. C. Stanford, The Evening of our Lord's Ministry, p. 273. XIX. 1. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. iii. p. 328. XIX. 1-6. C. Stanford, The Evening of our Lord's Ministry, p. 289. XIX. 1-16. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 244. XIX. 4-6. H. S. Holland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvii. p. 321. XIX. 5. Archbishop Magee, Sermons at Bath, p. 149. C. S. Macfarland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lx. p. 119. R. J. Campbell, City Temple Sermons, p. 50. XIX. 6. T. F. Crosse, Sermons (2nd Series) p. 58. The Silence of Jesus John 19:8-9 The Lord Jesus did not deal with every man in precisely the same way. If you would not misunderstand my meaning, I would say that He was not equally frank with every man, but treated each according to the spirit which He found in each. As I have been meditating on the deportment of the Living and Incarnate Word in this recorded instance, I think I have seen in Him a close analogy to the Written Word. The Scriptures, which are so responsive to some, are silent to others. The extent to which the Bible is a revelation to any man is conditioned very largely by the moral character and distinctive principles of the man himself. I. Among the influences in men which make the Bible a silent book to them, we find prejudice. If you bring a full pitcher to the spring, you can take no water away from it. If the mind be already made up to reject the Bible, it can get no answers from it to any of its questions. We must not, therefore, allow ourselves to be overawed by the mental greatness of many who have affirmed that Jesus in the Scriptures has given no answer to them. For more than intellect is needed here even the docile, candid, guileless spirit, together with the religious sense; and in the absence of these, the mightiest mind will go astray. Here is the law: 'If any man be willing to do His will, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself'. Nor ought it to be forgotten here that the same prejudice that makes the Scriptures as a whole a sealed book to so many operates also in the embittering of religious controversy, and the keeping of Christians from coming to agreement regarding the teachings of the Bible. II. Habitual indulgence in sin will prevent us from receiving any answers to our inquiries from the Scriptures. The man who is constantly hammering boiler plates soon becomes deaf from the very noise which he and his fellow-workmen make by their hammering. The hand becomes horny and callous by the constant doing of that very thing which at first blistered it and made it bleed. And in the same way the conscience becomes hardened, and the spiritual perception becomes blinded by habitual sin. When the life is immoral the Scriptures are silent to the man. III. The influence of sceptical philosophy makes the Bible silent to those who are under its power. For this again is a case of prejudice. A man comes to the Scriptures with convictions already formed which are at variance with their principles, and so it is not strange that they have nothing for him; and before he gets any help out of them, or any revelation that will benefit him, he must get rid of the false philosophy which he has accepted. The sum of the matter, then, is that what we get from Christ or from the Scriptures will depend entirely on the disposition which we bring to Him or them. References. XIX. 10. A. M. Fairbairn, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvi. p. 113. XIX. 10, 11. H. P. Liddon, University Sermons (2nd Series), p. 300. C. Bosanquet, The Consoler and the Sufferer, p. 241. R. J. Campbell, Sermons Addressed to Individuals, p. 51. XIX. 11. R. W. Dale, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlviii. p. 203. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. iii. p. 349. Expositor (6th Series), vol. xii. p. 33. XIX. 12-16. H. S. Seekings, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xviii. p. 124. XIX. 13. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. iii. p. 363. Expositor (4th Series), vol. viii. pp. 221, 296; ibid. vol. ix. p. 123. XIX. 14. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxiii. No. 1353. Expositor (4th Series), vol. v. p. 19. XIX. 16. J. J. Blunt, Plain Sermons, p. 186. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. ix. No. 497. Expositor (6th Series), vol. ii. p. 59. XIX. 16, 17. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. i. p. 231. XIX. 17. W. P. Balfern, Lessons from Jesus, p. 217. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxviii. No. 1683. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. iii. p. 380. XIX. 17, 18. A. M. Fairbairn, Christian World Pulpit, vol. li. p. 328. XIX. 17-30. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 252. XIX. 18. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. iii. p. 399. The Inscription on the Cross John 19:19 Let us read this inscription in the light of its setting. I take three points. First, the consummating claim of Christ. Secondly, the proofs of that claim. And thirdly, the unalterable verdict which each man must pass upon it. I. First, the consummating claim of Christ. Every reader of the New Testament is familiar with the claims made by Jesus. (1) He claimed, to begin with, to be the final moral authority of the race. When He stood up in the synagogues, when He gathered His disciples around Him, when He spoke at men's tables or to the multitudes by the seashore or in the Temple, He claimed to make the final and absolute revelation of the things of God. (2) A second claim Jesus made was to a perfect holiness. This claim very naturally was seldom openly on His lips. Only once, when slander was busy with His life and depreciation was quick with its scorn, did He put the question, 'Which man of you convicteth Me of sin?' (3) A third claim of Jesus is to be the judge of all men. It is one of the slightly noticed marvels of Christ's life that all who stand in His presence find themselves judged. What He claimed in parable and in prophecy, what men felt instinctively when He was on earth, as we all feel it now, was what Paul declared in his solemn words, 'We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ'. (4) But Christ's consummating claim is to be a king. Jesus might have been the last and greatest prophet of God, the supreme authority of the conscience, the wearer of a stainless moral beauty, and even the instant and final judge of humanity, and yet He would not have been enthroned as a king. As a matter of simple fact, Christ did not achieve His kinghood until He hung where Pilate nailed Him and set His title over His head on the cross. It is the cross of Christ which is His throne. It was because He hung upon the cross that His followers went out into all the lands where Caesar's name was known speaking of 'Another king, one Jesus'. II. In the second place, the proof of this claim. The first line of proof must lie within the Gospels. This first line of proof broadens out to a second which may have a more convincing appeal for some minds. That proof is the history of Christendom and the increasing dominion of its Christ. Who is king today? Enter any picture gallery and you will find that the face which hangs on every wall is the face of Him in whom the excellency of the knowledge of the glory of God has been revealed. Charles Lamb set the truth in his own quaint and tender way, when he said that if Shakespeare entered the room we should all rise and bow, but if Jesus came in we should all kneel. There is a third line of proof which I do no more than mention. That is the personal devotion of His subjects. The imagination falters when it attempts in a backward glance to call up the millions who have lived and died for Jesus. The unquestioned heroes of humanity are the saints and martyrs of Christ Their names shine like the stare of the firmament. Their sainthood at its best and highest has the wisdom and sanity and joy and the splendour of sacrifice which only the devotion to their king can give. III. In the third place, there is the unalterable verdict on this claim. Towards this claim of Jesus there were three attitudes taken up on the day of the cross. These three attitudes are taken up today. Some, like the chief priests, fiercely deny it. You can hear their cries repeated in much of our popular literature. It is keen with confident protest in the pages of the subtle criticism of unbelieving scholarship. It is hoarse with passion in the secular journals of the mob. Again, some, like Pilate, disregard it. Much that Jesus said and did evokes their sympathy and wins their commendation. But His claim to be the king, with absolute authority over the lives and destinies of men, they think to be an unreality, and a demand to be ignored. The third attitude is that of those who, like Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene and John the disciple, read the inscription and bow down in consent. But mark this truth, that whether a man deny it, or disregard it, or consent to it in devotion, he comes to a day and an hour when he finds his verdict unalterable, and he uses the words of Pilate either in pride or in petulance or in adoring gladness, 'What I have written I have written'. W. M. Clow, The Day of the Cross, p. 199. References. XIX. 19. J. Trevor, Types and the Antitype, p. 232. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 258. XIX. 19, 20. J. Macdonald, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lv. p. 326. Bishop Alexander, Verbum Crucis, p. 111. The Threefold Inscription on the Cross John 19:20 What were these three languages used in the inscription that hung above the head of the dying Jesus? Each had its own note, its own significance and character, summing up in itself the character of a nation. The Hebrew was the language of religion; the Greek was the language of culture; the Latin was the language of power. I. And Pilate wrote a title and put it on the cross, and it was written in Hebrew and Hebrew is the language of religion. The Hebrew did not argue the existence of God: he presupposed it. He is the crowning achievement of a race whose special mission it was to reveal God, and that writing on the cross is indelible, and amid all the changes of the ages has only grown clearer and more indubitable in significance Jesus, the king of the Jews. For us, on whom the ends of the world have come, the lesson is, then, unmistakable. In the language sacred to religion Jesus is proclaimed the King of all religion. In no other religion, in no other scheme of morality or social service, can we find security; we are driven to the refuge of Christ. II. And Pilate wrote a title and put it on the cross, and it was written in Greek, the language of culture 'Jesus the King'. How may we best sum up the essence and spirit of Greek teaching and philosophy? Broadly generalising, we may say that the Greek had taught the world two things, the first of which was the deification of the present. The Greek had also done another thing for the world: he had boldly created his gods out of the materials of human nature. For us, again, the lesson is clear. The spirit of the Greek has not left, and will never leave, the world. Wherever there is youth, there is the love of life, and joy in the beauty of the earth, and the deification of the present. No man can ever reach the full stature of his intellectual life who is ignorant of Christ. III. And Pilate wrote a title, and put it on the cross, and it was written in Latin, the language of power 'Jesus the King'. Three great ideals governed the Roman civilisation, and they also, but in a nobler form, were the ideals of Jesus. (1) Rome sought to fashion unity in religion, and so did Jesus, when He reduced religion to its simplest elements. (2) Rome aimed at universality in empire, and so did Jesus only He sought to gain it by spiritual and not carnal weapons. (3) Rome taught worship of the State as the basis of all religion, and fidelity to the State as the highest expression of religion: Jesus also taught that loyalty to the invisible kingdom of God and His righteousness was the only real form of religion. The title of king is written on the cross: do we discern therein mockery or truth? Can it be truly said that Christ has proved Himself a king? I think it can, and eighteen centuries are its witness. W. J. Dawson, The Comrade Christ, p. 113. The Inscription on the Cross John 19:20 Bishop Pearson, speaking of languages as part of the requirements for a theologian, says, ' Tres in titulo crucis consecratae sunt '. His words were quoted by Bishop King of Lincoln in his paper on Clerical Study. The Love and Wisdom of God, p. 344. References. XIX. 22. G. T. Newton, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xii. p. 108. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. iv. p. 103. Expositor (6th Series), vol. v. p. 119. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 266. XIX. 23. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ix. p. 458. Mary the Mother of Jesus John 19:25 Mary standing by the cross, patient and resigned, in the unspeakable anguish of her motherhood, is doing the typical deed of her life. No other could so fully have told the story or interpreted the mind of Jesus, yet no syllable, either of appeal or of protest or of sorrow, come from her. And as we think upon her character, it seems to express itself in three dominating traits. I. Of these three outstanding features the first is her inwardness. It is difficult to express in a single word that quality which penetrates her whole thought and action, but there is no better word for it than inwardness. Her spotless purity to the utmost depths of thought and motive; her lowly, simple ways; her few, soft appealing words; her gracious considerateness; her marvellous silences; her tenderness of feeling 'a thought ungentle couldna be the thought' of Mary of Nazareth all indicate the inwardness of her character. When we think of the vanity which might have been bred in her by such a Son, the presumption which might have marked her words and deeds, when we realise how impossible to her is any flaunting forwardness, we understand that deep inwardness which kept silent when other women wailed around her, which had no cry even to the cross, which could nourish the sure persuasion that He who reads the hearts of all would discern her sorrow and supply her need. II. The second notable trait of Mary's character is her submissiveness. Art, with its keen eye for a pathetic and typical situation, has often drawn Mary at the foot of the cross, and always in the attitude of perfect submission, not even lifting her eyes. Her sorrow can be matched by that of no other, yet she stands uncomplaining, fulfilling her last obedience, steadfast in her faith. That act of submission was but the summing up of her life, the closing and final expression of that grace which bore the rebuke at the marriage feast without rejoinder, accepted His perplexing words, 'Wist ye not that I must be about My Father's business,' without further chiding, and first of all, when the secret of the Lord was with her, and He showed her His covenant, bowed low before the will of God with her meek answer, 'Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it unto me according to Thy word'. III. The third notable trait in Mary's character is her selfsacrifice. The sacrifice of the cross is the sacrifice of Jesus. But it was the sacrifice of the Father likewise 'who spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all'. And it was also the sacrifice of Mary, who stood in meek acquiescence to see her Son die. This sacrifice of Mary has been finely conceived by Holman Hunt He has drawn the carpenter's shop at Nazareth. Jesus stands at His bench with uplifted arms, as though in a moment of aspiration, and Mary, stooping behind Him, sees the shadow of His arms cast on a wall before Him. To her foreboding heart, it is the shadow of a cross. It is a fine suggestion of the chilling fear which early possessed her heart, and became a heavier sorrow as He passed onward in His ministry, and now was realised in this dying hour. 'A sword shall pierce their own heart also,' Simeon had prophesied. Now standing by the cross she felt its sharp thrust, and she bowed her head as she made the mother's last sacrifice 'The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord,' was the psalm that she chanted in spirit. W. M. Clow, The Day of the Cross, p. 255. The Two Saint Maries At the Cross John 19:25 Truly the Captain of our salvation, who knew what was in man, chose for Himself most valiant soldiers to assist at His death. His Blessed Mother whose trust never wavered; the thief, who, next to her, showed greater faith than any other Saint; St. Mary Magdalene who so resolutely followed His example in despising the shame. We read of a captain in the Old Testament who chose out a place where he knew that the valiant men were. Of all such places that the world has ever seen, the greatest was the foot of the cross. J. M. Neale, Sermons in Sackville College Chapel, vol. iv. p. 69. References. XIX. 25. G. A. Berry, Vision and Duty, p. 157. J. Keble, Sermons for the Holy Week, p. 192. H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 1682, p. 495. C. F. Aked, The Courage of the Coward, p. 117. J. C. M. Bellew, Christ in Life; Life in Christ, p. 302. John Hunter, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvi. p. 296. R. C. Trench, Sermons New and Old, p. 241. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. iv. p. 67. W. M. Clow, The Day of the Cross, p. 283. Expositor (6th Series), vol. viii. p. 355; ibid. (7th Series), vol. v. p. 36; ibid. vol. vi. p. 468. XIX. 25, 26. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. i. p. 244. XIX. 25-27. Bishop Welldon, The Gospel in a Great City, p. 181. XIX. 26. A. G. Mortimer, The Chief Virtues of Man, p. 47. Expositor (6th Series), vol. vi. p. 106. The Considerateness of Jesus John 19:26-27 I. It is neither wise nor true to the spirit of the Evangelists to make too much of the physical suffering of the cross. Jesus Himself despised it. But here it adds to the grace and greatness of His deed. He came to Calvary after a night of sleeplessness, following on the agony in the garden, when the sweat stood like drops of blood on His brow. During the long anguish of the morning, He stood for hours with no one to bid Him rest, and He was scourged and crowned with thorns, and smitten by the soldier's rough palms. His limbs refused the weight of the cross on the way. He came to His dying act, with every nerve quivering with exhaustion, and every muscle crying out with pain. He hung upon His cross, with the nails piercing His hands and feet, and He felt the agony of an unappeasable thirst, and that slow chill which told Him that the shadow of death was upon Him. And although it may not so stir our human imagination, still more awful was the travail of His soul. The burden of human sin which He must bear alone, and the felt approach of that tide of forsakenness which swept for a moment between Him and the Father, were agonies which even David's conscience could not have fathomed. Who would have aught but words of praise had He concentrated every thought and word on the great redemption deed? Yet He lifts His eyes to look upon His mother. A flood of recollection, we can boldly say of Him who took upon Him our nature, passed over Him. The home in Nazareth, in His vision, hid the walls of Jerusalem. The crooning of His mother's voice as she sung her lullaby to Him; the feel and pressure of His mother's arms; the tending of her care as His boyhood grew to strength; the reverent wondering of her mind as He bore more plainly the marks of His divinity, and the piercing of her heart as He strained forward to the cross all came back to Him. Now also clear before Him rises the picture of her future. The widow's loneliness made more desolate, the whitened hair given another sorrow as it goes down to the grave, age feeling its failing strength, poverty and homelessness stinting her of the sweet comforts of life! He masters His agony, He refuses His groan, and in brief words, never forgotten by two of those who heard them, He said: 'Woman, behold thy Son'. 'Son, behold thy mother.' The disciple, who understood Jesus best, fulfilled His charge by taking her to his own home. Love needs only a hint. II. Every one must feel the charm and power of this grace of considerateness. Every one realises the wideness or its sphere. Of deeds like this our human hearts and lives are in sore and constant need. The spheres in which this grace is most needed are always those in which it seems to be most difficult of exercise. It is easiest in the greater experiences of life, in times of trial and sorrow, in days of sickness, and in the manifest calamities of life. There are many who bestow abounding gifts of mercy then, who let whole days of common life pass without a kindly word. The searching tests of a deep considerateness, a considerateness that costs, are to be found in the rough business, the daily commonplace intercourse, the worries, the vexations, and the petty mortifications of lite. III. How shall we win this lovely and most potent grace? When Jesus looked on His mother He thought with His heart. And this grace can be learned, not even in the least measure of it, nowhere except at the cross. The man who has only passed by the cross, and in some hour of tender feeling understood and sympathised with this deed of Jesus, cannot fail to acquire a desire after it, which will be operative in his character. But that will not suffice. We must accept the truth as it is in Jesus. We must look up at the cross for our forgiveness and our healing. We must accept that mastership of Him in whom God was reconciled unto us, who loves us in spite of all the evil of our nature, and now reconciles us to God, and as we kneel at the cross in self-surrender, we shall hear and feel the compelling power of the call: 'Be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God, for Christ's sake, hath forgiven you'. W. M. Clow, The Day of the Cross, p. 271. Jesus Providing for His Own John 19:26-27 Here we see Jesus forgetful of Himself providing for His own. In this word Jesus is the helper of those who have home duties, and we draw near to the cross because Jesus here hallows, blesses, and sanctifies home life. I. Notice the tenderness of the Saviour for the lonely. The lonely are very close to the heart of Jesus Christ. He understands their loneliness, He shares it, He ministers to it. It would be well if we Church people could, by our freedom from foolish reserve and pride, by our freedom from the spirit of controversy, make the Church what it ought to be the true home of the lonely. And yet there is no doubt that Jesus is here trying to help those whose life of discipline, and trial, and of preparation, is chiefly earned on in their own home. II. He teaches the blessedness of home life. Home is for most of us the training place for heaven. In the humble and unnoticed duties of husband to wife, of wife to husband, of children to parents, of servant to master, however humble be that round of duties, those qualities are being developed, those graces of character are growing to perfection which are, after all, the mainstay of cities and of nations. There is something unspeakably sacred in the life of home, and I love to think that my blessed Saviour gathered those whose lot is cast in families by His cross, and, though His heart is open to the lonely that have not the blessings of home, yet He lets His benediction rest on those to whom He has given the blessedness of home life. III. And then consider the things that threaten home life in its security and peacefulness. There is the great army of the homeless. By whose fault are they homeless, and what is to be done to cope with this ever-increasing and most unnatural evil that is eating away the very life of our nation, the homeless condition of so many of the poor? And then there are other evils which threaten home life. There is a dreadful short-sighted selfishness and love of pleasure that is unwilling to submit to the restraints of home. There is a great selfishness in every class of society on this matter. And then there are Godless homes, homes where the children are brought up without discipline, and without love, and without care. Let us remember in passing the iniquities, the enormities revealed in our shameful divorce courts. And remembering these things, let us pray to our God that a new spirit of devotion, nay, of patriotism, may be aroused among us, and that again our nation may be built up by this pure, beautiful, family life which Jesus has blessed at the cross. The Word of Tender Care John 19:26-27 The beloved mother is given into the charge of the beloved disciple. Love only can take charge of loved ones, and John was the disciple whom Jesus loved, and, although he does not say it, the disciple who loved Jesus. I. After the Incarnation was given to man the blessed mother seems to retire behind the scenes; we do not hear much about her very little. Her work in the world was to be the mother of the Lord Jesus Christ, her beginning and her end, her Alpha and her Omega, her first and her last. Being His mother, she is here at His death-bed, under the cross. She does not appear during the Passion: she is not reported to have said anything or done anything. Each of the Evangelists gives us four chapters about the Passion, and all that was said and done, but the blessed mother is left out until we come to Calvary. Why do you think this was? What are we to gather from it? Surely, first of all, that His mother knew all these things it was no news to her. The dear Lord and Master must have told her what was going to happen. II. And another point is this: she willed it. She made no complaint, no remonstrance against the cruelty of wicked men. She who said, 'Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it unto me according to Thy word,' knew that the word of God had gone out from everlasting that thus it must be She uttered no word; her will was the will of her Son. He laid down His life right willingly, and in His will was hers. She will not go on Easter morning to bring spices to the tomb not she. She will not show any faithless love. She will not go to Him at all. Why? She knows He is not there. 'The secret of the Lord is with those that fear Him.' She knows. III. What was it that distressed her so much then? Why was it that the sword passed into her soul? What was the piercing of the soul, if she willed it? (1) First, because she was His own mother. As our own Prayer Book says, He was 'of the substance of the Virgin Mary His mother'. He was not of the substance of any father'; He was twice as much of His mother as ever you or I are of ours, and that 'twice His mother' was hers. He is all the world's, but still He is hers. Though He have the world's worship, still her heart avers, 'The Child Divine belongeth unto me'. And now you can understand the first reason why the sword was piercing her soul. (2) And the second. If she was the dear mother of Christ, she was still the dear daughter of God. Who was it that put her Son to death? Who was it that was slaying Him? The Church. Pilate would not have killed Him. It was Mary's Church. Brought up amid all the associations of the old service and the old ritual, as dear a daughter of Israel as ever lived, she saw that the Chief Priests, and scribes had delivered Him up to be crucified. The thing was done by those she had loved most. Heathens cannot crucify Jesus. I tell you who can crucify Him. The Church only the Church. If the Lord Jesus Christ is to be put to death in these days it is by the Church of God no one else can crucify Him. A. H. Stanton. References. XIX. 26, 27. W. Robertson Nicoll, The Seven Words from, the Cross, p. 37. Bishop Alexander, Verbum Crucis, p. 51. G. S. Barrett, The Seven Words from, the Cross, p. 40. J. C. M. Bellew, Christ in Life: Life in Christ, p. 149. T. V. Tymms, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxx. p. 282. A. G. Mortimer, In the Light of the Cross, p. 28. XIX. 26-30. Expositor (5th Series), vol. iii. p. 223. XIX. 27. C. H. Grundy, Luncheon Lectures at St. Paul's Cathedral, p. 9. Expositor (6th Series), vol. i. p. 372. I Thirst John 19:28 I. If our Lord had only been a mere man, determined to brave it out and show a perfectly unflinching conquest over His tormentors, He could have endured the nails to be driven through His hands and feet without a word. He could have kept back this word, but He said, 'I thirst,' and I thank Him from my heart, for it is a word of sympathy with me in my frequent bodily weariness, when I am trying to do the will of God. For we do get tired, physically tired, even in prayer. Let us be real and true, and let us be on our guard. The flesh and the body always say soft and tender things of themselves. Be on your guard: the body is sure to say soft and pitying things about itself and its own capabilities, but still, there is over and above that the fact that we are of different degrees of strength, and we cannot do what some people do; and we should be much more cheerful, much better tempered, much happier, and get on much better with our spiritual duties, if sometimes we had the humble courage to say, 'I cannot do so much as you do, but I try, and I hope God will lead me on'. II. 'I thirst' expressed a weakness of body; but does it mean only that? I cannot think so. Surely it was from these very lips that we have heard the words before, 'Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled'. One cannot but imagine that the Psalms which were so frequently in our Lord's heart must have brought to His lips more than once, 'Like as the hart panteth for the waterbrooks, so longeth my soul after Thee, O God; yea, my soul, my heart is athirst for God, even the living God'. There was a longing for something to slake His natural thirst, and there was a thirst, I venture to say, for the souls of men. It was a thirst for the satisfaction of His Father's will, and therefore of His own will, that humanity might be restored, and made one in Them, as They were One. That, I believe, was the origin of this thirst a thirst which was a longing for the souls of men, a hunger and thirst for righteousness, and for the accomplishment of the perfect will of God. III. In considering this word 'I thirst,' I would beg you to ask yourselves, are you in any sense conscious of being able to make it your own? Do you hunger and thirst for more knowledge of God? If you know that at the present moment but one-third of the people in the world are Christians, and hundreds only Christians in name, are you anxious to make the conquests of Christ more perfect in England and out of England? Or is the want of this spiritual appetite because you are still sick in sin, because you are not growing in grace, because you are not working hard as Christ would have you work, as one really employed in His vineyard? Do ask yourselves such questions, and resolve to have a more real relation to missionary work in four ways: (1) by reading more about it, and the hundreds of millions who know nothing about Christ; (2) by giving more of your means to help on their conversion; (3) by praying for them; and lastly, by setting an example of the power of Christ in your own life so that the heathen may see that it is worth while becoming a Christian, because it is an advance towards the perfection of humanity, and the higher happiness, the higher knowledge of the will of God. Bishop Edward King, * Meditations on the Seven Last Words. * The Pains of Thirst John 19:28 Here we see that our Lord had a body, which, like our own, could feel the pains of thirst. Like some fever-tossed patient, after a night of suffering, as the darkness rolls away our Lord says, 'I thirst'. 'Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.' I. How wonderfully do the Beatitudes correspond to the words from the cross. The various appetites of our nature were implanted in us by God in order to impel us to seek, and to do, that which is for our good. (1) The appetites of the body, hunger and thirst, for instance, impel us to eat and drink, because the body needs food to supply its waste. (2) But there are also appetites of the mind, or, rather, an appetite that strange passion of curiosity, the desire to know, which is so deeply implanted in every child of man. God made the mind of man for truth, and in endowing it with the passion of curiosity He gave him that which would impel him to seek truth. (3) But, again, there is an appetite of the soul, the passion of love, the desire to possess the object of our love. Its true purpose is to impel us to seek God for His own sake, to love God. II. Now, not only has each part of our nature its own appetite, whose office it is to impel us to supply the needs of that part, but in order that the appetite may be satisfied, that the need may be rightly supplied, we must take into account the character of the food we eat; for all food is not alike some nourishes, other does not, or only to a slight extent, while some food is actually poisonous. (1) We know that a very large proportion of the diseases of the body may be traced to the food we eat. As the health of the body depends upon its food being the right food, both in character and quantity, so is it with the health both of the mind and of the soul. (2) We have already observed that the appetite of the intellect is curiosity, that its true food is truth the knowledge of good; but in the world in which we live, as well as in the Garden of Eden, we find trees laden with fruit which promises a knowledge of good and evil. The mind's thirst to know needs to be disciplined, to be satisfied with the knowledge of good, of truth, of the food which God provides for the mind; but there is a terrible temptation to try to assuage our thirst, to satisfy our curiosity, with a knowledge of evil. The noblest appetites are capable of the greatest perversion, and the danger to the appetite of curiosity is that we may feed it with poison. (3) There is yet another part of our nature to be thought of the soul. What is the food of the soul? The Body and Blood of Jesus Christ A. G. Mortimer, Lenten Preaching, p. 206. The Fifth Word From the Cross John 19:28 Here we have Jesus crucified helping the suffering, and we feel we are drawn, with the great army of those who suffer, closer to His side. The Passion is from first to last a mystery, filled with purpose. St. John tells us expressly, 'Jesus, therefore, knowing that all things were now fulfilled, saith, I thirst'. Everything was orderly, deliberate, and self-controlled in our Saviour's sufferings. He died, not because His life was taken away from Him, but because He chose to lay it down of Himself. How does the Blessed Jesus help the sufferer? I. First, of course, He helps us by sharing our sufferings. He has carried with Him to the throne of heaven a human heart that has passed through a true human experience, and there is no sorrow that He does not know by experience, no grief which racks the heart of man which has not found its place in Him. Thirst is a type of all suffering, bodily suffering and spiritual suffering, and especially perhaps of that restless suffering, the discomfort of a spiritual need which is not, but which might be, penitence. II. And then, secondly, He helps us by His example. See how He takes His sufferings to God. Surely that word 'I thirst' is not uttered to man. It must be taken as His plaint to God on high. And, if so, what is the lesson from it? We go about complaining of our sufferings to each other. Each of us has his own tale of discomfort, or of woe, or of annoyance; but the real end of all suffering is to draw us nearer to God. We must cast ourselves boldly upon God. We utter to Him the deep desires, the intensified longings of our hearts. That is surely the lesson of this cry of pain. III. And then, thirdly, Jesus accepts pain, and especially the pain of His Passion, as the due reward of sin. He suffers, the Just for the unjust, that He may bring us to God. God's will was that sin should suffer, and Jesus accepts suffering. He hates sin with the Divine hatred, He judges it with the Divine judgment, He sorrows for it with the Divine sorrow, and therefore there is Atonement (at-one-ment) between God and man. IV. And then, lastly, Jesus sanctifies suffering, whatever it be, as the means of cleansing us from sin. He calls us to go nowhere where He has not Himself led the way. He lays upon us no burden which He has not borne Himself. The Fifth Word From the Cross John 19:28 'I thirst.' It is the shortest of the seven words from the cross, and the only one that refers to our Saviour's bodily sufferings at all. There is a pathos about it, a touch of human weakness so appealing to us, especially if we have failed to follow the spiritual pathos of the preceding word: 'My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?' But for that 'I thirst' we might have thought of our Lord as hardly human. But Jesus felt it all. For Him there was no Divine assuaging of bodily pain. His lips were parched with fever, the thirst of the dying was upon Him, thirst, a keen expression of utter bodily exhaustion, and He is not ashamed to give it voice, for in His utmost need He craves for human sympathy, and asks for bodily relief. I. What are we to learn from this? I think the true humanity of our Lord. His Divinity has often been denied; but I think there is truth in what has been said that, on the whole, men are in greater danger of denying His humanity. That is a commoner error, even if it does not find its way into print. One meaning, surely, of the cry 'I thirst,' is to remind us that the Christ Whom we worship as Lord is a human Christ. It helps us to bear pain, and to suffer, and to be tempted when we know that He was tempted and suffered too. There is a so-called Christian science which would have us regard pain as the product of a diseased imagination. If pain were only an imaginary thing, our Saviour would not have found it so stern a reality, nor made it the means of the world's redemption. And, surely, there is also a meaning in our pain, if by the cross it is changed into a fellowship with the sufferings of Christ. II. Once more, if the Lord Himself both needed and accepted human sympathy, let us not be too proud to accept it also. There is a pride in us that shuts itself up in its own sorrow and insists on bearing its burden alone. It is part of our discipline that we should quell our proud wills and learn to bow the head as Jesus did. Let us not say: 'I do not choose to be under obligation to this man or that. I will bear my own sorrow alone.' Make it not impossible for willing friends to fulfil in you the Lord's behest: 'I was thirsty, and ye gave Me drink'. III. And let us not hold back our sympathy from those who suffer. There must be some who could do so much and gain so much by giving, by a simple transference from the account of self, its pleasures, its comforts, its recreations, to the account of the needs of the needy. Do we not know, have not the Gospels taught us, that we make our burden lighter and not heavier when we add to it the burden of another's sorrow? Therefore let no shyness, no shrinking, check the spirit that prompts the kindly visit, the tender and sympathetic letter, the gift of flowers or fruit to the sick; above all, let us remember in our prayers those who need to be prayed for. 'I thirst.' Some have heard in that cry the Divine love thirsting for us. Let there be in us a responsive thirst. Let us consider, then, our Lord as truly human, one of ourselves under the discipline of pain; let us consider that pain as the great message of fellowship, of sympathy elicited and going back, that fellowship which we are meant to have one with another. Divine Thirst John 19:28 Two words 'I thirst' but how full of meaning! They came from One Who had cried out in the streets of Jerusalem 'If any man thirst let him come to Me and drink'. It was the same Jesus Who a little time before sat with that woman in Samaria by the well and told her that the water would only quench her natural thirst for a while, but He would give her water which, if she drank, would not only quench for ever that thirst, but would enable her to go out and quench the thirst of others. And yet He said, 'I thirst'. I. Bodily Thirst. After the agonies of the Garden, after the mockery of the Jews and the Roman soldiers, after those three long dark hours, after all that He had endured, He felt a bodily need 'I thirst'. If we could only think of all it means for you and me 'I thirst'. That awful agony was borne for you and for me. II. Soul Thirst. 'He thirsted,' says a modern writer, 'to be thirsted after. He thirsted long for the souls of men and women. He came down from heaven to draw all the world to Himself.' Read once again the story of His Passion, the story of the cross, the story of His death, and you will understand if you read aright something of the awful soul thirst through which Christ passed. Christ thirsted for human souls: He thirsted for yours and mine. He thirsts. Is not that pathetic? Still He thirsts, thirsts for the souls of men and women all over the globe. Whenever a man or woman is brought to Him, whenever a man or woman comes to Him, it is as though some one had taken a drop of water and touched the dry lips. III. Fellowship with His Suffering. 'I thirst' If you and I had been on Calvary we should have loved to do something to minister to the wants of our Saviour. And when little souls cry on beds of sickness, when a man finds the struggle for daily existence more than he can stand, Christ through them is crying 'I thirst' to you and me, and their thirsty souls can be satisfied and Christ will be satisfied through you. Christ believes in man. Christ on the cross might have been silent, but He chose to speak 'I thirst,' and He showed the world what His sufferings were. He says again, speaking through suffering humanity, 'I thirst,' and He asks you to do something to quench that thirst, because He knows that deep down in the bottom of the heart there is some hope after all for the very worst man. The way of the world is to make the worst of everybody, to paint every one as black as possible. But Christ believed in man. He thought there was some good even in the heart of a Roman soldier, and He was not disappointed. Show your love for Christ by thirsting for souls that He came to save. Any good that we can do, let us do it now. Do not let us neglect it, for we shall never pass through this world again. References. XIX. 28. W. Robertson Nicoll, The Seven Words from the Cross, p. 79. A. G. Mortimer, In the Light of the Cross, p. 45. J. S. Bartlett, Sermons, p. 79. H. Bonar, Short Sermons for Family Reading, pp. 119, 125, 132. A. G. Mortimer, The Chief Virtues of Man, p. 79. J. Keble, Sermons for the Holy Week, p. 271. Bishop Alexander, Verbum Crucis, p. 77. G. S. Barrett, The Seven Words from the Cross, p. 76. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxiv. No. 1409. XIX. 28, 29. Bishop Alexander, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lv. p. 385. XIX. 28-30. A. Bradley, Sermons chiefly on Character, p. 254. Christ's Finished Work John 19:30 I. This cry is a sigh of relief. We should not make too much of our Lord's physical sufferings. Nor should we overdraw the pain and sorrow of His earthly life. We should not read 'the Son of man hath not where to lay His head' as though that were an appeal of Christ to our pity. He was merely emphasising, to a man who was not counting the cost, His homelessness, and declaring that homelessness should be the lot of all. Yet life was a serious and burdening thing to Him, as it is to all high and rare spirits. In spite of that constant joy He had in things beautiful, and His deep delight in men He loved, and in little children who loved Him, and despite the radiant calm that was ever on His brow life had its own strain, its many sorrows, its frequent wearinesses. In the year 401 b.c. an army of ten thousand Greeks was marching westward to their homeland. Some months before they had gone out eastwards into Asia, in the service of an ambitious ruler. They had fought and won a fruitless victory. Leaderless, half-starved, harassed by foes, yet unbroken in spirit, they marched their way back again across desolate mountain ridges, beside foul and undrained marshes, fording unbridged rivers, they tramped on. At last they reached the chain of hills which Asia Minor lifts around the Black Sea. They climbed their long flank, and reached the summit, and there lay the cool, dark, wine-coloured water. 'The sea! the sea!' they cried. It was a sigh of relief. Tears welled up in their eyes. Their long and weary trudge was over. The journey was done. The hunger and thirst and exhaustion were things of the past. Thoughts of home made their hearts leap up. They sighed with relief. So Jesus, remembering all the way He had come, about to slip off the mortal coil which had been His prison, looking forward to the Father's face, utters His sigh of relief, 'It is finished'. II. In the second place, this cry is a word of victory. Life with Jesus, although it had its joy, and had also, as we have seen, its underlying strain and sense of alienation and exile, had a deeper trial. It was a long and difficult and perilous pathway. It was a time of temptation such as no human soul has ever known. We find it difficult to understand the reality of our Lord's temptations. We cannot imagine the awfulness of the conflict. Yet we know that the hours of His temptations were the keenest and bitterest of His life. The sweat came out like great drops of blood in one crisis. 'Ye are they which have continued with Me in My temptations,' He gratefully says to men who helped Him more wondrously than they were aware. Only at the end could He say, 'The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in Me'. These great hours of strain and conflict are marked as they recur in the Gospels. The reason why the temptation in the wilderness has been revealed is that we might understand how stern was the battle He fought. Every temptation was a temptation in a wilderness. We may enter, although only feebly, into the meaning of such a significance. We all know the joy of overcoming temptation. We know that hour of the day in which we have resisted some seduction to sloth, turned a deaf ear to some call to self-indulgence, kept some promise at cost of pain to mind and heart, and reached the close of the day, or finished the bit of work we had begun, without faltering. When James Stewart, the engineer of the African Lakes Company, had almost completed the Stevenson Road along which the Gospel and its civilisation were to pass up into the heart of the continent, he was smitten by his last fever. He lay down to die in a hut near the northern terminus of the road. His body was racked with pain, but his spirit had a singular elation. He looked out in imagination along the road, and he heard the chariots of God pass along the highway. As he fell asleep in Christ he had also that word on his lips which was an echo of his Master's cry, 'It is finished'. Time and time again he had been tempted to desist because of the difficulties of the survey and the obstacles placed in his path by fever and by pitiless foes, but he had kept on his way in the strength of God, and the victory was his. So Jesus rejoiced in His dying hour. No blot had marred the stainless past. No word that needed to be forgiven could be recalled. No deed left undone now vexed His spirit. As He remembered the fierce battle, His cry was a word of victory, 'It is finished'. III. In the third place, this cry is a message to the Father. It was a sigh of relief and a word of victory, but it was more. We are taken back to another word spoken in the upper room, as He prayed, 'I have glorified Thee on the earth; I have finished the work which Thou gavest Me to do'. IV. In the fourth place, His cry is a proclamation to men. This may be called the full gospel of Jesus. It is the note which should never be absent from every Gospel preacher's message. It is Christ's declaration that the final revelation of God has been given, that all alienation between God and man has ended, that all other religious rites and ordinances, even those of the priests in the Temple, and the sacrifice of the Jew, are abrogated, and that henceforth there is only one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. W. M. Clow, The Cross in Christian Experience, p. 127. It Is Finished John 19:30 'Finished!' What a cry of relief from the long strain which had been upon Him! And what may we say the words specially refer to? I. Finished Sufferings. I think, first of all, to His own sufferings. Christ must suffer. That was, if we may say it reverently, a foregone conclusion. Think of all the world, with all its accumulated wickedness and sin. The sin which animates their hostility to Christ, do you not think that that sin would put Christ to death again if He came to the world? Do you not think that if Jesus came to the world today He would not be wanted? Would He be wanted in our homes, our social life? If He came to our churches would He be wanted there? He must suffer in order to enter into His glory. How is it with us? Need we wonder if when we try to do right we must also suffer? It has been so from the very beginning, but because Christ has said in His moment of apparent defeat, when the world thought that they had done with Him, 'It is accomplished,' therefore you and I may be assured that we shall have victory. The glory will be ours through suffering. II. Finished Temptations. Not only were His sufferings accomplished, but also His temptations. He had wrestled with the tempter and had overcome. All His life He had temptations to overcome. There is a note of quiet rest struck in these words, just as much as there is a note of triumph. And the same way with our sin, and griefs, and pains. Do not let us despair because they take so much overcoming, because we have always to fight and wrestle with them, and there seems no finality with them. Jesus has said: 'It is accomplished. Thy temptation is at an end. It is finished.' The most powerful thing in the world, Christ has vanquished it, and if you will but go on fighting in His strength, the time will come when you will be able to say, 'It is finished'. III. Finished Work. And then something else, too, Jesus accomplished His triumphant work. The battle of His corporeal life was over, but not before redemption, full and free, had been secured. In our Communion Service we say that Jesus made upon the cross 'a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world'; but that sacrifice is of no effect if we do not believe it and accept it as God's way of salvation. Let us look at the cross now, and pray that God will give us the faith we need, that we may see in Jesus our Saviour and our Redeemer, our Prophet, our Priest, and our King, One Who ever liveth to make intercession for us. It Is Finished John 19:30 When we come to this great word, 'It is finished,' we feel at once, I think, how great a distance there is between our Lord's life and our own. The best of us are in such a constant muddle, in such confusion and hurry; this life goes at such a pace, it is such a race, such a confusion duty upon duty presses one upon another, we can only, as it were, just brush the things away to see where the mark is; still there always seems a quantity of undone things round about us. I. Well, when we think how our blessed Lord quietly ended His life with the words, 'It is finished,' I think one practical reflection ought to be, are there not many important duties which we could and ought to finish? It would be a great thing, a very great thing, if part of our Good Friday's resolutions turned upon this word in that way. The best way to make it quite simple and practical. There are so many things probably which we have left unfinished that the difficulty is to select some few, four or five, two or three, or even one which we will really try and finish up. Some people, for instance, are very irregular in their accounts, not that they are dishonest at all, or have no money to pay, but they do not attend to them, and, therefore, don't know exactly how they stand, and very often thus cause inconvenience, without intending it, to their friends or their neighbours. Now it would be a most real, yet simple and plain way, to apply this word 'It is finished,' if a person were to resolve to say, 'Thank God, I have enough, without being dishonest; but if I were to be more punctual in my payments, more punctual with my worldly affairs, I should be more in order, more in hand, and I should have more leisure, more peace of mind, more time for reading my Bible, I should enjoy my Sundays more, and I should have more time for prayer and meditation.' II. Let us try then and bring this word, 'It is finished,' across our homely life, across our daily business, and see what we can do to finish up our work better. To our Lord this word was far-reaching, when He said, 'It is finished,' for He could look back upon all the means which He, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, had been devising for the redemption of the world. Perfect patience, perfect unwearied patience, perfect unbroken love; having loved His own, He loved them to the very end; nothing had been left undone. He had done all things well just at the right time, just in the right place, just in the right way; not too much, nor yet too little. 'It is finished;' it was done, and He could rest. We never, of course, could say that. And yet it was not merely, so to speak, the satisfaction that He had done all this; but the real satisfaction was rather this: That now the great sacrifice was over, the Lamb of God was slain, and the debt of the world was paid. III. This is included in the 'It is finished'; the one perfect sufficient sacrifice which was made for the sins of the whole world. We are saved; we are saved by the Blood of Jesus. He has been bearing our sins, and has been offering up Himself to the Father for us: and we are delivered. We, though we may have been sinners, yet may be saved. We, though we may have broken God's law and commandments again and again, yet now in the death of Christ have a new and living way made open by His Blood. The veil is rent in twain, the wall of partition is thrown down, and there is free access now to the Throne of Christ; all have been sinners, yet may be saved. That is the Father's wish, that is what the Son came to accomplish, that was what enabled Him to say with joy 'It is finished'. The bridge, as it were, between earth and heaven is completed; Jacob's ladder is set up, and there is now a way from earth to heaven, and the poorest, and the most unlearned, and the youngest, the wayfaring man, may go on this way if they will and need not err. This was the joy of 'It is finished'. Bishop Edward King, * Meditations on the Last Seven Words. * References. XIX. 30. W. Robertson Nicoll, The Seven Words from the Cross, p. 101. J. Keble, Sermons for the Holy Week, p. 270. W. L. Alexander, Sermons, p. 83. J. Budgen, Parochial Sermons, vol. i. p. 83. G. S. Barrett, The Seven Words from the Cross, p. 93. P. Brown, Penny Pulpit, No. 1576, p. 239. A. G. Mortimer, The Chief Virtues of Man, p. 93. C. Perren, Revival Sermons in Outline, p. 232. Bishop Alexander, Verbum Crucis, p. 91. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vii. No. 378; vol. vii. No. 421, and vol. xl. No. 2344. A. B. Davidson, Waiting Upon God, p. 255. A. G. Mortimer In the Light of the Cross, p. 50. Expositor (6th Series), vol. viii. p. 123. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 268. XIX. 31. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. iii. p. 408. XIX. 31-37. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxiii. No. 1956. XIX. 32-37. G. Body, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lix. p. 201. XIX. 33, 34. Bishop C. Bickersteth, The Gospel of Incarnate Love, p. 70. XIX. 34. C. G. Clark-Hunt, The Refuge of the Sacred Wounds, p. 47. XIX. 34, 35. J. Keble, Sermons on the Baptismal Service, p. 197. Expositor (4th Series), vol. iii. p. 244. XIX. 3.5. J. Keble, Sermons for the Saints' Days, p. 48. Expositor (4th Series), vol. iv. p. 331. XIX. 36-37. H. S. Holland, Church Times, vol. lix. p. 696. XIX. 36. J. G. Rogers, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liii. p. 289. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 79; ibid. vol. iii. p. 117. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 277. Completing Passages John 19:37 The 'other scripture' may not contradict the one that has been already quoted; the other scripture may expand it, complete it, may be the hemisphere needed to complete the globe. This is a lesson in Bible reading. We are not to stop just where we please; it is no business of ours to pick out favourite texts and found fantastic theories or mutable denominations upon them. The Scripture is a whole; every verse belongs to every other verse. Sometimes a text may be singular; that is to say, may be the only text of the kind in the whole Scripture. Yet, though brief, it may be pregnant, it may be a condensed revelation; it may be Biblical, that is to say, charged with the very spirit of the Bible, though it has no solitary parallel passage. These considerations show us how careful, and even critical, and sometimes even suspicious we should be in reading detached portions of Scripture. Always attend to the 'again'; never forget the 'another'; collate, bring into vital relation all the passages bearing upon any given subject. I. You could take the text, 'Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth,' and you could by that one text destroy a great portion of the Scriptural revelation and testimony. Charity is to be a thing absolutely speechless, no hint is to be given that we have done anything beneficial, gentle, helpful: here is the passage which distinctly says so; that you may have no difficulty about it I will quote it again: 'Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand is doing'; however multitudinous the charities of the right hand, the left hand must be kept behind, out of sight. Why dispute this? here is the text; here is our plain authority; we have nothing to do but obey. All this would seem to be reasonable and Scriptural: whereas it is neither the one nor the other, because another scripture saith, 'Let your light so shine before men that they, seeing your good works, may glorify your Father which is in heaven'. The one passage does not destroy the other; there is no mutual cancelling, but there is expansion, explanation, a different standard and a fuller suggestion. Bring the passages together; let them be mutually explanatory; neither overlook the one nor the other: in this way we come into possession of the mind of the Spirit, and in this way, and in this way only, do we become profoundly and beneficently Biblical. II. So then we come to the collation and parsing of Scripture, the mutual interpretation of divers texts, some of them apparently contradictory; and yet that which may not subject itself to easy interpretation of grammar and lexicon may be reconciled and built into a great solemn meaning by the magical worker Experience. We know some things simply by living them. The teacher can never make the scholar a gentleman; he must be born of God to be gentle. The schoolmaster can inform him, correct his errors, extend his knowledge, but that peculiar magical thing, gentlemanliness, the highest life, the most perfect and gracious refinement, why, this is a grace taught but in one school, the school of the Holy Ghost. If not so taught, it is simulation, veneer, a calculated attitude, not the outbreathing and the outgoing of a truly regenerated and divinely inspired character. III. The ever-recurrent lesson is, Do not build upon one text, upon a solitary instance; build upon the whole testimony. The devil had his text; he said once to Jesus, Cast Thyself down from this great height, have no fear, for it is written, He shall give His angels charge concerning Thee; they will delight to catch Thee in their outspread arms and bind Thee to their heaving, loving bosoms; the air is full of them: why not put this text to the test? it is written you are fond of quoting the Bible, let me quote it also it is written, He shall give His angels charge concerning Thee lest at any time Thou dash Thy foot against a stone; Thou art the darling of God, Thou art the radiant life of the angels; without Thee they would be solitary, swallowed up of sorrow; their great wings would be under Thee in less than the twinkling of an eye; then all the world would say that Thou art in very deed the Son of God. Jesus answered and said unto him, in effect, Yet again another scripture saith, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God; thou shalt not seduce the Almighty; thou shalt not create difficulties in order that God may extricate thee from them; thou shalt be wise, prudent, thou shalt exercise the reason and the forethought with which God has endowed thee; they are not thine, they are God's great gifts; act in the light of those gifts and in their exercise, and do not create a fantastic God or represent a fantastic piety. IV. The whole of this idea is beautifully set forth in the very text and context. The appointed officers went about and brake the legs of the malefactors, and when they came to Jesus and saw that He was dead already, they brake not His legs; and they said, There is no need to break the legs of this malefactor, He is quite dead. That was their account of the matter. A poor superficial and unsatisfactory account, but the right reading of the whole was as is given in the 36th verse 'that the Scripture should be fulfilled'. The accident you had not long ago was that the Scripture might be fulfilled. God is having His way; His way is right and is best. The Scripture vindicates itself by manifold human experience. Whilst we are looking at the Bible as a book taken out of a library, God says, Go now and read the Bible as a record of life, and read the record of life as a Bible. Not a translation, but a transmigration, an outgoing of this great book-spirit into the rugged literature of strife and tears and misery, of wedding bells, and knells that tell that the dead are going to their home. You have read the Bible as a revelation of life. Now read life as a confirmation of the Bible. Joseph Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol. vii. p. 136. References. XIX. 37. F. Bourdillon, Plain Sermons for Family Beading, p. 90. W. M. Clow, The Day of the Cross, p. 325. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 20; ibid. vol. v. p. 178; ibid. (5th Series), vol. vi. p. 136. Hidden Discipleship John 19:38 I. The Reality of Hidden Discipleship. Many names are written in the Book of Life that are not recorded upon Church registers. This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/expositors-dictionary/ Easter Day John 20:1 We can hardly visit a cemetery without being filled with solemn and impressive thoughts. As you stand there with multitudes at your feet, all wrapped in slumber, your thoughts cany you back to the past, and on to the future. You look at the cold marble or the green grass which waves over that precious dust, but there is no one able to bid the slumberers arise. I. The Empty Tomb. There are many such spots where different groups of mourners meet, but there is one tomb above all the rest in which every Christian heart has a common interest, around which all may meet. It contains more sorrows and more hopes than all the graves on earth. It contains no ashes, for it is empty. It is the place where the risen Redeemer once lay. We are met at a strange place, it is true the one place on earth where we know quite well that Jesus is not. Why, then, you ask, should we spend our time around a spot so cheerless and so Christless? Simply because He once was there, and every spot that Christ has touched is sacred and instructive. He once was there as lifeless as the dead of centuries, not merely in appearance but in reality. Many a head was bowed in woe, and many a heart was wellnigh breaking with sorrow, for their last hope had sunk in the grave with their Lord. And the night passed the blackest night that ever closed over human grief; but with the early dawn of the third day the brightest day that ever dawned for you love made Mary Magdalene draw near, and to her surprise she found the stone rolled away and the keepers fled. Fast and far the news travelled. The glorious fact of a conqueror more mighty than death was that morning proclaimed to the world, and no sophistry has as yet been able to explain it away. It was the greatest transaction in history; it was accomplished in silence. It was the mightiest conquest the world had ever known; it was achieved in the dead of night, while the world slept. The Redeemer overcame the world's most dreaded foe, and broke the bonds of death. He came forth from the tomb a living man. Yes, it is a fact. The grave of Jesus Christ is empty; I suppose it is the only empty tomb on earth; and history records no mightier fact for the instruction and comfort of mankind. And what is the significance of this great fact? II. The Atonement Completed. It means that the Atonement is complete; it means that God the Father has accepted Christ's work as a satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. It means that the problem of a future life has been solved, and a veritable hereafter revealed. Ours is not the Gospel of a dead Saviour, but of a living, reigning, life-giving One Who lives for evermore. Though a grave, it is the place of life. Since Jesus rose the power of the grave has been broken. It is no longer a dark prison-house, but the gate of life. Now we die to live again. But there is not only life for the body beyond the grave; there is spiritual life in the risen Saviour. As the Lord Jesus lay dead, not in appearance only, but in reality, so do all men by nature lie spiritually dead. Are there not men and women known to you in this world who are dead to every noble aim in life, buried in the world's follies and sins? So they will remain until they permit the risen and life-giving One to roll all their burden of sin back into the empty grave. III. A Place of Comfort. It is a place of comfort. We do not usually associate the grave with ideas of a comforting nature. We think of it rather as a place of parting and bitter grief. But the first note in the Gospel of the Resurrection was a note of comfort. 'Fear not ye,' said the angel to the weeping women. 'Fear not,' said the angels to the lowly shepherds when the Christ was born. The Gospel of Christ throughout is a Gospel of comfort. What but it has power to cheer the shrinking soul standing on the brink of the grave? 'Fear not' The past need not trouble you, for Christ has made atonement for sin. The present you need not dread, for you are supported by the everlasting arms. The future is all safe in the power and love of Jesus Christ. IV. A Place of Hope. The empty grave is a place of hope. How often our hopes are blighted here, our expectations dashed down. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ proclaims the reviving of lost hopes. The brightest hopes were blighted when Jesus died, but when He rose they all revived. How many hopes have been buried in graves. But graves are not dug in the ground alone, or hewn from rocks. Human hearts are sepulchres, and how many hopes are buried there! I do not suppose there is a single heart beating in which there does not lie some unrealised hope, some unfulfilled expectation, but if your hearts are true to Christ, then be sure there is a resurrection day coming. The hope you thought you lost has only gone on before. It awaits you in the glorious hereafter. With Him it rose, with Him it ascended, and with Him it is kept as a sacred trust till you go home to claim it. There is nothing you really value that Christ will not give you back again. There is not a joy, not a hope, that has gone down here in the night of disappointment, but will rise in a fairer world where the sun will never set. Every lost affection will return to every loving heart, every hope to the despairing soul, and joy unspeakable to every mourner. All that on earth you have loved and lost will be given back to you in heaven. But do not linger here. Do not rest by that empty grave. Go in search of the living Lord. You will find Him at God's right hand, and if you listen you will hear Him say, 'I am the Resurrection and the life. He that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. Whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die.' John 20:1 It is a man who tries to apprehend God through his logic and psychology; a woman understands Him better through emotions and deeds. It is the men who are concerned about the cubits, the cedar wood, the Urim and Thummim of the Tabernacle; women walk straight into the Holy of Holies. Men constructed the cross; women wept for the Crucified. It was a man a Jew defending his faith in his own supernatural revelation who tried to ram a sponge of vinegar into the mouth of Christ, dying; it was women who gathered at the sepulchre of the Resurrection. If Christ could have had a few women among His Apostles, there might have been more of His religion in the world, and fewer creeds barnacled on the World's Ship of Souls. James Lane Allen, The Reign of Law, pp. 287, 288. References. XX. 1. F. St. John Corbett, The Preacher's Year, p. 74. Expositor (7th Series), vol. v. pp. 322, 438. XX. 1-18. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 300. XX. 3. Expositor (7th Series), p. 512. John 20:6-7 Finding that one of His children had been greatly shocked and overcome by the first sight of death, he tenderly endeavoured to remove the feeling which had been awakened, and opening a Bible pointed to the words: 'Then cometh Simon Peter following him, and went into the sepulchre and seeth the linen clothes lie, and the napkin that was about His head not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself'. Nothing, he said, to his mind, afforded us such comfort, when shrinking from the outward accompaniments of death the grave, the grave-clothes, the loneliness as the thought that all these had been around our Lord Himself; round Him who died and is now alive for evermore. Stanley's Life of Dr. Arnold (chap. 4). References. XX. 9. H. Bonar, Short Sermons for Family Beading, p. 202. Bishop Westcott, Village Sermons, p. 138. XX. 10. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. iv. p. 190. XX. 10-16. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxv. No. 2119. XX. 11. W. H. Hutchings, Sermon Sketches (2nd Series), p. 127. J. Bateman, Sermons Preached in Guernsey, p. 68. C. Bickersteth, The Gospel of Incarnate Love, p. 79. XX. 11-24. F. J. A. Hort, Village Sermons in Outline, p. 231. Love and Grief John 20:11-18 In this beautiful and ever-memorable incident there are three things upon which I wish to dwell. The first is Mary's grief; the second is Mary's love; and the third is the revelation of the Lord to Mary. I. Let me speak, then, upon the grief of Mary, trying to make plain to you the greatness of that grief. (1) The first glimpse we get into its deeps is that Mary shows no wonder at the angels. There is nothing more absorbing than great grief. It banishes fear, surprise, dismay, astonishment. And from the utter absence of all such feelings here, we learn how terrible was Mary's grief. (2) The same intensity is manifest again when we notice how her grief embraced her world. It is when we see Mary so absorbed that every one she meets must know her sorrow, that we realise her womanly despair at the loss of her Saviour and her Lord. (3) Then, too, her grief had made her blind. That also reveals the depth of her dismay. Neither love nor hate nor jealousy nor anger is more effectual in sealing up the eyes than is the pressure of overwhelming grief. (4) The strange thing is that had she only known it, the cause of her grief was to be the joy of ages. And so I learn that in our deepest griefs may lie the secret of our richest joys, and that there may be 'a budding morrow in midnight'. II. Now let us turn to the depth of Mary's love. (1) And how intensely she loved may be most surely gathered from her refusal to believe that He was lost. There is a kind of love that faces facts, and it is a noble and courageous love. It opens its eyes wide to dark realities, and bowing the head it says, 'I must accept them'. But there is an agony of love that does not act so: it hopes against hope and beats against all evidence. It is only women who can love like that, and it was a love like that which inspired Mary. (2) The depth of Mary's love is also seen in her instant and glad obedience to her Lord. The one thing she wanted was to be with Christ, yet that was the one thing which He denied her. III. The revelation of the Lord to Mary. (1) The unceasing wonder of it all is this, that to her first He should have showed Himself. The strange thing is that what Christ did that morning, He has been constantly doing ever since. The first to see Him in all His power and love have been the very last the world expected. (2) And then Christ made Himself known by a single word. We are drawn to Christ by the deep and restful sense that we are known. G. H. Morrison, The Wings of the Morning, p. 97. The Rising of Christ (Easter Day) John 20:13 Resurrection is the method of the kingdom of God. Not by steady and unbroken progress does it advance, but by death and rising again in new form from the dead. So it has been in the history of the Church. Again and again the familiar forms in which faith had apprehended Him die and are lost to sight, only to be superseded by some new aspect of Him, at first unfamiliar and distrusted, at last recognised as Christ risen again. So it has been also in the faith of individuals. Having known Him in some particular fashion, we try to retain the vision just as it was. Like Haliburton, like Peter before him, we 'spake ravingly of tabernacles'. But God is inexorable, and we have to learn for ourselves 'what this rising from the dead should mean'. I. History. The Church began in a primitive simplicity which was content to tell the story of the Gospels. And, told by hearts hot with love to Jesus, that story conquered the world. But as the faith spread through the Roman Empire, and came in contact with the Greek thought of the day, lawless thinking and loose organisation demanded new forms both of creed and of ecclesiasticism, and the ancient Catholic Church arose. Doubtless there were many simple souls who felt themselves lost and bewildered among all those new institutions, and whose cry was: 'They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him'. Yet He was not taken away, but risen, in a new form suited to the new situation. Phase after phase of Christian faith rises, lives, and grows obsolete: and always there are some who cry that the Christ of the fathers has been taken away. But really it is only a phase that has been taken. That phase is dead. It has served its time and has now become ineffective, no longer influencing conduct, stirring the heart, or convincing the intellect. The claim of the new phases is as sound as that of the old was. 'There is no real resting-place,' says the late Dr. Jowett, 'but in the entire faith that all true knowledge is a revelation of the will of God'. In the new forms Christ is not taken away, but risen that He may reveal the Father to a new generation. II. Individual Experience. Here, too, Christ often disappears, and those who have lost Him come to old means of grace doctrines, sacraments, devotions and find them but cold and empty cerements. In one way or another, the world has been too much for you. Yet none of all these things have taken away your Lord. He is risen, and He waits to meet you, when you wander bewildered, disheartened, or ashamed. His appearance will not indeed be exactly what it was before. The search for truth, the cruelty of suffering, and the shame of apostacy each works in the soul changes which require some new aspect of the Christ. But the wonderful thing about Christ is that He is sufficient for life in all its aspects; and that whatever be your experience, and however impossible it be now to regain the exact aspect of faith which once was yours, there is in Him all that man can ever need. He stands not where you were but beside you where you are, and if you will but turn and look you will find that He is risen and not taken away. John Kelman, Ephemera Eternitatis, p. 90. References. XX. 14. H. Bonar, Short Sermons for Family Reading, p. 224. Expositor (7th Series), vol. vi. p. 115. Supposing Him to Be the Gardener John 20:15 I take my text from the supposition of Mary: 'She, supposing Him to be the gardener'. You know the events of the Easter morning: How she came to the tomb with spices prepared for the embalming of the dead Body, and how she did not seem frightened by the presence of the angels which frightened the men very often women are more brave than men. And when the angels asked, 'Woman, why weepest thou?' she said: 'Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him'. And as she said this, Jesus stood by her, and she, supposing Him to be the gardener, said: 'Sir, if Thou have borne Him hence, tell me where Thou hast laid Him, and I will take Him away'. As though the poor woman could have taken away that burden! And He said to her 'Mary' then she knew Him. I. 'She, supposing Him to be the gardener.' It was such a beautiful supposition, because the first Adam was placed in the Garden of Eden and the second Adam in the Garden of His Church. Eden was watered by the four rivers Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Euphrates. The Church of God is watered by the five rivers which flowed from the sacred wounds. He is the Gardener of His Church. This is why then, 'Supposing He is the gardener,' there is a Church at all. He can cause the fir-tree to grow instead of the thorn, and the myrtle-tree to spring up instead of the briar. He it is that has arranged the garden, its terraces, its walks, its parterres, its borders, everything. 'Supposing He is gardener,' we see how the Church of God has been arranged by the wounded hands. II. 'Supposing He is the gardener,' then that is why such beautiful flowers grow in His garden. Of course first comes our Blessed Lady: An angel-watered lily, that near God Grows and is quiet. Till, one dawn at home, She woke in her white bed, and had no fear At all, yet wept till sunshine, and felt awed: Because the fullness of the time was come. There are the saints of God all down the ages those of whom the world was not worthy. You are not surprised at the list of saints belonging to the Church of God who have given up all for the sake of the Master, 'Supposing He is the gardener'. III. And then, of course, that is the reason why you and I arc still in the garden. What have we brought forth? Have you ever asked yourself this question, 'Would it have been better for this man if he had never been born?' What good have I ever done in the Church of God? Why has He not plucked me up as the weed and thrown me on the fire and burned me up? Why has He borne with me? Why am I still in the Church of God? Why do I still believe in my Saviour and have faith in Him, while so many others who have done better works than I have fallen away? 'Supposing He is the gardener,' I think you will understand. My Saviour is the Gardener, that is the reason. Some have said that with the controversies and contradictions there are in the Church and the failures of Christians themselves, the greatest miracle is that there is a Church at all. So it is. The East winds are so cold and the frosts are so severe and the storms so terrible, how can anything grow? And yet the whole solution is plain and beautiful, 'Supposing Him to be the gardener'. He who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb takes care of the flowers in His garden. IV. 'Supposing He is the gardener,' our duty is to be happy in His garden. Some flowers are tall and great and beautiful like the lily and the rose. Then there are the little flowers like the sassafras, the little tiny rock plants, which men will hardly notice, but the Lord Jesus knows them. He loves them, and they are perfect. It takes the whole circle of the seasons running through the spring and autumn to produce the little daisy. And though we may be but very little in the Church of God, He made us and He died for us. It takes the whole circle of the revelation of the Holy Trinity 'for us men and for our salvation'. V. If He is the gardener we ought to love to have Him in the garden, that is why I love you to come to the altar that is His trysting-place. We believe He comes here in His garden to meet His people. Bring all your troubles and hopes and fears and joys, and lay them down at the foot of the altar. Oh Thou that 'feedeth among the lilies,' abide with us until the morning breaks and the shadows flee away. VI. We ought to be quite contented with where we are. If He put us here it is right. Let Him plant where He will, and if He prunes, let Him prune. And if He digs deep, let Him dig deep round about us. You will not mind what is the providence of God concerning you, 'Supposing He is the gardener'. 'Lord, do to us whatsoever seemeth best in Thy sight.' VII. Our duty is to try and bring forth much fruit. Let us try to bring Him fruit and flowers, love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, kindness. Those are the fruits He likes, and if we have brought forth a cluster, let us bring forth a thousand clusters. Let the love of God be in your heart, the joy of your God in your soul; the peace of God in your mind, and long-suffering and gentleness with everybody and anybody that you may meet, 'Supposing that He is the gardener'. VIII. 'Supposing He is the gardener,' there shall not be the slime of the serpent upon the garden path, the wild boar shall not root up the hedges, and the evil beast tear down the fences. We shall be safe. The Good Shepherd will take care of His sheep, and the Good Gardener will look after His garden. It is Ruskin who says, Flower's always grow best in the gardens of those that love them most. They tell us all kinds of things are coming to destroy the Church this modernism, new ideas, whatever it means! Never believe it, 'Supposing He is the gardener,' we shall be safe the fences shall not be rooted up or the hedges destroyed. IX. 'Supposing He is the Gardener,' He may have what flowers He likes. When He comes to pick His own flowers in the garden you must not complain. Supposing He takes from you the one flower you most love, well, it belonged to Him before it belonged to you, and your love is but a reflection of His. Supposing He is the gardener then He can transplant the plant He has reared into the garden that is above where the other plants are: 'I go to prepare a place for you, that where I am there ye may be also'. 'Supposing He is the gardener,' both the time and the manner of the transplanting we leave to Him. My time is in His hands. He who held me up ever since I was born, He Who made me and died for me will do the best for me in the end, 'Supposing He is the gardener'. A. H. Stanton. Mistaken Suppositions John 20:15 * ; Luke 24:37 * I. Putting these two incidents side by side, I can see a picture of the twofold difficulty of that new life that Christ came to reveal. I can see, as in a parable, the two ways in which we fail to gather and use the great revelation that Jesus makes to us. We make the mistake that the Magdalene made. We love an easy, earthly explanation of life. We live too often under the dominion of this world's narrow probabilities. We are content, nay, even resolved, that our thought shall move within the cramped limits of our experience. We pass unmoved, unenlightened through some hour that might have been a great hour of the soul, because, for us, life is prejudged. An explanation may be perfectly reasonable and quite wrong. What more reasonable than to suppose that that figure in the garden was the gardener? Who else was likely to be there at that early hour? Who else was likely to have any right or business there? The sanity, the likeliness of Mary's conclusion were beyond criticism. But she was wrong. She was tremendously and profoundly wrong. And her mistake teaches us that the truth as it is in Jesus may give the lie to all time-born probabilities. It may contradict earth's narrow, hour-long likelihood. The empty sepulchre is not an isolated marvel. It is not just a splendid, lonely mystery, challenging for evermore the mind that must still live on in a world wholly governed by laws that are traceable and wholly made up of situations that admit of being reasoned out. II. Let us look at what happened on the evening of the first day of the week. The mistake that the disciples made in the evening was just the opposite of the mistake that the Magdalene had made in the dawn. She had stumbled over the likely and the familiar: they stumbled over the unlikely and the strange. She had found an explanation that was simple and reasonable and by no means disconcerting. They found an explanation that was irrational, disquieting, and remote from the facts and laws of life. To her, Christ was the gardener about to begin his day's work: to them He was an inexplicable and dreadful apparition, a ghostly presence from the place of silence and shadows, flinging about their souls the garment of nameless fear. Mary did not go far enough in her explanation of the figure in the garden. She stopped short at the bidding of her habit of thought. She accepted too easily the verdict of sense and judgment. The disciples in their explanation of the figure that appeared among them went too far. They passed beyond the range of all that to them had ever been real and intelligible. They saw only a ghostly visitant, an abstraction, a terrifying mystery. Can we find in that stupefied and fear-stricken company a lesson we need to learn? Is it not the reality of the unseen world, the real existence, the immediate and practical significance of the things of the spirit? We lock the door, we bar the windows of the house of life. We shelter ourselves amid the securities and fellowships of earth. But in spite of every bolt and bar He comes. III. It was the same figure that Mary mistook for the gardener and that the disciples mistook for a dread apparition. It was the same living, loving Saviour of human souls. In Jesus the two worlds meet. In Him the earthly and the heavenly are reconciled. On the Magdalene Jesus laid a new law of reverence, on the disciples a new law of familiarity. Percy Ainsworth, The Pilgrim Church, p. 87. John 20:15 The gardener, as St. Francis sweetly says, reminded her only of flowers, while her head was full of nails, and thorns, and crosses. Faber. References. XX. 15. R. F. Horton, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvi. p. 33. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxix. No. 1699, and vol. li. No. 2956. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in a Religious House, vol. i. p. 68. XX. 16. H. S. Holland, Old and New, p. 201. A. Bradley, Sermons chiefly on Character, p. 273. XX. 16-18. H. S. Sanders, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvii. p. 409. Touch Me Not John 20:17 I. Observe, first, how the risen Lord withdraws Himself here from His disciple, and why. It is not enough merely to say, that in the nature of the case nothing else was to be looked for. It is true He had been on a far journey since He had met them last. In a word, He belonged to another order now, the order of the spiritual, the unseen, the eternal. And therefore it might be thought there must be a certain aloofness about Him so long as He should still remain on earth. They must 'touch Him not'. Nevertheless this is hardly our Lord's meaning here. Or if it be part of it, then it is the smaller and least important part As is evident from what follows: 'Touch Me not; for I am not yet ascended to My Father' implying surely, that when that consummation shall have been reached, a contact and companionship with Himself shall be open to which there shall attach no hindrance or limitation whatsoever. He closes one chapter in the history of His relations with the world that He may open another and even more desirable. The outward fellowship is to give place to an inward; the ordinary human companionship to a mystic or spiritual communion. II. Observe the nature of the new bond which our Lord speaks of here as existing between His followers and Himself. It comes out in His calling of them 'brethren'. It was a term which He had never applied to them before. We may say that there were three stages in the process by which the Son of God drew near to us, and identified Himself with our life and destiny as to be able to call us brethren. (1) In the first place there was His birth into this lowly world. (2) Then, further, there is His identification of Himself with His sinful brethren's lot as in God's sight which is the inner meaning of His whole public life. (3) And yet, it was not in the course of His lifetime He called men brethren, but after it was all behind Him. Why? may it not have been that to all this it was needful to add something else, before that most intimate relationship should be perfected and assured? The most expressly human of all our experiences, perhaps, is death. In that supreme hour of His death, He gained the full and final right to His own title, Son of man, and to claim us as His brethren. III. Once more observe how Jesus shares with His brethren here His own relation to the Father. 'Tell My brethren,' He says, 'that I ascend to My God and your God, and to My Father and your Father.' So that the God that is offered to our faith, you observe, is the God of living men. His grand desire for His brethren is, that what the Father was to Him, He may make Him to be to them. A. Martin, Winning the Soul, p. 133. The First Words of the Risen Lord John 20:17 The first words of the risen Lord were spoken to Mary: ' Touch Me not; for I am not yet ascended to My Father'. Take not hold of Me, He said. And yet neither in the old days nor in the new had it been His manner to repel or check the outgoings of love. Mary Magdalene washed His feet with tears the feet not yet nailed and wiped them with the hairs of her head. Since Mary and the Lord had parted, much had passed. The death, the sleep, the experiences of the other world, the return, the rising again, on His side; and on hers, a whole lifetime of questioning, misgiving, and agony. Even in the great forty days He suffered other women to clasp His feet. He was patient with the Apostle who demanded to touch and see, and yet it was His will of love to beat Mary back and say the words, * Touch Me not. * I. Touch Me not; for I am not yet ascended. So she may touch Him one day in another way. Touch Me not, for she was holding to the earthly, and imagining that His presence was bound up with the external form, and that she could only make sure of Him when she clasped Him with clinging hands. She had despaired when the bodily form of her Lord had vanished, and when she saw Him attain it was with the bodily form that she associated all possibilities of communion, likeness, and love. If it had been as she fancied, then, indeed, she would have believed in vain, for He was to linger but a little on these darkened shores of time. But His departure and herein is the sweetness and the power of His saying was to give Him back to her in a nearer, dearer, and closer manner than she had dreamed of when hope was highest. Touch Me not; for I am not yet ascended. There is to be a better fashion of touching Me, holding Me, detaining Me when I have gone away. I pass into the heavens, but I do not leave the earth. II. Between our Lord and the faithful dead there cannot be a perfect parallel. He conquered death as they did not. True, He burst the bars of iron asunder and made way for His own. True, He rose as the firstfruits of His sleeping people. True, they are with Him in Paradise on the day they die, but their bodies remain and see corruption, and the trumpet has not yet sounded. Their souls are in His sacred care, on the bosom of His love. But we cannot have communion with them as we can with Him. With Him there is possible the utmost intimacy of converse, the speaking and the hearing that go on from day to day between us and the living. He wakens us, if we will, every morning to fresh messages, and we may pour out our hearts before Him, and be assured of His heed. Not in the same full and satisfying sense can we communicate with our dead, and yet we slowly learn, under the Spirit's teaching, to think of them as we think of Him, and our love is changed, purified, and exalted in proportion as we realise the spiritual world and Christ as its King and Head. III. This may be illustrated by a study of 'In Memoriam'. That great poem is a unity, and it describes the way of the faithful soul in bereavement. It begins with the first experience of stupor and confusion and grief. The heart desires at first simply what Mary desired, the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still. It is bound to the past, and unable to rise to higher things than the lips and the eyes and the meeting of the morrow. It goes back with passionate yearning to what once was, and longs that it may be again the presence and companionship which meant sight and hearing and touch. It was through these that what it pines for was known and loved, and it cannot think of the soul existing apart from them. Even if it does exist it is not the human heart that was so dear, that is so missed. It is a phantom or a ghost. It is thought of with awe, perhaps even with recoil. While this phase of feeling lasts the dead body is dearer than the jewel it held. There is no consolation and no uplifting until we understand the spiritual touch, until the soul is delivered from the bondage to sense, until the desire fixed on what is dead turns to that which is not dead. The spiritual enfranchisement comes when we understand that love may survive the sensible presence of its object and that on both shores. When we on this side understand that, then the soul withdrawn becomes beloved and loving, not shadowy and awful, then the days that are no more become rather sweet than sad, a life in death and not a death in life. It may be very long ere the desire for the tangible, the visible, the material weakens. Through much tribulation the enlightenment must come. Indeed, it can hardly come except to those whose spirits the risen Lord has touched. This is the victory that overcomes grief, even our faith. W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, p. 181. Ascension Tide John 20:17 I. Our first thought is of our Master's glory, of that final attestation of His mission and work of which the voices from heaven at His Baptism and His Transfiguration were the prelude: of the opening and beginning of that new kingdom in which the Son of man has all power given to Him in heaven and on earth; in which He has the Name given Him which is above every name; in which He reigns 'far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come, King of kings, and Lord of lords'. II. And our next thought is, how deeply, how mysteriously we men are affected by this mystery of Christ; by what awful bonds we are bound to that nature which once was mortal like our own, and which is now in Divine Majesty on the eternal throne; by what near and intimate, an undecaying relations He has united and incorporated with Himself our whole race, even its outcasts; how, amid the darkness and the overthrows of time, we are able to believe in One who is beyond them and unchanged through them all, who once shared, as we share them, the conditions of life and time, and who now has all things, all life and death, all time, all being, beneath His feet; how we are able to think of Him as One who has not ceased to be man, and how we can stretch forth our hands to Him, through the veil, sure of His regard, sure that He knows us, sure of His sympathy. III. There is yet a third thought. This amazing relation of our race to its Eternal Lord must, if we believe in it, influence deeply our feelings of our relations to one another. Our distinctions disappear, our inequalities are lost, all that keeps us apart or uninterested in one another sinks, and all that attracts and unites us revives in fresh power, before the amazing message: 'Go to My brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto My Father, and your Father: and to My God, and your God'. R. W. Church, Pascal and other Sermons, p. 205. Touch Me Not (For Easter Day) John 20:17 This is the second word spoken by our Lord after His Resurrection; and it was spoken to the simple womanly penitent. His first word touched her heart, His second informed her spirit. I. The Action of the Magdalene. The action of the Magdalene in stretching out her hand to touch our Lord proved that she never supposed that He would be further removed from her than He was in His natural body. There was the Christian woman's faithful, loving, pious act. Is it your first impulse to get the precious possession of your risen Lord? II. The Rebuke. Let us go a step further. The word was instant 'Touch Me not'. Now, do you think that by that word He meant in any way that He was separate from her? Was it a warning, do you think, to His redeemed, that He was no more to be approached as near, that He was retiring into the nature which He had from all eternity, pure Godhead, and had left behind Him in the grave His manhood, emptied Himself of His human fellowship and kinship with us? Not at all. When He bade Mary touch Him not, He only negatived her impulsive love, and corrected it by a higher knowledge of a more perfect blessing which should after a brief interval of patience be hers. He needed that body as an instrument for our atonement and sacrifice in death upon the cross; He needs that body now to be an instrument of uniting man with God. Mary should touch Him, Mary should receive, embrace, possess Him, but not in the only way in which she had kissed His feet and washed them with her tears and wiped them with the natural drapery of her hair, but she should touch Him and possess Him in a better way. III. 'Not yet Ascended.' It is clear from these words that the union of any individual man with Christ is the result of the Ascension. The period of forty days between the Resurrection and the Ascension was a transitional state, not intended to last, an intermediate condition of life, an interval that is too subtle to be defined. The natural body of Christ that is, the body that was so liable to suffering and death was extinct when He said these words. It had no place, and has no place on earth, or in Hades, or in Heaven. The natural body was and is extinct. The glorified body was not perfect when He spoke with Mary. He waited till the Ascension for the endowment of power, sent forth by the Holy Spirit, charged with all the virtues of His manhood, the life, sacrifice, and atoning death of the Redeemer. And this authority given to the ascended and glorified Lord to send forth the Holy Ghost seemed to have been ordered in the eternal counsels of God to be the Son's reward, to be the glory to ensue after Christ had perfectly fulfilled His mission. It is the Holy Ghost Who is intrusted with the inward spiritual power of uniting man, in whom He indwells, with Christ. He conveys to the whole man, body, soul, and spirit, every gift and grace which Jesus has authority to give. Mary's Commission John 20:17 I. To whom Sent. Christ's brethren Peter, John, James, Andrew, and the rest. a. The condescension in it. God's Son calls them brethren. b. The honour in it. He calls brethren them who are Adam's children, creatures of a day, worms of the dust, ignorant, polluted, and condemned. c. The love in it. He does this though they all had deserted Him, and Peter had denied Him. II. With what Charged. A message a. Concerning Himself. 'Say to them I.' That will let them know I am risen. b. Concerning His Ascension. 'Say, I am ascending.' That will help them to understand that when I spoke of going to the Father (14:28; 16:10), I did not simply mean departing from the world by death, or passing into a super-terrestrial life I have done both, and yet I am not ascended but ascending to where I was before (6:62), to the Father's house (14:2), the Father's bosom (1:18), the Father's glory (17:5). c. Concerning the Father. 'Say, I am ascending to My Father and your Father, and My God and your God.' That will teach them that while there must ever remain a distinction between My relationship to God and yours, yours will resemble Mine in that (through grace) God will be to you a Father and all you will be brethren. References. XX. 17. Newman Smyth, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliii. p. 312. R. W. Church, Village Sermons (2nd Series), p. 190. J. Baines, Twenty Sermons, p. 173. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xliv. No. 2561, and vol. xlvii. No. 2733. A. Maclaren, After the Resurrection, p. 1. Expositor (6th Series), vol. i. p. 377; ibid. (7th Series), vol. vi. p. 113. XX. 18. H. S. Holland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvii, p. 337. XX. 19. C. Gutch, Sermons, p. 184. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxi. No. 1254. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in a Religious House, vol. i. p. 41. G. H. Morrison, The Unlighted Lustre, p. 112. XX. 19, 20. G. Body, Christian World Pulpit, vol. liii. p. 170. W. G. Bryan, Seven Sermons on the Sacraments, p. 89. XX. 19-23. Expositor (7th Series), vol. vi. p. 100. Beneficent Intrusions John 20:19 * ; John 20:26 * I. The circumstances thus briefly described are in themselves a significant illustration of a constantly re-appearing experience of life. For as the disciples unwittingly shut out the Lord, so in many a life the doors are shut upon Him. And as on that day, so in this, it is the joy of the Saviour to reveal Himself to those who all unintentionally have excluded Him from their lives, and all unconscious to themselves are poor without Him. Indeed, it is the tragedy of many a life that its doors are shut. Sometimes it is engrossment in pleasure, in business, in friendship, which bars the door against the ingress of the Saviour. All these things, lawful in themselves, and having indeed a right and necessary place in any life, may gain such an ascendancy as to become its masters, demanding all thought, all energy, all strength of life, until the man over whom they have gained control is himself behind closed doors. Sometimes it is by selfishness of joy or sorrow that the doors are closed. There is a joy which is regarded as unshareable, or a sorrow which is regarded as unpardonable, and He who is the Author of each is excluded from life by His own providences misreceived and misinterpreted. Often, too, it is with us as with these His earliest disciples, that fear of the consequences of identification with Him causes the door to be tightly barred. We are afraid of the disfavour of man, and in shutting out the Jews we really shut out Jesus. But chiefly it is sin which excludes the Son of God from the life in which He seeks to be known and served. II. And yet, despite these things, it is really impossible to avoid Christ, for He forces Himself again and again upon our attention. He comes despite closed doors, and reveals Himself in any or all of His guises, as Friend, Succourer, Redeemer, King. 'Love laughs at locksmiths,' it is said, and never was aphorism truer than when applied to the insistence with which He seeks to get at men's hearts. By the written Word or the spoken message, by uncontrolled memory or inexplicable impulse, in the glory of noontide or in the quiet watch's of the night, He is for ever coming to us through our shut doors, offering Himself and all that He is and has for our salvation and life. III. And His coming, however He may be disguised and under whatever circumstances He appears, is always with the same object as His appearance in the upper room on the first Easter Day. To the willing and listening heart His first word is one of benediction, 'Peace be unto you'. He comes not to increase the storm, but to quell it; not to complicate the problem of life but to solve it; not to alarm but to allay our fears. To the overwhelmed hearts in the upper room, and to us also, to whom the immensity of the task seems altogether beyond our powers, His last word proclaims the sufficient qualification for its fulfilment 'Receive ye the Holy Ghost'. The same enduement as that in which He lived is conferred upon those who go for Him, for in this life of wonderful paradox they are thus united with Him as they go. and share His own life and strength. J. Stuart Holden, The Pre-Eminent Lord, p. 103. References. XX. 19. Expositor (6th Series), vol. viii. p. 358; ibid. vol. xi. p. 452. Woundprints John 20:20 I. These wounds were silent arguments. Christ's hands and His side had an eloquence unapproachable. They were arguments cut in form and figure. Some men have been able to cut stone into poetry and words into music. There has been no speech, no appeal to the ear; the whole appeal seems to have been direct d to the vision of man, to vision at its best, to the vision that has a vision within, a keener vision than can be revealed by the eyes of the body. Silence will always have a place in the great ministry of the universe. There should be more silence in public worship. II. This was not only a silent argument, it was a visible answer and argument. He showed them His hands and His side. Then doubt was set at rest; He could not have made those wounds Himself; those wounds had a history, a meaning which it will take all the centuries of duration to explain; they were the devil's signature; but, gathered up by God's love, that which was intended as mischief was turned into a redemption; He maketh the wrath of devils to praise Him, and the remainder thereof He shuts up in a hell of His own making. We want visible arguments. We should be able to say concerning this man and that all over the Christian Church, that man represents Christ. III. What Christ did to the disciples on the occasion referred to in the text the Church should always be doing all the world over. How is the Church to be known? By its wounds. I have heard of respectable churches: never trust them, never believe them. I have heard of those who have made a decoration of Christianity; it is all bejewelled and bedizened and tricked out in various finery and in divers ways known only to the cunning of a perverted imagination. That is not the Church. O thou decorated pretender, show us thy hands and thy feet; out with your hands, and bare your side, this is a decency that sanctifies all other conduct; show the woundprints and thus give final and emphatic and gracious proof of the identity of Christ. Christ is re-incarnated, I repeat, in His people. IV. And what Christ expects of us He Himself has first shown in grand and majestic example. God has suffered for His Church; the history of God is a history of suffering, and therefore a history of sorrow, and finally a history of sympathy. God suffers for us every day. God takes the right view of our falls and wounds; God is, through Jesus Christ His only begotten Son, going to turn our apostacies, if we have to fall, into great realisations of character; we should be the better, under the mercy of God, for our very fall. That is what is meant by falling upwards. That word 'fall' is not to be interpreted in the usual cant phrase of the last five-and-twenty years, that the fall of Adam was a fall upwards; it is true of the fall of every soul that God has made that it may be turned into an upward movement. This is a great mystery and hardly to be explained in words, but it is a great experience and can be lived out to the last throb of the last letter. Joseph Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol. vii. p. 261. The Reality of the Risen Lord John 20:20 This scene is suggestive of so many considerations that the difficulty is which to choose. There are three which claim especial attention just at present. I. Our Lord's Indulgent Treatment of Mistakes and Imperfections in Religious Beliefs. Touch is, indeed, the least intellectual it is the bluntest, it is the most material of all the five senses. In the order of their spiritual precedence, touch is below taste and smell, just as sight and still more hearing are far above these. Touch may be deceived at least as easily as sight, but in certain depressed mental conditions touch does afford a sense of confidence which sight cannot command. It supplies a kind of evidence which, united to other and higher testimony, removes the last obstacle to faith. The first condition of successful teaching is patient sympathy with the difficulties of the learner to be able to remember that others may have to encounter obstacles all their own which the teacher has never had to encounter that others may have been denied opportunities which have been freely granted to him that others are possibly weighed down by encumbrances of which he has known nothing that they need a kind of assistance which for him may have been unnecessary. 'What is the first condition of successful teaching? ' 'Patience.' 'What is the second?' 'Patience.' 'What is the third?' 'Patience.' II. We see our Lord's Sanction of the Principle of Inquiry, upon occasion, into the very Foundations of our Religious Belief. The life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is not a work of the sanctified imagination of a later age. Handle it; handle it searchingly but reverently; and you will discover this for yourself. You will see that there is an intrinsic consistency, that there is a solidity, that there is a power of resistance to critical solvents, about it, which you little suspect. But do not suppose that, because it condescends to be thus tested by your understanding, as regards its reality, it is therefore, within the compass of your understanding as to its scope It ends in that which is beyond you. While you are finite and bounded in your range of vision, it, being an unveiling of the Divine Being, is Divine. Yes, Christianity plants its feet firmly on the soil of earth in the life of our Lord. Its hands are seen, again and again, working in the stirring agencies of later history, but it rears its head upwards to the sky. It loses itself as a creed in the clouds of heaven. We see the very feet, the very hands, the reality of the one incomparable life; but we only see enough to know assuredly that there is much more which is necessarily and utterly beyond us, lost, as the Apostle puts it lost in 'the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and of the knowledge of God'. III. See here the Direction which our Lord gives to the Thoughts of His Perplexed Disciples. He does not turn them in upon themselves. Whatever they may think and feel, He is there, utterly independent of their doubt, independent, too, of their enthusiasm there, in His own calm, assured, unassailable life. 'Behold My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself. Handle Me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see Me have.' H. P. Liddon. Christian Gladness John 20:20 The time of weariness, suspense, and doubt was over; the disciples knew that the Lord was risen from the dead. They saw Him, they heard Him speak, and He showed them His hands and His side. Here we come into contact with one of the abiding sources of Christian gladness. It is the presence of the Lord that makes His people glad, as it is the absence from Him which makes them sad. It is one of the axioms of the Christian faith that the Lord is ever with His people; it is one of their experiences that He keeps tryst, and His presence makes His people glad. Why did the sight of Jesus make His disciples glad? I. They were glad for His sake. They were glad when they saw the Lord, because the Resurrection told them that He had won the victory, and had finished His work. They were glad because they knew that He had overcome all that was hostile to Him and His work. That work was finished. But that source of gladness remains for all His people. Whenever we see the Lord, whenever manifestations of His presence come within our experience, we are glad for His sake, because He endured the cross and is set on the right hand of God. II. The disciples were glad for their own sake. He was still the same patient, loving, compassionate, helpful Friend and Saviour He had been during the years in which they had known Him. So when He had ascended up on high, and returned to the Father, they were persuaded that He felt in heaven as He had felt on earth, continued to be touched with a feeling of their infirmities, and was still afflicted in all their afflictions. A love that did not depend on the worthiness of the people loved, that death could not touch, that many waters could not quench, surely such a love was unexampled. We can only explain it or understand it by coming to understand Him. We Can only say it is like Jesus to love after this fashion. But this source of Christian gladness is also permanent. How may He come, and how may we recognise Him when He comes? To the first question no answer can be given. But there are times, places, seasons, where the seeking heart is sure to find Him. (1) It was when he was in the spirit on the Lord's Day that John saw the vision of the Lord, and received from Him the new mission he had to accomplish. (2) More definitely we may always expect to find Jesus in His Word. (3) But even more particularly. 'Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.' Never have His people met together and found that He was absent. J. Iverach, The Other Side of Greatness, p. 85. References. XX. 20. W. F. Shaw, Sermon Sketches for the Christian Year, p. 56. W. P. S. Bingham, Sermons on Easter Subjects, p. 66. F. St. John Corbett, The Preacher's Year, p. 77. W. H. Simcox, The Cessation of Prophecy, p. 314. S. Baring-Gould, Village Preaching for a Year (2nd Series), vol. i. p. 209. J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons (9th Series), p. 312. E. H. Bickersteth, Thoughts in Past Years, p. 1. C. Bigg, The Spirit of Christ in Common Life, p. 282. The Missionary Commission of the Church John 20:21 These are amazing words. If they do not amaze us I fear Newman's explanation is the true one: 'You do not meditate and therefore you are not impressed'. What an astonishing avowment it is! Christ makes Himself co-ordinate with the Father. Not only does the Lord associate Himself uniquely with God, but in a wonderful way He associates Christians with Himself. I. Christ commissions us to evangelise men. God sent Christ to save the world; in a lesser but very real sense Christ sends His disciples to save the world. My text has been well described as 'the charter of the Church'. Such it is. The point to be specially noted is that all Christians are sent. How can we all go? We can all go either personally or representatively. We are not responsible for the conversion of the world, but we are responsible for the evangelisation of the world. II. Christ sends His servants with a wonderful experience of Divine things. 'As the Father hath sent Me.' How did God send Jesus? I answer that He sent Him with a matchless experience Divine. 'So send I you.' What an experience He gave His first commissioned evangelists! 'He showed unto them His hands and His side.' They are made sure of the Saviour whom they are to proclaim. This is ever and infallibly the missionary secret. All who have seen the Lord are sent. And this rich experience is the inspiration of missionary work. III. The commissioned disciples are enriched with peace. What was the risen Master's greeting when He appeared among His disciples to commission them that first Easter evening? 'Peace be unto you.' And as He states the great delegation, what is His prefatory word? 'Jesus therefore said to them again, Peace be unto you.' There is a grand distinction between the two benedictions. As Bishop Westcott expresses it: 'The first "Peace" was the restoration of personal confidence; the second "Peace" was the preparation for work'. IV. The servants of the Lord are supremely empowered. In the Holy Spirit all empowerment for world-evangelisation rests. He is the ' Holy Spirit,' and imparts holiness to those who receive Him. V. With solemn authority Christ's commissioned servants go forth. 'All authority hath been given unto Me in heaven and on earth' is Christ's own declaration. Does He impart authority to His sent ones? Assuredly. This is His word: 'Whosesoever sins ye forgive they are forgiven unto them; whosesoever sins ye retain they are retained'. What is this authority? I believe it relates, in Wesley's phrase, to 'ecclesiastical censures' and to them only. It is entrusted with the power to keep its membership pure. Dinsdale T. Young, The Enthusiasm of God, p. 62. References. XX. 21. B. Martin, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlviii. p. 388. F. J. A. Hort, Village Sermons in Outline, p. 246. J. Keble, Sermons for the Saints' Days, p. 185. J. B. Brown, The Divine Life in Man, p. 296. G. Campbell Morgan, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxx. p. 257. Homes Dudden, Christ and Christ's Religion, p. 216. Expositor (6th Series), vol. ix. p. 45. XX. 21-23. W. Gladden, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliv. p. 148. J. Budgen, Parochial Sermons, vol. i. p. 28. A. Maclaren, After the Resurrection, p. 40; ibid. Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 308. XX. 22. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p. 111. XX. 22, 23. W. Forster, Penny Pulpit, No. 1649, p. 233. H. E. Manning, Sin and its Consequences, p. 127. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 11. XX. 22-28. Ibid. (5th Series), vol. ii. p. 450. XX. 23. A. B. O. Wilberforce, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlix. p. 321. XX. 24. C. Perren, Revival Sermons in Outline, p. 326. C. Bickersteth, The Gospel of Incarnate Love, p. 88. Expositor (6th Series), vol. iv. p. 356. XX. 24, 25. H. M. Butler, Harrow School Sermons (2nd Series), p. 127. The Doubt of Thomas John 20:24-29 Thomas the doubter how shall we think of him? We can classify the doubters. There is the indifferent doubter with whom all matters of religion are of so little importance that it is absurd to claim a miracle in support of them, especially such a miracle as the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. There is the conceited doubter. Then there is the doubter that only talks. And last of all there is the honest doubter, to whom all that is spiritual is unknowable. But surely Thomas is not represented by either of these classes. I. The very character of Thomas teaches us that faith is a much harder thing for some people than it is for others. Thomas was a slow, diffident man, a week behind the rest in seeing everything. Three times only Thomas speaks in the Gospels and each time it is with a sigh. There is a dolefulness in the tone, a shake of the head, you feel the despondency of the man. There are no people in the world who need to be more tenderly dealt with than those slow and diffident ones, who have always been at a disadvantage. We are tender and pitiful to the defects of the body. But, alas! natural defects of character have neither patience nor pity, and they need both. Our most gracious Lord will never let any one of us be at a disadvantage because of the peculiarity of our character. He will ever do most for those who have most to hinder them. II. See another aspect of this doubt as we turn from the character of the man to the story. Thomas so slow, so diffident, so apt to despond, has found the Lord Jesus Christ, and with all the power of devotion that such people are capable of when once their confidence is won, he clings to the Saviour. And now Christ was dead. Do you wonder that Thomas was absent at the gathering of the disciples on that first Sunday after Easter? I do not. It is told of one of our poets that at the death of his child he cried fiercely, 'Never will I risk such anguish again, I will never love anything any more'. Thus it is that many have gone into the gloom and power of doubt. Let us turn to see the Lord Jesus dealing with this doubt. First, He calls him by his name, 'Thomas'. So is it that He comes to each of us by ourselves, separately, calling us by our name and teaching us to say: 'My Lord and my God'. Then He meets Thomas away in the innermost thought of His heart. 'Thomas, reach hither thy finger, put forth thy hand.' So must His word often meet us in the innermost heart. And so must we see Him; and to commune with Him and gaze upon those woundprints is our deliverance. M. G. Pearse, The Gentleness of Jesus, p. 77. St. Thomas the Apostle John 20:24-29 It is said that the first institution of the Festival of St. Thomas was established at a period between the eighth and the eleventh century. In the Greek Church it is commemorated on 6th October, but in the English Church on 21st December. The name Thomas, whether in its Hebrew form or in that of its Greek equivalent Didymus signifies 'a twin,' or 'a twin-brother'; and because he is always mentioned in the sacred lists with St. Matthew, he is regarded as Matthew's brother. By birth, he was a native of Galilee; by trade, a fisherman. He was called by Christ to be one of His disciples; but He differed from his fellows in several characteristics, which are brought prominently before us in St. John's Gospel. I. The Doubt of Thomas. On the first day after His Resurrection Christ showed Himself five times. But Thomas was not favoured as yet with a sight of his Lord, and when the other disciples told him what they had seen, he said unto them, 'I will not believe'. Thus he took an attitude of stubborn resistance. Thomas held his ground for eight days. Yet behind him there was nothing but the silent tomb of Christ, and before him there was nothing but blank despair. So much for doubt. It robs the soul of everything, and gives nothing in its stead. II. The Confession of Thomas. On the second Sunday after His Resurrection, Jesus stood again in that dim-lighted chamber, and, after His salutation of peace, He singled Thomas out from the other disciples. What a proof this of Divine omniscience! And what proof, too, of gracious condescension! To the craving of Thomas for tangible evidence of His Resurrection Christ now gives the opportunity of testing His real substantiality and bodily identity. Thomas sank instantly from the lofty altitude of a stubborn intellect into the profound docility of a little child, and, embracing the feet of Jesus, he exclaimed, 'My Lord and my God!' This was the birth-cry of a new faith and a new heart; and Christ accepted him, but gently rebuked him for his preceding doubt, and pronounced an emphatic blessing on all who believe in Him though they have neither seen nor handled Him. Absolutely, there is no blessedness for any man apart from the Christ III. The After-life of Thomas. When different provinces were assigned to different Apostles after the ascension of their Master, Thomas took Parthia, and, according to Jerome, preached the Gospel not only to the Parthians, but to the Medes, Carmanians, Persians, and the Magi. Chrysostom further states that he baptised the very men who, guided by a star, found the young Child at Bethlehem, and that he ordained them as colleagues in the ministry. A well-established tradition has it that he extended his mission to India, where it is believed he fell a martyr to his zeal for Christ and His cause. St. Thomas's Doubt John 20:25 Of all the Apostles, St. Thomas affords the most striking parallel to the prevailing tendencies of our age. These words of his might have been spoken by a disciple of the modern school of sensational philosophy. But he is not a mere type of a school of thought. He is a Christian man with mingled graces and faults. I. St. Thomas's Doubt viewed in Relation to his own Spiritual Condition. (a) It was a decided doubt. We look upon doubt as something that wavers, falters, hesitates. But St. Thomas showed the opposite spirit. He was very positive. The dogmatism of unbelief is often observed; but here we may see the dogmatism of doubt Though the expression appears paradoxical, it is verified by common observation. If a man lays down certain conditions on which he will believe, and regards these conditions as absolute and final, he is as dogmatic in his decision not to decide the question before him till those conditions are fulfilled. (b) This doubt must be, distinguished from, distrust. The Apostle did not waver in his allegiance to Christ; he merely questioned the astounding rumour of the Resurrection. He would still die for his Master, though he could not believe that his Master had risen from the grave. The really important matter for all of us is an active loyal trust in Christ An orthodox Judas is no Christian, while a sceptical Thomas remains within the fold of Christ II. St. Thomas's Doubt as Illustrative of a Common Phase of Thought. There was a method in his doubt. He had a very clear idea of what he required to satisfy his mind. He wanted personal experience, and he wanted the evidence of his senses. This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/expositors-dictionary/ John 21 Mr. A. C. Benson says: 'I have often thought that the last chapter of St. John's Gospel is one of the most bewildering and enchanting pieces of literature I know. I suppose Robert Browning must have thought so, because he makes the reading of it, in that odd rich poem 'Bishop Blougram's Apology,' the sign, together with testing a plough, of a man's conversion, from the unreal life of talk and words, to the realities of life.' References. XXI. 1. J. S. Maver, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxviii. p. 11. Expositor (6th Series), vol. viii. p. 349. XXI. 2. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 184. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 338. The Practical Type John 21:3 This is the utterance of the man of action, the practical man, who cannot bear suspense and delay, and must be up and doing. I. Let us be thankful for the man of action. We can no more do without this type of character, than the head can do without the fingers, or the fingers without the tool which they wield. The man of thought is the brain of the community; the man of feeling is its heart; the man of deeds is its hand. While we want Plato and Kant to do our thinking for us, and poets to sing to us, and prophets to inspire us, we want our Alexanders and Caesars, and Cromwells and Wellingtons, to show how dreams may be turned into conquests: we want our Watts, and Stephensons, and Brunels, and Edisons, to prove that the thing thought of may become the thing done. And in our religious life we must have the man of affairs the organiser the man of executive energy and skill; the quiet, earnest, plodding worker, who will do what others talk of or dream over. II. But let us look a little closer at the practical man. With all his sterling worth, he, too, has his faults, and they are largely exemplified in the character of Simon Peter. (1) The practical man is often lacking in breadth of outlook. He is strong because he sees clearly and vividly the thing to be done, and sets about doing it without delay. But many men of this kind are unable to see more than the one thing. Their little scheme is not only the one thing needful, but there is no other scheme worth thinking or talking about. In this way they often ruin their cause by claiming too much for it. We need breadth of outlook as well as intensity of action. (2) Another fault of Peter, the practical man, was his restlessness, his lack of repose, and his passion for immediate results. There is hardly any feature more characteristic of our very practical age than this restlessness of spirit, and it largely comes of a feverish impatience of results. (3) Again, the practical man is apt to gauge everything too much by outward standards. There are some realities and they are the sublimest that will not lend themselves to arithmetical computation. (4) And now, finally, we must note that the practical man is often, like Simon Peter, apt to be easily discouraged if not fickle. The men that last, whose enthusiasm fails not, whose work, though seemingly defeated, abides, are the men who look not at the things that are seen, and can be weighed, measured, estimated, but at the things that are unseen. E. Griffith-Jones, Types of Christian Life, p. 70. Desertion and Drudgery John 21:3 I. There are seasons when Christ seems to be lost. There are times when Christ seems absent from the world, and evil triumphs without let or hindrance. There are times when Christ seems absent from the Church, and its worship is only fashion or routine. And there are times when Christ seems absent from the soul, and faith is dead, and comforts are departed, and one is ready to cry again with Mary, 'They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him'. It is then that one prays, and prayer seems a mockery. It is then that the Bible loses all its dew. It is in such hours a man is prone to fall, and to clutch again at what he had forsworn. It is in such hours that, for a word of sympathy, a woman will bow down her head and weep. II. In such seasons duty still remains. When Simon Peter said 'I go a fishing,' you are not to regard it as a sinful impulse. It has been taken so, and by some eminent scholars, but I am quite convinced that they are wrong. It was not a counsel of despair. It did not mean that Peter was now hopeless. It was not a return to the old life in Galilee, as if the discipleship had been a dream. It was the action of a man of energy, to whom it was torture to be sitting idle, and who would fill in the hours till his Lord appeared, by doing the plain duty at his hand. But Simon Peter said 'I go a fishing' there was work to do and I am going to do it. There was no joy for him his Lord was absent but the doing of his duty still remained. Through duty lies the road to restored fellowship. It was when they had toiled, and toiled heroically, that they discovered Jesus on the shore. There is something magnificent in their persistence all through the weary hours of that night. Time after time their nets were shot, and time after time their nets were empty. And yet they held to it till every light was quenched that had been twinkling seaward from the village, and the only sound that broke upon the silence was the calling of the night-bird on the loch. The wonder is they did not give it up. They must have been intensely disappointed. The fish were there, for other boats were taking them, and they were quite as skilful as the best. And yet they held to it all through the night, and till the dawn was crimsoning the east, and it was then that Jesus Christ came back. They did not find Him because of their success. They found Him because of their fidelity. He did not come after a day of triumph. He came after a night of toil. Not in despair, but from a sense of duty had Simon Peter cried 'I go a fishing'; and he discovered when the morning broke that duty was the road to restored fellowship. G. H. Morrison, The Return of the Angels, p. 224. References. XXI. 3. J. Marshall Lang, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lviii. p. 118. J. H. Jowett, British Congregationalist, 27th June, 1907, p. 636. XXI. 3-6. W. P. Balfern, Lessons from Jesus, p. 13. XXI. 4. W. P. S. Bingham, Sermons on Easter Subjects, p. 53. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 347. XXI. 4-6. H. S. Holland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lix. p. 305. XXI. 5. J. Reid, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xvii. p. 205. XXI. 6. Archbishop Magee, Sermons at Bath, p. 116. H. S. Holland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lix. p. 313. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. viii. No. 443. G. H. Morrison, The Unlighted Lustre, p. 234. St. John John 21:7 We must guard against a common error. It is often supposed that John was a soft and rather womanish character I say womanish, because, although all would agree that a womanly woman is one of the most precious things on earth, yet they would also agree that a womanish man is one of the most contemptible, and we slip into the idea that John's was a rather soft and clinging character, and we argue half-unconsciously from this, that the characters Christ loves best now are the soft and the gentle ones. It is quite true that He does take delight in them; but we must not forget that His friend was a Son of Thunder the disciple whom Jesus loved was as brave as a lion and as true as steel. I. Strength of character that comes out, then, as the first necessity in Christ's friends not strength of body. Are we strong we who aspire to be the friends of Christ? Is it not true to say that the weakness of Christians is the greatest obstacle to the advance of Christ's Church today? (1) Think of the weakness of will in resisting temptation. (2) Or, again, think of the weakness in society in standing up for the colours of the regiment under which we pretend to fight. (3) Or think of the weakness of going by the fashion in everything, the drifting with the tide, being sceptical when it is the thing to be sceptical, taking up Buddhism when it is the clever thing to do; not letting our conscience rule our habits in society, but the customs of society rule our conscience. II. But then, secondly, there is something which must go by the side of this, and that is, the most tender, the most gracious charity. 'Little children, love one another' it was the secret of St. John's life long before he said it. How should we stand this test of considerateness? (1) How about our servants? (2) Or those who serve in shops. (3) Or impatience at being kept waiting. III. And St. John's third attribute was surely personal love of Jesus Himself. We may think it so much easier for St. John than for ourselves to have a personal love for Christ, but we must remember that (1) we have the enormous evidence derived from subsequent history we know by sight what they had to know by faith; (2) we have the Gospels: for what object were these Gospels preserved except that Jesus might live and move before our eyes? (3) We have prayer and the Sacraments; for what object were prayer and the Sacraments instituted, except that we might hold real communion with the same living Lord? The true disciple will still be aiming at a personal love of Christ. Bishop Winnington-Ingram, Christ and His Friends, p. 13. John 21:7 Mr. A. C. Benson says of this passage: 'They (the disciples) go back, like men wearied of inaction, tired of agitated thought, to their homely trade. All night the boat sways in the quiet tide, but they catch nothing. Then as the morning begins to come in about the promontories and shores of the lake, they see the figure of one moving on the bank, who hails them with a familiar heartiness, as a man might do who had to provide for unexpected guests, and had nothing to give them to eat. I fancy, I know not whether rightly, that they see in Him a purchaser, and answer sullenly that they have nothing to sell. Then follows a direction, which they obey, to cast the net on the right side of the boat. Perhaps they thought the stranger for it is clear that as yet they had no suspicion of His identity had seen some sign of a moving shoal which had escaped them. They secure a great haul offish. Then John has an inkling of the truth; and I know no words which thrill me more strangely than the simple expression that bursts from his lips: "It is the Lord". With characteristic impetuosity Peter leaps into the water, and wades or swims ashore.' On the general passage Mr. Benson says: 'I can only say that for me a deep mystery broods over the record. The glimpses of Him, and even more His absences, seem to me to transcend the powers of human invention. That these men lived, that they believed they saw the Lord, seems to me the only possible explanation, though I admit to the full the baffling mystery of it all.' References. XXI. 7. F. Gooch, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliii. p. 348. S. A. Tipple, The Admiring Guest, p. 212. J. Keble, Sermons for the Saints' Days, p. 68. W. C. E. Newbolt, Church Times, vol. lxi. p. 23. Ibid. Church Family Newspaper, vol. xvi. p. 11. Expositor (4th Series), vol. iii. p. 228; ibid. (6th Series), vol. x. p. 324. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 358. XXI. 10, 11. F. J. A. Hort, Village Sermons in Outline, p. 251. A Call to Communion John 21:12 I. The first thing and the great thing in this chapter is the revelation of Jesus Christ 'After those things Jesus showed Himself again to His disciples at the Sea of Tiberias.' There must be the real Presence or there is nothing. Not a real presence in any awful mystery of bread and wine that surely is unlike all that we know of the blessed Saviour. But we must know Him as our very Friend and Brother, as they knew Him of old. 'Where Christ is, there is the Church,' said the great divine of old. Where Christ is, there, and there only, is the Sacrament. II. The second thought is the renewal of love. 'Simon, son of Jonas, dost thou care for Me? 'Instantly Peter with heart on fire cries, 'Lord, Thou knowest all things, Thou knowest that I love Thee'. Again Jesus asks him, 'Simon, son of Jonas, dost thou care for Me? 'Again he cries, more passionately, 'Lord, Thou knowest all things, Thou knowest that I love Thee'. The third time Jesus yields to Peter and uses his own word. 'Dost thou love Me?' 'Love Thee? my Lord, Thou knowest that I love Thee.' Why think you, is the question asked three times? The answer is not far to seek. Because by that fire of coals in the judgment hall three times did Peter declare 'I never knew Him'; and now three times should Peter look into that face and declare, 'Thou knowest that I love Thee'. For every one of us this is the next thing. There comes the question, 'Dost thou love Me? 'He waits for the separate and personal reply. III. The third thought is the commission for service. 'Jesus saith unto him, Simon, tend My sheep, feed My lambs, shepherd My sheep.' Love can only satisfy itself in service. It cannot live in words only, it must clothe itself in deeds. M. G. Pearse, The Gentleness of Jesus, p. 151. References. XXI. 12. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xi. No. 633, and vol. xxxv. No. 2072. XXI. 14. A. Maclaren, After the Resurrection, p. 65. XXI. 15. C. A. Berry, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlv. p. 296. J. J. Blunt, Plain Sermons, p. 47. C. Bickersteth, The Gospel of Incarnate Love, p. 97. F. W. Farrar, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvii. p. 289. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxviii. No. 1684. A. Maclaren, After the Resurrection, p. 77. Ibid. Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 372. XXI. 15-17. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. iii. No. 117. W. C. Smith, Sermons, p. 295. Expositor (4th Series), vol. i. p. 18; ibid. vol. vii. p. 312. XXI. 15-19. H. Smith, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xviii. p. 420. XXI. 15-23. F. J. A. Hort, Village Sermons in Outline, p. 257. XXI. 16. W. H. Evans, Short Sermons for the Seasons, p. 15. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxii. No. 1281. Love for Jesus John 21:17 There were special reasons why this question was put thrice to St. Peter, but I think I can show that it is put thrice to us. The real reason why, after getting an affirmative answer to this question, Jesus put it a second time, was because the first answer was too superficial Christ wanted an answer from a deeper place. And the reason why, after receiving an affirmative answer a second time, he put the question a third time, was that the second answer was still too superficial. He wanted an answer from a still deeper place. Now there are three places in us from which Christ wishes an answer to this question. In us you may see there are three strata the most superficial strata is Feeling, lower than that is Intellect, and lowest of all is Will, the very foundation of our whole nature and Christ wishes to have an answer from each of these places. But let me put it in this way. In the house of Life of each of us there are three storeys the basement storey, the middle storey, and the top storey and Christ comes to the door of each storey and puts his question. I. Let us begin first with Feeling. Jesus enters the house of our Life and comes to the door of the basement storey where Feeling dwells. He knocks at the door, and when Feeling opens the door He says 'Lovest thou Me?' There are in us many feelings of very different kinds that all pass by the general name of Love. Now, among all the kinds of love that your heart has known, has love to Christ been one? That is a possible kind of love in every life, and I suppose I may say without any fear of contradiction that it is the most sacred, the most sweet, the most influential of all the species of love. II. And now, second, Intellect. Christ has got His answer at the basement storey of the house of Life, and now He ascends the stair to the middle storey, where Intellect dwells. He stands there at the door and knocks, and when Intellect opens the door, He says, 'Lovest thou Me?' The bond which unites us to Christ is far stronger when to Feeling is added Intelligence. He likes our choice of Him to spring not only from emotion, but from judgment as well. There are two ways in which knowledge may deepen and strengthen our love of Christ. It may increase our gratitude to Him, or it may increase our admiration of Him. III. The Will. Christ has received His answer on the basement storey at the door of Feeling, and on the middle storey at the door of the Intellect, and now He ascends to the topmost storey where the Will dwells, and there He stands and knocks at the door, and when the Will opens the door, He says, 'Lovest thou Me? 'There are two totally distinct kinds of love in this world, the love that receives and the love that gives. The love that receives absorbs its object and enjoys it. The love that gives, on the contrary, is absorbed in its object, and forgets itself: its one thought is to do good to another, and it does not change. Now our love to Christ has to be submitted to this test. Love to Christ means disadvantage and self-denial. He asks every one who says he loves Him to take up his cross and follow Him, to confess Him before men, to take on His shoulders His cause, planning for it, praying for it, working for it, giving to it: and this is the test, not emotion. We love Christ just as much as we are able to do for Him, just as much as we are able to endure for Him, just as much as we are willing to give to Him, just as much as we are willing to be nothing, that He may be All-in-all. This is the pathway to perfect love. James Stalker, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliii. p. 113. John 21:17 Peter made those humble protestations of love and reparation for his three denials, and our Lord did not say 'You have formerly denied Me thrice, and are not worthy to feed My sheep,' but 'Feed My sheep'; for he loved much, having been pardoned much: for love is the prophet's secret; and those who have best fed God's sheep are those who have learned much love through much pardon. Coventry Patmore. John 21:17 Lord, within a little time I have heard the same precept in sundry places and by several preachers passed upon me. The doctrine seemeth to haunt my soul; whithersoever I turn it meets me. Surely this is from Thy providence, and should be for my profit. It is because I am an ill proficient in this point, that I must not turn over a new leaf, but am still kept to my old lesson? Peter was grieved because our Saviour said unto him the third time, 'Lovest thou Me?' But I will not be offended at Thy often inculcating the same precept, but rather conclude that I am much concerned therein, and that it is Thy pleasure that the nail should be soundly fastened in me, which Thou hast knocked in with so many hammers. Thomas Fuller. References. XXI. 17. R. J. Campbell, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lv. p. 305. H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. i. p. 317. J. Watson, The Inspiration of our Faith, p. 167. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlvi. No. 2669. The Two Girdings John 21:17-18 I. Under Divine Providence we have each a work to do for God, each a station and duties in the Divine society: some sheep to feed, some lambs to tend. II. The way in which we can best do this work, while it must task our own utmost capacity in wisdom and power, is yet (because it is under Divine power and wisdom) subject to changes beyond our calculation, which confound the wisdom of the wisest and lay the greatest power in the dust. Every one is familiar with Holbein's drawings, in which kings and knights and wealthy burghers, when their minds are freest from care, are touched on the sleeve by a messenger whose business brooks no delay. H. C. Beeching, The Grace of Episcopacy, p. 163. John 21:18 Dr. Marcus Dods wrote at the age of twenty-four: 'It is indeed a life of self-denial this, and I feel as if now for the first time I had even a dim view of what it is not to be one's own, to me a heart-rending lesson, a long and bitter lesson, one I would gladly exchange for fasting, or scourging, or what asceticism you will. Let me keep my own will, let me be my own, aim at my own idea of holiness, aid myself with my own props, and I would do most things. But this is the hard thing to learn, that in every thing, from this moment for ever, I am not only not to get my own will, but I am to desire not to get my own will, to will to be controlled by another wholly and unceasingly. This has to me at times all the pain of dissolution. It is indeed a dying to this world.' Early Letters, p. 103. John 21:18 Henri Perreyve wrote on this text to Charles Perraud: 'Let me repeat to you once more, even at the risk of saying the same thing always over again, that adorable verse of the Gospel in which Jesus speaks to the soul of every apostle in the person of St. Peter: "When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, thou didst choose thine own paths, thou hadst thy desires, thy wishes, thy choice. These desires were turned towards Me, and therefore I welcomed and blessed them;... but still they were thine own desires and not Mine, and thou walkedst whither thou wouldest, et ambulabas ubi volebas . But now thou art grown older, thou knowest My love better, My purposes for thee, and what I ask as thy friend. I count upon thee; thou shalt close thine eyes, thou shalt forget thy hopes, thou shalt hush thy desires for good, thou shalt stretch out thine arms like a blind man, like a little child, extendes manustuas ; thou shalt let thyself be girded by the gentle and irresistible hand of Him to whom thou hast surrendered thyself. Whether the girdle be of cord, of iron, or of fire, thou shalt let thyself be girded, alius est qui te cinget , and thou shalt let thyself be carried whither thou wouldest not, quô tu non vis , to suffering, to death, to uselessness, to inaction, which is the last of deaths.'" Lettres de Henri Perreyve á un ami d'enfance, pp. 244, 245. References. XXI. 18. H. Bonner, Sermons and Lectures, p. 180. Expositor (4th Series), vol. vii. p. 188; ibid. (6th Series), vol. xii. p. 247. XXI. 18, 19. C. Bosanquet, Blossoms for the King's Garden, p. 47. Expositor (4th Series), vol. iv. p. 5. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 382. XXI. 19. R. J. Campbell, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lx. p. 362. W. H. Evans, Sermons for the Church's Year, p. 23. W. P. S. Bingham, Sermons on Easter Subjects, p. 40. The Disciple Whom Jesus Loves John 21:20 I. St. John is here called, first of all, 'the disciple'. And John was emphatically the disciple. He seems almost to have usurped Mary's place, and to have sat at the feet of Jesus to hear His word. Other Evangelists tell us of the deeds of Christ, but St. John tells us of His words. He learnt of Jesus, he studied those words, he turned them over in his heart. And so you and I must be the disciples of Christ. We must be willing to sit at His feet, to hear of Him and to learn the revelation which He would give to us of the Father. II. Then, secondly, John is called 'the disciple whom Jesus loved'. He was the first to yield himself to Jesus Christ But yet our Saviour was in no way guilty of favouritism. He loved the world Nevertheless, there are some Christians who experience more of His love than other Christians. Why is this? Because they are nearer to the Source of Love. If you think of the planets above our heads, Mercury and Venus have more of the sun's light and warmth than do Jupiter and Saturn. Why? Because they are nearer to the Sun. And so it is with man. III. Then the third line in this character of St. John is 'following'. Ah, it is no use sitting down at the feet of Jesus and learning His Word unless you follow. Here is the practical side of the Christian's character. IV. And in the fourth place he is thus described, 'who also leaned upon His breast at supper'. I suppose the reason why St. John lay upon His breast at supper was this: that he was in great trouble. Our Lord had taken them up into that upper chamber, and had there told them plainly, that He was about to be taken from them. And John leaned upon his Master's breast. It was the only place on which he could pillow his aching head, it was the only place where he could find comfort when these sorrows were surging round about him. And Christian, you may have sorrow too. Lean upon His unchanging love, lean upon that ever-faithful heart. V. Then one thing more. 'And he asked Him, Which is he that betrayeth Thee?' He wanted to find out the worst. E. A. Stuart, His Dear Son and other Sermons, vol. v. p. 57. St. John the Evangelist's Day John 21:20 It is somewhat strange that no reference is made in the early registers of the Festival of St. John. The Venerable Bede is said to be the first writer in whose works it is mentioned; and the probability is that its first observance was merely local; in the thirteenth century, however, it became universal, and ever since has been celebrated, year after year, on the twenty-seventh day of December, with services of a high and holy character. I. The man. His form will stand out more distinctly if we but glance at some leading circumstances in his history. He was young, perhaps in his teens, when he entered into public life; and was a Galilaean, son of Zebedee and Salome, and junior brother of James the Great, with whom he pursued the vocation of a fisherman. Like all young men of true and powerful temperament, he was capable of vehement anger, which would occasionally burst forth (St. Luke 9:51-56 ). Hence he was surnamed 'a Son of Thunder'. When the hour of danger came he never turned his back in the day of battle. Such was John: lowly, yet noble; calm, yet passionate; gentle, yet brave; simple, yet real; in the main, a man to be greatly admired and safely followed. II. The disciple. He is now generally spoken of as 'the disciple whom Jesus loved'; and this appellation he gave himself on the evening of the betrayal; for neither did Jesus nor the other disciples use it. But it was a true and proper title nevertheless: Jesus loved him unutterably. His heart went out specially to him; and John's heart was won completely by the heart of Jesus. So closely were they bound together that John companioned with Jesus wherever He went, and when He sat down John 'leaned upon His breast'. Thus John was absorbed with his Lord, and thus he rested in the calm assurance of His Divine favour. This was John's heaven on earth. III. The Apostle. After the Ascension of Christ, John associated intimately with Peter, and this brotherly fellowship continued until they returned to Jerusalem from an evangelising tour in Samaria. From this time John seems to have taken little part in any outward movement; but he finally quitted the Holy City, and transferred his home to Ephesus. After residing here for a while, he was banished to Patmos a dreary islet in the Ægean Sea; yet albeit a wretched place, he was favoured here with the glorious visions so eloquently described in the Apocalypse. What he did in his exile, and how long he remained in it, we know not; but toward the end of the first Christian century he returned to his adopted city. He was now an old man the last survivor of those who had been with Jesus. He calls his converts in Ephesus 'my little children'; and thence, as a centre, he exercised all the holy influence he possessed. His Gospel and Epistles 'the last and richest treasures of sacred literature' show the ripeness of his experience and the depth of his wisdom. At the age of one hundred and twenty he prepared his soul for the New Jerusalem, and died peacefully at Ephesus, surrounded by his 'children'. References. XXI. 20. W. M. Sinclair, Words from St. Pauls, p. 151. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxvi. No. 1539. XXI. 20-22. J. M. Neale, Sermons for Some Feast Days in the Christian Year, p. 10. XXI. 21, 22. T. Allen, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lviii. p. 88. C. Bickersteth, The Gospel of Incarnate Love, p. 106. A. H. Walker, Preacher's Magazine, vol. v. p. 461. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture St. John, p. 391. XXI. 21-25. J. D. Jones, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvii. p. 404. XXI. 22. Newman Smyth, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvi. p. 38. S. Baring-Gould, Village Preaching for Saints' Days, p. 36. A. Maclaren, After the Resurrection, p. 89. J. G. James, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxx. p. 236. Expositor (4th Series), vol. x. p. 392. Ibid. (6th Series), vol. x. p. 155. XXI. 23. Ibid. p. 359. XXI. 24. J. Baines, Twenty Sermons, p. 315. The Omissions of the Gospel John 21:25 I. The first thing that the words of St. John suggest to us is the unlikeness of their spirit to the spirit of modern biography. In our day, a biography is not considered final or satisfactory, unless it gives us every known fact in the life of its hero, large or trivial, significant or unmeaning. That was a wise proverb of the Greeks which said that 'the half is more than the whole'. An outline sketch often conveys a truer idea than a finished picture. The artist selects those characteristics which seem to him to be typical of the man, and he portrays these alone. For the rest, his picture may not reproduce this or that feature, this or that trick of gesture, with exact precision; but it does reproduce what we wish to remember, what we desire to know. This is what St. John has done in his Gospel. II. A vivid picture! And yet we can hardly fail to be conscious at times of a desire for more knowledge of this Master of men of whom St. John wrote. Quite true is it that this brief story has affected human life as no other story has affected it And yet how much is there which has been left untold! III. This craving is natural; but it is deliberately disappointed by the Evangelists; it was always checked by the Church. There is a grave danger of missing the greatest message of the Gospels by a too exclusive attention to that earthly ministry, to which the title The Life of Christ is sometimes too exclusively appropriated. There may be a warning of this danger in the reserves of St. John. The Church does not profess complete knowledge. Many problems still torment and vex the curious soul. Still is the question asked by many an ardent spirit, anxious to reduce the world to its own narrow rules, 'Lord, are there few that be saved?' But the answer is still the same, stern in its refusal to supply theory, unfailing in power and wisdom as a guide to life: 'Strive to enter in at the strait gate'. IV. This is not, to be sure, the thought prominent in St. John's words at the close of the Gospel. He does not speak of impassable barriers to knowledge, of mysteries not yet disclosed because of the incapacity of our minds to receive them. For what St. John seems to say is that he knew of much which he did not think it fitting to record. It may be part of our discipline that we are kept in intellectual unrest; part of our discipline, lest in unruly pride we come to think that God is a mere creature of our imagination, a conception of which we have entire mastery. But it is also part of our inheritance; for thus is there ever more and more which we may learn. J. H. Bernard, Via Domini: Sermons for Christian Seasons, p. 273. Reference. XXI. 25. J. D. Jones, Elims of Life, p. 9.