Unknown - "The World English Bible (WEB): Ruth"

P. G. Wodehouse - "The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England"

Unkown - "One Divided by Pi, To A Million Digits"

Pedro Calderon de la Barca - "The Wonder Working Magician"

Expositions of Holy Scripture

A >> Alexander Maclaren >> Expositions of Holy Scripture




Lastly about this matter, Christ shows Himself to obedient love by a
true coming. 'We will come and make our mansion with him.' And that
coming is a fact of a higher order, and not to be confounded either
with the mere divine Omnipresence, by which God is everywhere, nor to
be reduced to a figment of our own imaginations, or a strong way of
promising increased perception on our part of Christ's fullness. That
great central Sun, if I might use so violent a figure, draws nearer
and nearer and nearer to the planets that move about it, and having
once been far off on an almost infinitely distant horizon, approaches
until planet and Sun unite.

Dear brethren, if we could only get to the attitude of simple
acceptance of this as a literal truth, and believe that, in prose
reality, Christ comes to every heart that loves Him, would not all the
world be different to us?

That coming is a permanent residence: 'We will make our abode with
him.' Very beautiful is it to notice that our Lord here employs that
same sweet and significant word, with which He began this wonderful
series of encouragements, when He said, 'In My Father's house are many
mansions.' Yonder they dwell for ever with God; here God in Christ for
ever dwells with the loving heart. It is a permanent abode so long as
the conditions are fulfilled, but only so long. If self-will, rising
in the Christian heart from its torpor and apparent death, reasserts
itself and shakes off Christ's yoke, Christ's presence vanishes. In
the last hours of the Holy City there was heard by the trembling
priests amidst the midnight darkness the motion of departing Deity,
and a great voice said: 'Let us depart hence'; and to-morrow the
shrine was empty, and the day after it was in flames. Brethren, if you
would keep the Christ in whom is God, remember that He cannot be kept
but by the act of loving obedience.

II. Now, in the next place, my text gives us the negative side, and
shows us what keeps away Christ and all His blessings.

An unloving disobedience closes the eyes to the vision, and the heart
against the entrance, of that dear Lord. Our Master lays down for us
two principles, and leaves us to draw the conclusion for ourselves.

The first is, 'He that loveth Me not, keepeth not My sayings.' No
love, no obedience. That is plainly true, because the heart of all the
commandments is love, and where that is not, disobedience to their
very spirit is. It is plainly true, because there is no power that
will lead men to true obedience to Christ's yoke except the power of
love. His commandments are too alien from our nature ever to be kept,
unless by the might of love. It was only the rising sunbeam that could
draw music from the stony lips of Memnon, as he gazed out across the
desert, and it is only when Christ's love shines on our faces that we
open our lips in praise, and move our hands in service. Those great
rocking-stones down in Cornwall stand unmoved by any tempest, but a
child's finger, laid on the right place, will set them vibrating. And
so the heavy, hard, stony bulk of our hearts lies torpid and
immovable, until He lays His loving finger upon them, and then they
rock at His will. There is no keeping of Christ's commandments without
love. That makes short work of a great deal that calls itself
Christianity, does it not? Reluctant obedience is no obedience;
self-interested obedience is no obedience; constrained obedience is no
obedience; outward acts of service, if the heart be wanting, are
rubbish and dung. Morality without religion is nought. The one thing
that makes a good man is love to Jesus Christ; and where that is,
there, and only there, is obedience.

'Talk they of morals? O Thou Bleeding Lamb!
The grand morality is love of Thee.'

'If a man love Me not, he will not keep My words.'

Then the second principle is, disobedience to Christ is disobedience
to God. 'The Word which ye hear is not Mine, but the Father's.'
Christ's consciousness of union so speaks out here as that He is quite
sure that all His words are God's words, and that all God's words are
spoken by Him. Paul has to say, 'So speak I, not the Lord.' And you
would not think a man a very sound or safe religious teacher who said
to you, to begin with, 'Now, mind, everything that I say, God says.'
There are no errors then, no deterioration of the treasure by the
vessel in which it lies. The water does not taste of the vase in which
it is carried. The personality of Jesus Christ is never, through all
His utterances, so separated from God but that God speaks in Him; and,
listening to His voice, we hear the absolute utterance of the
uncreated and eternal Wisdom.

Therefore follows the conclusion, which our Lord does not state, but
leaves us to supply. If it be true that the absence of love of Him is
disobedience to Him, and if it be true that disobedience to Him is
disobedience to God, then it plainly follows that what keeps away
Christ and all His gifts, and God in Him, is unloving obedience. What
brings Him is the obedience of love; what repels Him is alienation and
rebellion. If the heart be full of confusion, of the world, of self,
of unbridled inclinations, of careless indifference to His bleeding
love, He 'can but listen at the gate and hear the household jar
within.'

And so, dear friends, from all this there follow one or two points,
which I touch very briefly. One is, that it is possible for men not to
see Christ, though He stands there close before them. It is possible
to grope at noonday as at midnight, to see only 'bracken green and
cold grey stone' on the hillside, where another man sees the chariots
of fire and the horses of fire. It is possible for you--and, alas! it
is the condition of some of my hearers--to look upon Christ and to
turn away and say, 'I see no beauty in Him that I should desire Him,'
whilst the man beside yon, looking at the same facts and the same
face, can see in Him the 'Chief among ten thousand, and the altogether
lovely.'

Another thought is, that Christ's showing of Himself to men is in no
sense arbitrary. It is you that determine what you shall see. You can
hermetically seal your heart against Him, you can blind yourself to
all His beauty. The door of your hearts is hinged to open from within,
and if you do not open it, it remains shut, and Christ remains
outside.

Another thought is, that you do not need to do anything to blind
yourselves. Simple negation is fatal. 'If a man love not'; that is
all. The absence of love is your ruin.

And the last thought is this, that my text does not begin at the
beginning. Jesus Christ has been speaking about manifestations of
Himself to the loving and obedient; but there are manifestations of
Himself made that we may _become_ loving and obedient. You can build a
barrier over which these sweeter revelations, of which loyal love and
docile submission are the conditions, cannot rise. But you cannot
build a barrier over which the prior revelations to the unthankful and
disobedient cannot rise. No mountains of sin and neglect and
alienation can be piled so high but that the flood of pardoning grace
will rise above their crests, and pour itself into your hearts. You
ask, How can I get the love and obedience of which you have been
singing the praises now? There is only one answer, brethren. We know
that we love Him when we know that He loves us; and we know that He
loves us when we see Him dying on His Cross. So here is the ladder,
that is planted in the miry clay of the horrible pit, and fastens its
golden hooks on His throne. The first round is, Behold the dying
Christ and His love to me. The second is, Let that love melt my heart
into sweet responsive love. The third is, Let my love mould my life
into obedience. And then Christ, and God in Him, will come to me and
show Himself to me; and give me a fuller knowledge and a deeper love,
and make His dwelling with me. And then there is only one round still
to roach, and that will land us by the Throne of God, in the many
mansions of the Father's house, where we shall make our abode with Him
for evermore.




THE TEACHER SPIRIT

'These things have I spoken unto you, being yet present with you. But
the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in
My name, He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your
remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.'--JOHN xiv. 25, 26.

This wonderful outpouring of consolation and instruction with which
our Lord sought to soothe the pain of parting is nearing its end. We
have to conceive of a slight pause here, whilst He looks back upon
what He has been saying and contrasts His teaching with that of the
Comforter, whom He has once already, though in a different connection,
promised to His followers. He speaks of His earthly residence with
them as being 'an abiding,' distinctly therein referring to what He
has just said, that the Father and He will, in the future, 'make their
abode' with His disciples. He contrasts the outward and transitory
presence which was now nearing its end, with the inward and continuous
presence, which its end was to inaugurate.

And, in like manner, with, at first sight, startling humility, He
contrasts 'these things,' the partial and to a large extent
unintelligible utterances which He had given with His human lips, with
the complete, universal teaching of that divine Spirit, who was to
instruct in 'all things' pertaining to man's salvation. We have then,
here, sketched in broad outline, the great truths concerning the
ever-present, inward Teacher of God's Church who is to come, now that
the earthly manifestation of Christ, whom the twelve called their
'Teacher,' had reached a close. I think we may best gain the deep
instruction which lies in the words before us, if we look at three
points of view which they bring into prominence: the Teacher, His
lesson, and His scholars.

I. Now, as to the first, the promised Teacher.

I need not repeat what I have said in former sermons as to the wide
sweep of that word 'the Comforter,' beyond just reminding you that it
means literally one who is called to the side of another, primarily
for the purpose of being his representative in some legal process;
and, more widely, for any purpose of help, encouragement, and
strength. That being so, 'Comforter,' in its modern sense of
_Consoler_, is far too narrow for the full force of the word, which
means much rather 'Comforter,' in its ancient and etymological sense
of one who, in company with another, makes Him strong and brave.

But the point to which I desire to turn attention now is this, that
this comforting and strengthening office of the divine Spirit is
brought into immediate connection here with the conception of Him as a
Teacher. That is to say, the best strength that God, by His Spirit,
can give us is by our firm grasp and growing clearness of
understanding of the truths which are wrapped up in Jesus Christ. All
power for endurance, for service, is there, and when the Spirit of God
teaches a man what God reveals in Christ, He therein and thereby most
fully discharges His office of Strengthener.

Then note still further the other designation of this divine Teacher
which is here given: 'The Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost.' We
might have expected, as indeed we find in another context in this
great final discourse, the 'Spirit of _Truth_' as appropriate in
connection with the office of teaching. But is there not a profound
lesson for us here in this, that, side by side with the thought of
illumination, there lies the thought of purity built upon
consecration, which is the Scripture definition of holiness? That
suggests that there is an indissoluble connection between the real
knowledge of God's truth and practical holiness of life. That
connection is of a double sort. There is no holiness without such
knowledge, and there is no such knowledge without holiness.

There is no real knowledge of Christ and His truth without purity of
heart. The man who has no music in his soul can never be brought to
understand the deep harmonies of the great masters and magicians of
sound. The man who has no eye for beauty can never be brought to bow
his spirit before some of those embodiments of loveliness and
sublimity which the painter's brush has cast upon the canvas. And the
man who has no longings after purity, nor has attained to any degree
of moral conformity with the divine image, is not in possession of the
sense which is needed in order that he should understand the 'deep
things of God.'

The scholars in this school have to wash their hands before they go to
school, and come there with clean hands and clean hearts. Foulness and
the love of it are bars to all understanding of God's truth. And, on
the other hand, the truest inducements, motives, and powers for purity
are found in that great word which is all 'according to godliness,'
and is meant much rather to make us good than to make us wise.

So, in this designation of the teaching Spirit as holy, there lie
lessons for two classes of people. All fanatical professions of
possessing divine illumination, which are not warranted and sealed by
purity of life, are lies or self-delusion. And, on the other hand,
coldblooded intellectualism will never force the locks of the palace
of divine truth, but they that come there must have clean hands and a
pure heart; and only those who have the love and the longing for
goodness will be wise scholars in Christ's school. Your theology is
nothing unless its distinct outcome is morality, and you must be
prepared to accept the painful, the punitive, the purifying influences
of that divine Spirit on your moral natures if you want to have His
enlightening influences shining on the 'truth as it is in Jesus.' 'If
any man wills to do His will, he,' and only he, 'shall know of the
doctrine.' Knowledge and holiness are as inseparable in divine things
as light and heat.

And still further note that this great Teacher is 'sent by God' in
Christ's name. That pregnant phrase, 'In My name,' cannot be
represented by any one form of expression into which we may translate
it, but covers a larger space. God in Christ's name sends the Spirit.
That is to say, in some deep sense God acts as Christ's
representative; just as Christ comes in the Father's name and acts as
His representative. And, again, God sends in Christ's name; that is,
the historical manifestation of Christ is the basis on which the
sending of the Spirit is possible and rests. The revelation had to be
complete before He who came to unfold the meaning of the revelation
had material to work upon. The Spirit, which is sent in Christ's name,
has, for the basis of His mission, and the means by which He acts, the
recorded facts of Christ's life and death, these and none other.

And then note finally about this matter, the strong and unmistakable
declaration here, that that divine Spirit is a person: 'He shall teach
you all things.' They tell us that the doctrine of the Trinity is not
in the New Testament. The word is not, but the thing is. In this verse
we have the Father, the Son, and the Spirit brought into such close
and indissoluble union as is only vindicated from the charge of
blasphemy by the belief in the divinity of each. Just as the Apostolic
benediction, 'The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God
the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit' necessarily involves
the divinity of all who are thus invoked, so we stand here in the
presence of a truth which pierces into the deeps of Deity. That divine
Spirit is more than an influence. 'He shall teach,' and He can be
grieved by evil and sin. I do not enlarge upon these thoughts. My
purpose is mainly to bring them out clearly before you.

II. I pass in the second place to the consideration of the Lesson
which this promised Teacher gives.

Mark the words, 'He shall teach you all things, and bring all things
to your remembrance, whatsoever _I_ have said unto you.' Now as we
have seen in the exposition of the words 'in My name,' the whole
subject-matter of the divine Spirit's teaching is the life and work
and death and person of Jesus Christ. 'He shall teach you all things'
is wider than 'He shall bring all things which I have said to you to
your remembrance.' But whilst that is so, the clear implication of the
words before us is that Christ is the lesson book, of which the divine
Spirit is the Teacher. His weapon, to take another metaphor, with
which He plies men's hearts and minds and wills, convincing the world
of sin and of righteousness and of judgment, and leading those who are
convinced into deeper knowledge and larger wisdom, is the recorded
facts concerning the life and manifestation of Jesus Christ. The
significance of this lesson book, the history of our Lord, cannot be
unfolded all at once. There is something altogether unique in the
incorruption and germinant power of all His deeds and of all His
words. This Carpenter of Nazareth has reached the heights which the
greatest thinkers and poets of the past have never reached, or only in
little snatches and fragments of their words. _His_ words open out,
generation after generation, into undreamed-of wisdom, and there are
found to be hived in them stores of sweetness that were never
suspected until the occasion came that drew them forth. The world and
the Church received Christ, as it were, in the dark; and, as with some
man receiving a precious gift as the morning was dawning, each fresh
moment revealed, as the light grew, new beauties and new preciousness
in the thing possessed. So Christ, in His infinite significance, fresh
and new for all generations, was given at first, and ever since the
Church and the world have been learning the meaning of the gift which
they received. Christ's words are inexhaustible, and the Spirit's
teaching is to unveil more and more of the infinite significance that
lies in the apparently least significant of them.

Now, then, note that if this be our Lord's meaning here, Jesus Christ
plainly anticipated that, after His departure from earth, there should
be a development of Christian doctrine. We are often taunted with the
fact, which is exaggerated for the purpose of controversy, that a
clear and full statement of the central truths which orthodox
Christianity holds, is found rather in the Apostolic epistles than in
the Master's words, and the shallow axiom is often quoted with great
approbation: 'Jesus Christ is our Master, and not Paul.' I do not
grant that the germs and the central truths of the Gospel are not to
be found in Christ's words, but I admit that the full, articulate
statement of them is to be found rather in the servant's letters, and
I say that that is exactly what Jesus Christ told us to expect, that
after He was gone, words that had been all obscure, and thoughts that
had been only fragmentarily intelligible, would come to be seen
clearly, and would be discerned for what they were. The earlier
disciples had only a very partial grasp of Christ's nature. They knew
next to nothing of the great doctrine of sacrifice; they knew nothing
about His resurrection; they did not in the least understand that He
was going back to heaven; they had but glimmering conceptions of the
spirituality or universality of His Kingdom. Whilst they were
listening to Him at that table they did not believe in the atonement;
but they dimly believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ; they did not
believe in His resurrection; they did not believe in His ascension;
they did not believe that He was founding a spiritual kingdom, a
kingdom was to rule over all the world till the end of time. None of
these truths were in their mind. They had all been in germ in His
words. And after He was gone, there came over them a breath of the
teaching Spirit, and the unintelligible flashed up into significance.
The history of the Church is the proof of the truth of this promise,
and if anybody says to me, 'Where is the fulfilment of the promise of
a Spirit that will bring all things to your remembrance?' I say--here
in this Book! These four Gospels, these Apostolic Epistles, show that
the word which our Lord here speaks has been gloriously fulfilled.
Christ anticipated a development of doctrine, and it casts no slur or
suspicion on the truthfulness of the apostolic representation of the
Christian truths, that they are only sparsely and fragmentarily to be
found in the records of Christ's life,

Then there is another practical conclusion from the words before us,
on which I touch for a moment, and that is, that if Jesus Christ and
the deep understanding of Him be the true lesson of the divine,
teaching Spirit, then real progress consists, not in getting beyond
Christ, but in getting more fully into Him. We hear a great deal in
these days about advanced thought and progressive Christianity. I hope
I believe in the continuous advance of Christian thought as joyfully
as any man, but my notion of it--and I humbly venture to say Christ's
notion of it--is to get more and more into His heart, and to find
within Him, and not away from Him, 'all the treasures of wisdom and
knowledge.' We leave all other great men behind. All other teachers'
words become feeble by age, as their persons become ghostly, wrapped
in thickening folds of oblivion; but the progress of the Church
consists in absorbing more and more of Christ, in understanding Him
better, and becoming more and more moulded by His influence. The
Spirit's teaching brings out the ever fresh significance of the
ancient and perpetual revelation of God in Jesus Christ.

III. And now, lastly, note the Scholars.

Primarily, of course, these are the Apostolic group but the Apostles,
in all these discourses, stand as the representatives of the Church,
and not as separated from it. And whilst the teaching Spirit could
'bring to the remembrance' of those only who first heard them 'the
words that He said unto them,' that Spirit's teaching function is not
limited to those who listened to the Lord Jesus. The fire that was
kindled on Pentecost has not died down into grey ashes, nor the river
that then broke forth been sucked up by thirsty sands of successive
generations, but the fire is still with us, and the river still flows
near our lips, and we, too, may be taught by that divine Spirit. For
this very Evangelist, in writing his Epistle, has at least two
distinct references to, and almost verbal quotations of, this promise,
when he says, addressing all his Asiatic brethren, 'Ye have an unction
from the Holy One, and know all things.' And again, 'The unction which
ye have of Him abideth with you, and ye need not that any man should
teach you.'

So, then, Christian men and women, every believing soul has this
divine Spirit for His Teacher, and the humblest of us may, if we will,
learn of Him and be led by Him into profounder knowledge of that great
Lord.

Oh! dear brethren, the belief in the actual presence with the Church
of a Spirit that teaches all faithful members thereof, is far too much
hesitatingly held by the common Christianity of this day. We ought to
be the standing witnesses in the world of the reality of a
supernatural influence, and how can we be, if we do not believe it
ourselves, and never feel that we are under it?

But whilst a continuous inspiration from that self-same Spirit is the
prerogative of all believing souls, let us not forget that the early
teaching is the standard by which all such must be tried. As to the
first disciples the office of the divine Spirit was to bring before
them the deep significance of their Master's life and words, so to us
the office of the teaching Spirit is to bring to our minds the deep
significance of the record by these earliest scholars of what they
learned from Him. The authority of the New Testament over our faith is
based upon these words, and Paul's warning applies especially to this
generation, with its thoughts about a continuous inspiration and
outgrowing of the New Testament teaching: 'If a man think himself to
be spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto
you are the commandments of the Lord.'

Now from all this take three counsels. Let this great promise fill us
with shame. Look at Christendom. Does it not contradict such words as
these? Disputatious sects, Christians scarcely agreed upon any one of
the great central doctrines, seem a strange fulfilment. The present
condition of Christendom does not prove that Jesus Christ did not send
the Spirit, but it does prove that Christ's followers have been
wofully remiss and negligent in their acceptance and use of the
Spirit. What slow scholars we are! How little we have learnt! How we
have let passion, prejudice, human voices, the babble of men's
tongues, anybody and everybody, take the office of teaching us God's
truth, instead of waiting before Him and letting His Spirit teach us!
It is the shame of us Christians that, with such a Teacher, we, 'when
for the time we ought to be teachers, have need that one teach us
again which be the first principles of the oracles of Christ!'

Copyright (c) 2007. topbookz.net. All rights reserved.