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If a man love me, he will keep my word: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.—Joh_14:23.
Notice how, in His reply, our Lord subtly and significantly alters the form of the statement which He has already made. He had formerly said, “If ye love me, ye will keep my commandments,” but now He casts it into a purely impersonal form, and says, “If a man,” anybody, not you only, but anybody—“if a man love me, he,” anybody, “will keep my word.” And why the change? Probably in order to strike full and square against that complacent assumption of Judas that it was “to us and not to the world” that the showing was to take place. Our Lord, by the studiously impersonal form into which He casts the promise, proclaims its universality, and says to His ignorant questioner, “Do not suppose that you Apostles have the monopoly. You may not even have a share in My self-manifestation. Anybody may have it. And there is no ‘world,’ as you suppose, to which I do not show Myself. Anybody may have the vision if he observes the conditions.”
2. “He will keep my word.” That is more than a “commandment,” is it not? It includes all His sayings, and it includes them all as in one vital unity and organic whole. We are not to go picking and choosing among them; they are one. And it includes this other thought, that every word of Christ, be it revelation of the deep things of God, or be it a promise of the great shower of blessings which, out of His full hand, He will drop upon our heads, enshrines within itself a commandment. He utters no revelations simply that we may know. He utters no comforting words simply that our sore hearts may be healed. In all His utterances there is a practical bearing; and every word of His teaching, every word of His sweet, whispered assurances of love and favour to the waiting heart, has in it the imperativeness of His manifested will, has a direct bearing upon duty. All His words are gathered into one word, and all the variety of His sayings is, in their unity, the law of our lives.
Here we have laid down for all time in precise language the condition of Divine manifestation, and the realization of Divine and quickening power as the reward of fulfilling that condition.
The Condition is Loving Obedience
Obedience is the very pulse of spiritual life.1 [Note: Rainy, Life, i. 131.]
This universe is governed by laws. At the bottom of everything here there is a law. Things are in this way and not that; we call that a law or condition. All departments have their own laws. By submission to them, you make them your own. Obey the laws of the body: such laws as say, Be temperate and chaste; or of the mind: such laws as say, Fix the attention; strengthen by exercise; and then their prizes are yours—health, strength, pliability of muscle, tenaciousness of memory, nimbleness of imagination, etc. Obey the laws of your spiritual being, and it has its prizes too. For instance, the condition or law of a peaceful life is submission to the law of meekness: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” The condition of the beatific vision is a pure heart and life: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” To the impure, God is simply invisible. The condition annexed to a sense of God’s presence—in other words, that without which a sense of God’s presence cannot be—is obedience to the laws of love: “If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.” The condition of spiritual wisdom and certainty in truth is obedience to the will of God, surrender of private will.2 [Note: F. W. Robertson, Sermons, ii. 101.]
1. The source of true obedience is love.—Love and obedience have always been the condition on which the enjoyment of the Divine Presence depended. The sum of the Ten Commandments is, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and strength and mind, and thy neighbour as thyself.” And these words, of course, mean the same thing. They take us back, like the commandments, to His Father’s authority, and they bring into force all those declarations of the Old Testament in which the keeping of the commandments is laid down as the condition of fellowship. “If ye walk in my statutes … I will be your God, and ye shall be my people.” Now it is love, and now it is obedience, that is named as the condition of union and communion with the Most High. The reason is at once apparent. True obedience can spring only from love. “He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me.” Love is the hidden fountain; obedience is the visible stream. In its truest and highest forms Christianity is a religion of principles. It works from the centre outwards to the circumference. Its language is not “Do this,” and “Forbear from that,” but “Love, and thou fulfillest the law.”
That is exactly what distinguishes and lifts the morality of the Gospel above all other systems. The worst man in the world knows a great deal more of his duty than the best man does. It is not for want of knowledge that men go to the devil, but it is for want of power to live their knowledge. And what morality fails to do, with its clearest utterances of human duty, Christ comes and does. The one is like the useless proclamations posted up in some rebellious district, where there is no army to back them, and the king’s authority from whom they come is flouted. The other gets itself obeyed. Such is the difference between the powerless morality of the world and the commandment of Jesus Christ. Here is the road plain and straight. What matters that, if there is no force to draw the cart along it? There might as well be no road at all. Here stand all your looms, polished and in perfect order, but there is no steam in the boilers; and so there is no motion, and nothing woven. What we want is not law but power. And what the Gospel gives us, and stands alone in giving us, is not merely the knowledge of the will of God and the clear revelation of what we ought to be, but it is the power to become it. Love does that, and love alone. That strong force brought into action in our hearts will drive out from thence all rivals, all false and low things. The true way to cleanse the Augean stables, as the old myth has it, was to turn the river into them. It would have been endless work to wheel out the filth in wheelbarrows loaded by spades: turn the stream in, and it will sweep away all the foulness. When the Ark comes into the Temple, Dagon lies, a mutilated stump, upon the threshold. When Christ comes into my heart, then all the obscene and twilight-loving shapes that lurked there, and defiled it, will vanish like ghosts at cock-crowing before His calm and pure presence. He, and He alone, entering my heart by the portals of my love, will coerce my evil and stimulate my good. And if I love Him, I shall keep His commandments.1 [Note: A. Maclaren, Holy of Holies, 72.]
When the sun rises in the east, the sunflower opens towards its rays, and turns ever eagerly towards the sun, even until its setting in the west; and at night it closes and hides its colours and awaits the return of the sun. Even so will we open our hearts by obedience towards the illumination of the grace of God, and humbly and eagerly will we follow that grace so long as we feel the warmth of love. And when the light of grace ceases to awaken fresh emotions, and we feel the warmth of love but little, or feel it not at all, then it is night, when we shall close our heart to all that may tempt it; and so shall we shut up within ourselves the golden colour of love, awaiting a new dawn, with its new brightness and its fresh emotions; and thus shall we preserve innocence always in its pristine splendour.1 [Note: M. Maeterlinck, Ruysbroeck and the Mystics, 50.]
2. The outcome of true love is obedience.—There is no love worth calling love which does not obey. All the emotional and the mystic, and the so-called higher parts of Christian experience, have to be content to submit to this plain test—Do they help us to live as Christ would have us, and that because He would have us? Love to Him which does not keep His commandments is either spurious or dangerously feeble. The true sign of its presence in the heart and the noblest of its operations is to be found not in high-pitched expressions of fervid emotion, or even in the sacred joys of solitary communion, but in its making us, while in the rough struggle of daily life, and surrounded by trivial tasks, live near Him, and by Him, and for Him, and like Him.
So the test of love is obedience; and the more overmastering the love, the more will the obedience—not as reluctant, but as eager, not as a yoke or a burden, but as a passion and a life—dominate the whole self. It may be true that obedience which is not love is valueless. It is certainly true that love which does not express itself, perforce, in obedience, is not love. To the natural self the obedience of Christ seems burdensome. It is only experience of obedience that gives the lie to the instincts of the natural self. It is only experience that makes the religious man realize at last that Christ’s yoke is easy, and His burden is light—not indeed because it dispenses with self-denial, but because self-denial itself, as the necessary expression of desire towards God, finds in its own very suffering a gladness which is greater and deeper than the pain.
We must begin to love Christ before we can keep His word. Christ is the lawgiver of God’s world, and before we can obey His laws we must be on terms of amity with Himself. This implies that we know Him to be at peace with us; for, as we are made, we cannot love where we dread. God’s friendship must come before God’s service. Now, the very opposite of this is frequently taught—that there is to be service before there can be friendship, and that peace can be purchased only by obedience. We need not so much consult the Bible to see the falsehood of this as look into our own hearts, where we may feel the impossibility of doing anything that will bear the look of service in a spiritual sense until the heart is in it.1 [Note: John Ker.]
God’s will is—the bud of the rose for your hair,
The ring for your hand and the pearl for your breast;
God’s will is—the mirror that makes you look fair.
No wonder you whisper: “God’s will is the best.”
But what if God’s will were the famine, the flood?—
And were God’s will the coffin shut down in your face?—
And were God’s will the worm in the fold of the bud,
Instead of the picture, the light, and the lace?
Were God’s will the arrow that flieth by night,
Were God’s will the pestilence walking by day,
The clod in the valley, the rock on the height—
I fancy “God’s will” would be harder to say.
God’s will is—your own will? What honour have you
For having your own will, awake or asleep?
Who praises the lily for keeping the dew,
When the dew is so sweet for the lily to keep?
God’s will unto me is not music or wine,
With helpless reproaching, with desolate tears,
God’s will I resist, for God’s will is divine;
And I—shall be dust to the end of my years.
God’s will is—not mine. Yet one night I shall lie
Very still at His feet, where the stars may not shine.
“Lo! I am well pleased,” I shall hear from the sky;
Because—it is God’s will I do, and not mine.2 [Note: Sarah M. B. Piatt.]
The Reward is Divine Manifestation
God has not set up an arbitrary test of manifestation, He has taken the common course of our life, and given it applications to Himself. I might challenge the worshipper of Nature to say whether his god does not demand precisely the same condition of manifestation. The mountain is saying, If any man love me, I will manifest myself unto him; the sun holds the same language, so does the sea, so does every leaf oi the forest.1 [Note: J. Parker.]
Christ will come unto thee, and shew thee His own consolation, if thou prepare for Him a worthy mansion within thee.
All His glory and beauty is from within, and there He delighteth Himself.
The inward man He often visiteth; and hath with him sweet discourses, pleasant solace, much peace, familiarity exceeding wonderful.
O faithful soul, make ready thy heart for this Bridegroom, that He may vouchsafe to come unto thee, and to dwell within thee.
For thus saith He, “If a man love me, he will keep my words: and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.”2 [Note: Thomas à Kempis, Of the Imitation of Christ, bk. ii. ch. i.]
1. The manifestation is in union with the Father.—Jesus shows Himself to the obedient heart in indissoluble union with the Father. Look at the majesty, and, except upon one hypothesis, the insane presumption, of such words as these: “If a man love me, my Father will love him:” as if identifying love to Himself with love to the Father. And look at that wondrous union, the consciousness of which speaks in “We will come.” “We will come,” together, hand in hand, if one may so say; or rather, His coming is the Father’s coming. Just as in heaven, so closely are they represented as united that there is but one throne “for God and the Lamb”; so on earth, so closely are they represented as united that there is but one coming of the Father in the Son.
This is the only belief, as it seems to me, that will keep this generation from despair and moral suicide. The question for this generation is, Is it possible for men to know God? Science, both of material things and of inward experiences, is more and more unanimous in its proclamation; “Behold! we know not anything;” and the only attitude to take before that great black vault above us is to say, “We know nothing.” The world has learned half of a great verse of the Gospel: “No man hath seen God at any time;” nor can see Him. If the world is not to go mad, if hearts are not to be tortured into despair, if morality and enthusiasm and poetry and everything higher and nobler than the knowledge of material phenomena and their sequences is not to perish from the earth, the world must learn the next half of the verse, and say, “The only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” Christ shows Himself in indissoluble union with the Father.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]
2. The manifestation is abiding.—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.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]
“We will make our abode with him,” i.e. will be at home, as is possible where there is reciprocity of love. Where there is reciprocity of love there is what we call friendship. Lazarus was a friend of Jesus, who loved all, but had His friendships when on earth, and so He has now.2 [Note: R. W. Corbet, Letters from a Mystic of the Present Day, 171.]
Literature
Bourdillon (F.), Short Sermons, 109, 119.
Griffiths (W.), Onward and Upward, 65.
Humberstone (W. J.), The Cure of Care, 109.
McClelland (T. C.), The Mind of Christ, 167.
Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John ix.–xiv., 350.
Meyer (F. B.), The Soul’s Pure Intention, 35.
Miller (J.), Sermons Literary and Scientific, ii. 336.
Moberly (R. C), Christ our Life, 52.
Pope (W. B.), Discourses on the Lordship of the Incarnate Redeemer, 223.
Robertson (A. T.), The Teaching of Jesus: God the Father, 117.
Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, l. (1904) No. 2895.
Telford (J.), The Story of the Upper Room, 128.
Watson (J.), The Inspiration of our Faith, 179.
Westcott (B. F.), Peterborough Sermons, 39.
Whately (R.), Sermons on the Principal Christian Festivals, 107.
Christian World Pulpit, viii. 148 (Beecher); xii. 298 (Gallaway); li. 244 (Black).
Keswick Week, 1905, p. 87 (Sloan).