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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
‘Greater is He that is in you, than he that is in the world.’
1Jn_4:4
I. Is not greatness the aim of so much of the restlessness in the surging throng that passes us?—Men want to be great, they want to lead, they want to emerge from the ruck. At one time they thought that brute strength was going to do it, and this is not the only age of the world which has been prepared to worship an athlete. They thought riches were going to do it, and rich men have power, as we know full well. They thought the clear brain and wise head were going to do it, and yet there are some things absolutely hid from the wise and prudent. This greatness is a splendid aim; ambition may be the last infirmity of noble minds, but no one can be great without it. We may not sit still and look down on life as if we were the epicurean gods of Olympus, or spectators at a football match, whose interest is the interest of the non-combatant. No, it is St. John who is talking about greatness, sovereignty, strength, and he claims that the preponderance is on our side—that is, on the weaker, less popular, discredited side.
II. St. John would reassure us.—He surely would say that the greatest power in the world is goodness. Certainly among much that tends to disquiet us in things around us it is one of the most cheering signs that God’s presence is still with us, that we are able to appreciate goodness where we see it; nay, more, that the fascination of goodness, and the supremacy of goodness, where it is manifestly displayed, stands unrivalled. Again and again, we see knots unravelled by goodness which have withstood the subtle skill of cleverness or the overwhelming force of coercion. It has been said that ‘hearts will only yield to God.’ Cleverness too often arouses the combativeness of the human heart in the desire to find a suitable retort or to win a dialectical victory. Force provokes antagonism as a matter of course. But when behind the futile blow of a well-meaning partisan men hear, however faintly, the great “I AM,” they go backward in involuntary homage and fall to the ground. Goodness seems to be a power which few recognise but every one feels. And as we gaze out on the jostling throng to-day, those forms, few and insignificant, retiring, even despised, are found to exercise a force out of all proportion to their apparent strength. They are the pillars of society. These are the merciful men, whose righteousness has not been forgotten.
III. The ambition comes to most of us at some time or another to be of some good in the world, to be known, yes, to be great, to be famous, at least not to have lived in vain. And then there has come the disappointment which has crushed us in upon ourselves. The world is full of claimants for its posts of honour; it has a tendency to get weary of its Admirable Crichtons, and in sheer wilfulness to ostracise Aristides because his reputation for justice has become oppressive. It does not choose that we should elevate ourselves on the ruins of others; it despises jealousy. It does not value our own estimate of ourselves; it spurns vanity. There are few things more capricious and uncertain than fame, and it is a poor thing when we have attained to it. But goodness, the desire to do our piece of work as well as we can, for its own sake, not seeking a reward, is quite another matter. We began wrongly in looking outside ourselves; perfecting the instrument for God is our hope for usefulness. ‘First give thyself wholly to God, and then to the work which God gives thee to do.’ Listen to the words of the Apostle—‘He that is in you.’ ‘Christ in you the hope of glory,’ as St. Paul had said before him. Is not this the blessed truth which the Incarnation brings home to us? That once in the world’s history a Perfect Man stood forth, Whom we now acknowledge to be God, Who showed us what perfect infancy could be, what it is to be a perfect boy, what power there is in a perfect man; Who showed us what a superficial blemish poverty is, and that pain and even death can be worked into the full message of a perfect life. And it has been revealed to us that ‘As many as received Him to them gave He power to become the sons of God.’ Each of us may become, if Christ be in us, a faint imitation of Christ in our lives and actions. ‘He that is in you.’
IV. Here is a greatness within the reach of all—There is no aristocracy in goodness. Living in one room in Spitalfields will not of itself make you bad, neither will living in twenty in Belgravia of itself make you good. There were saints in Cæsar’s household, there were saints among the publicans and sinners, as well as among the sheltered lives of those who had time to think and room to expand. It is no use saying, If I were some one else I might be great; if I had a different nature I might be good. Read God’s records in the times of old, and see how He raises up his deliverers out of the parts most obnoxious to the attacks of the enemy; how He chooses obscure tribes and younger sons, and those whom the world has sent away, as having no sort of value in the common currency of merit. Bethlehem is the rival of Imperial Rome, Nazareth surpasses the wisdom of the Academy. Judæa itself was a strange country to arrest the gaze of the civilised world. It is open to any one here to-day to do a piece of work which shall last, to be a pillar in the House of God, because he has accepted the fulness of meaning which underlies the Apostle’s word, ‘Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.’ He has received Christ in his heart, and He has given him power, yes, the right, to become the son of God. Here is a work which may well fire the ambition of us all. But we cannot shut our eyes to its extreme difficulty. Before Christ can be in us there must be the absolute and entire surrender to Him of body, soul, and spirit.
—
Rev. Canon Newbolt.
Illustration‘What did St. John know about greatness? After all, he was only a Galilean fisherman, little at home even in the Greek language. Where would St. John be now if we put him down in the world of London, and who would listen to him? But St. John did not lie inert and lifeless in a backwater, still and unruffled, of the world’s stream. He was thrown violently across the agents and the genius of that Empire which claimed to be the mistress of the world. He was thought important enough to be banished for his opinions. And while we are seeking to estimate his power of attaining to greatness or of knowing what greatness meant, I would ask you how many in this congregation could tell me a single fact in the life of the Emperor Domitian, supreme ruler at that time of the haughtiest despotism that the world has ever seen, except, perhaps, that he killed flies? Whereas, I suppose, there are few, if any, who could not narrate many incidents in the career of the Apostle John. There is hardly a home in England, unless it be that of the utterly abandoned, where his writings are not to be found, hardly a church in which you will not find some representation of him either in statue, painting, or glass. We seem to hear, while we are thinking about greatness, the despairing cry of a rival heathenism—“O Galilæe vicisti,” “O Galilean, Thou hast conquered.” ’