James Nisbet Commentary - John 15:27 - 15:27

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James Nisbet Commentary - John 15:27 - 15:27


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QUALIFICATIONS FOR WITNESS

‘And ye also shall hear witness, because ye have been with Me from the beginning.’

Joh_15:27

Here we see for what our Lord has been preparing His Apostles all along during His ministry. They have been with Him from the beginning, very close to Him. They have been learning of Him; they have been initiated into the Divine mystery; they have been gradually educated to see who He is. They have been led to put their trust in Him in a way that they could not have put their trust in a merely human being. They are convinced that He is the Christ, the Messiah. They are sure that He has the words of eternal life. They believe in Him absolutely.

As with the first witnesses so with us, and we may say even more with us, it is necessary that there should be certain qualifications if the testimony is to be effective.

I. The witness must know the truth to which he witnesses.—He must have been with the Lord. In the beginning it was essential that an apostle should have seen the Lord. We have not seen Him with our bodily eyes, but to be good witnesses we must have seen Him by faith.

II. He must show the truth of what he says in his life.—If the Apostles had merely preached Christ, and had not shown by their lives that He was to them what they asserted that He was, they could never have borne a successful witness.

III. He must have a conscious realisation of the Presence of Christ.—We tell others of Christ by our words and by our lives, but we are not merely relying on a past fact. The fact itself to which we witness is in us, and with us. Christ, the living Christ, is speaking in us. Believe this and act as if it were true, which it is. How much more powerful could our witness be? Instead of saying, ‘What would Jesus do if He were here?’ say, ‘What is Jesus doing now in me, and in the Church?’ ‘What might He not do if we were not preventing His spirit from working by our foolishness and our sin?’ It is not Christ that fails, not Christianity, but Christians.

—
Rev. the Hon. J. Adderley.

Illustrations

(1) ‘There was a holy man who lived not long ago who said he thought he could say that he knew Christ better than any earthly friend. Perhaps we should hardly dare to speak thus, but we might all know Him very much better than we do. Many of us know characters in history, and even in fiction, almost as if we had met them face to face. At least, we Christians should know Christ as well as that. Yet how little some of us know of the words of Christ, how little we have thought out what His teaching involves in ordinary practice.’

(2) ‘We cannot be Christians in fragments. Christianity finds expression in a Christian life, and not simply in Christian acts. There is an infinite difference between failure and acquiescence in failure. It is not humility, but indolence, which accepts a low standard. If we deliberately live below our calling, it is sin. We shrink instinctively from hypocrisy: but it is no less hypocrisy to dissemble the good desires by which we are possessed, than to affect devotion which we do not feel. Our Faith—we must dare to say it, with whatever shame it may be—lays upon us great obligations and offers great resources. The Lord says to us, if we are His disciples, “Ye are the light of the world; ye are the salt of the earth.” Such a commission constrains us to inquire importunately, till our souls return some answer, What have we done, what are we doing, to bring home to men the Gospel of the risen Christ, by which things transitory and corruptible are invested with an eternal glory?’