Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI

A >> Alexander Maclaren >> Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI

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Notice how certain such prayer is of being answered. Of course, if it
is in harmony with the will of God, it is sure not to be offered in
vain. Our Revised Version makes a slight alteration in the order of
the words in the first clause of this promise by reading, 'If ye ask
anything of the Father He will give it you _in My name_.' God's gifts
come down through the same channel through which our prayer goes up.
We ask in the name of Christ, and get our answers in the name of
Christ.

But, whether that be the true collocation of ideas or not, mark the
plain principle here, that only desires which are in harmony with the
divine will are sure of being satisfied. What is a bad thing for a
child cannot be a good thing for a man. What is a foolish and wicked
thing for a father down here to do cannot be a kind and a wise thing
for the Father in the heavens to do. If you wish to spoil your child
you say, 'What do you want, my dear? tell me and you shall have it.'
And if God were saying anything like that to us, through the lips of
Jesus Christ His Son, in the text, it would be no blessing, but a
curse. He knows a great deal better what is good for us; and so He
says: 'Bring your wishes into line with My purpose, and then you will
get them'; 'Delight thyself in the Lord, and He will give thee the
desires of thine heart.' If you want God most you will be sure to get
Him; if your heart's desires are after Him, your heart's desires will
be satisfied. 'The young lions do roar and suffer hunger.' That is
the world's way of getting good; fighting and striving and snarling,
and forcibly seeking to grasp, and there is hunger after all. There
is a better way than that. Instead of striving and struggling to
snatch and to keep a perishable and questionable portion, let us wait
upon God and quiet our hearts, stilling them into the temper of
communion and conformity with Him, and we shall not ask in vain.

He who prays in Christ's name must pray Christ's prayer, 'Not My
will, but Thine be done.' And then, though many wishes may be
unanswered, and many weak petitions unfulfilled, and many desires
unsatisfied, the essential spirit of the prayer will be answered,
and, His will being done in us and on us, our wishes will acquiesce
in it and desire nothing besides. To him who can thus pray in
Christ's name in the deepest sense, and after Christ's pattern, every
door in God's treasure-house flies open, and he may take as much of
the treasure as he desires. The Master bends lovingly over such a
soul, and looks him in the eyes, and with outstretched hand says,
'What wilt thou that I should do unto thee? Be it unto thee even as
thou wilt.'

III. Lastly, the perfect joy which follows upon these two.

'That your joy may be fulfilled.' Again we have a recurrence of a
promise that has appeared in another connection in an earlier part of
this discourse; but the connection here is worthy of notice. The
promise is of joy that comes from the satisfaction of meek desires in
unison with Christ's will. Is it possible then, that, amidst all the
ups and downs, the changes and the sorrows of this fluctuating,
tempest-tossed life of ours we may have a deep and stable joy? 'That
your joy may be full,' says my text, or 'fulfilled,' like some
jewelled, golden cup charged to the very brim with rich and
quickening wine, so that there is no room for a drop more. Can it be
that ever, in this world, men shall be happy up to the very limits of
their capacity? Was anybody ever so blessed that he could not be more
so? Was your cup ever so full that there was no room for another drop
in it? Jesus Christ says that it may be so, and He tells us how it
may be so. Bring your desires into harmony with God's, and you will
have none unsatisfied amongst them; and so you will be blessed to the
full; and though sorrow comes, as of course it will come, still you
may be blessed. There is no contradiction between the presence of
this deep, central joy and a surface and circumference of sorrow.
Rather we need the surrounding sorrow, to concentrate, and so to
intensify, the central joy in God. There are some flowers which only
blow in the night; and white blossoms are visible with startling
plainness in the twilight, when all the flaunting purples and reds
are hid. We do not know the depth, the preciousness, the power of the
'joy of the Lord,' until we have felt it shining in our hearts in the
midst of the thick darkness of earthly sorrow, and bringing life into
the very death of our human delights. It may be ours on the
conditions that my text describes.

My dear friends! there are only two courses before us. Either we must
have a life with superficial, transitory, incomplete gladness, and an
aching centre of vacuity and pain, or we may have a life which, in
its outward aspects and superficial appearance, has much about it
that is sad and trying, but down in the heart of it is calm and
joyful. Which of the two do you deem best, a superficial gladness and
a rooted sorrow, or a superficial sorrow and a central joy? 'Even in
laughter the heart is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is
heaviness.' But, on the other hand, the 'ransomed of the Lord shall
return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their
heads. They shall obtain joy and gladness; and sorrow and sighing
shall flee away.'

THE JOYS OF 'THAT DAY'

'These things have I spoken unto you in proverbs: but the time
cometh, when I shall no more speak unto you in proverbs, but I
shall show you plainly of the Father. At that day ye shall ask in
My Name: and I say not unto you, that I will pray the Father for
you: For the Father Himself loveth you, because ye have loved Me,
and have believed that I came out from God.'--JOHN xvi. 25-27.

The stream which we have been tracking for so long in these
discourses has now nearly reached its close. Our Lord, in these all
but final words, sums up the great salient features which He has
already more than once specified, of the time when His followers
shall live with an absent and yet present Christ. He reiterates here
substantially just what He has been saying before, but in somewhat
different connection, and with some slight expansion. And this
reiteration of the glad features of the day which was about to dawn
suggests how much the disciples needed, and how much we need, to have
repeated over and over again the blessed and profound lessons of
these words.

What a sublime self-repression there was in the Master! Not one word
escapes from His lips of the personal pain and agony into which He
had to plunge and be baptized, before that day could dawn. All that
was crushed down and kept back, and He only speaks to the disciples
and to us of the joy that comes to them, and not at all of the bitter
sorrow by which it is bought. There are set forth in these words, as
it seems to me, especially three characteristics which belong to the
whole period between the ascension of Jesus Christ and His coming
again for judgment. It is a day of continual and clearer teaching by
Him. It is a day of desires in His name. It is a day of filial
experience of a Father's love. These are the characteristics of the
Christian period, and they ought to be the characteristics of our
individual Christian life. My brother! are they the characteristics
of yours?

Let us note them in order.

I. First, our Lord tells us that the whole period of the Christian
life upon earth is to be a period of continuous and clearer teaching
by Himself.

'Hitherto I have spoken to you in proverbs,' or parables. The word
means, not only a comparison or parable, but also, and perhaps
primarily, a mysterious and enigmatical saying. The reference is, of
course, directly to the immediately preceding thoughts, in which His
departure and the sorrow that accompanied it and was to merge into
joy, were described under that touching figure of the woman in
travail. But the reference must be extended very much farther than
that. It includes not only this discourse, but the whole of His
teaching by word whilst He was here upon earth.

Now the first thing that strikes me here is this strange fact. Here
is a man who knew Himself to be within four-and-twenty hours of His
death, and knew that scarcely another word of instruction was to come
from His lips upon earth, calmly asserting that, for all the
subsequent ages of the world's history, He is to continue its
Teacher. We know how the wisest and profoundest of earthly teachers
have their lips sealed by death, so as that no counsel can come from
them any more, and their disciples long in vain for responses from
the silenced oracle, which is dumb whatever new problems may arise.
But Jesus Christ calmly poses before the world as not having His
teaching activity in the slightest degree suspended by that fact
which puts a conclusive and complete close to all other teachers'
words. Rather He says that after death He will, more clearly than in
life, be the Teacher of the world.

What does He mean by that? Well, remember first of all the facts
which followed this saying--the Cross, the Grave, Olivet, the
Heavens, the Throne. These were still in the future when He spoke.
And have not these--the bitter passion, the supernatural
resurrection, the triumphant ascension, and the everlasting session
of the Son at the right hand of God--taught the whole world the
meaning of the Father's name, and the love of the Father's heart, and
the power of the Father's Son, as nothing else, not even the sweetest
and tenderest of His utterances, could have taught them? When, then,
He declares the continuance of His teaching functions unbroken
through death and beyond it, He refers partly to the future facts of
His earthly manifestation, and still more does He refer to that
continuous teaching which, by that divine Spirit whom He sends, is
granted to every believing soul all through the ages.

This great truth, which recurs over and over again in these
discourses of our Lord, is far too much dropped out of the
consciousness and creeds of the modern Christian Church. We call
ourselves Christ's disciples. If there be disciples, there must be a
Master. His teaching is by no means merely the effect of the recorded
facts and utterances of the Lord, preserved here in the Book for us,
and to be pondered upon by ourselves, but it is also the hourly
communication, to waiting hearts and souls that keep themselves near
the Lord, of deeper insight into His will, of larger views of His
purposes, of a firmer grasp of the contents of Scripture, and a more
complete subjection of the whole nature to the truth as it is in
Jesus. Christian men and women! do you know anything about what it is
to learn of Christ in the sense that He Himself, and no poor human
voice like mine, nor even merely the records of His past words and
deeds as garnered in these Gospels and expounded by His Apostles, is
the source of your growing knowledge of Him? If we would keep our
hearts and minds clearer than we do of the babble of earthly voices,
and be more loyal and humble and constant and patient in our sitting
on the benches in Christ's school till the Master Himself came to
give us His lessons, these great words of my text would not, as they
so often do in the mass of professing Christians, lack the
verification of experience and the assurance that it is so with us.
Have you sat in Christ's school, and do you know the secret and
illuminative whispers of His teaching? If not, there is something
wrong in your Christian character, and something insincere in your
Christian profession.

Notice, still further, that our Lord here ranks that subsequent
teaching before all that He said upon earth, great and precious as it
was. Now I do not mean for one moment to allege that fresh
communications of truth, uncontained in Scripture, are given to us in
the age-long and continuous teaching of Jesus Christ. That I do not
suppose to be the meaning of the great promises before us, for the
facts of revelation were finished when He ascended, and the inspired
commentary upon the facts of revelation was completed with these
writings which follow the Gospels in our New Testament. But Christ's
teaching brings us up to the understanding of the facts and of the
commentary upon them which Scripture contains, so that what was
parable or proverb, dimly apprehended, mysterious and enigmatical
when it was spoken, and what remains mysterious and enigmatical to us
until we grow up to it, gradually becomes full of significance and
weighty with a plain and certain meaning. This is the teaching which
goes on through the ages--the lifting of His children to the level of
apprehending more and more of the inexhaustible and manifold wisdom
which is stored for us in this Book. The mine has been worked on the
surface, but the deeper it goes the richer is the lode; and no ages
will exhaust the treasures that are hid in Christ Jesus our Lord.

He uses the new problems, the new difficulties, the new circumstances
of each successive age, and of each individual Christian, in order to
evolve from His word larger lessons, and to make the earlier lessons
more fully and deeply understood. And this generation, with all its
new problems, with all its uneasiness about social questions, with
all its new attitude to many ancient truths, will find that Jesus
Christ is, as He has been to all past generations,--the answer to all
its doubts, using even these doubts as a means of evolving the deeper
harmonies of His Word, and of unveiling in the ancient truth more
than former generations have seen in it. 'Brethren, I write unto you
no new commandment. Again, a new commandment I write unto you.' The
inexhaustible freshness of the old word taught us anew, with deeper
significance and larger applications, by the everlasting Teacher of
the Church, is the hope that shines through these words. I commend to
you, dear brethren, the one simple, personal question, Have I
submitted myself to that Teacher, and said to men and systems and
preachers and books and magazines, and all the rest of the noisy and
clamorous tongues that bewilder under pretence of enlightening this
generation--have I said to them all, 'Hold your peace! and let me, in
the silence of my waiting soul, hear the Teacher Himself speak to me.
Speak, Lord! for Thy servant heareth. Teach me Thy way and lead me,
for Thou art my Master, and I the humblest of Thy scholars'?

II. In the next place, another of the glad features of this dawning
day is that it is to be a day of desires based upon Christ, and
Christlike.

'In that day ye shall ask in My name.' Our translators have wisely
put a colon at the end of that clause, in order that we may not hurry
over it too quickly in haste to get to the next one. For there is a
substantial blessing and privilege wrapped up in it. Our Lord has
just been saying the same thing in the previous verses, but He
repeats it here in order to emphasise it, and to set it by the
subsequent words in a somewhat different light. But I dwell upon it
for a very simple, practical purpose. I have already explained in
former sermons the full, deep meaning of that phrase, 'asking in
Christ's name,' and have suggested to you that it implies two things
--the one, that our desires should all be based upon His great work
as the only ground of our acceptance with God; and the other, that
our desires should all be such as represent His heart and His mind.
When we 'ask in His name' we ask, first, for His sake, and, second,
as in His person. And such desires, resting their hopes of answer
solely upon His mighty sacrifice and all-sufficient merit, and shaped
accurately and fully after the pattern of the wishes that are dear to
His heart, are to be the prerogative and the joy of His servants, in
the new 'day' that is about to dawn.

Note how beautifully this thought, of wishes moulded into conformity
with Jesus Christ, and offered in reliance upon His great sacrifice,
follows upon that other thought, 'I will tell you plainly of the
Father.' The Master's voice speaks, revealing the paternal heart, the
scholar's voice answers with desires kindled by the revelation.
Longings and aspirations humbly offered for His sake, and after the
pattern of His own, are our true response to His teaching voice. As
the astronomer, the more powerful his telescope, though it may
resolve some of the nebulae that resisted feebler instruments, only
has his bounds of vision enlarged as he looks through it, and sees
yet other and mightier star-clouds lying mysterious beyond its ken--
so each new influx and tidal wave of knowledge of the Father, which
Christ gives to His waiting child, leads on to enlarged desires, to
longings to press still further into the unexplored mysteries of that
magnificent and boundless land, and to nestle still closer into the
infinite heart of God. He declares to us the Father, and the answer
of the child to the declaration of the Father is the cry, 'Abba!
Father! show me yet more of Thy heart.' Thus aspiration and fruition,
longing and satisfaction in unsatiated and inexhaustible and
unwearying alternation, are the two blessed poles between which the
life of a Christian may revolve in smoothness and music.

My friend! is that anything like the transcript of our experience,
that the more we know of God, the more we long to know of, and to
possess, Him? and the more we long to know of, and to possess, Him,
the more full, gracious, confidential, tender, and continuous are the
teachings of our Master? Is not this a far higher level of Christian
life than that we live upon? And why so? Is Christ's word faithless?
Hath He forgotten to be gracious? Was this promise of His idle wind?
Or is it that you and I have never grasped the fulness of privileges
that He bestows upon us?

III. Note, lastly, that that day is to be a day of filial experience
of a Father's love.

'I say not unto you that I will pray the Father for you, for the
Father Himself loveth you because ye have loved Me, and have believed
that I came out from God.' Jesus Christ does not deny His
intercession. He simply does not bring it into evidence here. To deny
it would have been impossible, for soon afterwards we find Him
saying, 'I pray for them which Thou hast given Me, for they are
Thine.' But He does not emphasise it here, in order that He may
emphasise another blessed source of solace--viz., that to those who
listen to the Master's teaching, and have their desires moulded into
harmony with His, and their wishes and hopes all based upon His
sacrifice and work, the divine Father's love directly flows. There is
no need of any intercession to turn Him to be merciful. Men sometimes
caricature the thought of the intercession of Christ, as if it meant
that He, by His prayer, bent the reluctant will of the Father in
heaven. All such horrible misconceptions Christ sweeps out of the
field here, even whilst there remains, in the fact that the prayers
of which He is speaking are offered in His name, the substance and
reality of all that we mean by the intercession of Jesus Christ.

And now note that God loves the men who love Jesus Christ. So
completely does the Father identify Himself with the Son, that love
to Christ is love to Him, and brings the blessed answer of His love
to us. Whosoever loves Christ loves God.

Whosoever loves Christ must do so, believing that He 'came forth from
God.' There are the two characteristics of a Christian disciple,--
faith in the divine mission of the Son, and love that flows from
faith. Now, of course, it does not follow from the words before us,
that this divine love which comes down upon the heart which loves
Christ is the original and first flow of that love towards that
heart. 'We love Him because He first loved us.' Christ is not here
tracking the stream to its source, but is pointing to it midway in
its flow. If you want to go up to the fountain-head you have to go up
to the divine Father's heart, who loved when there was no love in us;
and, because He loved, sent the Son. First comes the unmotived,
spontaneous, self-originated, undeserved, infinite love of God to
sinners and aliens and enemies; then the Cross and the mission of
Jesus Christ; then the faith in His divine mission; then the love
which is the child of faith, as it grasps the Cross and recognises
the love that lies behind it; and then, after that, the special,
tender, and paternal love of God falling upon the hearts that love
Him in His Son. There is nothing here in the slightest degree to
conflict with the grand universal truth that God loves enemies and
sinners and aliens. But there is the truth, as precious as the other,
that they who have 'known and believed the love that God hath to us'
live under the selectest influences of His loving heart, and have a
place in its tenderness which it is impossible that any should have
who do not so love. And that sweet commerce of a divine love
answering a human, which itself is the answer to a prior divine love,
brings with it the firm confidence that prayers in His name shall not
be prayers in vain.

So, dear friends, growing knowledge, an ever-present Teacher, the
peace of calm desires built upon Christ's Cross and fashioned after
Christ's Spirit, and the assurance in my quiet and filial heart that
my Father in the heavens loves me, and will neither give me
'serpents' when I ask for them, thinking them to be 'fishes,' nor
refuse 'bread' when I ask for it--these things ought to mark the
lives of all professing Christians. Are they our experience? If not,
why are they not, but because we do not believe that 'Thou art come
forth from God,' nor love Thee as we ought?

FROM' AND 'TO'

'I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again,
I leave the world, and go to the Father.'--JOHN xvi. 28.

These majestic and strange words are the proper close of our Lord's
discourse, what follows being rather a reply to the disciples'
exclamation. There is nothing absolutely new in them, but what is new
is the completeness and the brevity with which they cover the whole
ground of His being, work, and glory. They fall into two halves, each
consisting of two clauses; the former half describing our Lord's
_descent_, the latter His _ascent_. In each half the two clauses deal
with the same fact, considered from the two opposite ends as it were
--the point of departure and the point of arrival. 'I came forth
_from_ the Father, and am come _into the world: again I _leave_ the
world and go _to_ the Father.' But the first point of departure is
the last point of arrival, and the end comes round to the beginning.
Our Lord's earthly life is, as it were, a jewel enclosed within the
flashing gold of His eternal dwelling with God.

So I think we shall best apprehend the scope, and appropriate to
ourselves the blessing and power of these words, if we deal with the
four points to which they call our attention--the dwelling with the
Father; the voluntary coming to the earth; the voluntary departure
from the earth; and, once more, the dwelling with the Father. We must
grasp them all if we would know the whole Christ and all that He is
able to do and to be to us and to the world. So, then, I deal simply
with these four points.

I. Note then, first, the dwelling with the Father.

If we adopt the most probable reading of the first clause of my text,
it is even more forcible than in our version: 'I came forth _out of_
the Father.' Such an egress implies a being _in_ the Father in a
sense ineffable for our words, and transcending our thoughts. It
implies a far deeper and closer relation than even that of
juxtaposition, companionship, or outward presence.

Now, in these great words there is involved obviously, to begin with,
that, during His earthly life, our Lord bore about with Him the
remembrance and consciousness of an individual existence prior to His
life on earth. I need not remind you how frequently such hints drop
from His lips--'Before Abraham was, I am,' and the like. But beyond
that solemn thought of a remembered previous existence there is this
other one--that the words are the assertion by Christ Himself of a
previous, deep, mysterious, ineffable union with the Father. On such
a subject wisdom and reverence bid us speak only as we hear; but I
cannot refrain from emphasising the fact that, if this fourth Gospel
be a genuine record of the teaching of Jesus Christ--and, if it is
not, what genius was he who wrote it?--if it be a genuine record of
the teaching of Jesus Christ, then nothing is more plain than that
over and over again, in all sorts of ways, by implication and by
direct statement, to all sorts of audiences, friends and foes, He
reiterated this tremendous claim to have 'dwelt in the bosom of the
Father,' long before He lay on the breast of Mary. What did He mean
when He said, 'No man hath ascended up into heaven save He which came
down from heaven'? What did He mean when He said, 'What and if ye
shall see the Son of Man ascend up where He was before'? What did He
mean when He said, 'I came down from heaven, not to do Mine own will,
but the will of Him that sent Me'? And what did He mean when, in the
midst of the solemnities of that last prayer, He said, 'Glorify Thou
Me with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was'?

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