'At that day ye shall know that I am in My Father, and ye in Me, and I
in you. He that hath My commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that
loveth Me; and he that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father, and I
will love him, and will manifest Myself to him.'—JOHN xiv. 20, 21.
We have heard our Lord in the previous verse unveiling His deepest and
strongest encouragements to His downcast followers. These were: His
presence with them, their true sight of Him, and their participation in
His life. The first part of our present text is closely connected with
these, for it gives us their upshot and consequence. Because Christ's
true disciple is conscious of Christ's presence, sees Him with the eyes
of his spirit, and draws life from Him, therefore he will know by
experience the deep truths of Christ's indwelling at once in the Father
and in His servant, and of His servant's indwelling in Him. Our Lord
had just previously been exhorting His disciples to _believe_ that He
was in the Father and the Father in Him; and had been gently wondering
at the slowness of their faith. Now He tells them that, when He is
gone, their spiritual stature will be so increased as that they shall
_know_ the thing which, with Him by their side, they found it so hard
to believe.
The second part of our present text is the close of this whole section
of our Lord's discourse, and in it He urges the requirement of
practical obedience, as the sign and test of love, and as the condition
of receiving these high and wonderful things of which He has been
speaking. He has been unveiling spiritual blessings, which may seem
recondite and up in the clouds, and which, as a matter of fact, have
often been perverted into dreamy mysticisms of a most immoral and
unpractical kind. And so He brings us sharp back again here to very
plain truths, and would teach us that all these lofty and ineffable
gifts of which He has been dimly speaking are to be reached only by the
commonplace road of honest obedience and simple conformity to His
commandments. In these last words of my text, He administers the
antidote and the check to the possible abuses of the great things which
He has been saying.
I. Note, then, first, the knowledge that comes with the Christ who
comes.
'At that day' covers the whole period of which He has been speaking,
between His withdrawal from the disciples and His final corporeal
coming to judgment—that great day of which generations are but the
moments. In it the men who love Him are to have His presence, His
vision, His life, and because they have, 'Ye shall know that I am in My
Father, and ye in Me, and I in you,' The principle that underlies these
wonderful words is that Christian experience is the best teacher of
fundamental Christian truth. Observe with what decision, and with what
strange boldness, our Lord carries that principle into regions where we
might suppose at first sight that it was altogether inapplicable. 'Ye
shall know that I am in My Father.' How can such a thing as the
relation between Christ and God ever be a matter of consciousness to us
here upon earth? Must it not always be a truth that we must take on
trust and believe because we have been told it, without having any
verification in ourselves? Not so; remember what has gone before. If a
man has the consciousness of Christ's presence with Him, sees Him with
the true inward eye, which is the only real organ of real vision, and
is drawing from Him, moment by moment, His own high and immortal life,
then is it not true that this man's experiences are of such a sort as
to be utterly inexplicable, except on the ground that they come from a
divine source? If I have these experiences I know that it is Jesus
Christ who gives them, and I know that He could not give them, if He
did not dwell in God and were not divine. These new influences, this
revolution in my being, this healing, constraining, cleansing touch,
these calming, gladdening, elevating powers, these new hopes, these
reversed desires, loving all to which I was formerly indifferent, and
growing dead to all that formerly appealed most strongly to me; all
these things bear upon their very front the signature that they are
wrought by a divine hand, and as sure as I am of my own Christian
consciousness, so sure am I that all its experiences proclaim their
Author, and that Christ who gives me them is in God. 'Ye shall know
that I am in My Father.'
The New Testament, as I read it, is full at every point of the divinity
of Jesus Christ; and many profound and learned arguments on that
subject have been urged by theologians, and these are all well and
needful in their places, but the true way to be sure of it is to have
Him dwelling with us and working in us; and then what was an article of
belief becomes an article of knowledge, and we know Him to be our
Saviour and the Son of God.
In like manner, and yet more obviously, the other elements of this
knowledge which Christ promises here may be shown to flow naturally and
necessarily from Christian experiences. 'That ye are in Me, and I in
you,'—if a Christian man carries the consciousness of Christ's
presence, and has Him as a Sun in his darkness, and as a Life-source
feeding his deadness with life, then he knows with a consciousness
which is irrefragable that Jesus Christ is in him, for he feels His
touch; and he knows that he is in Christ, for he is aware of the power
that girdles him, and in which he has peace and righteousness and all.
So, dear brethren, let us learn what the Christian man's experience
ought to be and to do for him. It should change the articles of our
creed into elements of our consciousness. It should make all the
fundamentals of the Gospel vitally and vividly true; and certified by
what has passed within our own spirits We should be able to say: 'We
have the witness in ourselves.' And though there will remain much that
is uncertain, much in Christian doctrine which is not capable of that
clear and all-sufficing verification; much about which we must still
depend on the mere teaching of others, or on our own study, the central
facts which make the Gospel may all become, by this plain and short
path, elements of our very consciousness which stand undeniable to us,
whosoever denies them.
Such a direct way to knowledge is reasonable, is in full analogy with
the manner by which we attain to the knowledge of everything except the
mere external facts, the knowledge of which has arrogated to itself the
exclusive name of 'science,' How do you know anything about love? You
may read poems and tragedies to the end of time, and you will not
understand it until you come under its spell for yourself; and then all
the things that men said about it cease to be mere words, because you
yourself have experienced the emotion.
'He must be loved, ere that to you
He will seem worthy of your love,'
and the only way to be sure, with a vital certitude, of Christ, is to
take Christ for your very own, and then He comes into your very being,
and dwells there quickening, the Sun and the Life.
So, dear brethren, though such certitude arising from experience, which
in its nature is the very highest, is not available for other people,
the fact that so many millions of men allege that in varying degrees
they possess this certitude is available for other people, and there is
nothing to be said by the unbeliever to this, the attestation of the
Christian consciousness to the truth of the truths which it has tried.
'Whether this man be a sinner or no, I know not.' You may jangle as
much as you like about the questionable and controversial points that
surround the Christian revelation, I do not care in the present
connection what answer you give to them. 'Whether this man be a sinner
or no, I know not. One thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I
see.' And we may push the war into the enemy's quarters, and say: 'Why!
herein is a marvellous thing, that you that know everything do not know
whence this man is, and yet He has opened mine eyes. You want facts;
there are some. You want verification; we have verified by experience,
and we set to our seals that God is true.'
'Oh but,' you say, 'this is not a fair account of the way in which
Christian men and women generally feel about this matter.' Well, all
that I can say about that is, so much the worse for the so-called
Christian men and women. And if they are Christians, and do not know by
this inward experience that Christ is divine and their Saviour, then
there is only one of two reasons to be given for it; either their
experience is so wretchedly superficial and fragmentary, so rudimentary
as to be scarcely worth calling by the name or, having the facts, they
have failed to appreciate their significance, and to make their own by
reflection the certitudes which are their own.
Brethren, it becomes every Christian man and woman to be able to say,
'Because I have Christ with me, and see Him, and derive my life from
Him, I know that He is in the Father, and I in Him, and He in me.' And
if you cannot say that, it is your own grasp of Him, or your meditation
upon what you have got by your grasp, that is painfully and sinfully
defective.