With a conscience set free by faith in a risen and ascended Lord, and with the flow of joy which the un-grieved Spirit of God gives to a heavenly man who is a son of God, what is the fever of disease? What the clammy feel of the body, when its life is flickering in the socket, and the eternal life within centering the heart and mind upon the person of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself? Yes, but there is a coffin before us! There rests the body of an aged and devoted saint! happy in His love, and full of His love to His saints, and now gone! Aye, but gone whither? To the Lord Jesus. Is He not worthy to have His saints with Him, and has He forestalled God’s counsel in calling this one home, home to Himself—Himself the home? Not so; the words, ‘If ye loved me, ye would rejoice that I said I go to my Father, for my Father is greater than I’ may be quoted here as true in this case also. Oh, have we no love for those that go? no love save for our own selves? no willingness to see them blessed, their blessing will cost us any privation? It is will wretched selfishness, which forgets God’s joy and Christ’s joy in welcoming to His presence a soul that leaves us, and which hinders, too, our thinking of it great gain. Well may you, who are thus full of you own selves, forgetting God and Christ, and the friend you profess to have loved—well may you be indignant with your own selfishness and your own narrow-hearted love of self! But there is a jealousy of love in God, He wills that your hearts should know the sufficiency of Christ to satisfy you amid all the wrestlings of the wilderness. He wills in that jealousy of love that you should think of Him to whom He has espoused you and to His joy over those who sleep in Him, and that you should learn how to think and feel according to that sphere in which Christ is center.
What can I tell you concerning the blessedness of the departed? I can only answer by another question. What do you know of the blessedness of being with the Lord? For if self and selfishness fill you, why then, they find their aliment in this world; and if you are full of yourself, your likes and dislikes, your gains and your losses, you will not profit much from the doctrine of the blessedness of those absent from the body and present with the Lord. It does not fill you, with your selfishness, and so you may not like it? What did the thief know of Paradise? Probably nothing at all. But he had made a new friend in One whose fellow was not to be found. Faith had revealed to him the blessedness of the Lord. Faith had opened his heart to holiness and to confession, and to trust in his Judge, and had drawn into it the sweetness of inseparableness from that Saviour. “Thou shalt be with me.” With Him! that was enough. This throws us on the measure of our appreciation and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. Those who know and make much of Him will find much in the thought of being with Him. To a saint there is nothing like presence with the Lord. If self rules, we must have circumstances and details, so as to be able to pick up what suits man, thinking of himself and his circumstances.