THE great subject of this chapter is that we have here to represent Christ. It is not so much service—indeed, service is not spoken of in the chapter-it is that we are here to represent Christ. In the anticipation of His leaving the earth, the Lord, as it has been said, presents us as Himself before the Father, and then presents us as Himself before the world. He looks up to heaven before He speaks, and then sets forth that we should be His representatives where He is not. This is the greatest desire of His heart in leaving us here.
Let us look a little at the different things Which He gives us, in order that we may be able thus to represent Him.
We must first see that He has left the earth-that He has been rejected, and is not here. This the soul must learn as a distinct truth before it Can know what it is to be for Him here. " He came unto his own, and his own received him not." Both Jew and Gentile rejected Him; the Jews said: " He ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God; " and He was delivered over to the hands of the Romans. As Peter says: " He was disallowed of men." You cannot understand Scripture without seeing this. Many do not believe that Christ is rejected, so they think that human means and influence can be use in His service.. If you believe that, you do. not believe the world has rejected Christ; for you cannot expect the world to be the rejecter and the upholder of Christ at the same time. Honest, conscientious people, say the Jew rejected Him, but the Gentile did not; so we can use and make subservient to the cause of Christ everything that is of Gentile power. So all they can appropriate they do. But I say, while you use that power and that means you cannot be using the power of the Holy Ghost; it is impossible to be using both together.
It is a great and a solemn-thing that we are here to represent Christ; it is a simple fact that ought to interest every heart. The Lord, going away from earth after having shown out the nature and character of His love, says, I am going to heaven; but I leave you here to represent me; and I can state that, by the power of the Holy Ghost, you are glorifying me.
The church will come down eventually from heaven, " The fullness of him that filleth all in all "2-the full magnificent display in detail of all the beauty of Christ, and nothing but Christ; but, meanwhile, we are each left here to act as should a component part of the great future.
It is not a question of serving; a person on a sick bed who cannot serve at all can glorify Christ. Chapter 15 is service. This is not service; it is representation. You are here to represent Christ where Christ is not, as the full and true picture of what Christ is; and so the apostle says, " that I may win Christ."
Scripture says that man, both Jew and Gentile, rejected Christ. Power was committed by God to man-to the Jew first, afterward to the Gentile; and at the time of the death of Christ it was found in the Romans' hands. This power, I may say, was a downward thing; it. was given from God to man, and man used it to crucify Christ. This being so, God says to Him, " Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool." Man is thus utterly disqualified; and now, if Christ be to be maintained on earth, it must be by an entirely, new power-the power of the Holy Ghost. And to that power we are indebted for everything:, it is a power that is entirely unknown to the world-that power that is against Christ.
I now turn to chapter 14. Christ has been rejected by the power that man had; and now, consequent upon that rejection, and upon Christ Sitting at the right hand of God, a new power comes in-that of the Holy Ghost. All the Old Testament saints were born by the Holy Ghost, and yet God allowed them to use natural power in His service; not only such as King Solomon, when the people were in the land, but Daniel and others in Babylon. But Christ has now been rejected by man: all his resources were brought to bear against God's Son on earth; and now God maintains the saint on earth independently of everything that has pre-existed. I want to draw your attention to the character of it.
We read: " I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever; even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him. But ye know him, for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you." The first thing I learn is that the Holy Ghost is a divine person who comes to earth, who is sent down here, but whom the world can neither see nor receive. The power that I am to receive on this earth in the absence of Christ is an invisible power; it is no more to be seen than the power by which the walls of Jericho fell down. It is an immense thing when the soul gets hold of the fact that there is a power here that the world cannot receive. The difference between the Holy Ghost being here and Christ, is that Christ was visible whilst the Holy Ghost is invisible. Men may not have acknowledged Christ as a divine person, but they could see Him; but the Holy Ghost is neither received nor seen. Did they see the power by which Jericho fell down? No; they saw the results. In a certain sense steam-power is of this character; for the moment what is called steam becomes visible it ceases to have power-it is not steam any longer; it is only vapor.
The Holy Ghost came down to comfort my heart during the absence of Christ, so that a simple believer may say, I am entirely independent of the world-as independent as the armed men outside Jericho were of the armed men inside. He comes down from heaven and takes up His abode in the soul, when it knows that it belongs to Christ. And this gives me power: "Because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts." You have got the Holy Ghost, and the Holy Ghost never leaves the one in whom He takes up His abode. He may retire and let you feel that you have lost His support when you have grieved Him, and then you break down and do some foolish thing. Ro it is in their acts that saints always show out what they are. They may be able to talk very well, but it is in action that it comes out whether you have grieved the Spirit or not. If you have, He will, if I may use such a very familiar expression, " leave you in the lurch," when you come to act; but when you confess, He is ever ready to come to help you-to restore your soul. So you cannot, as David did, pray " take not thy Holy Spirit from me," for, though you may grieve the Spirit, He will never leave you. The Holy Ghost fills the new bottle after creating it; first there was only the old bottle. There is great confusion in Christendom as to this: the thought prevails, that He takes the old bottle and improves it.' It is not -so; it is a new creation altogether. As it has been well said, " He first builds the house and then dwells in it."
How then are you to get the Holy Ghost? By coming to Christ. You must get into another thing entirely-something outside yourself. The Lord Jesus is not only " He that taketh away the sin Of the world," but also " He -that baptizeth with the Holy Ghost.' Chapter 14 tells me that the Holy Ghost is come down to comfort my heart during the absence of Christ, and I am thus entirely independent of the world, which will neither receive Him nor see Him; so do not you try to get the world to understand it.-
In chap. 15. we have another- phase of the world: the world will hate you; " Because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you." Now mark how the connection comes. out. The Lord says, " This is my commandment, that ye love one another, as I have loved you," the simple meaning of which is that they were to die for the brethren as He had died for them. Any divine going into the world was to be with the object alone of seeking for the lost souls in it. What does Christ in His love do? He clears you from your sins. But people reduce- love to mere charity, which is just doing to a person what he himself would wish done. There are two" characters in this love: one that I remove. from you everything that hinders your being near Him, and the other is that I remove from myself everything that would hinder my being a good and efficient servant to you. That " is the thirteenth of Corinthians: a man stripping off self that he may be a true servant.
And what does this produce for me in the world? Hatred. You will find that nothing produces more hatred and more envy in the world than leaving your own relations and friends for the Lord's people. We ought to be like an island of the most devoted love in the midst of a ruthless sea, which seeks by all means to swamp it.
In the end of the chapter we get it in a less individual way: " When the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me.; and ye also shall bear witness, because ye have been With me from the beginning " It is now not so much individually as in testimony for Christ, here where I am placed with this hostile power against me. In the former case it is the Father who sends Him; of course I need not say He is the same person. He is the Witness here, whilst our Comforter individually. And now this same Person-this invisible Person-is the One who is here to testify for Christ. Supposing I had power over every one in this town, supposing they were all my servants, I could not make them stand for Christ; I might make soldiers of them, I might mark the name of Christ on them, but I could not make them stand for Christ. -Indeed, that is just what the world has done, and has thus lost both.
Passing on to chapter 16. I find the Spirit, having come, " convicts the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment." Here it is not that I am hated by the world, but that I oppose it. Not only does it hate me, but I stand against it. I am a witness against it; I stand with the Holy Ghost, and the presence of the Holy Ghost on earth is the incontrovertible witness that sin is on the world. The Lord grant us to know that the Holy Ghost is as near in the church as the air that we breathe. In Acts 2 we find the way He came down, and He never went back; after all the failure He is still with us; and I ask you solemnly to weigh the fact that He has not only come down to be a Comforter to us, but also to stand for Christ. We read that He first "filled all the house," and then that He " sat upon each of them."
He did not lose His power by giving to them. I beg you to ponder it, for it will produce a great effect on you. It is not now that the world hates the saints only, but that the saints are opposed to the world. The world is the culprit the saint is the witness in the witness-box; and he says: I fix the brand of sin on you; you may hate me, but I am against you. It is not that I do not seek their souls. " He will- convict the world;" convicted does not mean converted; if they are converted, they cease to be of the world.
Now you must see this, and you must accept it, else how can you carry it out? There., are three steps in truth: you must first accept, then admire, and lastly adopt it. You may say, But admire it as I may I cannot carry it out. Never mind that; if you admire it, you are sure to get it in the end.
The saint is called to entire separation from the world. I am like the armed men going round Jericho: I say to the world, I cannot touch you; but you certainly shall not touch me. They never ought to have taken anything out of Jericho-that was where their failure was; they never ought to have taken anything but the poor Rahab saved by the scarlet line. And that is all the business I have with the world; I do not seek for any acquaintance whatever, I only go into it to seek for souls.
It is just here that failure comes in.. People say: I own the Holy Ghost as the only means for comforting my-soul during the absence of Christ, but I do not see why I should not use the power of the world to promote the work of Christ. I answer that in the measure in which you give up the Holy Ghost as the only power to act for Christ here on earth, you also lose the sense of His poWer in your own soul. You are separating between the advantages and the responsibility of the Holy Ghost. He is One whom the world. cannot receive, and when you get worldly neither can you. It was thus that the church-lost it. Ananias and Sapphira lied against the Holy Ghost just because they did not see Him. Do you think they would have done it if they had? If they had had the High Priest before them instead, with the Urim and Thummim, they would not have dared to do it. Oh, there is no one there! was their thought. They go in and say -it was sold for so much. And so Peter says, You have lied to the Holy Ghost. And that is just the lie of Christendom: they do not believe that He is here.
You see, then, that if you take the place of testimony, what a portion you receive. The world will hate you. But now we find-the compensation that the Holy Ghost gives to the person who takes this place with Him. It says: "lie will guide you into all truth; he will show you things to come. He shall glorify me, for he shall take of mine, and shall show it unto you." Beloved friends, it is as clear as possible, that if you have this, you will "glorify Him." I do not believe a person can have a real senses of Christ at God's right hand-in the glory who has not taken his place with Him on earth. He does not communicate to your hearts heavenly things until you have taken your place with Him on earth. " All things that the Father hath 'are mine therefore said I, that he shall take of mine, and shall show it unto you."
We now come to the last verse of chap. where it is not only opposition to the world, abut we are to overcome it. " In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." Tribulation, that is not trouble: trouble is in the heart; this is another thing altogether, and brings us on to the seventeenth chapter; here we are overcomers of the world, as the Scriptures put it in another place, " Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?" The world does not see nor receive the p6wer that I have got-does not recognize it. And it is not only that the world hates me, and that I oppose it, but that I overcome it. So in chap. xvii. the Lord, as the One who has overcome, leaves us here. He gives us now the Father instead of the world; we have lost the world as our place, and He opens out to us what the Father was to Him here. All the organized thing here we are to be superior to, and so He opens out to us the different things that are to enable us to be thus superior. I very briefly call your attention to them, merely reading without making any comments on them.
The first is (verse 2) " eternal life." " Thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him." Then He says in verse 6: " They have kept thy word." Count the things yourselves as we go on, and see what a wonderful place He puts us in as victorious; not only as suffering, but as overcoming. Verse 8': " I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me;" and verse 9: "I pray' for—them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me, for they are thine." We are to be kept in all the sense of belonging to this new origin. It is a new origin, entirely apart: from the old order of things; I am superior to the whole; I am not in it, or only so as a bird is that walks on the earth; I fly quite away from it; I belong to another expanse and region altogether. He gives, them the words his Father gave Him, and they know " that I came out I from thee, that thou didst send me, and am glorified in them." Then verse -11 He manifests to them the name of the rather, to keep them in their new position. In verse 13, " They might have my joy fulfilled in themselves." That is where we are. Then verse 15: " I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil." Then: " They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world." And then (17): " Sanctify them through thy truth:" thy word is truth." That is the knowledge of...the Father; it is not the knowledge of other things. Verse 18: "As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world." That is our mission. Verse 19: " For their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sancti4ed through the truth." That is, we are to be as separate from everything here as Christ in heaven. We are all a long way off that. Then, verse 21: " That they all may be one;" and 24: " That they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me; for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world." That is the joy which He had, which we are not in yet; but which He has given to us, to set us in superiority to the world.
I say, thus, beloved friends, He has constituted us to be here, in a scene where He is not, as representatives of Himself; and I say, are your hearts really set-for that is the answer you have to give to Him to-night-are your hearts set upon thus being as standard rose-trees, though in yourselves but poor briars, to set forth the qualities, the features, of Him where He has set you. Do not say that you have not got the power, for that He himself has sent down to you-a power entirely outside the world, and whose primary action is to set forth Christ. You will always know that you have got the Holy Ghost by His action: He ever seeks to connect with Christ in glory; that is His work. And in the world I get hatred, because I am the expression of devotedness to those who are Christ's in it. It is not the gospel that calls out hatred; it is devotion to His own. And then if you want any one thing here for Christ you shall, have it if you -Want a room to preach in, if you want a jail shaken, the Father will do it for Christ. There is not the same demonstration now, but there is the same power-the very power that shook the jail. The Holy Ghost is here standing for Christ and has been ever since the day when He filled the house where they were; in the dark ages He was just as much here as now, but souls did not know it. -Thus it is true I have lost -the world, but, if -I have, I have gained heaven, and now I am to be victorious here.
He then opens out the desires of His heart, which I have not looked at so much as what He gives us to constitute us representatives of Himself.
The Lord awaken in each one of us the simple desire to thus represent Him in a world where He is not. (J. B. S.)