The Words of Jesus

Christ’s people are a sorrowing people! Chastisement is their badge—“great tribulation” is their appointed discipline. When they enter the gates of glory, He is represented as wiping away tears from their eyes. But, weeping ones, be comforted! Your Lord’s special mission to earth—the great errand He came from heaven to fulfil, was “to bind up the broken-hearted.” Your trials are meted out by a tender hand. He knows you too well—He loves you too well—to make this world tearless and sorrowless! “There must be rain, and hail, and storm,” says Rutherford, “in the saint’s cloud.” Were your earthy course strewed with flowers, and nothing but sunbeams played around your dwelling, it would lead you to forget your nomadic life,—that you are but a sojourner here. The tent must at times be struck, pin by pin of the moveable tabernacle taken down, to enable you to say and to feel in the spirit of a pilgrim, “I desire a better country.” Meantime, while sorrow is your portion, think of Him who says, “I know your sorrows.” Angels cannot say so—they cannot sympathise with you, for trial is a strange word to them. But there is a mightier than they who can. All He sends you and appoints you is in love. There is a provision and condition wrapt up in the bosom of every affliction, “if need be;” coming from His hand, sorrows and riches are to His people convertible terms. If tempted to murmur at their trials, they are often murmuring at disguised mercies. “Why do you ask me,” said Simeon, on his deathbed, “what I like? I am the Lord’s patient—I cannot but like everything.”

And then—“your sorrow shall be turned into joy.” “The morning cometh”—that bright morning when the dew-drops collected during earth’s night of weeping shall sparkle in its beams; when in one blessed moment a life-long experience of trial will be effaced and forgotten, or remembered only by contrast, to enhance the fulness of the joys of immortality. What a revelation of gladness! The map of time disclosed, and every little rill of sorrow, every river will be seen to have been flowing heavenwards,—every rough blast to have been sending the bark nearer the haven! In that joy, God Himself will participate. In the last “words of Jesus” to His people when they are standing by the triumphal archway of Glory, ready to enter on their thrones and crowns, He speaks of their joy as if it were all His own. “Enter ye into the joy of your Lord.”

Reader, may this joy be yours! Sit loose to the world’s joys. Have a feeling of chastened gratitude and thankfulness when you have them; but beware of resting in them, or investing them with a permanency they cannot have. Jesus had his eye on heaven when he added—

“YOUR JOY NO MAN TAKETH FROM YOU.”

23d Day.

This is not the petition of a suppliant, but the claim of a conqueror. There was only one request He ever made, or ever can make, that was refused; it was the prayer wrung forth by the presence and power of superhuman anguish: “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me!” Had that prayer been answered, never could one consolatory “word of Jesus” have been ours. “If it be possible;”—but for that gracious parenthesis, we must have been lost for ever! In unmurmuring submission, the bitter cup was drained; all the dread penalties of the law were borne, the atonement completed, an all-perfect righteousness wrought out; and now, as the stipulated reward of His obedience and sufferings, the Victor claims His trophies. What are they? Those that were given Him of the Father—the countless multitudes redeemed by His blood. These He “wills” to be with Him “where He is”—the spectators of His glory, and partakers of His crown. Wondrous word and will of a dying testator! His last prayer on earth is an importunate pleading for their glorification; His parting wish is to meet them in heaven: as if these earthly jewels were needed to make His crown complete,—their happiness and joy the needful complement of His own!

Reader! learn from this, the grand element in the bliss of your future condition—it is the presence of Christ; “with Me where I am.” It matters comparatively little as to the locality of heaven. “We shall see Him as He is,” is “the blessed hope” of the Christian. Heaven would be no heaven without Jesus; the withdrawal of His presence would be like the blotting out of the sun from the firmament; it would uncrown every seraph, and unstring every harp. But, blessed thought! it is His own stipulation in His testamentary prayer, that Eternity is to be spent in union and communion with Himself, gazing on the unfathomed mysteries of His love, becoming more assimilated to His glorious image, and drinking deeper from the ocean of His own joy.

If anything can enhance the magnitude of this promised bliss, it is the concluding words of the verse, in which He grounds His plea for its bestowment: “I will—that they behold my glory;”—why? “For Thou lovedst (not them, but) Me before the foundation of the world!” It is equivalent to saying, “If Thou wouldst give Me a continued proof of Thine everlasting love and favour to Myself, it is by loving and exalting My redeemed people. In loving them and glorifying them, Thou art loving and glorifying Me: so endearingly are their interests and My own bound up together!”

Believer, think of that all-prevailing voice, at this moment pleading for thee within the veil!—that omnipotent “Father, I will,” securing every needed boon! There is given, so to speak, a blank cheque by which He and His people may draw indefinite supplies out of the exhaustless treasury of the Father’s grace and love. God Himself endorses it with the words, “Son, Thou art ever with me, and all that I have is Thine.” How it would reconcile us to Earth’s bitterest sorrows, and hallow Earth’s holiest joys, if we saw them thus hanging on the “will” of an all-wise Intercessor, who ever pleads in love, and never pleads in vain!

“BE IT UNTO ME ACCORDING TO THY WORD.”

24th Day.

Believer! read in this “word of Jesus” thy glorious title-deed. Thy Saviour lives—and His life is the guarantee of thine own. Our true Joseph is alive. “He is our Brother. He talks kindly to us!” That life of His, is all that is between us and everlasting ruin. But with Christ for our life, how inviolable our security! The great Fountain of being must first be dried up, before the streamlet can. The great Sun must first be quenched, ere one glimmering satellite which He lights up with His splendour can. Satan must first pluck the crown from that glorified Head, before he can touch one jewel in the crown of His people. They cannot shake one pillar without shaking first the throne. “If we perish,” says Luther, “Christ perisheth with us.”

Reader! is thy life now “hid with Christ in God?” Dost thou know the blessedness of a vital and living union with a living, life-giving Saviour? Canst thou say with humble and joyous confidence, amid the fitfulness of thine own ever-changing frames and feelings, “Nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me?” “Jesus liveth!”—They are the happiest words a lost soul and a lost world can hear! Job, four thousand years ago, rejoiced in them. “I know,” says he, “that I have a living Kinsman.” John, in his Patmos exile, rejoiced in them. “I am He that liveth” (or the Living One), was the simple but sublime utterance with which he was addressed by that same “Kinsman,” when He appeared arrayed in the lustres of His glorified humanity. “This is the record” (as if there was a whole gospel comprised in the statement), “that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.” St. Paul, in the 8th chapter to the Romans—that finest portraiture of Christian character and privilege ever drawn, begins with “no condemnation,” and ends with “no separation.” Why “no separation?” Because the life of the believer is incorporated with that of his adorable Head and Surety. The colossal Heart of redeemed humanity beats upon the throne, sending its mighty pulsations through every member of His body; so that, before the believer’s spiritual life can be destroyed, Omnipotence must become feebleness, and Immutability become mutable!

But, blessed Jesus, “Thy word is very sure, therefore Thy servant loveth it.”

“I GIVE UNTO THEM ETERNAL LIFE, AND THEY SHALL NEVER PERISH, NEITHER SHALL ANY MAN PLUCK THEM OUT OF MY HAND.”

25th Day.

How faithfully did the Apostles, to whom this promise was first addressed, experience its reality! Hear the testimony of the beloved disciple who had once leant on his Divine Master’s bosom—who “had heard, and seen, and looked upon Him.” That glorified bosom was now hid from his sight; but does he speak of an absent Lord, and of His fellowship only as among the holy memories of the past? No! with rejoicing emphasis he can exclaim—“Truly our fellowship IS with ... Jesus Christ.”

Amid so much that is fugitive here, how the heart clings to this assurance of the abiding presence of the Saviour! Our best earthly friends—a few weeks may estrange them;—centuries have rolled on—Christ is still the same. How blessed to think, that if I am indeed a child of God, there is not the lonely instant I am without His guardianship! When the beams of the morning visit my chamber, the brighter beams of a brighter Sun are shining upon me. When the shadows of evening are gathering around, “it is not night, if He, the unsetting ‘Sun of my soul,’ is near.” His is no fitful companionship—present in prosperity, gone in adversity. He never changes. He is always the same,—in sickness and solitude, in joy and in sorrow, in life and in death. Not more faithfully did the pillar-cloud and column of fire of old precede Israel, till the last murmuring ripple of Jordan fell on their ears on the shores of Canaan, than does the presence and love of Jesus abide with His people. Has His word of promise ever proved false? Let the great cloud of witnesses now in glory testify. “Not one thing hath failed of all that the Lord our God hath spoken.” This “word of the Lord is tried”—“having loved His own, which were in the world, He loved them unto the end.”

Believer! art thou troubled and tempted? Do dark providences and severe afflictions seem to belie the truth and reality of this gracious assurance? Art thou ready, with Gideon, to say, “If the Lord be indeed with us, why has all this befallen us?” Be assured He has some faithful end in view. By the removal of prized and cherished earthly props and refuges, He would unfold more of his own tenderness. Amid the wreck and ruin of earthly joys, which, it may be, the grave has hidden from your sight, One nearer, dearer, tenderer still, would have you say of Himself, “The Lord liveth; and blessed be my Rock; and let the God of my salvation be exalted.” “Thanks be to God, who always maketh us to triumph in Christ.” Yes! and never more so than when, stripped of all competing objects of creature affection, we are left, like the disciples on the mount, with “Jesus only!”

“THESE THINGS HAVE I SPOKEN UNTO YOU, THAT IN ME YE MIGHT HAVE PEACE.”

26th Day.

What a voice is this breaking over a world which for six thousand years has been a dormitory of sin and death! For four thousand of these years, heathendom could descry no light through the bars of the grave; her oracles were dumb on the great doctrine of a future state, and more especially regarding the body’s resurrection. Even the Jewish Church, under the Old Testament dispensation, seemed to enjoy little more than fitful and uncertain glimmerings, like men groping in the dark. It required death’s great Abolisher to show, to a benighted world, the luminous “path of life.” With Him rested the “bringing in of a better hope”—the unfolding of “the mystery which had been hid from ages and generations.” Marvellous disclosure! that this mortal frame, decomposed and resolved into its original dust, shall yet start from its ashes, remodelled and reconstructed—“a glorified body!” Not like “the earthly tabernacle” (a mere shifting and moveable tent, as the word denotes), but incorruptible—immortal! The beauteous transformation of the insect from its chrysalis state—the buried seed springing up from its tiny grave to the full-eared corn or gorgeous flower—these are nature’s mute utterances as to the possibility of this great truth, which required the unfoldings of “a more sure word of prophecy.” But the Gospel has fully revealed what Reason, in her loftiest imaginings, could not have dreamt of. Jesus “hath brought life and immortality to light.” He, the Bright and Morning Star, hath “turned the shadow of death into the morning.” He gives, in His own resurrection, the earnest of that of His people;—He is the first-fruits of the immortal harvest yet to be gathered into the garner of Heaven.

Precious truth! This “word of Jesus” spans like a celestial rainbow the entrance to the dark valley. Death is robbed of its sting. In the case of every child of God, the grave holds in custody precious, because redeemed, dust. Talk of it not, as being committed to a dishonoured tomb!—it is locked up, rather, in the casket, of God until the day “when He maketh up His jewels,” when it will be fashioned in deathless beauty like unto the glorified body of the Redeemer. Angels, meanwhile, are commissioned to keep watch over it, till the trump of the archangel shall proclaim the great “Easter of creation.” They are the “reapers,” waiting for the world’s great “Harvest Home,” when Jesus Himself shall come again—not as He once did, humiliated and in sorrow, but rejoicing in the thought of bringing back all His sheaves with him.

Afflicted and bereaved Christian!—thou who mayest be mourning in bitterness those who are not—rejoice through thy tears in these hopes “full of immortality.” The silver cord is only “loosed,” not broken. Perchance, as thou standest in the chamber of death, or by the brink of the grave,—in the depths of that awful solitude and silence which reigns around, this may be thy plaintive and mournful soliloquy—“Shall the dust praise Thee?” Yes, it shall! This very dust that hears now unheeded thy footsteps, and unmoved thy tears, shall through eternity praise its redeeming God—it shall proclaim His truth!

“LORD, TO WHOM SHALL WE GO BUT UNTO THEE, THOU HAST THE WORDS OF ETERNAL LIFE.”

27th Day.

There are indeed blessed moments of communion which the believer enjoys with His beloved Lord now; but how fitful and transient! To-day, life is a brief Emmaus journey—the soul happy in the presence and love of an unseen Saviour. To-morrow, He is gone; and the bereft spirit is led to interrogate itself in plaintive sorrow,—“Where is now thy God?” Even when there is no such experience of darkness and depression, how much there is in the world around to fill the believer with sadness! His Lord rejected and disowned—His love set at nought—His providences slighted—His name blasphemed—His creation groaning and travailing in pain—disunion, too, among His people—His loving heart wounded in the house of His friends!

But “yet a little while,” and all this mystery of iniquity will be finished. The absent Brother’s footfall will soon be heard,—no longer “as a wayfaring man who turneth aside to tarry for a night,” but to receive His people into the permanent “mansions” His love has been preparing, and from which they shall go no more out. Oh, blessed day! when creation will put on her Easter robes—when her Lord, so long dishonoured, will be enthroned amid the hosannahs of a rejoicing universe—angels lauding Him—saints crowning Him—sin, the dark plague-spot on His universe, extinguished for ever—death swallowed up in eternal victory!

And it is but “a little while!” “Yet a little while,” we elsewhere read, “and He that shall come, will come, and will not tarry” (literally, “a little while as may be.”) “He will stay not a moment longer,” says Goodwin, “than He hath despatched all our business in Heaven for us.” With what joy will He send His mission-Angel with the announcement, “the little while is at an end;” and to issue the invitation to the great festival of glory, “Come! for all things are ready!”

Child of sorrow! think often of this “little while.” “The days of thy mourning will soon be ended.” There is a limit set to thy suffering time,—“After that ye have suffered a WHILE.” Every wave is numbered between you and the haven; and then when that haven is reached, oh, what an apocalypse of glory!—the “little while” of time merged into the great and unending “while of eternity!”—to be for ever with the Lord—the same unchanged and unchanging Saviour!

“A little while, and ye shall see me!” Would that the eye of faith might be kept more intently fixed on “that glorious appearing!” How the world, with its guilty fascinations, tries to dim and obscure this blessed hope! How the heart is prone to throw out its fibres here, and get them rooted in some perishable object! Reader! seek to dwell more habitually on this the grand consummation of all thy dearest wishes. “Stand on the edge of your nest, pluming your wings for flight.” Like the mother of Sisera, be looking for the expected chariot.

“HE IS FAITHFUL THAT PROMISED.”

28th Day.

Here Is Heaven! This “word of Jesus” represents the future state of the glorified to consist not in locality, but in character; the essence of its bliss is the full vision and fruition of God. Our attention is called from all vague and indefinite theories about the circumstantials of future happiness. The one grand object of contemplation—the “glory which excelleth,” is the sight of God Himself! The one grand practical lesson enforced on His people, is the cultivation of that purity of heart without which none could see, or (even could we suppose it possible to be admitted to see Him) none could enjoy God! “The kingdom of Heaven cometh not with observation ... the kingdom of God is within you.”

Reader, hast thou attained any of this heart-purity and heart-preparation? It has been beautifully said that “the openings of the streets of heaven are on earth.” Even here we may enjoy, in the possession of holiness, some foretaste of coming bliss. Who has not felt that the happiest moments of their lives were those of close walking with God—nearness to the mercy-seat—when self was surrendered, and the eye was directed to the glory of Jesus, with most single, unwavering, undivided aim? What will Heaven be, but the entire surrender of the soul to Him, without any bias to evil, without the fear of corruption within echoing to temptation without; every thought brought into captivity to the obedience of Christ; no contrariety to His mind; all in blessed unison with His will; the whole being impregnated with holiness—the intellect purified and ennobled, consecrating all its powers to His service—memory, a holy repository of pure and hallowed recollections—the affections, without one competing rival, purged from all the dross of earthliness—the love of God, the one supreme animating passion—the glory of God, the motive principle interfused through every thought, and feeling, and action of the life immortal; in one word, the heart a pellucid fountain; no sediment to dim its purity, “no angel of sorrow” to come and trouble the pool! The long night of life over, and this the glory of the eternal morrow which succeeds it! “I shall be satisfied when I awake, with Thy likeness.”

Yes, this is Heaven, subjectively and objectively—purity of heart and “God all in all!” Much, doubtless, there may and will be of a subordinate kind, to intensify the bliss of the redeemed; communion with saints and angels; re-admission into the society of death-divided friends: but all these will fade before the great central glory, “God Himself shall be with them, and be their God; they shall see his face!” Believers have been aptly called heliotropes—turning their faces as the sunflower towards the Sun of Righteousness, and hanging their leaves in sadness and sorrow, when that Sun is away. It will be in heaven the emblem is complete. There, every flower in the heavenly garden will be turned Godwards, bathing its tints of loveliness in the glory that excelleth! Reader, may it be yours, when o’er-canopied by that cloudless sky, to know all the marvels contained in these few glowing words, “We shall be like Him, for we shall see him as He is.”

“AND EVERY MAN THAT HATH THIS HOPE IN HIM PURIFIETH HIMSELF EVEN AS HE IS PURE.”

29th Day.

The pilgrim’s motto on earth is, “Here we have no continuing city.” Even “Sabbath tents” must be struck. Holy seasons of communion must terminate. “Arise, let us go hence!” is a summons which disturbs the sweetest moments of tranquillity in the Church below; but in Heaven, every believer becomes a pillar in the temple of God, and “he shall go no more out.” Here it is but the lodging of a wayfarer turning aside to tarry for the brief night of earth. Here we are but “tenants at will;” our possessions are but moveables—ours to-day, gone to-morrow. But these many “mansions” are an inheritance incorruptible and unfading. Nothing can touch the heavenly patrimony. Once within the Father’s house, and we are in the house for ever!

Think, too, of Jesus, gone to prepare these mansions,—“I go to prepare a place for you.” What a wondrous thought—Jesus now busied in Heaven in His Church’s behalf! He can find no abode in all His wide dominions, befitting as a permanent dwelling for His ransomed ones. He says, “I will make new heavens and a new earth. I will found a special kingdom—I will rear eternal mansions expressly for those I have redeemed with my blood!”

Reader, let the prospect of a dwelling in this “house of the Lord for ever,” reconcile thee to any of the roughnesses or difficulties in thy present path—to thy pilgrim provision and pilgrim fare. Let the distant beacon-light, that so cheeringly speaks of a Home brighter and better far than the happiest of earthly ones, lead thee to forget the intervening billows, or to think of them only as wafting thee nearer and nearer to thy desired haven! “Would,” says a saint, who has now entered on his rest, “that one could read, and write, and pray, and eat and drink, and compose one’s self to sleep, as with the thought,—soon to be in heaven, and that for ever and ever!”

“My Father’s house!” How many a departing spirit has been cheered and consoled by the sight of these glorious Mansions looming through the mists of the dark valley,—the tears of weeping friends rebuked by the gentle chiding—“If ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto my Father!” Death truly is but the entrance to this our Father’s house. We speak of the “shadow of death”—it is only the shadow which falls on the portico as we stand for a moment knocking at the longed-for gate—the next! a Father’s voice of welcome is heard—

“SON! THOU ART EVER WITH ME, AND ALL THAT I HAVE IS THINE.”

30th Day.

Another “word of promise” concerning the Church’s “blessed hope.” Orphaned pilgrims, dry your tears! Soon the Morning Hour will strike, and the sighs of a groaning and burdened creation be heard no more. Earth’s six thousand years of toil and sorrow are waning; the Millennial Sabbath is at hand. Jesus will soon be heard to repeat concerning all his sleeping saints, what He said of old regarding one of them: “I go to awake them out of sleep!” Your beloved Lord’s first coming was in humiliation and woe; His name was—the “Man of Sorrows;” He had to travel on, amid darkness and desertion, His blood-stained path; a chaplet of thorns was the only crown He bore. But soon He will come “the second time without a sin-offering unto salvation,” never again to leave His Church, but to receive those who followed Him in His cross, to be everlasting partakers with Him in His crown. He may seem to tarry. External nature, in her unvarying and undeviating sequences, gives no indication of His approach. Centuries have elapsed since He uttered the promise, and still He lingers; the everlasting hills wear no streak of approaching dawn; we seem to listen in vain for the noise of His chariot wheels. “But the Lord is not slack concerning His promise;” He gives you “this word” in addition to many others as a keepsake—a pledge and guarantee for the certainty of His return,—“I will come again.”

Who can conceive all the surpassing blessedness connected with that advent? The Elder Brother arrived to fetch the younger brethren home!—the true Joseph revealing Himself in unutterable tenderness to the brethren who were once estranged from Him—“receiving them unto himself”—not satisfied with apportioning a kingdom for them, but, as if all His own joy and bliss were intermingled with theirs, “Where I am,” says He, “there you must be also.” “Him that overcometh,” says He again, “will I grant to sit with Me on My Throne.”

Believer, can you now say with some of the holy transport of the apostle, “Whom having not seen, we love?” What must it be when you come to see Him “face to face,” and that for ever and ever! If you can tell of precious hours of communion in a sin-stricken, woe-worn world, with a treacherous heart, and an imperfect or divided love, what must it be when you come, in a sinless, sorrowless state, with purified and renewed affections, to see the King in His beauty! The letter of an absent brother, cheering and consolatory as it is, is a poor compensation for the joys of personal and visible communion. The absent Elder Brother on the Throne speaks to you now only by His Word and Spirit,—soon you shall be admitted to His immediate fellowship, seeing him “as He is”—He Himself unfolding the wondrous chart of His providence and grace—leading you about from fountain to fountain among the living waters, and with his own gentle hand wiping the last lingering tear-drop from your eye. Heaven an everlasting home with Jesus! “Where I am, there ye may be also.”—He has appended a cheering postscript to this word, on which He has “caused us to hope:”—

“HE WHICH TESTIFIETH THESE THINGS SAITH, SURELY I COME QUICKLY.”

31st Day.

Reader! put not off the solemn preparation. Be not deceived or deluded with the mocker’s presumptuous challenge, “Where is the promise of His coming?” See to it that the calls of an engrossing world without, do not foster this procrastinating spirit within. It may be now or never with thee. Put not off thy sowing time till harvest time. Leave nothing for a dying hour, but to die, and calmly to resign thy spirit into the hands of Jesus. Of all times, that is the least suitable to have the vessel plenished—to attend to the great business of life when life is ebbing—to trim the lamp when the oil is done and it is flickering in its socket—to begin to watch, when the summons is heard to leave the watch-tower to meet our God!

Were you never struck how often, amid the many gentle words of Jesus, the summons “to watch,” is over and over repeated, like a succession of alarum-bells breaking ever and anon, amid chimes of heavenly music, to rouse a sleeping Church and a slumbering world?

Let this last “word” of thy Lord’s send thee to thy knees with the question,—“Am I indeed a servant of Christ?” Have I fled to Him, and am I reposing in Him, as my only Saviour?—or am I still lingering, like Lot, when I should be escaping—sleeping, when I should be waking—neglecting and trifling, when “a long eternity is lying at my door?” He is my last and only refuge; neglect Him—all is lost!

Believer! thou who art standing on thy watch-tower, be more faithful than ever at thy post. Remember what is implied in watching. It is no dreamy state of inactive torpor: it is a holy jealousy over the heart—wakeful vigilance regarding sin—every avenue and loophole of the soul carefully guarded. Holy living is the best, the only, preparative for holy dying. “Persuade yourself,” says Rutherford, “the King is coming. Read His letter sent before Him, ‘Behold I come quickly;’ wait with the wearied night-watch for the breaking of the Eastern sky.”

Let these “Words of Jesus” we have now been meditating upon in this little volume, be as the Golden Bells of old, hung on the vestments of the officiating High Priest, emitting sweet sounds to His spiritual Israel—telling that the true High Priest is still living and pleading in “the Holiest of all;” and that soon He will come forth to pour His blessing on His waiting Church. We have been pleasingly employed in gathering up a few “crumbs” falling from “the Master’s table.” Soon we shall have, not the “Words” but the presence of Jesus—not the crumbs falling from His table, but everlasting fellowship with the Master Himself.

“AMEN, EVEN SO, COME LORD JESUS.”