Gooding, David: 7 - Highway to Holiness

We come back now to the Gospel of John and chapter fourteen to study verses four onwards, in which verses our Lord explains to us how we can know God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, making their abode with us in our hearts. Now our Lord must have been a supremely wonderful teacher, and there is evidence of it in this very chapter in front of our eyes, because we find that the lessons being difficult, the disciples were not afraid to interrupt every now and again and tell him straight, look, I don't understand what you're saying. And they, incidentally, must have been very good students. The worst of students is one who, not understanding what the man says, just sits there and says nothing, and says to himself underneath, well, I- I'd like to ask a question about that, but people will think I'm stupid if I say I don't know and ask a question. So we pretend we do know, of course, when all the time we don't really understand. And that is a harmful thing, really, when we do that, particularly with the phrases and technical terms that the New Testament uses on any matter, but on this matter in particular. What does it mean that Christ dwells in me? So we find, if you notice, that in verse five Thomas gets up on his hind legs and says, but Lord, we don't know. And then in verse eight Philip has a go, and he says, Lord, well, now I, that, that sounds to me a sensible idea. If you'd only do that, that would be all right. And then Judas says in verse twenty two that he's been scratching his head this last many minutes and saying, but how on earth can this happen like this, what you say? So we too, perhaps, could get into the same frame of mind. We have got to be really down to earth and challenge the phrases and ask ourselves what they mean, and if we don't understand them. Well, not particularly ask your present lecturer, but, uh, take those phrases to Christ as these men took them to Christ. But you'll have to do it in prayer, won't you? And ask him exactly what he meant when he said these things. The Lord had been talking to them, as we saw in our last session, about his providing for them a dwelling place in the Father's home. He had been promising that one day he would come again and take them to this Father's home. But now he was going to talk about something slightly different. And so he says, whither I go, you know the way. And I imagine in my simplicity that I can see a twinkle in his eye and a pause in his speech. He's looking in Thomas's direction. You know, don't you, Thomas? Well, now, Lord, he said, actually, I don't, to be honest. To start with, I haven't got the faintest clue where you're going, so how on earth would I know the way there if I don't know where it is you're going? Where are you going? Well, now that's a point. Where was he going? And what is the way there? Going to the Father's house? If the Lord put the question to you, would you know the way there? What is the way to the Father's house? Where is heaven? Take off from Port Stewart, go a thousand light years in the direction of the constellation Orion, turn to the left and you'll find a door with an otus heaven. Where is the way to the Father's house? All the learners come back at me and they say, no, but that's a puerile conception. There is a home for little children above the bright blue sky. Heaven isn't a place, it's a condition. Oh. But then our Lord said he came from heaven, and that he must go back to the Father. And if he must go back to the Father, there was a sense in which he was not present with the Father. I must confess that the words he uses seem to suggest to me a locality as well as a state. But if I should try and tell you where that locality is, how could I begin? I might borrow words from the mathematicians and say, well, now it isn't a place like so many light years up there. It's a kind of a place to which you would travel by going through different dimensions. That our world that we know is a four-dimensional world. Though I daren't try and remember which the four are. There's something about height and breadth and time and space or something. And they say, couldn't there be a five-dimensional world or a six? But obviously, if our Lord had started to talk to us in such like terms to explain where heaven is, he would by definition have had to talk of things that we cannot possibly understand in the present state of our finite mind. So very wisely, he didn't try. And when he left us to go back to his father's house, what he did do was to stage a token, in that he left them and went up into the clouds and disappeared, to give them the physical idea of ascending, going somewhere bigger and better and vaster and holier. And with that he left it, a token to indicate that going to the father's house will involve some kind of travel through some kind of medium. But when he said to Thomas, where do I go, you know, don't you? And Thomas said, no, I haven't got the faintest clue. Where are you going, and what is the way there? Then our Lord rephrased himself, and he said, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes unto the Father but by me, but said simply, no one comes to the Father except by me. You say, is there a difference then? Well, of course there is. I might come to your house, but find you out, the door open. I might even come and find the door open and a beautiful dinner on the table, and fall to it like Goldilocks when she found the porridge. But that would be altogether a different thing from finding you at home and coming to you. So it is obviously not a question merely of taking people to heaven. That wouldn't be good enough, to the Father's house. You have to do the far more profound thing, you have to bring them to the Father. How will you do that? That obviously is not merely a matter of travel, is it? You could come, or I could come and sit right alongside you so that we touched each other, and yet in heart I could be miles from you. That is the unfortunate fact that in some families on Earth, people sit at the same table, sit on the same sofa, and at heart they are millions of miles away. Such places are not home, are they? It's just a house with people in. If we are to be holy, it's not merely a question of coming to the Father's house, but a coming to the Father. How do I really come to the Father so that his heart and mine are one? Listen, this is the way to that. I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes unto the Father but by me. And we shall find that the rest of the chapter is, so to speak, an explanation of that basic verse. I am the way to the Father. I am the truth about the Father. I am the life by which you come to the Father. And so we begin in verse six now and onwards. I am the way to the Father, Thomas, because if you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From henceforth you know him and have seen him. That is the sense in which I am the way to the Father. Because he that has seen me, you see. Uh, you've seen the Father, haven't you? Well, now, said Philip, I was thinking, Lord, just as you said that, uh, um, wouldn't that be a good idea? That would, that would make it easy for us all to understand, and it would settle it all for once. Go on, Lord, show us the Father right here and now, and that would be enough. Yes, I suppose we've been tempted to feel like that, haven't we? That coming to the Father is seeing him, somehow physically. Uh, yes? Or I wonder that if you saw God in his essence, whether it might terrify you out of your wits, and you'd get nowhere near him. We need a way to the Father, don't we? To get to his heart, through all his glory, right to his heart. Says Christ, I am that way, Philip. Don't you realize, Philip, have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know me, Philip? He that has seen me has seen the Father. What do you mean? Well, look, says Christ, how do you think, Philip? Now you work it out, old boy. How do you think I do my works? You've seen me do these my- mighty miracles and signs, don't you? How do you think I do them? Oh, well, he hadn't thought. How, well, how do you do them? Well, he says, believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? The words that I say unto you, I speak not from myself, but the Father abiding in me doeth his works. That's how I do them, Peter, Peter and Thomas and Judas. That's how I do them. They don't start from me. For now, notice our Lord is conscious of two persons, I and the Father. I speak the words, he says, and yet it's the Father that originates them, and the Father does them through me, for the Father is abiding in me, Thomas. You say, show me the Father. Ah, for Thomas and Philip, they were thinking of a God way off in a heaven, and one day perhaps they would go to heaven and they would see him. He's a long way off at the moment. They discovered that evening that the Father was sitting the other side of the table in the person of Jesus. And for a while, heaven was down on earth, wasn't it? The Father in me, said Christ, dwelling in me and doing his works through me. I am the way to the Father. And thus he indicates that he is the way to the Father in two respects. He is the way to the Father because the Father dwelling in him shows himself to us through Christ. And we find out what God is like. And thus we come to love him. But he is the way to the Father because his experience is meant to be a pattern for our experience. If you believe on me, the same kind of thing happens to you. You shall do greater works even than I do, because I am going to the Father, and I shall send my Holy Spirit, and just as the Father dwells in me, I shall by my spirit come to dwell in you. And again, it won't obliterate your personality, but it will be not that you originate things, but that I originate things. It is God that works in you, says Paul to his converts. You work out your own salvation in your practical daily life, because it is God that works in you, both the willing and the doing. He is the way to the Father in that he shows us how we as believers may have in our proportion that experience of the Father dwelling in us, working his works through us. But then he said, I am the truth. No man cometh unto the Father but by me. And from verse fifteen onwards, he begins to amplify that statement, for he says, I will give you another comforter that he may be with you forever, even the spirit of truth. I am the truth, you see. No one comes to the Father but by me. And so that you might come right to the Father, I'm going to give you the spirit of truth that he might be in you. Why do I need the spirit of truth in order to come to the Father? Well, that is because, basically, my ideas of the Father have been perverted through sin and through Satan's slandering. Sin has made me guilty, and therefore I sense God in my unconverted days as a kind of a threat. I don't want to get too near God. And even as a believer, my mind has been warped in some part by Satan's slanderings, and still I am in danger of being tempted when life goes difficult. There you are, Satan whispers, there you are, you talk about the love of God, you know, but God, if he like, could have done better for you than this. How are you going to say that God loves you now? I remember a friend of mine telling me about a friend of his, and that friend of his was asked at one stage to conduct, uh, uh, Sunday school classes in a home for unwanted children in the city of Glasgow. And I heard all sorts of stories about the children and their broken back families and backgrounds, terrible stories, and how this Christian man and his helpers used to go along to tell them about the love of God in Christ. One incident sticks in my mind. This man went along one day to the home run by the state authorities, opened the door of the reception center and went in, and there was a nurse with a little boy, boy about seven or eight. And this little laddie, as soon as he saw this man come in, started to yell and to cry and to shout like nothing on earth. He had to go out. The nurse eventually pacified the child, and the good Christian man went in. And the nurse said, let me explain to you what's happening here. And she stripped the little laddie, and all down his body were burn marks. And the little laddie said in his Scotch tongue, he says, Sir, me feather he eye burns me. My father always burns me. He used to come home drunk, did that father, and beat the child with a red hot poker, and the marks were all down his body. You imagine what kind of a concept the word father would evoke in that child's mind. And in some sense, Satan has perverted all our concepts of what God is like. Even when we are believers and we know ourselves saved, let a bit of trouble come, and we find an almost natural instinct, don't we, at least I do, to question why? Why did God have to allow me? And surely I don't deserve this. We haven't quite come as near yet to the Father's heart as we could, have we? And what do you think the use of being in heaven would be if we couldn't trust God through thick and thin? Sin. How shall, how shall we be brought to the Father? To know the truth about the Father, that whatever happens, his love is genuine and true. Well, it won't merely be reading by vers- verses in the Bible that he loves us, though that will help enormously. It'll have to be deeper than that, won't it? We shall need something to get inside under all our complexes and our little neurotic systems and hang-ups and goodness knows what else, our inferiority complexes and the basic sin of our being, that is distrust of God. He says, our our Lord, now I am the way to the Father because I am the truth. And I'm going away, I'm not going to speak to you words merely, I'm going away and I'm going to send the Spirit of truth that he might be in you. In underneath all those difficulties and coming up and through them. And so says Paul in his epistle to the Romans in chapter five, he says, the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit, which is given to us, he pours out the love of God into our hearts, making real in our experience the love of God that loved us even while we were yet sinners, and guarantees to it that come hell and high weather, nothing shall separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus. When the Holy Spirit thus does his work, it is marvelous to see what he can do with a human personality. Take Paul, you'll say he was a saint and apostle. Yes, perhaps he was, but he served Christ to his limit, suffered enormously, and yet that man had been brought so close to the Father's heart and knew God that after all he had served and sacrificed, you could pitch him into the Mediterranean and leave him there a night and a day in the deep, climming- clinging for dear life to a broken spar or a board. And Paul would say, hmm, yeah, well, this is going too far, you know, I mean to say that's all right, but I never did deserve this. No, no, no, no, no, no. He could say a tribulation? Yes, old chap. Well, it's like being delivered over to slaughter every day of the week, isn't it? As it is written, there's nothing to be wondered at, innit? We're like sheep taken for the slaughter, but I'm persuaded of this, that nothing present nor eternal, pleasing or unpleasant, can separate me from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord. And finally, our Lord says, I am the life, no man comes unto the Father but by me. What did he mean by that? This was the question that worried Judas, not the Iscariot one, because he had, um, already gone out. Lord, he said, what has happened? That thou will manifest yourself to the world, uh, to us and not to the world. What exactly are you talking about? For our Lord had said this, I will not leave you comfortless. I will come to you. I will manifest myself to you. For the wonder about Christianity is that it is not just a system of ethics. It concerns itself with a living Lord, a living person. It is not that Christ has gone away, having given us an example merely, and his word full of instructions. He is still a living Christ and wants to maintain living contact. Because I live, you shall live also. And because he is a living savior, from time to time he manifests himself to us, though not to the world. And this was what Judas couldn't understand. He said, I don't get this bit. I mean, if you're going to manifest yourself to us, well, how is it that the world don't see it, Lord? He said. I don't get this business. What are you talking about? Well, let's use a few illustrations to help our see- ourselves see what the Lord is talking about. I could, uh, take you into a room, a beautiful art gallery, perhaps, or perhaps to a concert hall. And along with you, I will bring my dog, and I'll get somebody to play a beautiful orchestral work, and I shall see a lot in it, and I hope you will see a lot in it, and I hope together we shall see things in it that the composer intended us to see, and we shall be enraptured. Oh, marvelous, and I like that bit. And the dog? But he's there, he can see the violins are going, and he hear the noise, but he doesn't see anything in it except something to sit and howl at. It's being manifest, what this, uh, composer is trying to say to us, and we're seeing it, the dog isn't seeing it. On some occasions, nowadays more than it used to be, you may find yourself in a room where there's a starry-eyed couple, and by the looks of it, they're newly engaged, and she's seeing something in him that for, for the life of you, you can't see. You say to yourself, whatever she sees in him, but she sees it, and presumably it's there because she sees it and she's enjoying it marvelously. Oh, but you say that's love, you know. I mean, there's a relationship there, you see. You don't have the relationship and all those secrets and all those wonderful things they share together, you see. It gives every little detail of life a meaning, and every now and again they're looking at each other and smiling on goodness knows what they're seeing or talking about, but this relationship, yes. And you can be reading the same words out of Holy Scripture, and the unconverted man thinks it's as dull as ditchwater. He can't see for the life of him anything in it, and you see in it. And suddenly a verse rises out of Holy Scripture. Oh, you never saw it like that before. You, you've read it thousands of times, but oh, what it means, and you go in the strength of it from some days. Do you know what's happening? The Lord is manifesting himself to you. And as you love me and keep my commandments, says Christ, my Father will love you. It sets up a practical relation, doesn't it? And I say something and you do it to please me, and you feel the joy of pleasing me, and I feel the joy of being pleased in you, and I and my Father come and make there our abode with you. A living relationship between persons as the divine persons go on to manifest themselves to us. We get some examples of what that means in the ministry of our Lord after his resurrection and before he went home to heaven. In the last chapter of this gospel, John says that at the Sea of Galilee, our Lord manifested himself to his disciples again, another time, for he had earlier manifested himself too. And his manifestations of himself to his people in those days give us some idea of what he means when he talks about manifesting himself to us. We shall not see him visibly as they saw him, but we shall feel his impact on our spirit. There were two re- talking about biblical theology on the road to a mass, and a stranger drew near, and they were so puzzled, and he said, you are fools, aren't you? Haven't you seen Leviticus three and Numbers twenty four and, uh, uh, Jeremiah this and Isaiah something else? Oh, oh, oh, oh no, oh, fancy that. Oh, well, they'd not seen it like that before. And before long, their hearts were all leaping and burning. What was happening? The Lord was revealing himself to them in his word. Mary stood brokenhearted at a tomb, and a man she thought was the gardener began to speak. This time it wasn't a biblical address or an exposition of a prophet, but the making real to her of the reality of her relationship. I ascend to my Father and your Father, my God and your God, an everlasting, imperishable relationship with the very God of heaven. The Lord appeared. And Simon and company were out fishing in a boat one day, and the going had been hard as they worked. And a stranger stood on the shore and said, let the net down that side. And when they had let it down and brought it to land, it was full. How had it happened? Suddenly John saw it, what it was, and he nudged old Peter. Peter, he said, it's the Lord. And happy those servants of the Lord who, in their daily chores, now and again sense, as things happen more than coincidence could possibly explain, who senses in his spirit, ah, that was the Lord there. For he is a risen Lord, and it is this personal contact with Christ dwelling in our hearts and now and again revealing himself to us that lies at the very heart of our ongoing sanctification. As Christ put it, the way to make God a dwelling place in your heart, the way to the Father, I am the way, Thomas. I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh to the Father but by me.