John 17:2–3
As we have been considering the eternal life which we receive through our Lord Jesus Christ, we have seen that it is something that we cannot analyse too carefully or too closely. The danger is always that we stop short at certain points such as forgiveness and assurance without realizing that we are really called to share this life of God. Christianity, we reminded ourselves, in the terms of the definition of the Scotsman, Henry Scougal, is ‘The life of God in the soul of man’. So the object of all our endeavours, of all our worship, of our prayers and of our Bible reading, indeed, of everything we do, should be to experience what is expressed in that old hymn.
Breathe on me, Breath of God,
Fill me with life anew,
That I may love what Thou dost love,
And do what Thou wouldst do.
Edwin Hatch
and nothing less than that. And here we are reminded of this glorious objective towards which we should all be striving and which should be the supreme desire of our lives.
We have been looking at only one aspect of the radical manner in which eternal life manifests itself in our life and living, namely, the ways in which it affects our thought, our outlook and our attitude—the difference, if you like, that it makes to us in an intellectual sense. We must now go on to consider certain other manifestations of this glorious and wondrous life which God gives to us through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. He is sent from heaven to earth, to the cross and the grave, to the resurrection and the ascension, in order that he might give eternal life to those whom God has already given him. There is a sense in which the best way of looking at it is to say that those who have this eternal life begin to live the kind of life that the Lord Jesus Christ himself lived; that is perhaps the most accurate definition of it. We are meant to be living the kind of life that he lived, for, let us never forget, while he never ceased to be God, he became truly man as well. He is God and man, He is perfect man as well as perfect God, and what he says here is that he has come in order to give the type of life which he lived to those whom God has given him. So, then, as we come to examine the kind of life which we live, we who possess this eternal life, the best way of doing so is to look at the life of our Lord himself, and to see that the principles which characterized his life should be the very principles that animate and characterize our own.
Again, I have selected certain principles. The obvious one—and we touched on this in our last study—is that the man who has received the gift of eternal life knows God. It is not only that he knows things about God, it is not even that he believes certain things concerning God, it is beyond that, he knows God. You cannot read the gospels and their accounts of the life of our Lord without seeing that this was clearly the fundamental and the basic thing in his life here on earth as man. He knew God. He keeps on saying it—‘I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father: for so it seemed good in thy sight’ (Mt 11:25,26). He says, ‘Neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son. . .’ (Mt 11:27). God was not some stranger in the far distance; no, he knew him with an intimacy and frankness which enabled him always to come into his presence. He seemed to be longing to be there at all times. And all that is something which is offered to the Christian. He is meant to know God, by which I mean that God becomes real to him. God is not merely an intellectual concept to the man who has eternal life, he becomes an actuality and a reality. He really does know God and he knows what it is to realize the presence of God.
Now on the one hand this is a high and difficult subject and one about which people can often go astray; and yet on the other hand we must be very careful not to stop short of the fullness which the Scripture thus offers. There are two types of knowledge of God which we must always hold. There is, first of all, the knowledge of faith, the knowledge that is common to most people who are at all religious. It means a belief in God, a fulfilment of what the author of the epistle to the Hebrews says in chapter eleven, verse 6, ‘He that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.’ That is what I call the knowledge of faith.
But something beyond that is offered to the Christian. There is a kind of spiritual knowledge which is more direct and more immediate, and which you will find often described in the psalms, under the Old Testament dispensation, and also in the New Testament. You remember the knowledge of God that came to Moses when God put him in the cleft of the rock so that Moses could have a glimpse of him as be passed by. God revealed his glory to Moses and when he came down from the Mount his face was shining with the reflection of this divine glory. You find the apostle John having a similar experience on the Isle of Patmos. It is just as clear in the epistles; the apostle Paul knew what it was to be taken up into the third heaven, and there to experience things unseen and indescribable. He was a man, and yet he had that amazing experience.
And it is not merely confined to the people of whom we read in the Bible. It is something which has been experienced on innumerable occasions by those of God’s people who have realized the possibility of this, and have sought it as the most precious thing they could have in this life and in this world. One of the great Puritans, John Flavel, was taking a journey and suddenly, as he travelled along, God revealed himself to him. He did not have a vision, or see anything with the external eye, he just knew he was in the presence of the glory of God. He was so overwhelmed by it that he did not know how long he was there; he said that he ‘utterly lost sight and sense of the world and all the concerns thereof’. He was, as it were, just enjoying the presence of the glory of God.
Those who have read the autobiography of Jonathan Edwards will know that he had a similar experience of just finding himself in the presence of the glory of God. Again, there was no vision but just this sense, this consciousness, of the reality and nearness, and the holiness and the majesty, of the glory of God.
You can read of the same thing in the the life of D. L. Moody, Moody was actually walking along Wall Street, New York, of all the streets in the world, when, suddenly, he had a similar experience. God, as it were, revealed and manifested himself to him in an immediate way; he had believed in him before, he had been used by him, he was a great Christian man, but here was something new, this consciousness of the immediate presence of God, the glory of God. It was such a marvellous thing that he turned into an hotel, and asked for a room for himself. He wanted to be alone and the glory became so tremendous that he asked God to withhold his hand lest it might crush him—the surpassing glory of it all.1 I give these illustrations to impress the point that the possession of eternal life, which is life from God, leads to such a knowledge of God if we but realized it and cultivated it and developed it. And I do not hesitate to say that this is something which goes beyond the reaches of faith based upon knowledge. Genuine faith, established upon the full doctrine of the Bible, leads us to a knowledge of God which is more immediate and more direct, what the Puritans called a spiritual knowledge of God, over and above the knowledge of faith.
And that of course leads in turn to a fellowship with God. See this in 1 John 1. The old apostle realizes that he is coming to the end of his life, and as he writes to the young Christians in the churches, he tells them what he desires for them. It is that they might have fellowship with him, but, he says, not merely that they might have fellowship with him, because ‘truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ’. I want you to know that, says John. I want you to know that in spite of things that may happen to you in this world, you can be enjoying active fellowship with God. You are meant to be walking with God now, and you are never meant to feel that you are alone. You are meant to know for certain that God and Christ are with you, and that your life is to be a walk and a pilgrimage in the presence of God the Father and God the Son, by the Holy Spirit which is in you. That fellowship is meant to be unbroken. Should you fall into sin, you will break the fellowship, and you will be so conscious of sin that you will be aware you have been left alone. But, says John, I want to assure you that if you realize what you have done, and if you confess and acknowledge it, and go back to God, the blood of Jesus Christ is still efficacious. Your sin will be wiped out, you will be renewed, and you will continue in this holy walk in life in the presence of God.
Christian people, that is the thing to which we are called, that is the kind of life we are meant to be living. That is eternal life—to be walking with God, to be sharing his life, and to be having fellowship with him; not feeling that God is a stranger far away from us, whom we try to find when we are in trouble, but realizing that we are always with him, always in his presence, conscious of his presence, and walking together in fellowship with him in the light. That is the Christian life, to be always with God, not just during our special times of prayer. Our whole life is to be lived in the conscious presence of God.
And that, in turn, leads to the next thing, which is that knowing him in this way we come especially to know his life. When the apostle Paul prayed for the Ephesian church, he prayed that they might know the love of Christ, the height, the depth, the length, the breadth of that love ‘which passeth knowledge’, that they might join together with all the saints in knowing this. You know, my friends, I feel increasingly that this is our greatest lack; it is the greatest need of the modern church and the modern Christian. What we do not realize—and it accounts for most of our errors and deficiencies—is the amazing love of God. Oh, if we but knew this love! If we but knew and understood something of the whole mystery of the incarnation and the atonement, this astounding love of his towards the world, in spite of its sin! But the man who has eternal life begins to know and to realize this. It becomes attractive to him, and that is why he is able to smile at cruel foes. He can know and say with the apostle Paul that nothing can separate him from the love of God.
So, then, the man who has eternal life is the man who knows God, the man who enters into an increasing awareness of the character and nature of God. Here again I would ask a question: as we look back across our lives and review them, can we say that we are coming to an increasingly greater knowledge of God? Do we feel that we understand the whole nature of God more than we did before? Is God becoming more and more real, and are we increasingly aware of his astounding, amazing love?
Let us now come on to the second big principle, which is that having eternal life means that we not only know God in that way, but we begin to become increasingly aware of our relationship to God. This is something that the apostles emphasized without ceasing. The man who has eternal life, says Paul, is the man who has the spirit of adoption, who now really knows God as his Father, and I suppose it is in a sense the distinguishing feature of Christianity. The Jews of old believed in God in a general sense, in God as Creator, in God as the Maker of the world, but, surely, the special thing that our Lord introduced was this sure and certain knowledge and assurance of God as Father. ‘Ye have received,’ says Paul, ‘the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba Father’ (Rom 8:15). Now that is inevitable, of course, from all we have been saying; it is the inevitable outcome of our knowledge of God. We begin to realize the truth about ourselves in our relationship to God, and I know of nothing which will enable us to know more certainly whether or not we have received this gift of eternal life than our answer to a simple question: when we think of God and when we come into his presence, what is our thought, what is our idea of God? Do we realize and know for certain that he is our Father? When we say, ‘Our Father which art in heaven’ do we really mean that?
Our Lord described this in the Sermon on the Mount. He was anticipating there what was to be true of the Christian and he says, You should not worry about food and clothing, ‘for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things’ (Mt 6:32). We are coming to our Father, and as we come to him we should realize that he is our Father. Indeed, we should not only believe that, we should have a consciousness of it, the spirit of adoption which makes us cry, Abba Father—this intimate relationship. The Christian begins to realize that God is indeed his Father, that the hairs of his head are all numbered, and that his relationship to God is not something mechanical, it is experiential. That, of course, leads to a sense of dependence upon God, and the consciousness that, as time passes, we are in his hands. And that, further, means that we begin to look to him for strength, and for power, and for everything.
Oh, what fools we are! I make no apology for using such a phrase. How foolish we are as Christian people in failing to realize that in this relationship to God our every need can be supplied and our every want satisfied. The life that was lived by the Lord Jesus Christ here on earth, he himself tells us repeatedly, was a life that was lived in constant dependence upon his Father. He says, ‘The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works’ (Jn 14:10). But it is only as we realize this that we begin to understand why our Lord ever prayed. So many people cannot understand why the Son of God prayed while he was here on earth. The answer is that his life as a man was dependent upon God. He looked to God for the works he was to do and received power to perform them by receiving the Holy Spirit. He was constantly being filled with the Holy Spirit that was given to him without measure, and it was in this strength and power that he offered up himself. It was through the Spirit that he offered himself up to God, and he was ‘declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead’ (Rom 1:4).
This is surely one of the most staggering things that man can ever learn in this world, but it is an essential part of knowing God. And thus you find, as you read the lives of the saints throughout the ages, that they have always been people who have spent much of their time in prayer. They realized that they were supposed to live this life as Christ lived it in dependence upon God, so they did not rely upon their own strength and ability. They sought his mind and will, they sought the fullness of the Spirit, they sought the power which God alone could give and they drew from God and lived their life of victory and triumph.
But I want to emphasize another suggestive aspect of this great life, which is that the man who has eternal life not only knows God and his relationship to him, he delights in God, and his supreme desire is to know God better. Here again I take you back to the psalms. Do you remember what David felt like when he came again to the house of God? He tells us, ‘As the hart panteth after the water brooks so . . . my soul thirsteth for God, for the living God’ (Ps 42:1–2). Now that inevitably happens if we possess eternal life; like always attracts like. The characteristic of love is that it desires to be in the presence of the object of its love, and the receiving of eternal life leads to that attitude with respect to God. And thus you find, as you read your Scriptures about these holy men of God and as you read the lives of all the saints, that their greatest desire was to know God better. They were always seeking his presence, and an ever greater realization of it. It was this that led them to examine themselves every day and to discover how they lived. It was this which made that saintly man John Fletcher ask himself a series of questions when he went to bed every night. These questions were all destined to establish this point: had he been walking with God as he should have been? Had this walk been neglected in his life? Had there been any break in the fellowship? Had sin come in and spoilt and tarnished it? This is something that is universally true of all the saints, whatever the century, whatever the nation to which they belong; they have set before them, above everything else, a realization of the presence of God, and they have done so because they have delighted in him. To spend time in reading the Bible and in meditation is no burden to those who have eternal life. They delight in it, it is their greatest joy, because knowing God as they know him, they enjoy him. The first question of the shorter Catechism is: ‘What is the chief end of man?’ The answer is, ‘The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever.’ And you cannot read the Bible honestly without seeing that those who are described in the Old Testament knew and enjoyed God and enjoyed living their life with him. Our Lord’s chief delight was to be talking to his Father, to be communing with him. He enjoyed God and we are meant to enjoy God. Oh, God should not be a taskmaster to the man who has eternal life, to the man who is a true Christian! God should be the supreme object of his joy and his delight and of his pleasure.
My friends, if we but knew God in his holy, loving, character, if we but knew his love, we would want to spend our whole life in his presence and with him. That is the thing to which these men were looking forward. ‘That I may know him,’ says Paul; he is forgetting the things that are behind and he is looking forward to this unmixed enjoyment of God in heaven. That is the reality of heaven, to be basking in the love and glory of God. The man who receives eternal life begins to awaken to these things. I do not want to discourage anybody. I am describing this life in its fullness, but I am obviously suggesting, as I do so, that if we are utter strangers to this and know nothing about it, even in the most elementary form, then it is time we asked ourselves whether we have received eternal life. Am I a Christian at all? Do I know anything about these things? Have I ever had a passing second in my life in which I have known something of God and realized his presence and known something of his astounding love? The man who has this life is the man who loves God. You see, God does not stop at asking us to believe in him. ‘The first and great commandment,’ says our Lord, is, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God. . .’ Faith is insufficient, we are meant to go on to love God and to love him with the whole of our being.
But obviously I must come to the next principle, which is that the man who has eternal life loves to do the will of God. That is the logical sequence. The man who loves is the man who is anxious to please the object of his love. There is no better test of love than that, and unless you desire to please someone whom you claim to love, then I assure you, you do not love that person. Love always wants to be pleasing and to give itself, and anyone who loves God wants to do the will of God. If you look at Christ, you see that the whole of his life, his one object, was to do the will of his Father. He did not care what it was; even in the Garden of Gethsemane when he faced the one thing he did not want, even there he said, ‘Nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done’ (Lk 22:42). He says, I do not want to drink this cup, but if it is doing thy will, I will do even that—that is love at its maximum and its best, and it is true of all who have his life. The chief end of the true Christian is the glory of God, therefore he spends his time in seeking to know the will of God and in doing it. He strives to do it and he loves to do it. He is controlled by this one idea. Having learnt what God has done for him and what God is to him, having realized something of this love of God, he says, ‘Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.’ And man, therefore, who has eternal life, has this as the supreme object and desire of his life, to do the will of God.
And this brings me to my last word. The ultimate manifestation of the possession of eternal life is that it produces certain results in our lives. Fortunately for us they have all been set out in a very brief compass by the apostle Paul in Galatians 5, verses 22 and 23, where he talks of the fruit of the Spirit. A man once said a very profound thing when he described these verses as ‘The shortest biography of Christ that has ever been written.’ He was absolutely right. That is the perfect description of the life of the Lord Jesus Christ; those were its characteristics—‘love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith [or faithfulness], meekness, temperance’, and anyone who has received this gift of eternal life from him is one who in turn begins to manifest that sort of life; that is the kind of person he becomes. ‘The kingdom of God,’ says Paul to the Romans, ‘is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost’ (Rom 14:17). ‘The carnal mind is enmity against God’ (Rom 8:7); ‘to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace’ (Rom 8:6). So that as we examine ourselves at this moment, we must again ask ourselves this vital question: can Christ fulfill in me the object of his coming and dying? He says he has done it all to give eternal life. Have I received eternal life? And a very good way of testing it is to ask further: is the fruit of the Spirit manifesting itself in me? Because Christ is the eternal life and the Spirit produces its fruit in us.
Do you know this life of God in your own life? Have you this joy in the Holy Ghost, something that makes you independent of circumstances? Do you know a great peace in your heart, peace within, peace with other people, something that, whatever happens, leaves you unruffled. Are you longsuffering? He was longsuffering when he suffered the contradiction of sinners against himself. Are we gentle; are we good; are we patient with people or do we lose our tempers with them? Are we constantly manifesting our irritability and touchiness, or do we manifest longsuffering, gentleness and goodness, faithfulness, meekness, humility and temperance—or self-control? Is there a discipline in our lives? There is a control and balance in living the life of Christ. See these things and remember that he offered them to us. And I put these questions not only that we may know these things here and now, but that we may enjoy them. We can receive the gift of eternal life in this life and in this world, but if we die without receiving it, we cannot possibly enjoy the life of God in eternity. This is but a preparation, it is a foretaste. We are not given the full possession of the great estate, but we are given the seal, the earnest, the title deeds, so that I know I am going to get it all, because of what I receive now. And if I have not received the title deeds and the earnest of the inheritance here, it just means that I will never receive the full inheritance there.
Have you received eternal life, my friends? The most momentous challenge you have ever faced is the Lord Jesus Christ who died on the cross and who rose again to give you this gift. Do you find something of this life in you? If you do, well pledge yourself from this moment to live for it, to receive more of it, that it may grow and develop. But if you feel you have never received this life, hasten away quietly somewhere into the presence of God and tell him you see clearly that you have never had it; acknowledge and confess your sin to him, and give up relying upon yourself and your own goodness.
This is the test of a Christian, not to be better than anybody else, not to be a church member, not simply to hold certain views, nor to pride yourself in some strict morality. No, this is the test of Christianity and nothing less, and if you realize that you do not have it, confess it to God, confess all your self-righteousness, acknowledge it all. Cast yourself upon God’s offer of salvation freely in Christ who has died for you, and ask him to give you this gift of eternal life, this gift of life divine which is life indeed. And once you have it, you will begin to manifest these things and you will begin to live for God and his glory and to enjoy him. Religion will no longer be a task, it will be your chiefest delight. I end as I began, and ask you to pray:
Breathe on me, Breath of God,
Fill me with life anew,
That I may love what Thou dost love,
And do what Thou would’st do.
1 For a fuller treatment of these experiences, readers might be interested to read M. Lloyd-Jones, Joy Unspeakable (Kingsway, 1984).