When I Go Away
One Study on the Lord's Provision in John 14
by David Gooding
Would it not have been better if the Lord Jesus had remained with his disciples after his resurrection? David Gooding answers this question by explaining that Christ had to go, so that the Holy Spirit could come and live in us. The Lord is now preparing a place for us, so that we can go and live with him eternally. He is the only way to the Father: 'I am the way, the truth and the life', he said. Grasping the meaning of these spiritual truths will help us to appreciate our present blessings and our future hope.
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When I Go Away
Our Provision for Holiness
Reading: John 14
‘Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms 1. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. And you know the way to where I am going.’ Thomas said to him, ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.’ Philip said to him, ‘Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, “Show us the Father”? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else believe on account of the works themselves. Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me for anything in my name, I will do it. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.’ Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, ‘Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?’ Jesus answered him, ‘If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me. These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. You heard me say to you, “I am going away, and I will come to you.” If you loved me, you would have rejoiced, because I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I. And now I have told you before it takes place, so that when it does take place you may believe. I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming. He has no claim on me, but I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father. Rise, let us go from here.’
May the Lord himself draw near and teach us.
I want to speak this afternoon, addressing myself particularly to my fellow young Christians, on that provision which our Lord Jesus made for us by going away. There are, among others, two provisions which our Lord has made for us: the one by his dying on the cross; the other by his going back to heaven.
Now all of us are very familiar with the provision he has made by dying on the cross, which is able to bring us forgiveness of sins and peace with God through his blood. We revel in that, and find in it the strong motive to serve and please him. But, good as it is, in Christian life we shall find that gratitude to the Lord for our salvation isn’t strong enough to keep us living a holy life that is pleasing to him. It is perhaps a lesson we learn somewhat slowly. When we are first saved, and in those times when the memory of his death comes clearly upon us, we feel such gratitude that we say to ourselves we would willingly die for the Lord and give him our all—‘Were the whole realm of nature mine, | that were a present far too small’2 But so often we know very well that the gratitude escapes when life’s temptations and monotonies are too much for us. We are left bewailing, ‘Oh wretched man that I am. When I want to do right, evil lies close at hand’ (see Rom 7:21).
How was it good for the Lord to go away?
It will be an enormous help to us in our spiritual life if we learn early on that gratitude to the Lord for having saved our souls—while it is exceedingly good, and may lead us to wash his feet with our tears and wipe them with the hair of our head (see Luke 7:36–50)—isn’t by itself enough to lead us into holy living. It is for this reason that our Lord made the other great provision for us, by going away. ‘It is expedient,’ he said to the puzzled disciples, ‘that I go away’. For the life of them, they couldn’t see the point. ‘How is it good’, they said to themselves, ‘that he should go? While he is with us, he is such a tremendous power beside us; such a big influence to keep us in the ways of God. We go to him in our fears and in our perplexity: how can it possibly be good for him to go away?’ But then he himself explained, ‘Unless I go away, the Holy Spirit won’t come’ (see John 16:7).
By going away, he was going to make it possible for himself to come and live not beside them, but in them. Though it is a very blessed thing to have the Lord beside you, it is an exceedingly more blessed thing to have the Lord within you. You might call this the one major half of Christianity: Christ not merely for me at the cross, but Christ in me throughout life.
What does it mean, ‘Christ in me’?
Then somebody says, ‘What do you really mean? Bring it down to brass tacks. I know it sounds nice in the Bible, in theological texts and hymns, “Christ in me”—but what do you actually mean? Do you mean that at some time Christ comes literally inside me?’
Says someone else, ‘Do you really mean that here in this room, sitting on this seat, I have our Lord Jesus Christ inside me? What do you mean, in me?’
Well, that has puzzled more than us. It is distinctly encouraging to find that it puzzled the early disciples. It was so new and novel they didn’t know whether to believe their ears, take it literally, or what to make of it. In their puzzlement, they broke in on our Lord’s conversation and plied him with questions.
I like those disciples for that. You know, there are some teachers and they are so terribly severe that, even if you don’t understand what they mean, you dare not ask them, for fear they might bite your head off. Our Lord wasn’t one of those teachers. And as he proceeded, I think I can see him pause a little bit every now and again with a curious look in his eyes, to see whether it had sunk in; and, knowing all the while it hadn’t yet sunk in, give the disciples their chance to ask him again. I like those disciples for being brave.
You know, there are some students, and they don’t really understand what the teacher is saying. They would like to ask a question and find out a bit more, but they wouldn’t like their friends to know that they don’t understand, and for everybody to think they are terribly silly. ‘Fancy him not knowing that!’ And so they pretend to understand; but of course the examinations prove that they never did.
But somehow in our Lord’s presence people lost their fear. It would be well for us this afternoon if we could lose ours, admit our ignorance and tell the Lord that we don’t know— and, what’s more, that we don’t understand, and ask him again: ‘Lord, what do you mean by living in me?’
‘I’m going—let not your hearts be troubled,’ said the Lord. Never was there a more contradictory putting together of words than this. ‘Peter,’ he said, ‘the cock will not crow till you have denied me three times—let not your heart be troubled!’ (John 13:38; 14:1). On the one hand he was announcing to Peter his greatest fall. Then in the very next breath he was saying, ‘And let not your heart be troubled, Peter.’
He was telling us two things. There is enough in our hearts to cause any single one of us, however exalted we may be, to fall grievously and unexpectedly. But he knows our tendency to fall, and has something else to tell us that will steady our hearts, take away fear and dread, and assure us that in the end he has a way of making us perfectly holy.
‘What is holiness?’ you say. ‘Does it consist of not going there, and not doing this, and toeing all the lines of the rules?’
Well, that’s not first and foremost. True holiness is a love for the Lord; following after a person. Says our Lord to Peter and the others, ‘Let not your hearts be troubled. I’m going away to prepare a place for you, so that I can come again and receive you to myself, and where I am there you may be also. I am going to arrange it, that one of these days you’ll be where I am’ (see John 14:1–3). That is the secret of holiness and the secret of heaven: we shall be where Christ is. My brothers and sisters, if you love the Lord you are well on the way to holiness.
Christ—The Way to the Father
‘Let not your hearts be troubled,’ he said. ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions, and I go to prepare a place for you’ (see John 14:2). Notice that it is not to prepare you for the place. He did that when he died on the cross. ‘I go,’ he said, ‘to prepare a place for you’—one of those many places.
I was talking yesterday to the learned astronomer, Dr Lindsay, of your observatory. He was telling me of a conversation he had with a Christian not so long ago.
‘Dr Lindsay, do you believe there’s life in other worlds?’
‘Yes, I do, most certainly,’ replied Dr Lindsay.
‘But that’s not anywhere in the Bible,’ said his friend.
‘Isn’t it?’, he replied. ‘But doesn’t your Bible say, “In my Father’s house there are many mansions, and I go to prepare one of them for you”? What do you think all the others are for? Are they ‘to let’, or something? No, no. This is a vast world, and God’s word tells us that inhabiting his Father’s house, in some of those mansions, there are vast things: thrones, dominions, rulers and authorities’ (Col 1:16).
He has gone to prepare a home in those lofty places for humble you and me. Oh, what a glorious thing! Before then, he is going to prepare us to live in them, and our Lord went on to explain it. ‘I’m going, and you know the way to where I am going, don’t you?’ (see John 14:4). I fancy there was a pause as he said that, for he knew right well that they didn’t know. He waited for them to be frank and honest enough to tell him they didn’t know, and presently Thomas blurted it out.
‘Excuse me, Lord. I don’t even know where you’re going, so how on earth can I know the way there? What is the way?’
Our Lord replied, ‘Thomas, I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’ (see John 14:5–6).
Did you notice that when he replied, he gently changed the wording a bit? First of all, he was talking about the Father’s house. He’s coming again to take us to the Father’s house, and that will be wonderful. But now he starts talking about taking us to the Father. There’s a difference, isn’t there?
Sometimes on my holidays I take a journey, and go around and view one of the stately homes. It’s a pleasant way of spending an afternoon, and you can enjoy all the furniture and paintings without having to pay any rates and taxes to keep it up, or anything of the sort. But, you know, there’s a difference between going to a stately house, and going to the lord and lady of that house. I’ve been through many a stately home, and I haven’t even set eyes on any lord and lady. And they’ve never once asked me to tea, told me anything about themselves, made friends with me, nor given me the chance of making friends with them. I know them no more now than before I went.
Going to heaven will be wonderful; but there’s something exceedingly more wonderful than going to heaven, and that is going to the Father himself. It will be wonderful, walking around on golden streets, but you could soon get used to that. I don’t know, to be honest, whether in the end it will be any more wonderful than running around on tarmac. The wonder of heaven is the people you’ll meet there.
Jesus said, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’ How can I come near to the Father? How do I get to know the Father and make friends with him?
‘Of course,’ said our Lord, continuing the conversation with Thomas, ‘if you had known me, you would have known the Father, anyway. In fact, from now on, you do know him and have seen him’ (see John 14:7).
I fancy there was a pause again in the conversation, while Philip made up his mind to confess his ignorance. ‘I’m sorry, Lord,’ he said, ‘but I was thinking just now, if only you’d show us the Father, that would settle it and be enough. That’s all we ask for. It would be wonderful to see the Father; don’t let’s wait until we get to heaven’ (see John 14:8).
‘But Philip,’ said our Lord, ‘have I been so long time with you, and you haven’t known me? Don’t you realize, Philip, that whoever has seen me has seen the Father? If you don’t believe what I say, believe the works. You’ve seen my works. You’ve seen me raise the dead; you’ve seen me cure the leper; you’ve seen me give sight to the blind—tell me, how do you think I do those works? The words that I say to you, I do not speak on my own authority; but the Father who dwells in me does his works’ (see John 14:9–10).
The Father himself is living in Christ
There must have come a hush over that room, don’t you think, as for perhaps the first time some of those near him caught a glimpse of what this really meant? At the table in that humble Upper Room sat the Father himself, incarnate in the person of Christ. There was a magnificent temple down the road, offering the best adornment. The music was glorious, the intoning of the psalms was fascinating, but that temple was but a garden shed in comparison with what was now before them. There was something far more glorious in that human, that divine personality, Jesus of Nazareth, who sat with them at the table. God was in him; the Father was in him.
We note with great interest that our Lord was conscious of his own personality—‘The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority’. At the same time, he was conscious that their origin was not from himself—‘but the Father who dwells in me does his works’ (John 14:10). How exciting: they hadn’t to wait now until they got up to one of those many mansions to meet the Father. Christ is the way, not only to heaven; Christ is the way to the Father. He shows us how to come near to God.
So near, so very near to God, I cannot nearer be; For in the person of His Son I am as near as He.3
The Father was not next to him; the Father was in him, just as the Shekinah Glory of God had dwelt in the tabernacle and in the temple of old. I say, it shone much around that Upper Room! It made the ordinary tablecloth glow white, the humdrum knives and forks like sacred vessels in the ministry of God’s service.
The Lord himself is living in us
‘I am the way to the Father’, he said. ‘But, that’s not all. What’s true of me, I’m also going to make possible for you. There’s coming a day when it will dawn on you, and you will know it, that I am in the Father, the Father is in me, and I am in you’ (see John 14:20).
Isn’t it a lovely thought, to stand by your office desk, your bay in the factory or your kitchen sink, and feel you are working for the Lord. It’s an even more profound thing to know as you stand there that the Lord is working in you. But this is Christianity: no task is too humble to be performed if the Lord himself lives in us. Why is that? It is much more than mere gratitude driving us to try and live for the Lord’s glory; it’s because the Lord himself is living in us. It does not mean that our personalities are obliterated; we can still say meaningfully I and myself. But we ought to be increasingly able to say: ‘It’s not I, but Christ, who lives in me’ (see Gal 2:20).
Christ—The Truth about the Father
‘I am the way,’ he said, ‘no one comes to the Father except through me.’ But then he said more: ‘I am the truth, no one comes to the Father except through me.’ You see, there’s need not only of a way to come: if ever we’re going to come right near to the Father, we shall need to know the truth. How so?
Well, we know it from ordinary daily life. Here is Mr Jones, and here is Mr Brown, and they’re sitting right next to each other. They had to anyway, because there were no other seats left when they came in. If they could have done, Mr Jones would have sat rather a long way from Mr Brown, but as it was, Mr Brown and Mr Jones had to sit next to each other. So near they’re touching, but in heart they’re millions of miles off. Why is that? Oh, well, because Mr Jones has heard that Mr Brown has been saying a lot of things behind his back, and suspicions and enmities and jealousies and hatreds and slights and misunderstandings have come in. You can’t see them, but they’ve put Mr Brown and Mr Jones miles apart.
We can know the Father and trust him completely
Coming to the Father doesn’t mean merely sitting beside him; it means knowing the Father intimately as a friend, and coming to trust him.
But even so, there are barriers between us, aren’t there? If we have trusted the Saviour the barrier of the guilt of sin is gone, and we’re not afraid now to come to God. We know there’s no condemnation and we shall never be thrown out. But in most of us there are still deep-seated misunderstandings and misconceptions of God. We may never know they’re there until life’s troubles hit us—sudden bereavement, unexpected loss, long-continued trial. And then watch whether our hearts don’t begin to say ‘why has God allowed this?’ and ‘can I still believe that all his promises are true?’ In those days and nights when we find it very hard to give thanks to the Lord in everything, we realize that there’s still something wrong with us. You see, my brothers and sisters, if we got home to heaven and those misunderstandings of God weren’t already banished forever, heaven would cease to be heaven and its sunshine would become over-clouded with suspicions and questions.
I can imagine, perhaps, Princess Margaret going off one of these days to the liberated concentration camps of Europe, and her heart being taken with great compassion for the folk there.
‘Look,’ she says, ‘in my sister’s house in England there are many suites. I’ll go and prepare a place for you, and come back again and receive you, so that where I am and where she is, there you may be also.’
And so one of the suites in Buckingham Palace is all fitted out, and these refugees are brought in and placed in this glorious apartment. But maybe, when they begin to learn about the etiquette of the palace, some of their brows knit a bit and their faces look troubled. They say to themselves, ‘This is too good to be true; there’s a trap here. Does the Queen of England care for us, really? Is it likely that she would give us such enormous wealth and comfort? No, there’s something wrong here.’
You see, these folks would find it difficult to trust the Queen in everything she does because their only conception of a ruler is some terrible tyrant, of whom they had previously lived in fear and suspicion day in and day out. For many, what they had worked for all their lives had been taken away in a moment, leaving them desolate and afraid. So it will be difficult for them to believe that the Queen, or anyone in authority, can be trusted and has only their best interests at heart.
Wrong ideas about God
It happens like that with some of us where God is concerned. Our experiences in life can wrongly shape our view of God.
Think of a little toddler whose father is a brute of a man who comes reeling home drunk every Friday night, smashing the furniture about and beating his wife and child. Within that toddler is a deep-seated fear of his father. Coming right near to God the Father is going to be difficult for that little fellow. Father is a concept from which he will run away. If you tell him that God is a father, whatever is the child going to think? He’s never known what it is to nuzzle up against a loving father who spells security for him, so something is missing in his own psychological development. It will take some time for God’s Holy Spirit to undo those impressions.
Then there is a young woman. Maybe it was because she was the only girl in the family, she was spoiled and never allowed to think she had done anything wrong. She ruled the home, and when she grew up she became just a little bit difficult. The world seemed a terrible place, where there were thousands of other girls careering around, all wanting attention. Well, bless her, that’s decidedly awkward. Her concept of God, maybe, is of someone who just exists at her beck and call. Until that idea gets straightened out, life is going to be difficult.
We can all have misconceptions about God. Just look at how we react to the stresses of daily life. If you stand on my toe, you’ll find out what I think of God; ask me for too much money to fix the Volkswagen and you’ll find out what I think of God. Every time you see me standing on my personal dignity and demanding my pound of flesh, you’ll find out that I haven’t yet learned that there’s a mighty, infinite God in heaven who’s looking after my interests. And because I don’t really believe that he’s looking after them, I feel I’m obliged to look after them myself.
The Spirit of truth will dispel those wrong ideas
How shall we ever come near him? How shall all these knots be untied, and our image cleared so that we know God as he really is? ‘I am the truth,’ says Christ, ‘the truth about God, the truth about you. No one comes to the Father except through me, and for that reason I’m going to ask the Father to send you the Spirit of truth, so that he may be in you. Working deep down underneath all of the wrong impressions; down there in the depths of your personality, as well as in its conscious heights’ (see John 14:16). He will make God known, dispel the wrong ideas, chase away the bitter thoughts and free us from our infantile immaturities, until we come near the Father in perfect understanding. That’s why heaven is going to be heaven. We shall see then no longer through a mirror dimly, but we shall see face to face (1 Cor 13:12). We shall see God face to face, and we shall see each other too. As the old hymn puts it, ‘We shall know each other better, | when the mists have rolled away.’ 4
Christ—The Life which we share with the Father
‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life,’ he said. ‘No one comes to the Father except through me—I am the life, by which you’ll come to the Father.’
In the end, coming to a person will demand that we have the same love. I like dogs, as you do too. We get as near to the dog as we can, by various means and methods: you stroke him around the ear, you give him a bone, you get as near as you can. It’s limited, though, isn’t it? There are so many things about us that dogs don’t understand, and there are more than a few things about dogs that we don’t understand either. It’s because they don’t have the life as we have.
To know God, you’ve got to have life; not just physical life (that Christ as creator maintains for all), but life at the highest level—spiritual life. Our Lord told his disciples that, though he was going away and leaving them physically, he would not leave them as orphans. He would maintain them at the spiritual level by continuing to share his life with them, and from time to time he would manifest himself to them, but not to the world (John 14:18–19).
The Lord manifesting himself to his own
It was at that point that a difficulty arose for Judas (not Judas Iscariot; he’d gone out).
‘I was thinking there, Lord, and I’m a bit puzzled by what you said about this business of your manifesting yourself to us, and not to the world. I don’t get this. What exactly has happened that you’ll manifest yourself to us and not to the world?’
That is a point, isn’t it? What does it really mean that the Lord manifests himself to us and not to the world?
‘Well,’ said our Lord, ‘you see, it’s this matter of life and love. If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him’ (see John 14:23). ‘We’ll come and make our abode with you while you are still treading this earth,’ he says; and he uses the same word that he used earlier in describing to the disciples the Father’s house in heaven and the place he was going away to prepare for them there (see John 14:2–3). You can’t really have a person living in the house with you without knowing it, can you? The Lord will manifest himself to those with whom he has a relationship.
We see a similar thing happen in our interactions with other people, don’t we? Think of a group of people all sitting around the same table. One gentleman sitting there smiles at his wife who is sitting across the table, as he pulls a stone out of his pocket for her and the others to see. While a knowing glance goes between the two of them, to the other guests it means nothing. To the gentleman and his wife, it means everything. When that stone was picked up on a beach somewhere in northern Norway, a really funny thing happened that the two of them will never forget. It’s something they share, and they’ve only to show the stone to one another, and the whole thing comes alive. It’s something they have got between them that the others haven’t. And there are many common, ordinary, daily things of life in which our Lord is prepared to manifest himself to those with whom he has a relationship.
When we recognize that it is the Lord
Take a normal thing like fishing, for instance. At one stage, Peter and some of the other disciples made their living by fishing. After the Lord’s resurrection, Peter and John, along with one or two others, went out one morning to fish. They’d got to live, so they went fishing. Well, fishing’s all right, but it can be a rather clammy, cold sort of job. This particular morning it was different. Having fished all night, they had caught nothing. As they were returning to the shore, a man they did not immediately recognize told them to cast their net on the right-hand side of the boat to make a catch. When they did so, they were not able to draw in the net because of the multitude of fish, which may have evoked in them a memory of a few years earlier when, at Jesus’ instruction, they had had another miraculous catch of fish (see Luke 5:4–11). They knew then who was standing on the shore, and John said to Peter, ‘It is the Lord!’ He had manifested himself to them there (see John 21:1–14).
Have you ever known that? On some ordinary mundane occasion the Lord has shown himself to you, and you say, ‘Certainly, that’s the Lord.’ He waits to make himself known. ‘I am the life’, he says, and he’s given us the life that we can share with him, and to understand his secrets. That life shall not perish or decay with the passing of years. Spiritual experience will alter our psychology, maybe, but it isn’t dependent on our brains or our physical bodies, though God uses our minds and our bodies for his purpose. This knowledge of God goes deeper than that.
Fear of losing our relationship with the Lord
Most of us have stood by the bed of an elderly Christian friend or loved one. In their younger days they were bright, but you watched as the mind grew dim. Perhaps you’ve asked yourself: ‘Those years of serious Christian living and discipline of character, have they all been in vain?’ Nature has taken over, and childish pettiness, fights and selfishness have asserted themselves once more. My brothers and sisters, the character that Christ builds in us uses mind, body and emotions as the material for its exercise, and the lessons learned will remain engraved upon the spirit until the end.
Just this sort of fear may well have come over Mary Magdalene in the hours after our Lord’s crucifixion. How dreadful the thought was to her: Christ was gone; death had come in and severed her from the power that had once cleaned her character. But she learned that the life that is the secret to true holiness is a deeper thing than death. ‘I am ascending’, he said, ‘to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’ (John 20:17). The relationship would continue.
The Father and the Son will make their home in us
To return to Judas’s question, ‘Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him”’ (John 14:23). ‘If you love me, it will not merely be a matter of waiting to go to heaven; my Father and I will come and set up our abode in the rickety garret of your personality.’
You say, ‘Does it work, or is this merely a beautiful theory of the theologians that will break down at the washtub on Monday mornings?’ None of us can say, perhaps, that we have proved all its potential; but earth has seen one demonstration that has proved forever that it works. Christ left the Upper Room and climbed down the stone stairs outside that eastern house into the dark of Jerusalem’s night—a night loaded with envy, bitterness and malice. He faced the very jaws of death, a horrible death, and he walked there alone to meet the prince of this world and all the forms of rage and fury he could put on to bludgeon a man’s spirit and sour his soul.
The peace that the Son knew, he gives to us
Even as he rose from the table, he said, ‘Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you’ (John 14:27). Peace? Ah, that inner peace of knowing that the Father was with him and in him; the conscious peace of a man who knew he had all the resources for everything that would come. The Father was in him, and the prince of this world had not so much as a finger-grip on him. It works, my fellow believer. Here was a man, who beneath his groans and tears was at peace, and being at peace he was strong. And being strong, he overcame the horror and overcame its prince.
He was leaving that peace to us. Not as an attainment, which we frantically and feverishly try to grasp, but as a gift, the reality of which we shall increasingly enjoy as we come to realize what it is that Christ has done and is doing for us, and what he means by living in us.
1 The ESV translates this Greek word as ‘rooms’. Dr Gooding used the terms, ‘mansions’, or ‘abode’, and we will use these in this transcript.
2 Isaac Watts (1674-1748), ‘When I survey the wondrous cross’ (1707).
3 Horatius Bonar (1808-1889), ‘A mind at perfect peace with God’.
4 Annie Barker (1844-1932), ‘When the mists have rolled away’ (1883).