IN THE WORDS OF JESUS–Part 1209

ON LOVE; PART DCCXCVIII

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GoodWill IS Love in Action

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FIRST IS THE GREAT COMMANDMENTS: “The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:29-31).

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WHAT THEN IS LOVE? In a general sense love is benevolence, good will; that disposition of heart which inclines men to think favorably of their fellow men, and to do them good. In a theological sense, it includes supreme love to God, and universal good will to men. While this IS from an older definition of Charity, which IS rendered in the King James Bible from the same Greek word agape which IS generally rendered as Love, we should amend our own definition here to include the idea that in the reality of Love a man will accord to ALL men ALL things that he would accord to himself and to say that Love IS our thoughts and attitude of the equality of ALL men regardless of their outward nature or appearance…that ALL ARE equally children of Our One God

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PLUS THE EVER IMPORTANT AND HIGH IDEAL TAUGHT TO US BY THE CHRIST: “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them” (Matthew 7:12)

In the last essay we cited some of the more spiritually oriented ideas concerning the reality of the Master’s words that we see as telling us clearly that we must keep His words in as our part in that reciprocal interaction of attaining His Presence in our Life. For us this IS ever clear but this idea IS generally muddied by the doctrinal ideas that teach that this Presence, this grace, IS the “free gift” of God to the man who believes in Him as Lord and confesses Him as such. While none can detract from Jesus’ words here regarding ““He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them“, there IS the tendency to put this idea of obedience onto the apostles or, as John Gill sees this: Christ does not begin to love his people when they begin to love, and obey him; their love and obedience to him, spring from his love to them; which love of his towards them was from everlasting: but this phrase signs a clearer discovery of his love to them, which passeth knowledge; and some fresh mark and token of his affection for them ⁸. The Master of course has NO such dividing line as He tells us that is IS by keeping His words that we have His Presence and that the show of a man’s Love for Him is tied to this same reality which we read most clearly in His words saying “If ye love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15). It IS in the reality of the reciprocal action, the natural action of the spiritual upon the carnal, that we should see these ideas: that when we keep His words with intent and with a Repentant heart, we then have His Presence in our Life, a Presence that we must see as the revelations of Truth and the realization by the consciousness in the world of that Truth.

As the doctrinal view of these ideas remains nebulous and IS varied among the many denominations and sects of Christianity, the reality that keeping His words IS the key to His Presence IS NOT seen clearly by most and this we can see in the stark differences between the ideas of Alexander Maclaren and John Darby from the last essay against the ideas on this Presence from John Gill as we have often discussed. In the simplicity of “If ye love me, keep my commandments“, the former two see obedience to His Will as the Will of the Father while John Gill sees this more loosely which we read as: keep my commandments: Christ is Lord over his people, as he is the Creator and Redeemer of them, and as he is an head and husband to them, and as such he has a right to issue out his commands, and enjoin a regard unto them; and these are peculiarly “his”, as distinct from, though not in opposition to, or to the exclusion of, his Father’s commands; such as the new commandment of loving one another, and the ordinances of baptism, and the Lord’s supper, which are to be observed and kept as Christ has ordered them, constantly, in faith, and with a view to his glory ⁸. Here we should see the basic dilution of the Master’s words that IS the way of most doctrines, and we should understand that this latter approach IS in the mainstream of the Christian movement as opposed to the reality and the Truth of His Life, His teaching and His example. Mr. Maclaren offers us many words on how it IS that we should show that we Love God and among them ARE these ideas on this fifteenth verse:

They contain the all-sufficient law of Christian conduct. They contain the one motive adequate to bring that law into realisation. They disclose the very roots of Christian morality, and part of the secret of Christ’s unique power and influence amongst men. They come with a message of encouragement to all souls despairing of being able to do that which they would, and of freedom to all men burdened with a crowd of minute and external regulations. ‘If ye love Me, keep My commandments’-there are three points to be dwelt upon here-namely, the all-sufficient ideal or guide of life, the all-powerful motive which Christ brings to bear, and the all-subduing gaze of faith by which that motive is brought into action….Jesus Christ is not speaking merely to that little handful of men in the upper chamber, but to all generations and to all lands, to the end of time and round the world. The authoritative tone which He assumes here is very noteworthy. He speaks as Jehovah spoke from Sinai, and quotes the very words of the old law when He speaks of ‘keeping My commandments.’ There are distinctly involved in this quite incidental utterance of Christ’s two startling things-one the assumption of His right to impose His will upon every human being, and the other His assumption that His will contains the all-sufficient directory for human conduct….What, then, are His commandments? Those which He spoke are plain and simple; and people who wish to pick holes in the greatness of Christ’s work in the world tell us that you can match almost all His precepts up and down amongst moralists and philosophers, and they crow very loud if, scratching amongst Rabbinical dust-heaps, they find something that looks like anything that He once said. Be it so! What does that matter? Christ’s ‘commandments’ are Christ Himself. This is the originality and uniqueness of Christ as a moral Teacher, that He says, not ‘Do this, that, and the other thing,’ but ‘Copy Me.’ ‘Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart.’ His commandments are Himself; and the sum of them all is this-a character perfectly self-oblivious, and wholly penetrated and saturated with joyful, filial submission to the Father, and uttermost and entire giving Himself away to His brethren. That is Christ’s commandment which He bids us keep, and His law is to be found in His life ¹².

In the stark difference between these approaches lies the difference between the reality of His words and the doctrinal approach to them and while Mr. Maclaren’s ideas come to us through the prism of his own sense of doctrine, his reality IS so much more meaningful than ARE the generally accepted ideas of the “free gift” of His grace, His Presence, in the Life of the man who simply believes that He IS Lord. And there IS yet a deeper idea to be considered here, the idea and the reality that Love IS the Way that we keep His commandments, Love for ALL men as we see in the Great Commandments that we have again at the top of our essay IS our KEY to the promise of His Presence which we read again in His words saying:

“He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him. Judas saith unto him, not Iscariot, Lord, how is it that thou wilt manifest thyself unto us, and not unto the world? Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him. He that loveth me not keepeth not my sayings: and the word which ye hear is not mine, but the Father’s which sent me” (John 14:21-24).

And Mr. Maclaren also addresses, from the perspective of this same group of sayings in the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel of John, our own view so to speak of the doctrinal rut that IS found in the misunderstanding of the Apostle Paul’s words on the law and how that to follow the law as such IS NOT the way to the Kingdom of God nor to His grace. It IS in the reality of the apostle’s words that we find the deeper ideas that lead a man to keep His commandments, that the impetus to DO so comes to a man from His own Soul, His own Christ Within, as the prompting to the Good, the Beautiful and the True, the prompting to leave off keeping the world and the things of the world as one’s focus and to see the Truth found in one’s focus upon the things of God. Mr. Maclaren tells us: there is no obedience worth calling so which is not the child of love; and all the multitude of right things which Christians do without that motive are made short work of by that consideration. Obedience which is formal, mechanical, matter-of-course, without the presence in it of a loving submission of the will; obedience which is reluctant, calculated, forced upon us by dread, imitated from others-all that is nothing; and Jesus Christ does not count it as obedience at all. This is a sieve with very small meshes, and there will be a great deal of rubbish left in it after the shaking. ‘If ye love Me, keep My commandments.’ The ‘keeping of My commandments’ which has not ‘love to Me’ underlying it is no keeping at all ¹².

It IS with this in mind that we should understand the closing part of the Master’s own words above where, after He has divulged to His apostles the reality of keeping His words as the quid pro quo to having His Presence, His grace, which IS the revelations and the realizations of Truth that come to a man in the reality of his own unction, his own anointing, he reiterates the same from the negative view saying: “He that loveth me not keepeth not my sayings“. In these few words we should see the reality of Mr. Maclaren’s point that the man who IS ‘keeping of My commandments’ which has not ‘love to Me’ underlying it is no keeping at all ¹². And we should note here as well that there should be no confusion regarding the idea of His commandments and His words as Jesus continues to remind them, and us through them, that there IS NO division between the words of the Master and the commandments of God; that these ARE the same because “the word which ye hear is not mine, but the Father’s which sent me“. And we should remember here that ALL things spiritual come upon a man by degree and in such a way as each becomes a part of the other; that IS, that we keep His words in response to the prompting to do so that emerges in our consciousness from Him through our own sense of the God and Christ Within. It IS this prompting that is faintly heard amid the clamor of daily living; this IS the prompting of the consciousness to heed the Truth and to see the difference between “the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error” (1 John 4:6) as we read in the Apostle John’s Epistle. The “spirit of error” IS found in the clamor of daily Life, in the wranglings of the personality in this world of men, while the “spirit of truth” IS the very Spirit of God which the Master shows us saying of God that “he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you” (John 14:16-18).

In this idea of comfort that the Master seeks to bestow upon the Eleven we should see the reality of the Trinity of God albeit NOT in the way that is perceived by most. In the sayings above we find that it IS to the man who keeps His words that “we will come unto him, and make our abode with him” and that it IS in this sense of we that we see the Unity of the Father and the Son, the Spirit and the Soul, and of the God and the Christ Within. It IS here that we should see that their realized Presence in the Life of a man IS the Presence of the Spirit of Truth and IS the Presence of the Holy Spirit….it IS this Presence that IS our comfort as we come to KNOW the Truth which sets us free from the “from the bondage of corruption”, the Truth which lifts us “into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). This IS our ultimate reality: to have the fullness of the realization of the Presence of God in one’s Life. And this IS intimately tied to our keeping His words in Love and expressing the essence of His teachings to the world of men. In the idea that having brings us more, the reality of our spiritual success IS the great Truth; there IS little else where we can point with certainty to this idea that when we have some grace in our lives as His Presence, we act upon than Presence as our expression and by this we bring into our lives more of this Presence in an upward spiral that reaches into the Kingdom of God and leads us to our own Redemption….our own perfection.

We did NOT get back to our next selection from the Gospel of John in this post and we will try to get back to this in the next essay. As we close however we should note again the intimate relationships of the fourteenth and the fifteenth chapters and understand that these words we leave with below ARE Jesus admonishment to His apostles that they must continue, that they must grow in their own sense of keeping His words, as it IS only in this way that they can grow their own measure of His Presence in their individual lives.

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit. Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned. If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you. Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be my disciples. As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love. If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love. These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full. This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you” (John 15:1-12).

We will continue with our thoughts in the next post.

Note on the Quote of the Day

This daily blog also has a Quote of the Day which may not be in any way related to the essay. Many of these will be from the Bible and some just prayers or meditations that may have an influence on you and are in line with the subject matter of this blog. As the quote will change daily and will not store with the post, it is repeated in this section with the book reference and comment.

Repeating a Quote of the Day from the past that has some significance in relation to what we are discussing here, that the Kingdom of God and therefore God is within us ALL and that it IS His Presence which a man realizes by measure as he begins his journey to the Kingdom of God. Here Lord Tennyson poetically tells us just how close God Truly IS and how it is that we touch Him

Speak to Him, thou, for He hears,
and Spirit with Spirit can meet
Closer is He than breathing,
and nearer than hands and feet.

(Alfred, Lord Tennyson 1809–1892)

From the poem The Higher Pantheism which puts forth the authors spiritual belief. Whether we agree with him or not, the quote if spiritually perfect for all of Christianity as well as any other world religion.

The thought behind the idea above IS NOT unlike that which we have been carrying as our Quote of the Day for many essays; It IS in the closeness that Lord Tennyson shows us that we should see the idea that “God dwells in the inner part of every man” which we read in the previous Quote of the Day. For us this saying and the previous one show us the closeness of the spiritual self to the Father and then too the closeness of the spiritual self with the personality of man. Men may like to think of God as something outside and above but the reality, as we have seen in so many of the sayings of the Master, is that God is with us and in us and we need only to let ourselves be drawn and to focus upon Him. And, if we can use these words from the Gospel of Thomas here we can perhaps see much: “When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize that you are the children of the living Father“

Let the peace of God rule in your hearts

• ⁸ Bible commentaries on BibleStudyTools.com
• ¹² Expositions of Holy Scripture by Alexander Maclaren–(1826-1910); from http://biblehub.com/commentaries/maclaren