^ God cannot, will not, does not, bless those who are living in
disoljedience. But only set out in the path of obedience, and at
; once, before one stone is laid upon another, God is eager, as it
; were, to pour out His blessing. " From this day will I bless you." ^
4. But do we not need the Spirit to make us obedient ; do we not long for the Spirit's power, just because we mourn so much the disobedience there still is, and desire to be otherwise ? And yet Christ claims obedience as the condition of the Father's giving and our receiving the Spirit. The answer is that Christ Jesus had come to prepare the way for the Spirit's coming. Or rather. His outward coming in the flesh was the preparation for His inward coming in the Spirit to fulfil the promise of a Divine indwelling. The outward coming appealed to the soul, with its mind and feeling, and affected these. It was only as Christ in His outward coming was accepted, as He was loved and obeyed, that the inward and more intimate revelation would be given.
' Personal attachment to Jesus, the personal acceptance of Him as Lord and Master to love and obey, was the disciples' preparation
' for the baptism of the Spirit.
^ It is as we prove our love to Jesus in a tender listening to the voice of conscience, and a faithful effort to keep His commands, that the heart will be prepared for the fulness of the Spirit. Our attainments may fall short of our aims, we may have to mourn
* Hitdson Taylor's Sayings, 48.
ST. JOHN XIV. 15-17 133
that what we would we do not — if the Master sees the whole- hearted surrender to His will, and the faithful obedience to what we already have of the leadings of His Spirit, we may be sure that the full gift will not be withheld.^
ii. Prayer. "And I will pray the Father."
1. There are two telephones across the abyss that separates the ascended Christ from us. One of them is contained in His words, " If ye shall ask anything in my name, I will do it " ; the | other is contained in these words, " If ye keep my commandments,
I will ask." Love on this side of the great cleft sets love on the other side of it in motion in a twofold fashion. If we ask, He does ; if we do, He asks. His action is the answer to our prayers - and His prayers are the answer to our obedient action. '
2. " I will ask " seems a strange drop from the lofty claims with which we have become familiar in the earlier verses of this chapter. " Believe in God, believe also in me " ; " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father"; "If ye shall ask anything in my name I will do it " ; " Keep my commandments." All these distinctly express, or necessarily imply. Divine nature, prero- gatives, and authority. But here the voice that spake the perfect revelation of God, and gave utterance authoritatively to the perfect law of life, softens and lowers its tones in petition ; and Jesus Christ joins the ranks of the suppliants. Now common sense tells us that apparently diverse views lying so close together in one continuous stream of speech cannot have seemed to the utterer of them to be contradictory ; and there is no explanation which does justice to these two sides of Christ's consciousness — the one all Divine and authoritative and lofty, and the other all lowly and identifying Himself with petitioners and suppliants everywhere — except the belief that He is " God manifest in the flesh." The bare humanistic view which emphasizes such utter- ances as these does not know what to do with the other ones, and cannot manage to unite these two images into a stereoscopic solid. That is reserved for the faith which believes in the Man- hood and in the Deity of our Lord and Saviour.
^ A. Murray, T/te Spirit of Christ, 72.
134 THE GIVING OF THE COMFORTER
^ In all utterances of Jesus Christ which express the lowest humiliation and completest identification of Himself with humanity, there is ever present some touch of obscured glory, some all but suppressed flash of brightness which will not be wholly concealed. Note two things in this great utterance ; one, Christ's quiet assumption that all through the ages, and to-day, nineteen centuries after He died, He knows, at the moment of their being done, His servants' deeds, " Keep my command- ments, and, knowing that you keep them, I will then and there pray for you." He claims in the lowly words an altogether supernatural, abnormal, Divine cognizance of all the acts of men down the ages and across the gulf between earth and heaven.^
3. Christ's prayer is the expression of the eternal Will re- specting those for whom He prays. There is no thought of the Son for man that is not the thought of the Father. There is no dissonance of feeling, no discordance of desire, no conflict of will. The promise that Christ will pray is the assurance that the thing He asks for will be given. It is the utterance of that which is in the heart of God.