3401. Sharing Christ’s Life

A Sermon Published On Thursday, April 9, 1914.

Yet a little while, and the world sees me no more; but you see me; because I live, you shall live also. {Joh 14:19}

For other sermons on this text:

   {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 968, “Life in Christ” 959}

   {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 2953, “Spiritual Sight and Eternal Life” 2954}

   {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 3401, “Sharing Christ’s Life” 3403}

   {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 3443, “Seeing Jesus” 3445}

   Exposition on Joh 14:1-20 {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 3510, “Fainting Soul Revived, The” 3512 @@ "Exposition"}

   Exposition on Joh 14:1-21 {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 2672, “Neither Forsaken nor Forgotten” 2673 @@ "Exposition"}

   Exposition on Joh 14:15-31 {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 2895, “Blessed Gospel Chain, A” 2896 @@ "Exposition"}

   Exposition on Joh 14:15-31 {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 2953, “Spiritual Sight and Eternal Life” 2954 @@ "Exposition"}

   Exposition on Joh 14:15-31 {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 3272, “How to Become Full of Joy” 3274 @@ "Exposition"}

   Exposition on Joh 14 {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 2515, “Something Worth Seeking” 2516 @@ "Exposition"}

   Exposition on Joh 14 {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 3076, “Cause and Effect of Heart Trouble, The” 3077 @@ "Exposition"}

   Exposition on Joh 14 {See Spurgeon_Sermons No. 3307, “Over the Mountains” 3309 @@ "Exposition"}

1. This was, and is, the sign of the true believer, that he sees Jesus. When Jesus was here among men, the world saw him in a certain sense, but yet in truth it did not see him at all. The world’s eye saw the outside of Christ — the flesh of the man Christ, but the ungodly eye could not discern the true Christ. They could not perceive those wonderful attributes of character, those delightful graces and charms, which made up the true spiritual Christ. They only saw the husk, and not the kernel; they saw the quartz of the golden nugget, but not the pure gold which that quartz contained. They only saw the external man; they could not see the real, spiritual Christ. But to as many as God had chosen, Christ revealed himself as he did not do to the world. There were some to whom he said, “The world does not see me, but you see me.” There were some whose eyes were anointed with the heavenly eyesalve, so that they saw in “the man Christ Jesus,” the God, the glorious Saviour, the King of kings, the Wonderful, the Counsellor, the mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.

2. The blind world said of him that he was a root out of a dry ground, and when they saw him there was no beauty in him that they should desire him; he was despised and rejected by men. But these men saw him as God over all blessed for ever, descending to live among men, and to take upon himself man’s imperfect nature, so that he might redeem him from all iniquity and save him.

3. Now, to this hour, this is the mark of the true Christian: this is to be of the elect: this is the very badge and symbol of the faithful — they see Jesus. They look beyond the clouds. Other men see the cloud and the darkness, and they do not know what it is; but these men with more than eagle eye pierce through the clouds of mere sensual impressions, and they see the glory that was always his, even the glory of the Only Begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. Beloved, have you ever seen Jesus with the eye of faith? Have you ever perceived the glory of his person, and the beauty of his character? Have you so perceived Jesus as to trust in him? Have you been so enamoured by him as to have yielded yourselves to be his servants for ever? Do you take up his cross? Do you affirm yourselves to be his followers, come what may? If so, then you are saved; but if you do not see Christ with your spirit, neither do you know him, nor shall you enjoy a portion with him.

4. Blessed be God, there is this to be said, that he who has once seen Christ shall always see him. The eye may sometimes be clouded, but the light shall yet return. Where Christ has opened a blind eye, blindness does not come back again. He takes the cataract totally away. He does not give a transient gleam of spiritual sight, and then permit the soul to go back into the darkness of its grave; but the sight which he gives is the sight of eternal things, a sight which shall strengthen and grow until at the last, when death shall take away every barrier which separates us from the unseen world, we shall know even as we are known, and see even as we are seen. To see Jesus! it is heaven begun! And heaven consummated is only to see Jesus, no longer through a mirror dimly, but face to face — still it is to see Jesus, to behold the King in his beauty. This, I say, is the sum and substance of eternal life, and it is true life here below.

5. And now our Lord, speaking to those who had seen him, seen him truly and in spiritual recognition, talks to them concerning life. Sometimes it is ours to speak to you of death, not necessarily with gloom, for it is for the Christian illuminated with rays of heavenly light; but here and now we desire to speak of life, the best and most divine life; we will forget the raven with its dusky wing, and see only the tender, gentle dove, bearing for each one of us the olive branch of peace and victory.

6. We shall speak of life — life of the highest possible degree: not the life which gladdens our eyes in the sunlight when we behold the flowers of the field opening their cups: this is vegetable life. Nor the life of the young lambs as they frisk, and caper, and dance for very gladness in the spring sunbeams. This is only animal life. Nor even the life that enables men to think and speak on common themes of interest, and perform the ordinary duties of their different callings: this is only mental and social life. We reach to something still higher — spiritual life, life in Christ Jesus; a life twice created; a life which is grafted, and is an advance on the first life which we have when we are born, surpassing by far the life of the flesh, because that shall eventually expire; but this is a life which springs from incorruptible seed, and which lives and remains for ever.

7. The text, in talking to us about life, gives us, first, the assurance that Jesus lives; it then promises us that his people shall live; and it clearly states that there is a connecting link between the two things — that because Jesus lives, his people shall live also.

8. I. First, then: — JESUS LIVES.

9. He always lived. There never was a time when he was not. “Before the hills were created I was there,” he says. The eternal Wisdom of God is from everlasting. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with God. The same was in the beginning with God.” The life, however, which we think is intended in the text, is not his divine life, his life as Deity, but his life as man, his life as Mediator between God and man. In that life he lives. We did not need to be assured of his divine life: but since, as a Mediator he died, it was necessary to assure us that as a Mediator he descended into the tomb; it is good for us to be assured that as a Mediator he rose again from his grave, and now lives at the right hand of the Father, no more to bleed and die.

10. Jesus Christ at this time lives in his proper manhood. He lives concerning his soul: his human soul is as it was on earth. He lives concerning his human body. He is a man before the throne; and I have no doubt that he wears the symbol, of course, mightily glorified, of his sufferings.

   Looks like a Lamb that had been slain.

   And wears his priesthood still.

11. That very Christ, who once lay on his mother’s breast as a babe, and who afterwards trod the waves of Gennesaret: who, after his resurrection, ate a piece of broiled fish and of honeycomb — that very Christ is now before the eternal throne. In very soul and body the man Christ Jesus is there. He lives.

12. He lives a real life. We are so very apt to mystify and becloud everything, and to suppose that Christ lives by his influence only, or lives by his Spirit. Brethren, he lives, the very man who died, as surely as he bled on the tree, and in his own proper person, from five actual wounds poured out the warm life-torrents of his heart, so surely does he actually live at this present moment in the midst of unnumbered hearts that sound his praise — the delightful object of the vision of the myriads of spirits who continually adore him. He actually lives; he really and truly lives, as he lived here below.

13. He lives, also, actively — not in some wondrous sleep of quiet and sacred repose. He is as busy now as he was when here. He proposed to himself a certain work when he went away. “I go to prepare a place for you,” he said. He is still preparing that place for us. He intercedes, also, daily for his people. Oh! if your faith is strong enough, even now you can see him distinctly standing before the throne of God, pleading his glorious merits. I think I see him now as clearly as ever the Jews saw Aaron when he stood with his breast-plate on before the mercy seat, for, remember, the Jew never did see Aaron at all there, for the curtain was dropped, and Aaron was within the veil, and, therefore, the Jew could only see him in his imagination. But I say I see him as clearly as that, for I see my Lord, not by imagination, but by faith. There, where the veil is torn, so that he is not hidden from my soul’s gaze. I see him with my name and yours on his breast, pleading before God.

14. Why, just gaze for a while and you may think you see him now. Just as the Jew saw Aaron, waving the censer, standing between the living and the dead, and stopping the plague, even so is Christ standing at this hour between the living and the dead, and so moving the whole Deity to spare the guilty yet a little longer, while he makes intercession for them so that they may live. And then comes his higher intercession for his elect, of whom he says, “I pray for them; I do not pray for the world.” He lives, then, an actual life, of which you and I reap the daily fruits. Not a life of slumber and stillness, but an active, busy life, by which he continually dispenses gifts to us.

15. For this reason it is good to remind you, that, therefore, Jesus can only live as a man in one place. When we speak of Christ being found in every assembly of his people, we understand that of his presence in his Godhead and by his Holy Spirit, who rules on earth in this age of the Spirit. But the man Christ can only be in one place, and he is now at the right hand of the Majesty on high. It is absurd, it is horrible, both to faith and to reason, to say that Christ’s body is eaten, and that his blood is drunk in tens of thousands of places wherever priests choose to offer what they call “the mass.” A “mass” of profanity, indeed, it is! Our Lord Jesus Christ, concerning his real, positive, corporeal presence, is not here. As for his flesh and his blood, he is not, and cannot be, here. He will be here one day, when he shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the trump of the archangel and the voice of God, but in his real person, he is now where his saints are — before the throne, from where eventually he will descend. Meanwhile, his spiritual presence is our joy and our gladness, but his corporeal presence — a doctrine which our faith grasps and lays hold of — his corporeal presence is before the throne of God, and there he lives in proper flesh and blood as the Son of man.

16. Brothers and sisters, listen to a brief sketch of the biography of Christ’s life in glory. When the holy women and godly men wrapped him in spices, and laid him in the tomb, Jesus was dead. He remained there for parts of three days and nights. He saw no corruption, but yet he was in the place of corruption. No worm could assail that holy thing which no sin had tainted, and yet he laid in the place where death seemed sovereign. He slept for a while, and the Church mourned, but blessed was the day when, at the first rosy dawn of the light, the Saviour rose.

17. Then he could say, “I live.” His body, imbued with life, rose from its slumber, and began at once to put off the grave-clothes. He unwound the grave-clothes and the fine white linen, and laid them carefully down, and left them there, for you and me, that we might have our bed well-sheeted when we come to lie in it at the last.

18. As for the napkin, he unwound it, and laid it by itself, as though that were for us who are living, to wipe our eyes when our dear ones are taken away, since we have no reason to sorrow as they do who have no hope. And when this was done, an angel rolled away the stone, and out came the Saviour — glorious, no doubt, but so much like other men that Mary “supposed him to have been the gardener,” so that there could have been no very supernatural splendour surrounding his person. He revealed himself to many of his disciples — sometimes to as many as five hundred at once. He ate with them; he drank with them; he was a man among men with them, until, when forty days had passed, he gathered them all at Olivet, the mountain from which he had so often addressed them, and took his final leave. While he was blessing them, his hands outstretched in benediction, a cloud received him out of their sight. And since then he has sat down at the right hand of God, waiting until his enemies are made his footstool. He is waiting there yet a little while longer. When the fulness of time shall come — if I may go on with his biography — he will come again. “This same Jesus,” said the angels, “who is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in the same way as you have seen him go into heaven.” He will, therefore, come in proper person a second time, without a sin offering, to salvation. Then he will gather his saints together who have made a covenant with him by sacrifice. Then they shall reign with him. Then the earth shall be covered with his glory. All nations shall bow before him, and all people shall call him blessed. And then shall come the end, when he shall deliver up the kingdom to God, even the Father, and God shall be all in all. But Christ shall still live, for he has received a priesthood after the order of Melchizedek, without beginning of days, or end of years — a priest for ever. When suns and moons shall grow dim with age, and the round world shall all dissolve, like the morning hoar-frost, and time shall be rolled up like a vesture, and all the ages shall have been trodden out like sparks beneath the foot of the Eternal God, then Jesus Christ shall still live on, world without end. So we have spoken concerning Christ as living.

19. II. But now, in the next place: — LIFE IS PROMISED TO CHRIST’S PEOPLE.

20. This does not mean their natural existence. They have received this from Adam, and, through their sin, it has become a curse to them, rather than a blessing. Should they remain unpardoned, the fact of continued existence will become to them the most dreadful of calamities, since it must be an existence in God’s holy abhorrence of sin for ever; driven from every glimpse or hope of forgiveness.

21. The life which comes to us through Christ is of this kind — I trust you know it in your own hearts — it is spiritual life, given to us in regeneration. When the Holy Spirit quickens a dead soul, that dead soul then receives the life of Christ. No man is alive to God spiritually, except through Christ. Because Christ lives, we live. When a dead soul gets into living contact with the living Saviour by the power of the Spirit, it is then that spiritual life begins. The very first evidence of spiritual life is trusting in Jesus, which shows that as the first sign is alliance to Christ, the cause of the life must be somewhere here, namely, union with Christ. One of the very first outward signs is prayer — prayer to Christ, and that, again, rises from the fact that Christ gives us his life, and then that life goes back again to him. Brethren, if you seek the life of other souls, and desire to see them brought to God, preach Christ to them. Do you not see, “Because I live, you shall live”? Then no sinner ever will live spiritually apart from Christ. Though you and I cannot quicken them, yet we can preach the gospel to them, and faith comes by hearing, and where faith is, there is life. It is no use trying to raise the dead by preaching the law to them. That is only covering them up completely with a lie in their right hand; but to preach of dying love and of rising power, to tell of pardons bought with blood, and to declare that Christ died a substitute for sinners — this is the hopeful way of bringing life to the dead. It is by such instrumentality that souls are brought to eternal life. Because Christ is alive, his elect in due time receive spiritual life by the power of the Holy Spirit, and, although once they were dead in sin, they begin to live to righteousness.

22. Further, this spiritual life is preserved in us by Christ still living. “Because I continue to live, you shall continue to live also.” The text clearly means that: it bears that paraphrase. Oh! dear friends! when we once get spiritual life into us, what a thousand enemies there are who try to put it out! Very many times it has seemed to go hard with my soul concerning whether I really had a spark of life within my spirit. I have endured temptation after temptation until it appeared as if I must yield my hold on Christ and give up my hope. There has been conflict after conflict, and struggle after struggle, until at last the enemy has got his foot on the neck, and my whole being has trembled, and had it not been for Christ’s promise, “Because I live, you shall live also,” it might have gone harder with me, and I might have despaired, and given up all hope, and laid down to die. The assurance, then, that the spiritual life of the Christian must be maintained because Christ lives, was the only power to get me the victory. Let it teach us, then, this practical lesson. Whenever our spiritual life is very weak, and we want it to grow stronger, let us get to the living Christ for the supply of his strength. When you feel you are ready to die spiritually, go to the Saviour for revived life. The text is like a hand that points us to the storehouse. You who are in the desert, there is a secret spring under your feet, and you do not know where it is; this is the mysterious finger which points you to the place. Contemplate Christ; believe in Christ; draw yourselves by faith nearer and nearer to the Lord Jesus Christ, and so your life shall receive a divine impetus which it has not known for many a day. “Because I live, you shall live also.”

23. And further, brethren, we get an educated life from Christ. Any man may be spiritually alive, and yet he may not know much about the higher life. There is a scale of degrees in spiritual life. One man is just alive to God; another man may be active and vigorous; another may be rapturously consecrated. I hope you and I will anxiously desire to get the highest form of spiritual life that is known. We do not wish to be beggars in the kingdom of Christ, but, if we can, to take our place in the House of Peers, to be princes through Jesus Christ. We need not be poor; Christ is willing to enrich us. We are not constrained in him; we are constrained in ourselves. Now, Christ gives the promise, “Because I live,” he says, “the highest life, far above all principalities and powers, you shall also live this higher life with me.” You may have it; you may obtain it, but brethren, if you want to get it, never go to Moses for it; never go to yourselves for it. Do not seek to school yourselves by rules, and regulations, and resolutions, or by a morbid asceticism, such as some men delight in; but go to the living Saviour, and in the living liberty which you will enjoy in communion with him, your soul will take wings for itself, and mount into a clearer atmosphere: your spirit will be braced to a higher degree of robust devotion: you will draw nearer to heaven, because you have gotten nearer to Christ, who is the Lord of heaven. “Because I live, you shall have life: you shall have that life continued, and you shall have that life even more abundantly: I am come, not only that you may have life, but more abundantly.” These are your Master’s words; plead them before your Master’s throne.

24. And now, brethren, we will go a little further. We will suppose that you are well acquainted with these forms of life, and now there comes a jerk, as it were. You are travelling along the iron road of the railway, and there comes a sudden jerk, and you stop. What is it? It is the thought of death. Well, but Jesus tells us here that that is of no consequence. It is an item in the great world of life that to you who are in him is scarcely worth consideration, because the text overrides that, and swallows it up, as it is written “death is swallowed up in victory”: it is made as though it did not exist. “Because I live, you shall live also.” Your continued life of happiness, of holiness, of spirituality, of consecration, and of obedience — which, indeed is your only life worth having — is guaranteed to you in the text. Death cannot interfere with it, not even for a single second — indeed, I tell you not even for the tick of a clock. What, a Christian die? “Because I live, you shall live, also,” is never suspended. There is no time for it to be suspended in. Do you know what death really is? Does it take long to die? I have heard of men who have been said to be weeks in dying. Not so; they were weeks in living; the dying occupied no time; that was done at once, and immediately. And so with the believer. To him death is so slight a jerk that he still keeps on along the same line. He still lives, only there is this difference, that it is as though the railway had so far been running through a tunnel, and he now comes out of it into the open plain. His life below was the train in the tunnel, but when he dies, as we call it, there is a jerk, and then it comes right out of the tunnel into the fair, open plain country of heaven, where all is clear and bright, where all the birds are singing, and the darkness is over, and the mist and fogs are gone, and his soul is for ever blessed. “Because I live a life that cannot be suspended,” Christ seems to say, “you shall live also.” At the bottom of every man’s heart there is, I suppose, a fear of ceasing to be. Some infidels seem to find comfort in the thought of being annihilated, but that thought is, perhaps, the most abhorrent that ever crossed the human mind. There is something within us that tells us we are immortal, or there is, at any rate, something which makes us hope we are, and shrink with loathing from the idea of being annihilated. Now, at that point comes in our text, and it says, “What! Annihilated! You who believe in Jesus cannot be: you shall live also, live with that higher life which you have received — a life of beauty, a life of excellence, of holiness, and of Godlikeness: that new life implanted within you shall never be suspended.” No, never even for the time of a single tick, for “Because I live, you shall live also.”

25. Further, brethren, our text is such a wide one that we have a hold of the fact that we are to continue to live as for our spirits and our souls. The text beneath its sheltering wings, like a hen gathering her brood, gathers many precious truths, and the next one is that this very body of ours is to live, too. It must take its time for that. It must remain in the earth, on which it has lived. It is so decreed that there it should lie, unless Christ should come before that time. But concerning this very body, there is no decree of annihilation. It will rot away. It may be taken up by the spade of the careless sexton, {grave-digger} and all the atoms of the body may be scattered to the winds of heaven. But there is a life-germ within it which no human power can destroy, and over which the divine eye perpetually watches; and when that mysterious and long-expected sound of the angelic trump shall ring over land and sea, through heaven and earth, and the graves shall all be opened, then my soul shall find my body yet again — fashioned into a more beautiful form; more fit for the spirit than previously; more cheerful; altogether free from weakness; no longer such as shall be subject to pain, to sickness, to accident, to decay, to ultimate corruption; but a spiritual body, raised in power, in glory, and in immortality; not raised in the likeness of the first Adam in the garden, but in the likeness of the second Adam in the everlasting Paradise of God. Courage my eyes, courage! You shall be closed for a while, but you shall see the Redeemer when he stands a second time on the earth. Courage, my fingers and my hands! You must for a time lie still and motionless, but you shall not be so for ever, for you, even you, shall strum the strings of those celestial harps that pour out his praise. Courage, all you members of my body, which have been sanctified to be members of Christ, and made to be parts of the Holy Spirit’s temple! You shall all take your part in the grand triumphal entry of Christ, when he shall descend to take possession of his kingdom. “Though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall behold for myself, and not another.” So go to your bed in the earth, poor body, and sleep there for a while. Bathe yourself like her who bathed herself in spices to make herself ready for the King, so go and get yourself prepared to meet your Lord. Take off your work-day dress, and put on your Sabbath garments, your bridal array, and then you shall come to the King and see him in his beauty, and crown him with the crown with which his mother crowned him in the days of his espousals. Yes, because he lives in the body which he bore, this body shall live again, also.

26. And so, beloved, the text amounts to this, that in body and soul, the Christian shall be immortal, like his Master. When our reign on earth — whether it shall last a thousand years, or a thousand ages — (we do not know what the Word of God intends) — but when that glorified state on earth, which I do most assuredly believe in, shall be over, and it shall be said: — 

   Now Jehovah’s banner’s furled,

   Sheathed his sword because ’tis done;

when the drama of the mediatorial reign shall all be closed, and we shall dwell under the immediate sovereignty of God once again, then, beloved, every believer shall be with Christ, eternally glorified, for here stands the irrevocable decree and the divine mandate of creation’s Lord, who is also the redeeming Lamb, “Because I live, you shall live also.” Reel, you pillars of earth! Be shaken, you arches of the starry heavens! Pass away, oh Time, and you, you rolling worlds, dissolve into your native nothingness! But the believer must live on, because Jesus lives, and until the Lord’s Christ can bow his head, until he who only has immortality can expire, until God himself can cease to be, no soul that believed in Jesus can lose the incorruptible life which God’s own Spirit has put within it.

27. I want to sing, brethren, rather than to talk with you. These are words and thoughts fit for some ancient bard, or for the spirit of some inspired prophet sent from heaven. I can only lisp where even seraphs might find their loudest songs fail in the theme. Let your hearts mount! Let your souls exalt! Let your spirits be glad! Do you: — 

   Long for evening to undress,

   That you may rest with God,

and enter into his heaven? Long for the evening of death, when your toil shall be over, and the hour of your bliss shall have come.

28. III. I shall have no time, I fear, for the third and last point, and, therefore, I must only give a few hints of what I would have said. THIS LIFE IS LINKED WITH CHRIST’S LIFE.

29. Immortal, all glorious, promised to true believers, it is bound up with the life of our immortal Lord. Why is this? First, because Christ leads a justified life. I scarcely know how to express my meaning. You understand that as long as Jesus was here he lay under the charge of our sins. While he was in the world, his Father had made to meet on him the iniquity of us all. But when he died, his death discharged all the liabilities of his elect. The handwriting of ordinances that was against us was then taken away. When he went to Calvary as our Surety, the sins of all his people were his debts: he had taken them upon himself. But when he rose from the dead in the garden that first Easter morning he had no debts of ours: he had no longer any substitutional engagement or liability. All the debts which he had taken upon himself as our Redeemer he had fully and completely discharged. No officer can arrest a man for debt who has none, and Christ now lives, therefore, as a justified person. And brethren, no officer of justice can arrest any of the people for whom Christ paid their debts. How, then, shall death have any dominion over those whose debts are all discharged? How shall they be laid in prison for whom Christ was laid in prison? How shall they suffer death, which is the penalty of sin, for whom Christ has already suffered all the penalties which justice could have demanded? Because he lives the life of one who has discharged the debts of his people, they must, in justice, live.

30. Secondly, Christ lives a representative life. He is no longer Christ for himself. Just as the Member of Parliament represents a town, so Jesus Christ represents all the people who are in him, and as long as he lives they live. He is their Covenant Head. As long as Adam stands, his race shall stand; when Adam falls, the human race falls. While, therefore, Christ lives, the Christly ones, who are in him, live through his representation.

31. In the next place, Christ lives a perfect life. Perhaps you do not see how this is a link between his living and your living, but it is, because we are a part of Christ. According to the Word of Scripture, every believer is a member of Christ’s body. Now, a man who lives perfectly has not lost his finger, or his arm, or his hand. A man may be alive with many of his limbs taken away, but you can scarcely call him a perfect-living man. But I cannot imagine a maimed Christ. I have never been able to conceive in my soul, of Christ lacking any of his members. Such a thing was never seen on earth. The barbarous cruelty of the Jews could not accomplish that, and, by the Providence of God, Pilate’s officers were not permitted to cause such a thing. “Not a bone of him shall be broken,” was the ancient prophecy. They broke the legs of the first and second thief, but when they came to the matchless Lord they saw he was already dead, so they did not break his legs. Even in his earthly body, which was the type of his spiritual body, he must suffer no maiming injury. Therefore, my brethren, because Christ lives as a perfect Christ, everyone who is one with him must live also.

32. Then, fourthly, Christ lives a blessed life — a life of perfect blessedness, and, therefore, we must live also. “Why?” you say. Why, look: there is a mother here. She is alive: she is in good health, but she is not perfectly happy, for she is a Rachel weeping for her children, and will not be comforted, because they are not. Time will heal her wounds, it is true: for the most affectionate heart cannot be always mourning, but our Lord Jesus Christ in that infinitely affectionate heart of his would not only mourn over one of his children if lost, but he would mourn over it for ever. I cannot conceive of Christ being happy and losing one of his dear children. I cannot conceive of Christ to be personally blessed, and yet one of the members of his own person cast into the “outer darkness.” Because he lives in perfect happiness, I conceive that all who are dear to him will be all around him. It shall not be said that he lost one of them, nor shall one of the family be missing, but: — 

   All the chosen seed

      Shall meet around the throne,

   To bless the conduct of his grace,

      And make his wonders known.

33. And, lastly Christ leads a triumphant life, and, therefore, you shall live also. You say again, “How is that?” Why, brethren, the triumph of Christ concerns us. This is the triumph of Christ, “Of all those whom you have given to me, I have not lost one.” Now, suppose there is to be heard a whisper from the infernal pit, “Aha! Aha! You lie! There is one here whom the Father gave you, but whom you lost” — why, Christ would never be able to speak again by way of triumph! He could never boast any more. Then he might put down his crown. If it were only to happen in that one case, at any rate, the enemy would have gotten the advantage over him, and he would not have been the Conqueror all along the line. But, glory be to God! he who trod the wine-press with no one for his assistant, came out from the crimson conflict, having struck all his foes, and won a complete victory. There shall not be in the whole campaign a single point over which Satan shall be able to boast.

34. Christ has brought many sons to glory as the Captain of their salvation, and never yet has he failed, and he never shall in any point, neither the least nor the greatest, neither the strongest nor the weakest. This is essential, dear friends. It is essential to the acclamations of heaven, that every soul that believes in Jesus should live for ever. It is essential to the everlasting harmony and to the joy of Christ throughout eternity, that all who trust in him should be preserved and kept safe, even until the end. Therefore, the text says, “Because I live, you shall live also.”

35. So I leave this truth with you, only praying that those who have no part in this matter may seek Christ at this very time, and be led by the Spirit to cry mightily to him, and his promise is, “Those who seek me early shall find me.” “Seek the Lord, while he may be found, call on him while he is near.”

36. May God bless you, for Christ’s sake. Amen.

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