“LOVE AND I”—A MYSTERY – Charles Spurgeon
“LOVE AND I”—A MYSTERY
“I have declared unto them Your name, and will declare it, that the love with which You have loved Me may be in them, and I in them.” – John 17:26
For several Sabbath mornings, my mind has been directed to subjects which I might fitly call the deep things of God. I think I have never felt my own incompetence more fully than in trying to handle such subjects. It is a soil into which one may dig and dig as deep as you will, and still never exhaust the golden nuggets which lie within it. I am, however, comforted by this fact: these subjects are so fruitful that even we, who can only scratch the surface of them, shall yet get a harvest from them. I once read of the plains of India that they were so fertile that you had only to tickle them with a hoe, and they laughed with plenty. Surely such a text as this may be described as equally fruitful, even under our feeble husbandry. Pearls lie on the surface here as well as in the depths. We have only to search its surface, and stir the soil a little, and we shall be astonished at the plenitude of spiritual wealth that lies before us. Oh, that the Spirit of God may help us to enjoy the blessed truths which are here set forth! Here is the priceless treasure, but it lies hidden until He reveals it to us.
You see, this text is taken from our Lord’s last prayer with His disciples. He did as good as say, “I am about to leave you, I am about to die for you, and for a while, you will not see Me, but now, before we separate, let us pray.” It is one of those impulses that you have felt yourselves. When you have been about to part from those you love, to leave them perhaps in danger and difficulty, you have felt you could do no less than say, “Let us draw near unto God.” Your heart found no way of expressing itself at all so fitting, so congenial, so satisfactory, as to draw near unto the great Father and spread your case before Him.
Now, a prayer from such a one as Jesus, our Lord and Master, a prayer in such a company, with the eleven whom He had chosen, and who had been with Him from the beginning, a prayer under such circumstances, when He was just on the brink of the brook of Kedron, and was about to cross that gloomy stream and go up to Calvary and there lay down His life—such a prayer as this, so living, earnest, loving, and divine, deserves the most studious meditation of all believers. I invite you to bring your best thoughts and skill for the navigation of this sea. It is not a creek or bay, but the main ocean itself. We cannot hope to fathom its depths. This is true of any sentence of this matchless prayer, but for me, the work of exposition becomes unusually heavy because my text is the close and climax of this marvelous supplication. It is the central mystery of all. In the lowest depth, there is still a lower depth, and this verse is one of those deeps which still exceed the rest. Oh, how much we need the Spirit of God. Pray for His bedewing. Pray that His balmy influences may descend upon us richly now.
You will observe that the last word of our Lord’s prayer is concerning love. This is the last petition which He offers, “That the love with which You have loved Me may be in them, and I in them.” He reaches no greater height than this, namely, that His people be filled with the Father’s love. How could He rise higher? For this is to be filled with all the fullness of God, since God is love, and he that loves dwells in God, and God in him. What importance ought you and I to attach to the grace of love! How highly we should esteem that which Jesus makes the crown jewel of all. If we have faith, let us not be satisfied unless our faith works by love and purifies the soul. Let us not be content indeed until the love of Christ is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given unto us.
Well did the poet say—
“Only love to us be given,
Lord, we ask no other heaven.”
For indeed there is no other heaven below, and scarcely is there any other heaven above than to reach the fullness of perfect love. This is where the prayer of the Son of David ends, in praying, “That the love with which You have loved Me may be in them.” What a subject! The highest that even our Lord Jesus reached in His noblest prayer. Again, with groans, my heart cries, Holy Spirit, help.
I shall this morning try to speak first upon the food of love, or what love lives upon. Secondly, upon the love itself, what kind of love it is. And then, thirdly, upon the companion of love. “That the love with which You have loved Me may be in them, and I in them.”
I. The Food of Love to God: What Is It?
It is knowledge. “I have made known unto them Your name, and will make it known.” We cannot love a God whom we do not know. A measure of knowledge is necessary to affection. However lovely God may be, a man blind of soul cannot perceive Him, and therefore is not touched by His loveliness. Only when the eyes are opened to behold the loveliness of God will the heart go out towards God, who is so desirable an object for the affections.
Brethren, we must know in order to believe, we must know in order to hope, and we must especially know in order to love. Hence the great desirableness that you should know the Lord and His great love which passes knowledge. You cannot reciprocate love which you have never known, even as a man cannot derive strength from food which he has not eaten. Till first of all the love of God has come into your heart, and you have been made a partaker of it, you cannot rejoice in it or return it. Therefore, our Lord took care to feed His disciples’ hearts upon the Father’s name. He labored to make the Father known to them. This is one of His great efforts with them, and He is grieved when He sees their ignorance, and has to say to one of them, “Have I been so long time with you, and yet have you not known Me, Philip? He that has seen Me has seen the Father; and why do you say, then, Show us the Father?”
Study much, then, the word of God; be diligent in turning the pages of Scripture and in hearing God’s true ministers, that the flame of love within your hearts may be revived by the fuel of holy knowledge which you place upon it. Pile on the logs of sandalwood, and let the perfumed fires burn before the Lord. Heap on the handfuls of frankincense, and sweet odors of sacred knowledge, that on the altar of your heart there may always be burning the sacred flame of love to God in Christ Jesus.
The knowledge here spoken of is a knowledge which Jesus gave them. “I have known You, and these have known that You have sent Me. And I have declared unto them Your name, and will declare it.” O beloved, it is not knowledge that you and I pick up as a matter of book-learning that will ever bring out our love to the Father. It is knowledge given us by Christ through His Spirit. It is not knowledge communicated by the preacher alone which will bless you, for however much he may be taught of God himself, he cannot preach to the heart unless the blessed Spirit of God comes and takes of the things that are spoken, and reveals them and makes them manifest to each individual heart, so that in consequence it knows the Lord.
Jesus said, “O righteous Father, the world has not known You,” and you and I would have been in the same condition, strangers to God, without God and without hope in the world, if the Spirit of God had not taken of divine things and applied them to our souls so that we are made to know them. Every living word of knowledge is the work of the living God. If you only know what you have found out for yourself, or picked up by your own industry apart from Jesus, you know nothing aright. It must be by the direct and distinct teaching of God the Holy Spirit that you must learn to profit. Jesus Christ alone can reveal the Father. He Himself said, “No man comes unto the Father but by Me.” He that knows not Christ knows not the Father, but when Jesus Christ reveals Him, ah, then, we do know Him after a special, personal, peculiar, inward knowledge! This knowledge brings with it a life and a love with which the soul is not puffed up, but built up. By such knowledge, we grow up into Him, who is our head, in all things being taught of the Son of God.
II. The Love Itself
Brethren, we have as yet only been standing at the furnace mouth, let us now enter into the devouring flame while we speak, in the second place, upon the love itself. Observe, first, what this love is not. “I have declared unto them Your name, and will declare it, that the love with which You have loved Me may be in them.” Notice that the prayer is not that the Father’s love may be set upon them, or moved towards them. God does not love us because we know Him, for He loved us before we knew Him, even as Paul speaks of, “His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses and sins.”
Jesus has not come to set His Father’s love upon the chosen. Oh, no, He did not even die with that objective, for the Father’s love was upon the chosen from everlasting. “The Father Himself loves you” was always true. Christ did not die to make His Father loving, but because His Father is loving; the atoning blood is the outflow of the very heart of God toward us. So do not make a mistake. Our Lord speaks not of the divine love in itself, but in us. This is not the eternal love of God towards us of which we are now reading, but that love in us. We are inwardly to feel the love which proceeds from the Father, and so to have it in us. We are to have the love of God shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given to us. It is to be recognized by us, felt in us, made the subject of inward joy; this it is that our Lord wishes to produce, that the love of God may be in us, dwelling in our hearts, a welcome guest, the sovereign of our souls.
And this love is of a very peculiar sort. Let me read the verse again, “That the love with which You have loved Me may be in them.” It is God’s own love in us. The love of the Father towards Jesus springs up like a crystal fountain, and then the sparkling drops fall and overflow, as you have seen the fountains do, and we are the cups into which this overflowing love of God towards Christ Jesus flows, and flows till we too are full. The inward love so much desired for us by our Lord is no emotion of nature, no attachment proceeding from the unregenerate will, but it is the Father’s love transplanted into the soil of these poor hearts, and becoming our love to Jesus, as we shall have to show in the next point.
But is not this a wonderful thing—that God’s own love to Jesus should dwell in our hearts? And yet it is so. The love with which we love Christ, mark you, is God’s love to Christ, “That the love with which You have loved Me may be in them.” All true love, such as the Father delights in and accepts at our hands, is nothing but His own love, which has come streaming down from His own heart into our renewed minds. But what can this mean?
I must ask you to observe that it includes within itself four precious things. First, the text means that our Lord Jesus Christ desires us to have a distinct recognition of the Father’s love to Him. He wants the love with which the Father loves Him to be felt in us, so that we may say, “Yes, I know the Father loved Him, for I, who am such a poor, unworthy, and foolish creature, yet love Him, and oh, how His Father must love Him.”
I love Him! Yes, by His grace, it were a blessed thing to die for Him, but if I love Him, oh, how must His Father love him who can see all His beauty, and can appreciate every distinct piece of loveliness that is in Him!
God never loved anything as He loves Christ, except His people, and they have had to be lifted up to that position by the love which the Father has to His Son. For, first and foremost, the Father and the Son are one; they are one in essence. The Savior has been with the Father from the beginning, and His delight has been with Him, even as the Father testified, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”
Oh, try to feel, if you can, the love of the Father to His Son, or else you will not love the Father as you should for the amazing sacrifice which He made in giving Jesus to us. Think what it cost Him to tear His Well-Beloved from His bosom and send Him down below to be “despised and rejected.” Think what it cost Him to nail Him up to yonder cross, and then forsake Him and hide His face from Him, because He had laid all our sins upon Him.
Oh, the love He must have had to us to have made His best Beloved become a curse for us, as it is written, “Cursed is everyone that hangs on a tree.”
I want you to get this right into your souls, dear friends. Do not hold it as a dry doctrine, but let it touch your heart. Let it flow into your heart like a boiling stream, till your whole souls become like Icelandic geysers, which boil and bubble up and send their steam aloft into the clouds.
Oh, to have the soul filled with the love of the Father towards Him who is altogether lovely. Now, go a step further and deeper. Our text bears a further reading. Remember that you are to have in your heart a sense of the Father’s love to you, and to remember that it is precisely the same love with which He loves His Son. “That the love with which You have loved Me may be in them.”
Oh, wonder of wonders, I feel more inclined to sit down and meditate upon it than to stand up and talk about it! The love with which He loved His Son—such is His love to all His chosen ones. Can you believe it, that you should be the object of God’s delight, even as Christ is, because you are in Christ, that you should be the object of the Father’s love as truly as Christ is, because He sees you to be part and parcel of the mystical body of His Well-beloved Son?
Do not tell me that God the Father does not love you as well as He does Christ; the point can be settled by the grandest matter of fact that ever was. When there was a choice between Christ and His people, which should die of the two, the Father freely delivered up His own Son that we might live through Him.
Oh, what a meeting there must have been of the seas of love that day, when God’s great love to us came rolling in like a glorious springtide, and His love to His Son came rolling in at the same time. If they had met and collided, we cannot imagine the result, but when they both took to rolling together in one mighty torrent, what a stream of love was there!
The Lord Jesus sank that we might swim, He sank that we might rise, and now we are borne onward forever by the mighty sweep of infinite love into an everlasting blessedness which tongues and lips can never fully set forth. Oh, be ravished with this. Be carried away with it, be in ecstasy at love so amazing, so divine. The Father loves you even as He loves His Son, after the same manner and sort He loves all His redeemed.
III. The Companion of Love: “I in Them”
Look at the text a minute and just catch those two words. Here is “love” and “I”—love and Christ come together. Oh, blessed guests! “Love and I,” says Christ, as if He felt He never had a companion that suited Him better. “Love” and “I,” Jesus is always at home where love is reigning. When love lives in His people’s hearts, Jesus lives there too.
Does Jesus, then, live in the hearts of His people? Yes, wherever there is the love of the Father shed abroad in them, He must be there. We have His word for it, and we are sure that Jesus knows where He is. We are sure that He is where love is; for, first, where there is love there is life, and where there is life, there is Christ, for He Himself says, “I am the life.” There is no true life in the believer’s soul that is divided from Christ. We are sure of that, so that where there is love there is life, and where there is life there is Christ.
Again, where there is the love of God in the heart, there is the Holy Spirit. But wherever the Holy Spirit is, there is Christ, for the Holy Spirit is Christ’s representative, and it is in that sense that He tells us, “Lo, I am with you always,” namely, because the Spirit is come to be always with us. So where there is love, there is the Spirit of God, and where there is the Spirit of God, there is Christ. So it is always “Love and I.”
Furthermore, where there is love, there is faith, for faith works by love, and there never was true love to Christ apart from faith. But where there is faith, there is always Christ, for if there is faith in Him, He has been received into the soul. Jesus is always near to that faith which has Himself for its foundation and resting place. Where there is love, there is faith; where there is faith, there is Christ, and so it is “Love and I.”
Yes, but where there is the Father’s love toward Christ in the heart, God Himself is there. I am sure of that, for God is love. So if there is love within us, there must be God, and where God is, there Christ is, for He says, “I and my Father are one.” So you see where there is love, there must be Jesus Christ, for these reasons and for many others besides. “I in them.”
Yes, if I were commanded to preach for seven years from these three words only, I would never exhaust the text, I am quite certain. I might exhaust you by my dullness, and exhaust myself by labor to tell out the sacred secret, but I should never exhaust the text. “I in them.” It is the most blessed word I know of. You, beloved, need not go abroad to find the Lord Jesus Christ. Where does He live? He lives within you. “I in them.” As soon as ever you pray, you are sure He hears you because He is within you. He is not knocking at your door; He has entered into you, and there He dwells, and will go no more out forever.
What a blessed sense of power this gives to us. “I in them.” Then it is no more “I” in weakness, but, since Jesus dwells in me, “I can do all things through Christ that strengthens me.” “I in them.” It is the glory of the believer that Christ dwells in him. “Unto you that believe He is precious.” Hence we gather the security of the believer.
Brothers and sisters, if Christ be in me, and I am overcome, Christ is conquered too, for He is in me. “I in them.” I cannot comprehend the doctrine of believers falling from grace. If Christ has once entered into them, will He not abide with them? Paul says, “I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” To that persuasion I set my hand and seal.
Well, then, if Christ is in us, whatever happens to us will happen to Him. We shall be losers if we do not get to heaven, but so will He, for He is in us, and so is a partaker of our condition. If it is an indissoluble union—and so He declares it is—“I in them,” then His destiny and ours are linked together, and if He wins the victory, we conquer in Him. If He sits at the right hand of God, we shall sit at the right hand of God with Him, for He is in us.
I know not what more to say, not because I have nothing more, but because I do not know which to bring forward out of a thousand precious things. But I leave the subject with you. Go home, and live in the power of this blessed text. Go home, and be as happy as you can be to live, and if you get a little happier, that will not hurt you, for then you will be in heaven.
Keep up unbroken joy in the Lord. It is not “I in them” for Sundays, and gone on Mondays; “I in them” when they sit in the Tabernacle, and out of them when they reach home. No, “I in them,” and that forever and forever. Go and rejoice. Show this blind world that you have a happiness which as much outshines theirs as the sun outshines the sparks which fly from the chimney and expire. Go forth with joy and be led forth with peace, let the mountains and the hills break forth before you into singing—
“All that remains for me
Is but to love and sing,
And wait until the angels come,
To bear me to the King.”
“Oh, but I have my troubles.” I know you have your troubles, but they are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in you, nor even with your present glory. I feel as if I could not think about troubles, or sins, or anything else when I once behold the love of God to me. When I feel my love to Christ, which is but God’s love to Christ, burning within my soul, then I glory in tribulation, for the power of God shall be through these afflictions made manifest in me.
“I in them.” God bless you with the knowledge of this mystery, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.