John 14:19

John 14:19

I. Christ lives. In Him was life. He was the Prince, the Author of life. He submitted to die for the sin of the world. But it was impossible that He should be holden of death. He has resumed the body of His humanity, but it is now a glorified body, a body freed from the laws to which He before submitted it, of space and motion; no longer the body of our vileness, but the body of His glory.

II. He liveth; and now what does our text announce to us from His own lips as the consequences of that His life? "Because I live, ye shall live also." Immense consequences shall result from this resumption of His Body, and reunion of it in its resurrection form to His Godhead and His glorified humanity. (1) "In Christ shall all be made alive," In this lowest, but evident sense, because He lives, we shall live also. Every body of man shall one day be re-animated; known as his body was known, by its distinguishing marks and features; built up again by Him who built it up at first, and reunited to the human soul, which has been waiting in the abode of the departed the fulness of the Father's time. (2) All are united to Christ in the flesh. His body was our body; and the unbeliever, as well as the believer, is one flesh with Christ. All have the same animal and intellectual soulwhich Christ took upon Him; all, unbeliever as well as believer, are sharers in the immortality which He conferred on our nature by His resurrection, as far as this is concerned in it. All have the same immortal spirit; but here comes in the difference. The man who has degraded that Spirit by which he should have reached out after God, who has never sprinkled it with Christ's atoning blood, nor had God's Spirit dwelling in it, he shall live for ever in one sense but how live for ever? In no spiritual life or enjoyment of God, in no apprehension of Him; for he has rejected the Son of God; and thus for him is reserved a final state of banishment from the presence of God and disappointment of all the high ends of his being. But in the opposite case of the spiritually minded, of those who have learned to look above the world and its animal enjoyment, and its intellectual power and pride, and to seek after the Father of their Spirits by believing on the Son of His love, they are united to Christ not only in the flesh, not only in the animal and intellectual soul, but in the Spirit also. When Christ, who is their life shall appear, then shall they also appear with Him in glory.

H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons,vol. i., p. 251.

Life in Christ

I. What we all want, and most of us feel that we want, is to live lovingly. Most persons have a consciousness that they are not living up to the intention of their being, and this sense of the interval which there is between the life we live and the life we might live, is perhaps the chief cause of that general undefined feeling of dissatisfaction and uncomfortableness by which so many of us are continually oppressed. So long as there is an interval between what a man might live, and what he ought to live, and what he does live, there will never be any real rest, and the greater the distance, the greater the restlessness. Seeing that we are constituted as we are, no man can have the true enjoyment of the sense of life until there is something of eternity in his living. It is an element which God has made to be a part of our spiritualised nature. And there will always be a void until it is in the mind, and we can say of anything we feel, think, or do, "This is for eternity."

II. Now, it is of this life of a man, in his body, soul, and spirit it is of this life in a man, as forming a part of his immortality, that Christ is speaking, when He makes this comfortable promise concerning His resurrection and ascension, "Because I live, ye shall live also." See how the life of every Christian, i.e.,of everyone who really lives, owes itself to the life of Jesus Christ. We live because the death of Christ upon the Cross redeemed us from a state of death; the dying of Jesus being in substitution for our dying, released us from the necessity of dying for ever. And having thus made us capable of living, the death of Christ placed us under those processes by which a certain new inward life is formed and perfected in us.

III. As water is ever seeking the level from which it flows, so the Christian life is always rising towards the standard of that life of Christ in which its own hidden fountain lies. It is a self-evident truth that if we live by Christ and on Christ, we must also live in Christ and to Christ. Our being, true to its great prototype, of which indeed it is only a part, is passing, for a short appointed period, through a risen spiritual life, preparatory to its glorified condition, of which it is always standing upon the eve, when, like Jesus, it will ascend and be taken up to its perfected consummation, and rise to life indeed for ever and ever.

J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,5th series, p. 44.

The Natural Immortality of the Human Soul

I. Note some considerations which go to establish the radical unlikeness between spiritual and material beings. (1) The spirit of man knows itself to be capable of continuous improvement and development. (2) The spirit or mind of man is conscious of, and it values, its own existence. (3) Unless a spiritual being is immortal such a being does count for less in the universe than mere inert matter, for matter has a kind of immortality of its own.

II. How does Christ communicate life when He is out of reach of the senses? (1) By His spirit; (2) by the Christian sacraments.

H. P. Liddon, Penny Pulpit,No. 945.

Consider some aspects in which our Lord's words light up for us our life. I propose to show how the risen Saviour dispels the darkness in which we walk, fills the vacancy which we dread, gives us the victory over death.

I. The resurrection of Christ is emphatically the accomplishment of our redemption. Apart from that there is no hope for us as sinners in the sight of God. If Jesus Christ had only died, the perfect man would have appeared, but the perfect man would have gone down into the abyss of darkness like the rest. There would have been no proof that the Sacrifice was pleasing to God, no evidence that the Father had accepted Him. But now is Christ risen from the dead, and therein is our salvation sure.

II. But, again, the resurrection of Christ is our victory over death. The life which He has purchased He has given to us, and that life scorns death. He is so One with us that His victory is ours. And so He Himself declares that if we believe in Him we shall never die. Not only death cannot terrify Christ's children, death has no power over them; death is not death, it is a sleep, or rather it is a birth a birth into a new and glorious life. It is a deliverance, it is a joy. Do not call it death; there is no real death but separation from God; thatis death, death of body and death of soul, death temporal and death eternal. The believer who is one with Christ can say, "O death, where is thy sting?"

III. But the text is true in another sense. The resurrection is the pledge of the resurrection of our bodies. Because He lives, we also shall live, not only as disembodied spirits, but with new bodies, clothed upon with our house which is from heaven.

IV. The resurrection of Christ implies that we are now, even in this world, risen with Him. St. Paul's great object, he tells us, was to know Christ and the power of His resurrection. It was his aim and endeavour, it was his constant prayer, to be conformed to the image of his risen Saviour. It was to this that he exhorted his converts, "Our conversation is in heaven." "If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God."

J. J. S. Perowne, Sermons,p. 274.

References: John 14:19. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xvii., No. 968; Preacher's Monthly,vol. x., p. 18; J. Vaughan, Three Hundred Outlines on the New Testament,p. 91; T. T. Munger, The Freedom Faith,p. 257.