John 14:3

John 14:3

With Christ for Ever

I. This whole passage is beautifully calculated to place in their right proportions that hope which every one feels of meeting again in heaven those that are gone before us, and the one all-satisfying anticipation of being with Christ. I feel persuaded that many are far too much afraid of dwelling on the idea of our knowing and loving and enjoying one another again in the future state. I believe, if rightly understood, the danger lies more on the side of thinking of it too little, than of magnifying it too much. Are we not to know all things to know even as we are known, and if all things, then certainly one another?

II. But perhaps the real mistake and confusion of thought is in this, that we do not connect and identify the saints, as we ought to do, with Christ. Now it is a deep mystery, but it is a most certain fact, that Christ is not a complete Christ without His members. We know and admire Christ in every one of His members, and every one of His members in Christ, and so the very fact of the rejoining of the departed, which some think to be contravened by the text, is by the text promoted and established, and is actually in the words when Christ says, "That where I am, there ye may be also."

III. The nearest approach we can make to the idea of glory lies, I think, in the text. Let any child of God take what Christ's felt presence has been to his soul, in its most favoured season of spiritual communion. Let him conceive that sweet ecstasy rid of its clogs multiplied a thousand-fold, and perpetuated for ever and then this, not any picture of colour or shape, place or circumstance, will be the closest approximation he can make to a true imagination of the heavenly state. He will see how independent everlasting happiness becomes of those things of which the natural heart generally makes it to consist; and how there is enough, and more than enough, for eternity in that single assurance, "Where I am, there ye shall be also."

J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,5th series, p. 31.

Reference: John 14:5; John 14:6. H. P. Liddon, Christmastide Sermons,p. 18.