John 17:24

John 17:24

Christ's Wish for Man

This must always be the first joy of any really good life, its first joy and its first anxiety at once, the desire that others should enter into it. Indeed, here is a test of a man's life. Can you say: "I wish you were like me?" Can you take your purposes and standards of living, and quietly, deliberately, wish for all those who are nearest to you that they should be their standards and purposes too? Do not consent to be anything which you would not wish to ask the soul that is dearest to you to be. Be nothing which you would not wish all the world to be.

I. Thus, then, we understand Christ's longing for the companionship of His disciples. He wanted them to be with Him. That wish of His must have run through all the scale of companionship which we have traced, but it must have completed itself in the desire that they should be like Him, that they should have His character, that in the obedience of God, where He abode, they should abide with Him.

II. He wants His disciples to be with Him, "that they may behold My glory." Before these words can be cut entirely free from low associations and soar into the high pure meaning which belongs to them, we must remember what Christ's glory is which He desires us to see. Its essence, the heart and soul of it, must be His goodness. It is Christ's goodness then that He would have His people see. Think for a moment what prospects that wish of our Lord opens. Only by growth in goodness can His goodness open itself to us. What is He praying for then? Is it not that which we traced before in the first part of His prayer, the same exactly, that we might be like Him? So only can we see Him. It is His glory that He wants us to see; but back of that, He wants us to be such men and women that we can see His glory. The only true danger is sin, and so the only true safety is holiness. What a sublime ambition. How it takes our vague, half-felt wishes and fills them with reality and strength, when the moral growth, which makes a man complete, is put before us, not abstractly, but in this picture of the dearest and noblest being that our souls can dream of, standing before us and saying to us: "Come unto Me," standing over us and praying for us, "Father, bring them where I am."

Phillips Brooks, Sermons,p. 299.