1 John 5:11-12

ETERNAL LIFE

‘And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in His son. He that hath the Son hath life.’

1 John 5:11

When the words ‘eternal life’ are uttered in our hearing, we turn instinctively to the opening of the great High Priestly prayer recorded in the seventeenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, where we find our Lord saying: ‘This is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, Whom Thou hast sent.’

I. How do we attain to this ‘eternal life?’

(a) It is a gift of God. We cannot merit it; we cannot acquire it, as the recompense, or result, of any amount of laborious effort or of moral excellence on our part; what we have to do is simply to accept it, to stretch out the hand, and thankfully take what the Lord God, of His infinite bounty and goodness, sees fit to offer to us.

(b) It is bound up with the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. ‘This life,’ says St. John, ‘is in His Son’—i.e. I suppose, in the Lord Jesus Christ we have the reservoir in which the life is contained. ‘In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.’ ‘As the Father hath life in Himself, so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself.’

(c) And again: we must come into contact, so to speak, with this living reservoir or fountain-head, in order that the stream that issues from it may flow into our being, and make us, too, partakers of its blessings. ‘He that hath the Son hath life.’

II. What are we to understand by the expression ‘Hath the Son’?—The idea is that of possession, of mutual possession, so that each of us shall be able to say of Christ, ‘He is mine’; and Christ, on His part, shall be willing to say of each of us, ‘I am his.’ But how is this possession brought about? On our part, by the perfect surrender of ourselves to the Lord. As long as there is any reserve, any holding back of anything from Christ, Christ is of no avail to us. He will not—indeed, He cannot—enter our inner being until we open the door and allow Him to come in; and even then He will enter on no other terms than that of absolute surrender.

III. What are the manifestations of eternal life?—There is a correspondence between our physical and our spiritual life which may possibly seem to illustrate this part of our present subject. In a living body we find three things—more, of course, than three things, but certainly these three—sensation, movement, growth.

(a) Consciousness.—In a living soul there is what, perhaps, we could not call sensation, but which we may call consciousness, or realisation, of God. God surrounds every soul, as the atmosphere surrounds us. We are encompassed with God on every side. We are plunged in God as in an element. But it is perfectly possible for us to be utterly insensitive, and not to have any consciousness of Him—in fact, it must be so until we have received the new birth which the Spirit bestows. Then God flashes upon us actually as if He had Himself just come into being. We behold, we know, we delight in the moral teaching and grandeur of Him who is manifested to us in His Son Jesus Christ.

(b) Another manifestation of life is movement. And occupation for God, or for man for God’s sake, is one of the characteristics of those who are born again of the Spirit, and made new creations in Jesus Christ. ‘Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?’ is one of the first questions which such persons always ask. Absolute stillness—by which I mean abstinence from all spiritual occupation—is an evidence of spiritual death. You must move; you must employ yourself; you must use some, at least, of your talents in the Divine service, if you are ‘alive unto God.’

(c) Then there is growth; and this is of various kinds: (i) First, the growth that comes from exercise—the exercise of the graces which God has bestowed upon us. (ii) Next, the growth of intelligence in spiritual things. We have many schoolmasters here—the Scriptures, our conscience, and not least of all, the discipline of life. And through these the Holy Spirit is showing us daily more about ourselves, and more about the character and will and purposes of God. (iii) Then the growth of advancing assimilation. I mean this—we become like those with whom we associate. And God takes advantage of this peculiarity of our human constitution to produce in us a resemblance to Christ. He sets before us the Lord Jesus as the great object of our contemplation. Looking at Christ, earnestly gazing upon Him, trying to understand Him, sympathising with Him more and more, we catch something of His spirit; the features of His character are impressed upon us; we become to some extent like Him.

Rev. Prebendary Gordon Calthrop.

Illustration

‘ “Life” is not what we live—but how we live it. To live, indeed, you must live livingly. To carry about with you, in everything, that sweetest of all feelings, that your sins are forgiven you—to mingle every affection and every joy with the light of the smile of God’s countenance—to tell every secret into the ear of a heavenly Father—to work every day, with the certainty of a success; with an object worthy of an immortal spirit—to bear along with you the sympathies of all bright intelligences, the purest—to see everything in the radiance of a near and glorious eternity—to regather there all that has been so pleasant here, and to find them again a thousand-fold—oh! it is that which makes life worth the living. And that is to have the companionship and the fellowship and the love of Christ; and in all this that truth does but repeat itself—“He that hath the Son hath life.” ’