Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

John 15:16

John 15:16. Ye did not choose me, but I chose you, and appointed you, that ye should go away and bear fruit, and that your fruit should abide. But He had not taught them merely to fill their minds with knowledge. He had ‘heard' from the Father that He might ‘do.' They ‘hear' that they may ‘do' also. As the Father, having taught, had sent Him, so He, having taught, sends them. He had ‘chosen' them a choice having here nothing to do with eternal predestination, but only with choosing them out of the world after they were in it. He had ‘appointed' them, had put them into the position which they were to occupy on their post of duty. The manner in which their post is described is important. It is by the word ‘go away,' the word so often used of Jesus Himself in this part of the Gospel. They were to ‘go away;' that is, they had a departure to make as well as He. This can be nothing else but their going out into the world to take His place, to produce fruit to the glory of the Father, and to return with that fruit to their Father's house. How manifest is it that here again we have to do with the fruits of active Christian labour, not of private Christian life!

That whatsoever ye ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you. This is the culminating-point of the climax, taking us to the thought of that intimacy of communion with the Father which secures the answer to all our prayers, and the supply of all our needs.

Three times now have we met in this discourse the promise just given, and the attentive reader will easily perceive the interesting gradation in the circumstances in which those to whom it is successively given are supposed to be. At John 14:12-13, they are viewed simply as believers; at John 15:7, they ‘abide in Christ, and His sayings abide in them;' now they have ‘gone away,' and have borne abiding fruit. To each stage of Christian living and working the same promise in words belongs, but the fulness included in the words is dependent in each case on the amount of need to be supplied. It may be questioned how we are to understand the second ‘that' of this verse, whether as co-ordinate to the first ‘that,' and so, like it, dependent on ‘I have chosen you,' or as expressing a consequence of their bringing forth abiding fruit in their work of Christian love. The latter is undoubtedly to be preferred. Jesus chooses out His disciples for work first, for correspondingly higher privilege afterwards; and those who faithfully bear fruit are here assured that in this sphere of fruit-bearing with all its difficulties, and temptations, and trials, they shall want nothing to impart courage, boldness, hope, to make them overcome the world, as He Himself overcame it.

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Philip Schaff's Popular Commentary (4 vols)

John 15:16

Old Testament

New Testament