Gooding, David: 2 - The Upper Room Ministry

In our last session, we were considering the significance of our Lord's handing the sop to Judas. Now I want us to come back to the text of John chapter thirteen to notice that after the giving of the sop and Judas's exit from the upper room, our Lord taught them certain general lessons. In fact, if you care to look at the chapter as a whole, you will find that John has arranged his materials in a simple pattern. We began the chapter with the symbolic act of washing the disciples' feet, and we have the record from verse one to verse eleven. Then from verses twelve to verse twenty, we have certain general observations and lessons given by the Lord on the basis of that symbolic act. And then from verses twenty one to thirty, we come to this second symbolic act, the giving of the sop, and that act is followed once more by some general observations from verse thirty one to thirty five. We pick up in verse thirty one with these observations that our Lord made on the basis of the giving of that sop to Jude. He said in the first place, now is or was the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him, and God shall glorify him in himself, and straightway shall he glorify him. Those verses tell us that in some real sense, the giving of the sop to Judas was an act that glorified both the Lord Jesus and by him glorified God. It is not difficult, surely, to see how this act brought glory to God through Christ. For there Christ was himself personally confronted by the most loathsome and treacherous sin aimed at him personally on the part of a man who had accepted all his gifts, but had no time for Christ personally and was about to betray him. That our Lord reacted to him in perfect and undiminished love, without the slightest trace of embitterness or sourness or revenge or peevishness. In fact, it is important and il- uh, and, and, uh, very instructive to notice that when our Lord spoke those final words to Judas, after Judas had received the salt but rejected the Savior and was now going out in company with Satan to betray the Lord, when the Lord spoke to him then, knowing that Judas had rejected him, he spoke in such a tone of voice as those in the room thought he was saying, give something to the poor. For if Judas' act had been able to provoke our Lord to some sinful reaction, some peevish, some sour, some revengeful reaction, however small, then Christ, of course, would have become a sinner and disqualified to be our saviour. It was a tremendous triumph of the love of God, that when man had expressed his worst, so to speak, God in Christ should offer him still the sop of his friendship. It tells us volumes about the nature of God and makes God a- appear, as he indeed is, exceedingly wonderful, that he should love us while we are yet enemies and yet sinners. But for the love of God to be translated into terms of flesh and blood, meeting an actual Judas in the heart of a real human Jesus. This indeed was a wonderful triumph. It shows us that the love of God is not just theory and principle, but has been translated into time and space and human history in the flesh and blood and behavior of Christ. In a sense, Christ here reached the peak of his ministry. His love tempted to the limit and proved perfect. And that glorifies God in another sense. It is the fact that men like Ju- Judas will perish eternally. And you say, how could I possibly believe in a God that would send men to hell? You say, such a God would be such an awful tyrant that I couldn't possibly respect him, let alone love him. Here Christ shows how you can love a God like that. Judas is now in hell. But he made his own hell. He went there in spite of the love of God. He went there in spite of the love of God that loved him when he had done his worst. And he went simply because of his own free will. He rejected that love. And because this, so to speak, was the peak of Christ's ministry, God's love perfectly displayed in Jesus our Lord and in his death for sinners. That death of Christ has led to his resurrection and ascension. God's response to the perfect expression of his love in Christ is to raise Christ from the dead and enthrone him supreme in all the universe. What a glorious, glorious prospect that makes for all who trust him. That one day, on the throne of the universe, actively in control of everything, from the highest point of administration to the lowest, shall sit enthroned love of this kind, a love that has manifested itself in deed and word in the person of Christ in our world. The second observation that our Lord had to make is in verse thirty four. While he himself is going away, he leaves us a new commandment, as he calls it. A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one to another. The command that we are to love one another is, of course, to be found already in the Old Testament. That we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. This is an Old Testament commandment. How then is it new? Well, it is a new commandment because our Lord's interpretation of it, both in word and, more importantly, in deed, has given it altogether a new dimension and a new richness. We are to love as he loves. The common ideal that men set before themselves in the ancient world is given in the words of our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount. You have heard that it was said, thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine Lying enemy. enemies. Classical Greek and Roman ethics unashamedly preached that kind of thing. You loved your neighbor, you loved your friends, you hated and injured as far as possible your enemies. And if you didn't injure your enemies and fight them and beat them, then they thought that there was something, uh, of a shortcoming in your ethics. What a new commandment this is. Not merely to love our neighbor and our friends, but our enemies. But I say unto you, love your enemies and pray for them that persecute you, that ye may be sons of your Father which is in heaven, for he maketh his son to rise on the evil and the good. We are to love, in a word, says Christ, as I have just shown my love to Judas, to that same extent. And you say, how is it possible for a man to love his neighbor like that? Well, frankly, it is impossible for us in our natural state. We don't have the puff and the spiritual energy. It is no longer now natural for us, and we might altogether despair at such counsel of perfection, hadn't we learned the first lesson in this school of holiness? That while it is not natural for us to love our enemies, there is this great washing, this once and for all bathing. There is a reality that you can describe as a being born again, receiving the very life of God, and with it the nature of God, which new nature makes it realistically possible for a man to love his enemies? Let us listen to John's comment on this in his later epistles. In one John chapter four, John reminds us that it is our Christian duty to love one another. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another, he says. But how can we do it? Again, he explains in one John four and verse nineteen. We love... we love because he first loved us. That is to say, we love, we love not only him, as some versions have it, because he first loved us, but we love anybody because he first loved us. This kind of love, this more than natural, this more than human love, the very love of God, how can I show it? It is, says John, as we first come to realize that that is how God has loved me, has loved us, and we begin to enter into the joy of that love and know ourselves loved in that fashion, that we find the strength in turn to love other people like that. We love because he first loved us. Let John himself again remind us of the nature of that love. He says earlier in that chapter, verses nine and ten, herein was the love of God manifested in us, that God has sent his only begotten son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. This is, it seems to me, an exceedingly practical and important point. After a lecture that I had given the other week, a young man came to the vestry of the church where I was preaching to ask about this practical matter. How could he find Christ as his own personal savior and enter into this personal relationship with God? He says, surely I have first got to make an act of perfect contrition and love God with all my heart. Well, if that were so, we should be a long time being saved, shouldn't we? In fact, in a sense, he was proposing to himself an impossibility. How can I, in the natural bankruptcy me- bankruptcy of my human heart, love God enough to merit his love to me and his salvation. No, says the Apostle John, it's the other way round. We learn to love others, including God himself, as we first come to experience God's love to us. It is when I realize that Christ so loved me, loved me like he loved Judas, knowing the very worst, and when I was still his enemy, died for me. When I see Christ on the cross, see him, so to speak, suffering all my nastinesses and rebellions and kicks and ingratitude, in that very moment holding out to me the sop of God's love and friendship. When I'm at my very worst, he loves me best. And I see that my whole salvation depended on God loving me like that. It makes such an indelible im- impress, doesn't it? That when I am tempted to vent my spite on somebody who has injured me, even though in a sense I might feel my spite would be justified, but then I can't forget that if God had treated me like I now propose to treat that other fellow, where would I have been? And so, as he himself said, I have given you an example that you should do to others as I have done to you. So in this matter, as I come to know and realize and enjoy God's love to me first, I begin to love others. I love because he first loved me. And now we come back from that epistle of John to our chapter thirteen of the gospel once more, to prepare ourselves to move on to the third great lesson in the school of holiness. And we begin, as so frequently, with Simon Peter and one more of his mistakes. Simon Peter had obviously been very impressed with this whole incident and episode of the giving of the sop to Judas. His anger doubtless had boiled, his indignation, uh, come up like a volcano in his heart against Judas and the blackness and loathsomeness of Judas' mean sin. And I rather fancy he was, by contrast, being quite a little bit good. Well, rotten Judas. Now, for my part, you know, I would go anywhere for the Lord. I might not be a real saint as I ought to be always, every Friday at least, or every Tuesday afternoon, but in any way, I do love the Lord, and if holiness is a matter of post personal devotion to Christ, why, of course, I would be tops. I'd go anywhere, lay down my life for him. When our Lord began to speak, and he said, I'm going away. Simon Peter saith unto him, Lord, whither goest thou? Jesus answered, whither I go, thou canst not follow me now, but thou should follow me afterwards. Peter saith to him, Lord, why cannot I follow thee now? I will lay down my life for thy sake. And he really meant it, didn't he? We mustn't suppose this was mere words, mere ostentation, mere emotional excitement. He really meant it. A man that had the courage to take on the whole squad of soldiers single-handed when they came to arrest Christ. Yes, he thought his devotion w- to Christ was at least enough to see him right to prison and to death. One day, Christ would perfect that devotion, and Peter would follow Christ to prison and to death. But not just yet. Yes, he was a born again man. He had been bathed all over. But lurking still in his personality, there was a flaw, there was a fault, a fissure, so to speak, running far deeper than ever Peter realized. Within a few hours, to his utter consternation, he would find Satan work on that weakness in his character and lead him to deny the Savior. And so our Lord takes the occasion to preach us a third lesson, starting from his remarks with Peter. There never was a more wonderful thing, was there, in all Holy Scripture, than the effect that is gained by what John records here of our Lord's remarks. Verse thirty eight of chapter thirteen, followed by verse one of chapter fourteen. Jesus answered him, Wilt thou lay down thy life for me? Verily, verily, I say unto thee, the cock shall not crow till thou hast denied me thrice. Let not your heart be troubled. You say, but surely they were never meant to be read together in one breath. Surely the very prospect of denying the Lord ought to have filled his heart with dismay and trouble and uncertainty. Why, if he's going to deny the Lord, surely that imperils his whole salvation. Well, then let me read you the words again. Before the cock crow twice, thou shalt have denied me thrice. Let not your heart be troubled. Yes, we cannot repeat it too much. If we are going to make real progress in the school of holiness, we shall have to let the Lord teach us and confirm within us our utter security. It is a serious thing to deny the Lord as Peter denied him. But where it is a question, so to speak, of a Peter and not a Judas, a man that at heart does believe the Savior, has been born again, has put his faith in Christ. Then let there be however grave a weakness, and let his fallings and failings be never so big. And yet Christ stands to affirm that that man will never be lost. He can face life, whatever it will bring, however many failures and fallings, by the way, with this utter peace in his heart. Let not your heart be troubled. So far from that security leading to license, it is in fact a basic necessity. If we are going to be delivered as Christian people from our weaknesses, it will not be by some fairy wand. We shall not go to bed one Friday, miserably wretched, gnarled characters, and wake up Saturday morning perfect saints. Though I confess it would be nice, and sometimes I, I am tempted to wish I could live in a fairy land where I have only got to say one prayer or something, and hey, presto, I was sinlessly perfect. But it doesn't happen that way. We shall not be made holy without first being made to face our sins. We shall not be recovered from our weaknesses without first being made conscious of those weaknesses. The program of turning us into saints, holy people, were- is not going to turn us into machines and robots. Though Christ's strength is there all the way along the line, it won't be applied without our personal and willing cooperation. The finished product may and will have to be Christ living in me, but it will still be me. And what Christ is out to do is to not to obliterate our personality and substitute somebody else's personality, namely his own, but is to develop our personality. So, as Christ will put it, I live, yet it's not I, but Christ liveth in me, and yet it is I. And therefore, the process of making us holy will involve our Lord's allowing us to discover our weaknesses, and that process can be shattering indeed. How think you Peter felt when eventually he had denied the Lord? Wasn't only such a rotten thing to do, but it shattered Peter's self-respect. He thought till now he'd been getting on famously as a believer. Well, he wasn't perfect, but he did love the Lord, and he was a manly man, and he would stand for him. Now, the very thing in which Peter thought he was strong, therein he failed. It was such a shattering thing that if Peter hadn't have been absolutely confident in the love of Christ, it might have broken him completely. And therefore our Lord deliberately juxtaposes these two things. Peter, you shall deny me thrice, but fundamentally, let not your heart be troubled. For Christ has foreseen the weakness and made provision to deal with it. Of that ongoing provision, we must begin to think in our next session.