(On Trinity Sunday.)
TEXT: JOHN iii. 1-8.
WHEN the Saviour promised to His disciples the Spirit, who, after His own departure from the earth, was to come upon them abundantly, He said to them, He will take of Mine and give unto you, and thereby He will glorify Me in and through you. We have once more completed the circle of our memorial festivals, from His birth to the fulfilment of that promise; and now, without being reminded, by the universal custom of the Church, of any specially great event in the times of the founding of Christianity, we have before our Christian assemblies a long period of quiet meditation. What better can we wish for that period, than that this very Spirit who glorifies Christ may be always among us, so that each of our devout meditations may exalt Him in our eyes, and that thus, through His having a more constant and active power in us, He may be also more and more glorified through us.
It is therefore my purpose, in the period on which we are entering, to follow the words of the Saviour that I have just quoted; we will take of His own, that His Spirit may more and more enlighten us and glorify Him before us. They shall be words which the evangelists have preserved for us as His own; the most direct sayings from His lips, with which we intend during this time to connect our meditations. If, then, His Spirit is actually among us, if Christ becomes increasingly glorious to us through our study of His words, our inward parts more and more enlightened by the eternal, divine light, which He brought from heaven, our hearts more and more purified; we shall then, when the next time of commemorating our Lord comes round, return with new joy and gratitude to the beautiful circle of our Christian festivals, and anew, with yet purer spirit and in a way more worthy of Him, participate in adoring remembrance of His birth, His sufferings and His glorification.
And with what words can we better begin the series of our proposed meditations, than with one of those which most closely connect the festival period just closed with that which lies before us? The Saviour has now, as it were, completed anew before our eyes His work, of the chief points in which our Church festivals were meant to remind us; He has taken to Himself flesh and blood, He has become obedient, even to the death of the cross, He has comforted and instructed His people, He has sent down the promised Spirit after His own final departure from the world, and prepared His disciples for the founding and extension of His kingdom. Now as He generally began His work of teaching by inviting men into the kingdom of God, which had come near to them, we may suitably begin by asking, How are we to attain, or how have we at some former time attained to our part in the Saviour’s benefits? How does His kingdom still go on extending in the present day? The remarkable saying of the Saviour which we have taken as the ground of our meditation, gives a clear answer to these questions.
In this whole conversation of the Saviour with Nicodemus, it is very difficult to understand the precise connection, more so than in most of the Saviour’s other discourses; but we shall not be surprised at this if we reflect how it is with ourselves when we wish to communicate our most important thoughts, and are limited to a brief conversation in which to do so. We cannot in such a case bestow the usual pains and attention on so arranging our discourse that the other shall instantly take up our meaning; we cannot so enlarge that all the bearings of one thought on another shall become quite obvious; but, knowing that only a little time is granted us, we feel constrained, and strive to give expression only to what is most important, to comprise in few words a real wealth of thoughts and to impress these thoroughly on the hearer, so that he may afterwards reflect more minutely on their import, and may then be able to discover what at present escapes him. It was in this position, so far as such a comparison can be made at all, that Christ here found Himself. He was only rarely in the capital, on the occasions of the great feasts, and this man could only come to Him during the night. Hence the Saviour hastens to point out to the inquiring man the main points on which every thing depends; hence the conversation that must contain so much, passes abruptly from one great thought to another; and it is possible that John also may have had too little room to communicate much in the course of the conversation which would have given us here and there clearer insight into the connection.
But the chief of all the weighty matters which our Lord had to say to Nicodemus is just the answer to the question we have proposed. A man must be born anew, else he cannot see the kingdom of God. One life must be destroyed and give place to another—the life of the flesh to the life of the Spirit: that is the only way in which any one can enter the kingdom of God; the new birth is the only manner in which new numbers are ever being won to it. The inquirer has various objections to this, and the Saviour removes them; but certainly in a way which we may believe left him still much to think about, and intimated to him that nothing but a higher personal experience would help him to a full clearness of understanding. Let us take the same course, by considering that a man comes into the kingdom of God only through the new birth of the Spirit. We will first make plain to ourselves, according to the Saviour’s words, our common understanding of this in its simple truth: secondly, we will see what objections the masters in Israel have now as then against this doctrine; and thirdly, how we know of no other information or advice to give on the subject than what the Saviour said to Nicodemus.