JOHN xiv. 19. “Because I live, ye shall live also.”

OUR subject is a deeply mysterious one, life. What we all
want is to live livingly, and most people feel that they are
not living up to the intention of their being. So long as
there is this sense of the interval between the life a man
lives and the life he might live, there will never be any real
rest. Nothing really lives which does not live in its in-
tegrity, that is in all its parts. So that if a man’s body
and mind and affections live, but if his soul does not live,
that man can never live in the happy feeling of a full life.
There must be something for eternity in his life. There is
a difference between life and the energy of life. Living
energetically renders a man happy. Unless the soul be
right with God, and the inner life be busy for God, neither
the feelings, nor the understanding, nor the outer life of
any man can ever be what it ought.
I. The connection between the life of Christ and the life
of every Christian. “Because I live, ye shall live also.”
We live because Christ died and redeemed us from a state
of death, and thus made us capable of living. We know
that His death is the fountain of our life, because God,
in raising Him from the dead, gave an assurance that
He had accepted the atonement. So we live in the sweet
sense of life, and that comes to pass “Because I live.”
The power to live was given at Calvary, but the sustenta-
tion of that life is due to the glorified life of our interceding
Saviour. He watches over us, works in us and for us, in-
tercedes and sends us continually the Holy Spirit. It is
because He lives that we can live. Through sacraments,
and means of grace, and the silent influences of Divine
power, communications of life flow into a believer’s soul,
and his real feeling is, “I live, and yet not I, but Christ
liveth in me.”
II. The effect that life is intended to have upon the be-
liever. To as many as have indeed put on Christ, this life
is a resurrection life, and the question to be asked is, “Is
our present sojourn the counterpart of that interval of
Christ’s life between His resurrection and ascension?”
These forty days were busy days, full of activity, and one
is struck with the earnestness, fervour and intensity of our
Lord’s words in this period. He was as a man under the
continual conviction that life was short. Here is our
lesson. Again, He was always in the attitude to go; and
again, work for God was the thought which He was always
impressing upon others. This also is our lesson. Full,
earnest, on the wing, loving, holy, set to the great object of
the extension of His Father’s glory, this was the mode of
that life of which Christ speaks when He says, “Because I
live, ye shall live also.”
James Vaughan, M.A.