Quiet Talks on John's Gospel

Quiet Talks on John’s Gospel

By

S. D. Gordon

1915

Preface

Everything depends on getting Jesus placed. That lies at the root of all — living, serving, preaching, teaching. John had Jesus placed. He had Him up in His own place. This settles everything else. Then one gets himself placed, too, up on a level where the air is clear and bracing, the sun warm, and the outlook both steadying and stimulating. Get the centre fixed and things quickly adjust themselves about it to your eyes.

It will be seen very quickly that this little book makes no pretension to being a commentary on, or an exposition of, John’s Gospel. That is left to the scholarly folk who eat their meals in the sacred classical languages of the past. It is simply a homely attempt to let out a little of what has been sifting in these years past of this wondrous miniature Bible from John’s pen.

The proportions of this homely little messenger of paper and type may seem a little odd at first. The longest chapter is devoted to only the opening eighteen verses of John, the prologue. While the whole of the first twelve chapters of John, excepting that prologue, is brought into one smaller chapter. It wasn’t planned so, though I felt it coming as the wondrous mood of this book came down over me. I think it mast be the effect of the atmosphere of John’s book.

Sometimes John packs so much in so little space, and again he goes so particularly into the details of some one incident. The prologue is a miniature Bible. The whole Bible story is there in its cream. And on the other hand John spends five chapters (xiii.-xvii.), almost a fifth of the whole, on a single evening. He devotes seven chapters (xiii.-xix.), almost a third of all, on the events of twenty-four hours. John is controlled not by mere proportion of space or quantity, but by the finer proportions of thought and quality.

It has been difficult to hold these homely talks down to the limit of space they take here. So many veins of gold in this mine, showing clearly large nuggets of pure ore, lie just at hand untouched in this little mining venture. But it seemed clearly best to get the one clear grasp of the whole. That helps so much. But there’ll be strong temptation to get one’s pick and spade and go at this gold mine again.

But now these things are written that we common folk may understand a bit better, and in a warm way, that Jesus was God on a wooing errand to the earth; and that we may join the blest company of the won ones, and become co-wooers with God of the others.

S. D. G

Contents

I. John’s Story

II. The Wooing Lover

Who it was that came.

III. The Lover Wooing

A group of pictures illustrating how the wooing was done and how the Lover was received.

IV. Closer Wooing

An evening with opening hearts: the story of a supper and a walk in the moonlight and the shadows.

V. The Greatest Wooing

A night and a day with hardening hearts: the story of tender passion and of a terrible tragedy.

VI. An Appointed Tryst Unexpectedly Kept

A day of startling joyous surprises.

VII. Another Tryst

A story of fishing, of guests at breakfast, and of a walk and talk by the edge of blue Galilee.

The Heart-strings of God.

There’s a tense tugging at the heart of God. The heart-strings of God are tight, as tight as tight can be. For there’s a tender heart that’s easily tugged at one end, and an insistent tugging at the other. The tugging never ceases. The strings never slack. They give no signs of easing or getting loose.

It’s the tug of man’s sore need at the down-end, the man-end, of the strings. And it’s the sore tug of grief over the way things are going on down here with men, at the other end, the up-end, the heart-end, of the strings. It’s the tense pull-up of a love that grows stronger with the growth of man’s misunderstanding.

But the heart-strings never snap. The heart itself breaks under the tension of love and grief, grieved and grieving love. But the strings only strengthen and tighten under the strain of use.

Those heart-strings are a bit of the heart they’re tied to, an inner bit, aye the innermost bit, the inner heart of the heart. They are the bit pulled, and pulled more, and pulled harder, till the strings grew. Man was born in the warm heart of God. Was there ever such a womb! Was there ever such another borning, homing place!

It was man’s going away that stretched the heart out till the strings grew. The tragedy of sin revealed the toughness and tenderness of love. For that heart never let go of the man whom it borned. Man tried to pull away, poor thing. In his foolish misunderstanding and heady wilfulness he tried to cut loose. If he had known God better he would never have tried that. He’d never have started away; and he’d never have tried to get away.

For love never faileth. A heart — the real thing of a heart, that is, God’s heart — never lets go. It breaks; but let go? not once: never yet. The breaking only loosens the red that glues fast with a tighter hold than ever. The fibre of the heart — God’s heart — is made of too strong stuff to loosen or wear out or snap. Love never faileth. It can’t; because it’s love.

Now all this explains Jesus. It was man’s pull on these heart-strings that brought Him down. The pull was so strong and steady. It grew tenser and more insistent. And straight down He came by the shortest way, the way of those same heart-strings. For the heart-strings of God are the shortest distance between two given points, the point of God’s giving, going love, and the point of man’s sore need, given a sharper-pointed end by its very soreness.

It is a sort of blind pull, this pull of man on the heart of God; a confused, unconscious, half-conscious, dust-blinded, slippery-road sort of pulling, but one whose tight grip never slacks. Man needs God, but does not know it. He knows he needs _some_thing. He feels that keenly. But he does not know that it’s God whom he needs, with a very few rare exceptions. It doesn’t seem to have entered his head that he’ll never get out of his tight corner till God gets him out.

Down the street of life he goes, eyes blinded by the thick dust, ears deafened by the cries of the crowd, by the noise of the street without, and the noise of passions and fevered ambitions within, heart a-wearied by the confusion of it all, groping, stumbling, jostled and jostling, hitting this way and that, with the fever high in his blood, and his feet aching and bleeding; sometimes the polish of culture on the surface; _some_times rags and dirt; but underneath the same thing.

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