The Expositor's Bible: The Gospel of St. John, Vol. IIDods, Marcus
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Gospel of St. John, Vol. II
Dods, Marcus
Bible. John; Bible. John -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Why should we find it so hard to believe in that abundant life? There is
a sufficient source of physical life which upholds the universe and is
not burdened, which in continuance and exuberantly brings forth life in
inconceivably various forms. The world around us indicates a source of
life which seems always to grow and expand rather than to be exhausted.
So there is a source of spiritual life, a force sufficient to uphold all
men in righteousness and in eternal vitality of spirit, and which can
give birth to ever new and varied forms of heroic, holy, godly living—a
force which is ever pressing forward to find expression through all
moral beings, and capable of making all human action as perfect, as
beautiful, and infinitely more significant than the products of physical
life which we see around us. If the flowers profusely scattered by the
wayside are marvels of beauty, if the bodily frame of man and of the
other animals is continually surprising us with some new revelation of
exquisite arrangement of parts, if nature is so lavish and so perfect in
physical life, may we not believe that there is as rich a fountain of
moral and spiritual life? Nay, “the youths may faint and be weary, and
the young men utterly fall,” physical life may fail and in the nature of
things must fail, “but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their
strength, they shall run and not be weary.”
It is Jesus Christ who brings us into connection with this source of
life eternal—He bears it in His own person. In Him we receive a new
spirit; in Him our motive to live for righteousness is continually
renewed; we are conscious that in Him we touch what is undying and never
fails to renew spiritual life in us. Whatever we need to give us true
and everlasting life we have in Christ. Whatever we need to enable us to
come to the Father, whatever we shall need between this present stage of
experience and our final stage, we have in Him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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