THE LORD’S CARE
I refer to these scriptures as they convey some impression of the Lord’s present service to us. We are apt to think a great deal of the Lord’s service historically and rightly so, what He did in going to the cross and the expression of His love in dying for us. But the Lord would have us to be up-to-date in the sense of His love for us. He said, “When I was with them I kept them ...” How well they were kept! Criticised by the Pharisees, because they ate on the sabbath, the Lord took up the question. What a sense they must have had of His protecting love and care for them. “I kept them in thy name”. He kept them in relation to the Father’s name, the Father’s love and grace. He says, “I have guarded”. How full that service the gospels tell us about!
In this chapter they heard Him pray. He leaves them with the impression that they were going to be as safe in His absence as they had been in His presence. That is what He would convey to us in this time in which we are, a sense of His protecting love in the circumstances that we pass through. In sorrows and family exercises and local exercises He would give us a sense of His love and priestly service of love and grace. He says, “I sanctify myself for them”. It simply means that He is fully engaged in serving His own, whatever circumstances come into our lives in weakness of body and other things that cause doubts and fears in our minds. Think of the Lord speaking to the Father about you and me. He reminds the Father of His children and their needs. The Lord says, “for your heavenly Father knows that ye have need of all these things”, Matt 6: 32. The Lord speaks there about clothing and our need of food and all these things and He says, “your heavenly Father knows”. Here the Lord is saying, “I sanctify myself for them”. What an occupation! Think of Christ being received up in glory, His service on earth completed, and while He is awaiting His public vindication, He has sanctified Himself to serve the saints. It tells us more about it later on in Ephesians, what He has given in view of the edifying of the body, in view of that time when He will receive us to Himself, not jaded, not having the marks of the world about us. He says, “They are not of the world”. That is what will be seen when He receives us to Himself, a heavenly company, fruit of His gracious service, through this long dispensation, suited to be with Him in the realm of glory where He is. May we be helped to know more and count in faith on the Lord’s present service, as He has sanctified Himself for us.
As I have said, He leaves them with the impression that they were going to be as safe in His absence as they had been when He was with them. Well, we do not always believe that, but I believe He left that impression, and these disciples had a real sense of that. In the Acts when they were persecuted, Peter in the prison, the prison gates open and the angel led him out. That was the Lord’s service, sending an angel. Paul was stoned and the Lord raised him up. These were outstanding circumstances maybe, but we could all point to having known something in our own lives of the Lord’s real, present service to preserve us. The Lord’s movements in resurrection were wholly connected with His own. He was not then feeding five thousand, raising dead or cleansing lepers. He was engaged in the forty days with His own and that has continued through the dispensation, that he is serving His own so that they are not overcome but are sustained in the grace, and the joy that He represents as being there for them before the Father. That is the great point in John 17, I think, that the saints may have some knowledge of the joy of our place in Christ before the Father and He has sanctified Himself that we may be maintained in that place.
And then He says to them, “I will not leave you orphans”. What a sense of loss they must have felt as they heard the Lord speaking about going away! Peter, when He spoke to them about it earlier said, Lord this shall in nowise be. He did not want Him to go. The Lord says, “I will not leave you orphans”. He has loved us too much to leave us in an orphan condition, however much we may think it at times. We all pass through exercises when we think that nobody has ever known the depths and sorrows that we are tasting. You are never without a friend. You are never without a Father in this sense. The Lord takes a fatherly place, the great Provider: “I will not leave you orphans”. How precious these words! Then He says, “I am coming to you”, coming with all the wealth and the grace of heaven to us in the circumstances in which we are. May we make room for Him! I am sure this is largely collective but it also has an individual side. In verse 21 it says, “I will love him and will manifest myself to him”. That is you in your individual circumstances, at work or school or family life, whatever it may be.
Well, I believe there is a need for faith operative in our hearts to know something of the wealth of what is flowing from Him as ascended above and what He would bring to us collectively and individually. May it encourage our hearts for His Name’s sake!
KIRKCALDY
7th March 1995