There is a difficulty in seizing the precise meaning of the word "world." It seems an airy, subtle, impalpable thing, that world of St. John. It refuses to be described, to be precipitated, to be measured, to be defined. It is not the wicked, though they are its victims. It is not Satan, though the Scriptures call him its prince, as presiding over it and rejoicing in it. It is an atmosphere, a temper, a spirit, a power real and most energetic, but dread and invisible. It has hung for ages this world like a dark murky cloud over the heart of humanity. It poisons the very air we breathe. It is that warp in the aim and affections of the soul which makes of each of the objects of this visible creation, and of the circumstances of life, a distinct hindrance to getting to heaven. Let us note the character of its influence.
I. First of all, it works secretly and without being suspected. Observe the language which we use with regard to it in daily life. When we speak of the world, we uniformly assume that it is something outside us. The world disguises itself; it is like Satan showing himself in the character of an angel of light; it seeks to be habitually respectable, it dislikes gross sin, it affects very particularly to cultivate the social virtues. It can be prudent, like the old prophet; it can be wise, like Ahithophel; it can be courageous as was Saul; it can be very pious indeed, like the false apostles of the Church of Corinth.
II. The world has a marvellous versatility, a power of self-adaptation to all ages and races and classes. There may be a difference of form; there is a marvellous and awful unity of spirit. The spirit of the world is contagious; it passes, like an infection, from soul to soul.
III. What was the relation of our Lord to the Jewish world in His day and generation? It could not receive His spirit; it rejoiced at His departure. It rested not, that world, till it had led Him to the Cross. And, therefore, His resurrection was not merely a conquest of death, not merely the crowning proof of His Divinity; it was a triumph over the power that had killed Him. It was the conquest of the world. "Be of good cheer," He said, in full view of His Easter triumph; "I have overcome the world."
H. P. Liddon, Penny Pulpit,No. 3847.
The Mystery of Peace
I. The mystery of peace, for the disciples, as for us, could be clearly shown by teaching two truths. (1) First, the Lord brought out to them, as seen in the fact of His conflict, the meaning of the outer life of the Christian. That outer life, so it appeared, was to take its meaning and derive its trial from antagonism with one overwhelming power. In the world ye shall have tribulation. There lay before the Christian, if he had strength to be a Christian, a long and necessary course of trial. (2) But the tribulation is turned to excellent uses. Trial is the school of obedience; trial is the means of growth of character; trial is the method of discipline; trial is the training of faith. There is this sad fact of the outer life of the Christian; but the silence of the winter world witnesses to the coming life of spring; the narrow wrapping of the narrow bud witnesses to the opening flower; the dark night witnesses to the morning; the outer struggle of the Christian witnesses to the inner life.
II. Examine some of the conditions of the mystery of peace. (1) First, we plainly need the forgiveness of sin. Resistance; the onward march of a struggling soul; the yearning towards, the crying for, the seeking after forgiveness; these are needed; then for Christ is unfailing in His promise it is the peace, the real rest of the weary, not the stillness and lethargy of decay. (2) "First the kingdom of God and His righteousness" is a condition of peace. When the soul is learning to act in this life on the principles of another to live, to move, to work, in fact, "in Christ" then, like the consistent calmness of the sunlight on the quiet summer day, then, like the majesty of stillness in the unfathomed azure of the summer night then, there is peace. (3) As a condition of peace we must surrender an attractive principle and adopt one at least apparently severe. To have this treasure of peace, so fair, so needed, we must be freed from a tyrannous and trembling anxiety to please ourselves.
III. We are led to peace (1) by Christ's example; (2) by faith in His blood; (3) by growth in grace.
W. J. Knox-Little, The Mystery of the Passion,p. 137.
There is clearly a negative rolled up in this sentence. It is this: that there is no peace out of Christ.
I. Let us be careful that we understand what the peace of God is. It is the feeling of being forgiven a quiet conscience a stilling sense of the love of God. That is the first thing. Then, growing out of that, it is a certain contemplative habit of mind that deals silently with unseen things, which lives up high enough not to be tossed and anxious much about the matters which concern the present world. For it is the repose of faith, a trust in promises, a sense of a Father's love, a Father's nearness, a Father's care the hush of a little child leaning on His bosom.
II. It is of immense importance to have that peace, because (1) first, it is the sweetest and the best and the only satisfying of all possessions. It meets the deepest longings of a man's heart. Pleasure is man's delight, but peace is man's necessity. No man is complete till he has peace. No man knows what he can be the capabilities of his own nature, or what enjoyment is till he is at peace. (2) Peace is the root of all holiness. To believe that you are pardoned, to be at leisure from the retrospect, to carry a conscience at ease, to take the unruffled reflection of Christ, even as Christ did of the Father that is the atmosphere of a daily religious life, and that is the secret of every good thing. (3) Peace is the fulfilment of the work of Christ. Then the eloquence of the Cross has not been in vain. Then His word has accomplished its grand design. "These things have I spoken unto you, that in Me ye might have peace."
III. Three rules for peace. (1) Be more decided. Decision is the parent of peace. Take some steps at once heavenward, and it may be that one step will land you in peace. (2) Confess Christ; confess Him in the world; do not be ashamed of your better portion; begin to speak of Christ to somebody. (3) And lastly, go up and down more in Christ His work, His person, His beauty, His grace. Listen for His still small voice. He will speak. You will hear Him, and you will feel Him a strange grand reality a thing that comes and does not go away again, like everything else peace.
J. Vaughan, Sermons,1868, p. 37.
In the world ye have tribulation! Such is our cry when we think of the thousand pains and miseries which we have endured in the year that is gone, when we remember the labour and trouble that we have passed through, eating our bread in the sweat of our brow, sighing under the burden and heat of the day. These are but our own troubles, and life would be an easy thing if each had only his own burden to bear, if the manifold grief of others did not also lie heavy on our hearts.
I. What was the tribulation of which the Lord speaks in the words of our text? A new Divine life had sprung up for the disciples in their Redeemer a life which the world neither possessed nor understood. They were to bring that life to the world. And the world was hostile to them; not only was it unwilling to receive the life of God, but it would not even listen to the story of that life; it had no heart for the love which God had shown it, no eye for the truth of grace which shone in upon its darkness. So the disciples had tribulation in the world; and their tribulation is ours also. We feel that this is a world of sin. We know the terrible power with which sin rules in the world at large, and in the little world which each man carries within him.
II. "Be of good cheer," says the Lord; "I have overcome the world." He who speaks thus was no idle spectator of our sorrows, but One who Himself fought a battle such as none ever fought before or since. At the very moment when His fiercest conflict was about to begin, He calls to us in these words from the clear joyous heights in which His being had its home. And was not the battle He fought the fiercest ever engaged in? He bore Himself in the contest as no warrior ever did before. There was not one moment of defeat during all that conflict. He was victor from first to last. The fiercer the battle, the more glorious was His victory. And the glorified Victor calls now to us: "Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." For him who follows, the world is overcome already. This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.
R. Rothe, Predigten,p. 70.
The Duty of the Church to the World
I. The world is nothing less than this any one of God's works enjoyed or possessed without God, be it what it may the world contemplated without that counterpoise in the other world that exists, and was meant to exist, to prevent us from being slaves of this. Without this love of God which lifts a man above this present world, he must, whether pagan or Christian, become necessarily the slave of the world, the subject of its rule, the very servant of its whims and its caprices. He becomes a very man of the world in the very lowest and poorest sense of the word not daring to be his own master, but the very servant, not even of the world in its largest and best sense, but of that little fragment of the world and of society to which he appears to belong.
II. We live, every one of us, or we are in danger of living, in the most abject slavery to the world to which we belong. And what will set us free? The truth, and the truth alone, makes man free the truth that teaches each one of us that we are redeemed and immortal spirits, telling us that we belong not to ourselves nor yet to our party, nor yet to our world, but to the God in heaven Who made us and will judge us, and has redeemed us. This alone gives a man the courage that comes forth from the very depths of self-sacrifice and humiliation before his Lord and Master, to rise up, and in His name, in the name of His law and in the power of His might, to defy the smaller laws to break through the stringent customs, to brave the hostile opinions of the world in which he lives. And the man who cannot do this is not yet made free with the glorious liberty of a son of God. He is overcome by the world; he has not yet learned to overcome the world.
III. It is not, and never was, the duty of the Church to conform herself to the spirit of the age. It is the duty of the Church to instruct the age, to love the age, and if need be to rebuke the age, but never yet in its whole history has it been her duty to conform to the spirit of the age. And yet, on the other hand, how deeply and intensely it is the duty of the Church to understand and sympathise with her age to be in very deed a dweller amongst men. She is to go forth wherever men are, and, in the name of her Divine Master, who died to redeem humanity, whatever men are doing and thinking, she is to say with an infinitely deeper meaning than it had on the lips of Him who first said it: "We are human, and there is nothing in or of our age that we can count estranged from us." The Church is to be of her day, and yet of all days and of all ages; having truths deeper, and facts greater, and laws and powers mightier to speak of and to reveal, than even the facts and the truths and the laws which science is revealing to us now. In this way only can the Church hope to overcome the world.
Bishop Magee, Penny Pulpit,No. 579.
References: John 16:33. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxii., No. 1327; Ibid., Morning by Morning,p. 124; Contemporary Pulpit,vol. xi., p. 304; Preacher's Monthly,vol. iii., p. 278; G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines,p. 361; J. Aldis, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xi., p. 129; J. H. Kitchens, Ibid.,vol. xiii., p. 203; E. Johnson, Ibid.,vol. xxii., p. 137; New Outlines on the New Testament,p. 67; W. M. Taylor, Three Hundred Outlines on the New Testament,p. 97. John 17:1. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxv., No. 1464; Contemporary Pulpit,vol. x., p. 363; J. M. Neale, Sermons in a Religious House,vol. ii., p. 588; F. D. Maurice, Gospel of St. John,p. 411; J. Armstrong, Parochial Sermons,p. 230; W. Braden, Christian. World Pulpit,vol. xiii., p. 168; C. Stanford, Evening of Our Lord's Ministry,pp. 151, 157; C. Kingsley, Good News of God,p. 12; Homilist,vol. vii., p. 382. Joh 17:1, John 17:2. Homiletic Magazine,vol. viii., p. 72; vol. ix., p. 137.