In a quiet market-town in the North of England an aged Christian had invited a number of those of whom our Lord says, "whensoever ye will ye may do them good," to take tea with him and his friends. After they had enjoyed what loving hands had made ready, their host took out God's book, and turning to the second verse of the fourteenth chapter of John's Gospel, read it, and then said, "It comes to me in this way, dear friends: If our Lord is preparing a place, He wants a prepared people."
He then went on to say that we all need preparing, that is making ready, to dwell in the place of which the Lord Jesus Christ spoke as "My Father's house"—the place which was always His own home—and then he told once again the story which you have so often heard—
"… the old, old story Of Jesus and His love."
The Lord often spoke to His own disciples about His Father. He said, "I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father," and when He spoke of leaving them He said, "If ye loved Me ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father." But we know that those who had been with their Master for so long did not rejoice when He spoke of going away: their hearts were filled with sorrow.
When He said to them, "Whither I go ye know, and the way ye know," Thomas replied; "Lord, we know not whither thou goest, and how can we know the way?"
What did the Lord say?
He said that He was Himself the way to the Father—"I am the way, and the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father but by Me."
But if the Lord was going back to His Father's House—the place which was always His home—He was not willing to go alone. He might have gone back at any time, but if He would have those who could neither cleanse nor clothe themselves, who were sinful and unfit for that Home of love and light, He must go by the way of death, giving up His own life, that He might make them ready to dwell with Him in His Father's house; so that when He said, "I go to prepare a place for you," He, the Son of God, in His wonderful love, was going to do that which alone could make anyone fit to enter there, and be at home for evermore.
But then we sometimes go on as if we were to live in this world for ever, and do not come to Him who says, "I am the way." Or perhaps we think we can make ourselves ready by trying to be good—forgetting that the One who is Himself the Truth said, "The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost," and that if the Lord is preparing a place, He wants a prepared people.
But we were speaking about the way in which God, when He made this world in which we live, prepared it for the creatures to whom He would give it to be their dwelling-place; and especially of the globe of air with which He has surrounded the earth—that wonderful ocean of air in which we live and move, just as the fish live and move in their ocean of water.