“You will observe that the last word of our Lord’s prayer is concerning love. This is the last petition which He offers, ‘That the love wherewith Thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them.’ He reaches no greater height than this, namely, that His people be filled with the Father’s love. How could He rise higher? For this is to be filled with all the fullness of God, since God is love, and he that loveth dwelleth in God and God in him. What importance ought you and I attach to the grace of love! How highly we should esteem that which Jesus makes the crown jewel of all. If we have faith, let us not be satisfied unless our faith worketh by love and purifieth the soul. Let us not be content, indeed, until the love of Christ is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us. Well did the poet say,
‘Only love to us be given;
Lord, we ask no other Heaven;’
for indeed there is no other Heaven below, and scarcely is there any other Heaven above than to reach to the fullness of perfect love. This is where the prayer of the Son of David ends, in praying ‘that the love wherewith Thou hast loved me may be in them.’ What a subject! The highest that even our Lord Jesus reached in His noblest prayer. Again with groanings my heart cries, Holy Spirit, help!
“I. First, the food of love to God: What is it? It is knowledge. ‘I have made known unto them Thy name, and will make it known.’ We cannot love a God whom we do not know; a measure of knowledge is needful to affection. However lovely God may be, a man blind of soul cannot perceive Him, and therefore is not touched by His loveliness. Only when the eyes are opened to behold the loveliness of God will the heart go out toward God, who is so desirable an object for the affections. Brethren, we must know in order to believe; we must know in order to hope; and we must especially know in order to love. Hence the great desirableness that you should know the Lord and His great love which passeth knowledge. You cannot reciprocate love which you have never known, even as a man cannot derive strength from food which he has not eaten. Till first of all the love of God has come into your heart, and you have been made a partaker of it, you cannot rejoice in it or return it. Therefore our Lord took care to feed His disciples’ hearts upon the Father’s name. He labored to make the Father known to them. This is one of His great efforts with them, and He is grieved when He sees their ignorance and has to say to one of them, ‘Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? He that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Show us the Father?’ Study much, then, the word of God: be diligent in turning the pages of Scripture and in hearing God’s true ministers, that the flame of love within your hearts may be revived by the fuel of holy knowledge which you place upon it. Pile on the logs of sandal wood, and let the perfumed fires burn before the Lord. Heap on the handfuls of frankincense and sweet odors of sacred knowledge, that on the altar of your heart there may always be burning the sacred flame of love to God in Christ Jesus.
“The knowledge here spoken of is a knowledge which Jesus gave them. ‘I have known Thee, and these have known that Thou hast sent me. And I have declared unto them Thy name, and will declare it.’ O beloved! it is not knowledge that you and I pick up as a matter of book-learning that will ever bring out our love to the Father: it is knowledge given us by Christ through His Spirit. It is not knowledge communicated by the preacher alone which will bless you; for, however much he may be taught of God himself, he cannot preach to the heart unless the blessed Spirit of God comes and takes of the things that are spoken, and reveals them and makes them manifest to each individual heart, so that in consequence it knows the Lord. Jesus said, ‘O righteous Father! the world hath not known Thee!’ and you and I would have been in the same condition, strangers to God, without God and without hope in the world, if the Spirit of God had not taken of divine things and applied them to our souls so that we are made to know them. Every living word of knowledge is the work of the living God. If you only know what you have found out for yourself, or picked up by your own industry apart from Jesus, you know nothing aright: it must be by the direct and distinct teaching of God the Holy Ghost that you must learn to profit. Jesus Christ alone can reveal the Father. He Himself said: ‘No man cometh unto the Father but by me.’ He that knows not Christ knows not the Father, but when Jesus Christ reveals Him, ah! then we do know Him after a special, personal, peculiar, inward knowledge. This knowledge brings with it a life and a love with which the soul is not puffed up, but built up. By such knowledge we grow up into Him in all things who is our head, being taught of the Son of God.
“This knowledge, dear friends, comes to us gradually. The text indicates this: ‘I have declared unto them Thy name, and will declare it.’ As if, though they knew the Father, there was far more to know and the Lord Jesus was resolved to teach them more. Are you growing in knowledge, my brothers and sisters? My labor is lost if you are not growing in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. I hope you know much more of God than you did twenty years ago when first you came to Him. That little knowledge which you received by grace when you found ‘life in a look at the Crucified One’ has saved you; but in these after years you have added to your faith knowledge, and to your knowledge experience; you have gone on to know more deeply what you knew before, and to know the details of what you seemed to know in the gross and the lump at first. You have come to look into things as well as upon things—a look at Christ saves, but oh! it is the look into Christ that wins the heart’s love and holds it last and binds us to Him as with fetters of gold. We ought every day to be adding something to this inestimably precious store, that as we are known of God so we may know God, and become thereby transformed from glory unto glory through His Spirit.
“Are you not thankful for this blessed word of the Lord Jesus: ‘I will declare it,’ ‘I will make it known’? He did do so at His resurrection, when He taught His people things they knew not before; but He did so much more after He had ascended up on high when the Spirit of God was given. ‘He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.’ And now to-day in the hearts of His people He is daily teaching us something that we do not know. All our experience tends that way. When the Spirit of God blesses an affliction to us, it is one of the Saviour’s illuminated books out of which we learn something more of the Father’s name, and consequently come to love Him better: for that is the thing Christ aims at. He would so make known the Father, that the love wherewith the Father had loved Him may be in us, and that He Himself may be in us.
“This knowledge distinguishes us from the world. It is the mark by which the elect are made manifest. In the sixth verse of this chapter our Lord says: ‘I have manifested Thy name unto the men which Thou gavest me out of the world. Thine they were, and Thou gavest them me; and they have kept Thy word.’ The world does not know the Father, and cannot know Him, for it abides in the darkness and death of sin. Judge yourselves, therefore, by this sure test, and let the love which grows out of gracious knowledge be a token for good unto you.