12 “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. 13 When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. 14 He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. 15 All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you. (John 16:12-15)
I. THE AVOWED INCOMPLETENESS OF CHRIST’S OWN TEACHING (ver. 12).
1. Earlier we have our Lord asserting that all things whatsoever He had heard of the Father He had made known unto His servants. Is it possible to make these two representations agree? Yes! There is a difference between the germ and the flower; between principles and complete development. All Euclid is in the axioms and definitions, yet when you have learned them there are many things yet to be said, of which you have not grown to the apprehension. And so our Lord, as far as confidence and fundamental and seminal principles were concerned, had declared all that He had heard. But yet, in so far as the unfolding of these was concerned, the tracing of their consequences, the exhibition of their harmonies, the weaving of them into an ordered whole in which a man’s understanding could lodge, there were many things which they were not able to bear. And so our Lord declares that His spoken words on earth are not the completed revelation.
2. We cannot but contrast the desultory, brief, obscure references which came from the Master’s lips with the more systematized and full teaching which came from the servants, especially in reference to the atoning character of His sufferings.
3. What then? The above text gives us the reason. “You cannot bear them now,” not in the sense of endure, tolerate, or suffer, but in the sense of carry. And the metaphor is that of some weight — it may be gold, but still it is a weight — laid upon a man whose muscles are not strong enough to sustain it. It crushes rather than gladdens. So our Lord was lovingly reticent. There is a great principle involved here. A wise physician does not flood that diseased eye with full sunshine, but puts on bandages, and closes the shutters, and lets a stray beam, ever growing as the cure is perfected, fall upon it.
(1) So from the beginning until the end of the process of revelation there was a correspondence between man’s capacity to receive the light, and the light that was granted; and the faithful use of the less made them capable of receiving the greater. “To him that has shall be given.”(2) Now that same principle is true about us. How many things there are which we sometimes feel we should like to know, but compassed with these veils of flesh and weakness we have not yet eyes able to behold the ineffable glory. Let us wait with patience until we are ready for the illumination.
4. People tell us, “Your modern theology is not in the Gospels. We stick by Jesus, not Paul.” What then? Why this, it is exactly what we were to expect; and people who reject the apostolic form of Christian teaching because it is not found in the Gospels are going clean contrary to Christ’s own words.
II. THE COMPLETENESS OF THE TRUTH INTO WHICH THE SPIRIT GUIDES (ver. 13).
1. Note the personality, designation, and office of this new Teacher. “He,” not it, He, is the Spirit of Truth. “He will guide you” — suggesting a loving hand put out to lead — “into all truth.” That is no promise of omniscience, but the assurance of gradual and growing acquaintance with the truth which is revealed, such as may be fitly paralleled by men passing into some broad land of which, there is much still to be possessed and explored. “He shall not speak of Himself, &c. Mark the parallel between the relation of the Spirit-teacher to Jesus and the relation of Jesus to the Father. “All things whatsoever I have heard of the Father I have declared unto you.” The mark of Satan is “He speaks of his own;” the mark of the Divine Teacher is, “He speaks not of Himself, but whatsoever things,” in all their variety, in their continuity, in their completeness, He shall hear. Where? Yonder in the depths of the Godhead — whatsoever things He shall hear — “there, He shall show to you.” And especially, “He will show you the things that are to come.” Step by step there would be spread out before them the vision of the future and all the wonder that should be, the world that was to come, the new constitution which Christ was to establish.
2. Now, if that be the interpretation, then —
(1) This promise of a complete guidance into truth applies in a peculiar and unique fashion to the original hearers of it. One of the other promises of the Spirit was the certificate to us of the inspiration and reliableness of these four Gospels. In these words there lie involved the inspiration and authority of the apostles as teachers of religious truth. And so for us the task is to receive the truth into which they were guided. The Acts of the Apostles is the best commentary on these words. There you see how these men rose at once into a new region; how the things about their Master which had been bewildering puzzles to them flashed into light. In the book of the Apocalypse we have part of the fulfilment of “He will show you things to come;” when the seer was “in the Spirit” on the Lord’s day, and so the heavens were opened, and the history of the Church was spread before him as a scroll.
(2) This great principle has an application to us. That Divine Spirit is given to each of us if we will use it. Only we do not stand on the same level as these men. They, taught by that Divine Guide and by experience, were led into the deeper apprehension of the words and the deeds of Jesus. We, taught by that same Spirit, are led into a deeper apprehension of the words which they spoke. And so we come sharp up to this. “If any man thinks himself to be a prophet, or spiritual,” &c. That is how an apostle put his relation to the other possessors of the Divine Spirit. And you and I have to take this as the criterion of all true possession of the Spirit of God that it bows in humble submission to the authoritative teaching of this book.
III. THE UNITY OF THESE TWO.
1. “He shall glorify Me.” Think of a man saying that! So fair is He, so good, so radiant, that to make Him known is to glorify Him. The glorifying of Christ is the ultimate and adequate purpose of everything that God the Father, Son, and Spirit has done, because the glorifying of Christ is the glorifying of God, and the blessing of the eyes that behold His glory.
2. “For He will take what is Mine, and declare it to you.” All that that Divine Spirit brings is Christ’s. So, then, there is no new revelation, only the interpretation of the revelation. Christ said, “I am the Truth.” Therefore, when He promises, “He shall guide you into all the truth,” we may fairly conclude that the “truth” into which the Spirit guides is the personal Christ. We are like the first settlers upon some great island-continent. There is a little fringe of population round the coast, but away in the interior are leagues of virgin forests and fertile plains stretching to the horizon, and snow-capped summits piercing the clouds, on which no foot has ever trod.
3. “All things that the Father has are Mine, therefore said I,” &c. (ver. 15). What amazing words! Is that what you think about Jesus Christ? He puts out here an unpresumptuous hand, and grasps all the constellated glories of the Divine nature, and says, “They are Mine;” and the Father looks down from heaven and says, “Son, You are ever with Me, and all that I have is Yours.” Do you answer, “Amen! I believe it?“
Conclusion:
1. Believe a great deal more definitely in, and seek a great deal more earnestly, and use a great deal more diligently that Divine Spirit that is given to us all. I fear that over very large tracts of professing Christendom men only stand up with very faltering lips and confess, “I believe in the Holy Spirit.” Hence comes much of the weakness of our modern Christianity, the worldliness of professing Christians.
2. Use the book that He uses — else you will not grow, and He will have no means of contact with you.
3. Try the spirits. If anything calling itself Christian teaching comes to you and does not glorify Christ, it is self-condemned. And if the great teaching Spirit is to come who is to “guide us into all truth,” and therein is to glorify Christ, and to show us the things that are His, then it is also true, “hereby know we the Spirit of God,” &c
Here’s an instance where the Holy Spirit revealed through St John the Apostle the things that are to come (i.e. our destiny). “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is”. (1 John 3:2)
The present is the prophet of the future, says the above text: “We are God’s children now, and (not “but”) what we will be has not yet appeared.” Some men say, ‘Ah! now are we, but we shall be–nothing!’ John does not think so. John thinks that if a man is a son of God he will always be so.
I. THE FACT, OF SONSHIP MAKES US QUITE SURE OF THE FUTURE. It seems to me that the strongest reasons for believing in another world are these two — first, that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead and has gone up there; and, second, that a man here can pray and trust and love God, and feel that he is His child. “We are the children of God now” — and if we are children now, we shall be grown up some time. Childhood leads to maturity. And not only the fact of our sonship avails to assure us of immortal life, but also the very form which our religious experience takes points in the same direction. “The child is father of the man”; the bud foretells the flower. In the same way the very imperfections of the Christian life, as it is seen here, argue the existence of another state where all that is here in the germ shall be fully matured, and all that is here incomplete shall attain the perfection which alone will correspond to the power that works in us. There is a great deal in every nature, and most of all in a Christian nature, which is like the packages that emigrants take with them, marked “Not wanted on the voyage.” These go down into the hold, and they are only of use after landing in the new world. If I am a son of God I have got much in me that is “not wanted on the voyage,” and the more I grow into His likeness the more I am thrown out of harmony with the things around me in proportion as I am brought into harmony with the things beyond.
II. SONSHIP LEAVES US IGNORANT OF MUCH IN THE FUTURE. “We are the sons of God, and,” just because we are, “it is not yet made manifest what we shall be.” John would simply say to us, “There has never been set forth before men’s eyes in this earthly life of ours an example, or an instance, of what the sons of God are to be in another state of being.” And so because men have never had the instance before them they do not know much about that state. In some sense there has been a manifestation through the life of Jesus Christ. But the risen Christ is not the glorified Christ. The chrysalis’s dreams about what it would be when it was a butterfly would be as reliable as a man’s imagination of what a future life will be. So let us feel two things — let us be thankful that we do not know, for the ignorance is a sign of the greatness; and then, let us be sure that just the very mixture of knowledge and ignorance which we have about another world is precisely the food which is most fitted to nourish imagination and hope.
III. OUR SONSHIP FLINGS AN ALL-PENETRATING BEAM OF LIGHT ON THAT FUTURE, in the knowledge of our perfect vision and perfect likeness. “We know that when He appears, we shall be like Him for we shall see Him as He is.”
When He appears’–to what period does that refer? It seems most natural to take the manifestation here as being the same as that spoken of only a verse or two before. ‘And now, little children, abide in Him, and when He shall be manifested, we may have confidence, and not be ashamed before Him at His coming’ {2. 28}. That ‘coming’ then, is the ‘manifestation’ of Christ; and it is at the period of His coming in His glory that His servants ‘shall be like Him, and see Him as He is.’
To behold Christ will be the condition and the means of growing like Him. That way of transformation by beholding, or of assimilation by the power of loving contemplation, is the blessed way of ennobling character, which even here, and in human relationships, has often made it easy to put off old vices and to clothe the soul with unwonted grace. Men have learned to love and gaze upon some fair character, till some image of its beauty has passed into their ruder natures. To love such and to look on them has been an education. The same process is exemplified in more sacred regions, when men here learn to love and look upon Christ by faith, and so become like Him, as the sun stamps a tiny copy of its blazing sphere on the eye that looks at it. But all these are but poor, far-off hints and low preludes of the energy with which that blessed vision of the glorified Christ shall work on the happy hearts that behold Him, and of the completeness of the likeness to Him which will be printed in light upon their faces.
As a bit of glass when the light strikes it flashes into sunny glory, or as every poor little muddy pool on the pavement, when the sunbeams fall upon it, has the sun mirrored even in its shallow mud, so into your poor heart and mine the vision of Christ’s glory will come, moulding and transforming us to its own beauty. With unveiled face reflecting as a mirror does, the glory of the Lord, we ‘shall be changed into the same image.’ ‘We shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.’
Dear brethren, all begins with this, love Christ and trust Him and you are a child of God! ‘And if children, then heirs, heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ.’
Rock Of Faith 
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