The Gospel According to St John Author:Alexander Maclaren Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: darkness of sin. Self-sacrifice at the bidding of Jesus Christ is the recipe for the highest, the most exquisite, the most godlike gladnesses of which the human ... more »heart is capable. Our joy will remain if His joy is ours. Then our joy will be, up to the measure of its capacity, ennobled, and filled, and progressive, advancing ever towards a fuller possession of His joy, and a deeper calm of that pure and perennial rapture, which makes the settled and celestial bliss of those who have ' entered into the joy of their Lord.' Brother! there is only one gladness that is worth calling so—and that is, that which conies to us, when we give ourselves utterly away to Jesus Christ, and let Him do with us as He will. It is better to have a joy that is central and perennial—though there may be, as there will be, a surface of sorrow and care— than to have the converse, a surface of joy, and a black, unsympathetic kernel of aching unrest and sadness. In one or other of these two states we all live. Either we have to say, ' as sorrowful yet always rejoicing,' or we have to feel that ' even in laughter the heart is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness.' Let us choose for ourselves, and let us choose aright, the gladness which coils round the heart, and endures for ever, and is found in submission to Jesus Christ, rather than the superficial, fleeting joys which are rooted on earth and perish with time. THE ONENESS OF THE BRANCHES 'This is My commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved yon. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his lite for his friends.'—John xv. 12,13. The union between Christ and His disciples has been tenderly set forth in the parable of the Vine andthe branches. We now turn to the union between the disciples, which is the conse...« less