Revelation of the Fatherhood of God Judaism any more.” Monotheism was in Judaism; the reve lation of God was in Judaism; but that was nothing to the disciples now that they had seen that glorious vision of His Father made known to men in Jesus Christ His Son. It would seem to follow that our attitude towards Jesus Christ is deter minative of our life in the Father, and that the imagination that we have a life in the Father that rests on a rejection of the claims of Jesus Christ is an imagination with no founda tions under it at all. Take those great words of our Lord: He that loveth me not keepeth not my words; and the word which ye hear is not mine, but the Father’s who sent me. If a man love me, he will keep my word: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him and make our abode with him.” All through these last discourses of Jesus you come upon the two terms, “word” and “words.” In the Greek they are not just the singular and the plural of the same word. The word that is translated word” here,is the same word that in the beginning of this Gospel is translated “word,” logos, which does not mean the utterances of Jesus, which does not mean the things that Jesus said, which does not mean the ideals of life that Jesus erected. We are not complying with that con dition when we try to be kind and unselfish and to obey the Golden Rule. What Jesus is setting forth there as the condi tion of a right attitude toward God is a man’s acceptance of the inner secret of His own life, a man’s deliberate committing of himself to the great principles that underlie the character and the person of Jesus, a sympathetic union with Himself. And He summed it all up in those words to Philip, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” It is in this sense, I say, that you and I cannot honestly declare that we “believe in God the Father” unless we go right on to say, “And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord,” for we know practically nothing about God as Father except what was revealed of God as Father in Him Who said, “I and the Father are one.” Do we believe in the fatherhood of God in that sense ?
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