that sent Me; and none of you asketh Me, Whither goest Thou? But
because I have said these things unto you, sorrow hath filled
your heart.'--JOHN xvi. 1-6.

The unbroken flow of thought, and the many subtle links of connection
between the parts, of these inexhaustible last words of our Lord make
any attempt at grouping them into sections more or less
unsatisfactory and artificial. But I have ventured to throw these,
perhaps too many, verses together for our consideration now, because
a phrase of frequent recurrence in them manifestly affords a key to
their main subject. Notice how our Lord four times repeats the
expression, 'These things have I spoken unto you.' He is not so much
adding anything new to His words, as rather contemplating the reasons
for His speech now, the reasons for His silence before, and the
imperfect apprehension of the things spoken which His disciples had,
and which led to their making His announcement, thus imperfectly
understood, an occasion for sorrow rather than for joy. There is a
kind of landing place or pause here in the ascending staircase. Our
Lord meditates for Himself, and invites us to meditate with Him,
rather upon His past utterances than upon anything additional to
them. So, then, whilst it is true that we have in two of these verses
a repetition, in a somewhat more intense and detailed form, of the
previous warnings of the hostility of the world, in the main the
subject of the present section is that which I have indicated. And I
take the fourfold recurrence of that clause to which I have pointed
as marking out for us the leading ideas that we are to gather from
these words.

I. There is, first, our Lord's loving reason for His speech.