Jesus is God coming down into our midst and giving His own very life, and then, more, giving it out in death, that He might make us hate sin, and might woo and win the whole world, away from sin, back to the intimacies of the old family circle again.

On a Wooing Errand.

Jesus was a mirror held up to the Father’s face for man to look in.  So we may know what the Father is like.  When you look at Jesus and listen to Him you are looking into the Father’s heart and listening to its warm throbbing.  And no one can look there without being caught by the great passion burning there, and feeling its intense soft-burning glow, and carrying some of it for ever after in his own heart.

Jesus was on a wooing errand to the earth.  The whole spirit of His dealings with men was that of a great lover, wooing them to the Father.  He was insistently eager to let men know what His Father was like.  He seemed jealous of His Father’s reputation among men.  It had been slandered badly.  Men misunderstood the Father.  He would leave no stone unturned to let men know how good and loving and winsome God is.  For then they would eagerly run back home again to Him.  This was His method of approach to the world He came to win.

Jesus is the greatest wooer the old world has ever known, and will be the greatest winner of what He is after, too.  Run thoughtfully through these Gospels, and stand by Jesus’ side in each one of these simple, tremendous incidents of His contact with the common people.  Then listen anew to His teaching talks, so homely and so gripping.  And the impression becomes irresistible that the one thought that gripped at every turn, never forgotten, was to woo man back to the Father’s allegiance.

Jesus’ World-passion.

Have you not marked the world-wide swing of Jesus’ thought and plan?  It is stupendous in its freshness and bold daring.  The bigness of His idea of the thing to be done is immense.  To use a favorite phrase of to-day, He had a world-consciousness.  It is hard for us to realize what a startling thing His world-consciousness was.  We are so familiar with the Gospels that we lose much of their force through mere rote of familiarity.

It takes a determined effort, and the fresh touch of the Holy Spirit, too, to have them come with all the freshness of a new book.  And then we have gotten sort of used in our day, and in our part of the world especially, to talking about world-wide enterprises.

We don’t realize what a stupendous thing a world-consciousness was in Jesus’ day.  He certainly did not get it from His own generation; not from the Jews.  It stands out in keen contrast to their ideas.  They lived within very narrow alleyways.  They supposed they were the favorites of God; and everybody else—­dogs, and damned dogs, too; not in the profane usage, but actually.

But Jesus thought of a world, and yearned for a world.  The words “world” and “earth” are constantly on His lips.  He said He came “into the world;” not to Palestine; that was only the door He used for entrance.  It was from Him that John learned, what he wrote down, that He was to “lighten every man that cometh into the world.”