Run through this Gospel with that fresh in your mind, and it is perfectly fascinating to find how much like a magnet it is, picking out to itself so many bits from the Master’s lips that fit exactly into it.  Jesus’ constant thought was that He used to be with the Father; He came down on an errand to the earth.  By and by when the errand was done He would go back home again.

This sentence becomes a simple, exact, comprehensive outline of the entire Gospel.  Notice:  “I came out from the Father”:  that is chapter one, verses one to eighteen.  There Jesus is seen coming down from His Father’s own presence.  Then chapter one, verse nineteen through to the close of the twelfth chapter is fully described and covered by the next clause, “and am come into the world.”  Here He is seen in the world, in the midst of its crowds and contentions and oppositions.

“Again, I leave the world,”—­chapters thirteen to nineteen.  In chapters thirteen to seventeen He is tenderly leaving the inner circle.  In chapters eighteen and nineteen He is going out of the world by the terrible doorway of the cross it had carpentered for Him.  How quietly He says the words, though the terrible going is yet to come, and is now so near that He can already feel the shame and the thorns and the nails.

And as quietly He looks beyond and adds, “and go unto the Father.”  In chapters twenty and twenty-one He lingers a little for the sake of these being left behind, but His face is already turned homeward.  They would hold Him in their midst.  He quietly tells them that He is going back home to the Father to get things ready for them, as He had said.

He Comes to His Own.

The front-door key hangs right at the very front, outside, low down, where even a child’s hand can reach it.  It is in chapter one, verses eleven and twelve:  “He came unto His own, and they that were His own received Him not.  But as many as received Him to them gave He the right to become children of God, even to them who believe on His name.”  This is the great key, the chief key to this whole house.  It flings the front door wide open and you are inside at once, and take in the whole of the house at a glance, one glance, one wonderful glance.

The first twelve chapters tell of Jesus coming to His own, His own nation, humanly, racially, His own chosen people.  He is coming steadily and persistently, in spite of rebuffs; coming patiently, tenderly, earnestly; coming ever closer in the ever increasing measure of divine power seen in His actions.

And continually, persistently, He is being rejected and accepted.  He is rejected silently and contemptuously, then aggressively and bitterly, viciously and murderously.  “His own received Him not.”  But many received Him, eagerly and warmly and thoughtfully.  They received Him with a growing depth of conviction and deepening tenderness of love.  And as they come, He is ever receiving them, giving them that touch of new life that marks only the children of God.