He was listened to, doubted, questioned, discussed, thought over, and then accepted. And He was accepted with a faith and with a love that counted not suffering nor sacrifice for the sake of Him whom they believed and trusted and loved.  John makes this clear, rejected and accepted.

Jesus divided the crowds.  Down the road He comes, with quiet strength, witnessing to the great simple truth of the Father’s pure strong wooing love.  And the crowd looks and listens and—­divides.  Some reject; clearly they are a minority, but entrenched in a position of power that proves quite sufficient for their purpose.  Though it took all the power at their command to carry out their purpose.

Others accept.  These are the crowds, the majority.  Some don’t understand.  Their motives are selfish or mixed, like some other folks’ motives.  Some are played upon by the cunning of the leaders and swung away.  But there remain the thoughtful ones whose faith goes from weakness to strength; it grows from more to yet more.  It mellows from a true simple faith to a deepened, seasoned, sorely-tested, surely-toughened faith that loves, loves clear down to the roots, and endures gladly.  This is the simple warp-thread into which John’s very simple story of Jesus is woven.

Spelling God.

I want to give you a bunch of keys, as we start into these homely talks in John’s Gospel.  They are simple keys.  Any one can use them.  They fit easily and smoothly into every lock, the lock of your life, the lock of any circumstance, any sore problem that may come up to baffle all your efforts.  They bring treasures within easy reach.  They open up the way into all you need.  There is a key to God, a key to the Book of God, and then there are three keys to this little John book.

The key to God is in one little word.  It has two spellings, sometimes with four letters, sometimes with five, and both correct spellings.  The four-lettered spelling is for all the world.  The five-lettered spelling is chiefly used in the western half of the earth, and along certain lines and in certain spots here and there in the eastern half where the word is known.

That first spelling is l-o-v-e.  God is love.  Love is of God. God is always controlled by a purpose in all His dealings with the race, and with you and me.  There is no chance-happening with Him, no caprice, no shadow in His path that tells of His being swerved aside, by anything we do, from a steady purpose.

And that controlling purpose is always a purpose of love. It’s a purpose of strong steady pure clinging brooding love.  The bother is we don’t know what that word love means; none of us.  We know words but not the real things they stand for.  We don’t know the real thing of love because we don’t know the real thing of God.  If we knew, oh! if we but knew it—­Him—­how that simple statement would melt us down, and mellow us through, and mould us all over anew!