P. Johnson
“And I am no longer in the world, and these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep them in thy name which thou hast given me, that they may be one as we” (John 17:11).
“And this is the eternal life, that they should know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3).
Eternal life = Goes beyond something that is just endless, but it brings in the thought of the knowledge, communion, and fellowship of divine Persons.
We are brought into a life where there is fellowship with the Father and His Son, and this in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Resources that He leaves us with through the grace of God:
- Eternal Life
- His Precious Word
- Himself as an Object
- The Glory as Our Hope
Appendix
Notes from The Girdle of Truth: Fellowship with the Father and the Son (1 John 1):
Fellowship
“The great purpose of God, in all His dealings in grace, is to bring us — and to bring us individually too — into fellowship with Himself […] ‘we dwell in Him and He in us.’ There cannot be anything more intimate.”
The Epistle of John vs. the Writings of Paul
“Although the Epistle of John is very abstract, yet it is abstract about things that the very feeblest saint knows in Christ. God can come down to us in our weakness, in Christ. The difference between the writings of Paul and John is this, that Paul unfolds to us the counsels of God in creation — the counsels of God towards the Jews; (there are various developments of Christ’s person, as in Hebrews and Colossians); but John may be called more abstract because he speaks of the nature of God Himself. The purpose and object of God are to bring us into full fellowship with Himself.”
New Nature
“There must be a new nature capable of affections towards God. […] The capacity to love God is that which we get by being partakers of the divine nature. The Holy Ghost is that which gives us the competency to enjoy these things. There must be 1). our standing in the presence of God without our conscience being at work at all; 2). a nature capable of enjoying God — a new nature; and 3). power to walk in the new nature, which is by the Holy Ghost dwelling in us.”
The Truth of Having Christ
“If they have Christ, then they have all that the Father has, all that is revealed of Him: and they cannot go from that without being wrong. They have got eternal life, the perfect revelation of God — the power of life in Christ. This is what is presented to us as the full enjoyment and the safeguard of the saint.
Knowledge
“My soul ought to know Christ better every day. […] The question of knowledge is to give place to Christ.”
The Secret of Joy
“And it is as we study the Lord Jesus Christ that we shall have affections established towards Him, which nothing can break … The secret of our joy is to know the love of Christ to us; and then we have confidence in Him, understanding that God has come so near as to reveal Himself, and inspire confidence. The more that we go out and study Christ — the more we penetrate into His ways — the more we learn the depth of all these riches in Him, the more is His divine fulness revealed to us. If it is His taking little children up into His arm that I see, I see in that what God’s character really is. ‘He that has seen me, has seen the Father.'”