John had the nearest, the dearest, the closest fellowship with Christ in the flesh. As he had laid his head upon Christ’s bosom, so had he laid all his thoughts and all the emotions of his mind upon the heart’s love and divine affection of his Lord and Master. But Christ was gone; it was no more possible to hear his voice, to see him with eyes, or to handle him with hands; yet John had not lost his fellowship, though he knew him no more after the flesh, yet he knew him after a nobler sort. Nor was his fellowship less real, less close, less sweet, or less divine, than it had been when he had walked and talked with him, and had been privileged to eat and drink with him at that last sacred feast. John says, “Truly our fellowship is”—not was—“is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.”

The highest aspiration of our spirit, when it is most enlarged, and most inflamed is, that he in all things may be glorified.

Looking at all the plan from the beginning to the end, do you not agree in it? Does it not strike you as being the wisest, the most gracious, the most glorious scheme that could have been devised? And as from its first fountain in predestination, onward to the ocean of glory, you traverse the ever-flowing stream, do you not say of it in all a matchless course, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his abundant mercy hath chosen us in him from before the foundation of the world, and who having chosen us, will glorify us and bring us to himself at the last?” Yes, there is not a single word that we would alter; there is not a line in this divine scheme that we would wish to change. If it approves itself to him, it certainly approves itself to us; if he chose it as the plan of divine operation, we adore his choice, we reverence both the wisdom and the love which planned and carried out the design.

Holiness is our pleasure, purity is our delight, and if we could but be perfect even as he is perfect, and freed from sin, even as God our Father, is freed from everything like iniquity, then we should be in heaven, for this is our happiness; the same happiness which God finds in purity and righteousness, we find in it too.

if the Father delights in his Son, even so do we delight in him, and such delight, that if we told it to the stranger, he would not believe us, and if we spoke it in the worldling’s ear, he would think us mad. Jesu, thou art the sun of our soul; thou art to us the river of which we drink, the bread of which we eat, the air we breathe; thou art the basis of our life and thou art the summit of it; thou art the prop, the mainstay, the pillar, the beauty, the joy of our being! If we have but thee, we can ask nothing besides, for thou art all in all, and if we have thee not, we are wretched and undone. So, then, we have fellowship with the Father, because that which is his happiness is most certainly our happiness.

“I would not change my bless’d estate
For all the world calls good or great.”
And if I had to die like a dog, and there were no hereafter, I would still prefer to be a Christian, and the humblest Christian minister to being a king or an emperor, for I am persuaded there are more delights in Christ; yea, more joy in one glimpse of his face than is to be found in all the praises of this harlot-world, and in all the delights which it can yield to us in its sunniest and brightest days.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon