Now, I want to give you the three keys to John's Gospel. There's a back-door key, a side-door key, and a front-door key. These keys hang outside the doors, low down, that so any one who wants to can easily reach up, and get them. And if used faithfully and simply they will be found to unlock every page and line and difficult question.

The back-door key hangs right at the back door. It is the very last verse of chapter twenty. That really was the last chapter at first. The thought of the book comes to a close there. The story is complete. Then the Holy Spirit led John to add a little, a second last-chapter, an added touch for good measure. Love is never content. It is always adding more.

Here is the key: "these are written that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye may have life through His name." This was John's whole thought in telling the Jesus-story. The practical gripped him wholly and hard. This is the thing that guides his selection of incidents. This purpose shapes the shape of the book. It explains everything told, and just why it is told in just the way it is told.

John lets Jesus walk before our eyes fresh from His Father's presence. The mere fact of His presence, the winsomeness of His personality, the clearness of His teaching, the power of His actions, the uncompromising purity of His character amidst sin-stained crowds and sin-dirtied surroundings, the unflinching rigidity of His ideals, the persuasiveness of His very manner and tone of speech, the patience and gentleness, the rugged granite strength, the mother tenderness, above all the willingness to suffer so terribly, -- all this is a plea, a tremendous overpowering plea, all the stronger because presented so simply and briefly. Jesus is a Lover and this is His wooing.

And John's one thought in writing is the same as the one thought in the Lover's heart. John has become simply an echo of Jesus. It is this, that you, whoever you are, wherever, whatever, that you may believe. You look and listen, question, puzzle a bit maybe, but keep on listening and looking, thinking, weighing, till you are clear these things are just so as John tells them. Yon accept them as trustworthy. Then you accept Him, Jesus, as He comes to you, your wooing Lover, your Lover-God, your Saviour and Lord.

You believe: that is you love. The grammar of the word works itself out inside you thus, -- believe, trust, love. The truth comes in through eyes and ears and feeling, into brain and will; through emotion clear down into your heart. You love. You cannot help yourself. You love Him, Jesus, the One so lovable.

John says that you may believe. It is possible. It is the reasonable intelligent thing to do after such a presentation. John makes it easy for us to believe. His telling of the story is so strong and convincing, though so simple and short, that believing is the natural thing. Jesus Himself, as He conies to us through John's eyes and speech, is so believable, so trustworthy, so lovable.

Now we may believe. It's the thing to do after a thoughtful kneeful study of the case as put by John. We may believe clear into and through intellect and emotions and will, right down into the depths of heart and love, clear out into every action of the life.

And John sweeps in the whole crowd of the world in the way he puts it here. Listen: "that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ." That was for the Jew peculiarly in the first instance. The Jew had been taught through generations that there was One coming who was God's chosen One for the Hebrew nation. He was the Anointed One. The Hebrew said Messiah. The Greek said Christ. Both mean the same, the One chosen of God, anointed by Him as the King and Leader of His chosen people, and through them of all the race.

Listen further: "that Jesus is the Son of God." That is for all of us, Jew and foreigner, insider and outsider. This Jesus is in a distinctive sense the Son of God, the only begotten Son. This pure loving pleading wooing suffering dying rising-again Jesus, this is the only begotten Son of the Father. All there is in a Father comes to, and is in, an only begotten son. This is God Himself coming to us in His Son.

Once let this sift into thought and heart, then who would not believe, and trust, and love, and fall on his face in the utter devotion of a voluntary slave before such a God!

And so believing, trusting, loving, touching, His life flows in and fills up and floods out. We have it now. That word eternal, used so often by John with the word life, is not a mere length word. It is not a calendar word. It tells the sort of life, the quality of life, that comes in through the opening door of our believing. This is John's back-door key, but it lets you clear in through the whole house.

Then there is the side-door key. It hangs at the side, a bit towards the back. It is in the Thursday night talk, as we commonly call it, that last heart-talk with the inner group on the betrayal night. It is in chapter sixteen, verse twenty-eight: "I came out from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go unto the Father."

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.