'The wind bloweth where it listeth.' Of course, in these days of
weather forecasts and hoisting cones, we know that the wind is subject
to as rigid physical laws as any other phenomena. But Jesus Christ
speaks here, as the Bible always speaks about Nature, from two points
of view—one the popular, regarding the thing as it looks on the
surface, and the other what I may call the poetico-devout—finding
'sermons in stones, books in the running brooks,' and hints of the
spiritual world in all the phenomena of the natural. So, just as in
spite of meteorological science, there has passed into common speech
the proverbial simile 'as free as the wind,' so Jesus Christ says here,
'The wind bloweth where it listeth, … so is every one that is born of
the Spirit.' He passes by the intermediate link, the Spirit that is the
parent of the life, and deals with the resulting life and declares that
it is self-impelled and self-directed. Is that a characteristic to be
desired or admired? Is doing as we list precisely the description of
the noblest life? It is the description of the purely animal one. It is
the description of an entirely ignoble and base one. It may become the
description of an atrociously criminal one. But we do not generally
think that a man that says 'Thus I will; thus I command; let the fact
that I will it stand in the place of all reason,' is speaking from a
lofty point of view.
But there are two sorts of 'listing.' There is the listing which is the
yielding to the mob of ignoble passions and clamant desires of the
animal nature within us, and there is the 'listing' which is obeying
the impulses of a higher will, that has been blended with ours. And
there you come to the secret of true freedom, which does not consist in
doing as I like, but in liking to do as God wishes me to do. When our
Lord says 'where it listeth,' He implies that a change has passed over
a man, when that new life is born within him, whereby the law, the
known will of God, is written upon his heart, and, inscribed on these
fleshly tables, becomes no longer an iron force external to him, but a
vital impulse within him. That is freedom, to have my better will
absolutely conterminous and coincident with the will of God, so far as
I know it. Just as a man is not imprisoned by limits beyond which he
has no desire to go, so freedom, and elevation, and nobility come by
obeying, not the commands of an external authority, but the impulse of
an inward life.
'Ye have not received the spirit of bondage,' because God hath given us
the Spirit of power, and of love, and of self-control, which keeps down
that base and inferior 'listing,' and elevates the higher and the
nobler one, 'Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty,'
because duty has become delight, and there is no desire in the new and
higher nature for anything except that which God enjoins. The true
freedom is when, by the direction of our will, we change 'must' into 'I
delight to do Thy will.' So we are set free from the bondage and burden
of a law that is external, and is not loved, and are brought into the
liberty of, for dear love's sake, doing the will of the beloved.
'Myself shall to my darling be
Both law and impulse,'
says one of the poets about a far inferior matter. It is true in
reference to the Christian life, and the 'liberty wherewith Christ hath
made us free,'
But, then, in order freely to understand the sweep and the greatness of
this perfect law of liberty, we must remember that the new life is
implanted in us precisely in order that we may suppress, and, if need
be, cast out and exorcise, that lower 'listing,' of which I have said
that it is always ignoble and sometimes animal. For this freedom will
bring with it the necessity for continual warfare against all that
would limit and restrain it—namely, the passions and desires and
inclinations of our baser or nobler, but godless, self. These are, as
it were, deposed by the entrance of the new life. But it is a dangerous
thing to keep dethroned and discrowned tyrants alive, and the best
thing is to behead them, as well as to cast them from their throne. 'If
ye, through the Spirit, do put to death the deeds' and inclinations and
wills 'of the flesh, ye shall live'; and if you do not, they will live
and will kill you. So the freedom of the new life is a militant
freedom, and we have to fight to maintain it. As Burke said about the
political realm, 'the price of liberty is eternal vigilance,' so we say
about the new life of the Christian man—he is free only on condition
that he keeps well under hatches the old tyrants, who are ever plotting
and struggling to have dominion once again.
Still further, whilst this new life makes us free from the harshness of
a law that can only proclaim duty, and also makes us free from our own
baser selves, it makes us free from all human authority. The true
foundation of the Christian democracy is that each individual soul has
direct and immediate access to, and direct and real possession of, God,
in his spirit and life. Therefore, in the measure in which we draw into
ourselves the new life and the Spirit of God shall we be independent of
men round us, and be able to say, 'With me it is a very small matter to
be judged of you or of man's judgment.' That new life ought to make men
_original_, in the deep and true sense of the word, as drawing their
conceptions of duty and their methods of life, not at second hand from
other men, but straight from God Himself. If the Christian Church was
fuller of that divine life than it is, it would be fuller of all
varieties of Christian beauty and excellence, and all these would be
the work of 'that one and the selfsame Spirit dividing to every man
severally as He will.' If this congregation were indeed filled with the
new life, there would be an exuberance of power, and a harmonious
diversity of characteristics about it, and a burning up of the
conventionalities of Christian profession such as we do not dream of
to-day. 'The wind bloweth where it listeth.'