where the Spirit dwells and knows the mind of the Spirit. The Spirit who
dwells in our hearts searches the deep purposes and the will of God to
us, and reveals those purposes and that will of God, “that we might know
the things which are freely given to us of God.” Our spirits are so
fully indwelt by the Spirit of God, so responsive and obedient to His
illumination and to His will, that we ask with holy boldness and freedom
the things which the Spirit of God has shown us as the will of God, and
faith is assured. Then “we know that we have the petitions that we have
asked.”
The natural man prays, but prays according to his own will, fancy and
desire. If he has ardent desires and groanings, they are the fire and
agony of nature simply, and not that of the Spirit. What a world of
natural praying there is, which is selfish, self-centered,
self-inspired! The Spirit, when He prays through us, or helps us to meet
the mighty “oughtness” of right praying, trims our praying down to the
will of God, and then we give heart and expression to His unutterable
groanings. Then we have the mind of Christ, and pray as He would pray.
His thoughts, purposes and desires are our desires, purposes and
thoughts.
This is not a new and different Bible from that which we already have,
but it is the Bible we have, applied personally by the Spirit of God. It
is not new texts, but rather the Spirit’s embellishing of certain texts
for us at the time.
It is the unfolding of the word by the Spirit’s light, guidance,
teaching, enabling us to perform the great office of intercessors on
earth, in harmony with the great intercessions of Jesus Christ at the
Father’s right hand in Heaven.
We have in the Holy Spirit an illustration and an enabler of what this
intercession is and ought to be. We are charged to supplicate in the
Spirit and to pray in the Holy Spirit. We are reminded that the Holy
Spirit “helpeth our infirmities,” and that while intercession is an art
of so Divine and so high a nature that though we know not what to pray
for as we ought, yet the Spirit teaches us this Heavenly science, by
making intercession in us “with groanings which cannot be uttered.” How
burdened these intercessions of the Holy Spirit! How profoundly He feels
the world’s sin, the world’s woe, and the world’s loss, and how deeply
He sympathises with the dire conditions, are seen in His groanings which
are too deep for utterance and too sacred to be voiced by Him. He
inspires us to this most Divine work of intercession, and His strength
enables us to sigh unto God for the oppressed, the burdened and the
distressed creation. The Holy Spirit helps us in many ways.
How intense will be the intercessions of the saints who supplicate in
the spirit! How vain and delusive and how utterly fruitless and
inefficient are prayers without the Spirit! Official prayers they may
be, fitted for state occasions, beautiful and courtly, but worth less
than nothing as God values prayer.
It is our unfainting praying which will help the Holy Spirit to His
mightiest work in us, and at the same time He helps us to these
strenuous and exalted efforts in prayer.
We can and do pray by many inspirations and in many ways which are not
of God. Many prayers are stereotyped in manner and in matter, in part,
if not as a whole. Many prayers are hearty and vehement, but it is
natural heartiness and a fleshly vehemence. Much praying is done by dint
of habit and through form. Habit is a second nature and holds to the
good, when so directed, as well as to the bad. The habit of praying is a
good habit, and should be early and strongly formed; but to pray by
habit merely is to destroy the life of prayer and allow it to degenerate
into a hollow and sham-producing form. Habit may form the bank for the
river of prayer, but there must be a strong, deep, pure current, crystal
and life-giving, flowing between these two banks. Hannah multiplied her
praying, “but she poured out her soul before the Lord.” We cannot make
our prayer habits too marked and controlling if the life-waters be full
and overflow the banks.
Our divine example in praying is the Son of God. Our Divine Helper in
praying is the Holy Spirit. He quickens us to pray and helps us in
praying. Acceptable prayer must be begun and carried on by His presence
and inspiration. We are enjoined in the Holy Scriptures to “pray in the
Holy Ghost.” We are charged to “pray always with all prayer and
supplication in the Spirit.” We are reminded for our encouragement, that
“Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities; for we know not what
we should pray for as we ought; but the Spirit itself maketh
intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” “And he
that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit,
because He maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of
God.”
So ignorant are we in this matter of prayer; so impotent are all other
teachers to impart its lessons to our understanding and heart, that the
Holy Spirit comes as the infallible and all-wise teacher to instruct us
in this divine art. “To pray with all your heart and all your strength,
with the reason and the will, this is the greatest achievement of the
Christian warfare on earth.” This is what we are taught to do and
enabled to do by the Holy Spirit. If no man can say that Jesus is the
Christ but by the Spirit’s help; for the much greater reason can no man
pray save by the aid of God’s Spirit. Our mother’s lips, now sealed by
death, taught us many sweet lessons of prayer; prayers which have bound
and held our hearts like golden threads; but these prayers, flowing
through the natural channel of a mother’s love, can not serve the
purposes of our manhood’s warring, stormy life. These maternal lessons
are but the A B C of praying. For the higher and graduating lessons in
prayer we must have the Holy Spirit. He only can unfold to us the
mysteries of the prayer-life, its duty and its service.
To pray by the Holy Spirit we must have Him always. He does not, like
earthly teachers, teach us the lesson and then withdraw. He stays to
help us practise the lesson He has taught. We pray, not by the precepts
and lessons He has taught, but we pray by Him. He is both teacher and
lesson. We can only know the lesson because He is ever with us to
inspire, to illumine, to explain, to help us to do. We pray not by the
truth the Holy Spirit reveals to us, but we pray by the actual presence
of the Holy Spirit. He puts the desire in our hearts; kindles that
desire by His own flame. We simply give lip and voice and heart to His
unutterable groanings. Our prayers are taken up by Him and energised and
sanctified by His intercession. He prays for us, through us and in us.
We pray by Him, through Him and in Him. He puts the prayer in us and we
give it utterance and heart.
We always pray according to the will of God when the Holy Spirit helps
our praying. He prays through us only “according to the will of God.” If
our prayers are not according to the will of God they die in the
presence of the Holy Spirit. He gives such prayers no countenance, no
help. Discountenanced and unhelped by Him, prayers, not according to
God’s will, soon die out of every heart where the Holy Spirit dwells.
We must, as Jude says, “Pray in the Holy Ghost.” As Paul says, “with all
prayer and supplication in the Spirit.” Never forgetting that “the
Spirit also helpeth our infirmities; for we know not what we should pray
for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with
groanings which cannot be uttered.” Above all, over all, and through all
our praying there must be the Name of Christ, which includes the power
of His blood, the energy of His intercession, the fullness of the
enthroned Christ. “Whatsoever ye ask in my name that will I do.”
XV
THE TWO COMFORTERS AND TWO ADVOCATES
_If we were asked whose Comforter the Holy Spirit was, the answer
would be—Ours. The answer is not so ready when we are asked whose
Advocate He is. The Spirit is Christ’s Advocate, not ours. It is
Christ’s place He takes, Christ’s cause He pleads, Christ’s name He
vindicates, Christ’s Kingdom He administers._—SAMUEL CHADWICK.
The fact that man has two Divine Comforters, Advocates, Helpers, is
declarative of the affluence of God’s provisions in the gospel, and also
declarative of the settled purpose of God to execute His work of
salvation with efficacy and final success. Many-sided are the
infirmities and needs of man in his pilgrimage and warfare for Heaven.
These two Christs can meet with manifold wisdom.
The affluence of God’s provision of two Intercessors in executing the
plan of salvation finds its counterpart in the prayer promise in its
unlimited nature, comprehending all things, great and small. “All things
whatsoever ye ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.” All things we
have in Christ, all things we have in the Holy Spirit, and all things we
have in prayer.
How much is ours in God’s plan and purposes we have in these two
Christs, the one ascended to Heaven and enthroned, there to intercede
for our benefit, the other Christ, His Representative, and better
Substitute, on earth, to work in us and make intercessions for us!
The first Christ was a person. The other Christ, a person, but not
clothed in physical form nor subject to human limitations as the first
Christ necessarily was. Transient and local was the first Christ. The
other Christ not limited to locality, not transient, but abiding; not
dealing with the sensible, the material, the fleshly, but entering
personally into the mysterious and imperial domain of the spirit, to
emancipate and transform into more than Eden beauty that waste and dark
realm. The first Christ left His novitiates that they might enter into
higher regions of spiritual knowledge. The man Christ withdrew that the
Spirit Christ might train and school into the deeper mysteries of God;
that all the historical and physical might be transmuted into the pure
gold of the spiritual. The first Christ brought to us a picture of what
we must be. The other Christ mirrored this perfect and fadeless image on
our hearts. The first Christ, like David, gathered and furnished the
material for the temple. The other Christ out of this material forms
God’s glorious temple.
The possibilities of prayer, then, are the possibilities of these two
Divine Intercessors. Where are the limitations to results when the Holy
Spirit intercedes for us with groanings which cannot be uttered, when He
so helps us that our prayers run parallel to the will of God, and we
pray for the very things and in the very manner in which we ought to
pray, schooled in and pressed to these prayers by the urgency of the
Holy Spirit! How measureless are the possibilities of prayer when we are
filled with all the fullness of God; when we stand “perfect and complete
in all the will of God”?
If the intercession of Moses so wondrously preserved the being and
safety of Israel throughout its marvelous history and destiny, what may
we not secure through our Intercessor, who is so much greater than
Moses? All that God has lies open to Christ through prayer. All that
Christ has lies open to us through prayer.
If we have the two Christs covering the whole realm of goodness, power,
purity and glory, in Heaven and on earth—if we have the better Christ
with us here in this world—why is it that we sigh to know the Christ
after the flesh as the disciples knew Him? Why is it that the mighty
work of these two Almighty Intercessors finds us so barren of Heavenly
fruit, so feeble in all Christly principles, so low in the Christly
life, and so marred in the Christly image? Is it not because our prayers
for the Holy Spirit have been so faint and few? The Heavenly Christ can
only come to us in full beauty and power when we have received the
fullness of the present earthly Christ, even the Holy Spirit.
Living always the life of prayer, breathing always the spirit of prayer,
being always in the fact of prayer, praying always in the Holy Spirit,
the Heavenly Christ would become ours by a clearer vision, a deeper
love, and a more intimate fellowship than He was to His disciples in the
days of His flesh.
We would not disguise nor abate the fact that there is a loss to us by
our absent Christ as we will see and know Him in Heaven. But in our
earthly work to be done by us, and above all to be done in us, we will
know Christ and the Father better, and can better utilise them by the
ministry of the Holy Spirit than would have been possible under the
personal, human presence of the Son. So to the loving and obedient ones
who are filled with the Spirit, both the Father and the Son “Will come
unto us and make their abode with us.” In the day of the fullness of the
indwelling Spirit, “Ye shall know that I am in my Father and ye in me
and I in you.” Amazing oneness and harmony, wrought by the almighty
power of the other Christ!
There is not a note in the archangel’s song to which the Holy Spirit
does not attune man into sympathy, not a pulsation in the heart of God
to which the Holy Spirit-filled heart does not respond with loud amens
and joyful hallelujahs. Even more than this, by the other Christ, the
Holy Ghost, “we know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.” More
than this, by the Holy Spirit we are “filled with all the fullness of
God.” More than this, God is able to do exceeding abundantly above all
that we ask or think according to the power of the Holy Spirit which
worketh in us.
The presence and power of the other Christ would more than compensate
the disciples for the loss of the first Christ. His going away had
filled their hearts with a strange sorrow. A loneliness and desolation
like an orphan’s woe had swept over their hearts and stunned and
bewildered them; but He comforted them by telling them that the Holy
Ghost would be like the pains of a travailing mother, all forgotten in
the untold joy that a man-child was born into the world.
XVI
PRAYER AND THE HOLY GHOST DISPENSATION
_How God needs, how the world needs, how the Church needs the flow
of the mighty river, more blessed than the Nile, deeper, broader and
more overflowing than the Amazon’s mighty current! and yet what mere
rills we are! We need, the age needs, the Church needs, memorials of
God’s mighty power, which will silence the enemy and the avenger,
dumbfound God’s foes, strengthen weak saints, and fill strong ones
with triumphant raptures._
—EDWARD BOUNDS.
The dispensation of the Holy Ghost was ushered in by prayer. Read these
words from Acts 1:13—“And when they were come in, they went up into an
upper room where abode both Peter and James and John and Andrew, Philip
and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James, the son of Alpheus, and
Simon Zelotes, and Judas, the brother of James. These all continued with
one accord in prayer and supplication, with the women, and Mary, the
mother of Jesus, and with his brethren.”
This was the attitude which the disciples assumed after Jesus had
ascended to Heaven. That meeting for prayer ushered in the dispensation
of the Holy Spirit, to which prophets had looked forward with entranced
vision. And to prayer in a marked way has this dispensation, which holds
in its keeping the fortune of the Gospel, been committed.
Apostolic men knew well the worth of prayer and were jealous of the most
sacred offices which infringed on their time and strength and hindered
them from “giving themselves continually to prayer and to the ministry
of the Word.” They put prayer first. The Word depends on prayer that it
“may have free course and be glorified.” Praying apostles make preaching
apostles. Prayer gives edge, entrance and weight to the Word. Sermons
conceived by prayer and saturated with prayer are weighty sermons.
Sermons may be ponderous with thought, sparkle with the gems of genius
and of taste, pleasing and popular, but without they have their birth
and life in prayer, for God’s uses, they are trifles, dull and dead.
The Lord of the harvest sends out labourers, full in number and perfect
in kind, in answer to prayer. It needs no prophetic ken to declare that
if the Church had used prayer force to its utmost the light of the
gospel would have long since girdled the world.
God’s Gospel has always waited more on prayer than on anything else for
its successes. A praying Church is strong though poor in all besides. A
prayerless Church is weak though rich in all besides. Praying hearts
only will build God’s Kingdom. Praying hands only will put the crown on
the Saviour’s head.
The Holy Spirit is the Divinely appointed Substitute for and
representative of the personal and humanised Christ. How much is He to
us! And how we are to be filled by Him, live in Him, walk in Him, and be
led by Him! How we are to conserve and kindle to a brighter and more
consuming glow the holy flame! How careful should we be never to quench
that pure flame! How watchful, tender, loving ought we to be so as not
to grieve His sensitive, loving nature! How attentive, meek and
obedient, never to resist His Divine impulses, always to hear His voice,
and always to do His Divine will. How can all this be done without much
and continuous prayer?
The importunate widow had a great case to win against helpless, hopeless
despair, but she did it by importunate prayer. We have this great
treasure to preserve and enhance, but we have a Divine Person to
entertain and help. We can only be enabled to meet our duties by
exceeding much prayer.
Prayer is the only element in which the Holy Spirit can live and work.
Prayer is the golden chain which happily enslaves Him to His happy work
in us.
Everything depends upon our having this Second Christ, and retaining Him
in the fullness of His power. With the disciples, Pentecost was made by
prayer. With them, Pentecost was continued by giving themselves to
continued prayer. Persistent and unwearied prayer is the price we will
have to pay for our Pentecost, by instant and continued prayer. Abiding
in the fact and in the spirit of prayer is the only surety of our
abiding in Pentecostal power and purity.
Not only should the many-sided operation of the Holy Spirit in us and
for us, teach us the necessity of prayer for Him, but His condition with
our praying assumes another attitude, the attitude of mutual dependence,
that of action and reaction. The more we pray the more He helps us to
pray, and the larger the measure of Himself He gives to us. We are not
only to pray and press and wait for His coming to us, but after we have
received Him in His fullness, we are to pray for a fuller and still
larger bestowment of Himself to us. We are to pray for the largest and
ever-increasing and constant fullness of capacity. “That ye might be
strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man,” as Paul prayed
for the Spirit-baptised Ephesian Church. It will be remembered that He
also prayed that “Christ might dwell in your hearts by faith,” rooted
and grounded in love, measuring up to the breadth, length, depth and
height of the most perfect sainthood, and up to the immeasurable love of
Christ, being “filled with all the fullness of God.”
In that wonderful prayer for those Christians, Paul laid himself out to
pray to God, and by prayer he sought to fathom the fathomless depths and
to measure the illimitable purposes and benefits of God’s plan of
salvation for immortal souls by the presence and work of the Holy
Spirit. Only importunate and invincible prayer can bring the Holy Spirit
to us, and secure for us these ineffably gracious results. “Epaphras
always labouring fervently in prayers, that ye may stand perfect and
complete in all the will of God.”
The Word of God provides for a mighty, consciously realised religion in
His saints, into whose happy, shining spirits God has been brought as a
Dweller, and whose Heaven-toned lives have been attuned to melody by
God’s own hand.
Then will it prove true: “He that believeth on me, out of his belly
shall flow rivers of living water.” Here is a promise concerning the
indwelling and outflowing of the Holy Spirit in us, life-giving,
fructifying, irresistible, a ceaseless outflow of the river of God in
us.
How God needs, how the world needs, how the Church needs the flow of
this mighty river, more blessed than the Nile, deeper, broader, more
overflowing than the Amazon’s broad and mighty current! And yet what
mere rills we are and have!
O that the Church, by the infilling and outflowing of the Holy Spirit,
might be able to raise up everywhere memorials of the Holy Spirit’s
power, which might fix the eye as well as engage the heart! We need, the
age needs, the Church needs, memorials of God’s mighty power, which will
silence the enemy and the avenger, dumbfound God’s foes, strengthen weak
saints, and fill strong ones with triumphant raptures.
A glance at some more of the Divine promises concerning this vital
question would show us how they need to be projected into the
experimental and the actual. “If any man will do his will, he shall know
of the doctrine, whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself.” How
we do need a conscious religion, personal and vital, unspeakable in its
joy, and full of glory! The need is for a conscious religion, made so by
the Spirit bearing witness that we are the children of God. A religion
of “I know” is the only powerful, vital and aggressive religion. “One
thing I know, whereas I once was blind, but now I see.” We need men and
women in these loose days who can verify the above mentioned promise of
Christ in their inner consciousness. And yet how many untold thousands
of people in all of our churches, who have only a dim, impalpable, hope
so, maybe so, I trust so, kind of religion, all dubious, intangible and
unstable.
There is certainly a great need in these days in the modern Church,
first, for Christians to see and seek and obtain the high privilege in
the Gospel of a Heaven-born, clear cut, and happy religious experience,
born of the presence of the Holy Spirit, giving an undoubted assurance
of sins forgiven, and of adoption into the family of God.
And secondly, there is a need, subsequent to this conscious realization
of Divine favour in the forgiveness of sins, and added to it, of the
reception of the Holy Spirit in His fullness, purifying their hearts by
faith, perfecting them in love, overcoming the world, and bestowing a
Divine, inward power over all sin, both inward and outward, and giving
boldness to bear witness and qualifying for real religious service in
the Church and in the world.
There is a fearfully prevailing agnosticism along here in the Church
just at this time. We greatly fear that a vast majority of our Church
members are now in this school of spiritual agnosticism, and really deem
it to be a virtue to be there. God’s word gives no encouragement
whatever to a shadowy religion and a vague religious experience. It
calls us definitely into the realm of knowledge. It crowns religion with
the crown of “I know.” It passes us from the darkness of sin, doubt and
inward misgiving into the marvelous light, where we see clearly and know
fully our personal relations to God.
“The things unknown to feeble sense,
Unseen by reason’s glimmering ray,
With strong, commanding confidence,
Their heavenly origin display.”
Two things may be said just here in concluding this part of our study
upon this subject: First, this sort of Bible religion, hereinbefore
described, comes directly through the office of the Holy Spirit dealing
personally with each soul; and secondly, the Holy Spirit in all of His
offices pertaining to spiritual life and religious experience is secured
by earnest, definite, prevailing prayer.
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