IS THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD STRAITENED?

'O thou that art named the house of Jacob, is the Spirit of the

Lord straitened? Are these His doings?'--MICAH ii. 7.

The greater part of so-called Christendom is to-day[1] celebrating the

gift of a Divine Spirit to the Church; but it may well be asked whether

the religious condition of so-called Christendom is not a sad satire

upon Pentecost. There seems a woful contrast, very perplexing to faith,

between the bright promise at the beginning and the history of the

development in the future. How few of those who share in to-day's

services have any personal experience of such a gift! How many seem to

think that that old story is only the record of a past event, a

transient miracle which has no kind of relation to the experience of the

Christians of this day! There were a handful of believers in one of the

towns of Asia Minor, to whom an Apostle came, and was so startled at

their condition that he put to them in wonder the question that might

well be put to multitudes of so-called Christians amongst us: 'Did you

receive the Holy Ghost when you believed?' And their answer is only too

true a transcript of the experience of large masses of people who call

themselves Christians: 'We have not so much as heard whether there be

any Holy Ghost.'

[1] Whitsunday

I desire, then, dear brethren, to avail myself of this day's

associations in order to press upon your consciences and upon my own

some considerations naturally suggested by them, and which find voice in

those two indignant questions of the old Prophet:--'Is the Spirit of the

Lord straitened?' 'Are these'--the phenomena of existing popular

Christianity--'are these His doings?' And if we are brought sharp up

against the consciousness of a dreadful contrast, it may do us good to

ask what is the explanation of so cloudy a day following a morning so

bright.

I. First, then, I have to ask you to think with me of the promise of the

Pentecost.

What did it declare and hold forth for the faith of the Church? I need

not dwell at any length upon this point. The facts are familiar to you,

and the inferences drawn from them are commonplace and known to us all.

But let me just enumerate them as briefly as may be.

'Suddenly there came a sound, as of the rushing of a mighty wind, and it

filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared cloven

tongues as of fire, and it sat upon each of them; and they were all

filled with the Holy Ghost.'

What lay in that? First, the promise of a Divine Spirit by symbols which

express some, at all events, of the characteristics and wonderfulness of

His work. The 'rushing of a mighty wind' spoke of a power which varies

in its manifestations from the gentlest breath that scarce moves the

leaves on the summer trees to the wildest blast that casts down all

which stands in its way.

The natural symbolism of the wind, to popular apprehension the least

material of all material forces, and of which the connection with the

immaterial part of a man's personality has been expressed in all

languages, points to a divine, to an immaterial, to a mighty, to a

life-giving power which is free to blow whither it listeth, and of which

men can mark the effects, though they are all ignorant of the force

itself.

The other symbol of the fiery tongues which parted and sat upon each of

them speaks in like manner of the divine influence, not as destructive,

but full of quick, rejoicing energy and life, the power to transform and

to purify. Whithersoever the fire comes, it changes all things into its

own substance. Whithersoever the fire comes, there the ruddy spires

shoot upwards towards the heavens. Whithersoever the fire comes, there

all bonds and fetters are melted and consumed. And so this fire

transforms, purifies, ennobles, quickens, sets free; and where the fiery

Spirit is, there are energy, swift life, rejoicing activity,

transforming and transmuting power which changes the recipient of the

flame into flame himself.

Then, still further, in the fact of Pentecost there is the promise of a

Divine Spirit which is to influence all the moral side of humanity.

This is the great and glorious distinction between the Christian

doctrine of inspiration and all others which have, in heathen lands,

partially reached similar conceptions--that the Gospel of Jesus Christ

has laid emphasis upon the _Holy_ Spirit, and has declared that holiness

of heart is the touchstone and test of all claims of divine inspiration.

Gifts are much, graces are more. An inspiration which makes wise is to

be coveted, an inspiration which makes holy is transcendently better.

There we find the safeguard against all the fanaticisms which have

sometimes invaded the Christian Church, namely, in the thought that the

Spirit which dwells in men, and makes them free from the obligations of

outward law and cold morality, is a Spirit that works a deeper holiness

than law dreamed, and a more spontaneous and glad conformity to all

things that are fair and good, than any legislation and outward

commandment could ever enforce. The Spirit that came at Pentecost is not

merely a Spirit of rushing might and of swift-flaming energy, but it is

a Spirit of holiness, whose most blessed and intimate work is the

production in us of all homely virtues and sweet, unpretending

goodnesses which can adorn and gladden humanity.

Still further, the Pentecost carried in it the promise and prophecy of a

Spirit granted to all the Church. 'They were all filled with the Holy

Ghost.' This is the true democracy of Christianity, that its very basis

is laid in the thought that every member of the body is equally close to

the Head, and equally recipient of the life. There is none now who has a

Spirit which others do not possess. The ancient aspiration of the Jewish

law-giver: 'Would God that all the Lord's people were prophets, and that

the Lord would put His Spirit upon them,' is fulfilled in the

experience of Pentecost; and the handmaiden and the children, as well as

the old men and the servants, receive of that universal gift. Therefore

sacerdotal claims, special functions, privileged classes, are alien to

the spirit of Christianity, and blasphemies against the inspiring God.

If 'one is your Master, all ye are brethren,' and if we have all been

made to drink into one Spirit, then no longer hath any man dominion over

our faith nor power to intervene and to intercede with God for us.

And still further, the promise of this early history was that of a

Spirit which should fill the whole nature of the men to whom He was

granted; filling--in the measure, of course, of their receptivity--them

as the great sea does all the creeks and indentations along the shore.

The deeper the creek, the deeper the water in it; the further inland it

runs, the further will the refreshing tide penetrate the bosom of the

continent. And so each man, according to his character, stature,

circumstances, and all the varying conditions which determine his power

of receptivity, will receive a varying measure of that gift. Yet it is

meant that all shall be full. The little vessel, the tiny cup, as well

as the great cistern and the enormous vat, each contains according to

its capacity. And if all are filled, then this quick Spirit must have

the power to influence all the provinces of human nature, must touch the

moral, must touch the spiritual. The temporary manifestations and

extraordinary signs of His power may well drop away as the flower drops

when the fruit has set. The operations of the Divine Spirit are to be

felt thrilling through all the nature, and every part of the man's being

is to be recipient of the power. Just as when you take a candle and

plunge it into a jar of oxygen it blazes up, so my poor human nature

immersed in that Divine Spirit, baptized in the Holy Ghost, shall flame

in all its parts into unsuspected and hitherto inexperienced brightness.

Such are the elements of the promise of Pentecost.

II. And now, in the next place, look at the apparent failure of the

promise.

'Is the Spirit of the Lord straitened?' Look at Christendom. Look at all

the churches. Look at yourselves. Will any one say that the religious

condition of any body of professed believers at this moment corresponds

to Pentecost? Is not the gap so wide that to fill it up seems almost

impossible? Is not the stained and imperfect fulfilment a miserable

satire upon the promise? 'If the Lord be with us,' said one of the

heroes of ancient Israel, 'wherefore is all this come upon us?' I am

sure that we may say the same. If the Lord be with us, what is the

meaning of the state of things which we see around us, and must

recognise in ourselves? Do any existing churches present the final

perfect form of Christianity as embodied in a society? Would not the

best thing that could happen, and the thing that will have to happen

some day, be the disintegration of the existing organisations in order

to build up a more perfect habitation of God through the Spirit? I do

not wish to exaggerate. God knows there is no need for exaggerating. The

plain, unvarnished story, without any pessimistic picking out of the

black bits and forgetting ail the light ones, is bad enough.

Take three points on which I do not dwell and apply them to yourselves,

dear brethren, and estimate by them the condition of things around us.

First, say whether the ordinary tenor of our own religious life looks

as if we had that Divine Spirit in us which transforms everything into

its own beauty, and makes men, through all the regions of their nature,

holy and pure. Then ask yourselves the question whether the standard of

devotion and consecration in any church witnesses of the presence of a

Divine Spirit. A little handful of people, the best of them very

partially touched with the life of God, and very imperfectly consecrated

to His service, surrounded by a great mass about whom we can scarcely,

in the judgment of charity, say even so much, that is the description of

most of our congregations. 'Are these His doings?' Surely somebody

else's than His.

Take another question. Do the relations of modern Christians and their

churches to one another attest the presence of a unifying Spirit? 'We

have all been made to drink into one Spirit,' said Paul. Alas, alas!

does it seem as if we had? Look round professing Christendom, look at

the rivalries and the jealousies between two chapels in adjoining

streets. Look at the gulfs between Christian men who differ only on some

comparative trifle of organisation and polity, and say if such things

correspond to the Pentecostal promise of one Spirit which is to make all

the members into one body? 'Is the Spirit of the Lord straitened? Are

these _His_ doings?'

Take another branch of evidence. Look at the comparative impotence of

the Church in its conflict with the growing worldliness of the world. I

do not forget how much is being done all about us to-day, and how still

Christ's Gospel is winning triumphs, but I do not suppose that any man

can look thoughtfully and dispassionately on the condition, say, for

instance, of Manchester, or of any of our great towns, and mark how the

populace knows nothing and cares nothing about us and our Christianity,

and never comes into our places of worship, and has no share in our

hopes any more than if they lived in Central Africa, and that after

eighteen hundred years of nominal Christianity, without feeling that

some malign influence has arrested the leaping growth of the early

Church, and that somehow or other that lava stream, if I might so call

it, which poured hot from the heart of God in the old days has had its

flow checked, and over its burning bed there has spread a black and

wrinkled crust, whatsoever lingering heat there may still be at the

centre. 'If God be with us, why has all this come upon us?'

III. And now, lastly, let us think for a moment of the solution of the

contradiction.

The indignant questions of my text may be taken, with a little possibly

permissible violence, as expressing and dismissing some untrue

explanations. One explanation that sometimes is urged is, the Spirit of

the Lord _is_ straitened. That explanation takes two forms. Sometimes

you hear people saying, 'Christianity is effete. We have to go now to

fresh fountains of inspiration, and turn away from these broken cisterns

that can hold no water.' I am not going to argue that question. I do not

think for my part that Christianity will be effete until the world has

got up to it and beyond it in its practice, and it will be a good while

before that happens. Christianity will not be worn out until men have

copied and reduced to practice the example of Jesus Christ, and they

have not quite got that length yet. No shadow of a fear that the gospel

has lost its power, or that God's Spirit has become weak, should be

permitted to creep over our hearts. The promise is, 'I will send

another Comforter, and He shall abide with you _for ever_.' It is a

permanent gift that was given to the Church on that day. We have to

distinguish in the story between the symbols, the gift, and the

consequences of the gift. The first and the last are transient, the

second is permanent. The symbols were transient. The people who came

running together saw no tongues of fire. The consequences were

transient. The tongues and the miraculous utterances were but for a

time. The results vary according to the circumstances; but the central

thing, the gift itself, is an irrevocable gift, and once bestowed is

ever with the Church to all generations.

Another form of the explanation is the theory that God in His

sovereignty is pleased to withhold His Spirit for reasons which we

cannot trace. But it is not true that the gift once given varies in the

degree in which it is continued. There is always the same flow from God.

There are ebbs and flows in the spiritual power of the Church. Yes! and

the tide runs out of your harbours. Is there any less water in the sea

because it does? So the gift may ebb away from a man, from a community,

from an epoch, not because God's manifestation and bestowment fluctuate,

but because our receptivity changes. So we dismiss, and are bound to

dismiss, if we are Christians, the unbelieving explanation, 'The Spirit

of the Lord is straitened,' and not to sit with our hands folded, as if

an inscrutable sovereignty, with which we have nothing to do, sometimes

sent more and sometimes less of His spiritual gifts upon a waiting

Church. It is not so. 'With Him is no variableness.' The gifts of God

are without repentance; and the Spirit that was given once, according to

the Master's own word already quoted, is given that He may abide with us

for ever.

Therefore we have to come back to this, which is the point to which I

seek to bring you and myself, in lowly penitence and contrite

acknowledgment--that it is all our own fault and the result of evils in

ourselves that may be remedied, that we have so little of that divine

gift; and that if the churches of this country and of this day seem to

be cursed and blasted in so much of their fruitless operations and

formal worship, it is the fault of the churches, and not of the Lord of

the churches. The stream that poured forth from the throne of God has

not lost itself in the sands, nor is it shrunken in its volume. The fire

that was kindled on Pentecost has not died down into grey ashes. The

rushing of the mighty wind that woke on that morning has not calmed and

stilled itself into the stagnancy and suffocating breathlessness of

midday heat. The same fulness of the Spirit which filled the believers

on that day is available for us all. If, like that waiting Church of

old, we abide in prayer and supplication, the gift will be given to us

too, and we may repeat and reproduce, if not the miracles which we do

not need, yet the necessary inspiration of the highest and the noblest

days and saints in the history of the Church. 'If ye, being evil, know

how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your

Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him?' 'Ask and ye

shall receive,' and be filled 'with the Holy Ghost and with power.'