STRENGTHENED WITH MIGHT

'That He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory; to

be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner

man.'--Eph. iii. 16.

In no part of Paul's letters does he rise to a higher level than in his

prayers, and none of his prayers are fuller of fervour than this

wonderful series of petitions. They open out one into the other like

some majestic suite of apartments in a great palace-temple, each leading

into a loftier and more spacious hall, each drawing nearer the

presence-chamber, until at last we stand there.

Roughly speaking, the prayer is divided into four petitions, of which

each is the cause of the following and the result of the

preceding--'That He would grant you, according to the riches of His

glory, to be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner

man'--that is the first. 'In order that Christ may dwell in your hearts

by faith,' 'ye being rooted and grounded in love'--such is the second,

the result of the first, and the preparation for the third. 'That ye may

be able to comprehend with all saints ... and to know the love of Christ

which passeth knowledge,' such is the third, and all lead up at last to

that wonderful desire beyond which nothing is possible--'that ye might

be filled with all the fulness of God.'

I venture to contemplate dealing with these four petitions in successive

sermons, in order, God helping me, that I may bring before you a fairer

vision of the possibilities of your Christian life than you ordinarily

entertain. For Paul's prayer is God's purpose, and what He means with

all who profess His name is that these exuberant desires may be

fulfilled in them. So let us now listen to that petition which is the

foundation of all, and consider that great thought of the divine

strength-giving power which may be bestowed upon every Christian soul.

I. First, then, I remark that God means, and wishes, that all Christians

should be strong by the possession of the Spirit of might.

It is a miserably inadequate conception of Christianity, and of the

gifts which it bestows, and the blessings which it intends for men, when

it is limited, as it practically is, by a large number--I might almost

say the majority--of professing Christians to a simple means of altering

their relation to the past, and to the broken law of God and of

righteousness. Thanks be to His name! His great gift to the world begins

in each individual case with the assurance that all the past is

cancelled. He gives that blessed sense of forgiveness, which can never

be too highly estimated unless it is forced out of its true place as the

introduction, and made to be the climax and the end, of His gifts. I do

not know what Christianity means, unless it means that you and I are

forgiven for a purpose; that the purpose, if I may so say, is something

in advance of the means towards the purpose, the purpose being that we

should be filled with all the strength and righteousness and

supernatural life granted to us by the Spirit of God.

It is well that we should enter into the vestibule. There is no other

path to the throne but through the vestibule. But do not let us forget

that the good news of forgiveness, though we need it day by day, and

need it perpetually repeated, is but the introduction to and porch of

the Temple, and that beyond it there towers, if I cannot say a loftier,

yet I may say a further gift, even the gift of a divine life like His,

from whom it comes, and of which it is in reality an effluence and a

spark. The true characteristic blessing of the Gospel is the gift of a

new power to a sinful weak world; a power which makes the feeble strong,

and the strongest as an angel of God.

Oh, brethren! we who know how, 'if any power we have, it is to ill'; we

who understand the weakness, the unaptness of our spirits to any good,

and our strength for every vagrant evil that comes upon them to tempt

them, should surely recognise as a Gospel in very deed that which

proclaims to us that the 'everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the

ends of the earth,' who Himself 'fainteth not, neither is weary.' hath

yet a loftier display of His strength-giving power than that which is

visible in the heavens above, where, 'because He is strong in might not

one faileth.' That heaven, the region of calm completeness, of law

unbroken and therefore of power undiminished, affords a lesser and

dimmer manifestation of His strength than the work that is done in the

hell of a human heart that has wandered and is brought back, that is

stricken with the weakness of the fever of sin, and is healed into the

strength of obedience and the omnipotence of dependence. It is much to

say 'for that He is strong in might, not one of these faileth;' it is

more to say 'He giveth power to them that have failed; and to them that

have no might He increaseth strength.' The Gospel is the gift of pardon

for holiness, and its inmost and most characteristic bestowment is the

bestowment of a new power for obedience and service.

And that power, as I need not remind you, is given to us through the

gift of the Divine Spirit. The very name of that Spirit is the 'Spirit

of Might.' Christ spoke to us about being 'endued with power from on

high.' The last of His promises that dropped from His lips upon earth

was the promise that His followers should receive the power of the

Spirit coming upon them. Wheresoever in the early histories we read of a

man who was full of the Holy Ghost, we read that he was 'full of power.'

According to the teaching of this Apostle, God hath given us the 'Spirit

of power,' which is also the Spirit 'of love and of a sound mind.' So

the strength that we must have, if we have strength at all, is the

strength of a Divine Spirit, not our own, that dwells in us, and works

through us.

And there is nothing in that which need startle or surprise any man who

believes in a living God at all, and in the possibility, therefore, of a

connection between the Great Spirit and all the human spirits which are

His children. I would maintain, in opposition to many modern

conceptions, the actual supernatural character of the gift that is

bestowed upon every Christian soul. My reading of the New Testament is

that as distinctly above the order of material nature as is any miracle,

is the gift that flows into a believing heart. There is a direct passage

between God and my spirit. It lies open to His touch; all the paths of

its deep things can be trodden by Him. You and I act upon one another

from without, He acts upon us within. We wish one another blessings; He

gives the blessings. We try to train, to educate, to incline, and

dispose, by the presentation of motives and the urging of reasons; He

can plant in a heart by His own divine husbandry the seed that shall

blossom into immortal life. And so the Christian Church is a great,

continuous, supernatural community in the midst of the material world;

and every believing soul, because it possesses something of the life of

Jesus Christ, has been the seat of a miracle as real and true as when He

said 'Lazarus, come forth!' Precisely this teaching does our Lord

Himself present for our acceptance when He sets side by side, as

mutually illustrative, as belonging to the same order of supernatural

phenomena, 'the hour is coming when the dead shall hear the voice of the

Son of God and they that hear shall live,' which is the supernatural

resurrection of souls dead in sin,--and 'the hour is coming in the which

all that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth,'

which is the future resurrection of the body, in obedience to His will.

So, Christian men and women, do you set clearly before you this: that

God's purpose with you is but begun when He has forgiven you, that He

forgives you for a design, that it is a means to an end, and that you

have not reached the conception of the large things which He intends for

you unless you have risen to this great thought--He means and wishes

that you should be strong with the strength of His own Divine Spirit.

II. Now notice, next, that this Divine Power has its seat in, and is

intended to influence the whole of, the inner life.

As my text puts it, we may be 'strengthened with might by His Spirit _in

the inner man_.' By the 'inner man' I suppose, is not meant the new

creation through faith in Jesus Christ which this Apostle calls 'the

new man,' but simply what Peter calls the 'hidden man of the heart' the

'soul,' or unseen self as distinguished from the visible material body

which it animates and informs. It is this inner self, then, in which the

Spirit of God is to dwell, and into which it is to breathe strength. The

leaven is hid deep in three measures of meal until the whole be

leavened. And the point to mark is that the whole inward region which

makes up the true man is the field upon which this Divine Spirit is to

work. It is not a bit of your inward life that is to be hallowed. It is

not any one aspect of it that is to be strengthened, but it is the whole

intellect, affections, desires, tastes, powers of attention, conscience,

imagination, memory, will. The whole inner man in all its corners is to

be filled, and to come under the influence of this power, 'until there

be no part dark, as when the bright shining of a candle giveth thee

light.'

There is no part of my being that is not patent to the tread of this

Divine Guest. There are no rooms of the house of my spirit into which He

may not go. Let Him come with the master key in His hand into all the

dim chambers of your feeble nature; and as the one life is light in the

eye, and colour in the cheek, and deftness in the fingers, and strength

in the arm, and pulsation in the heart, so He will come with the

manifold results of the one gift to you. He will strengthen your

understandings, and make you able for loftier tasks of intellect and of

reason than you can face in your unaided power; He will dwell in your

affections and make them vigorous to lay hold upon the holy things that

are above their natural inclination, and will make it certain that their

reach shall not be beyond their grasp, as, alas! it so often is in the

sadness and disappointments of human love. He will come into that

feeble, vacillating, wayward will of yours, that is only obstinate in

its adherence to the low and the evil, as some foul creature, that one

may try to wrench away, digs its claws into corruption and holds on by

that. He will lift your will and make it fix upon the good and abominate

the evil, and through the whole being He will pour a great tide of

strength which shall cover all the weakness. He will be like some subtle

elixir which, taken into the lips, steals through a pallid and wasted

frame, and brings back a glow to the cheek and a lustre to the eye, and

swiftness to the brain, and power to the whole nature. Or as some plant,

drooping and flagging beneath the hot rays of the sun, when it has the

scent of water given to it, will, in all its parts, stiffen and erect

itself, so, when the Spirit is poured out on men, their whole nature is

invigorated and helped.

That indwelling Spirit will be a power for suffering. The parallel

passage to this in the twin epistle to the Colossians is--'strengthened

with all might unto all patience and long-suffering with gentleness.'

Ah, brethren! unless this Divine Spirit were a power for patience and

endurance it were no power suited to us poor men. So dark at times is

every life; so full at times of discouragements, of dreariness, of

sadness, of loneliness, of bitter memories, and of fading hopes does the

human heart become, that if we are to be strong we must have a strength

that will manifest itself most chiefly in this, that it teaches us how

to bear, how to weep, how to submit.

And it will be a power for conflict. We have all of us, in the discharge

of duty and in the meeting of temptation, to face such tremendous

antagonisms that unless we have grace given to us which will enable us

to resist, we shall be overcome and swept away. God's power given by the

Divine Spirit does not absolve us from the fight, but it fits us for the

fight. It is not given in order that, holiness may be won without a

struggle, as some people seem to think, but it is given to us in order

that in the struggle for holiness we may never lose 'one jot of heart or

hope,' but may be 'able to withstand in the evil day, and having done

all to stand.'

It is a power for service. 'Tarry ye in Jerusalem till ye be endued with

power from on high.' There is no such force for the spreading of

Christ's Kingdom, and the witness-bearing work of His Church, as the

possession of this Divine Spirit. Plunged into that fiery baptism, the

selfishness and the sloth, which stand in the way of so many of us, are

all consumed and annihilated, and we are set free for service because

the bonds that bound us are burnt up in the merciful furnace of His

fiery power.

'Ye shall be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man'--a

power that will fill and flood all your nature if you will let it, and

will make you strong to suffer, strong to combat, strong to serve, and

to witness for your Lord.

III. And now, lastly, let me point you still further to the measure of

this power. It is limitless with the boundlessness of God Himself. 'That

he would grant you' is the daring petition of the Apostle, 'according to

the riches of His glory to be strengthened.'

There is the measure. There is no limit except the uncounted wealth of

His own self-manifestation, the flashing light of revealed divinity.

Whatsoever there is of splendour in that, whatsoever there is of power

there, in these and in nothing on this side of them, lies the limit of

the possibilities of a Christian life. Of course there is a working

limit at each moment, and that is our capacity to receive; but that

capacity varies, may vary indefinitely, may become greater and greater

beyond our count or measurement. Our hearts may be more and more capable

of God; and in the measure in which they are capable of Him they shall

be filled by Him. A limit which is always shifting is no limit at all. A

kingdom, the boundaries of which are not the same from one year to

another, by reason of its own inherent expansive power, may be said to

have no fixed limit. And so we appropriate and enclose, as it were,

within our own little fence, a tiny portion of the great prairie that

rolls boundlessly to the horizon. But to-morrow we may enclose more, if

we will, and more and more; and so ever onwards, for all that is God's

is ours, and He has given us His whole self to use and to possess

through our faith in His Son. A thimble can only take up a thimbleful of

the ocean, but what if the thimble be endowed with a power of expansion

which has no term known to men? May it not, then, be that some time or

other it shall be able to hold so much of the infinite depth as now

seems a dream too audacious to be realised?

So it is with us and God. He lets us come into the vaults, as it were,

where in piles and masses the ingots of uncoined and uncounted gold are

stored and stacked; and He says, 'Take as much as you like to carry.'

There is no limit except the riches of His glory.

And now, dear friends, remember that this great gift, offered to each of

us, is offered on conditions. To you professing Christians especially I

speak. You will never get it unless you want it, and some of you do not

want it. There are plenty of people who call themselves Christian men

that would not for the life of them know what to do with this great gift

if they had it. You will get it if you desire it. 'Ye have not because

ye ask not.'

Oh! when one contrasts the largeness of God's promises and the miserable

contradiction to them which the average Christian life of this

generation presents, what can we say? 'Hath His mercy clean gone for

ever? Doth His promise fail for evermore?' Ye weak Christian people,

born weakling and weak ever since, as so many of you are, open your

mouths wide. Rise to the height of the expectations and the desires

which it is our sin not to cherish; and be sure of this, as we ask so

shall we receive. 'Ye are not straitened in God.' Alas! alas! 'ye are

straitened in yourselves.'

And mind, there must be self-suppression if there is to be the triumph

of a divine power in you. You cannot fight with both classes of weapons.

The human must die if the divine is to live. The life of nature,

dependence on self, must be weakened and subdued if the life of God is

to overcome and to fill you. You must be able to say 'Not I!' or you

will never be able to say 'Christ liveth in me.' The patriarch who

overcame halted on his thigh; and all the life of nature was lamed and

made impotent that the life of grace might prevail. So crush self by the

power and for the sake of the Christ, if you would that the Spirit

should bear rule over you.

See to it, too, that you use what you have of that Divine Spirit. 'To

him that hath shall be given.' What is the use of more water being sent

down the mill lade, if the water that does come in it all runs away at

the bottom, and none of it goes over the wheel? Use the power you have,

and power will come to the faithful steward of what he possesses. He

that is faithful in a little shall get much to be faithful over. Ask and

use, and the ancient thanksgiving may still come from your lips. 'In the

day when I cried, Thou answeredst me, and strengthenedst me with

strength in my soul.'