"Ye shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon
you."
Is Jesus Christ divine? Is the Bible an inspired Book? Is man a
fallen creature who can be saved only through the suffering and
sacrifice of the Creator? Will there be a resurrection of the
dead, and a day in which God will judge all the world by the Man
Christ Jesus? Is Satan a personal being, and is there a Hell in
which the wicked will be for ever punished?
These are great doctrines which have been held and taught by His
followers since the days of Jesus and His Apostles, and yet they
are ever being attacked and denied.
Are they true? Or are they only fancies and falsehoods, or
figures of speech and distortions of truth? How can we find truth
and know it?
Jesus said, "When He, the Spirit of Truth, is come, He will guide
you into all truth" (John xvi. 13).
What truth? Not the truth of the multiplication table, or of
physical science, or art, or secular history, but spiritual
truth--the truth about God and His will and character, and our
relations to Him in Christ--that truth which is necessary to
salvation and holiness--into all this truth the Holy Spirit will
guide us. "He shall teach you all things," said Jesus (John xiv.
26).
How, then, shall we escape error and be "sound in doctrine"? Only
by the help of the Holy Spirit.
How do we know Jesus Christ is divine? Because the Bible tells us
so? Infinitely precious and important is this revelation in the
Bible; but not by this do we know it. Because the Church teaches
it in her creed, and we have heard it from the catechism? Nothing
taught in any creed or catechism is of more vital importance; but
neither by this do we know it.
How then? Listen to Paul: "No man can say that Jesus is the Lord,
but by the Holy Ghost" (I Cor. xii. 3). "No man," says Paul. Then
learning it from the Bible or catechism is not to know it except
as the parrot might know it; but every man is to be taught this
by the Holy Spirit, if he is to really know it.
Then it is not a revelation made once for all, and only to the
men who walked and talked with Jesus, but it is a spiritual
revelation made anew to each believing heart that in penitence
seeks Him and so meets the conditions of such a revelation.
Then the poor, degraded, ignorant outcast at The Army penitent-form
in the slums of London or Chicago, who never heard of a
creed, and the ebony African and dusky Indian, who never saw the
inside of a Bible, may have Christ revealed in him, and know by
the revelation of the Holy Spirit that Jesus is Lord.
"It pleased God... to reveal His Son in me," wrote Paul (Gal. i.
15, 16); and again, "Christ liveth in me" (Gal. ii. 20); and
again, "My little children, of whom I travail in birth again
until Christ be formed in you" (Gal. iv. 19); as though Christ is
to be spiritually formed in the heart of each believer by the
operation of the Holy Spirit, as He was physically formed in the
womb of Mary by the same Spirit (Luke i. 35); and again, "The
mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but
now is made manifest to His saints,... which is Christ in you,
the hope of glory" (Col. i. 26, 27); "That Christ may dwell in
your hearts by faith" (Eph. iii. 17); "Examine yourselves,
whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye not
your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be
reprobates" (2 Cor. xiii. 5)?
"At that day," said Jesus, when making His great promise of the
Comforter to His disciples, "At that day ye shall know that I am
in My Father, and ye in Me, and I in you" (John xiv. 20); and
again, in His great prayer, He said: "I have declared unto them
Thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith Thou hast
loved Me may be in them, and I in them."
It is this ever-recurring revelation to penitent, believing
hearts, by the agency of the ever-present Holy Spirit, that makes
faith in Jesus Christ living and invincible. "I know He is Lord,
for He saves my soul from sin, and He saves me now," is an
argument that rationalism and unbelief cannot answer nor
overthrow, and so long as there are men in the world who can say
this, faith in the divinity of Jesus Christ is secure; and this
experience and witness come by the Holy Ghost.
"I worship Thee, O Holy Ghost,
I love to worship Thee;
My risen Lord for aye were lost
But for Thy company."
And so it is by the guidance and teaching of the Holy Spirit that
all saving truth becomes vital to us.
It is He that makes the Bible a living Book; it is He that
convinces the world of judgment (John xvi. 8-11); it is He that
makes men certain that there is a Heaven of surpassing and
enduring glory and joy, and a Hell of endless sorrow and woe for
those who sin away their day of grace and die in impenitence.
Who have been the mightiest and most faithful preachers of the
gloom and terror and pain of a perpetual Hell? those who have
been the mightiest and most effective preachers of God's
compassionate love.
In all periods of great revival, when men seemed to live on the
borderland, and in the vision of eternity, Hell has been
preached. The leaders in these revivals have been men of prayer
and faith and consuming love, but they have been men who knew
"the terrors of the Lord," and, therefore, they preached the
judgments of God, and they proved that the law with its penalties
is a schoolmaster to bring men to Christ (Gal. iii. 24). Fox, the
Quaker; Bunyan, the Baptist; Baxter, the Puritan; Wesley and
Fletcher, and Whitefield and Caughey, the Methodists; Finney, the
Presbyterian; Edwards and Moody, the Congregationalists; and
General Booth, the Salvationist, have preached it, not savagely,
but tenderly and faithfully, as a mother might warn her child
against some great danger that would surely follow careless and
selfish wrong-doing.
What men have loved and laboured and sacrificed as these men?
Their hearts have been a flaming furnace of love and devotion to
God, and an over-flowing fountain of love and compassion for men;
but just in proportion as they have discovered God's love and
pity for the sinner, so have they discovered His wrath against
sin and all obstinate wrong-doing; and as they have caught
glimpses of Heaven and declared its joys and everlasting glories
to men, so they have seen Hell, with its endless punishment, and
with trembling voice and overflowing eyes have they warned men to
"flee from the wrath to come."
Were these men, throbbing with spiritual life and consumed with
devotion to the Kingdom of God and the everlasting well-being of
their fellowmen, led to this belief by the Spirit of Truth, or
were they misled? Is it the prophet, weeping and praying and
preaching and fighting for God and men, to whom the Spirit has
always first spoken and revealed the things of God? Or is it the
philosopher, or dry-as-dust theologian, or the popular preacher
of smooth things, sitting in his study and among his books,
spinning out of his own mind his conceits concerning God's plan
and purpose in the universe?
Does Seneca or the Psalmist, Plato or Paul, Rousseau or Wesley,
the idolised, high-salaried, soft-raimented preacher of a wide
gate and broad way to life and Heaven, or the veteran soul-winner,
General Booth, more clearly make known the mind of God in
matters that are spiritual?
"The things of the Spirit... are spiritually discerned" (I Cor.
ii. 14), says Paul. It is not by searching and philosophising
that these things are found out, but by revelation. "Flesh and
blood hath not revealed it unto thee," said Jesus to Peter, "but
My Father which is in Heaven" (Matthew xvi. 17). The great
teacher of truth is the Spirit of Truth, and the only safe
expounders and guardians of sound doctrine are men filled with
the Holy Ghost.
Study and research have their place, and an important place; but
in spiritual things they will be no avail unless prosecuted by
spiritual men. As well might men blind from birth attempt to
study the starry heavens, and men born deaf undertake to expound
and criticise the harmonies of Bach and Beethoven. Men must see
and hear to speak and write intelligently on such subjects. And
so men must be spiritually enlightened to understand spiritual
truth.
The greatest danger to any religious organisation is that a body
of men should arise in its ranks, and hold its positions of
trust, who have learned its great fundamental doctrines by rote
out of the catechism, but have no experimental knowledge of their
truth inwrought by the mighty anointing of the Holy Ghost, and
who are destitute of "an unction from the Holy One," by which,
says John, "ye know all things" (1 John ii. 20, 27).
Why do men deny the divinity of Jesus Christ? Because they have
never placed themselves in that relation to the Spirit, and met
those unchanging conditions that would enable Him to reveal Jesus
to them as Saviour and Lord.
Why do men dispute the inspiration of the Scriptures? Because the
Holy Ghost, who inspired "holy men of God" to write the Book (2
Peter i. 21), hides its spiritual sense from unspiritual and
unholy men.
Why do men doubt a Day of Judgment, and a state of everlasting
doom? Because they have never been bowed and broken and crushed
beneath the weight of their sin, and by a sense of guilt and
separation from a holy God that can only be removed by faith in
His dying Son.
A sportsman lost his way in a pitiless storm on a black and
starless night. Suddenly his horse drew back and refused to take
another step. He urged it forward, but it only threw itself back
upon its haunches. Just then a vivid flash of lightning revealed
a great precipice upon the brink of which he stood. It was but an
instant, and then the pitchy blackness hid it again from view.
But he turned his horse and anxiously rode away from the terrible
danger.
A distinguished professor of religion said to me some time ago,
"I dislike, I abhor, the doctrine of Hell"; and then after a
while added, "But three times in my life I have seen that there
was eternal separation from God and an everlasting Hell for me,
if I walked not in the way God was calling me to go."
Into the blackness of the sinner's night the Holy Spirit, who is
patiently and compassionately seeking the salvation of all men,
flashes a light that gives him a glimpse of eternal things which,
heeded, would lead to the sweet peace and security of eternal
day. For when the Holy Spirit is heeded and honoured, the night
passes, the shadows flee away, the day dawns, "the Sun of
Righteousness arises with healing in His wings," and, saved and
sanctified, men walk in His light in safety and joy. Doctrines
which before were repellent to the carnal mind, and but
foolishness, or a stumbling-block to the heart of unbelief, now
become precious and satisfying to the soul; and truths which
before were hid in impenetrable darkness, or seen only as through
dense gloom and fog, are now seen clearly as in the light of
broad day.
"Hold thou the faith that Christ is Lord,
God over all, who died and rose;
And everlasting life bestows
On all who hear the living word.
For thee His life-blood He out-poured,
His Spirit sets thy spirit free;
Hold thou the faith--He dwells in thee,
And thou in Him, and Christ is Lord!"
"HAVE YE RECEIVED THE HOLY GHOST SINCE YE BELIEVED?"