"And behold I send _the promise of My Father upon you_; but tarry ye
in the city of Jerusalem until ye be _endued with power from on
high_."--ST. LUKE xxiv. 49.
"Ye shall receive _power_, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon
you."--ACTS i. 8.
To-day we are celebrating the last of the series of historical festivals
which mark the springtime of our Christian year. And without this one
the rest would leave us with a sense of incompleteness; for we should be
without its gift of the abiding and indwelling Spirit, and the fulfilment
of the last promise.
What, then, are we learning of its practical lessons, and gathering into
our life? We have read the Pentecostal narrative, and others that
illustrate it. We have sung Pentecostal hymns. We have joined in
special prayer for the light of the Holy Spirit to shine in our hearts,
giving us a right judgment; and if we are led to ask, "To what purpose is
all this?" the answer is to be seen in the texts I have just read to you,
the burden of which is the gift of power from on high. Do we not
recognise this as the end of the New Testament revelation? And do we not
acknowledge that this revelation fails, so far as we are concerned, if it
gives us no such _power_? It is, indeed, in considering this power of
the Spirit that we touch to the quick the real influence of religion in
the practical life of men; for experience shows that it is possible for a
man to be endowed with almost every other gift and yet to lack this
one--this indwelling gift of the Holy Ghost the Comforter.
Our life is filled with almost everything we could ask or require to
enlighten us or to guide and direct, and yet it fails sometimes.
It may be failing in some of us here to-day, just from want of this
Divine spark, this influence of a Spirit from above taking up His abode
in us, burning and shining in our hearts so as to purge our affections
from sinful taint and purify our tastes, lifting up and enlarging our
capacities, and rousing our energies--in one word, fusing all our life
into a new form with its refining power.
And the question of all questions for each of us to consider is, "How am
I to make my life the home and embodiment of this power from above?" If
we turn to our Lord's own example, or to the life of Paul or any other of
His followers, or to any life we have known and felt to breathe around it
this same power of the Spirit, some things become at once very obvious
and clear to us.
That supreme example and those lives declare that whoever desires to have
his soul purified and invigorated, to be charged with this Divine
electric influence, must have something of separateness and independence
in his life; he must feel himself as not merely one of a crowd moved by
the desires, aims, hopes, tastes, and ambitions which may chance to
prevail around him, but as a separate soul in direct communion with the
Spirit of God.
But if we are to realise this in our own life, it means that our times of
daily prayer, whether in private or in public, are times at which we lay
open our secret life to the Divine presence and influence; it means that
we give some real thought and meditation to this presence of God in our
life, and that we thus feed our souls continually on wholesome spiritual
food. It is in this way that men's lives become in a real sense the
temples of the Holy Spirit, and the influences of sin fall away from
them.
But the hindrances that are always acting to undermine or destroy any
such spiritual power in us are manifold, and seldom far away from our
life.
The world outside is always with us and acting in this way, distracting
thought, setting up its own standards, drawing us into its channels, and
deadening the Spirit in us. This is one of the inevitable conditions of
life as you will have to live it, and the man who is in earnest
recognises it as a paramount reason why he should never drop out of his
personal practice the habit of separate prayer and communion with God. Or
again, we may, and often do, let these hindrances grow up within us
through our own fault, and quite apart from any active influences of the
outer world.
We contract a dulness of spirit, so that spiritual things have no
interest and faith has no living power in the heart; and all this very
often not because any person, or anything outside of us, can be said to
have led us away and entangled us, but simply because we have taken no
pains to keep our life within the range of spiritual influences; we have
let prayer slip out of it; we have lived in no spiritual companionship;
we have done nothing to keep our soul alive in us. This is how men
choose the lower life, and surrender their birthright out of pure
inertia, so that they lose their spiritual capacity.
But worst of all hindrances to the indwelling of God's Holy Spirit in any
life is the harbouring of sensual appetite or craving, passion, or
indulgence. No man can expect the Holy Spirit of God to make its home in
such unclean company. It is on this account that there is nothing which
so soon grows to depraved habit, to God-abandoned state, as sensual
appetite; nothing which so rapidly dulls the higher affections in the
heart and saps all the finer elements of life.
Therefore, when we are thinking of God's gift of the Holy Ghost, and of
spiritual power as the saving and uplifting influence in our soul, we do
well to reflect a little on those hindrances which will be fatal to all
such power in us, if they are allowed to take possession of our life and
to prevail in it.
We do well to reflect in this way, because such reflection will make us
very careful against harbouring or encouraging any of these fatal
hindrances, and careful also against any other form of spiritual waste.
There is no surer guide to a right use of all liberty than this
reflection upon the power of the indwelling spirit in us, and the things
that add to it or destroy it.
Recognising that this Spirit, which, in the language of your confirmation
prayer, is the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel
and ghostly strength, the Spirit of knowledge and true godliness and of
holy fear; recognising that this Spirit, with its sevenfold gifts, is the
saving element in all free life, you begin to look with fresh feelings on
all your leisure hours, on all your hours of liberty, when you are
released from task work or supervision, when your life is what you
yourselves are making it, and you begin to consider whether these times,
as you spend them, are indeed times of growth or, it may be, of waste,
times of genuine freedom or of slavery to some form of lower life. When
you think of this Holy Spirit of God as a power in every good life, it
becomes a very real question what and of what sort is the _power_ that is
holding sway over you in your leisure hours.
This is indeed a question which never sleeps, and to-day we ask, What is
your Whitsuntide answer to it?
If there be any one to whom such a question is not yet a matter of living
concern, it is the purpose of this Pentecostal festival to rouse him to
new thoughts about it.
If there be any older person in this congregation who lets his years slip
from him, not caring or forgetting the importance of it, and not striving
to leaven all his hours of work or leisure with the thought of this
indwelling Spirit from above; or if there should be any young boy who, in
utter thoughtlessness, or from perversity or coarseness, or any induced
depravity of taste, allows any evil spirit to bear rule in his life, our
prayer for such an one to-day is that the baptism of fire may descend
upon his soul, and the power of a new spirit be felt in it.
And indeed there is not one of us but needs to come at such a time with
this same prayer for his own life; for our own experience is too often
very like the vision of Ezekiel. Under the influences that come between
us and the Spirit of the living God, our soul is in continual danger of
being like the prophet's valley of dry bones, which lay lifeless,
unmoved, till the breath of the Lord breathed over them, and the breath
came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an
exceeding great army.
So we pray that our life may prove responsive to these influences of the
Pentecostal season. And the first response it gives is when it rises up
in the consciousness of the Spirit of God as a living power in the heart,
a power to drive out evil, and to inspire and strengthen us for what is
good.
And if, under the inspiring associations of this historic and holy day,
you feel your soul touched with a new spirit or consciousness rising up
in you from the grave of its own dead self to new desires and new
thoughts, and a new sense of the living nearness of the Holy Ghost the
Comforter, then you know--and you need no prophet to tell you--that the
Pentecostal gift has not failed, and there is good hope that you will not
spoil either your youth or your manhood with any form of ignoble life.