THE GIFT OF THE SPIRIT
[p. 35] THE GIFT OF THE SPIRIT
It is of deep importance that we should be impressed with the fact that the gift of the Spirit is a great reality. There are many precious doctrines in the Scriptures, and amongst them are the truths connected with the presence here of the Spirit of God during the absence of Christ. But the gift of the Spirit is a reality — an actual fact; that is, each one in this company either has or has not received the Holy Spirit. I believe it would please Satan well for us to regard the gift of the Spirit merely as one of the doctrines of Christianity, and as one item in an orthodox creed. Be assured of this, that when believers drift along in a sleepy and dormant profession, without exercise, and making no spiritual progress, they have lost all sense of the reality of the gift of the Spirit. If the hearts of God’s children were awakened to consider this great and blessed reality, I feel sure that exercise would be produced which would be fruitful in spiritual blessing and growth.
I should like to say a few words, in the first place, about
THE RECEPTION OF THE SPIRIT.
Paul asks the Galatian believers an important question when he says, “This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?” Galatians 3: 2. It is evident from the whole context that the apostle is pressing upon them the impossibility of getting any blessing from God on the ground of “the works of the law”; it must all come in the same way as they had got the Spirit, and that was “by the hearing of faith”. God had wrought in their souls a sense of need, and when Paul preached the gospel to them there was, on their part, the “hearing of faith”, and in connection therewith they received the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Then it becomes necessary to ask, What did Paul preach to them? In other words. What is the Gospel? It must be a wonderful message which secures such a gift to those who listen to it with “the hearing of faith”. To answer these questions fully it would be needful to go through much of the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles, but for my present purpose it will suffice to say that three things, at any rate, were distinctly prominent in the preaching of the apostles:
- An accomplished redemption
- A risen Saviour
- The assurances of forgiveness and justification through faith in the risen and glorified Saviour
See Acts 2: 23 - 39; Acts 3: 15 - 19; Acts 10: 39 - 44; Acts 13: 26 - 41; Romans 4: 22 - 5: 1; 1 Corinthians 15: 1 - 4; etc. etc.
1. The Messiah had come into the world and had been rejected, but at the very moment when His rejection was consummated redemption was accomplished. Man’s wickedness and the working out of God’s blessed will met at the cross. The fierce cry, “Away with him! Crucify him!” showed that man did not want God, but that wondrous redemption work is the eternal witness that God wants man.
2. The Accomplisher of redemption has been raised from the dead. The One who suffered for sins, who went under the judgment of God as made sin, who entered into and tasted death — and all this for the glory of God — has been raised in triumph and glory and set at God’s right hand. Who can question the supreme satisfaction of God in the Man Christ Jesus, seeing He has raised Him from the dead and given Him glory?
[p. 37] 3. Now the testimony of God is that “through his name whosoever believeth in him shall receive the remission of sins”. Acts 10: 43. The proclamation of grace runs thus: “Be it known unto you therefore, men and brethren, that through this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins: and by him all that believe are justified from all things, from which ye could not be justified by the law of Moses”. Acts 13: 38, 39. There was evidently the “hearing of faith” on the part of those to whom Peter preached in the house of Cornelius, when they thus heard “the word of truth”, the gospel of their salvation; and, having believed, they were sealed with the Holy Spirit. Ephesians 1: 13. We receive the Spirit on the ground that redemption is accomplished, that Christ is raised and glorified, and that we believe the gospel which gives us unwavering assurance of forgiveness and justification through and by the risen Saviour.
So that the question for those who do not know whether they have received the Spirit or not is, What have you received by the hearing of faith? If you know, on the authority of the Word of God, that your sins are forgiven, and that you are justified from all things, there is no scriptural reason for doubting that you have the Spirit. If you do not know that your sins are forgiven, and that God will not impute sin to you, you have not yet believed “the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation”. It is not the doubter
or the hoper, but the BELIEVER who receives the gift of the Spirit.
As this is a matter of great importance I will read a few verses from the epistle to the Romans in connection with it, where we shall also see the first effect of the Spirit indwelling the believer. “For what saith the scripture? Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness. Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh [p. 38] not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness. Even as David also described the blessedness of the man unto whom God imputeth righteousness without works, saying, Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin ... . And therefore it was imputed to him for righteousness. Now it was not written for his (Abraham’s) sake alone, that it was imputed to him; but for us also, to whom it shall be imputed, if we believe on him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead; who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification. Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ: by whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God ... the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given unto us”. Romans 4:3-8; Romans 4:22; Romans 5:2,5.
Here we see that God in wondrous grace imputes righteousness, without works, to the believer, and this on the ground of redemption. There has been One found to bear our sins and their judgment, so that God can righteously set us in His presence without a spot and hold us to be clear of every charge. Jesus our Lord has been “raised again for our justification”. This is a marvellous truth, if you consider what infinite satisfaction God has in that risen One. Every believer would rejoice to own that Christ risen is the complete and worthy Object of God’s satisfaction and favour. But God has set Him there with a view to having us in the same standing and acceptance. When God raised Him He was thinking of us — “for our justification”. God has set Himself free by the work of the cross to have us before him in the standing and favour of Christ risen. If you take that in, your heart will be assured of the love of God. It is a glorious [p. 39] moment for us when we learn that nothing less will satisfy the heart of God than that we should have the place of Christ risen, and that to secure it Christ died for us when sinners and ungodly, and in this way God commends His LOVE to us. It is a wonderful moment, because it is the moment when our hearts first get a true sense of the love of God. This is the first wave of the Spirit’s power in our souls — the first effect of His indwelling; He sheds the love of God abroad in our hearts. This I take to be
THE JOY OF SALVATION,
and the Spirit given is the divine spring of it. Instead of doubts, fears, and misgivings, which naturally arise in the heart when there is a sense of unworthiness and failure, we have the blessed assurance that in God’s reckoning we are in the standing and favour of Jesus our Lord. And we know the love of God as the source of all our blessing; the Holy Spirit sheds it abroad in our hearts. How could a human heart know divine love? It would be impossible if God had not given us His Spirit. Think of the greatness of it. Do not get into the way of repeating such scriptures as if they were commonplace matters. To have the love of God shed abroad in the heart is an overpowering joy — it is superlative blessing — it is rapture no tongue can tell.
And this leads me to call your attention to God’s object in giving us the Spirit. Why has God conferred this marvellous gift upon us? We could not possibly suppose that God would give His Spirit as a mere deposit that should make no change in our thoughts or in our moral constitution. You could not conceive that one might receive the Spirit without an immense change — a total revolution — being effected in the whole course of his thoughts and affections. God’s object in giving us the Spirit is to bring us into harmony with His own thoughts and affections.
[p. 40] The Spirit is given to us that we might be on the line and in the current of divine thoughts and affections — that we might be “in the Spirit”. I trust I may be enabled to bring before you what is involved in this.
It is very evident that the Holy Spirit was not given until the Lord Jesus had died and taken His place, as risen and glorified, at the right hand of God. John 7: 39: Acts 2: 33. That is, so long as man in the flesh was before God, whether without law or under law, there was no gift of the Spirit. God’s thoughts and affections could find no answer or object in a sinful and ruined race. After the fall there was nothing in Adam or his children in which God could find satisfaction. Two great facts are made clear in the Old Testament. First, that when man is left to himself he has no desire to do God’s will. This comes out very plainly before the flood, and in the heathen world. Second, that when called by grace to have to do with God he has no power to carry out the will of God. This comes out in the history of the children of Israel, to whom the law was given when they were professedly anxious to do God’s will.
What has thus been manifested on a large scale in the history of the world has also been proved in our individual experience. In our unconverted days we cared nothing about God’s will; we did not recognize in any way that God had a claim upon us. Then when we were awakened and converted, and began to know something of God and to desire to do His will, it was the greatest distress possible to find that we had no power to do it. Every fresh ray of light, and every deepened desire to live to God, only caused us greater unhappiness by deepening our consciousness of failure. So long as you are on this line, the more light you get, and the more earnest you are in your desires, the more unhappy you will be. In fact, the end of it will be that you will be brought down in your soul’s experience to death. “The commandment which was ordained to life,
I found to be unto death”. “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of this body of death?” Romans 7: 10, 24.
When we are brought down to this we are prepared to understand the meaning of, and the deep necessity for, the death of Christ. God does not set the law before us, or One who has kept it for us; He sets before us
A CRUCIFIED ONE.
Galatians 3: 1. One who has come under the law, not to be an example for us in that position, but to redeem us from it altogether. Galatians 4: 4, 5. One who has been lifted up on the cross to end in death the man who had neither the desire nor the power to carry out God’s will, so that we might be set free from the law, and have Him, risen and glorified, as the controlling object of our hearts. We are thus brought on to a new line altogether. We see the end of “our old man” at the cross. We have found out that we are helpless and worthless, and we are glad to see that the death of Christ is the end of our history as in the flesh.
It is on the ground that sin in the flesh has been condemned in the death of Christ (Romans 8:3) that the Spirit is given to us. God cannot recognize the flesh at all; He has utterly condemned it in the death of Christ; hence, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in us, we are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit. Romans 8: 9. The fact that the Spirit of God dwells in us is the proof that in God’s thoughts we are on a new line and in a new state altogether, and He dwells in us for the purpose of bringing us in our souls consciously on to that new line.
But Satan will do all that he can to thwart the purposes of God, and to hinder us from getting the good of the gift of the Spirit. How successfully he can work we may learn from the history of the churches in Galatia. The apostle had to ask them, “Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?” Galatians 3: 3. Under the influence of Judaising teachers they were turning back to works of law: observing days, months, times, and years; they were being constrained to be circumcised, and in many ways were being entangled again with the yoke of bondage. And no doubt they persuaded themselves that in this way they would become more holy, and better pleasing to God.
But all this was a terrible triumph of the enemy, who had succeeded thereby in diverting the saints altogether from the line and current of the Spirit. They were occupying themselves with the cultivation of holy and religious flesh. One difference between Romans and Galatians is that in Romans we have the flesh, if I may so say, in its crude state, but in Galatians it is flesh with a religious polish on it, and this is more dangerous, because more deceptive, than the other. But when the flesh sets up to be good and holy it is always a hypocrite. There is always a want of uprightness in connection with religious flesh. Peter and the other Jews refrained from eating with the Gentiles after that “certain came from James”, because they wanted to keep up their religious reputation with their Jewish brethren. Galatians 2. They “dissembled”, and even Barnabas was “carried away with their dissimulation”. Very often believers will do things in secret that they would not do in the company of their brethren. It is a sad thing to make yourself better before men than you are before God.
Paul, on the other hand, was on the line of the Spirit. “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me”. Galatians 2: 20. No thought of maintaining his religious reputation crossed his [p. 43] mind; he was crucified with Christ. The end of man in the flesh in the death of Christ was a great experimental reality in his soul. He was, by the Spirit, in perfect harmony with God as to this great fact. CHRIST was his object and his life.
Let us now turn to Galatians 4: 4 - 6. “But when the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father”. Here we find the Holy Spirit presented as
THE SPIRIT OF SONSHIP.
The great thought of God in sending forth His Son was “that we might receive the adoption of sons” — that we might receive the position of sonship as a gift. He would have us before Him for ever in perfect suitability to His own love. The way we come into it is, “For ye are all sons of God by faith in Christ Jesus”. Galatians 3: 26. It is by faith that we apprehend Christ Jesus, the risen and glorified One in whom God has found the eternal satisfaction of His love, and “in Christ Jesus” we are sons. This is entirely outside everything that we are as men and women in this world — outside all religious, social, and natural distinctions. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus”. Galatians 3: 28. Our place in sonship is outside everything here. “In Christ Jesus” we are in perfect suitability to the thoughts and love of God. Very soon we shall be conformed to the image of His Son in glory; but in the meantime “God has sent out the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father”.
[p. 44] The Holy Spirit is given to us to be the Spring in our hearts of affections that are proper to that heavenly scene where Christ is, and to the relationship of sons. He is here to fill our hearts with the deep, divine joys of this heavenly relationship. We are not yet in the circumstances or condition suitable to sonship, but we have the Spirit of sonship in our hearts. And these heavenly affections formed in our souls separate us from this present evil world, and are the practical power by which alone we can “walk even as he walked”. The way in which those heavenly affections would form us practically here, we may learn in divine perfection in Him. Take Psalm 16: “The saints that are in the earth, and the excellent, in whom is all my delight”. It is a mark of decline when one ceases to regard the saints as the excellent of the earth. If you begin to find fault with the saints, and to shun your brethren, it is a very bad sign. “The Lord is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup ... the lines are fallen to me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage”. He found everything in God; He had no other portion, nor did He desire any. “My flesh also shall rest in hope. For thou wilt not leave my soul in hades: neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption. Thou wilt shew me the path of life”. He gives up the earth — accepting death here — and looks for life in another scene. “In thy presence is fullness of joy”. He has entered into it now as risen and glorified. He is out of all the sorrow and contrariety in a scene where divine affections flow unhindered, and God has sent the Spirit of that risen and glorified One into our hearts to bring those affections there, that in liberty and joy we may cry, “Abba, Father”. What transcendent grace!
The Galatians had lost all thought of sonship, if they had ever had it, and had fallen into legal bondage. In their hearts and consciences they were servants, not sons.
A servant is in the house conditionally: he is there on the [p. 45] ground of responsibility; if he fails he may be turned out. But a son is there unconditionally; he is there on the ground of unchangeable relationship and affection. Jesus said, “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed”. John 8: 36. It is blessed, indeed, to have the liberty and affections of sonship brought into our hearts now by the Holy Spirit.
I should like to say a few words now on the importance of
WALKING IN THE SPIRIT.
“If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit”. “Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh”. Galatians 5: 25, 16. This is the only way of holiness. To walk in the Spirit requires real purpose of heart, because there are ten thousand things that will divert us if we allow them. We ought to feel that our portion is too precious to lose — that we cannot afford to be robbed of our heavenly joys by gratifying the flesh — that we prize our spiritual possessions too highly to give them up for the beggarly things of the world.
The Spirit has His own line, and it is as our thoughts and affections are on that line that we “walk in the Spirit”. I used often to pass a water-wheel at the side of a railway which reminded me of some believers. In dry weather the stream of water used to fall short of the wheel, and in wet weather it went right over without touching it. The wheel was only occasionally in the current. It will not do for us to be like that, because if we are not walking in the Spirit we are in some way or other fulfilling the lust of the flesh. There is no movement for God in our souls except as we walk in the Spirit. As He controls and forms our affections we are kept moving on with God, and are sustained in superiority to all the lust of the flesh. Let us see to it that we abide in the current.
[p. 46] The result of walking in the Spirit is that
THE FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT
will be developed in us. “Love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance”. Galatians 5: 22. The character of Christ — all those graces which are delightful to God when found in the midst of a world of evil — is thus developed in the saints. All this fruit came out in Him in absolute perfection when He was here; now it comes out, by the Spirit, in the whole company of God’s children, It takes the whole church to display that lovely cluster of fruit. It is a blessed thing to have it developed in us as the present result of our affections being under the sway of the Spirit.
But for this there must be
SOWING TO THE SPIRIT.
“For he that soweth to his flesh, shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit, shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting”. Galatians 6: 8. I am afraid we often lose sight of this. We cannot harbour what is of the flesh — we cannot entertain or make provision for it — without suffering. If you indulge the flesh you have to pay dearly for it. A little bit of fleshly gratification may cost you a lifetime of sorrow. The believer who listlessly turns over the leaves of his Bible, and finds it dry and profitless — who attempts in vain to pray — is probably reaping the fruit of some sowing to his flesh. Perhaps he has been in worldly company, or reading worldly literature. Depend upon it, God has a reckoning with His children about such things.
How blessed, on the other hand, to sow to the Spirit. If you want the infinite joy of eternal life in your soul now,
[p. 47] you may have it by sowing to the Spirit. As we refuse the flesh and pursue the things of the Spirit we shall undoubtedly “of the Spirit reap life everlasting”, and He will also conduct our hearts into the circle of divine affections; He will lead us into the knowledge of the Father and the Son; He will cause us to reap even here the joys of heaven.