Waiting for Power

Luke xxiv. 49

’Taery ye ia the city of Jerusalem until ye be endued with power from on high.” — Luke xxiv. 49.

LUKE goes twice over the same ground — the narrative of our Lord’s forty days after the Resurrection, and of the Ascension — in the end of His Gospel, and in the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles. The double narrative binds the two books together, and shows the importance to be attached to the incidents it narrates, and is also interestinobecause it looks at them from two different points of view. In the Gospel they are regarded as the end of the earthly life; in the Acts, as the beginning of the heavenly. And so, in the latter narrative, wo have a fuller explanation of the power that the disciples were to wait for, and a clear statement of the great tasks which they were to do, when they were equipped with it, as well as the promise of the return of the Lord in the faroft’ future.

We have to bring the two narratives together in order to see the full significance of either.

Another point to be noticed is that, if we had only this Gospel before us, we might suppose that this injunction and promise were given by our Lord on the day of His resurrection, but, with the further light thrown upon them by the Acts, we learn that the interval of waiting was very brief, since the words that prescribe it were spoken, if not on the very day I of the ascension itself, at least very near it. xind so there were about ten days of expectancy, and then came the rush of the promised spirit.

Now it seems to me that both the promise and the commandment of our text have a bearing, though in a modified way, upon us, as well as upon the original recipients. And whilst the greater part of Christendom is to-day thinking of that past gift of Pentecost, I in this sermon deal with its bearings on our present. I think I shall best reach my end if I simply ask you to look at the two things in our text, the promise and the instruction; the equipment for service, and the wait- I ing for it. “Tarry ye in the city till ye be endued with power from on high.”

I. — Note then, first, the equipment for sei’vice.

Now the metaphor that is concealed to an ordinary En owlish reader under that archaic word “endued,” is a very simple and beautiful one. The word means “clothed.” As we read in other places of being “clothed with shame,” or “clothed with zeal “; and of God as being ‘’■ clothed with majesty “; in like manner the apostles speak to us of” putting on Christ,” and beinof “clothed with Him,” and of beini;- “clothed upon “with the house that is from heaven. The ideas of abundant fulness of qualities, of a gift that is visible on the outside, and of something that wraps and veils and dignifies the naked humanity, lie in that great word ‘• clothed with power from on high.”

Now, I need not remind you that, although in our text there is no distinct explanation of what this power consists in, the other narrative in the Acts supplies what is wanted in the interpretation of the metaphor, and identities it with the gift of a Divine Spirit to the Church, and to the Church because to each individual member thereof.

The gift of Jesus Christ to the world — that is to say, to those in the world who believe on Him — is the gift of a new life, communicated by the actual indwelling of the Divine Spirit. I believe that truth has been far too much neglected by modern Christendom, and that in the neglect is to be found a large part of the reason why the neglected promise has been but partially realized, and why the Church of to-day is the poor thing that it so largely is. And there is little, as it seems to me, that is more needed by the consciousness of Christendom at large than to go back, with a clear understanding and with an unfaltering faith, to that ancient promise of the gift of a Divine Spirit, to dwell in every believing spirit.

Brethren, whether we believe that such a promise is a phantasm or a Divine revelation, vfhether we accept Christ’s words or not, it seems to me that we cannot read them without seeing that He meant us to believe that He would give to them that love Him this greatest of all gifts. You may accept the words, or you may reject them, but you cannot twist them so as to exclude the meaning of a personal bestowment of a Divine Spirit, without doing violence to them.

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We are not to weaken that great thought into metaphor or rhetoric, or a strong way of saj’ing that the influence of Christ’s teaching: will last throuo’h the ages. It means a great deal more than that. It means the gift of a Divine Spirit to dwell with us and in us.

If we think of how much is taught us by the metaphors and epithets under which that gift is described to us, we shall still more clearly see, and I hope deeply feel, its importance and its blessedness. It is described as wind or breath, the source of life, the immaterial, invisible energy that sweeps through the world and brings freshness where it comes; that varies in intensity from the whispering zeph3TS of some calm evening to the gale that destroys cities and lashes the ocean into tempest. It is fire that melts, that Avarms, that cleanses by consuming; it is oil that invigorates and supples, that drops upon the head as the designation to and the bestowment of fitness for office. It is water that refreshes, that fertilizes, that stimulates all growth, that is indispensable to life; and this stream flows from the throne of God and of the Lamb. It is the Dove, gentle, meek, heaven-sent, peace-bringing, calmly settling where it lights, and blessing where it settles. These are the emblems under which Scripture sets forth this great gift. And higher than all is the unfigurative fact, “I will send you My Spirit.”

Then let us remember that this gift, the characteristic blessing which Jesus Christ has to bestow, with its manifold blessings, is by the pledge and prophecy of Pentecost a perennial gift. It is not correct, indeed, to say that the Sph’it of God was given then to the Church once for all. There is only one thing that is once for all, and that is the Sacrifice for the sins of the whole world that was made on Calvary. All else is the continuation of the consequences of that deed once for all done for men. Christ’s work was once for all; Christ’s workings are the uninterrupted communication of its results. The ofift is not inalienable, in the sense that when bestowed it abides whatever the demeanour of the recipients, but it is permanent in the sense that it is ever available, and that if there are variations, the variations are due to us. The fire was lit on Pentecost, and it blazes still. The wind that begun to blow on that day has not sunk to a sickly stagnation of calm. The river has not, like the rivers of Asiatic plateaux, been sucked up and lost in the thirsty sand. The gift that began to be given when these disciples were “clothed with power” is available to-day. It was no prerogative of an official aristocracy; no exclusive bestowment upon primitive Christianity. Christendom should be a democracy, because each individual contained in it has equal access to the fountain of heavenly radiance, and, apart from all instrumentalities of priests, sacraments, services, ceremonial, every man may and must for himself draw near to the Giver, and by himself become the recipient of the gifts. “On your servants and on your handmaidens will I pour forth of My Spirit.”

Then there is a second thought to be considered, and that is that this Divine gift is the source of all power for Christian living and service. The Church has ever been tempted, and we as individuals are tempted, to fall back upon other things. There is no antagonism between the lower forms of Divine gifts, by which men are adapted for various types of Christian service, and these hicher, without which all the other are, as I believe, of no avail. Our natural gifts are heightened into spiritual gifts when there dwells in our hearts the Spirit of God. And anything that we can bring of eloquence, of genius, of perseverance, of diligence, of scholarship, or anything else is, by that gift, kindled into tenfold brightness, and exalted to an unreckonably higher power and efficacy. Plunge a candle into oxygen and it will flame the brighter. Our natural gifts and opportunities of whatever kind they may be, being reinforced and ‘’ clothed” — to take the metaphor of my text — with this Divine Spirit, are a thousandfold more than ever they were before.

And without it what are they all worth for Christian work? There have been churches that have relied upon creeds. There have been churches that have relied upon secularities, wealth. State recognition, position, and the like. There is a tendency in this day to rely on organizations, and the multiplication of effort and advertising, and drum- beating and trumpet-blowing, and general fussiness. They tried in America some little time ago to bring down rain by exploding gunpowder, and it did not answer. And it will not answer to try to bring down the success which is real success by any such noisy reverberations as these to which I am referring.

There is one thing by which all men that ever have done much for God and men have been marked. There have been infinite diversities in them, differences of creed, differences of idiosyncrasies and cast of character, different ways of working, different grades of capacity. Some of them have been eloquent, hive Isaiah; some of them have been of stammeringtongue, like Moses; some of them have been wise, and some of them have been foolish. It does not matter. One thing they all have had, which the world calls personal magnetism, which the New Testament calls being filled with the Holy Ghost. Why is it that two men shall stand up and say the same thing; and from the lips of the one the words will drop cold and impotent, and from the other they will come flaming with power? There may be subordinate reasons for the difference; the reason lies in this, that the one man is speaking from personal contact with Jesus Christ and His Spirit, and the other man is chattering what he has learnt from men, or what he thinks it is the proper thing to say. The power that touches the world is the power of an indwelling Divine Spirit.

And now, brethren, one more word. If all this is true, what about the present condition of Christendom? There is no need to be pessimistic, or to indulge in exaggeration. I joyfully recognize a great deal that is good, a quickened sense of responsibility, a wider application of the conception of Christian duty, and Gospel preaching to civic and social and political questions, as well as to the salvation of the individual soul. I see and I rejoice in all that. And then I turn the page, and I see the other side. Churches with an enormous proportion of their

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members sunk in gross worldliness; churches of which thousands of their adherents live exactly like the men who do not pretend to have any religion at all. What about the enormous amount of work and the comparatively small results? What about the Kves of those wdio thus say that the Spirit of God dwells in them? “Is the Spirit of the Lord straitened? Are these His doings?” Surely not. If it be true that that Divine Spirit has been given, how has all this come upon us? and why this torpid, lagging, often recreant, and often futile Christianity? Christianity is not “played out,” but it sometimes seems as if a good many of the organizations that profess to embody it are very nearly so.

So, dear friends, we all have need to ask ourselves whether the facts of the churches to which we beloni? correspond with the promise of Christ, and to set our hearts on this assurance, that that promise is of perpetual validity. The tongues of fire flickered into extinction, the miracle of speech ceased in a few moments, and the rushing mighty wind was hushed. But the gift remained after the fiery tongues that sat upon the heads of the disciples had disappeared, and the heads on which they sat had mouldered into dust.

11. — And now I have only time for a word or two about the second point of this text, and that is the waiting for equipment which our Lord here prescribes.

I have already said that the perpetuity of that Divine gift is not the perpetuity of a thing given once for all, but of a bestowment continually repeated. The river flows. There are variations in the cur-

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rent and in the depth, but they are not due to intermittent pulsations coming from the source, but to obstacles that men place in the channel. Travellers tell us that at certain seasons of the year there form up on the main tributary of the Nile great banks of tropical weed which stop the flow, and that when these break the inundation comes that brings fertility away down in the Delta, thousands of miles off. And so Christian men may pile up dams between themselves and the continuous flow of the river; and whilst its waters are sparkling on the one side, there may lie a dreary expanse of parched and barren clay upon the other.

Think of these people in Jerusalem, for the ten days of waiting. It was no indolent waiting. How they must have felt solitary and helpless without their Master! How tremendous they must have felt the task that He had left them as a legacy! How .keenly they must have felt their own impotence! How eagerly they must have desired that yet unknown equipment which He had promised them! And so they filled the days, not with mere passive waitino’ but with a waitincf screwed to the hio-hest tension of expectation and yearning in the fulness of desire.

That is the sort of waiting that you and I have to exercise, brethren. We hear to-day of perpetual calls for work; this scheme here, that other one there, pressed upon all of us. I would not have less work, but I would have far more quiet waiting. We must ‘’feed our minds by a wise passiveness.” Silence is fruitful, like the calm autumn days when the year’s

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work is done, nnci the earth rests for next spring’s and next summer’s promise and fertinty AVe need far more habitual, quiet expectance. Time spent in waiting is not wasted. Such waiting has nothing in common with indolent repose.

We need for eii’ectual Christian work more solitude on the part of the workers, and for depth of Christian life more solitude on the part of the livers. Solitude is the mother country of the strong. No man has ever done much worth doino- in this world who has not lived very much apart. And no Christian has ever done much who has not lived very much apart with God. “I was left alone, and I saw this great vision.” “Come ye apart and rest awhile.” Brother, if we are to be fit for service, we must be familiar with the “secret place of the Most High,” where He will whisper in our ears that which afterwards may be sounded from the housetops.

Solitude, silence, meditation, expectation, desire — all these have to be united if we do not want to stop the flow to us of the gift of the Divine Spirit. Leave some of your work undone. It is better to he than ta do. Leave some of your work undone, that you may hold converse with your Christ, and you will afterwards do your work all the better.

The days of waiting were brief If you and I will fill them as these men filled them, with supplication, with desire, with expectancy, then He will not forget His promise. A waiting Church or a waiting soul will, in a little time, be a Church or a soul filled with the Holy Spirit, and therefore mighty for Christian work.