The Spiritual Glow

“Be fervent in spirit.” — romans xii. n.

“Maintain the spiritual glow” (Dr. Moffatt’s Translation).

I want to consider the defensive power of a noble enthusiasm. What do I mean by an enthusiasm? I mean an intense and generous passion for some supreme interest, so passionate that it dominates the life. And what do I mean by the defensive powers of such an enthusiasm? I mean that such a passion gathers all the forces of life into its own swift goings, so that nothing is left to loiter, nothing is left to trail along in aimless vagrancy. Every power is caught in the commanding suction of a great enthusiasm; it is not trapped by any insidious enticement which may be lurking by the way. A noble enthusiasm is defensive because it makes life whole and wholesome. This kind of fire tends to keep everything clean.

Turn where you please you may watch the protective influence of a great enthusiasm. Take a young fellow who goes to one of our national Universities. What does he find? He finds pernicious influences of many kinds. There are germs of enervation which would reduce him to mental lassitude. There are soft enticements which would lull him into moral laxity. But give him a passion for learning, and all these small invaders are burnt up in the fervent heat. A bewitching pleasure, a luring indolence, a seductive mischief — his enthusiasm destroys them as in a consuming fire. The assailments shrivel like moths in a flame. His passion is his defence.

So it is with the reign of any predominant enthusiasm. It has protective ministry. Give a working man a passion for gardening and put him into an allotment, and what defensive forces his enthusiasm throws round about his leisure hours! All the meaner enticements lose their power. They never reach his central consciousness. Indeed, there is no consciousness to spare. His enthusiasm commands all his forces, and the baser things call to him in vain. His fire is his defence.

It is even so with the passionate championship of some great ideal. Emerson’s counsel has now become a familiar phrase: “Hitch your wagon to a star!” It is the wedding of idealism to very mundane tasks. It is Emerson’s way of saying that even the drawing of a cart along a muddy road can be associated with lofty and shining ideals. Wagons can be drawn by starry steeds. Humdrum tasks can be harnessed to heavenly coursers. There can be a noble passion in common toil. Yes, and when we do hitch our wagon to a star, we may be perfectly sure that, whatever the star may do for the wagon, it will irradiate the wagoner and protect him by the ministry of sacred flame. When he arrives with his wagon at the end of the road, be the wagon empty or full, he himself will be as clean as a priest of the Lord; nay, he is a priest of the Lord, clothed in linen pure and white, ministering at the altar of labour, on which there burns the fire divine. His fiery passion is his defence.

But, when enthusiasm begins to cool, our defensive energy begins to wane. As the fire dies out the enemy comes in. Just as soon as radiation ceases invasion begins. Mean things appear, and they appear in aggressive pride. It is as when the temperature of the blood is reduced.

Waiting plague and lurking disease find entry and foothold and they begin to thrive in the defenceless roads of the flesh. Admiral Peary has told us, in his account of the discovery of the North Pole, that it was in the dreary, weary Arctic winter, when enthusiasm waned, that the hidden weaknesses of his men appeared. It was then that the spirit of irritation and dissension would breathe disturbing air upon the fellowship. As the fires died low quarrelsomeness stole in. The moral defences departed with the glow. And so it is in every relationship of life. When noble fires are burning our estates are secure. When the noble fires smoulder our estates are invaded, and mean and baser things possess our spiritual world.

And so, right in the midst of all this, there comes this word of the Apostle Paul, “Be fervent in spirit.” Keep your fires burning! Maintain a spiritual glow! This urgent counsel was given to a little company of disciples who were living their consecrated life in the city of Rome. Think of their environment. They breathed a moral atmosphere full of deadly germs. They were surrounded by the seductive, destructive lure of Mammon. They felt the ceaseless power of the down- dragging magnetism of worldly gravity. They were beset by evil incitements and suggestions and antagonisms. They lived and moved where the majesty of evil had its throne and sovereignty.

And the Apostle Paul tells them that nothing but a passionate religion will endow them with needful resistance. Tepid devotion will afford no defences. Luke-warmness will be the friend of contagion. Nothing but exuberant and overflowing health will afford protection from the moral plague. If the fires go out Rome will come in. So be fervent in spirit! Maintain the spiritual glow! Keep the home fires burning! Let them burn like the live coal which glows upon the altar of God.

Now I will contend that there is no other counsel of the Apostle which is more urgent and timely for our own day. Now, as then, our spiritual enthusiasms are our moral defences. If our devotion to Christ burns with an intense fervour, if it burns as with a core of glowing heat, the mean and deadly things which beset us will be consumed as in a fiery furnace. God still purifies Jerusalem, and He keeps her pure by the spirit of burning.

Let us turn the light of the Apostle’s counsel upon the individual life and let us see what guidance it gives us in the personal welfare of the soul. When our devotion to Christ maintains a spiritual glow everything in our life shares the gracious influence of the quickening heat. Every power experiences the stirring of the heavenly warmth. Life is energized from the central fire, and every noble faculty begins to disclose its purposed strength and glory. It is like it is in a green-house, the basal heat quickens every plant to increase its stature and to clothe itself in floral beauty. Or better still, it is like a garden where every unsprung seed thrills to the common touch of the spring-tide sun. So when there is a spiritual glow in life everything begins to be fulfilled; we are becoming complete in the Lord, who rises upon us with healing in His wings.

And as such a fire-possessed life is whole and wholesome so is it also secure. Its fire is its defence. When night falls upon the explorer in African jungle he seeks for a clearing, and he lights a fire, and the cheery flame is his protection against the prowling beast. Our picnic fire puts the mosquito to flight. And so it is with our

190 spiritual fire, it keeps the beast at bay, and it resists the hornet that carries the plague. Our fire is our defence. “He was clad with zeal as with a cloak,” and when a man is wearing that cloak of fire he is encased in armour of invincible security.

But if our fires abate, if our passion cools, if our devotion to Christ Jesus loses its fervour, the issues run to gloomy destiny. Every noble faculty of life feels the withdrawal of the central heat. Our graded powers are like a regiment which has lost its esprit de corps, and every sacred gift becomes a weakling in the ranks. Aye, but more than this, the lessening of the fires means the loss of our defences. When the fire smoulders the poison-laden hornet is again on the wing. When the fire in the forest dies down, the wild beast always draws near. How urgent then is the Apostolic counsel:” Maintain your spiritual glow! ‘Keep the heart fires burning! And thou shalt not be afraid of the pestilence that walketh in darkness, nor of the destruction that wasteth at noonday.

Now turn the light of the Apostle’s counsel to social fellowship, and let it fall upon the corporate life of the Church. When there is a spiritual glow in the Church mean things are consumed like dirt in a furnace. The spiritual radiations of the Church ensure its moral security. But let the Church lose her spiritual glow and all manner of un-Christly things swarm across her desecrated floors. We have a glaring example of all this in the state of the Church at Corinth as it is revealed to us by the Apostle Paul. The fires in the Church had burned low, they had burnt down almost to grey ashes amid the deadly besetments of Corinth, and one has only to read the Apostle’s letter to the Corinthians to find out what manner of unclean things crowded her sacred courts. The wild beast entered the holy place in the shape of unnameable vices. Sordid moods found a prolific resource. Petty partisanship became common. Peddling questionings began to abound. There was an emphasis of things external, there was an exaltation of ritual and traditions. There was bickering, and quarrelling, and gossip. The fires in the Church died down, and the world streamed in.

I think there is an equally startling revelation of the smallness which invades a lukewarm

Church in the example of the Church at Jerusalem. The Church in Jerusalem had no missionaryenthusiasm because it had lost its spiritual glow. It had no flaming evangel because it had lost its fire. It had no speeding Seraphim because its altars were cold. When the great missionary Apostle returned from the last and greatest of his missionary tours he reported his work to the Church in Jerusalem. And what happened? Paul had kindled a line of holy fires through Asia Minor. Sacred beacons were blazing in Macedonia and lower Greece. Isles of the sea had become luminous with the light of life. He had incurred perils innumerable. He had been ceaselessly pursued by the cruel hounds of persecution. He had been flung into prison. He had been scourged. He carried the scars of travail. He bore the marks of the Lord Jesus. And he was now old and broken, but his quenchless fire was burning, and he told his glowing story to the Apostles and Church at Jerusalem. “He declared particularly what God had wrought among the Gentiles by his ministry.” And what did they say about it? In what kind of holy rapture did they express their glowing praise? ‘Thou knowest, brother, how many thousands

193 of Jews there are which believe, and they are all zealous of the law.” Yes, and what next? Can you think what is coming? They urged him to take a purifying vow and to shave his head! Can you imagine that if that Church had been glowing with a passion of devotional love to the Lord, such a peddling bit of Jewish ritual would have been forced into a season of spiritual wonder and exuberance? I know the great Apostle did it: yes, I know he did it; but I think I also know that in doing it he became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross.

I repeat that when the Church of Christ loses its spiritual glow ritual becomes more than miracles of grace, and hierarchical orders and ministries obscure the blazing wonders of the Holy Ghost. It is as though the venerable General Booth had returned from one of his glorious evangelistic journeys in which thousands of souls had opened their windows to the saving light of God’s most marvellous dawn, and he had told the story of grace to some episcopal convocation, and had been met by the response: “Brother, there are many thousands of believers who are zealous of the ecclesiastical law. Do this, therefore, that we say to thee: receive ordination to the ministry by the laying on of episcopal hands.” To which, I think, the old warrior would have replied: “I live, yet not I, Christ liveth in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” “For me to live is Christ!”

But we need not go to ancient Corinth or Jerusalem to learn that when the great glow departs from the Church smaller things come in. Do you think there would ever have been a Kikuyu controversy if there had been a glowing, passionate devotion to Christ? Do you think we should be so tremblingly discussing interchange of pulpits if we were aflame with love for our Lord? Do you think we should be painfully concerned with the form and colour of ritualistic raiment if we were clad with zeal as with a cloak f These things stand high when fires burn low. When the spiritual glow goes out of the Church the organism is supplanted by the organization, the vital is changed for the institutional, the Christly becomes the Churchly, and ecclesiastical orders have more emphasis than the divine grace.

It is needful for us to remember, in our own ecclesiastical realm, and in the face of modern strivings, that we must have glow before we can gain union. I have sometimes felt that we were like foolish blacksmiths who were seeking to weld luke-warm bars of iron into a single piece. We were ecclesiastical blacksmiths trying to weld luke-warm Churches into vital Communion. I do not think it is blacksmith’s work at all. The Scriptures say nothing about welding sundered things into vital fellowship, but they do speak about separated things flowing together into union. What a difference there is between welding things and the same things flowing together! But before things can flow together they must have become molten. We must have molten affections, fluid sympathies; we must have genialities and fraternities flowing like molten streams from a central fire. And therefore does the Apostle urge us to maintain a spiritual glow. Let the Church of Christ do this, and in the blazing devotion we shall flow together as kindred streams of heavenly flame.

Now, at the end of all this, may I not suggest, as an additional vista of meditation, that in international life peoples become one only in the uniting energies of noble fire? There is something about the binding power of a passionate crusade which resists every poisonous incitement and every perilous lure. These things flee before a generous enthusiasm as snakes and vipers flee before a prairie fire. We have seen the uniting power of a commanding passion in the fiery travail of the Great War. I know not how it may have been in diplomatic circles; the tortuous ways of diplomacy sometimes seem to be the last roads to be reached by the heat of a noble passion. But as for the allied peoples, those who flamed in the sacred charge, they surely became one in the fire of common duty, common danger, common hope, and common sacrifice. Old estrangements were knit together in vital fellowship. Old perversities were consumed like autumn leaves in a gardener’s fire. We trusted where we had suspected, we cheered where we had frowned, we admired where we had criticized. We flowed together.

And all this was especially true in the relations of the British and American peoples. Old prejudices melted away like icebergs in tropical seas. Antipathies which were the creation of a hundred years changed into friendship. Stony moods which were the petrifactions of generations softened into the kindly amenities of kindred flesh and blood. We found each other, and we saw each other, in the revealing fires of a vast enthusiasm, and all the meaner things perished like stubble in the flame. Are we maintaining the glow? I confess that to me the old evil things seem to be creeping back again. Are the noble fires smouldering? I think I see the critical spirit contending with the fraternal. I think I see good-will hardening here and there into the old suspicion. I think I see the peril of intimate comradeship drawing apart again into the cold aloofness of ancient prejudice. What I call the hair-trigger mood, the touchand-fire mood, is asserting itself again. On the one side there is American touchiness, susceptible as the eye-ball; on the other side there are signs of British superciliousness and pride. On the one hand we hear suggestions that Jonathan has harked back to his dollars again. On the other hand we have suggestions that John Bull has reverted to his old game of double dealing and his successful practice of up-the-sleeve diplomacy. All of which means that the old stinging hornets are buzzing in the air again. It means that the old beasts are beginning to “home” again on the international fields.

Now, what is to save us? Nothing but the spiritual glow. We can repel and destroy these emerging evils by feeding the fires of a large and noble enthusiasm. Everybody can help in making the fire. Everybody can bring fuel to the holy flame. We can strengthen it with knowledge, we can feed it with thought, we can quicken it with expression, we can deepen it with prayer. We can live and labour for the passion of fraternity, the enthusiasm of humanity, the glow of Christ, the fire of God.

Our resource, in all our imminent problems, and in all the difficulties which confront us, is to be found in the maintenance of the spiritual glow. I see no hope for the world except in common and enthusiastic devotion to our Lord Jesus Christ. And by devotion to Christ I mean something loftier than ecclesiastical passion, and something far nobler than denominational pride. I mean that vital, personal, quickening relationship to the Saviour which fills the mind and heart with generous and cleansing passion. I mean the spiritual devotion which makes a life conspicuous for magnanimity, chivalry, fraternity, humanity. That fire of God can cleanse the world!

Come Holy Spirit, Heavenly dove,
With all Thy quickening powers

Kindle a flame of sacred love
On these cold hearts of ours.