The Spirit in the Writings of St Paul: Christ Dwelling in the Heart by Faith

Or the main theme of our enquiry in the last chapter we went to the Epistle to

the Ephesians. And now, for the last of our

successive explorations of this continent of living truth, we come to the same Epistle again, and to a passage more full if possible

than even that other of the inmost treasures

of the doctrine of the Spirit.

Who has not read and re-read the closing verses of the third chapter of the Ephesians with the feeling of one permitted to look through parted curtains into the Holiest Place of the Christian life? Who has not longed to step into that sanctuary in a personal experience of its riches and blessings? Who that in any true sense has entered in by grace does not feel, does not know, that indeed it is rest and joy beyond all exposition to be there?

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THE SPIRITUAL PEM ELL jx delle 11.5) LIL. 226

It is the spiritual swmmum bonum of the Pilgrimage. It is the beginning of the happiness of the eternal Country.

Approaching this very sacred passage for some special meditations on one glorious part of it, let us first briefly recall its contents as a whole.

It forms the resumption of a dropped subject. At the close of ch. ii. the Apostle had written of the building of the great spiritual Temple, the true Church of God, the holy structure in which every stone is living and in living contact with the Augulare Fundamentum, the Stone of the Corner. That structure he had described as rising, growing, “into an holy sanctuary in the Lord;” preparing for the eternal Day of its final consecration, when it should be ready at length and for ever to be the “abiding habitation of God in the Spirit.” — Eph. ii. 22. Then followed a long and memorable digression, in which the imagery of sanctuary and habitation disappears. But at the fourteenth verse of the next chapter, our present chapter, it comes up again. We read again, and in a like connexion with the work and grace of

Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, of a “permanent inhabitation.”’ We see again a divine Indweller, abiding in a shrine constructed as it were of human materials and prepared for His presence by the skill and power of the Spirit. But there is a difference. The former passage had to do rather with the believing Company as such, the Temple of the true Church. This has to do rather with that company as seen in its individuals; it speaks of the

Eph. iii.r7, ‘‘ Leavts” of the saints, a word full of the thought of separate personalities; it con-. templates them as each an abode for the divine Indwelling. Each living stone is as it were taken by itself, and seen as a miniature of the Living Temple; not so that the glorious total is forgotten, for it appears throughout the whole passage in the use of the plural (“your hearts,”

Eph. iii.28. and ‘‘with adZ saznts”), but so that the individual aspect of the matter is the most prominent for the time. This form of the divine Inhabiting St Paul here dwells upon, and suppli-Eph.iii.x6. Cates the Father of the great Family

1 The karouxynoa of iii. 17 takes up the caroxnrnpiov of ii. 22.

LHE PRAYER OF EPH. Ii. 231

that by the Spirit it may take place fully and decisively in each Ephesian disciple. And then he proceeds to prayer on prayer, all xph. iii. x7-21. springing from this same root of blessing. He asks that the saints, thus each possessed by Christ as perpetual Inhabitant, “rooted and grounded” in that eternal Love which is manifested and conveyed through Him, may all together in some sort grasp the measureless dimensions of that Love, and all get a new and blissful knowledge in particular of the Love of Christ Himself, and all be filled with “the Fulness of God,” with “the plenitude of those blessings which the Infinite One is willing and able to bestow at each moment upon the finite recipient.” Then follows that great Doxology in which ‘“elory is given,” now and in the endless prospect, to the Father of the Son and of the saints in Him, in view of His almighty and unmeasured power to bless, and of the coming eternal manifestation of His praise “in the Church, and in Christ Jesus.” y

We have thus in some slight sense traversed

‘ T use the preferable reading here, év ty éxkAnoia kal év Xpior@ “Inoov.

the paragraph and reviewed its outline. I do so partly because there is a sort of sacred necessity to do so; to be so near such treasures of revealed grace and life, and to say nothing about the rest of them because our precise concern is with only one or two, is at least difficult. But also this view of the passage as a whole brings out what I would wish to remember throughout our present enquiry, that the profoundly individual blessing and experience with which we are specially concerned is set forth in connexion with more than individual interests. It is a thing which does not termi- “nate in the saint; it goes out through him to “all the saints,” and it finds its rest and goal in the glory of God.

But now to come to the treasures of truth which are our immediate subject. They are, the Dwelling of Christ in the heart by faith, and the connexion of this great gift of grace with a special work of the Hoty Sprrir.

Let me speak very simply, and at no great length, of the Inhabitation of the Lord in the heart. The theme is one rather for believing

— — = ee ee ee ee and adoring prayer, and reception, and experience, than for much explanation or disquisition. A few great points stand out however so clearly from the words that I may reverently say a little of them, as in the presence of our Lord the Indweller.

First we plainly have here a truth more special than the underlying truth that “in” every true believer Christ is, by the Holy Spirit. Precious beyond all estimate is that truth, and happy the man who habitually remembers it and acts upon it. Yes; “Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be 2Corsxiiis, counterfeits;” and great indeed are the inferences meant to flow direct from that fact into the Christian’s faith and life.1. But there is something more special here. For these Ephesians are addressed as no counterfeits in spiritual life; and yet St Paul prays that Christ may dwell in their hearts.

Secondly, the kind of speciality is indicated by the word “your hearts;” not your nature, your being, but your hearts. And “the heart”

=: — — a,

1 See above, ch. ii, is a word which, in Scripture, means very much the organ of the whole inner consciousness, of living thought, affection, will. Accordingly the Indwelling here must be something appropriate to that organ; a blessed Presence of the Lord in the saint’s recollection, and love, and purposes. “In” the Christian off his guard the Lord still ‘‘is,” in His patient mercy; but not ‘dwelling in his heart.’ To borrow the imagery of a Puritan commentator’ on the Ephesian Epistle, Christ may be present in the Temple, in the Church, of the believer’s being, while yet He is not sitting enthroned in its Choir. Ay Thirdly, the words of the Apostle assure us that it is the plan and purpose of the Gospel that such a session of Christ in the sanctuary of affections and will should be the experience, and the abiding experience, of every disciple. Not some of the Ephesian saints but all of them are contemplated in this great prayer; in each heart of all the company Christ is thus to abide. No esoteric privilege, to be won by

1 Bayne, or Baynes, of Cambridge; odzz¢ 1617, special achievements, or by special austerities, or under exceptional surroundings, is here in view. The means of attainment, or rather of reception, are divinely simple, as we shall presently see; this sacred bliss of the Presence is to be entered upon “by faith.” And it is meant to be not an intermittent and precarious glory, dropped for a season through the rolling clouds of doubt and fear, and soon to fade again into twilight. The word? selected to describe it is a word made expressly to denote residence as against lodging, the abode of a master within his own home as against the turning “aside for a night” of the Jerxiv.a, wayfarer who will be gone to-morrow. Holy and welcome intimation! It is within the scope of prayer, and of humblest expectation, and of believing reception, that this most sacred Presence of our Lord, in a mode which affects the inmost experience of His servant, shall be as continuous and as regular (may I not venture to say?) as the very consciousness of our own personality. ‘“Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”

1 Karoxeiv.

Lastly, the grammatical shape here of this same verb, its aorist tense,’ suggests to the reader the thought not only of a divine Indwelling in the heart, but of a certain coming wm of the Indweller, a taking up of His holy residence within. It conveys the idea of an initial entrance in order to a stated permanence of presence. And the inquiry presents itself, whether this teaches us that for each Christian, in the law of his spiritual life, there is intended to take place at some stage of his progress a definite and solemn step from a lower to a higher experience, from an ordinary to an extraordinary state of communion with his Lord. Did St Paul view the Ephesians as all then occupying a lower level from which they were all to rise decisively and forthwith to another as yet unknown to them? I cannot think that his meaning can be put precisely thus, in view of the whole context, and of his whole teaching. I do not trace in the New Testament at large any formed and deliberate doctrine of such a single and ruling crisis as

1 Karockjoat

IS AHERE ALWAYS A CONSCIOUS CRISIS ?: 237

divinely intended in every case of life and faith, and accordingly to be sought by every convert. The blessing indicated has nothing in it to forbid that it should coincide with the earliest living acceptance of Christ by the awakened man; and it has nothing in it to forbid the belief that in countless instances it should be truly present while yet its arrival, its development, was unnoticed by the man and took place through a process which he cannot even seem to analyse. Let no Christian judge another in this matter. But then let no Christian whose record is thus uzzformitarian (if we may borrow a word from the geologist) think that for his friend or brother there cannot be a critical and decisive experience of the Indweller’s “arrival to reside in the heart.” Testimonies innumerable, and given by gravest witnesses, tell us that such experienced arrivals of Jesus Christ there are, followed by a residence in the heart which is indeed a new and blissful experience to the man, as he discovers that what has before been an occasional and exceptional communion of soul with His living and present Redeemer may be, and in fact proves to be, prevailing and habitual. Such

cases St Paul I doubt not contemplates here, assured that within the large community at Ephesus there were many for whom such a crisis was the great spiritual need. And he includes the whole company in his prayer; partly, if I read him aright, to remind each disciple that whatever might be his experience of the Arrival there was no man who might not possess, and ought not to possess, the experience of the Presence; but partly for another reason. The holy Reality, in this as in other things of the soul, inevitably transcended any single metaphor of it. Arrival and Residence were ideas not narrowly to be limited to any one crisis of the life of faith, however great and memorable. Even for the most fully experienced, each access of conscious knowledge of the power of that Presence .in the heart would be as it were a new arrival for another stay. Such is He of whom the writer speaks, and such is His indwelling, that in the very heart itself, in the very same heart, He may from one point of view be lastingly present while from another point of view He may be arriving even now. ‘‘ Even so come, Lord Jesus.”

But while we thus speak of this sacred Indwelling, this dear inner secret of the Christian life, are we forgetting our true theme, the work of the Holy Spirit? No, we are not. I have dwelt thus far upon ver. 17 in order to put with the more emphasis the truth of ver. 16, the revealed action of the Spirit in this matter.

Observe then that it is HE who so to speak stands behind this whole wonderful experience as its immediate Agent:.and Secret::° The Apostle bows his knees to the Father that these dear Ephesians, each and all, one by one, may be dealt with in divine speciality by the Holy Ghost. Her must act in them and through them if Christ is thus to dwell within. Deep below the Christian’s consciousness, within those springs of thought and will which are such mysteries to the person himself, the Spirit of the Father — and of the Son — must do the work of ‘strengthening with might in the inner man. Operating there with the divine skill which violates nothing in the nature He has made, and with the divine power which can do what He will in and with that nature, He must give, He will give, supernaturally to the man’s inmost self a spiritual firmness and vigour which shall discard certain deep fears and do certain acts that could not otherwise be done. Sacredly significant indeed is the phraseology. In order to a reception into me of what is altogether the gift of God and not the sequel or remuneration of any toils or endurances of mine, I yet need to be “strengthened with might by the Spirit in” (‘deep within,” as the Greek! seems precisely to indicate) ‘‘the inner man.” And I ask what this means, what is the occasion in this matter for a divine strengthenng, where perhaps I might have looked rather for such words as subduing or alluring. And I read the answer in the light of the truth that the blessing in question is the residence always in the heart of its Master and Lord, who where He dwells must rule; who enters not to cheer and soothe alone but before all things else to reign. And I remember that nature, nature in the Fall, does not like that Presence in that aspect; fears greatly to admit ‘‘this

1 Ris tov gow avOpwror.

WHY HIS “STRENGTHENING” TS NEEDED, 241:

Man to reign over us.” I remem- Luke xix. 14.

ber that the regenerate soul itself — such is the dimness of sight and the spiritual imbecility of even the child of God ‘‘in this tabernacle” — all too easily loses its conscious certainties of the absolute tenderness along with the absolute sovereignty and royalty of the Lord who “stands at the” inner Rev. iii. 20.

‘door and knocks;” it trembles lest His incoming should of necessity bring some nameless shock or sorrow in its train. ‘‘I dreaded to yield myself without reserve to Jesus Christ,’ said a Christian kinswoman of my own, relating to a little circle the story of her own experience; ‘I felt so sure that He would take from me my little Hugh.” But the strength of a quiet confidence in the perfect wisdom and love of the claimant King, along with a calm intuition into His adorable beauty and desirableness, at length overcame that dread; and the door was opened, cost what it might. He has come in — and the child has not been taken from the mother’s embrace, or rather it has been given back to her, “Isaac-like,” more than ever her

own, out of that supreme surrender.

Do we not understand in the light of such an instance the need of the Holy Spirit’s strengthgiving work, in order to the reception of the Lord Christ as the abiding and ruling Inhabitant of the very heart? And do we not see how it is the special function of none other than THE Spirit so to deal with the inner man? He ‘s the Glorifier of Christ; it is His, as we have seen above,’ to

Show us that loving Man That rules the courts of bliss, The Lord of hosts, the mighty God, The eternal Prince of Peace.” And in the sacred matter of the Indwelling, it is He accordingly who so “shows” Him to the wistful soul that it sees, with an intuition truly its own yet supernatural in its conditions, how safe, how satisfying, how blissful is His all-ruling presence, not only in “the courts of bliss” but in the believing sinner’s heart. So the door is opened, for this private but royal entrance of the King of Glory. So work Thou then in us all, O Spirit of the Father and of the Son.

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And here, as our meditation on this bright oracle closes, let us lastly remember those words of ver. 17; “dy faith.” They are all-important to a practical use of the truth and promise of our Lord’s Indwelling. On the one hand they remind us that, if that Indwelling is to be our experience indeed, there is need of genuine personal action on the Christian’s own part, action God-taught and God-granted, as we have seen, yet not the less the man’s own, The Lord “stands at the door and Rew. iii. 2. knocks;” the man, the inner man, must rise and set it open. Faith is the act of man though it is “the gift of God;”! and “by — Eph. ii. 8, means of faith” Christ arrives in the heart to dwell there. But on the other hand, because the action of the soul zs in this case faith, and nothing else, the words remind us for our “comfort and good hope” that the action is in effect nothing but the utmost simplicity of reception. Do we need to define “faith” to ourselves over again?? Has not every instance of the use of the word by our

hs Sana Te eae ia an a

1 See above, p. 106,? See above, p. 108.

Et re re

Lord Himself in the Gospels long ago assured us that it means just personal reliance, personal trust, personal entrustment 1? 3 Legis the open arms which in their emptiness embrace Christ, the open lips which receive Him as the bread of the soul, the life, the all. As in Justification so in this its glorious sequel, our part is to take the Promise as it stands, to take the Thing in the envelope of the Promise, and to act upon its holy presence and reality.

Well has it been said that weak faith may indeed do but weak works but that it can — open a door.

And He who is “the Spirit of faith” is 2Cor.iv.13 faith’s appropriate Giver, for this as for all things.’ For this, as for our earliest acts of trust, Hr enables us, by manifesting Christ in His divine trustworthiness and putting the soul into contact with Him, the seen, the trusted, the welcomed Lord.

‘© Son of God, who lovest me,
I will be Thine alone;

And all I have, and all I am,
Shall henceforth be Thine own.”

1See Bp O’Brien, Nature, etc., of Faith, ch. i.

It is a “full and glad surrender.” “And all this hath worked that one and the selfsame SPIRIT.”

Our enquiries and meditations on the Person and the Work of the Holy Spirit here draw to a close. It is needless to spend words in owning how fragmentary, how imperfect, even on a very modest standard, the attempt has been. But I can hope and can pray that my reader may have gained here and there a suggestion, perhaps about some forgotten side of a familiar truth, and that he may have felt some stimulus to an ever-deepening search into the divine Word for more and yet more of the treasures of the truth of the Holy Spirit.

And may writer and reader both be found, through His great grace, among the happy ones who, living by the Spirit, walk by the Spirit, and by the Spirit draw continually out of the fulness of Jesus Christ, to whom by the Spirit they are conjoined in an unspeakable union.

More than thirty years ago that great man, great thinker and preacher, and great saint,

Adolphe Monod, lay on his sorely suffering and comparatively early deathbed at Paris. Led in his youth through experiences of complicated doubt and profound - melancholy to the foot of the atoning Cross of a divine and personal Redeemer, and to the solemn and glad experiences of the work of the Spirit in the believer’s life, and to a holy submission and repose before the whole revealed truth of our salvation by grace, he had spent his years and used all his great gifts of intellect and of heart “in the defence and confirmation of the Gospel,” with the one longing, loving desire to bring others into the peace and certainty he had found, and to build them up in it.’ Now he was dying, at the age of fifty-four. His beloved ministry was over, and he was looking back on work and onward into the heavenly rest from his Pisgah-top of suffering. One day,? in the midst of much physical distress, a few words escaped him, his brief

1 An impressive word-portrait of M. Monod is given in M. Guizot’s Méditations sur 0 Etat actuel de la Réligion Chrétienne (1866), pp. 170-184.

2 Vie, p.470; Life and Letters (English translation), p. 244.

ALTAOVeTHE HOLY SPIRIT. 247
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summary of a Christian’s peace, strength, aim, and all. I close by repeating them, and invite my reader with me to make them the motto not only of our death hereafter but of our life this day:

“All in Christ; by the bolp Spivit; for the Glory of God. All elge is nothing.”

“Du Athem aus der ew’gen Stille,
Durchwehe sanft der Seelen Grund;
Full’ mich mit aller Gottesfulle,
Und da wo Siind’ und Grauel stund,
Lass Glaube, Lieb’, und Ehrfurcht grtinen,
Im Geist and Wahrheit Gott zu dienen.

“O Geist, O Strom, der uns vom Sohne
Er6éffnet, und krystallenrein
Aus Gottes und des Lammes Throne
Nun quillt in stille Herzen ein,
Ich 6ffne meinen Mund und sinke
Hin zu der Quelle, das ich trinke.”

TERSTEEGEN, 1697 — 1769.