The Spirit Glorifying Christ to the Soul

WE have endeavoured to think eut something of the great subject of Conviction of Sin by the Spirit of God. Perhaps I should rather say not to think it out, but to think it in; to turn inward in view of it, and question our souls, writer and reader together, about our Rom. vii x3. OWn insights into the “exceeding sinfulness of sin” in the light of the Holy Ghost.

I turn now to the glorious other side of the operation of the Spirit in His work of new creation, re-constitution, of us sinners. I turn to His dealings with us in. the way of making our Lord Jesus Christ to be to us what He is given to. be to such as we are — our spiritual “life, and breath, and all things;” our righteousrCori.3 ness, and sanctification, and redemption”; our joy, our peace, our power, our hope. We have seen the Heavenly Worker ploughing the soil, breaking up the fallow, crushing the underlying rock into dust. We see Him now dropping the seed, letting fall the divine “corn of wheat” into the ground. We John xii. 2.

see Him applying Christ to the sorely needing soul, now conscious of its need. And we see Him to this end dealing with it as the Spirit of Manifestation, ‘“revealing in it the Son of God.” Gal. i. 16.

Here is indeed the Holy Spirit’s congenial, beloved work. For He is the “Spirit of Christ.” And in our second chapter we saw how deep the indications of that phrase go; how the Spirit is not only the Emissary of Christ but, in the inner Life of Godhead, the Stream from Him the Fountain. Wonderful is the union of nature and of operation so indicated; wonderful, blissful, divinely deep and tender, the union and communion of that Love of the Spirit and the Son. —

Let us dwell a little on this point of truth. It is possible, and it is not uncommon, so to dwell on the convincing work of the Spirit as to associate His action mainly with that side of grace; as if His characteristic were to

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penetrate, to detect, to expose the soul to itself, to cast it down wounded and broken. But ino, it is not so.) I have strivenito lay all the emphasis I can on the unspeakable importance of the work of conviction. But therefore I am all the more free to remind my reader and brother that this is after all the Spirit’s “strange work.” The Eternal Neh. ix.20. Dove, the Spirit of grace, the “Good Spirit,” has for His dear and welcome function the uplifting of the sweet glory of Christ to the aching eyes of the contrite; the applying of the soft balm of Christ to the wounds He Himself has mercifully made through “soul Heb. iv.x2, and spirit.”

There is a delightful little book by the late venerable Dr Horatius Bonar, Zhe Gospel of the Spirit’s Love. It is only a tract, of less than fifty pages ;1 but it is full of that 7; heology of Consolation® which has few better modern expositors than the deeply taught saints and ia Edinburgh: A. Stevenson, North Bank Street. 2nd ed., ey borrow the phrase from the title of a very valuable

historical doctrinal work by the Rev. D. C. A. Agnew. (Edinburgh: 1881.)

thinkers trained in the thorough views of our sin and ruin expounded in the Scottish Confession, and in that adoring insight into the wonder, and glory, and tenderness of the work of grace which seems specially given to those who have accepted the whole truth of man’s ruin. I commend this little book to my reader. It will press home on him on every side the conviction that indeed “Thy Spirit zs Ps. exliii. ro,

good;’’ that the Love of the Spirit, as truly as that of the Son, “‘ passeth knowledge;’’ that it is a deep mistake, a fallacy which chills and blights the soul’s life, to fail to recognize this; “as if there were something in the Spirit which repelled us, whatever there might be in Christ to attract us; as if the light which the Cross throws upon the love of the Spirit were not quite in harmony with that which it reveals of the love of Christ; as if the Spirit were not always as ready with His help as is the Son” (p. 21). And one passage, close to this short quotation, speaks in words pregnant with truth about our special subject here, His glorification of Christ to us : — ‘‘ The want of stable Zeace, of which so many complain, may arise from imperfect views of the Spirit’s love. True, our peace comes from the one work of the Substitute upon the Cross, from the blood of the one Sacrifice, from the sin-bearing of Him who has made peace by the blood of the Cross. But it is the Holy Spirit who glorifies Christ to us, and takes the scales from our eyes. If, then, we doubt His love, can we expect Him to reveal the Son in our hearts?) Are we not thrusting Him away, and hindering that view of the peace-making which He alone can give?... Perhaps the want of fazt#, which we often mourn over, may arise from our not realizing the Spirit’s love. ‘Faith’ (no doubt) ‘cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God;’ yet it is the Holy Spirit who shines upon the word; it is He who gives the seeing eye and the hearing ear. Under the pressure of unbelief have we fled to Him, and appealed to His love? ‘Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief, may be as aptly a cry to the Spirit as to the Son of God. He helpeth our infirmities; and in the infirmity of our faith He will most assuredly succour us. It is through Him that we become strong in faith; and He doves to impart the needed strength. He giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not. Yet in our dealings with Him regarding faith let us remember that He does not operate in some mystical or miraculous way, as if imparting to us a new faculty called faith; but by taking of the things of Christ and showing them to us; so touching our faculties by His mighty yet invisible hand, that, ere we are aware, these disordered souls of ours begin to work aright, and these dull eyes of ours begin to see what was all along before them, but what they had never perceived, ‘the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus our Lord’” (pp. 23-5).

So it is the “loving Spirit” who, having convinced us, testifies of Christ, and glorifies Christ, with the heavenly skill and power of a love as tender, as gentle, as it is divine. He brings the soul down into self-knowledge, into a Kuzow Thyself of the true sort, and then He brings it up into the glorious counterpart, into the knowledge not of a “better self” but of Jesus Christ, in all the fulness of what He is. And He loves to do it. It is not only His eternally appointed, but surely also His eternally beloved work.

As we pass on let me call attention to Dr Bonar’s statements quoted just above regarding the Spirit’s gift of faith to us, and His mode of — giving. My readers well know that it has been a grave question whether the Spirit, whether God, does “give” faith; whether rather faith is not just that which we have to contribute of our own store to the work of conversion. I am indeed aware of the mysteries which connect themselves with that question. But I am quite sure that Scripture does nevertheless teach us that a living and saving faith is as truly a gift

Actsv.3. Of God as is, for instance, “repentance.” I find this stated in Eph. 11. 8; a passage where, if the context is attended to, the stress of the argument is all in favour of explaining the words “and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God,” to mean that the matter just before mentioned, namely the presence of faith in the saved, is the gift of God. I read the same truth in the phraseology of Phil. 1. 29, where alike the power to believe and the call to suffer are seen as ‘the gift” given to the saints. And I see it very clearly, in a yet deeper and more suggestive connexion, in 2 Cor. iv.

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13, where the Apostle speaks of himself and his fellow-workers as “having the same spirit of faith” with the Old Testament saints. I believe the word “spirit” there to refer to the blessed Personal Spirit!; but that point is not necessary to the present purpose. What anywise the passage intimates is that faith is not of nature, but of grace. It is from above, not from the resources of human nature; it is the special and supernatural gift of God. I know the mystery involved, and indeed I feel it; but I entrust it to Him who, unlike me, knows the whole eternal case, and will one day gloriously justify those ways of grace which He calls us now to trust. And so I hold, and I am sure it is good to hold, that, where a man believes to life eternal, it will be made plain hereafter, if not now, that every link in the chain, not every link except one, was “mercy from first to last,” and very special mercy too.

But then on the other hand? this view of the gift of faith, as Dr Bonar well puts it, does not

1 See above, p. 9. * How often, in pondering the things of God, we need to Say “on the other hand” for a moment lead us to think of faith as of an alien or exotic something inserted, like a lifegerm from another planet, into our nature. ‘Faith is trust,’ say what the Council of Trent’ may. Our Lord’s use of the word wictis in the Gospels proves this. Faith is trust, reliance, personal confidence. And personal confidence, self-entrustment to another, is in itself a perfectly xatural exercise of the human soul. What then is swperynatural, what is divine gift, about it in this great instance of saving faith? Why, surely, just that which can be illustrated from the experiences of human life, whenever anything ‘gives me confidence” in another. In such a case, the fact of my need being presupposed, and the fact of my consciousness of my need — the fact, for instance, of my knowing myself to be very ill — what “gives me confidence” in such or such a physician? The convincing manifestation to

1 In the Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, c. ix. of Session vi. is devoted to the “refutation” of the zzanis hereticorum fiducta; and Canon xii. of the Session anathematizes those who say jidem justificantem nihil aliud esse quam fiduciam divine misericoraie, peccata remittentis propter Christumt.

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me of his personal trustworthiness. Suppose me fully conscious of my urgent need of a physician, with a consciousness so strong that ipso facto 1 am willing to use a physician, and suppose the trustworthiness of that particular man manifested to me by good proofs; there is thus and then “given” to me the gift of faith in him.

Transfer this to the case of (not anyone but) the awakened sinner. The Spirit has convinced him of his need — deep, wide, and urgent — of salvation. The Spirit now “takes of the things of Christ, and shows Jonnxvi. 1. them to” the soul thus prepared to behold them to purpose. The Lord and Saviour, in His fitness, His adequacy, His unspeakable trustworthiness, stands before it. The need, divinely shown, is met by the response and the supply, divine and shown divinely; and the man lays his hand, sets his foot, upon the Rock, because it is wanted and because it is there. He entrusts himself to his manifested Saviour, and is His. He believes, and it is with a faith that is the gift of God:

It is important, if I understand the case at

all, to remember clearly in this whole matter what in it is natural and what is supernatural. The natural element is the action of a human soul, conscious of exceeding need, accepting the perfect provision for that need, seen to be such. And from this point of view it is the preacher’s, and the private friend’s, blessed privilege and duty to point the awakened person as directly, simply, and practically as possible to the facts of the Lord Jesus Christ’s Person, work, willingness, love. No considerations of the supernatural ought for a moment to disturb that action, any more than if we were concerned in recommending a tried physician to a friend in illness, Only to-day it has been my duty and my blessing to try to deal thus with a wearied and burthened mind and soul; and my steady aim was, secretly indeed to invoke the Spirit’s grace, but ,also to point out in the simplest and most practical terms the “reason x Pet. iii 1s. Of the hope that is in us;” the central certainty of the Resurrection of the buried Lord of Calvary, and the light (amidst whatever surrounding darkness) which that one precious fact sheds upon all He did, and said, and is.

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And with the effort to state the reason of the hope” it was inevitable also to bear personal witness to the experienced reality of its power, the experienced mercy and love of this Risen Saviour, and thus to bring in the forces, so far as possible, of the sympathy of soul with soul. All this was, from one point of view, a natural proceeding; as natural as if I had been asserting and justifying my recommendation, on grounds of common reason and experience, of some médical or legal adviser of whose aid my friend stood in need. But all the while I knew full well that “God must give the: Cor. iii,

increase,” God the Holy Spirit. I had a bright hope that He would use my poor reasoningss and witness in order to bring the soul of my friend (who is very little likely ever to read these words) to a Saving view of Jesus Christ; or that anywise He would somehow cause the veason of the Gospel to present itself satisfactorily to his mind. But well I knew that there needed also, in order to that man’s believing unto life eternal, a special dealing by the Holy Ghost with those materials of argument and witness, It was needful that He, divine and personal, should speak in ways in which I cannot, and no man can, to the depths of that spirit about “this same Jesus;” should “testify of Him” and ‘“glo-John xv. 26; XV1. 14.

rify Him,” as no man can, to that human consciousness. He must in His own way make the facts more than mere facts, the witness more than just credible, the Lord more than an assured certainty of the past, or of the unseen present; even the ineffably attractive magnet, desire, repose, of this burthened soul. The mystery of the Fall is a fact. Man’s spirit does not of itself ‘see beauty in Him that it should desire Him,” (though no act of inward seeing is more 2 Cor. iii 17,18. absolutely reasonable,) until “the Spirit of the Lord” gives that “liberty” which comes along with a new grace-given intuition into “the glory of God in the face 2Cor.iv.6. Of Jesus Christ.”

Thus, naturally at once and supernaturally, the blessed Spirit ‘‘gives faith” in Jesus. Naturally, by providing that the facts about Him, and His work, and His love, shall come in some genuine measure before the mental eyes.

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Supernaturally, by bringing the soul, fallen from that original righteousness in which it was in sympathy and harmony with God, back into sympathy with the blessed facts. And this He does in part through His work of conviction of sin, and in part through shedding upon “the truth as it is in Jesus,” in ways Eph.iv. 2. wholly of His own, a light of glory and beauty, or however of reality, which “eye + Cor.ii.g30. hath not seen,” but which “God revealeth by His Spirit.” And so the soul sees, and the man believes and comes, entrusting himself to the divinely manifested Christ, and “believing, hath life through His Name.” John xx, 3r. It is most true that saving faith is not always so given as that the order of the process of its giving can be described just as above. There are conversions where the process is, in a certain sense, reversed. Such a cotversion was that of Count Zinzendorf,! the second

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* Since writing this passage I have examined Bishop Spangenberg’s Life of Zinzendorf (English translation, 1838), which as the work of the Count’s intimate Christian friend is the best authority on such a subject as this. And I do not find all the statements in my text quite borne out. The narrative runs thus, p. 15 : — From [F rankfort-on-the-Main] they proceeded to founder of the ‘“Moravian” Church, the Uxztas Fratum, with its marvellous missionary enterprises. His new birth to righteousness and God was wrought, so the story runs, through the sight of a picture of the Crucifixion, bearing the

Diisseldorf, where the Count’s attention was particularly attracted by the excellent Ecce Homo in the picture-gallery, under which was the following inscription: ‘All this I have done for thee; what doest thou for Me?’ He reflected that he would scarcely be able to answer this question, and besought his Saviour to force him into the fellowshtp of His sufferings, if he should ever be disinclined to it.” He was just nineteen at the time; and his own account of his earlier years makes it plain that he both was, and knew himself to be, a believer long before that time. “It was my happiness early to experience a heartfelt impression of the Saviour; after this all my wishes and desires were directed towards the Bridegroom of my soul, that I might live unto Him who atoned for me” (p. 3). But something not wholly unlike the account given in the text is alluded to in another extract (p. 4) from his own words : — “I was told [as a child] concerning my Creator, that He became a man.... I felt happy in conversing with Him, and grateful for His having remembered me for good in His Incarnation, But I did not wholly understand the greatness and sufficiency of His meritorious sufferings, nor was my own wretchedness and inability sufficiently obvious to me. I did also what I could in order to be saved, wztil one extraordinary day, when I was so much affected by what my Creator had suffered for me that I shed an abundance of tears, and attached and joined myself still more closely to Him.”

On the whole I have preferred to leave the text as it stands, with this note. The experience which without quite adequate evidence is assigned in it to Zinzendorf is however an experience realized in many instances.

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ZINZENDORFE’’ S EXPERIENCE. IIs

inscription, “Zhzs have I done for thee, what hast thou done for Me?” He gazed, loved, and rejoiced “with exceeding joy,” turning from a life of indecision at once, and without a pang, to Christ. But do not think that the element of conviction was absent in Zinzendorf s experience as a whole. It came later, and with power. And it was an element most necessary, as his life-story shows, in order to save him from some grave wanderings from sound faith in the matter of Christian experience, and from a tendency to drift away from a steady anchorage on the atoning work of the Lamb of God! And I

* I quote as follows from a French memoir (Bover’s, i., Pp. 224) of his life: — “About this time I met with the work of Dippel, in which the doctrine of Imputed Righteousness is attacked. Its system seemed to aim at eliminating from the idea of God the notion of His wrath; and just so far as I sympathized with that view I liked the system. I was then in the attitude of the natural theologian; and the ‘good God’ distressed me when His acts seemed to lack a sequence of mathematical precision. I sought to justify Him, at all costs, to men of reason. But when I came to think over my own conversion I saw that in the death of Jesus and in the word Ransom there lay a profound mystery — a mystery before which Philosophy stops short, but as regards which Revelation is immovably firm. This gave me a new intuition into the doctrine of Salvation. I found its blessing and benefit first in the instance of my own heart, then in that of my brethren and fellow-workers [in the Unitas Fratrum]. Since the year am well assured that that after-gift of spiritual conviction tended in its turn only to deepen and develop for Zinzendorf the first gift of joy and love. The elements which we have dwelt upon as characteristic of conversion and its life were there, though the order of their arrival, if I may call it so, was abnormal. His faith in its sum total was the repose of the divinely awakened soul in the divinely manifested Saviour.

I appealed in my last chapter to my reader’s own experience. May I do so again in this brighter and more blessed connexion? In anything but an inquisitorial spirit, I do venture to say to you, has the Holy Spirit testified to you of Jesus Christ, glorified to you Jesus Christ, taking of His things and showing them unto you? I do not ask, have you had this vivid crisis of consciousness, that almost vision of the unseen and eternal? I am not one of those who speak lightly of such things, as if they were to be estimated off-hand

1734 the doctrine of the expiatory sacrifice of Jesus has been, and will for ever be, our treasure, our watchword, our all, our panacea against all evil, alike in doctrine and in practice.”

as so many illusions, a discredit to sober faith. Faith is magnificently sober as to its grounds, and as to its nature. But when we remember that what it clasps is JESUS CHRIST, and what it receives is the life eternal and the hope of glory, shall we think it necessarily fanaticism if sometimes, and in some Christians, “the sweet unveilings of His face” have been such as even to agitate greatly the faculties of the mortal tabernacle?

“‘ My earthly by His heavenly overpower’d Sank down.”

But I do not speak to you now of these things, which certainly are not the dazly ‘‘ bread of life.” I only ask, has the Lord Jesus Christ been so “revealed in you” that it is no forced figure of speech to say that He has been ‘“olorified”? Has He been so shown to the eyesight of the inner man as the Lamb of Calvary that you not only hold (as it is so good to hold) the clearest mental convictions about Justification by Faith, as our Second and Eleventh Articles put that great truth, but that the Crucified, the Shedder of the justifying blood, is the adored and beloved of your awakened and confiding soul? Has He been so shown within you as the Son of the Father, the Only Begotten in the Father’s bosom, that you not only reject with fullest intellectual conviction the misbeliefs of a Sabellius, an Arius, or a Socinus, in their oldest or their most modern phases, but that your spirit does indeed Ps.iixz. kiss the Son” with the deepest homage of worshipping love, responding in sweet harmony to the Voice out of the Matt. vii.s. bright cloud — ‘ This is JZy beloved Son”? Has He been so shown within you as your sovereign Master that you not only reasonably own His claims but find that a complete submission to them is pure happiness, because it is so real a means to feeling the bond which unites you for ever to Him? Has He been so shown within you as your life, your power, your wealth of resource against the devil, the world, and the flesh, and your enablement for humble service to His will, that you not only applaud a spiritual theory, and take pleasure in its exposition, but “‘ ¢ake Pleasure in infirmities, that the power of Christ

may rest upon you,” and His beloved 2 Cor. xii. ». presence be felt as it hardly can be felt without the cross?

Is it thus with you? Is it not thus with you? It is a divine reality, is it not? Calm and pure in its holy essence, this glorification of Christ yet moves and thrills with a “joy unspeakable and full of glory.” And it is the :Pet.is Holy Spirit to whom immediately the thanks for that joy are due. You, convinced and believing soul, reaping these fruits of living faith in the Son of God, are a subject of the best-beloved work of the loving Spirit. His breath has moved the cloud for you from the face of Eternal Beauty, and has quickened you into the consciousness of what it is. ‘“Her hath been thus effectual in this secret work of your regeneration unto newness of life;” in this new birth ‘‘ unto a living hope.” x Pet. i. 3.

Love Him, adore Him, give “thanks to Him. And meanwhile seek and expect His abiding and continuous work of loving grace. Look up to the Father, in this as in so many other spiritual connexions, with the prayer, sure to be answered, “‘ Take not Thy Holy Spirit from

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me. Expect, and humbly receive, not only Ps.liixx. an ever deeper view of the sinfulness of sin, but also an ever deeper view of the glory of Christ, seen in the secret places of present communion with Him and obedience to Him. The Spirit will unfold more to you, Eph. iii.8 and yet more, of ‘the unsearchable riches” and their applications. He will Eph. iii, 16, xy, — Strengthen you in the inner man,’ ie so that “Christ shall dwell in your heart by faith” with a blessed development of continuousness and power, and so that you shall “know the love of Christ,” with the joy of an ever new discovery. —

“Come, Holy Spirit, come,
Let Thy bright beams arise;
Dispel the darkness from our minds
And open all our eyes.

“‘ Convince us of our sin,
Then lead to Jesu’s blood,

And to our wondering view reveal
‘The secret love of God.

“Show us that loving Man
That rules the courts of bliss,

The Lord of Hosts, the mighty God,
The Eternal Prince of Peace,
“Tis Thine to cleanse the heart,
To sanctify the soul,

To pour fresh life in every part
And new-create the whole.

*‘ Dwell, therefore, in our hearts,
Our minds from bondage free;

Then we shall know, and praise, and love, The Father, Son, and Thee.”

So, a hundred and thirty years ago, wrote Joseph Hart; and the need, the promise, and the prayer are the same this day.