The Spirit’s Work as Further Seen in Our Lord’s Last Discourse and Prayer
WE have considered now, in our view of
the revelation through St John of the
Holy Spirit’s work, three main passages dealing with that work. We have seen the Spirit as our Regenerator from spiritual death into John iii, spiritual life, and as our Convincer, Jomxvii and as the Glorifier of Christ in the souls of the convinced. In this study we have looked from different points of view upon His supremely important function and action in bringing the individual into that living Union with the Son of God of which we treated in a previous chapter. That union, as we there’ remembered, is altogether by the Holy Spirit, and is normally effected by Him through the processes of repentance
1 Page’39. See also below, p. 131.
and faith, under which the man lays hold of and receives Him who is our Life, and receives in Him all His blessed fulness, the “grace for grace” of a perpetual Jonni: and ever-new supply of the peace and power which is in Christ.
We have thus as it were seen the soul safe arrived at its Union with the Lord; and now henceforth its life, the whole life of the man thus united, is to be a new life, a spiritual life, a perpetual reception out of Christ following upon that initial entrance into Him. How then is this life to be led? Is the man now to take his spiritual affairs into his own hands? Flas the Spirit led him up to his Redeemer, and there left him? No, most certainly. True it is that the experiences of this new life are to be as personal, as conscious, as truly voluntary (let us not forget this), as those of the old. “No will is so fully equipped for work as the regenerate will.” The whole Scripture overflows with illustrations and reminders of that fact. Nevertheless the new life, if the man is living it indeed, is to have in it from first to last this divine and glorious new factor, the inworking presence of the blessed personal Paraclete, who in a sense now new and special is both to guard and animate the “first springs of thought and will,” and above all to keep alive, by continuous application of Christ, the life He gave by first application of Christ. Thus, in the words of a aun dear to many a believing heart,
“¢ Every virtue we possess,
And every victory won,
And every thought of holiness,
Are His alone.”
Following now our proposed method of Scripture study, I keep still to the Gospel according to St John, reserving for after study the forms of truth given through St Paul. And to illustrate from St John the work of the Spirit in the developing experience of the regenerate believer, I go again to the same Paschal Discourse of our beloved Lord which we have approached in the two previous chapters. We have found there His own account of some initial steps in the Spirit’s saving work. We shall now find there, in the
THE SPIRIT IN ¥OHN XIV — XVI. 125
words of the same Teacher, a delineation of some of the inmost characteristics of the true life of His true followers, such as it was already in a measure then, and such as it soon was to become in rich development under the developed in-working of the Spirit.
In this whole delineation we have to remember that although the Holy Spirit is only occasionally mentioned He is everywhere implied. For the discourse on the whole manifestly deals with the disciples’ experience in view of the withdrawal of the bodily presence of Jesus Christ. And the promised equivalent, and more than equivalent, for that presence, was to be the developed presence of the Comforter. As therefore the whole previous walk and life of the disciples had been bound up with the presence and power of their dear visible Master, so now their whole walk and life was to be bound up, in a connexion as necessary, tender, and powerful as possible, with the presence in them of this His holy Representative; by whom already they had come to believe on the Name of the Son of God and to be, however little they understood it as yet, united to Him in the eternal life. We read then rightly all through the Discourse, and all through the High Priestly Prayer at its close, the underlying truth of the work of the Spirit, effecting every blessed experience in the whole new life of the disciple.
And here let me point out the rightness of referring these promises of the Paschal Chamber not to the Apostles only but to us, to every member of the believing Church. There are, I doubt not, words in the Discourse and the Prayer which have a primary reference to the Apostles, and to their past and present experience, and to their coming work as the Spirit-taught, infallible, teachers of the Church. But there are indications everywhere that the Apostles then, as on many another occasion, were viewed by the Lord Jesus zot only as guides and teachers of the Church, but as “the Church by representation,” if I may use the phrase. In the fourteenth chapter, for example, we find our Lord continually passing from words bearing a primary special reference
‘T owe the remark to my friend the Rev. C. H. Waller.
to the Apostles to words completely inclusive
in their terms. ‘‘Hethat believeth ver.x. - on Me, the works that I do shall he do also;” ‘He that hath My com- vera.
mandments and keepeth them ... I will manifest Myself to him;” “If a man love Me... We will make Our abode ver. 23. with him.” And indeed all through the great passage, with hardly an exception, we feel that it is rather the C4vrestzan life and character than specially the apostolic that is in view; the same life and character which the First Epistle of St John depicts and explains without any reference at all to special ministerial functions assigned to any sharers in it. So without hesitation or reserve I read these precious words of the Lord Jesus, spoken on the eve of His death and glory, as on the one hand bearing throughout on the work of the Spirit, and on the other hand applicable throughout to the life, needs, privileges, and possibilities, of every true believer. With these principles: in mind let us come to the study.
I read then first in this Discourse some divine revelations about the Oneness of the saints with
Christ, and with the Father, and so with one another. ‘At that day” (the day, surely, of John xiv.2. the promised coming of the Comforter), “ye shall know that I am in My Father, and ye in Me, and I in you in Sete they all may be one; as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us;” “And the glory which Thou gavest Me I have given them; that they may be one, even as We are one; I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be made perfect in one;” “And I have declared unto them Thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith Thou hast loved Me may be in them, and I in them.” Ponder the words, as if you had never read them before. I well remember an occasion when they were
John xvii, 21, 22,
23, 20.
thus brought forcibly and anew to my mind. It was an anxious hour of public religious discussion on the nature of the divine life in the Christian. One deeply earnest speaker carried his statements to a length which in my view was, as it still is, at variance with the holy proportion of revealed truth; leading through truth out of truth toa related error which lay beyond
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it. But God sometimes overrules even a manifest exaggeration or distortion to call attention to something which it distorts but which we, perhaps, have neglected and ignored. So it was with me then. The solemnity, the intense significance, the pregnant emphasis, with which my friend and opponent that day repeated the words of John xiv. 20: “At that day ye shall know that Iam in the Father, and ye in Me, and I in you,” sank deep into one heart at least of those present and asked it whether there did not lie in those words treasures of grace as yet unsuspected and unclaimed; and so there did. May I again, as I have done more than once before, turn to my reader and ask if perhaps it is so now with him? And if so, may I in my turn entreat him to listen to those divine words “in the silence of the soul, as to a revelation of principles, and powers, and experiences, and possibilities, which have not the remotest necessary connexion with fanaticism but which may nevertheless szeax an inner life far different from a life of fitful and intermittent faith, love, joy, peace, and power for witness-bearing and light-bearing for Christ? The verses cited above from the seventeenth chapter have, I well know, a momentous bearing on questions of Church Unity, and are a standing caution of the utmost gravity and tenderness against the spirit of schismatic separation and antagonism in external Christian life. But while remembering this, and reminding my reader of it, I must yet more earnestly point out that the inner and intense meaning of the words has to do with regions of truth, life, and experience compared with which even the sacred and important truths of exterior Church Unity are a lower region. It has to do primarily with the vital, spiritual, Heb. xii. 23. eternal union of “the Church of the firstborn written in heaven” with their glorious — Head, union in a life which is altogether of God in its root and fruit. It has to do with “knowledge” and experiences to which “the world” is an utter stranger, with insights into everlasting love and joy coming down from the Father of Lights, and with a cohesion and co-operation, a united work and witness, which depend absolutely for their possibility and power on the recognition and following out of sach prin-UNION WITH CHRIST. 13)
ciples of union. Blessed will it be for Church and for World when these principles shall so vastly prevail as to find expression naturally and from within in a harmonious counterpart of order; a far different thing from what is, I cannot but think, an illusory prospect — the attainment of such internal unity by a previous exaction of exterior governmental uniformity.
But this is by the way. My point is now to call attention to the wonderful depth and height, and personally searching and alluring power, of these words of the Lord about Oneness, and then to remind my reader that the realization of those words lies in the work of the Holy Spirit. It is as He unites me, and unites thee, to Christ, by His new-creating and life-giving touch and drawing, that we enter into this amazing oneness with the Son, and the Father, and one another; a oneness spiritually organic, in which each personality, while quite exempt from zzvaszon, falls under the power of a divine coheszon whose results in spiritual harmony of life and action will develop for ever. “These things worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit,”’ blessed be His Name.
Along with this revelation of spiritual and Spirit-wrought oneness between the believer and the Lord, and between believers in the Lord, I gather up from this same Discourse many another precious kindred word. There is that great promise, ‘‘ Because I live, ye shall John xiv.19. live also.” It is a promise not merely of the Rescuer to the rescued, of the
Saviour to the saved, of the Leader to the
led, but of the Head to the limb, of the Vine to the branch. We rest on that promise, we Heb. xii.2, humbly believe it. ‘ Looking off? unto Jesus,” (very definitely and very necessarily “of unto’? Him,) we appropriate it, and take it for granted, and act on it amidst the realities of life. ‘“When thronging duties press,” when by the providence of God we have to meet men, to walk up and down in the world of the present day, we yet fall back internally on the truth that “he that hath the rJohnv.xz. Son hath life.” The basis of our true being, the spring-head of our true life-pulse, is in Him. Even so; and therefore, while He
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COMMUNION WITH CHRIST. ee
liveth, and because He liveth, we “shall not die but live.” And this too “spake He of the Spirit.” The Worker of this our abiding life is “the Lord, the Life-Giver,” the Giver to us in inward reality of the Son who is our Life.” And shall we not bless His Name?
Closely in the same connexion I read here of blessed articulate experiences and realizations of this union and life. I read of “union turned into communion.” I listen to the Son of God speaking not only to John and to Peter, but to me, that Paschal evening; and I hear Him say, “I will not leave you orphans; Jobnaiv.:8, x. I will come to you;” ‘ The world seeth sTo-will.see Me no more, but ye see Me; you again, and your hearts shall re- j... vi.or, 2, joice;” “I will manifest Myself to ™
him;” ‘“My Father will love him, and We will come unto him, and make Cur abode with him.” I read these promises, coming direct from the lips of our Lord and Life, and I remember along with them those other words which He spoke out of His glorified life through
1 See above, p. 39.
this same John: “To him that overcometh Revi [ will give to eat of the hidden manna;” “TJ will come in to him, and will
Rev. iii 20. sup with him, and he with Me.” And we bless Him for even the least realization of what they mean. And we remember that it is the Holy Spirit who brings about these realizations in us, who gives us to
know in any measure what is meant by
the indwelling and overshadowing of Jesus Christ. And as we possess and enjoy this wonderful, this infinitely merciful gift of the known presence of the Son of God, and of the Father in Him, we thank and adore the personal and gracious Holy Spirit that it is thus with the soul.
“Shall I ever forget the summer morning, in 1886,” writes one whom [| know, ‘“‘ when on the sunny slopes of a Yorkshire moor, on a brief holiday, not long after that blessed time of spiritual discovery and strengthening in the
knowledge of God, I experienced indeed a ‘ joy unspeakable and full of glory’ in the sight of our Lord and Life? Walking out alone I fell into prayer, prayer to be conformed in all things to the will of Him who had redeemed me and drawn me to Himself. As I proceeded, while heart and mind were kept in the deepest peace, and not the slightest enthusiastic disturbance of judgment was to be suspected, it was yet as if a heaven was opened around me, and the joy of the Lord flowed in divine effusion over my being. The glory and beauty of my Saviour’s Person, the indescribable reality of His presence both in me and around me, the absolute ‘all-sufficiency’ of His grace and power, the loveliness and attraction of His ‘ perfect will ’” — all shone upon me with a brightness of which the August sunshine seemed but a type and a shadow. ‘The Lord is my portion,’ said the inmost spirit in that holy hour. In a sense, the glory passed away, as to special excitation. But in a sense, in a yet deeper sense, it abode, diffused among the experiences of life, and proving its ‘sober certainty of waking bliss’ by its power amidst these experiences, to calm, and purify, and lift above the selfishness of the old life.’ And “all this worked that one and the selfsame Spirit.” It is by Him John xvii. 3.
that we “know the only true God, and Jesus
Christ whom He hath sent,” with that knowledge which is no mere result of information and inference mentally collected. It is “eternal life.” Shall we not bless the Spirit’s Name that thus we know?
And so I may go on through the Paschal John xv.x8. Discourse. I may take the Lord’s words about the True Vine, and the branches which are in Him, and which abide or remain - in Him, and by virtue of their conjunction and abiding bring forth fruit; and under this whole paragraph I may read the presence and work of the uniting and life-giving Holy Spirit. To deviate for a moment to St Paul, and to a Gal.v.22. passage with which we shall deal more fully later,! we recollect that the sweet fruit of holiness in the disciple’s life is “the fruit of the Spirit. He it is who so works in the man that, having “come to Christ” Jomniizz; and ‘received Him,” he also abides yor in Him as the days and years go iene Ons, uk he qaman freely and truly “chooses life,” welcomes and cherishes his 1 See ch, x,
Lord’s precious indwelling presence and power; but that he freely does so is of the gift of the Holy Ghost. Because of Him, present and inworking, the man “abides in the jonnxiv. 27; ieee Oliss uOrd, eand sain aldis (Aas aise friendship, and in His peace, and responds with full joy to His joy. John xvi. 33. And again, how much we have here about the work and life of prayer! <‘ Whatsoever ye shall ask in My name that will jonnsiv.cs,z4; iecdos lf) Ye. shall, ask anything *<7) 75” in My name, I will do it;” ‘Ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full;” “I have ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain; that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in My name, He may give it you.” In those last words we have surely an indication of the deep, vital connexion between ‘true prayer and true fruit-bearing; such that the two things are as it were convertible terms. It is as if He said, “I have ordained you to produce real and lasting spiritual effects for Me; zz other words, I have ordained you to be, in Me, prevailing petitioners with My
Father that you may be bearers of such fruit.” The ‘things asked of the Father in Christ’s
b]
name” are that the disciple may be a vessel meet for the Master’s use, a branch pregnant with holy fruit; and there is therefore a deep and living correspondence between the bearing and the asking. Now here again is the operation of the Spirit, “the Spirit of grace and Zech. xii.xo Of Supplications.” The prayer here meant is no mere devout performance of duty, the due utterance of an expression of reverence and dependence; it is ‘‘ prayer in Jude 20. the Holy Ghost,” who “maketh in- Rom. viii. 26,27. tercession for us ... according to (the will of) God.” It is the prayer of a heart filled with Him, and therefore filled with the humble but intense desire that His will may be done, and in particular that His implement may be used for His glory. Results of life, word, and work in answer to such prayer are “fruit that remaineth.” And indeed it is “fruit of the Spirit.”
I write* close to the tenth anniversary of the
1 June, 1889.
blessed death of that truly sanctified servant of God, the late Miss Frances Havergal. Her life and work has just now been much in my mind, with its rich lesson and holy example. Speaking not for myself only but assuredly for a multitude of other readers, I may truly say that - I never read her words of witness for our Lord without a sense of peculiar spiritual weight, influence, and holy persuasion, coming from those words to my heart. In a very marked manner
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her fruit seems to me to “remain;” the personal warmth and emphasis of her testimony “remains,” as if the page had a living voice. And for my part I attribute this to the fact that while that devoted Christian was kept by the Spirit of God remarkably loyal to the foundation truths of the ancient and only Gospel of grace she was by the same Spirit led to, and kept in, an attitude of unreserved self-consecration to the holy Master’s work and will which characterized her every effort, literary or otherwise, in His service. By the Spirit she asked to be fruitful, and by the Spirit she bore fruit indeed, “fruit that remaineth,” and shall remain. In Our measure. as we too are “vessels of the ate
Lord,” let it be likewise with us, by the same secret.
Is it not somewhere in this direction that the humble Christian may look for God’s fulfilment, in His own way, of that mysterious promise,
John xiv.x2. ‘Greater works than these shall he do”? Very possibly these words bear in their ultimate meaning not so much on the personal work of the individual Christian as on that of the Christian as a member of the Body and Bride of Christ; as if to say, “He shall have a real, living, full share in that -wonderful work of ingathering and upbuilding Acts i. x. which I his Master did but ‘ begin,’ leaving it to My Bride to do more in ¢hat See Col. i. 24. A222 than I had done.” But such
a view of the passage can only be true if it
leaves clear the fact that wonderful possibilities
of fruitful service are open, in the life of the
Spirit, to the individual disciple who by the Spirit really lives and walks as a servant and implement of Christ.
John xiv. 26; Another class of passages in this SR aS ohn: sae xvi. 7- divine Discourse bears explicitly
upon the dzeaching work of the Holy Spirit
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THE TEACHING “UNCTION.” I4l
Here, I willingly and reverently own, we have a plain primary reference to the special knowledge and authoritative, infallible teaching of the inspired Apostles. But I do not think the words can be wholly limited to them. An instructive parallel is 1 John u. 20, 27, where an inspired Apostle is addressing all the “little children” of his flock, and reminding them of their heavenly “unction, and of its mysterious power to give supernatural knowledge. And I gather from that passage that the true disciple is promised, not apostolic infallibility, but a more than natural instinct, in the use of divine revelation, to discern between essential error and essential truth in the things of salvation; a divinely given feeling, if 1 may put it so, for the sound word and against the illusory, counterfeiting substitute for it; and that this is the gift, the presence, the light, of the Holy Spirit in the soul regenerated by Him. Like many other great promises it needs to be read side by side with complementary and cautionary truths; but it is there, it is a reality, it is never to be forgotten, it is to be welcomed
— —
and used. And the Holy Worker is to be blessed and thanked.
In closing I point to those precious words of the High Priestly Prayer which speak of the “keeping” and the “sanctifying” of the disciples by the Father, who has given them bis aitraties eternal life in the Son: ‘“Holy Sag Father, keep in Thine own name those whom Thou hast given Me, that they may be one, as We are;” “I pray not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that Thou shouldest keep them from the evil;” “Sanctify them in Thy truth; Thy word is truth.’ Need we elaborately explain that here the Spirit’s work is to be seen, though His name is not named? How in fact was this prayer of the Son answered in the life and history of the Church of the children of God? It was by the effusion of the Spirit, by whom, in a sense and mode so large and full that it was more than compensation for the seen presence of the Son, the true members and the true body were “governed and sanctified” in the new, wonderful life of the Gospel. By Him they possessed,
TES Lt Se LE IINGT LOWER, 143
— — — a
and possess, the Father and the Son. By Him, the Spirit of faith, they were, and are, “kept through faith unto salvation.” — Pet.i.s. Peeraying sul him, +. they -*! keep «themselves in the love of God.” Of the Judean, 2r. Father,. through the Son, by the Spirit, comes all keeping power, all sanctifying, separating, consecrating grace. Let us adore the threefold Work; and now specially let us not forget, in our love and praise, the Third and immediate blessed Worker.
So we leave the Upper Chamber. Or rather so we close our enquiry into what was said there by the Lord Jesus about the life which is to be lived by us in the Spirit, only that we may now and always “there continually dwell.” Amidst the stress and fulness of life and duty, amidst the realities of trial and temptation, there may we dwell indeed, in internal recollection and experience, “sitting at the table! with” our beloved Lord, John xii. 2.
1 J need not point out in detail how large and rich, in the light of the truths we have here considered, should be our fruition of our life in Christ by the Spirit when we assemble at ¢he Lord’s Table, the Table of the Paschal Chamber, at the Lord’s most leaning upon His sacred breast, and listening to His voice as He teaches us how to live that life of union, abiding, prayer, fruitfulness, spiritual insight, all under divine safe-keeping, which is laid up for those who by the 2Cor.v.17. Opirit are indeed ‘in Christ, a new creation.”
ee
loving command. Not that I limit for a moment the phrase in the text to Eucharistic occasions. Faith and lové can turn our soctal table into ‘‘God’s board” in a true sense; for certainly they can create a sanctuary in all the places and events of life.