070. THE HOLY SPIRIT THE ONE AND ONLY POWER IN MISSIONS1

THE HOLY SPIRIT THE ONE AND ONLY POWER IN MISSIONS¹

Brethren Of The Missionary Union :—" The days of our years are threescore years and ten, or even by reason of strength fourscore years; yet is their pride but labor and sorrow, for it is soon gone and we fly away." Moses the man of God spoke truly of the individual human life; and the sore bereavements of the past few months have deeply impressed upon us the lesson. But corporate societies obey a different law. "As the days of a tree," lengthening out to a thousand years, "are the days of my people," saith the Lord. Our Missionary Union has passed fourscore, and celebrates now its eighty-first anniversary. No man now lives who participated in its founding. But the life of God was in it from the beginning, and because he lives it lives and will live also. It has survived the changes of another year. We have paid the expenses of the twelvemonth and have somewhat diminished the great debt with which we began. The tide has begun to turn, and we trust in God that the winter of commercial depression will soon be changed to glorious summer, and that we shall see the clouds that lowered upon our enterprises in the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

One year ago, in this very place, Dr. Gordon was with us and led us in our opening prayer. I cannot refrain from saying how much he was to me personally, and how much to the Missionary Union. Of him as truly as of John the Baptist it might be said: "There was a man sent from God whose name was" A. J. Gordon. He was a leader and inspirer and comforter of God’s people, because he believed most profoundly in the leadership and inspiration and comfort of the Holy Ghost. And now that God has taken him from us, and we have no longer with us his great conscience and strong faith and noble heart, I can do you no better service than to draw your thoughts to that great theme which absorbed the last energies of his life. The administration of the saintliest man must cease, but the administration of the Holy Spirit abides. As two years ago I spoke to you of "The Decrees of God the Great Encouragement to Missions," and one year ago of "The Love of Christ the Great Motive of Missions," so to-day I take for the subject of my last presidential address,— The Holy Spirit The One And Only Power In MisSions. Who is the Holy Spirit? He is the third person of the blessed Trinity. In opposition to much of the false and pernicious teaching of our day, I emphasize the truth that the Holy Spirit is a person, not an influence —some one, and not some thing. I do not need to tell you that the tripersonality of the divine nature is essential to the life, communion, and blessedness of God. Because God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, he is independent of creation; he does not need the universe. The world has had a beginning; it is the work of his sovereignty and grace; but the Holy Spirit is eternal, and before the world was he existed, coequal with the Father and the Son. He is not only a person, but he is that person of the Godhead who comes nearest to us in our needs, who brings the Creator not only to, but into, the creature. He is personal Love in its tenderest form, and only when we appreciate the depths of our own ingratitude and his holy shrinking from our sin, can we understand "the love of the Spirit" that bears with our manifold provocations and still persists in his healing and purifying work. As Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane "began to be sorrowful and very troubled," so the Holy Spirit is sorrowful and very troubled at the ignoring, despising, resisting of his work, on the part of those whom he is trying to rescue from sin and to lead out into the activities of the Christian life. Multiply this experience by millions, and conceive how great must be the suffering and sorrow of the third person of the Trinity, as he struggles with the apathy and unbelief of the church, endeavors to replace the spirit of selfishness by the spirit of missions, and strives to turn the weakness of his people into power! But though the Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity, he is more than this; he is also the Spirit of the incarnate Christ. We cannot understand this without reflecting upon the nature of the change in Christ himself when he took upon him human flesh. Before his incarnation he was the eternal Word of God, the Revealer of God in nature and in history. But when he was born of a virgin, he condensed his glory, so to speak, and manifested himself within the limits of humanity. What was before abstract and far away now became concrete and near. In Christ we see the Godhead in our own likeness, speaking to us with a brother’s voice and feeling for us with a brother’s heart. Christ is now Son of Man as well as Son of God. And what I wish to say with regard to the Holy Spirit is, that he is the Spirit, not of the preincarnate but of the incarnate Christ, with just as much more power than he had before as Christ had more power after his incarnation. The Holy Spirit had wrought in some measure before the incarnation, just as Christ had wrought. But as Christ, the Word of God, was abstract and hard to recognize, so the Spirit of Christ partook of the same disabilities. The Holy Spirit, who always manifests Christ, could in Old Testament times manifest only the divine side of Christ, because there was as yet no human side to manifest. But when Christ’s person had become complete by taking humanity into its divinity, and when Christ’s work had become complete by taking all our sins and penalties and bearing them for us, then the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, had more to manifest than he ever had before. From being the Spirit of God alone, he became the Spirit of the God-man, the Spirit of the incarnate Jesus, the revealer through all space and time of the humanity that had been taken up into the divinity.

We can understand now how it can be said in John’s Gospel that before the crucifixion and resurrection "the Spirit was not yet given "—or was not yet—" because Jesus was not yet glorified." The proper work of the Holy Spirit is to take of the things of Christ and show them to men. Until Christ’s work was accomplished the Holy Spirit had comparatively little to show. Not only was his influence limited in its degree, but it was also limited in its kind: the Holy Spirit as the revealer of the incarnate Jesus did not as yet exist. We might illustrate this by the pride and joy of the mother in showing off her son: she can exhibit him after he has reached his majority and has education and character, as she never could when he was a babe in arms. One might even say that while she was caring for him in his infancy her time for showing him off had not yet come. The mother was not yet exhibitor. So the Holy Spirit could not exhibit Christ until there was a fullgrown Christ to exhibit. While our Lord retained the form of a servant and was subject to the Holy Spirit here on earth, the Holy Spirit could not make him known, any more than the mother could publish abroad the greatness of her son, before the time of his greatness had come. But when Christ’s humiliation was ended and his exaltation had begun, then the Holy Spirit’s work could begin also. Only when the Saviour was glorified in heaven, could the Spirit glorify him on earth. But we must not separate the Spirit from Christ as if the two were independent of each other like Peter and Paul. The persons are one in essence. As the .Father dwells in and reveals himself through the Son, so the Son dwells in and reveals himself through the Spirit. As Christ could say: "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father," so the Holy Spirit might say: He that hath seen me hath seen Christ. In the Holy Spirit we have Christ himself, no longer far away and unintelligible, but possessed of a human soul and touched with the feeling of our infirmities as he could never be if he had not passed through the temptation and the sorrow of an actual human life. The Holy Spirit is the same incarnate Christ now made omnipresent and omnipotent. You can appreciate how great a truth this is, when you remember the sorrow of the disciples at the taking from them of their Lord. To part with him, their teacher and helper, seemed to them to be the loss of all. How hard it was for them to realize that it was expedient for them that he should go away! Yet it was best for them to lose his visible, bodily presence, because only thus could they have his invisible, spiritual omnipresence. Unless he went away in body, he could not send his Spirit. But if he departed from their eyes, he could come into their hearts. Hence he can say indifferently, "I will send the Comforter," and "I will come unto you"; for the Comforter is only Christ in another, more spiritual, more universal form.

It was to educate the disciples to this faith in his invisible presence through the Holy Spirit that Jesus appeared to them so mysteriously in the upper chamber, on the way to Emmaus, by the seaside of Galilee. A moment ago he seemed absent, but now he is here, stretching out his hands in blessing. Has he come through the solid walls, or through the circumambient air? Ah, not so! The lesson to be learned is rather that he has been here all the while, and now he only manifests his presence. And the disciples do learn the lesson that, while seemingly absent, the Saviour is ever present with them,—while invisible, by the eye of faith he can be seen. The Holy Spirit is the incarnate Christ not only, but the incarnate Christ spiritualized, freed from all the limitations of space and time, no longer subject to the conditions of his humiliation, but omnipresent and glorified. While here on earth in human flesh he could heal the lepers and feed the hungry and raise the dead and walk the sea; but he could not be in two places at the same time, nor teach Peter in Galilee at the same time that he taught John at Jerusalem. Now, by his Holy Spirit, he can be present with the little knot of believers that worships in Swatow, at the same time that he meets with us here in Saratoga. And as the Holy Spirit is the omnipresent Christ, so he is the omnipotent Christ also, with every restraint upon his working removed, except the restraints of infinite wisdom and infinite love.

We begin to see the greatness of the Holy Spirit. And yet we shall not understand how great he is, unless we remember how great this Christ is who works through him. Jesus said that all power was committed to him in heaven and in earth. This means nothing less than that Nature, with all her elements and laws, is under his control and manifests his will; that History, with all her vicissitudes, including the rise and fall of empires and civilizations, is the working out of his plan; and that the Church, with her witnessing for the truth, her martyrdoms, her love and anguish for men’s souls, her struggling after righteousness, is the engine by which he is setting up his kingdom. The incarnate Christ is now on the throne of the universe, and the hand that was nailed to the cross now holds the sceptre over all.

Who, then, is the Holy Spirit? He is the incarnate and divine Redeemer wielding all this infinite power, in the realm of spirit, and for spiritual ends. He is the organ of internal revelation, as Christ is the organ of external revelation. Just so far as Christ does anything for intelligent and moral beings he does it through the Holy Spirit. We can make no exceptions. As the Spirit of God in the beginning brooded over chaos and brought forth forms of life and beauty, so still he works in nature to complete and restore the creation which sin has marred; as he strove with men before the flood, so he strives with them all along the course of time, in every nation and in every conscience giving witness of Christ’s law and grace; as with Noah and Abraham and Moses and David and Isaiah he renewed the heart by presenting the truth made known by the preincarnate Logos, so now he takes the clearer truth of Christ’s incarnation and sacrifice and resurrection and makes it the means of establishing the kingdom of God in human hearts. Pentecost could come only after the Passover. The feast of jubilation and first fruits dated back to the other feast when the lamb was slain in every household. So Christ had first to die, before the Holy Spirit couid show to John on Patmos the Lamb that had been slain, sitting upon the very throne of God and with all the crowns of the universe upon his brow. In other words, the Holy Spirit is the divine but incarnate Saviour omnipresent and omnipotent to subdue to himself the hearts of earth’s revolted millions and to go forth conquering and to conquer until every spiritual enemy has been put beneath his feet.