11. The Cross Enables the Gift of the Holy Spirit
The Cross Enables the Gift of the Holy Spirit
Fourth, the cross makes possible the gift of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 3:13-14), “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is everyone that hangeth on a tree: that the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.” The cross makes possible the gift of the Holy Spirit. The gift of the Spirit is based upon the work of Christ in His atoning sacrifice. Calvary and Pentecost are inseparable. Calvary always sends a man on to Pentecost; Pentecost is always sending a man back to Calvary. The man who stops at Calvary arrests the plan of God. That is to say, if a man is satisfied with forgiveness of his sins and wants nothing more, he has an arrested life and the plan of God has come to a stop; but the man who stays at Pentecost and does not continually go back to Calvary is defeating the purpose of God. Calvary and Pentecost are always working into each other’s hands. You never can know the power of Pentecost unless the power of the cross is working in you.
One of the saintliest men on the Keswick platform in the olden days was Charles Fox, and Charles Fox used to say, “The risen life somehow or other always gravitates back to the cross.” That is a great truth for us to learn. It just means this, that the finished work of Christ on the cross is the basis on which the Holy Spirit operates to bring to fruition the great purpose of God.
I know that the believer is filled with the Spirit when he first receives Him, but only to the extent of his power to receive, and his capacity at that moment is small, very small. It can only be enlarged as he apprehends the great fact of the death of Christ and yields himself to the Spirit of God for the purpose of that death to be worked out in him.
Near my last church in Scotland was a little village, a favorite summer resort that jutted out into an arm of the North Sea, and the action of the sea was continually silting up the sand at the mouth of the river, preventing the river from doing its work. Therefore the government had to be continually dredging the channel so as to let the river flow. There are things in your lives and in mine that only the cross can deal with, and if the cross is not allowed to deal with those things and touch them with death, why then the channel of our lives is continually getting silted up with these things and blocked. Therefore it is that the Holy Spirit desires to use the cross in order to deepen the channel of our lives and so have the opportunity of filling us with His fullness.
Calvary and Pentecost are inseparable and they are indispensable for the preaching of the Gospel. Calvary creates the preacher and the teacher, and Pentecost equips the preacher and the teacher. Book learning will never make us preachers or teachers, although book learning has its place and a very great place; but there is one theological seminary into which we must go, and from which we must graduate if we are to be preachers and teachers of the Gospel. It is sometimes called Arabia, and Arabia means for you some place where you come face to face with the need in your life and fight it out in the presence of God. If you will do that you will learn what Paul learned in his Arabia, you will learn the meaning of the cross, and you will learn much about the purpose and the power of the Holy Ghost, for Calvary and Pentecost are inseparable.
We may stand in pulpits and we may teach classes, and we may organize Christian work, and people may praise us, and we may have outward success, but if we do not know Calvary and we do not know Pentecost except in a superficial manner, those people we speak to and teach will never have cause to glorify God in us, and see God mighty in and through us as they saw in the apostle Paul.