“What Is a Christian?” Part 35” by Romans
We are continuing in our Series, “What Is A Christian?” and in our review and examination of the indwelling Holy Spirit as playing a major Role in answering the question posed by our Series, “What Is A Christian?” We read last week of the Holy Spirit being another Comforter given to us to be with us and in us forever. And we read a wonderful array of insights and comments by a variety of Bible Commentators that illuminated His being another Comforter from many angles.
But last week, due to time constraints, I omitted a particularly good Commentary by Alexander MacLaren. So, tonight, with your indulgence, and for the first time that I am doing this, I would like to resurrect a Scripture used in a previous week, and share with you a Commentary on it. I hope you will see the value in my doing this, when it is done. First let's read the verses to refresh our memories, and then I will share Alexander MacLaren's thoughts on them with you:
“If ye love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you” (John 14:15-17).
Of this, Alexander MacLaren writes, “THE COMFORTER GIVEN: The ‘and’ at the beginning of these words shows us that they are continuous with and the consequence of what precedes. ‘If ye love Me, ye will keep My commandments, and I will pray . . . and He will send.’ Such is the series; but we must also remember that, as we have seen in previous sermons, the obedience spoken of in the clause before my text is itself treated as a consequence of some preceding steps.
The ladder that is fixed upon earth and has its summit in heaven has for its rungs, first and lowest, ‘believe’; second, ‘love’; third, ‘obey.’ And thus the context carries us from the very basis of the Christian life up into its highest reward, even the larger gift to an obedient spirit of that Great Spirit, who is the Comforter and the Teacher.
And there is another very striking link of connection between these words and the preceding. There are, if I may so say, two telephones across the abyss that separates the ascended Christ and us. One of them is contained in His words, ‘If ye ask anything in My name I will do it’; the other is contained in these words, ‘If ye keep My commandments I will ask.’
Love on this side of the great cleft sets love on the other side of it in motion in a twofold fashion. If we ask, He does; if we do, He asks. His action is the answer to our prayers, and His prayers are the answer to our obedient action. So we have here these points-the praying Christ and the giving Father; the abiding Gift; the blind world and the recipient disciples.
I. Note, then, first, the praying Christ and the giving Father. "I will ask and He will give’ seems a strange drop from the lofty claims with which we have become familiar in the earlier verses of this chapter. ‘Believe in God, believe also in Me’; ‘He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father’; ‘If ye shall ask anything in My name I will do it’; ‘Keep My commandments.’
All these distinctly express, or necessarily imply, divine nature, prerogatives, and authority. But here the voice that spake the perfect revelation of God, and gave utterance authoritatively to the perfect law of life, softens and lowers its tones in petition; and Jesus Christ joins the rank of the suppliants.
Now common sense tells us that apparently diverse views lying so close together in one continuous stream of speech cannot have seemed to the utterer of them to be contradictory; and I venture to affirm that there is no explanation which does justice to these two sides of Christ’s consciousness ~ the one all divine and authoritative and lofty, and the other all lowly and identifying Himself with petitioners and suppliants everywhere...
except the old-fashioned and to-day discredited belief that He is ‘God manifest in the flesh,’ who prays in His Manhood and hears prayer in His Divinity. The bare humanistic view which emphasises such utterances as these of my text does not, for the life of it, know what to do with the other ones, and cannot manage to unite these two images into a stereoscopic solid.
That is reserved for the faith which believes in the Manhood and in the Deity of our Lord and Saviour. His intercession is the great hope of the Christian heart. His intercession is the great activity of His present exalted and glorious state.
His intercession is no mere verbal utterance, nor the representation to the Father of an alien or a diverse will, but His intercession, mysterious as it is, and unfathomable to our poor, short lines and light plummets, must mean this at all events ~ His continual activity in presenting before the divine Father, as the motive and condition of His petition being granted, His own great work upon the Cross.
The High Priest passes within the veil, bearing in His hand the offering which He has made, and by reason of that offering, and of His powerful presence before the mercy-seat, all the spiritual gifts which redeem and regenerate and sanctify humanity are for ever coming forth. ‘I will pray, and He will give,’ is but one way of saying, ‘Seeing then, that we have a great High Priest over the House of God who is entered within the veil, let us draw near.’
But I would have you notice how, as is always the case in all utterances of Jesus Christ which express the lowest humiliation and completest identification of Himself with humanity, there is ever present some touch of obscured glory, some all but suppressed flash of brightness which will not be wholly concealed.
Note two things in this great utterance; one, Christ’s quiet assumption that all through the ages, and today, nineteen centuries after He died, He knows, at the moment of their being done, His servants’ deeds.
‘Keep my commandments, and, knowing that you keep them, I will then and there pray for you.’ He claims in the lowly words an altogether supernatural, abnormal, divine cognisance of all the acts of men down the ages and across the gulf between earth and heaven. And the other signature of divinity stamped on the prayer of Christ is His certitude of the answer. ‘I will ask and He will give’:
He puts, as it were, the Father’s act in pledge to us, and assures us, in a tone of certainty, which is not merely the assurance of faith, but the certitude of One who is ‘one with the Father,’ that His prayer brings ever its answer. ‘Father! I will that they whom Thou hast given Me be with Me.’
How strange! How far beyond the warrantable language of man! And how impossible for a fisherman of Bethsaida to imagine, if he had not heard, that strange blending of submission and of authority which speaks in such words! Then, remember what I have already said, that, according to the teaching of this verse, taken in connection with its context, that which put in motion Christ’s Intercessory activity, as represented in my text, is the obedience of a Christian man.
If you obey He will pray, and the Father will send. So the reward of imperfect obedience is the larger measure given to us of that divine Spirit by whose indwelling obedience becomes possible, and self-surrender a joy and a power. And that is not merely because of the natural operation by which any kind of conduct tends to repeat itself in more complete measure, nor is it merely a case of ‘to him that hath shall be given’;
as a man’s arm is strengthened by exercise, and any faculty becomes more assured, and swift, and at the command of its owner, by use. But there is a distinct supernatural impartation to every obedient heart of divine gifts which come straight through Jesus Christ to it.
He Himself, in this immediate context, says, ‘If I depart I will send Him unto you,’ and the true conception is that in that Spirit’s gift, which is a reality waiting as its crown and reward upon our poor stained obedience, the whole Godhead is present; the Father the Source, the Son the Channel, the Spirit the Gift.
II. And so, secondly, note what our text tells us of that abiding gift. ‘He will send another Comforter,’ ‘that He may abide with you for ever, even the Spirit of Truth.’ I suppose I may take it for granted that most of my audience know all that need be said as to the meaning of this word ‘Comforter.’
In our present modern English it has a very much narrower range of meaning than its etymology would give it, and than probably it had when it was first used in an English translation. ‘Comforter’ means a great deal more than ‘consoler,’ though we have narrowed it to that signification almost exclusively. It means not only one who administers sweet whispers of consolation in sorrow, but one who, in any circumstances, by his presence makes strong.
And the original Greek word, of which it is the translation here, has a precisely analogous meaning; its original signification being that of ‘one who is called to the aid of another,’ primarily as an advocate in a court of law, but more widely as a helper in any form whatsoever. And that is the idea which is to be attached to the word here: ~ a Comforter who makes strong by His presence; the Paraclete, who is our Advocate, Helper, Guide, and Instructor.
Need I dwell upon the great thoughts that spring from that metaphor; how we have to look for a Person, and not merely a vague influence; a divine Person who will be by our sides on condition of our faith, love, and obedience, to be our Strength in all weakness, our Peace in all trouble, our Wisdom in all darkness, our Guide in every perplexity, our Comforter and Cherisher, our Righteousness when sin is strong, the Victor over our temptations, and the Companion and Sweetener of our solitude?
The metaphors with which Scripture represents this great personal Influence are full of instruction and beauty. He comes as ‘the Fire,’ which melts, which warms, which cleanses, which quickens. He comes as the ‘rushing, mighty Wind,’ which bears health upon its wings, and sometimes breathes softly as an infant’s breath, and sometimes sweeps with irresistible power.
He comes as the ‘Oil,’ gently flowing, lubricating, making every joint supple, nourishing. He comes as the ‘Water of Life,’ refreshing, vitalising, quickening all growth. He comes fluttering down as the Dove of God, the bird of peace that will brood upon our hearts. The predicates which Scripture attaches to that great Name are equally various, and are full of teaching as to the manner in which He is the Comforter and the Advocate.
He is the Spirit of Holiness, the Spirit of Truth, the Spirit of Wisdom, the Spirit of Power, the Spirit of Love, the Spirit of a sound Mind, the Spirit of Sonship, the Spirit of Supplication, and of many great things besides. And this sweet, strong, all-sufficient Person is offered to each of us, and waits to enter our hearts. And, says Christ, this Strengthener and Advocate is to replace Me and to carry on My work. ‘He will send another Comforter.’
Who was the other but the Master who was speaking? So all that that handful of men had found of sweetness and shelter and assured guidance, and stay for their weakness, and enlightenment for their darkness, and companionship for their solitude, and a breast on which to rest their heads, and love in which to bathe their hearts, all these this divine Spirit will bring to each of us if we will.
And further, our Lord tells us that this strong continuer of His presence will be a permanent Companion. ‘He will abide with you for ever.’ He was comforting the disciples who were trembling at the thought of His departure, and knowing that all the sweetness of these three short years had come to an end; and He says to them, and through them to all the ages to the end of time: ‘Here is the abiding Guest, that nothing but your own sin will ever cast out from your hearts.’
And Christ tells us how this great Spirit will do His work. He is the ‘Spirit of Truth,’ not as if He brought new truth. To suppose that He does so, opens the door to all manner of fanaticism, but the truth, the revelation of which is all summed and finished in the person and work of Jesus Christ, is the weapon by which the divine Spirit works all His conquests, the staff on which He makes us lean and be strong.
He is the Spirit by whom the truth passes into our personal possession, by no mere imperfect form of outward teaching which is always confused and insufficient, but by the inward teaching that deals with our hearts and our spirits. But Christ speaks, too, of the blind world. There is a tone of deep sadness in His words.
The thought of the immense multitude of men who were incapacitated to receive this Strengthener steals across and casts a momentary shadow upon even the brightness and greatness of His promise. ‘The world cannot receive because it seeth Him not, neither knoweth Him.’
The ‘world’ is the mass of man, considered as godless and separate from Him, and there is a bit of the world in us all; but there are men who are wholly under its influence and dominion. And these men, says Christ, are perfectly incapable of receiving the teaching of this divine Comforter. Of course there are other operations of that Great Spirit of which we shall have to hear as we go on further in this context, in which His work ‘convicts the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment.’
But what our Lord is speaking of here is the work of that Spirit who comes in response to His prayer which rises in consequence of our obedience, and who, coming, brings with Him strength and purity and peace and wisdom; and that aspect of His operations a heart that is all full and seething with the world is unfit to receive. It cannot see Him.
Embruted natures are altogether incapacitated for high thoughts, for the perception of natural beauty, for the appreciation of art; and worldly men, by the very same law, are incapable of receiving this divine Spirit... {W}orldly men ~ that is to say, men whose tastes, inclinations, desires, hopes, purposes, strivings ~ lack the organ that enables them to see that divine Spirit moving round about them.
Whether you have put your eyes out by fleshly lusts, or, as many men in this generation have done, by intellectual self-sufficiency and conceit, if the world, in its grosser or in its most refined forms, is your master, you are stone blind to all the best realities of the universe, and you cannot see the things that are.
If you look out upon the history of the Church, or upon the present condition of Christendom, and say, ‘I see no divine Spirit working there’; well, then, the only thing that is to be said to you is, ‘Go to an oculist; your sight is bad. Perhaps there is solid land, as some of us see it, where you see only mist.’ This generation needs the preaching of a supernatural power at work beside us, and among us, and until we come to believe that, we do not understand the fullness of Christ’s gift.
III. Then, lastly, note the recipient disciples. Observe that the order of clauses is reversed in the last part of the text. The world cannot receive, because it does not know. The disciple knows, because he receives. Possession and knowledge reciprocally interchange places, and may be regarded as cause and effect of one another.
That is to say, at bottom they are one and the same thing. Knowledge is possession, and possession is the only knowledge. These disciples knew Christ in a fashion. He had just been telling them that they did not know Him; but so far as they did dimly grasp Him, they saw the Spirit ~ in another form, indeed, than they would hereafter see ~ but still truly, though imperfectly.
Beholding the Spirit, though ‘through a glass darkly,’ and cherishing their partial possession of Him, they will come to more, and steadfastly increase from the morning’s twilight to the midday glory. So He says: ‘He dwelleth with you’ now, and ‘He shall be in you’ hereafter. There is a better form of possession opening before them, which came at Pentecost, and has lasted ever since.
From thenceforward we have a Spirit that not only stands by our sides and holds fellowship with us (for the two ‘withs’ of our text are two different words, expressing respectively proximity and communion), but who actually dwells in the central depths of our natures, and whom we thus possess more perfectly and blessedly than is possible to even the closest outward proximity, and the sweetest outward fellowship.
That possession of an abiding and indwelling Spirit is the gift of Christ to every Christian soul, and is to be found by us all upon the path so plainly marked out in our text and its connections-’believe,’ ‘love,’ ‘obey.’ Then the Dove of God will flutter down upon our heads and nestle in our hearts, and brooding over the solemn and solitary sea of our chaotic spirits, will bring up from it a new world glistening in fresh order and beauty, and ‘very good’ in its Maker’s eyes.”
We have just read of Jesus, on the night before His crucifixion, promising the Gift of the Holy Spirit to His disciples. Now, after His Resurrection we read His words to them in Acts 1:8: "But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth."
Of this, Albert Barnes writes, “But ye shall receive power ... - Literally, as it is translated in the margin, “Ye shall receive the power of the Holy Spirit coming upon you.” This was said to them to console them. Though they could not know the times which God reserved in his own appointment, yet they should receive the promised Guide and Comforter.
The word “power” here refers to the help or aid which the Holy Spirit would grant; the power of speaking with new tongues; of preaching the gospel with great effect; of enduring great trials, etc. See Mark 16:17-18. The apostles had impatiently asked him if he was then about to restore the kingdom to Israel. Jesus by this answer rebuked their impatience, taught them to repress their ill-timed ardor; and assured them again of the coming of the Holy Spirit.
Ye shall be witnesses - For this purpose they were appointed; and to prepare them for this they had been with him for more that three years. They had seen his manner of life, his miracles, his meekness, his sufferings; they had listened to his instructions, and had conversed and eaten with him as a friend; they had seen him after he was risen, and were about to see him ascend to heaven; and they were thus qualified to bear witness to these things in all parts of the earth.
Their number was so great that it could not be pretended that they were deceived; they had been so intimate with him and his plans that they were qualified to state what his doctrines and purposes were; and there was no motive but conviction of the truth that could induce them to make the sacrifices which they would be required to make in communicating these things to the world.
In every respect, therefore, they were qualified to be impartial and competent witnesses. The original word here is {the Greek word for} “martyrs.” From this word the name martyrs has been given to those who suffered in times of persecution.
The reason why this name was given to them was that they bore witness to the life, instructions, death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus, even in the midst of persecution and death.
The fact that this was the design of their appointment, and that they actually bore such testimony, is abundantly confirmed in the Acts of the Apostles, Acts 1:22; 5:32; 10:39, 10:42; and 22:15. It is commonly supposed that nearly all of the apostles bore witness as martyrs in this sense to the truths of the Christian religion, but of this there is not clear proof. See Mosheim’s Ecclesiastical History, vol. i. p. 55, 56.
Still the word here does not necessarily mean that they to whom this was addressed would be martyrs, or would be put to death in bearing witness to the Lord Jesus; but that they were everywhere to testify to what they knew of him.
In Jerusalem - In the capital of the nation. See Acts 2. The great work of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost occurred there. Most of the disciples remained in Jerusalem until the persecution that arose about the death of Stephen, Acts 8:1, and 8:4.
The apostles remained there until Herod put James to death. Compare Acts 8:1, with Acts 12:1-2. This was about eight years. During this time, however, Paul was called to the apostleship, and Peter had preached the gospel to Cornelius, Philip to the eunuch, etc.
In all Judea - Judea was the southern division of the Holy Land, and included Jerusalem as the capital. See the notes on Matthew 2:22.
And in Samaria - This was the middle portion of Palestine. See the notes at Mat_2:22. This was fulfilled by the disciples. See Acts 8:1, “And they were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria”; compare Act_1:4-5, “They that were scattered abroad went everywhere preaching the word. Then Philip went down to the city of Samaria, and preached Christ unto them.” See also Acts 1:14 and 9:31.
And unto the uttermost part of the earth - The word “earth,” or “land,” is sometimes taken to denote only the land of Palestine. But here there does not seem to be a necessity for limiting it thus. If Christ had intended that, he would have mentioned Galilee, as being the only remaining division of the country.
But as he had expressly directed them to preach the gospel to all nations, the expression here is clearly to be considered as including the Gentile lands as well as the Jewish. The evidence that they did this is found in the subsequent parts of this book, and in the history of the church.
It was in this way that Jesus replied to their question. Though he did not tell them the time when it was to be done, nor affirm that he would restore the kingdom to Israel, yet he gave them an answer that implied that the work should advance - should advance much further than the land of Israel; and that they would have much to do in promoting it.
All the commands of God, and all his communications, are such as to call up our energy, and teach us that we have much to do. The uttermost parts of the earth have been given to the Saviour Psalm_2:8, and the church should not rest until he whose right it is shall come and reign, Ezekiel_21:27.”
There is much more to say regarding the vital aspect of the Holy Spirit indwelling us, as a significant part of the answer to the question posed by the title of our current Series, “What Is A Christina?” I plan, God willing, in the coming weeks to review and examine more on the Holy Spirit. I invite all of you hearing or reading my words to join us at this same place and time next week.
This concludes tonight's Discussion for our current Series, “What Is A Christian? Part 35.”
This Discussion was presented “live” on Wednesday, October 2nd, 2024.
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