Holy SpiritBy Ruth PetersEnergized by the Holy SpiritSeneca, the Roman historian and philosopher, said, “No one is free who is a slave to the body.” In 1 Corinthians 6:19 Paul specifically refers to the body of the believer as the temple of the Holy Spirit. “What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?” Yet in 1 Corinthians 3:16 he says, “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” Is there a contradiction here between the body as the temple, and the whole person as the temple? No, both are correct. Our spirit pervades our body, and it is through the works of the body that the spirit, the real person, is shown. This is why the stress is on the body, because that is what people can readily discern, while the spirit is invisible. Paul knew that the body is the last area of man to be brought entirely under the Spirit’s influence and power, just as the twigs and leaves are the last parts of a plant to be energized by the sap. Thus the bodily temple presents to us the complete picture of the fully consecrated man.
Enthusiasm—the Unquenchable FireJohn Henry Jowett has beautifully expressed what characterizes the life of power. “Another element in a forceful character is heat, the fire of an unquenchable enthusiasm …. The Acts of the Apostles is a burning book. There is no cold or lukewarm patch from end to end. The disciples had been baptized with fire, with the holy, glowing enthusiasm caught from the altar of God. They had this central fire from which every other purpose and faculty in the life gets its strength. This fire in the apostles’ souls was like a furnace-fire in a great liner, which drives her through the tempests and through the envious and engulfing deep. Nothing could stop these men. Nothing could hinder their going. ‘We cannot but speak the things that we have seen and heard. We must obey God rather than men.’ This strong imperative rings throughout all their doings and all their speech. They have heat, and they have light, because they were baptized by the power of the Holy Ghost.”
The Spirit as the ReceiverThere must be a correspondence between the receiver and the transmitter. When we listen to a radio broadcast, there are many sound waves all around us, but the only way for us to become aware of them is to have an appropriate receiver able to catch them and make them audible. We would never know that anyone was talking to us from a distance if we expected our watch to pick up the sound waves. There is only one way in which man can know God, and that is through man’s own spirit. God is a Spirit and can be known only by a spirit. We must not expect to feel Him with our fingers, or see Him with our physical eyes. It cannot be done. Yet that which can be perceived only by the spirit of man is just as real as that which can be perceived by his physical senses.
Christ in YouBenjamin West, the great painter, speaking of Gilbert Stuart, a brother artist famed for his beautiful coloring, used to say to his pupils, “It’s no use to steal Stuart’s colors; if you want to paint as he does, you must steal his eyes.” When we are baffled in our efforts to live as Christ lived, the record of His life, however wonderful it is, will not enable us to be like Him. What we need is His heart, His nature. Only divinity within us can recognize divinity without. Without the Holy Spirit, we cannot know Him as God.
The Work of the Holy SpiritMr. Spurgeon once preached what in his judgment was one of his poorest sermons. He stammered and floundered and felt that his message was a complete failure. He was greatly humiliated and when he got home, he fell on his knees and said, “Lord God, Thou canst do something with nothing. Bless that poor sermon.” All through the week he uttered that prayer. He woke up in the night and prayed about it. He determined the next Sunday he would redeem himself by preaching a great sermon. Sure enough, his sermon the next Sunday went off beautifully. At the close, the people crowded him and covered him with praise. Spurgeon went home pleased with himself and that night he slept like a baby, but he said to himself, “I’ll watch the results of those two sermons.” What were they? From the one that had seemed a failure he was able to trace forty-one conversions. From the magnificent sermon he was unable to discover even a single soul that had been saved. Spurgeon’s explanation was that the Spirit of God used the one and did not use the other.
Give the Lord ControlIn his observations on 1 Corinthians 2:1 , J. Stuart Holden gives a beautiful illustration. He says, “I have around my home a garden. In that garden and its possibilities I have the mind of nature. For instance, I know what soil and what seed should produce this, that, and all the other kinds of flowers and fruit; I see set forth in the seedsmen’s catalogues the wonderful things that the garden should bring forth …. But mark you, the flowers and the fruit are only produced by labor, by obedience to the laws of nature. When the garden has been made beautiful and fruitful, it has been made so only by intelligent cooperation with nature. Similarly, we Christians have the mind of Christ. We know full well what a Christian life should be.” The fruits of the Spirit are only made evident in our lives as we wholeheartedly cooperate with the Lord in full submission and obedience to Him by letting His Spirit have full control of us—body, soul and spirit.
