Revision as of 15:38, 22 April 2015

INTRODUCTION

This book is an attempt to present. the Christian understanding of the Holy Spirit in ordinary language. It is recognised that the whole idea of the Holy Spirit is strange to many people in our materialistic generation, and that most ordinary folk, even within the Christian fellowship have a concept of the Holy Spirit which is vague because it is uncertain and often ill-defined. The effort is here made to outline the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in fairly bold and simple terms, and not to argue the pros and cons of the historical development of the idea.

My aim throughout is for clarity and brevity. I am fully aware that the kind of clarity sought involves the risk of giving offence to the more philosophical reader by failing to wrestle with all the peripheral implications of saying “I believe in the Holy Spirit”. I recognise, too, that the brevity selected in the interests of the non-theological reader is bound to leave many questions unanswered.

It is my strong conviction that a clearer concept of the Holy Spirit, which can be made far more central to the daily faith of ordinary Christians, is essential, if we are to experience the Living God in our lives, and not worship only the memory of a Christ in the past, or take our inspiration only from the institutions of the Church, valuable as these are.

The experience of the Holy Spirit was a warm, vitalising, and central feature of the life of the early Church, which communicated the gospel in its hostile environment with astonishing effectiveness. That this is not true of the present day Church on the whole is both an expression of our deviation from the New Testament and an explanation of our ineffectiveness in society.

If the Church makes much of the birthday of Christ, overlaying it with much that is superficial though pretty, and sings lustily of the Resurrection at Easter time, yet fails to live in the radiant confidence of Pentecost, as the conscious possessor of this living Christ by His Spirit, it must not be surprised if it fails to communicate a living faith to a secularist world.

If this book is read by those on the fringe of the Church’s life, I hope they will see—at the very least—that the Christian notion of the Holy Spirit is not just a piece of semi-magical mumbo-jumbo, but a very vital part of the Christian’s experience of the Living Christ.

If the Holy Spirit is retained in our thinking only as an important intellectual doctrine in orthodox Christian theology we will never know the reality of His presence and power. He must be retained in our thinking and living because His influence and power have been recognised by us, and have become real to us.

THE PLACE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

In the thinking of many present-day Christians the Holy Spirit has no real place. He is an adjunct or addendum to their faith and is not integral to its meaning or to its expression in daily life. This, to say the least, is in marked contrast with the Church of the New Testament. There the Holy Spirit was the indispensable source of the Christian life, mission, and witness.

Indeed in the Bible as a whole, the Holy Spirit, or the Spirit of God, has a place which may surprise many of us. He is not an addition to the Christian faith, invented to satisfy a later theology. Those who argue that we should simply get back to Jesus, His life, teaching, influence, even His death and resurrection, and that we should regard other things, even ideas like that of the Holy Spirit, as incidental, must think again. It was Jesus who said to His disciples,

It is for your good that I am leaving you. If I do not go, your Advocate (the Holy Spirit) will not come, whereas, if I go, I will send him to you . . . When he comes who is the Spirit of truth, he will guide you  (John 16: 7, 13 NEB)
If the Holy Spirit was meant by Jesus to be as central to the life of Christians in the world as this suggests, is it not strange that we should have relegated him to the sidelines of life?

The Old Testament

When you turn the pages of the Old Testament you will be surprised at how frequently the Spirit of God appears. The idea appears in the majority of its books. The word used for spirit—ruach—is a word which means “wind”, or breathe”, or breeze”. We cannot be sure how it came to be used to describe God, but we can be sure it was widely used to indicate God at work. Perhaps the idea of “the wind of God” or “the breath of God” was used to describe His unseen, and inexplicable, but obviously living power. Certainly the Spirit of God was thought of as being as much a part of Him and His life as a man’s breath is part of a man.

The word was used in the Old Testament to indicate various things. Fox instance, the word “wind” or “spirit” was used to refer to the principle of life as in Job 17: 1 “My mind is corrupt” where the word for mind is ruach.
Again, it refers to human emotions as in Judges 8: 3 their anger died down”. “Anger is ruach. It can refer to intelligence or ability, as in Exodus 28: 3, with its talks of those “. . . endowed with skill (ruach) . .
The spirit of God was as much part of God as breath is part of a man. The idea was in no sense a departure from the Jewish insistence on one God. Yet the spirit of God was distinctive in function. In Genesis 1: 2 the Authorised Version says, “The Spirit of God moved on the face of the water, and God said, ‘Let there be light  Here is diversity of function, but no conflict.

The oneness of God and His Spirit is seen in Psalm 139 where the Psalmist prays. “Where can I escape from Thy spirit? Where can I flee from Thy presence?” The Spirit of God in the Old Testament was thought of as part of God, going forth from him in action. He is thought of as giving power to men or equipping them for action and service. The Spirit of God is said to have come upon Othneil and he judged Israel (Judges 3: 10); upon Bezaleel, giving him wisdom to construct the tabernacle (Exodus 31: 2-4); upon the prophets to .inspire them, as Ezekiel testified (Ezekiel 2: 2).

A significant saying is in Isaiah 31:3 (NEB) “The Egyptians are men not God, their horses are flesh not Spirit  The difference appears between the physical and the spiritual, the first bing lesser and mortal, the second being strong and enduring”.  The Spirit is the power of God working in human history, especially in the history of Israel.- and in individuals, to serve  God and His people. See Isaiah 63: 11-14.

God spoke, acted, and endued with power through His Spirit. Always it was God who was at work. There is never any conflict. A. B. Davidson wrote, “. . . we have to start from the idea that the Spirit of the Lord IS the Lord—not an influence from Him, but the Lord Himself . . . we may say the beginnings at least of the distinction between the Lord and His Spirit are to be seen, in the Old Testament”. This blend of identity of God and His Spirit and specialisation of function is surely the seed-bed for the much more clearly defined concept of a triune God which emerged in the New Testament and the early Church.

The New Testament

In the New Testament the Greek word for Spirit is Pneuma, which comes from the verb “to breathe” and has a similar significance as the Old Testament term. The Spirit in the New Testament appears in many roles, some of which must be considered further. He is the progenitor of Christ (Matthew 1:18). He was active in the baptism of Jesus (Matthew 3: 16, Mark 1: 10), His temptations, driving Jesus into the desert (Mark 1:12), and was present in His ministry (Luke 4:14). He is the helper or advocate of the disciple, acting in the life of the believer, and acting for him (John 15: 26).

He is the guide of the Church and the Christian (John 16), the source of spiritual power, the enabler for Christian witness (Acts 2).
The Church, as the New Israel, is the creation of God’s Spirit, and is the fellowship of the Spirit. So the letter to the Ephesians urges the readers to “spare no effort to make fast with bonds of peace the unity which the Spirit gives” and points out that “There is one body and one Spirit”.
He is the life giving Spirit (1 Corinthians 14: 25); He gives gifts to men (1 Thessalonians 5: 19f); He is the source of Christian character (Galatians 5: 22.23, Ephesians 5:16). He is indispensable to the life of the Christian. Without Him there is no Christian faith or experience (Romans 8)
He lives within the Christian, bringing the life of Christ into human life, and transforming the lower by the higher (Galatians 5 and 6).
These facts, and many others .which we could elaborate to strengthen them, show that the idea of the Holy Spirit is central to the Bible, and basic to the life of the Church of the New Testament. Of themselves, they may give the impression that the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the Bible is what many people suspect, a cold, impersonal, doctrine arising out of a Trinitarian view of God which is no more than a theological exercise, and that the religion of the New Testament is the acceptance of doctrines which are hard to understand, and which are irrelevant to life. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The early Church based its belief in the Holy Spirit, not on some creed it had inherited, nor on a bare philosophy which it made essential to salvation. It believed in the Holy Spirit as a living, warm, powerful, reality because of its experience. Stanley Jones wrote a book called “The Christ of Every Road”. That is what the Holy Spirit is. He is Christ sharing every road, every path, every experience of the Christian life. The early Christians believed in Him because their experience at Pentecost and after could be explained in no other way.

“Acts” tells us that as they waited in Jerusalem for Christ’s promise to be fulfilled, suddenly “. . . there came from the sky a noise like that of a strong driving wind (notice the word ‘wind’), which filled the whole house where they were sitting . . . And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to talk in other tongues,, as the Spirit gave them power of utterance.”

Now these words speak to some people of an odd emotional experience, and are not attractive. E. S. Jones says, “I know of no call so urgent as the call to get down beneath the phenomena to the facts of Pentecost .
Pentecost meant . . . they had found God. And God not as a floating idea, but as a living fact of experience; God, no longer magical and vague, but focal and dynamic; God no longer coming to them in awful Sinais and in the stern prophetic word, but God tender, intimate, face to face …a doctrine of the Trinity grew up, not out of formal thought, but out of the realities of experience.”

Now this is important. The early Christians believed in the Holy Spirit because they could explain their experience of the living Christ in no other way. Christ was still with them. At Pentecost, and afterwards, they saw and experienced His power at work. Yet He had gone physically. They knew He was still with them, not only setting them an example from alongside them, but giving them an altogether new boldness and power inside them.

He had promised them a helper, a comforter, an advocate, a guide—His own Spirit. How else could they begin to describe what they experienced but in terms already familiar through the Old Testament and through the words of Jesus, but now known in a new intimate way. They had received. the Holy Spirit.

If the present day Church—and present day Christians like you and me—really believed in the presence and power of such a living Spirit of God, and did not only pay lip-service to His existence as a doctrine, the whole impact of our Christian witness might be transformed. Professor Barclay writes in his study on Acts “. . . if ever a doctrine needed to be rediscovered it is the doctrine of the Holy Spirit . . . In the first 13 chapters of Acts there are more than 40 references to the Holy Spirit. The early Church was a ‘Spirit-filled Church and precisely therein lay its power.”

If all this is true, then the implications for us are tremendous. In the remainder of this book we will try to spell out some of the basic implications. Suffice it here to say that if we are to recapture the verve and vitality of first century Christianity, whether in our preaching, or our group evangelism, or our social action, this concept of God as a living Spirit must be basic and controlling. It implies that all our efforts will be quite useless unless the Holy Spirit is speaking in and through them. It is not enough to be clever, or slick, or contemporary: we must see to it that in all our activity we expect the Holy Spirit to be at work. If you were blasting a roadway through rocks, you might bore holes for your explosive charges in a hundred strategic places. But until you inserted the charges and let them do their own work, your toil would be quite ineffective. And for the witness of the Church we have been promised the power of God’s Spirit, and upon Him depends the effectiveness of our efforts.

THE PERSON OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

Is the Holy Spirit a person or an influence? He is both. In the Bible the language used of the Holy Spirit sometimes denotes a person, sometimes it is neuter. The Holy Spirit is God at work convincing men, guiding them, leading them into all. truth. He is, then, living as God is living, and personal as God is personal.

The Holy Spirit is more than an influence or principle. He is the living activity of God, bringing Christ to men in every generation;
It is perhaps necessary to discuss the person of the Holy Spirit in the context of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Here I must ask you to think carefully with me for a little.  No doctrine of the Christian faith is more difficult, or more frequently challenged, than the doctrine of the Trinity. It is often regarded as the basic inconsistency of the faith, and is cited as evidence of illogicality and intellectual un­reliability. This critical attitude of course sets up intellectual acceptability as the final authority and sanction for truth.

It suggests that there is no truth which cannot be understood. It claims—albeit unwittingly—infinity for the human mind. It begins honestly enough by seeking truth: it ends dishonestly by affirming that anything which cannot be squared with the human intellect is not true, thus limiting truth to the bounds of human comprehension.

 But to do this is manifest pride. To suppose that we, who are so small, and recent, and immature, in the history of the world, should discredit what we cannot fully understand or explain to our own satisfaction, is to elevate ourselves and our “laws” to a place of final authority in a universe about which we know so very little, It is to claim deity for ourselves, and is to become blinded by our own self-confidence.

The child who will not trust what he sees of his father’s love because he does not fully understand yet, will become resentful, introverted, and delinquent, And the man Who, in the face of the unmistakable love of God in Christ, shrugs it off because he cannot talk his way round it, will likewise become a moral and spiritual pigmy or delinquent.

 We want to tie God down, or up, as if He were an object we could put in a box, or subject to our control, . and manipulate with our minds. If He will not submit, then we shall reject Him. If He defies our understanding we shall discredit Him. And yet it does not seem to occur to us that, if we could control Him as we wish, and comprehend Him as we might a geometric theorem, then we would be his master, and not He ours.

But why has the doctrine of the Trinity arisen? Why should the Church, in trying to win the world, involve itself in such difficulties? Let me say at once that the presence of tension and difficulty is an indication of truth rather than falsehood. It is the way of the world to smooth the difficulties, to avoid snags, and make things palatable. But truth cannot be treated that way.

It has to be faced, and reckoned with, even when it disturbs our preconceptions. Let me suggest some reasons for the existence of the doctrine of the Trinity. The Church came to its belief in the Trinity through the World of God mediated through the Scriptures, and through experience it could not otherwise explain. In this context, the Doctrine of the Trinity has two sides to it.

(1) It is an attempt to describe Mystery. God, if He is as far above us as the heavens are above the earth, is bound to be beyond our ultimate comprehension. He is mystery. The assertion of the Christian faith is that this God has come from the shrouded and veiled habitation of mystery, and has revealed Himself to us in human form. But because He has made Himself visible, we must not try to force Him to be completely subject to our minds. Emil Brunner writes in his book, “Our Faith,” “Anyone who speaks of God as though He were a cousin, about whom, naturally, one knows everything, really knows nothing at all of God. The first and most important fact that we can know about God is ever this: WE know nothing of Him, except what He Himself has revealed to us. God’s relevation of Himself always occurs in such a way as to manifest more deeply His inaccessibility to our thought and imagination. All that we can know is the world. God is not the world. Therefore He is also exalted above all our knowledge. He is mystery. Not simply a riddle, for riddles can eventually be solved—some sooner, some later.

That God is mystery means that WE cannot solve the enigma. “Cans’t thou by searching find out God?” To man’s proud “Not yet” the Bible replies “Not ever”. Such majesty is like a profound abyss, whoever looks into it becomes dizzy. “From everlasting to everlasting’ ‘—who can understand that? He who was in the beginning when there was as yet nothing, and through whose will all things that are have arisen—who can ever conceive of such a thing? To think of the mystery of God makes us feel vain and petty, we remember that we are dust”.

Of course there is mystery about the Trinity, and about the Holy Spirit. A man came to Jesus one night and quizzed Him about eternal life. Jesus told him that he must be born again by the Spirit of God. He did not understand. So Jesus told him that the Spirit of God is like the wind (the Greek word is the same), and He reminded Nicodemus that, although he may often have experienced the wind in his face, he did not know where it came from or where it was going. That part was mystery. Says J. G. Riddell in his book “What We Believe” (p. 159), “All he knows is that it is there. So, Jesus says, those who have received the Spirit of God know how mysterious His coming is and yet are sure, beyond all doubt, of the reality of His presence”.

(2) The second thing about the Trinity is that it is an attempt to describe experience. The reason for postulating a complex doctrine of God rather than a simple one is just this, that man’s experience of God had demanded some such expression. The incarnation, i.e. the coming of Christ, has complicated the issue, and yet without it no hope of salvation could exist. It is indispensable, but immediately you grant it, you are faced with plurality in the Godhead.

The experience of Christ led the early Christians to ascribe deity to Him. How else can you explain a supernatural resurrection? Their experience of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost forced them to some explanation of such Divine power. They had known God in Christ and through the Spirit, and, without any concern about intellectual difficulties, they formulated the doctrine of the Trinity. This is perfectly legitimate, and the same phenomena have still to be explained in our day. You gain nothing by saying that because difficulties exist you reject the whole thing, as if you were the final authority yourself, nor do you alter the realities such doctrine seeks to explain or describe.

The late Dr. H. R. Mackintosh, in his monumental work “The Person of Jesus Christ”, writes (p. 509), “The doctrine of the Trinity found in Scripture, however, is naive and experimental . . If God is in Christ, not figuratively but in reality, and if the Spirit gives a renewing Divine life, these central facts must somehow be gathered into a conception of Godhead. The intuition, then, that God is Triune is born of experience.”

The early Church used a Latin phrase to try to capture the nature of God. He is, they said, “una substantial, tres personae” i.e. “one being, three personal expressions

We may put this in one or two phrases.
The three expressions of God, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, are three living expressions of one life, As the breath, the words and the actions of a man are three expressions of one life, so are the persons of the Godhead expressions of one God.

Or put it another way. They were three personal appearances of one being. The same God comes to us as the Creator/Father, the Redeemer/Son, and the Comforter/ Spirit. 1~hey are not three separate or opposing forms, as if in competition with one another. They are the three ways in which God reveals Himself.

If you reject them you reject, for example, the deity of Christ. The early Christians believed that because Jesus Christ did what only God could do, such as overcoming death, He must be God. In the same way, when they discovered, alter Christ had left them physically that they could do things they knew perfectly well they could not do by themselves, they realised that God had come to live inside them, and to give them His power, a power like Christ’s. They sensed, in their new-found powers to witness, the presence of Christ, and realised that this was none other than God at work in them. He had given them His Spirit, as Christ had promised “to abide with them for ever.”

The fact that we cannot rationalise or explain the mystery of God or the Spirit of God does not affect the reality. The late C. S. Lewis put it in these words, “In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube.” (Mere Christianity, p. 138.)

The third person, or personal appearance of God, is the Holy Spirit. In our materialistic world, whenever you talk of a spirit, or the spiritual, you run the risk of being considered unrealistic, mystical, and “out of this world”. And when the Bible says, “God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him, must worship Him in Spirit and in truth (John 4: 24) men think this is a vague idea of a bodiless, incorporeal, force you cannot see or feel. But this is ‘as far from being the New Testament emphasis as it is possible to get. God is not to be thought of by the Christian just as a living spirit OUT there, but known as a living Spirit IN HERE. The Christian view of God does not arise, because of a set of doctrinal propositions.

It is the outcome of living experience of Him. And the doctrine of the Holy Spirit . . . God as living Spirit, is the way in which the disciples explained their experience of God. They thought if Jesus left them they would lose Him. He said they would not. They discovered that,. though unseen, He was still, with them, and they sensed His presence. That is the meaning of the Holy Spirit. When Mary Baker Eddy said “God is incorporeal, supreme, infinite Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love” she was perhaps being clever: but she. was not really being Christian. The children’s hymn which says, “God is always near me, Hearing what I say, Knowing all my thoughts and deeds, All my work and play” is much nearer the Christian truth!

Our Lord began His teaching on God as Living Spirit by saying something which sounded strange indeed, “It is expedient for you that I go away . . .“ which means literally, “It. is to your advantage that I go away.” Now this must have sounded odd, to say the least. How could it possibly be to their advantage for this to happen? Surely Jesus was mistaken. But no. What He meant was this. They had come to take Him as an external presence. He wanted them to know Him as an internal one. Moreover, so long as He remained physically present, He was in some sense limited in time and space. And He said it would be good for them if He went away and sent the Holy Spirit, because they would learn to walk by faith, not by sight, and also His local influence would become universal as the Holy Spirit indwelt believers everywhere.

Archbishop William Temple has a striking passage on this. “How could it possibly be true? We look back and think there was never any privilege like theirs. They had walked with Him in the corn-fields, and sat with Him in the boat upon the lake; they had supped with Him among His friends. What greater privilege could there be? Yes—it was a supreme privilege. But what became of that faith which relied upon the Lord as an external Presence to whom they could turn at every moment of doubt or need? When the crisis came it all went to pieces.

‘They all left Him and fled.’ Simon Peter did indeed follow—’afar off’—to the place where he would stand and warm himself, and say, ‘I know not this man’. Yet a few weeks later these same men are found confronting the rulers of their nation with a calm and unruffled courage, and rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonour for the Name. What explains the transformation? Of course it is that of which the Lord here speaks; He has withdrawn from them as a visible, external Presence, to return in the Person of the Spirit as the very breath of their lives.”

Now the word Jesus uses of the Holy Spirit is of great interest and significance. It is “The Comforter” in the Authorised Version; “The Helper” in Moffat’s Version, “The Divine Helper” in J. B. Phillips’ Version; and “The Advocate” in Weymouth and the New English Bible. The Greek word is Parakletos . . a forensic term, a word from the law courts. It means the same as our legal term “advocate”, a helper in the sense of one called alongside to help. The suggestion is that God offers Himself to the Christian believer as an advocate as one who comes alongside to strengthen and aid us in our lives.
This should be enough to show that the Holy Spirit is to be thought of in the moss intimate and personal terms.

The point of Pentecost is to take Jesus out of the history book, however valuable that may be, and bring Him into the everyday experience of life. It saves us from isolating Christ in book or temple or sacrament or liturgy and reminds us that He is really in us by the person of His Spirit day by day.
Let us try to get this quite cleat. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit has to do with our experience of God, not our intellectualising about Him. It has always been this way.

Professor J. S. Stewart makes this point in The Strong Name (p. 251) “. . . in its origins the doctrine of the Trinity came, not from the dialectic of philosophers nor out of the lecture-room or any Neoplatonic Academy, but straight out of the experience of ordinary men and women. It did not spring from the dextrous manipulations of abstract ideas; it sprang from the presence of concrete facts and realities. Now that is important; for it means that this doctrine impinges upon, and strikes home to, the experience of ordinary people like ourselves today.”

THE PURPOSE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

It is probably true to say that a great many Christians are not clear about why the Holy Spirit has been given to the Church. Doubtless there are some who wonder whether He is really necessary. Is it not enough to know that God is our Father and Christ our Saviour? Does not the concept of a Holy Spirit, vague and uncertain, create more problems than it solves?

The problems are caused by the vagueness and uncertainty of so much thinking about the Holy Spirit. The picture in the New Testament is not vague or uncertain. It depicts a third person of the Godhead whose specific function -is to reveal God in Christ to the heart and life of the believer. He is not remote but near at hand, a warm, intimate, vital, personal reality. He is the helper, the advocate, the companion of the Christian’s way. In a word, He brings Christ to the inner life. He is not a rival to God the Father. He is not a competitor with Christ the Saviour. He is the Unseen Presence in every heart which convinces us that God is our Father and Christ is our Saviour. Without Him there would be no real and a revolutionary faith in Christ.

The purpose of the Holy Spirit may be described in a number of ways, and we shall consider these simply. The following purposes can be discerned in the New Testament. He is to make Christ universal. The ministry of the Holy Spirit is centred in Christ. Jesus said, “He will glorify Me, for everything He makes known to you He will draw from what is Mine.” (John 16; 14.)

He is called the Spirit of Christ (as such He is sent to make Christ real in the experience of every Christian). Jesus said to His disciples, “It is for your good that I am leaving you. If I do not go, your advocate will not come, whereas if I go I will send Him to you. (John 16: 7.) J. B. Phillips puts it this way, “Just before He left the earth He said a rather peculiar Thing to His followers. ‘It’s a good thing for you really’,

He told them, ‘that I am leaving you. For now I shall send you my spirit who will be with you always and everywhere.’ Do you see the point? He meant that so long as He was on this earth as a man He could be in only one place at a time, but if He came, so to speak, as God the Spirit, He could and would be anywhere He was needed and sincerely called upon to be. In other words, He was not just going to be an inspiring figure of the past but an available power in the present.” (Plain Christianity, p. 100.)

Look at it this way. The Apostles and the other early Christians had followed Christ and had seen Him physically. When he left them, He promised that he would only leave them bodily but that He would come back to them in spirit and stay with them wherever they were. Doubtless they were puzzled by this and for some days waited and wondered. How, could such a thing happen? Then came Pentecost with the startling manifestation of a power far beyond their own. With new boldness and effectiveness they communicated the Gospel. They knew Christ was with them, living and present. This was the fulfilment of His promise. The Holy Spirit had come. And if this means anything today it surely means that the Holy Spirit is given to us to make Christ present in every believing life everywhere.

His purpose is to bring men to faith in Christ, In the same passage in John 16~ Jesus said, “When He comes, He will confute the world and show where wrong and right and judgment lie. He will convict them of wrong by their refusal to believe in Me. He will convince them that right is on My side by

showing that I go to the Father when I pass from your sight, and He will convince them of divine judgment by showing that the Prince of this world stands condemned.” (John 16: 8-11.)

Here is stated the Holy Spirit’s purpose to convince men of their own moral weakness and inadequacy and the relevance of Christ to meet their need. It is the Holy Spirit who persuades men in their innermost beings of the truth of Christ and His Gospel. Once He has done this, His function is to build the Christian in his faith in Christ. Some people are perplexed by Paul’s words in Romans 8: 9 “You are on the spiritual level if only God’s Spirit dwells within you; and if a man does not possess the Spirit of Christ he is no Christian.”

They are afraid that if they do not have an emotional feeling which they can identify as the Holy Spirit, they do not have Him and are therefore not true Christians. To all such it is important to say that if you have real faith in Christ as Saviour and Lord, then you have the Holy Spirit because that faith is brought about by Him. He is given to reveal Christ. When Jesus said, “He will guide you into all the truth” He made it perfectly clear by what follows that all the truth the Holy Spirit could reveal would be consistent with Christ.

Professor J. S. McEwan in his little book, “Why We Are Christians” makes the following very helpful comment: “The task of the Holy Spirit is to take the revelation given in Christ and to bring it home to us step by step as we are able to grasp it. The Christian who understands this will not be led astray by ‘freak religions’ whose founders imagine that they have some ‘new revelation’ divulged especially to them by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit points only to Christ and reveals only what is in Christ . . . it is important also to note that it is no part of the Spirit’s work to make us conscious of Himself, but rather to make us conscious of Christ. Faith in Christ, not any peculiar emotion or feeling, is the proof that we have the Spirit.”
This simple statement has a profound implication for the Christian and we shall refer to it again. Let us look a little closer at these two concepts we have seen in this section, namely that the Holy Spirit brings a man to faith in Christ
and leads him into the truth of Christ. As the giver of faith, the Holy Spirit is the creator of spiritual life and the evidence of that life is a living faith which, as Paul says in Ephesians 2: 8 is “. . . the gift of God”. This faith is not to be confused with an intellectual set of propositions. You can work that up superficially without the Holy Spirit, but real faith is a vital and vitalising factor involving a simple, but complete trust in Christ on the one hand and a real and meaningful recognition of His sovereignty in life on the other hand, and taith of that kind though it may be helped to clarification by intellectual processes is really brought into being through the working of the Holy Spirit. Let me ask you if you are a Christian, why do you believe? Is it for intellectual reasons?

You are probably convinced of the veracity of the resurrection of Christ on historical grounds. I believe anyone who studies the evidence should be so convinced. You may be persuaded by the inner logic of the Christian faith. You may recognise the dynamic results of real Christianity in history and so on. But behind all that is there not an inner consciousness that the claims of Christ ring true? The chances are that they did ring true before you were as intellectually clear about your faith as you now are. You were persuaded, not by intellectualising or rationalising or intuition.

The New Testament teaches that your persuasion was brought about by the Holy Spirit. I. have been convinced of Christ since boyhood. Subsequent facing of the challenges to the Christian faith and questioning of its presuppositions and teaching have led me to much clearer understandings, till now I believe it is possible to defend the Christian faith and its precepts intellectually against all comers. The original persuasion, however, and the experience which has been the anchor of life ever since is, I believe, the work of Christ by His Holy Spirit.

When Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would be the guide of the Christian into all truth, He was reminding us that Christian wisdom and discernment are not dependent on the intellectual capacity of the individual, but upon the inspiration and ministry of the Holy Spirit. If this were not so, Christian growth and maturity would only be possible to the intellectually advanced. In fact, it is available for all Christians, since all Christians have the Holy Spirit. This Spirit is given to every believer, not just as a guarantee of our acceptance by God, but as the guide of our lives. This does not in any sense deny the value of using our minds to the limit of. our capacity, It is an assertion that intellectual acumen, without the Holy Spirit, will not lead a man to growth in the truth of God.

Now this is a very practical point, If the Holy Spirit is to be our guide, we must learn to depend and draw upon His guidance daily. It is thus Christ indwells and leads us by His Holy Spirit which He has given to guide us in our living.

The Holy Spirit, however, is given not only to bring us to faith in Christ and then to lead us into truth concerning Him, but to direct the course of our lives. The Apostle Paul puts it very directly in Romans 8: 4 where he describes Christians as those “. . . whose conduct, no longer under the control of our lower nature, is directed by the Spirit.” In verses 14 and is he expands this by saying, “For all who are moved by the Spirit of God are sons of God. The Spirit you have received is not a Spirit of slavery leading you back into a life of fear, but a Spirit which makes us sons enabling us to cry Abba, Father.”

Here the Apostle makes it very clear that God’s purpose in giving us the Holy Spirit is to bring Christ into our everyday lives so that we may experience God’s leadership. When he calls that Spirit the Spirit of adoption, he clearly indicates that now we are meant to live under God in the relationship of children to a father. We are, as it were, living under His roof by His provision and in obedience to His will as provided by the Holy Spirit within us.

The word translated “move” in verse 14 of Romans 8, when Paul says, “For all who are moved by the Spirit of God are sons of God” is a Greek word which means “to lead along”, “to guide”, “to steer”. Now this is a startling suggestion. So many Christians seen to be quite happy to live their lives on general principles like decency, church-going, saying their prayers, not being too selfish and the like, without any real reference to God as a living, present, spirit within. Paul speaks sternly to such when he says, “If a man does not possess the Spirit of Christ, he is no Christian.”
He is given to make us like Christ. We have just seen that He is called “the Spirit of Christ”. If this is so, then the character He seeks to produce in us will be a character like Christ’s. Schleiermacher in the 19th century said, “The fruits of the Spirit are the virtues of Christ.” It is therefore inconceivable that the Holy Spirit should make us other than Christ-like. This is important in the light of the tendency among some Christians so to stress certain of the gifts of the Holy Spirit that they overlook this central purpose of the Holy Spirit’s ministry in the Christian, namely to make him like Christ; for many find some of the gifts of the Spirit particularly attractive and desirable. Unless their experience of the Spirit creates in them a character like Christ’s, then their experience is deficient.

When Paul spells out the fruits or the harvest of the Spirit in Galatians 5: 22, 23 as “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control,” he describes characteristics. of .Christ. The man who grows in these virtues grows in Christ. The only power able to lead us into such growth is the Holy Spirit. In Galatians 5: 25, Paul concludes his logic simply, “If the Spirit is the source of our life, let the Spirit also direct our course.” That course will always lead us nearer to and make us more like Christ. Nothing can take the place of this, It is so consistent with what Jesus Himself said, “He who dwells in Me as I dwell in him bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.” It is clear that we dwell in Christ as His Spirit dwells in us.

He is given to equip us for service and witness, Jesus is recorded in Acts 1: 8 as saying, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you and you will bear witness for me . . .“ It is quite clear that the Holy Spirit was given to the first Christians to strengthen them for their witness in the world. The fact that He was to lead men into “all truth” has sometimes led some Christians to believe that the sole or main purpose of the Holy Spirit is doctrinal, to keep from error, or to give understanding of the teaching of the Bible. Of course this is part of His function. The Reformers were doubtless right in insisting in the inner witness of the Holy Spirit—”Internum testimonium spiritus sancti”—as essential to a real understanding of the Scripture, but all such understanding and experience of the Holy Spirit are given for the express purpose of bearing witness to Christ. Indeed, our Lord linked the witness of the Spirit and our witness to Christ together when He said, as recorded in John 15; 26, 27 “But when your advocate has come whom I will send you from the Father—the Spirit of truth which issues from the Father—He will bear witness to me. And you also are My witnesses .

First, the Spirit bears witness to Christ within the Christian and inspires the Christian to bear witness to Christ in the world. Indeed wherever you look in the Bible, Old or New Testament, the filling of the Holy Spirit is always connected with witness and service, e.g. it is written of Bezaleel in Exodus 31: 3 “I have filled him with divine spirit making him skilful and ingenious . . . for workmanship of every kind.” There the Spirit was given for service. In Numbers 24: 2 it is said of Balaam, “The Spirit of God came upon him and he uttered his oracle.”

Again, the Spirit is given for witness and service. It is written in Judges 6: 34 “Then the Spirit of the Lord took possession of Gideon; he sounded the trumpet and the Abiezarites were called out to follow him . . .“ Again the Spirit equipped him for service. In the account of the anointing of David in 1 Samuel 16 when he was commissioned to serve as King, we read (v 13) “Then the Spirit of the Lord came upon David and was with him from that day onwards.” In Ezekiel 11: 24 there is the testimony, “And the Spirit lifted me up and brought me to the exiles in Chaldea . . . I told the exiles all that the Lord had revealed to me.”

Again, the Spirit is given for service. In the New Testament the emphasis is the same. It is typified in Acts 2:18, when an Old Testament Scripture is taken as the promise of God fulfilled in the gift of the Spirit to the Church, “I will pour out upon every one a portion of my Spirit, and your sons and daughters shall prophecy, your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams.” Here again, the Spirit is given for witness and service.
This needs to be emphasised also because of the common errors of thinking the really important thing is to experience the “charismatic” gifts of the Holy Spirit that is the special gifts of His grace. Often gifts of healing and tongues and the like are desired as ends in themselves or as “proofs” of the Spirit’s presence. Now in a proper setting these are legitimate and right. In fact, however, they have no spiritual value unless they are instruments of witness and service to Christ. If they testify to Christ and communicate Him to others they are valid. If they are merely expressions of some alleged spiritual superiority over other Christians, they are spurious. The Holy Spirit is not given to place us a cut above others but to enable us to be effective witnesses to our living faith in our living Lord.

He is given to unite us in fellowship. In Philippians 2: 1 Paul writes, “If then our common life in Christ yields anything to stir the heart, any loving consolation, any sharing of the Spirit, any warmth of affection or compassion, fill up my cup of happiness by thinking and feeling alike . .
Christian fellowship is not simply the result of common interest, It is not like the friendship that exists between members of the same club, It is a fellowship deep and rich and lasting which is spontaneously felt between Christians who share a common faith in, and love for, Christ, It is “the sharing of the Spirit”,

It is the result of our “common life in Christ” mediated to us by the Spirit, and so long as the Church keeps Christ central to its life, the sharing of the Spirit, the fellowship of the Spirit, will be real. When the Church gets off-centre and does not build its life around Christ, fellowship wanes because the Holy Spirit is not free to do His work of testifying to Christ and leading us into the truth as it is in Christ.

There is a difference between human friendship and Christian fellowship. True Christian fellowship finds its centre in Christ and you can tell the presence of the Holy Spirit by the place Christ has. Such fellowship transcends all barriers, social, racial, cultural, as nothing else can, because the Holy Spirit makes men of all races and classes and cultures members of one household and brothers in one family.

The reality of this fellowship is described by Paul in Ephesians 2, when he says that Christ has broken down the biggest known barrier in the history of mankind, the barrier between the Jew and the Gentile. Now he says, “Through Him we both alike have access to the Father in the one Spirit. Thus you are no longer aliens in a foreign land but fellow citizens with God’s people, members of God’s house­hold . . In Him you too are being built with all the rest to a spiritual dwelling for God.” (Ephesians 2: 18-22). The Authorised Version renders this phrase “An habitation of God through the Spirit”. It is the Spirit that makes us one in this sense.

Or take another picture in Ephesians. Ephesians 4: 4 says, “There is one body and one spirit . . .“ You can see the implication quite clearly. Christians belong together in the same way as different parts of one body belong together. They are united by one spirit, In another passage in Galatians 4: 6 Paul says, “To prove that you are sons, God has sent into our hearts the spirit of His son, crying Abba, Father.” Now the description of Christians as sons of God by the Holy Spirit is yet another illustration of the fellowship which exists between those who belong to the same father. All of this is the work of the Spirit. The practical implication of all this is that the Holy Spirit could make the Church the biggest force for peace in the world. As we are united through the Holy Spirit in a oneness which exists in Christ, we ought, by the expression of that oneness, to be a constant challenge to, and influence in, society.

That this is so seldom the case in modern Westernised Christianity is an indictment on our over-identity with human “systems and structures” and our reticence to stand, with Christ, over against society, or to go with him, “Outside the camp . . . bearing this reproach”, if need be.

THE POWER OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
A great deal of Christian thinking about the Holy Spirit is academic, It is possible to believe all the right things about the Holy Spirit and yet to be ignorant of His real influence. Without question, one of the key words in the New Testament relating to the Holy Spirit is the word “power”. In his second letter to Timothy 1: 7 Paul writes, “For the Spirit that God gave us is no craven Spirit but one to inspire strength . . .“ The Authorised Version justifiably renders the meaning that “God has not given us the Spirit of fear, but of power . . .“ The word is accurately translated thus. The gift of God’s spirit is the gift of power.
Our Lord confirms this in His promise to the disciples before His ascension recorded in Acts 1: 8 “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you The coming of the Holy Spirit and the receiving of power were intimately bound up together in the teaching of Jesus. On another occasion He said to His disciples, “Apart from me you can do nothing.” This was said in the context of a statement about dwelling in Christ and having Christ dwell in us. The point is plain. The Christian and the Church will lack power unless it is received from the Holy Spirit. Now in a number of places the nature of the Spirit’s power is described simply.

He gives the power to confess Christ. Jesus said, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you; and you will bear witness for Me . . .“ Between the ascension of Christ and the day of Pentecost the Church remained behind closed doors. It was with the coming of the Holy Spirit with His gifts to the Church that new power was experienced. Stanley Jones has this to say, “You might have told that band of disciples behind closed doors for fear that since Jesus had arisen from the dead there was nothing to be afraid of. But that would not have taken them out from behind those closed doors.

There was only one way to get them out and that was to raise the tone of the inner life so that they were inwardly a match for outward circum­stances. Pentecost gave them that inner adequacy. Inner
life became adequate for outer life, henceforth nothing could stop them. Fears fell away as irrelevancies. Out of that upper room which had been the place of fears they burst with the glad news, they smiled at poverty, rejoiced under stripes, were elated at their humiliations, sang in midnight prisons, courted death and shame of every man everywhere in their own abundant life. God had matched them against that need and they were spiritually adequate.”

That happened at Pentecost. The power they lacked themselves came through the Holy Spirit. Many people find practical difficulty in confessing their Christian faith. The Holy Spirit has been promised to us, however, and His power is ours as we trust His living presence. A simple but impressive illustration of this in the New Testament is in Acts 8, where Philip, whom we are told was “full of the spirit”, witnessed to the Ethiopian on a desert road. We read, “The Spirit said to Philip, ‘Go and join the carriage’
.‘‘ It was under the impulse and the direction of the Holy Spirit within that Philip exercised a convincing witness to his companion.

He has power to convince. Jesus said of the Spirit, When He comes He will confute the world and show where wrong and right judgment lie. He will convict them of wrong by their refusal to believe in Me; He will convince them that right is on My side . . . and He will convince them of divine judgment      (John 16: 8-11 NEB). Now this is sometimes hard to grasp. We are tempted to believe that the way to convince men of anything is by cold irrefutable logic. That may be the way to defeat them. It is seldom the way to convince them. The Apostle Paul’s simple statement in 1 Corinthians 4: 20 is significant, “The Kingdom of God is not a matter of talk but of power.” Of course there is a place for Christian apologetics, argumenta­tion. exposition and “defence of the Gospel”.

The Early Church believed, however, quite clearly that it is the Holy Spirit and not these other factors who convinces men. A mother does not convince her child of her love by argumentation. She might say to her child, “I love you and you know it because I buy you ice cream and I provide your clothes, I cook your food, I make sure you have a com­fortable bed, I care for you when you are unwell and so on.

These arguments would not convince the child. Nor could the would-be suitor hope to make much impression if he had to resort to arguments about the reality of his love. No, in both cases the conviction lies deeper than words and is a matter of spirit communicating with spirit. So the Holy Spirit is given to the Christian. Paul testifies, “. . . I have been Christ’s instrument to bring the Gentiles into His allegiance by word and deed, by the force of miraculous signs and by the power of the Holy Spirit.” (Romans 15: 19 NEB). And when he wrote his first letter to the Thessalonians he testified “when we brought you the Gospel, we brought it not in mere words but in the power of the Holy Spirit and with strong conviction as you know well.” It is evident from these passages that the New Testament’s understanding is that men are convinced, as the indwelling Spirit exercises His power by creating in us lives which commend Christ to the unbeliever, and which convince him of the truth of the Gospel. He gives the power to communicate. Although this idea is closely linked to the last, I want to hold it separate in our thinking for a very simple reason. It seems to be that the story of Pentecost lays great stress on this particular point and that one of the lessons we must learn from that story is that the Holy Spirit enables us to communicate the Gospel effectively. Not only does He penetrate the hearts and consciences of other people, convincing them of Christ, He gives to the Christian Church and individuals a capacity and ability beyond their own, enabling them to communicate the Gospel effectively.
Much discussion has taken place on the nature of the gift on tongues in Acts

2. The resolving of the issue as to the exact nature of the gift of tongues as recorded in Acts 2 is really incidental. Whether we conclude that the Apostles were given the ability to speak other languages as Acts 2: 4 says very explicitly, or that the Holy Spirit by equally supernatural action affected the hearing of the listeners, the end result is the same. The disciples in the midst of a cosmopolitan, sometimes curious and often hostile crowd, received the power to communicate the Gospel. I think that is the heart of the lesson. The Christian individual or Church may devise all manner of media of communication but it is axiomatic to Christian thought that if we depend on ‘method” for effective communication and fail to draw on the inner presence and promised power of the Holy Spirit who resides in us we may communicate words but we will not communicate faith.

The importance of communication is also underlined in 1 Corinthians 14: 13 ff., where the gift of tongues appears, The Apostle says “I would rather speak five intelligible words, for the benefit of others as well as myself, than thousands of words in the language of ecstasy”.
He gives power to conquer. The Holy Spirit is the source of Christian morality. As Paul puts it in Romans 8: 26, The Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness.” He teaches that the only way to overcome our lower nature is by the Holy Spirit. In Galatians 5: 16 we read “. . . If you are guided by the Spirit you will not fulfil the desires of your lower nature. That nature sets its desires against the Spirit while the Spirit fights against it.” He then contrasts the life of the “lower nature” and the life of the “Spirit”, the first including impurity, indecency, idolatry, quarrelling, rage, orgies and the like, and the life of the Spirit being marked by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control. It is the Spirit who gives moral power. Paul describes these virtues as “the fruit of the Spirit” or “the harvest of the Spirit”, implying that where the Spirit is a controlling factor in the Christian life these characteristics will emerge. Like seed coming to harvest they will grow slowly and often imperceptibly, but they will be more and more apparent, and increasingly mature. This formation of character and imparting of moral power is a principal function of the Holy Spirit.

What is claimed is this. Man cannot overcome his moral weakness unaided. The Christian does not achieve moral strength simply by accepting spiritual principles. He needs God’s help within. Paul sets out this teaching at the beginning of Romans 8 when he says, “. . . In Christ Jesus, the life-giving law of the Spirit has set you free from the law of sin and death. What the law could never do because our lower nature robbed it of all potency, God has done . . . So that the commandment of the law may find fulfilment in us whose conduct, no longer under the control of our lower nature, is directed by the Spirit.” God has given us His spirit to make us better men, It is not for nothing that He is called “the Holy Spirit” or “the Spirit of Holiness”.

THE POSSESSION OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
Many people are concerned about whether or not they really possess the Holy Spirit. Let me at once insist that the New Testament teaches that whoever believes in Christ truly as Lord and Savior possesses the Holy Spirit. He is not the prerogative or exclusive possession of the chosen few but belongs to all who belong to Christ. There is no need for anxiety for the humble believer who reads Paul’s words in Romans 8: 9 where he says, “You are on the spiritual level if only God’s Spirit dwells within you; and if a man does not possess the Spirit of Christ he is no Christian.”

Here let me recall again the simple but incisive point made by Professor McEwan in “Why We Are Christians” page 43, “Faith in Christ, not any peculiar emotion or feeling, is the proof that we have the Spirit.”
This is the uniform insistence of the New Testament and should bring comfort to every Christian. Comfort not complacency however, since those who possess the Spirit are meant then to “walk in the Spirit.” As the Apostle urges in Galatians 5:16, “If you are guided by the Spirit you will not fulfil the desires of your lower nature”, and a few verses later, “The harvest of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control.”

The Holy Spirit is possessed by. all believers in Christ, but not all live under His influence so that life is molded by Him. Consequently, many fail to demonstrate the fruits or the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Let us consider the possession of the Holy Spirit in two ways.
The method of possession. How is the Holy Spirit received, by what means and at what time? There are two main views of this. There is the view that the Holy Spirit is given through Christian ritual. Of course this views varies very much in its expressions.

For some traditions in the Christian Church the principal means of receiving God and His Spirit is at the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper or the Holy Communion. Here, it is believed, grace is transferred and the Spirit is promised to the participant. Of course we all know the danger of this
view—that it can, when held superficially, lead to a religion which substitutes performance for a spirit of trust in God. At its worst this becomes a superstitious religion.

Let it be noted, however, that there are many people who value the Sacraments because they come to them with such devotion of spirit and sincerity of purpose that they do indeed sense the presence of the Living Christ by His Spirit. For all such, the Lord’s Table is a very precious commemoration and means of grace. Would that we all set as high a store by this trusting place of our Lord as do some of the best spirits in the more liturgically minded churches.

There are others, of course, who believe that the Holy Spirit is given specifically in and through baptism. Without raising here the question of the nature or form of baptism, we simply note the view that baptism is taken to be accompanied by the gift of the Holy Spirit in the thinking of many Christians, who base their view on the Pentecostal preaching of Peter who said, “Repent and be baptised every one of you in the name of Jesus the Messiah for the forgive­ness of your sins and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” (Acts 2: 38.)

There are still others who believe that the giving of the Holy Spirit is expressed in the laying on of hands, since the New Testament has cases of special gifts being given to the accompaniment of this rite, as in the case of Timothy to whom Paul writes, “. . . I now remind you to stir into flame the gift of God which is within you through the laying on of my hands.” (11 Timothy 1: 6). There are also those who believe that a precedent was clearly set by Paul in Ephesus when, as Luke records, “. . - And when Paul had laid his hands on them the Holy Spirit came upon them . . .“ From this stream of thought comes the practice of laying on of hands on special occasions such as confirmation, ordination, indicating the activity and involvement and gift of the Holy Spirit.

There are others who insist that the Holy Spirit is given in a very special way in an experience variously named as “the baptism in the Holy Spirit,” “the fullness of the Holy Spirit,” or some such expression. Those who hold such a
view will point out the clear indication by John the Baptist who said, “. . . But there is one to come who is mightier than I . . . He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire” (Luke 3:16). The gift of the Holy Spirit in this sense has been believed by some to bring about in the Christian life a state of “sinless perfection” or has been regarded as “a second blessing” parallel to the dramatic change associated with conversion to Christ. Many exponents of this view look for evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit in quite specific ways and particularly in the gift of tongues or ecstatic utterance.

Alongside all of these is the simple insistence that the Holy Spirit is given to all who believe and that He is the inalienable possession of every Christian, the evidence of His presence being the existence of faith in Christ which the Holy Spirit came to give and to cultivate. Where is the truth to be found? Does the New Testament have a clear pattern? In reply it should be stated at once that one of the main things which emerges from the New Testament in relation to the Holy Spirit is that He is free. He is not bound by our understanding or our structures or our theory. The Apostle Paul in a passage on spiritual gifts makes it quite clear that the Holy Spirit is the free initiator and giver of all such gifts, “That all these gifts are the work of one and the same Spirit distributing them separately to each individual at will.” (1 Cor. 12: it NEB.) Clearly, the Christian was never meant to dictate to or direct the Spirit and we need not hope to try to push Him into channels we have prepared. Along with this it is important to stress again that there will always be mystery in the Holy Spirit. Remember Jesus’ words to Nicodemus,

“The wind blows where it will: you hear the sound of it but you do not know where it comes from or where it is going. So with everyone who is born from Spirit.” (John 3: 8.) It seems perfectly clear that Jesus did not expect us to try to master the Spirit by establishing inflexible patterns or understandings to which He must be subject, but to recognise quite simply that the Spirit of God is as free as the wind.

This being so, it becomes difficult to insist that certain
ceremonies convey the Holy Spirit. The idea that the Spirit is given invariably or inevitably through a rite however sacred like Holy Communion or Christian Baptism, cannot be clearly sustained by reference to the New Testament. For example, Peter’s words at Pentecost, “Repent and be baptised every one of you in the name of Jesus the Messiah for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” (Acts 2: 38.) do not make the reception of the Holy Spirit the automatic accompaniment of baptism. He linked repentance and baptism, faith and baptism. Surely he was saying that it is in connection with the total commitment of the believer expressed in repentance towards God and baptism in the name of Jesus that the Holy Spirit was given.

To make His coming the automatic consequence of a rite is certainly to go beyond the New Testament. It has been argued that the account given from the early verses of Acts 19 suggests the giving of the Holy Spirit in connection with baptism and the laying on of hands, “On hearing this they were baptised into the name of the Lord Jesus; and when Paul had laid his hands on them the Holy Spirit came upon them . . .“ G. H. C. Macgregor comments on this passage that these people “cannot in any full sense have been Christians . . . The whole account is somewhat obscure and Luke seems to have no very clear knowledge as to who these people were. Probably the idea that it was part of the function of the apostles to mediate the gift of the Holy Spirit has transformed the conversion of some disciples of John to Christianity into a story of how imperfect Christians were changed into perfect ones by the laying on of apostolic hands.”

Here, faith in Christ, baptism, laying on of hands and the gift of the Holy Spirit are held very much together and it looks as if these people were at this point making their total response to the Gospel. That is the important factor and not any one of its con­stituent elements isolated from the others. It is also hard to support from the New Testament the idea that, “baptism in the Holy Spirit” is a separate and dramatic event bringing about a state of “sinless perfection” in the Christian.

 There is nothing to suggest that even the apostles lived in such a state, although there are clear suggestions that the life which is submitted to the influence of the Spirit is kept from sin, while submission to the Holy Spirit is maintained. This is certainly the implication of Galatians 5:16, “If you are guided by the Spirit you will not fulfil the desires of your lower nature.” By the same token, Paul made it clear in writing to those who were committed Christians in Ephesus that it was possible to go back on their experience of the fullness of the Holy Spirit when he wrote to them, “And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God for that Spirit is the seal with which you were marked for the day of our final liberation.” (Eph 4: 30 NEB.)

This is said following a passage about the kind of life the Christian is meant to live. In other words, it is clearly taught that, however real and deep a man’s experience of God’s indwelling Spirit may have been, he can by self-will thwart that Spirit. There is no question of a once-for-all act which gives him a new and irreversible position of sinlessness. Much more, the picture is of constantly renewed dependence on and submission to the Holy Spirit.
It is perfectly right to desire to seek the fullness of the Holy Spirit as the source of power for living, and as the giver of spiritual gifts, and to do so daily as the natural means of living the Christian life: but any attempt to relate the Holy Spirit exclusively to ritual acts or to an inflexibly conceived experience subsequent to Christian commitment is hard to reconcile with various passages of the New Testament. We read that after His resurrection, Jesus “breathed on them saying ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’ “ (John 20: 23.) The Spirit was given at the word and command of Christ. Moreover, Luke 11: 13 suggests simply that God gives the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him without any kind of ritual or formal obligation. It is fair to say that both of these passages have been questioned by New Testament scholars on the basis of what they originally meant. The record at the end of Acts 10, however, is significant, where Peter makes clear reference to unbaptised Christians, “who have received the Holy Spirit

Just as we did ourselves,” although this clearly suggests that the gift of the Holy Spirit is not inevitably dependent on baptism, or any ritual for that matter. It is also worthy of note that Peter immediately after saying this “ordered them to be baptised in the name of Jesus Christ.” He did not debase or dismiss baptism. He did, however, make it quite clear that the Holy Spirit can be given with or without the most sacred rites.

Stanley Jones has some penetrating comments about the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost, “. . . When the supreme moment at Pentecost came and the Spirit was received, they were undergoing no rite or ceremony of any type or kind . . . Our Gospel uses rites and ceremonies but it is not bound up with any of them in the sense that any rite or ceremony is essential to receiving God’s highest gift, Himself.” On the question of baptism and the Holy Spirit he adds, “I believe in Christian baptism because I do not believe it to be absolutely essential.

As a method of expressing and declaring one’s faith before the world nothing is more beautiful and expressive, but as a sine qua non for finding the Spirit, nothing has been more disastrous, for under this conception the baptised are supposed to keep up the idea which in many cases amounts to a fiction that they have necessarily found the Spirit in baptism and the consequence has been that while the rite has been thereby raised, the fact of the Spirit in the life has been thereby lowered, lowered almost to becoming meaningless.”
Without doubt, the most decisive passage of all is in Paul’s letter to the Galatians in the third chapter, verses 2, 5 and 14 are of special importance. Here is what he says, “Answer me one question, did you receive the Spirit by keeping the law or by believing the Gospel message . . . I ask you then, when God gives you the Spirit and works miracles among you, why is this? Is it because you keep the law, or is it because you have faith in the Gospel message?” (v 5). And finally, ~‘. . . So that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.” (v 14).

In this passage, Paul challenges the view that the Spirit is given in response to the observation of ritual. The burden of the Galatian letter of course was very much that of the relationship of circumcision to faith or legalism to faith. He insists quite clearly that it is faith in Jesus Christ which sets a man’s feet on the Christian path and which guarantees to him the personal presence of the Holy Spirit.

In his exposition on Galatians, Raymond T. Stamm, New Testament Professor in Gettysburg, writes, “Paul has in mind a believing kind of hearing that welcomes the Gospel and leads the hearer to entrust himself to Christ, In the hearing of the word which creates the faith, the Spirit is received.” And Professor Burton declares, “The receiving of the Spirit here referred to is evidently that which marked the beginning of their Christian lives,” and talks of “Faith as the means by which men become acceptable to God and that through such faith they receive the Spirit.” (Inter­national Critical Commentary Galatians pages 147 and 176).

On the basis of this passage supported by the general teaching of the New Testament, we can therefore assert that the Holy Spirit is given as men believe in Christ. When men accept the message of Christ, the Holy Spirit comes to them. It was this precisely which Paul was eager to establish as against the Judaistic elements in the Galatian Church who wanted to impose certain rituals and to insist that they would add something to the validity. of Christian experience. Of course these rituals were Jewish and not Christian as in the case of circumcision, but Paul is anxious to make clear the point that the Holy Spirit is given not on a mechanical basis in response to the operation of any rite or ceremony, however sacred or precious, but in response to . faith in Christ.

THE PROOF OF POSSESSION
How can a person be sure of having the Holy Spirit? Tension exists between those who say the evidence of possession of the Spirit is to be seen in “the fruits of the Spirit”, and others who tend to the view that the Spirit’s fullness is demonstrated in “the gifts of the Spirit.” There is no conflict in the New Testament between these views. In a word, the fruits of the Spirit are meant to be manifest in every Christian life. The gifts of the Spirit, as the New Testament makes clear, are God’s to give freely to individual men and to the Church as He wills, not as men demand. Paul makes this abundantly clear in an outspoken passage in I Corinthians 12 from verse 4 which is worth noting here.

“There are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit, there are varieties of service but the same Lord, there are many forms of work but all of them in all men are the work of the same God. In each of us the Spirit is manifested in one particular way for some useful purpose. One man through the Spirit has the gift of wise speech, while another, by the power of the same Spirit, can put the deepest knowledge into words. Another, by the same Spirit, is granted faith; another by the one .spirit gifts of healing and another miraculous powers; another has the gift of prophecy and another ability to distinguish true spirit from false; yet another has the gift of ecstatic utterance of different kinds and another the ability to interpret. But all these gifts are the work of one and the same Spirit distributing them separately to each individual at will.”

If it is ever insisted that one particular expression or gift of the Holy Spirit is an essential proof of His presence, this is in itself evidence that those insisting on such a position have taken their leave of the New Testament. We have no right to demand either from Him or from Christians one gift above others. To do so is to deny the Holy Spirit His freedom to distribute His gifts as God knows to be best. This being clearly stated in the New Testament, we must not only look for proof of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life to the gifts ~f the Spirit as such which are indicated in the New
Testament. If we do we must be very careful to bear in mind these gifts are very much more than the dramatic gifts of healing, miraculous powers, tongues, and even the impressive and persuasive gifts of prophecy (preaching), inspired utterance, administration, or teaching, all of which are indicated in 1 Corinthians 12 or Romans 12. The gifts which show the Holy Spirit’s presence and enabling signifi­cantly include (see 1 Corinthians 12: 28) the “ability to help others or power to guide them”. These are equally the gift of the Spirit.

After all he has to say about the gifts of the Spirit, Paul makes this simple comment, “And now I will show you the best way of all.” (1 Corinthians 12: 31). Immediately, in the next chapter, he proceeds to outline the way of love indicating that it is possible to have the appearance of some of the gifts of the Spirit but to no avail whatever because of a lack of love. He says, “I may have the gift of prophecy and know every hidden truth; I may have faith strong enough to move mountains; but if I have no love I am nothing.”

At the beginning of the following chapter, he sums it up by saying, “Put love first; but there are other gifts of the Spirit at which you should aim also and above all prophecy.” But such gifts were clearly to be sought for the benefit of the church and not for the reputation of the seeker. So Marcus Dods comments, “Paul has explained that these gifts were bestowed for the edification of the Church and not for the glorification of the individual; and that therefore the individual should covet not the most surprising but the most profitable of these manifestations of the Spirit.”

Towering above them all, however, the unquestioned proof of the Spirit is love which is patient, kind, unenvying; never boastful, conceited, rude, selfish, or gloating—besides which all the gifts of the Spirit are temporary and partial. Love is eternal.
It is significant too that when Paul wrote to the Galatians he described what he called “the harvest of the Spirit” (Galatians 5: 22, 23). The first among them was love. In Colossians 3: 14 he says “To crown all, there must be love to bind all together and complete the whole.” If any expression of the Spirit proves that He is really possessed by the Christian it will be the harvest of love.
This “love” is not merely affection, it is not attraction, it is not even simply loyalty. The New Testament has several words for love, the highest of which is the word agape. It is used of the love of God and it means a love which is expressed in unremitting goodwill regardless of the merit or lack of merit of the object loved. Some forms of love are spontaneous, like the emotion felt between two young people who “fall in love”.

Other forms of love are built up and reinforced by a relationship such as the love between a mother and her child, beginning with the spontaneous love of the mother and the natural dependence of the child and building up into a deep bond. Another form of love is created by common interest, as when people who love the same things care for one another. Sometimes this love is marked more by duty than devotion, but not always so. There is a kind of love, however, which is unique.

It is a love which reaches out to others regardless of what they are and despite what they are. It is God’s love. It cannot be created merely by humanitarian concern, ideals or prin­ciples. The New Testament teaches that it is implanted in the heart by God through His Spirit, It is the love which God has for the sinner whereby He cares for the sinner and wishes only his good despite his sinfulness, It is this love the Spirit imparts to the Church and to Christians within it so that the Christian Jew is enabled to love the despised pagan Gentile.

Paul used this illustration and indicated that Christ has broken down the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile. If there is a love which can break that barrier it is unique. Much more, however, its uniqueness is seen in God’s love expressed in Jesus Christ and pre-eminently through His Cross. where God’s love for the sinner leads Him to bear sin’s pain and alienation while the sinner still jeers at Him in His suffering and agony. It is the creation and cultivation of that kind of love which is the proof of the Spirit and nothing can substitute for it or in any way take its place. Paul clearly states this is the work of the Holy Spirit when he says (Romans 5: 5) “. . . God’s love has flooded our inmost heart through the Holy Spirit He has given us. The late S. D. Gordon wrote a remarkable little devotional book many years ago called ‘Quiet Talks on Power’ in which he describes love as “the all inclusive passion” (page 254 ff.). He says, “That marvellous tender passion—the love of God-—heightless, depthless, shoreless shall flood our hearts making us as gentle, tender-hearted and self-sacrificing and gracious as He. Every phase of life will become a phase of love. Peace is love resting, Bible study is love reading its lover’s letters, prayer is love keeping tryst, conflict with sin is love jealously fighting for its lover,, hatred of sin is love shrinking from that which separates from its lover, sympathy is love tenderly feeling, enthusiasm is love burning, hope is love expecting, . patience is love waiting, faithfulness is love sticking fast, humility is love taking its true place, modesty is love keeping out of sight

Love is revolutionary. It radically changes us and revolutionises our spirit toward all others . . . Love is not only the finest fruit but it is the final test of the Christian life.” Of course, there are many other expressions of the Spirit. In his Galatian letter Paul adds to love the following, “joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control.” These marks of Christian character are the proofs of the Holy Spirit. Without them, no amount of eloquence or drama or ecstasy has any spiritual significance.

Bishop Stephen Neill has written a book entitled “The Christian Character” which is an exposition of these “fruits” of the Spirit. This in itself is a reminder that, like character, these must grow. They are not produced overnight, It is important to see this to save ourselves from the despair of feeling that because we are not so loving, peaceful, joyous, or patient as we ought to be that we do not have the Spirit. Consistently the New Testament describes the Christian life as a growth. It is the growth of character. Before fruit can be produced the seed must be sown and the seed which is the ultimate proof that we have the Holy Spirit is faith in Jesus Christ. There is no way of getting behind or beyond this.

Above all else and before all else the Holy Spirit comes to us to make us aware of Christ and to enable us to have faith in Him. When that faith is present we have the Spirit. In Romans 8 He is described as the Spirit of adoption, “A Spirit that makes us sons enabling us to cry ‘Abba! Father!’ In that cry the Spirit of God joins with our spirit in testifying that we are God’s children.” The point is simple. The believing Christian who has learned in Christ to call God Father and to trust Him as such may be sure he has the Holy Spirit. Faith in Christ as personal Lord and God as personal Father is evidence of the Holy Spirit’s presence. The further evidence will come in a growing character built upon love and in God’s good time the Holy Spirit will be expressed in such gifts as God considers best. While that faith is continually exercised the Holy Spirit will always be there to aid and to build up the Christian life. Jesus said He would come to us as a “Comforter” or more accurately as our “Advocate.” The word used of Him as we have observed, is the Greek word “parakletos.” It means “Someone called alongside to help.” As we exercise the faith in Christ which God’s Spirit has given to us, we shall find that help to be ever present.

THE PRACTICALITY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
All that we have said about the nature, the function and the purpose of the Holy Spirit as described in the Bible will be utterly without meaning unless the Holy Spirit is a practical reality. In our materialistic world is it still practical to talk of the Holy Spirit? I believe it is, It is vital, however, to remember that the Holy Spirit is given not to talk about but to draw upon.
He is practical for the individual Christian

The warning needs to be sounded that if I spend my time arguing with myself or with others about the Holy Spirit, I may miss completely all sense of His guidance and presence in my life. For the Holy Spirit is given, in a word, to bring Christ to the individual, to bring Christ from OUTSIDE the believer in history to INSIDE the believer in experience. He has been given not to make the believer conscious of His, the Holy Spirit’s, presence but to make him conscious of Christ. He has been given to develop the Christian’s character and to impart to the Christian power for Christian living and witness. He is not meant to be a relic of historical theology:
He is meant to be a reality in personal experience. Every Christian who believes in Christ has the Holy Spirit.

The practical challenge of the Holy Spirit is that every believer should learn to live in dependence upon Him and to draw upon His presence and His power.
He is a practicality for the Church. All too often the Church has applauded the idea of the Holy Spirit without taking His presence seriously. Again and again, Christians have been like the disciples between the Ascension and Pentecost. They have hidden behind closed doors, powerless and sometimes afraid, believing in the risen Christ but ex­pressing nothing of His living power.

Thankfully Pentecost came with its amazing experience in the early Church of the living power of God working through His people in the gift of the Holy Spirit. that Spirit has ever since been the inalienable right of the Christian Church and the practicality of His power may still be known. Sadly, Church-men and theologians have frequently explained the manifestations of
the Holy Spirit is the early Church almost as extra­vagances or, at best, exceptions given for the needs of their day. Some have gone so far as to say quite bluntly that the gifts He was alleged to have given in these days have no further relevance at all, that they were among the things which, like prophecy, Paul said were “to pass away.”

This kind of dismissal of the Holy Spirit as a reality in the life of the Church is tragic because it has frequently meant that the Church has ended by trying to generate its own power through its programmes and its plans and ‘often through mere ingenuity and wit, when all the time the promised Spirit of God was available.

This does not mean that the Church has lost its faith given to it by the Holy Spirit, If it has lost its power it is surely because, while believing in the historicity of the living, risen Christ, it has sometimes failed to accept that living, risen Christ into its life by dependence on His Spirit. Let Stanley Jones bring the challenge of this in his telling words from “The Christ of Every Road” (page 24)

“The Church” he says, “is living between Easter and Pentecost. It stands hesitant between the two, hesitant hence comparatively impotent. Something big has dawned on its thinking—that Christ has lived, taught, died and risen again and has commissioned the Church with the amazing good news. But something big has yet to dawn on the very structure, make-up and temper of the life of the Church—Pentecost. Easter has dawned; Pentecost has not. If the Church would move up from that between state to Pentecost, then nothing could stop it—nothing.”

This is the plain truth. The Holy Spirit is God at work in the life of the individual and of the Church. He belongs to us as we belong to Him. He waits to fill our lives and fulfil in us His purposes. He is not mere mysticism, though mystery. He is the source, the secret, and the supply of God’s life and power in human experience.

We, His people and His Church, are meant to know His presence and power.
“Let the Holy Spirit fill you,” urged Paul (Ephesians 5:
18). The question is, will we let Him fill us? If we do, it will be evident, in the growth of the harvest of the Spirit. It will show in the whole direction of life. Paul wrote (Romans 8: 5)

“Those who live on the level of the lower nature have their outlook formed by it, and that spells death, but those who live on the level of the Spirit have the spiritual outlook, and that spells life and peace.” What, then, is the formative influence in my outlook, my motivation? Is it—honestly—my lower nature? Or is it the will of Christ, as I discover it by depending on the Holy Spirit? It is one or the other But which? But how can we practise the life of the Spirit? Let me make several suggestions.

First, by believing that He is real. The promise of Christ that He would be present with His disciples by putting His Spirit in them is the objective assurance that He is real. (By ‘objective assurance” I mean the certainty from outside yourself, the real basis of your faith.) Second, by inviting Him to fill our lives. Now the way this is done will vary. I personally find it helpful to pray each morning that Christ will take control of me and of my life throughout the new day. This He does by His Spirit within us.

Third. hi’ trusting Him to guide. This is perhaps one of the hardest things of all. It is one thing to believe He guided Paul to Macedonia; it is altogether another thing to trust Him to guide me in my career, or through one day. But this is necessary. Notice this is more than asking Him to guide. It is trusting Him to guide. If only we would believe that God is sufficiently interested in us and close to us to guide us today, we would soon be conquerors over every anxiety about the future, and would begin· to discover the hidden resources which are ours each day through the Holy Spirit. Fourth, by listening for His word. Through the Bible, through prayer. through worship, the sacraments. and experience of a hundred different kinds the Holy spirit desires to lead us. But too often we do not listen. And. of course, we do no hear.
Fifth. hi’ acting on His prompting.

There is no need to fear that this might lead us astray. If we remember that our Lord assured us that the Holy Spirit would always lead us into truth, and bear witness to Christ, we need never hesitate to act on the impulse we feel compelling us, when once we have sought, and then trusted His guidance. If in such circumstances, we feel driven to action, then, provided we know it to be consistent with Christ, and true to Him, we may be confident to act, knowing we have the mind of the Holy Spirit.

No more practical Christian truth and doctrine exists than the Holy Spirit. Yet no concept has been subjected to worse distortion, or had to accept such blatant neglect.

When we honour and trust the indwelling presence of the Spirit of Christ we shall be honouring Christ, and shall be on the way to being adequately equipped for His service in the world.