Sermons at Rugby

by John Percival

XVII. A NEW HEART.

“A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you.”—Ezekiel xxxvi. 26.

In the beautiful and suggestive dream of Solomon, which is recorded in the third chapter of the First Book of Kings, God appears to him, saying, “Ask what I shall give thee”; and Solomon’s answer is, “O Lord, I am but a child set over this great people, give me, I pray Thee, a hearing heart.” And God said to him, “Because thou hast asked this thing, and hast not asked for thyself long life, nor riches; behold, I have done according to thy words. I have given thee a wise and understanding heart, and I have also given thee that which thou hast not asked, both riches and honour.” And the record of this vision was clearly meant to indicate that the supreme gift of the wisest of men was the

hearing or understanding heart. On the other hand, there is nothing against which our Lord in the Gospels utters stronger warnings than that dulness or deadness of spirit which is described as having eyes that see not, and ears that are dull of hearing, and hearts that do not understand. And in illustration of this we read how, while the crowds throng or press upon Jesus, it is the stricken woman who, with soul sensitive to His influence, feels the virtue come out of Him though she only touches the hem of His garment.

Thus we are warned to beware lest that should come upon us which was the ruin of the Jews, dulness or deadness of spiritual faculty; and we are exhorted to pray for and to cherish the hearing heart, the soul that sees and feels spiritual influences, and is sensitive to every high call. And if your soul is thus open and receptive, it is marvellous how full the world becomes to you of Divine voices. They come upon you unexpected, unsought, sending through your heart some illuminating flash of surprise, so that you wonder at your previous

dulness; they strike you with the sudden shock of some new knowledge or insight, and make you feel, as never before, the true nature of your daily conduct or your duty and your relation to other men; or they come as the unresting presence of some new thought, which, once roused, haunts and troubles you with questions which you cannot answer, or feelings which you cannot get rid of.

When the soul is roused in this way we see and feel the hatefulness of any sin that may have tempted or beset us; or we contrast our own life with that of those whose lot is so much harder than ours, and we are struck with shame at our selfishness, or waste, or our indifference to the privation, and sin, and suffering that are all around us in the world.

Or sometimes these Divine voices in our ears bring it home to us how much we are losing out of our life’s higher possibilities, if from sinful or selfish habit, from dulness of spirit or lack of sympathy, we cut ourselves off in thought and feeling and interest from the great

needs, the great sorrows, the great pulsations of the larger world.

But why, you may ask, do I dwell on all this? It is because these are the true Advent voices for us, coming as they do to rouse us out of narrow preoccupation, to open our eyes to the sinfulness of sin, to make us feel that the self-centred, isolated, self-seeking life is a life of a low type, and to stir us with social and religious interests and enthusiasms.

These calls that come to you, whether invited or not, and that stir your heart, speaking to you out of the multitudinous life of the time you live in, are like the watchmen on the walls of Jerusalem, which never hold their peace day nor night.

This ferment of higher life within us and around us, these voices of the Spirit in us, as it struggles to lift us out of the region of fleshly influences, is renewed in every generation and in every single life. If you hear no such voices, if the phenomena of life make no such impression upon you, if you are deaf to all these calls, and care for none of these

things, then it is clear that your soul is not yet awake in you; you are living with a dull or darkened heart. It is a sort of cave life, or subterranean life, you lead in such a case, a life of lower rank and lesser hopes.

Yet these voices from above, that come as the witness of the Divine Spirit with our spirit that we are the children of God, never fail us. They do not belong only to times far off. We are not to think of them merely as enshrined in the Bible and peculiar to it; but as living voices that are speaking to us to-day out of the depths of the Divine life, in which our life is sustained.

But we have always to bear this in mind, that the Divine voices speak to men with most stirring effect in every generation when they speak to them through the pressing needs of their own day. To the Jews the voice of God came in the inspired language of their deliverers and prophets—in their unceasing warnings, and their impassioned appeals, and their revelations of new truth. To the first generation of Christians these same voices

came in the shape of strong Advent hopes. Many things contributed to lift the Apostles and their followers nearer to God than men of ordinary times. They had seen the Lord; they had lived in His presence; they had gone through much tribulation; the tongue of fire had rested on them; the Spirit had taken full possession of them; but we cannot read the New Testament without feeling that the most stirring, the most regenerative influence in their society was the vividness and intensity of their Advent hope. Their expectation of the Lord’s return lifted them out of the temptations of the world and above the trials of it. It took hold of their active powers, and made them new men.

Their Advent expectation was not the vague, half mystic, half sentimental movement of the heart, which just touches the lives of so many Christians during our Advent seasons, while it does not really alter any of their earthly concerns.

Christ was very near to the Apostolic Christians. As the eastern sky brightened

every morning they felt that it might be the light of His coming; they thought of Him as only hidden from them by the neighbouring cloud. They looked for Him to return at midnight, or at the cock-crowing, or in the noonday, and none could say how soon. And so it came to pass that this expectation made those first believers, those humble followers of Christ, those Galilean fishermen, those obscure provincials, instinct with that great life which lifts men above the world, and constitutes them a new power in it.

Our lives are largely influenced by the thought of slow development; but we miss a great deal of the secret of all higher life if we forget this wonderful exaltation of the poor and ignorant and obscure by this gift of the Spirit and the inspiration of Divine hope. It was not by any method which we could have forecast that those men found out this charm which takes the heart captive and regenerates the life. In their presence we feel the force of the prophet’s words, “Not by might nor by power, but by My spirit, saith the Lord.”

But then there rises the question, How are these Divine influences to become powerful in us also?

On the one hand, we are conscious that as we live involved or entangled in the worldly life, or in any form of external life around us, the spiritual part of us slumbers or is overlaid. It loses its practical power over our thought, our feeling, and our conduct—our lamp goes out. Whilst on the other hand we are conscious that the special form of Advent expectation which inspired and possessed the first generation of Christians is gone from us past recovery. We see clearly enough as we read the New Testament what that first generation expected, and how the expectation transformed their lives; but we see also that they were mistaken in their hope, and that God’s providential plan proved to be far greater than their human conception of it. What, then, are our Advent hopes?

There are two things which we should keep clear in our minds concerning them. One, that they must be based upon our feeling of the

living influence of Christ and the working of the Holy Spirit; and the other is that the voices of the Spirit must come to us out of the needs of our own life and of the time we live in if they are to lead us to practical issues. When we look out upon the world and its life we feel that Advent hopes must take some new form if they are to preserve reality and to be fulfilled.

We see decaying faith in some quarters, and selfishness growing where faith decays; we see ignorance and want and all their crop of sin and misery deep-rooted in the life of every city; and the prospect which these things suggest, the problems that meet us as we think of them, might well fill us with misgiving. And they would indeed do so were it not for the fact that the revelation of such things brings with it another revelation also; it seizes on men’s souls and stirs them as with a Divine summons. And thus we have these hopeful signs for the future rising around us, even where things look darkest, that the great problems of humanity are felt in our day to

be above all things its social and religious problems. And seeing that the aspirations of the time—the feelings, the purposes, the aims, and hopes that lift men—grow out of the needs of the time and the problems of its life, we look forward—we have good ground for looking forward—to a generation of men who shall be distinguished by religious earnestness and by social enthusiasm.

But if this be so, what will your share be in this coming life? The Spirit of God, as we now understand it, comes to us with calls of this kind.

If you would hasten the Advent of Christ in your own soul and in the souls of others, you must discard selfishness, you must rise above self-indulgence, you must prepare to merge yourself in the social life, for the social good; seeing that the growth of this good is the only sure and certain sign of the coming of the Lord. So, then, the Angel of the Advent is thus calling us. The future before you is big with social and religious issues, and the Spirit of Christ is brooding over it, and you and such as you are to be His chosen instruments in helping forward these issues.

XVIII. SPIRITUAL POWER.

“And behold I send the promise of My Father upon you; but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem until ye be endued with power from on high.”—St. Luke xxiv. 49.

“Ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you.”—Acts i. 8.

To-day we are celebrating the last of the series of historical festivals which mark the springtime of our Christian year. And without this one the rest would leave us with a sense of incompleteness; for we should be without its gift of the abiding and indwelling Spirit, and the fulfilment of the last promise.

What, then, are we learning of its practical lessons, and gathering into our life? We have read the Pentecostal narrative, and others that illustrate it. We have sung Pentecostal hymns. We have joined in special prayer for the light of the Holy

Spirit to shine in our hearts, giving us a right judgment; and if we are led to ask, “To what purpose is all this?” the answer is to be seen in the texts I have just read to you, the burden of which is the gift of power from on high. Do we not recognise this as the end of the New Testament revelation? And do we not acknowledge that this revelation fails, so far as we are concerned, if it gives us no such power? It is, indeed, in considering this power of the Spirit that we touch to the quick the real influence of religion in the practical life of men; for experience shows that it is possible for a man to be endowed with almost every other gift and yet to lack this one—this indwelling gift of the Holy Ghost the Comforter.

Our life is filled with almost everything we could ask or require to enlighten us or to guide and direct, and yet it fails sometimes.

It may be failing in some of us here to-day, just from want of this Divine spark,

this influence of a Spirit from above taking up His abode in us, burning and shining in our hearts so as to purge our affections from sinful taint and purify our tastes, lifting up and enlarging our capacities, and rousing our energies—in one word, fusing all our life into a new form with its refining power.

And the question of all questions for each of us to consider is, “How am I to make my life the home and embodiment of this power from above?” If we turn to our Lord’s own example, or to the life of Paul or any other of His followers, or to any life we have known and felt to breathe around it this same power of the Spirit, some things become at once very obvious and clear to us.

That supreme example and those lives declare that whoever desires to have his soul purified and invigorated, to be charged with this Divine electric influence, must have something of separateness and independence in his life; he must feel himself

as not merely one of a crowd moved by the desires, aims, hopes, tastes, and ambitions which may chance to prevail around him, but as a separate soul in direct communion with the Spirit of God.

But if we are to realise this in our own life, it means that our times of daily prayer, whether in private or in public, are times at which we lay open our secret life to the Divine presence and influence; it means that we give some real thought and meditation to this presence of God in our life, and that we thus feed our souls continually on wholesome spiritual food. It is in this way that men’s lives become in a real sense the temples of the Holy Spirit, and the influences of sin fall away from them.

But the hindrances that are always acting to undermine or destroy any such spiritual power in us are manifold, and seldom far away from our life.

The world outside is always with us and acting in this way, distracting thought,

setting up its own standards, drawing us into its channels, and deadening the Spirit in us. This is one of the inevitable conditions of life as you will have to live it, and the man who is in earnest recognises it as a paramount reason why he should never drop out of his personal practice the habit of separate prayer and communion with God. Or again, we may, and often do, let these hindrances grow up within us through our own fault, and quite apart from any active influences of the outer world.

We contract a dulness of spirit, so that spiritual things have no interest and faith has no living power in the heart; and all this very often not because any person, or anything outside of us, can be said to have led us away and entangled us, but simply because we have taken no pains to keep our life within the range of spiritual influences; we have let prayer slip out of it; we have lived in no spiritual companionship; we have done nothing to

keep our soul alive in us. This is how men choose the lower life, and surrender their birthright out of pure inertia, so that they lose their spiritual capacity.

But worst of all hindrances to the indwelling of God’s Holy Spirit in any life is the harbouring of sensual appetite or craving, passion, or indulgence. No man can expect the Holy Spirit of God to make its home in such unclean company. It is on this account that there is nothing which so soon grows to depraved habit, to God-abandoned state, as sensual appetite; nothing which so rapidly dulls the higher affections in the heart and saps all the finer elements of life.

Therefore, when we are thinking of God’s gift of the Holy Ghost, and of spiritual power as the saving and uplifting influence in our soul, we do well to reflect a little on those hindrances which will be fatal to all such power in us, if they are allowed to take possession of our life and to prevail in it.

We do well to reflect in this way, because such reflection will make us very careful against harbouring or encouraging any of these fatal hindrances, and careful also against any other form of spiritual waste.

There is no surer guide to a right use of all liberty than this reflection upon the power of the indwelling spirit in us, and the things that add to it or destroy it.

Recognising that this Spirit, which, in the language of your confirmation prayer, is the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and ghostly strength, the Spirit of knowledge and true godliness and of holy fear; recognising that this Spirit, with its sevenfold gifts, is the saving element in all free life, you begin to look with fresh feelings on all your leisure hours, on all your hours of liberty, when you are released from task work or supervision, when your life is what you yourselves are making it, and you begin to consider whether these times, as you spend them, are indeed times of growth or, it may be,

of waste, times of genuine freedom or of slavery to some form of lower life. When you think of this Holy Spirit of God as a power in every good life, it becomes a very real question what and of what sort is the power that is holding sway over you in your leisure hours.

This is indeed a question which never sleeps, and to-day we ask, What is your Whitsuntide answer to it?

If there be any one to whom such a question is not yet a matter of living concern, it is the purpose of this Pentecostal festival to rouse him to new thoughts about it.

If there be any older person in this congregation who lets his years slip from him, not caring or forgetting the importance of it, and not striving to leaven all his hours of work or leisure with the thought of this indwelling Spirit from above; or if there should be any young boy who, in utter thoughtlessness, or from perversity or coarseness, or any induced depravity of

taste, allows any evil spirit to bear rule in his life, our prayer for such an one to-day is that the baptism of fire may descend upon his soul, and the power of a new spirit be felt in it.

And indeed there is not one of us but needs to come at such a time with this same prayer for his own life; for our own experience is too often very like the vision of Ezekiel. Under the influences that come between us and the Spirit of the living God, our soul is in continual danger of being like the prophet’s valley of dry bones, which lay lifeless, unmoved, till the breath of the Lord breathed over them, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.

So we pray that our life may prove responsive to these influences of the Pentecostal season. And the first response it gives is when it rises up in the consciousness of the Spirit of God as a living power in the heart, a power to drive out evil, and

to inspire and strengthen us for what is good.

And if, under the inspiring associations of this historic and holy day, you feel your soul touched with a new spirit or consciousness rising up in you from the grave of its own dead self to new desires and new thoughts, and a new sense of the living nearness of the Holy Ghost the Comforter, then you know—and you need no prophet to tell you—that the Pentecostal gift has not failed, and there is good hope that you will not spoil either your youth or your manhood with any form of ignoble life.