This goodness, then, affords a presumption that he will make us good. That is a profound word of the Psalmist’s “Good and upright is the Lord; therefore will he teach sinners in the way.” The more clearly we see the perfect purity and goodness of God, the more conscious shall we certainly be of our own unlikeness to him. But in that discernment of his lustrous perfectness, and penitent recognition of our own sinfulness, there lies hope, not despair. We may be sure that he loves us too well to keep such sovereign completeness to himself and leave his poor children stumbling here in the mud and mire. What he is, he assuredly will desire to make us, so far as it may be. He is the “giving God” and the poorest and most impure of men may be sure that God does desire to give him purity of heart and life, and may lift up the hopeful and bold prayer, “Thy spirit is good, lead me into the land of uprightness.”
Surely, too, it needs but little experience of life to feel that, if we are ever to be made good, a divine power is needed to do it. A very small amount of honest attempt to mend our own characters might teach each of us that the viper has got far too tight a hold on us for us to shake it into the fire, and that its poison is in our blood. If you have ever tried to cure a bad habit, you know how hard it is; and some of us could tell how the sins that we loathe most hold us in a grip none the looser because of our disgust at them and ourselves, and, like a reefer’s knot, their cords are tied the tighter by the pressure of our resistance against them. It is as impossible for a man to make himself good, in the deepest sense of the word, as it is for him to lift himself by his own hand laid on his own collar. There must be some power outside him to raise. God only can strengthen us to cast out sin. God only can enlighten our eyes to see lurking evil; he only can give energy to our wills to root it up, though we drag bleeding fragments of our hearts with it; he only can give the positive goodness which is more than mere freedom from evil, and fill the empty chamber with a guest strong enough to keep out the returning demon and all his crew.
So his Holy Spirit is given to us, if we will, to make us holy. We may, if we will, have that divine guest in our inmost spirit, molding us anew, purging the fountains of our will, enlightening our blindness, fixing our love on all things pure and high, burning up all our evil, with which in our own strength we have vainly fought, and kindling in us a flame of self-forgetting love, in which, as in the central fire of the earth, all the elements of the new nature to be formed within us are molten together, ready to crystallize into beauty like precious gems, or to consolidate into strength like the granite mountains. Any man may, if he will, be “full of the Holy Ghost”—as a vessel is filled with precious elixir poured into it. Any man may, if he will, have his whole nature influenced and inhabited by that mighty spirit of whom we may all be the temples, and which dwells in us not as the image of the god abides in the shrine, but as our spirits animate our bodies, being diffused through all our nature, the eye of our seeing, the heart of our love, the will of our resolve, and in all of us the source of our goodness, and the life of our better life. “If any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of his.” Let us remember that this penetration of all our nature with a divine spirit dwelling within us is the promise of Christianity to every man. No mere love of God the Father, even if it were brought to us in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ would be enough without the communion of the Holy Ghost. Calvary and Olivet are not sufficient for our victory over sin without the upper room and the rushing mighty wind. And let us not forget that the spirit thus given to all Christians is the spirit of illumination indeed, the spirit of power, rich in his seven-fold energies, and the source of every endowment of mind and hand and tongue and heart that we possess, but that his highest and most universal office is to make us good, and his best name the Holy Spirit. Let us court earnestly the best gifts, but seek more earnestly still that gift which needs no special capacity to receive nor any special circumstances to exercise, but may be claimed by the poorest, and will ennoble the loftiest. Let others seek for gifts; do you pray for graces. Let who will be great, do you try to submit to the working of the good Spirit who makes you good.
Our text carries the analysis a step farther, and shows us how Barnabas came to be full of the Holy Ghost. It gives us the condition of goodness. He was good because he was full of the spirit, and he was full of the spirit because he was full of faith. That is the final explanation of his character.
The spirit of God dwells in a man through his faith. One text speaks of “the Holy Ghost which they that believe on him should receive,” and everywhere similar language is held as to the connection between faith and the dwelling of the spirit of goodness in our hearts. By the act of trust in Christ, the Lord of the Spirit, we open our natures for the entrance of the sanctifier, who ever waits to enter in. A man has to shut his door and pull down his blinds to keep the light out. If we open ever so minute a crevice, a beam will come in, and the wider we open, the broader the stream that pours in. So in our simple faith, we open the door and there pour into our hearts the quickening energies of that good spirit. The amount of our faith measures the amount of our possession of the Spirit who makes us good.
Thus faith becomes the condition of goodness, because it is the condition of the Spirit of God dwelling in us. It brings us into contact with the electric battery, completes the circuit, and as soon as the circuit is completed the spark comes. It is also the condition of goodness, because it implies self-oblivion and self-distrust, and is the opposite of that self-regard which, as we have seen, is the root of all evil. The germ of all holiness is in faith, not only because it brings us under the operation of the divine power which makes holy, but because it is itself the great antagonist of selfishness.
So Christian morality is the very opposite of the practical heathenism which lies at the bottom of so much of the teaching of to-day. Trust thyself, say many voices—it is the beginning of wisdom, strength, freedom. Distrust thyself and trust Christ, says the Gospel—thereby alone wilt thou be made pure and blessed. The Babel builders tried to get up to the heavens by their own building. The Titans tried to storm it by placing mountain on mountain, but “no man hath ascended up to heaven.” Better for us to rise thither by that ladder which now binds together heaven and earth, even Jesus Christ, our brother and our Lord, by whom all bright-winged angels of help and cleansing will come to minister to us purity and joy, and by whom we at last, perfected in goodness, shall pass into that presence, of which the radiant purity would blast all that had one taint of uncleanness.
Learn the conditions, then, on which you can be good. No goodness without God’s Spirit—no Spirit without faith. You can not make yourself better, can not hammer or pare your own nature into purity and loveliness. But you can put your confidence in Jesus Christ, who will take your nature into his hands and mold it into a fairest likeness to himself. You can trust him, who will breathe into you his spirit to make you holy. If my epitaph is ever to be, “He was a good man,” it must first be said, “He was full of the Holy Ghost and of faith.” Let us give up the weary, hopeless work of trying to make ourselves good, and yield ourselves to him that he may make us like himself, and that we may have a mightier power ever working in our natures till they are full of beauty and “holy as God is holy.”