We would not disguise nor abate the fact that there is a loss to us by our absent Christ as we will see and know Him in Heaven. But in our earthly work to be done by us, and above all to be done in us, we will know Christ and the Father better, and can better utilise them by the ministry of the Holy Spirit than would have been possible under the personal, human presence of the Son. So to the loving and obedient ones who are filled with the Spirit, both the Father and the Son “Will come unto us and make their abode with us.” In the day of the fullness of the indwelling Spirit, “Ye shall know that I am in my Father and ye in me and I in you.” Amazing oneness and harmony, wrought by the almighty power of the other Christ!
There is not a note in the archangel’s song to which the Holy Spirit does not attune man into sympathy, not a pulsation in the heart of God to which the Holy Spirit-filled heart does not respond with loud amens and joyful hallelujahs. Even more than this, by the other Christ, the Holy Ghost, “we know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.” More than this, by the Holy Spirit we are “filled with all the fullness of God.” More than this, God is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think according to the power of the Holy Spirit which worketh in us.
The presence and power of the other Christ would more than compensate the disciples for the loss of the first Christ. His going away had filled their hearts with a strange sorrow. A loneliness and desolation like an orphan’s woe had swept over their hearts and stunned and bewildered them; but He comforted them by telling them that the Holy Ghost would be like the pains of a travailing mother, all forgotten in the untold joy that a man-child was born into the world.
XVI
PRAYER AND THE HOLY GHOST DISPENSATION
How God needs, how the world needs, how the Church needs the flow of the mighty river, more blessed than the Nile, deeper, broader and more overflowing than the Amazon’s mighty current! and yet what mere rills we are! We need, the age needs, the Church needs, memorials of God’s mighty power, which will silence the enemy and the avenger, dumbfound God’s foes, strengthen weak saints, and fill strong ones with triumphant raptures.
—Edward Bounds.
The dispensation of the Holy Ghost was ushered in by prayer. Read these words from Acts 1:13—“And when they were come in, they went up into an upper room where abode both Peter and James and John and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James, the son of Alpheus, and Simon Zelotes, and Judas, the brother of James. These all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication, with the women, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren.”
This was the attitude which the disciples assumed after Jesus had ascended to Heaven. That meeting for prayer ushered in the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, to which prophets had looked forward with entranced vision. And to prayer in a marked way has this dispensation, which holds in its keeping the fortune of the Gospel, been committed.
Apostolic men knew well the worth of prayer and were jealous of the most sacred offices which infringed on their time and strength and hindered them from “giving themselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the Word.” They put prayer first. The Word depends on prayer that it “may have free course and be glorified.” Praying apostles make preaching apostles. Prayer gives edge, entrance and weight to the Word. Sermons conceived by prayer and saturated with prayer are weighty sermons. Sermons may be ponderous with thought, sparkle with the gems of genius and of taste, pleasing and popular, but without they have their birth and life in prayer, for God’s uses, they are trifles, dull and dead.
The Lord of the harvest sends out labourers, full in number and perfect in kind, in answer to prayer. It needs no prophetic ken to declare that if the Church had used prayer force to its utmost the light of the gospel would have long since girdled the world.