2. Through Christ as an intercessor.—“But this man,” etc. (Heb. x. 12). A disciple in temptation cries for deliverance from evil, and Christ prays, “Holy Father, keep through Thine own name those whom Thou hast given Me” (John xvii. 11). A dying saint asks for “an entrance into the heavenly kingdom,” and Christ pleads, “Father, I will that they also, whom Thou hast given Me, be with Me where I am” (John xvii. 24). None need deem himself too unworthy to call on God who comes to Him through Christ’s sacrifice and intercession.
III. The assistance afforded by the Holy Spirit.—As we have access unto the Father through Christ pleading for us, so we have access unto the Father by the Spirit pleading in us.
1. The Spirit kindles holy desire.—It is the work of the Spirit to draw off the hearts of men from the world and raise them to God in prayer. As in playing on a musical instrument no string sounds untouched, so without this influence of the Spirit man would never look heavenward, or his heart fill with desire toward God.
2. Prompts to immediate application.—Blessings are often desired but feebly. The Spirit rebukes this hesitancy, and urges on to immediate application.
3. Aids in that application.—“Without the Spirit we know not what we should pray for” (Rom. viii. 26). Our thoughts wander, our affections chill, the fervour of our importunity flags, unless the Spirit “helpeth our infirmities.”
Reflections.—1. Those who do not enjoy this privilege are highly culpable. 2. Those who do enjoy this privilege are indeed happy.—The Lay Preacher.
Access to God, revealing the Trinity in Unity.
I. The end of human salvation is access to the Father.—That is the first truth of our religion—that the source of all is meant to be the end of all, that as we all come forth from a Divine Creator, so it is into Divinity that we are to return and to find our final rest and satisfaction, not in ourselves, not in one another, but in the omnipotence, the omniscience, the perfectness, and the love of God. Now we are very apt to take it for granted that, however we may differ in our definitions and our belief of the deity of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, we are all at once, there can be and there is no hesitation, about the deity of the Father. God is Divine. God is God. And no doubt we do all assent in words to such a belief; but when we think what we mean by that word “God”; when we remember what we mean by “Father,” namely, the first source and the final satisfaction of a dependent nature; and then when we look around and see such multitudes of people living as if there were no higher source for their being than accident and no higher satisfaction for their being than selfishness, do we not feel that there is need of a continual and most earnest preaching by Word and act, from every pulpit of influence to which we can mount, of the Divinity of the Father. The Divinity of the Father needs assertion first of all. Let men once feel it, and then nature and their own hearts will come in with their sweet and solemn confirmations of it. But nature and the human heart do not teach it of themselves. The truest teaching of it must come from souls that are always going in and out before the Divine Fatherhood themselves. By the sight of such souls, others must come to seek the satisfaction that comes only from a Divine end of life—must come to crave access to the Father. So we believe, and so we tempt other men to believe, in God the Father.
II. And now pass to the Divinity of the method.—“Through Jesus Christ.” Man is separated from God. That fact, testified to by broken associations, by alienated affections, by conflicting wills, stands written in the whole history of our race. And equally clear is it to him who reads the Gospels, and enters into sympathy with their wonderful Person, that in Him, in Jesus of Nazareth, appeared the Mediator by whom was to be the Atonement. His was the life and nature which, standing between the Godhood and the manhood, was to bridge the gulf and make the firm, bright road over which blessing and prayer might pass and repass with confident, golden feet for ever. And then the question is—and when we ask it thus it becomes so much more than a dry problem of theology; it is a question for live, anxious men to ask with faces full of eagerness—Out of which nature came that Mediator? Out of which side of the chasm sprang the bridge leaping forth toward the other? Evidently on both sides that bridge is bedded deep and clings with a tenacity which shows how it belongs there. He is both human and Divine. But from which side did the bridge spring? It is the most precious part of our belief that it was with God that the activity began. It is the very soul of the Gospel, as I read it, that the Father’s heart, sitting above us in His holiness, yearned for us as we lay down here in our sin. And when there was no man to make an intercession, He sent His Son to tell us of His love, to live with us, to die for us, to lay His life like a strong bridge out from the Divine side of existence, over which we might walk fearfully but safely, but into the Divinity where we belonged. Through Him we have access to the Father. As the end was Divine, so the method is Divine. As it is to God that we come, so it is God who brings us there. I can think nothing else without dishonouring the tireless, quenchless love of God.
III. The power of the act of man’s salvation is the Holy Spirit.—“Through Christ Jesus we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father.” What do we mean by the Holy Spirit being the power of salvation? I think we are often deluded and misled by carrying out too far some of the figurative forms in which the Bible and the religious experience of men express the saving of the soul. For instance, salvation is described as the lifting of the soul out of a pit and putting it upon a pinnacle, or on a safe high platform of grace. The figure is strong and clear. Nothing can overstate the utter dependence of the soul on God for its deliverance; but if we let the figure leave in our minds an impression of the human soul as a dead, passive thing, to be lifted from one place to the other like a torpid log that makes no effort of its own either for co-operation or resistance, then the figure has misled us. The soul is a live thing. Everything that is done with it must be done and through its own essential life, If a soul is saved, it must be by the salvation, the sanctification, of its essential life; if a soul is lost, it must be by perdition of its life, by the degradation of its affections and desires and hopes. Let there be nothing merely mechanical in the conception of the way God treats these souls of ours. He works upon them in the vitality of thought, passion, and will that He put into them. And so, when a soul comes to the Father through the Saviour, its whole essential vitality moves in the act. When this experience is reached, then see what Godhood the soul has come to recognise in the world. First, there is the creative Deity from which it sprang, and to which it is struggling to return—“the Divine End, God the Father.” Then there is the incarnate Deity, which makes that return possible by the exhibition of God’s love—the Divine Power of salvation, God the Holy Spirit. To the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit. This appears to be the truth of the Deity as it relates to us. I say again, “as it relates to us.” What it may be in itself; how Father, Son, and Spirit meet in the perfect Godhood; what infinite truth more there may, there must, be in that Godhood, no man can dare to guess. But, to us, God is the end, the method, and the power of salvation; so He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is in the perfect harmony of these sacred personalities that the precious unity of the Deity consists. I look at the theologies, and so often it seems as if the harmony of the Father, Son, and Spirit has been lost, both by those that own and those that disown the Trinity. One theology makes the Father hard and cruel, longing as it were for man’s punishment, extorting from the Son the last drops of life-blood which man’s sin had incurred as penalty. Another theology makes the Son merely one of the multitude of sinning men, with somewhat bolder aspirations laying hold on a forgiveness which God might give but which no mortal might assume. Still another theology can find no God in the human heart at all; merely a fermentation of human nature is this desire after goodness, this reaching out towards Divinity. The end is not worthy of the method. I do not want to come to such a Father as some of the theologians have painted. Or the method is not worthy of the end. No man could come to the perfect God through such a Jesus as some men have described. Or the power is too weak for both; and all that Christ has done lies useless, and all the Father’s welcome waits in vain for the soul that has in it no Holy Ghost. But let each be real and each be worthy of the others, and salvation is complete. But each cannot be worthy of the others unless each is perfect. But each cannot be perfect unless each is Divine; that is, our faith is in the Trinity—three Persons and one God.—Philips Brooks.