Now, St. Paul tells us, that it is the natural man to whom these things are foolishness; and the spiritual by whom they are discerned to be wisdom. In proportion, then, as you receive them not, or undervalue them, you are natural in contradistinction to spiritual. And what is it to be thus natural? It is to regard the things of religion as one doth other things, from a mere human point of view; and with the faculties and feelings that belong to our human nature, independently of the operation on it of the enlightening and persuading and strengthening influences of the Holy Spirit. It is to attempt to acquaint ourselves with them by natural observation and scrutiny; to expect to understand them through natural instruction received into natural ears; to try to picture them by the exercise of natural imagination. This is to be natural; and this is what we too frequently are. We get our religious notions as we do our acquaintance with natural science, or with secular history: from observation, or reading, or hearing. We strive to be religious (simply mechanically) by obeying certain laws, and following certain prescribed courses, just as we become peaceful subjects or approved servants; aiming to do what is bidden, to avoid what is prohibited: not from appreciating the sanction or restriction; not from loving what is ordered; but simply from following it as appointed and obligatory obedience. And we get our conception of heaven, of eternal bliss, of God Himself (just as we form ideas about countries afar off, or men who lived before us), by putting together for ourselves, and making to assume a shape of fancy, what we have read or heard about them. It is the mere man—the brain, the mind, the human soul, the natural affections, the unassisted innate energy—which conceives and aims at the observance of the things of the Spirit of God. Hence the failure. The natural powers, which alone we use, cannot grasp spiritual things. “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the mind of man to conceive the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him:” and yet it is the eye, the ear, or the mind, which alone we use to discern them. We have indeed a theory which contradicts our practice. We know of an external power—the Holy Spirit, which alone can take of the things of God and show them unto us, and influence us to love, and enable us to follow them. We know how that power is to be appropriated, and sustained, and made effectual. We talk of its imparted gift, and we use certain words of prayer for its continuance and efficacious working, but still we go on thinking our own thoughts and doing our own deeds, as though there were no such power; and we wonder and grieve that we are not religious; that we do not heartily approve and follow what God has enjoined and promised.
Believe me, my brethren, or, rather, believe the apostle, it will never be otherwise till you are thoroughly convinced of the utter inability of the natural man to discern the things of the Spirit of God; till your religion consists of earnest entreaties for Divine instruction and impulse, of ready, eager use of all appointed means of securing and vivifying within you the operation of Divine grace, of entire submission to the Spirit’s rule, of watchfulness for His motions, of zealous co-operation with Him. You may spend your life in trying to learn and practise religion, and yet be irreligious after all; unless you renounce all the independent thoughts and efforts of the natural man; unless you give yourselves, actively and passively, in all things, to the special illumination and direction of the Holy Spirit of God. Trust not to the eye, to the ear, or to the mind: they cannot inform or influence you. Trust not, I say, to the eye. People talk of finding out God from the contemplation of His works; of looking from nature up to nature’s God; of examining the evidences of religion, and becoming religious. But who ever found out the God of the Bible from the works of nature; by the traces of power, and wisdom, and skill, and adaptation, which it is true are marked upon every part of creation; by theorising about a first cause; by investigating Scriptural coincidences, and establishing the authenticity of sacred history? One of the ablest naturalists that ever lived ascribed the various forms and functions of animals to chance, to the operations of winds and streams, to shaping in natural moulds. One of the profoundest astronomers saw no necessity for a first cause; and the man who penned perhaps the sublimest description of our blessed Lord’s character and career, and the most cogent argument for accepting Him as the Messiah, concluded all by saying: “And yet I cannot believe in Him.”
No! brethren; nature is the handmaid of religion. It will corroborate what is already revealed; but it is no ladder to heaven; it is no telescope, to bring near what is afar off. Look at yourselves, and at all around you, by natural light only. You perceive Providence, but not love; sin, but not its remedy; mortality, but not immortality. Read history, ponder probabilities, accredit testimony. Your mind will be instructed; your heart, perhaps, touched; but your spirit will not be quickened.
It is for this reason that the advocates of religion protest so stoutly against harmless, intellectual recreation as a compromise between godliness and ungodliness; and maintain, on Scripture grounds, that however sobered, however civilised, however naturally elevated, the man is not one inch nearer to heaven and spiritual discernment who spends his Sunday in a crystal palace, or a museum of nature, than he who riots in a den of infamy. “Eye hath not seen.” The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God.
Neither, again, hath ear heard them. Others, that is, cannot describe them to us. It was this which made Paul’s preaching foolishness to the Corinthians. Judges of beauty, lovers of philosophy, fertile imaginers they were, but they had no spiritual ear; they were not enabled by the Holy Spirit; and so the preaching of Christianity sounded to them as some unknown tongue would to us; as unintelligible, unmeaning jargon. Ask an unlearned man to give you an account of some abstruse lecture he has heard; and he will be able to tell you as much as the natural man can tell you of the religious instruction he has received. He will have caught certain names and definitions; he will have remembered, that something was to be thought about this, and something to be done about that; and, if he is enthusiastic, he will, perhaps, attempt the thinking and the doing. But he will not have grasped the subject; he will have no soul to receive it; for the necessary qualification is wanting—learning, and love of learning. And so, when the Bible, or the preacher, sets forth the things of the Spirit, the natural reader, or hearer, receives them not, and cannot know them. When Christ was on earth, and spoke in simplest words, the men who heard Him, even His own disciples, knew not what He said; and if He were now to come down from heaven and preach to us, all His instruction, all his loving remonstrances, all His precepts and promises, all his glowing pictures of bliss, all His threats of wrath, would be heard by the mere natural man (by those who are not spiritually fitted for spiritual instruction) without influence, and all but without comprehension.
It is most important, brethren, to be convinced of this. We are all of us too apt to make our religion consist of hearing sermons; to suppose, that if we listen patiently, and grasp the intellectual meaning, and feel a little emotion about what is pathetic and alarming, and have a desire to do something that the preacher recommended, or to give up something that he denounced, then that we are receiving the things of the Spirit. Whereas preaching cannot, under any circumstances, do the least spiritual good, or at all enlarge spiritual comprehension, unless the hearers are spiritually prepared. We discourse on heaven or hell: we put together all that the Bible says or hints about it; we form a kind of natural picture of a spiritual thing, and we bid you look at it and consider it. Wherefore? If you are spiritual, to quicken your spirit; if you are natural, to speak to you a kind of parable, the meaning whereof you may be prompted to ask of Him who alone can reveal it, the Holy Spirit of God. And so of all preaching; it is an important means to an end. It talks to men of God, of redemption, of probation, of the Holy Spirit, of heaven and hell: not with any hope of thereby revealing to them these things; but only to convince their eyes, their ears, their hearts, that there is a kind of knowledge which ought to be had, but which they cannot take in; and so to stir them up to the inquiring how it is to be had, and to enlist them in the right effort to obtain it. Through the ear we arrest the natural man, as the voice of thunder did Saul on his road to Damascus; we do not sanctify him; we do not show him the things of God; we only convince him that there is something which he has not rightly received, or taken into account, and we bid him go elsewhere, to the Spirit, for instruction and salvation. The only possible good that a sermon can do, is, by working on the feelings, or appealing to the understanding, or cross-questioning the conscience, to stir men up to say: “I will know more of this matter.” And the work of grace is only then beginning, when the hearer of the sermon becomes a learner of the Spirit. Ear hath not heard.
“Neither hath entered into the mind of man to conceive” spiritual things. I need not enlarge on this. We know, indeed, that the imagination has great powers; that it forms a very tangible idea of what neither eye nor ear has had opportunity to discern; that sometimes it surpasses eye and ear, and succeeds in grasping what they have but touched. Hence such sayings as, “It is easier to imagine than describe;” and such practices as shutting the eyes, when we want to realise an idea. But still, in spiritual things, if actual observation and study, if faithful descriptions by qualified persons, a prophet, an apostle, the Bible, the Spirit, utterly fail to inform the natural man, surely he cannot expect illumination from the fancies of his unassisted imagination. Religious ideas come into the mind through the eye and the ear; if, then, these have all along been closed, it must, of course, be empty.
And now, dear brethren, does not all this show you why you are so little religious? Have you not, all along, been dealing with the things of the Spirit too much as though they were things which you could perceive by observation, by investigating their evidence, by intellectually studying them? Have not you tried to learn religion as you would a human language, or a physical science? And have not your highest religious exercises, your searchings into the deep things of God, been the hearing of sermons; or the indulging of your reason, or your imagination? What do you know of religion, which you did not in some of these ways acquire? How much has the Spirit of God taught you? that Spirit who alone knows the things of God, and who alone can reveal them; that Spirit which comes not first into the eye, or the ear, or the mind of man, but into his spirit. How often do you pray for the Holy Spirit, and strive to prepare yourselves for Him? What dependence do you place on Him for guidance? What means do you use to bring Him near; and how much have you Him in mind while using them? What homage do you render Him? How do you serve Him? When do you commune with Him? When you regard nature, is it by the light of the Spirit? When you read the Bible, is it to learn what the Spirit will say to you, the Spirit invoked to speak? When you hear a sermon, do you pray the Spirit, “Lord, declare unto me, unto my spirit, this parable?” When you meditate, is your supplication, “Open thou mine eyes;” “Except Thy presence go with me, carry me not up hence?” Is your life—thoughts, words, and deeds—directed by the consideration, “If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God”? If not, this is why you are not really religious; and the remedy is in seeking to be and do what I have now described.
Only use your spirit as you have hitherto used your eye, your ear, or your mind. Only put yourselves under the tutorship of the Spirit of God. Only seek to meet Him in appointed places; at public worship, at holy communion, over the Bible, on your knees. Only seek instruction from Him, and refer to Him for interpretations and explanations; and only ask His help to be spiritually used; and order your life, as far as you can, in accordance with your prayers. And soon you will be, not smatterers, but apt scholars of Divine learning; soon you will walk as seeing Him who is invisible; soon will you know the reality of spiritual things; and, knowing them, love them and seek for them. They will cease to be foolishness to you. You will choose them in every circumstance, as wisdom; you will feel religion to be the one thing needful; you will make it the business and the pleasure of your lives. The life of a Joseph, an Abraham, a Moses, a Job, a David, a Stephen, a Paul, will be found to be not simply possible, but desirable; the only life worthy of the name. Obedience will be easy; trust will expel care; love will cast out fear; selfishness will pass away; temptations will lose their power. No matter will it be to you, where or what you are. Prosperity, adversity, honour, shame, power, weakness, life, and death, will be indifferent to you. If you live, you will live to the Lord; if you die, you will die to the Lord: living and dying, in endurance and desire, thought and deed, you will be the Lord’s.
Brethren, this is what the Spirit of God would make you. That Spirit is pledged to all of you who ask for Him; He waits to reveal to you the things of God.