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.