Therefore, when we are thinking of God’s gift of the Holy Ghost, and of spiritual power as the saving and uplifting influence in our soul, we do well to reflect a little on those hindrances which will be fatal to all such power in us, if they are allowed to take possession of our life and to prevail in it.
We do well to reflect in this way, because such reflection will make us very careful against harbouring or encouraging any of these fatal hindrances, and careful also against any other form of spiritual waste.
There is no surer guide to a right use of all liberty than this reflection upon the power of the indwelling spirit in us, and the things that add to it or destroy it.
Recognising that this Spirit, which, in the language of your confirmation prayer, is the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and ghostly strength, the Spirit of knowledge and true godliness and of holy fear; recognising that this Spirit, with its sevenfold gifts, is the saving element in all free life, you begin to look with fresh feelings on all your leisure hours, on all your hours of liberty, when you are released from task work or supervision, when your life is what you yourselves are making it, and you begin to consider whether these times, as you spend them, are indeed times of growth or, it may be,
of waste, times of genuine freedom or of slavery to some form of lower life. When you think of this Holy Spirit of God as a power in every good life, it becomes a very real question what and of what sort is the power that is holding sway over you in your leisure hours.
This is indeed a question which never sleeps, and to-day we ask, What is your Whitsuntide answer to it?
If there be any one to whom such a question is not yet a matter of living concern, it is the purpose of this Pentecostal festival to rouse him to new thoughts about it.
If there be any older person in this congregation who lets his years slip from him, not caring or forgetting the importance of it, and not striving to leaven all his hours of work or leisure with the thought of this indwelling Spirit from above; or if there should be any young boy who, in utter thoughtlessness, or from perversity or coarseness, or any induced depravity of
taste, allows any evil spirit to bear rule in his life, our prayer for such an one to-day is that the baptism of fire may descend upon his soul, and the power of a new spirit be felt in it.
And indeed there is not one of us but needs to come at such a time with this same prayer for his own life; for our own experience is too often very like the vision of Ezekiel. Under the influences that come between us and the Spirit of the living God, our soul is in continual danger of being like the prophet’s valley of dry bones, which lay lifeless, unmoved, till the breath of the Lord breathed over them, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.