But what is to secure this? Our hope hangs on one thing—the promise of the Spirit. Every past conquest has been the effect of union and communion with the Comforter; and our own ability for the enterprises of the future must be derived from the same source. The chapter begins with a cheering account of the approach of a brighter day following a season of gloom and depression, which is to be terminated finally and only by the pouring out of the Spirit from on high. So always. Large as are our resources, we were never more dependent on help from heaven than now. Without special Divine aid we can do nothing.
I. The Spirit of God must be with us, or we shall not use the right means for converting the world. Our work is a vast one, but we are not left in uncertainty as to the way in which it is to be accomplished. The Gospel made for man. Sending the knowledge of Christ abroad through the nations is the appointed method of saving men. 1. More faith is needed in God’s instrumentality. The cause may seem unequal to the effect, but a Divine unseen agency accompanies it, and difficulties must pass away. 2. No part of our business to make experiments for the relief of human woe or guilt; or dig channels for our compassion other than those in which the Saviour’s flowed. Calvary our sole expedient, &c. 3. We need to keep to the means by which all this is accomplished without deviation or faltering. A downward tendency in the best of men, even when engaged in the holiest of work, which nothing but a constantly exerted influence from God can effectually counteract. Charters, subscriptions, pledges will not do it. 4. Must not lay our strength out on extraneous matter. Our true service only performed while relying on Divine aid.
II. Unless the Holy Spirit be with us, we shall never prosecute our work with proper energy. An enterprise like ours cannot be expected to flourish unless it takes fast hold on the hearts and sympathies of its friends. It is a cause of too much import to be carried on lukewarmly. One of the main purposes of the Church, her own self-extension. How shall we get up to this state of feeling, this standard of action? Never! until we have more of the Spirit of God.
Again, half our strength has to be expended in trying to keep our enterprise up to the lines already reached. We seem at times to be merely stationary, and this side by side often with great secular prosperity. Why this falling off? And that as contrasting with the success of primitive believers? They seem to have carried with them a never-failing assurance, that where they planted and watered, God would give the increase. The Church can never come up to this standard until the Spirit is more copiously poured upon us from on high. We are shut up to this single resource.
III. That the Spirit must be given us, or we shall never see our efforts crowned with success. Something in a simple dependence on Divine help which imparts to our labours a character so earnest and decided as betokens a favourable result. We work best ourselves when we feel that God is working in us and by us. Nothing so nerves the arm and strengthens the heart as confidence in Him. So Luther, Whitfield, Paul wrought. Nothing else will keep zeal alive in the Church.
Hence arises 1. Our encouragement. Faith in the efficacy of the Gospel preached under the influence of the Holy Ghost is to be the mainspring of all our efforts. The Spirit is to take of the things of Christ and show them to men. We can only be straitened on that side. 2. Our duty. All converging to a single point—prayer.—David Magie, D.D.: National Preacher, vol. xxi. p. 221.
Let it be supposed that the invader and the conqueror have been in our land. Cultivation has disappeared, impoverishment and neglect reign over its once fertile and well-cared-for fields. The city, formerly the centre of life and activity, depopulated and desolated. Its factories dilapidated, its exchange a ruin, its streets overgrown with grass. Such was the ruin the prophet saw about to befall his country. How long would it continue? Until God should pour His Spirit upon the people, so as to turn them from their iniquities. When the moral scene changed, the material scene would also. Prosperity would return. The city would again be populated; the country resume its beauty and fertility; the wilderness would be a fruitful field, and the fruitful field be counted for a forest.
It is a picture of the world’s moral desolation without the Gospel; of the time when the power of the Gospel shall be displayed; and of the happy state of the world in that day of its power. These topics are presented in the text; the necessity, the certainty, and the condition of the world’s salvation.
I. Its necessity. It is a fallen world. Scepticism at present criticises the Christian representation of the moral state of human nature as too low, while its standard is too high. Whatever may be said of the latter part of the indictment, the former part must be denied. The alienation of the human heart from God; its aversion to His holiness; the depth of its pollution, as evinced in the crimes and vices which disfigure the face of society, and are too patent to be refined away. With all the restraining influences around us, we have enough at our hand to justify the representation that man is morally fallen and desolated. Add to this the idolatry, with its attendant cruelty and impurity, prevalent over so large a population of the human family. And to this the extreme and manifold wickedness of men in history. The Christian representation of the state of human nature is fully justified. There is universal sin. There is need of mercy, change, conversion. Not merely the adoption, by large masses of men, for various reasons, of new religious names and forms. It is a personal conversion. Men need the change one by one.
II. Its certainty. We should despair of the world’s conversion if our vision were limited to its existing state. We should pronounce it as hopeless as the attempt to tear up the everlasting mountains from their roots, or to drive the ocean from its bed. But we are not thus limited. We are not at liberty thus to limit our vision. In the Word of God we find it declared that the redeeming dominion of Christ shall be co-extensive with the globe. Plain statements sometimes, utterly inexplicable except in this way. Including these in our vision, we have nothing to do with the difficulties, but only with the great duty of their destruction.