THE HOLY SPIRIT
If the Victorious Life is “the life that is Christ,” lived in the power of the risen Christ dwelling in the heart, what is the work of the Holy Spirit in such a life? Are Christians who pray for, or seek, the “fullness of the Spirit,” or the “baptism of the Spirit” or the “receiving of the Spirit,” asking for something different from the life of victory in Christ?
The answer to such questions reveals the beautiful unity of God’s plan of salvation, in which each Person of the Godhead has His perfect work but in which our Lord Jesus Christ has ever the pre-eminence till the work of salvation is completed. We may approach the truth from teaching concerning the Holy Spirit, but it is Christ who will be exalted. Or we may experience resurrection life through learning of the truth concerning the indwelling Christ, but it is the Holy Spirit who makes possible that experience in the life.
The Holy Spirit is God. If we start with this fact, and stay with it, we shall be saved from much confusion as to the Holy Spirit’s office. If he is God, we cannot limit Him, and we cannot confine Him to this or that manifestation of His power.
The Holy Spirit is not merely a manifestation of God; He is God. And one Person of the trinity is never present without the others. While the Holy Spirit has a distinct work in the believer, this work is never disassociated from the other Persons in the Godhead. The Father and the Son and the Spirit all dwell with us (John 14:17, 23; 1 Cor. 6:19; 2 Cor. 13:5).
The Holy Spirit is a Person. We are not to seek a quantitative appropriation of a certain amount of the Spirit of God, perhaps comparing the amount we have with that which we think others have, but rather to receive God the Holy Spirit, who is a Person. But this truth of His personality is to be kept in balance by the companion truth that He is God, and in conceiving Him as a person we must not put the limitations of human personality upon God, as though He could only indwell one person at a time, or as though one person or any number of persons could exhaustively contain Him.
What is the work of God the Holy Spirit in this age? We know that we are born again by the power of the Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is in every child of God (John 1:12, 13; John 3:5, 6; Rom. 8:9, last clause; 1 Cor. 6-19).
If the Holy Spirit is in every child of God, what result does this have in the life? What is His work in the believer? Is it the same for each believer? In what sense did the Holy Spirit come at Pentecost, and in what sense is he here in a different way from His manifestation before Pentecost?
It is in answering such questions that we are in danger of building up a doctrine from experience rather than from the Word.
A Bible teacher who has been mightily used in soul-winning and in stimulating other Christians to this work, dates his great success from the time when he learned that the Holy Spirit was the secret of power in service; he lacked the power, saw the need, asked for the fulness of the Holy Spirit, by faith believed that God had granted his desire, went out boldly with no reference to feeling and counted upon the fact of the Holy Spirit’s work as he gave the message to men. The results were marvelous, and continued to be as day by day he counted upon this enduement of the Spirit. Along with this experience came the inevitable longing to share it with others, for he knew that any Christian might do as he had done; the blessed result was that many Christians through him were led into this new life of service. It was natural that this mighty man of God should take his true and Scriptural experience and build around it his doctrine of the Holy Spirit and His work for believers, interpreting the Scriptures by the experience. So he developed an inclusive doctrinal teaching that the baptism of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and to-day in the life of the individual believer, is for power in service, the evidence of the work being the results in witnessing.