Quiet Talks on Power

by S. D. Gordon

When the Holy Spirit takes possession there is love, aye, more, a flood of love. Have you ever seen a flood? I remember one in the Schuylkill during my boyhood days and how it impressed me. Those who live along the valley of that treacherous mountain stream, the Ohio, know something of the power of a flood. How the waters come rushing down, cutting out new channels, washing down rubbish, tearing valuable property from its moorings, ruling the valley autocratically while men stand back entirely helpless.

Would you care to have a flood-tide of love flush the channelways of your life like that? It would clean out something you have preferred keeping. It would with quiet, ruthless strength, tear some prized possessions from their moorings and send them adrift down stream and out. Its high waters would put out some of the fires on the lower levels. Better think a bit before opening the sluice-ways for that flood. But ah! it will sweeten and make fragrant. It will cut new channels, and broaden and deepen old ones. And what a harvest will follow in its wake. Floods are apt to do peculiar things. So does this one. It washes out the friction-grit from between the wheels. It does not dull the edge of the tongue, but washes the bitter out of the mouth, and the green out of the eye. It leaves one deaf and blind in some matters, but much keener-sighted and quicker-eared in others. Strange flood that! Would that we all knew more of it.

The Fullness of the Stature of a Man.

Now note some of the changes in the personality which attend the Spirit's unrestrained presence. Without doubt the face will change, though it might be difficult to describe the change. That Spirit within changes the look of the eye. His peace within the heart will affect the flow of blood in the physical heart, and so in turn the clearness of the complexion. The real secret of winsome beauty is here. That new dominant purpose will modulate the voice, and the whole expression of the face, and the touch of the hand, and the carriage of the body. And yet the one changed will be least conscious of it, if conscious at all. Neither Moses nor Stephen knew of their transfigured faces.

It is of peculiar interest to note the changes in the mental make-up. It may be said positively that the original group of mental faculties remain the same. There seems to be nothing to indicate that any change takes place in one's natural endowment. No faculty is added that nature had not put there, and certainly none removed.

But it is very clear that there is a marked development of these natural gifts, and that this change is brought about by the putting in of a new and tremendous motive power, which radically affects everything it touches.

Regarding this development four facts may be noted.

First fact:—Those faculties or talents which may hitherto have lain latent, unmatured, are aroused into use. Most men have large undeveloped resources, and endowments. Many of us are one-sided in our development. We are strangers to the real possible self within, unconscious of some of the powers with which we are endowed and intrusted. The Holy Spirit, when given a free hand, works out the fullness of the life that has been put in. The change will not be in the sort but in the size, and that not by an addition but by a growth of what is there.

Moses complains that he is slow of speech and of a slow tongue. God does not promise a new tongue but that he will be with him and train his tongue. Listen to him forty years after in the Moab Plains, as with brain fired, and tongue loosened and trained he gives that series of farewell talks fairly burning with eloquence. Students of oratory can find no nobler specimens than Deuteronomy furnishes. The unmatured powers lying dormant had been aroused to full growth by the indwelling Spirit of God.

Saintly Dr. A. J. Gordon, whose face was as surely transfigured as was Moses' or Stephen's used to say that in his earlier years he had no executive ability. Men would say of him, "Well, Gordon can preach but—" intimating that he could not do much else; not much of the practical getting of things done in his makeup. When he was offered the chairmanship of the missionary committee of the Baptist Church, he promptly declined as being utterly unfit for such a task. Finally with reluctance he accepted, and for years he guided and molded with rare sagacity the entire scheme of missionary operation of the great Baptist Church of the North. He was accustomed with rare frankness and modesty to speak of the change in himself as an illustration of how the Spirit develops talents which otherwise had lain unsuspected and unused.