Quiet Talks on Power

by S. D. Gordon

[3] Gal., 5:22.

Do you remember Paul's list of the traits of character that mark a christian life—love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, meekness, faithfulness, self-control?[3] Suppose for a moment you think through a list of the opposites of those nine characteristics—bitterness, envy, hate, low-spiritedness, sulkiness, chafing, fretting, worrying, short-suffering, quick-temper, hot-temper, high-spiritedness, unsteadiness, unreliability, lack of control of yourself. May I ask, have you any personal acquaintance with some of these qualities? Is there still some need in your life for the other desirable traits? Well, remember that it is only as the Holy Spirit has control that this fruit of His is found. For notice that it is not we that bear this fruit, but He in us. We furnish the soil. He must have free swing in its cultivation if He is to get this harvest. And notice, too, that it does not say "the fruits of the Spirit," as though you might have one or more, and I have some others. But it is "fruit"—that is, it is all one fruit and all of it is meant to be growing up in each one of us. And let the fact be put down as settled once for all that only as we tarry and receive the Master's promise of power can we live the lives He longs to have us live down here among men for Him.

If that father is so to live at home before those wide-awake, growing boys that he can keep up the family altar, and instead of letting it become a mere irksome form, make it the green, fresh spot in the home life, he must have this promised power, for he cannot do it of himself. I presume some of you fathers know that.

There is that mother, living in what would be reckoned a humble home, one of a thousand like it, but charged with the most sacred trust ever committed to human hands—the molding of precious lives. If there be hallowed ground anywhere surely it is there, in the life of that home. What patience and tirelessness, and love and tact and wisdom and wealth of resource does that woman not need! Ah, mothers! if any one needs to tarry and receive the power promised by the Son of that Mary, who was filled with the Holy Spirit from before His birth for her sacred trust, surely you do.

Here sits one whose life plans seem to have gone all askew. The thing you love to do, and had fondly planned over, removed utterly beyond your reach and you compelled to fit in to something for which you have no taste. It will take nothing less than the power the Master promised for you to go on faithfully, cheerfully just where you have been placed, no repining, no complaining, even in your innermost soul, but, instead, a glad, joyous fitting into the Father's plan with a radiant light in the face. Only His power can accomplish that victory! But His can. And His may be yours for the tarrying and the taking.

Let me repeat then with all the emphasis possible that as certainly as you need to trust Jesus Christ for your soul's salvation, you also need to receive this power of the Holy Spirit to work that salvation out in your present life.

A Double Center.

It has helped me greatly in understanding the Master's insistent emphasis upon the promise of power to keep clearly in mind that the christian system of truth revolves around a double center. It is illustrated best not by a circle with its single center, but by an ellipse with its twin centers. There are two central truths—not one, but two. The first of the two is grained deep down in the common Christian teaching and understanding. If I should ask any group of Sabbath school children in this town, next Sabbath morning, the question: What is the most important thing we christians believe? Amid the great variety in the form of answer would come, in substance, without doubt, this reply: "The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin." And they would be right. But there is a second truth—very reverently and thoughtfully let me say—of equal importance with that; namely, this: the Holy Spirit empowereth against all sin, and for life and service. These two truths are co-ordinate. They run in parallel lines. They belong together. They are really two halves of the one great truth. But this second half needs emphasis, because it has not always been put into its proper place beside the other.

Jesus died on the cross to make freedom from sin possible. The Holy Spirit dwells within me to make freedom from sin actual. The Holy Spirit does in me what Jesus did for me. The Lord Jesus makes a deposit in the bank on my account. The Spirit checks the money out and puts it into my hands. Jesus does in me now by His Spirit what He did for me centuries ago on the cross, in His person.

Now these two truths, or two parts of the same truth, go together in God's plan, but, with some exceptions, have not gone together in men's experience. That explains why so many christian lives are a failure and a reproach. The Church of Christ has been gazing so intently upon the hill of the cross with its blood-red message of sin and love, that it has largely lost sight of the Ascension Mount with its legacy of power. We have been so enwrapt with that marvelous scene on Calvary—and what wonder!—that we have allowed ourselves to lose the intense significance of Pentecost. That last victorious shout—"It is finished"—has been crowding out in our ears its counterpart—the equally victorious cry of Olivet—"All power hath been given unto Me."