“Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?”
XIII.
Offences Against the Holy Ghost
“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you.”
One day, in a fit of boyish temper, I spoke hot words of anger, somewhat unjustly, against another person, and this deeply grieved my mother. She said but little, and though her sweet face has mouldered many years beneath the Southern daisies, her look of grief I can still see across the years of a third of a century. And that is the one sad memory of my childhood. A stranger might have been amused or incensed at my words, but mother was grieved—grieved to her heart by my lack of generous, self-forgetful, thoughtful love.
We can anger a stranger or an enemy, but it is only a friend we grieve. The Holy Spirit is such a Friend, more tender and faithful than a mother; and shall we carelessly offend Him, and estrange ourselves from Him in spite of His love?
There is a sense in which every sin is against the Holy Ghost. Of course, not every such sin is unpardonable, but the tendency of all sin is in that direction, and we are only safe as we avoid the very beginnings of sin. Only as we “walk in the Spirit” are we “free from the law of sin and death” (Romans viii. 2). Therefore, it is infinitely important that we beware of offences against the Spirit, “lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews iii. 13).
Grieving the Holy Spirit is a very common and a very sad offence of professing Christians, and it is to this that must be attributed much of the weakness and ignorance and joylessness of so many followers of Christ.
And He is grieved, as was my mother, by the unloving speech and spirit of God’s children.