In the ordinary affairs of life we grasp facts, and hold them fast, without puzzling ourselves over the how of things. Who can explain how food sustains life; how light reveals material objects, how sound conveys ideas to our minds? It is the fact we know and believe, but the how we pass by as a mystery unrevealed. What God has revealed, we believe. We cannot understand how Jesus turned water into wine; how He multiplied a few loaves and fishes and fed thousands; how He stilled the stormy sea; how He opened blind eyes, healed lepers, and raised the dead by a word. But the facts we believe. Wireless telegraphic messages are sent over the vast wastes of ocean. That is a fact, and we believe it. But how they go we do not know. That is not something to believe. It is a matter of pure speculation, and is unexplained.
An old servant of God has pointed out that it is the fact of the Trinity, and not the manner of it, which God has revealed, and made a subject for our faith.
But while the Scriptures reveal to us the fact of the personality of the Holy Spirit, and it is a subject for our faith, to those in whom He dwells this fact may become a matter of sacred knowledge, of blessed experience.
How else can we account for the positive and assured way in which the Apostles and disciples spoke of the Holy Ghost on and after the day of Pentecost, if they did not know Him? Immediately after the fiery baptism, with its blessed filling, Peter stood before the people, and said: “This is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel: And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out My Spirit upon all flesh”; then he exhorted the people and assured them that if they would meet certain simple conditions they should “receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.” He said to Ananias, “Why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost?” He declared to the High Priest and Council that he and his fellow-Apostles were witnesses of the resurrection of Jesus: and added, “And so is also the Holy Ghost, whom God hath given to them that obey Him.” Without any apology or explanation, or “think so” or “hope so,” they speak of being “filled” (not simply with some new, strange experience or emotion, but) “with the Holy Ghost.” Certainly they must have known Him. And if they knew Him, may not we?
Paul says: “Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth” (I Cor. ii. 12, 13). And if we know the words, may we not know the Teacher of the words?
John Wesley says:—
“The knowledge of the Three-One God is interwoven with all true Christian faith, with all vital religion. I do not say,” he adds, “that every real Christian can say, with the Marquis de Renty, ’I bear about with me continually an experimental verity, and a fullness of the ever-blessed Trinity. I apprehend that this is not the experience of “babes,” but rather “fathers in Christ."’ But I know not how anyone can be a Christian believer till he ‘hath the witness in himself,’ till ’the Spirit of God witnesses with his spirit that he is a child of God’; that is, in effect, till God the Holy Ghost witnesses that God the Father has accepted him through the merits of God the Son.
“Not that every Christian believer adverts to this; perhaps, at first, not one in twenty; but, if you ask them a few questions, you will easily find it is implied in what he believes.”
I shall never forget my joy, mingled with awe and wonder, when this dawned upon my consciousness. For several weeks I had been searching the Scriptures, ransacking my heart, humbling my soul, and crying to God almost day and night for a pure heart and the baptism with the Holy Ghost, when one glad, sweet day (it was January 9th, 1885) this text suddenly opened to my understanding: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness”; and I was enabled to believe without any doubt that the precious blood cleansed my heart, even mine, from all sin. Shortly after that, while reading these words of Jesus to Martha: “I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth on Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and he that liveth and believeth on Me shall never die,” instantly my heart was melted like wax before fire; Jesus Christ was revealed to my spiritual consciousness, revealed in me, and my soul was filled with unutterable love. I walked in a heaven of love. Then one day, with amazement, I said to a friend: “This is the perfect love about which the Apostle John wrote; but it is beyond all I dreamed of; in it is personality; this love thinks, wills, talks with me, corrects me, instructs and teaches me.” And then I knew that God the Holy Ghost was in this love, and that this love was God, for “God is love.”
Oh, the rapture mingled with reverential, holy fear—for it is a rapturous, yet divinely fearful thing—to be indwelt by the Holy Ghost, to be a temple of the Living God! Great heights are always opposite great depths, and from the heights of this blessed experience many have plunged into the dark depths of fanaticism. But we must not draw back from the experience through fear. All danger will be avoided by meekness and lowliness of heart; by humble, faithful service; by esteeming others better than ourselves, and in honour preferring them before ourselves; by keeping an open, teachable spirit; in a word, by looking steadily unto Jesus, to whom the Holy Spirit continually points us: for He would not have us fix our attention exclusively upon Himself and His work in us, but also upon the Crucified One and His work for us, that we may walk in the steps of Him whose blood purchases our pardon, and makes and keeps us clean.