SUNDAY COLUMN

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 66, Issue 44, 1 December 1945, Page 5

SUNDAY COLUMN

DEVOTIONAL READING (Conducted by the Ashburton Ministers’ Association.) THE HOLY SPIRIT “For God giveth not. the Spirit by measure unto Him.” ( We all believe in the Holy Spirit, even if we seldom use the name. We all believe that a divine influence stirs in our hearts, bringing to birth there a desire for God and a yearning for goodness. When we sing in the well known hymn, And every virtue we possess, And every victory won, And every thought of holiness, Are His alone,

we are not using empty words, out words that express a deep conviction. We rise above our lower selves not in our own strength, but by divine aid, the Spirit’s help. Our text suggests that this thought will help us to understand Jesus Christ. He is one to whom the Spirit is given “not by measure.” The meaning is that while the Spirit has worked through all God’s servants in varying degrees, but. always hampered somewhat by their human imperfection, in Jesus, the Spirit worked wholly unimpeded, and thus had His complete and full influence in a perfect human life. God is present by His Spirit to some extent in the life of every man who loves Him, but in Christ He was fully present. The Spirit always seeks to produce in men a reflection of God’s character of love, and in Jesus He brought forth love to God and man in their perfection, and so made Jesus a perfect image of God. Here is an easily understood way of expressing what we mean by the divinity of Christ. All those who follow Jesu£s must have asked themselves: Who is Jesus? Our text gives us a simple anud perfectly intelligible answer: Jesus is the Person in Whom the Holy Spirit of God, that divine Presence and Power who is .one of thevital factors in human life, dwelt in the most complete fashion that He can dwell in any one of our human race. We need some such idea. Jesus was more than a mere man. His own thoughts about Himself and His work went far beyond those of any ordinary human being. His nearest followers saw in Him more than a mere man, and the experience of Christians of all ages confirms their view. It has been well put thus:—That Christians of all ages have not called Christ divine simply to repeat what the Apostles said, “but because their inner voice recognised the claims of Jesus as claims of the Holy God, because the merciful love of Jesus preached the love of God, and because faith gained the courage from its confidence in Jesus and His innocent suffering to trust in this merciful love of God.” Who then is this Jesus? He Himself has warned us that a full understanding of His nature is beyond us. Its inmost secret ’we cannot unfold. We cannot penetrate, so deep as to learn how God made Him- what He was. God only knows that. “No man knoweth the Son save the Father.” The simplest and “ the earliest explanation of His unique divine manhood is that implied in our text. This was the first result of His followers’ thinking on this question of who their Master was. He was One, they said, perfectly filled with God’s Holy Spirit,, so that His whole personality was attuned to the Spirit’s will, and became.the perfect instrument on which were played the melodies of God’s love. “God dwelt so perfectly in Jesus,” says Loofs, “as has never been the case before and never will be again till the end of time.” In thus thinking we take a familiar idea, and, enlarging it beyond all ordinary experience, find that it‘fits the case of our Lord. Some may find more to say about Hjm. This at any rate is true, scriptural and helpful; Christ is the completely Spirit-filled Person,. This statement does Justice to the uniqueness of His historical life and to His unique meaning for Hi:; followers’ faith.

The thought can he put in a different way. We notice stages in the degree in which the Spirit works - in receptiveness of divine influence to let the Spirit work in him a living faith, a pure trust and a good life. A stage higher is the prophet, the religious genius, who by flie mysterious constitution of his nature is especially open to and receptive of the Spirit’s power, so that the Spirit dwells more fully in him, makes him the pioneer of faith, brings to birth through him new views of God’s truth and of man’s duty. In the prophet the Spirit does really creative work. But the prophet is not the final reach of the Spirit’s, work. We can think of a higher stage beyond him, as far beyond the prophet as" the prophet is beyond the common 'man. We can look beyond the prophet to one in whom is found the Spirit in all fullness, not in measure, but boundlessly. Such a one we call the Son. ‘ Such a one is Jesus Chris’t. Therefore do we sing, “Thou art the King of Glory, 0 Christ. Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father.”