"And it came to pass, that, while Apollos was at
Corinth, Paul having passed through the upper country came to
Ephesus, and found certain disciples: and he said unto them, Did
ye receive the Holy Spirit when ye believed?" (Acts 19:1-2).
A Lack
of the Spirit That May Accompany Believing
I want to speak to you for this
little while on what I believe to be a fact. I have no theory, no
systematized doctrine on 'a second blessing', but I believe that
there is something represented by this word - indeed, I know there
is something which is a fact. That Paul should ask a question in
this form, "Did ye receive the Holy Spirit when ye
believed?" (for this is the proper translation; not,
"Have ye received the Holy Spirit since ye believed?")
implies that some kind of relationship with Christ is possible
without receiving the Holy Spirit. That seems to me to be
implicit in this very question. Paul at once regarded these
disciples as believers, but he had a question about them and put
his question to them.
There is such a thing as being
a 'parenthetical' Christian - one in between two things. Here the
parenthesis was between believing in Christ and receiving the
Holy Spirit. Those believers were, so to speak, in brackets. But
note, this is not the normal New Testament position. Again and
again, right at the beginning - at the time of believing -
believers received the Holy Spirit in a very definite way. The
Apostles' attitude toward this matter is perfectly clear; they
held that believing alone was not sufficient. They would make
sure that those who had believed received the Holy Spirit. I am
not stopping to give you the instances, for you know them. This
situation at Ephesus is not the normal in the New Testament.
Perhaps we can call it the unusual, but it can exist and I fear
very often it does. I am almost inclined to say that to be in
brackets, to be in a parenthesis, to be in between believing in
Christ and receiving the Holy Spirit, has become the normal.
The Holy
Spirit Consummates Relationship to Christ
This means that there is
something that consummates relationship to Christ. Apart from
that something, Christian life is largely negative or neutral, in
a position or state of suspension, indefinite, tentative, as
though there is something more yet to happen. Those disciples had
believed, but there was something yet that needed to be. That is
how it works out, there is no doubt about it. There are
multitudes who have believed - believed that Jesus is the Christ,
believed in the facts of His birth, life, death, resurrection and
ascension, and even of His coming again, and much more of the
Christian doctrine - and, having believed, they have come into a
certain relationship with Him; and yet there is a pause, there
seems to lack something, and as time goes on that lack becomes
more accentuated, more apparent, more real to those concerned and
to others who know them. In the Church they are either negatives
or neutrals, or somehow suspended, tentative. You feel that
something has to happen to them, something is needed.
Is that what Paul found? I am
very sure that it was, and he could not accept that condition. He
at once sought to get to the root of it and to have it put right;
and it was found to be that, though they had believed - had
accepted certain truths which resulted in their accepting Jesus -
they were not right out, liberated, regnant, effective. Something
still had to take place. Their relationship with Christ had to be
in some way brought to a fulness, a completeness.
This consummation (as we see it
in every case in the New Testament, and as I have no doubt many
of us know in experience) places life on an altogether new basis.
Indeed, it places life upon what we call a supernatural level.
There is no doubt about it in the case of those mentioned in the
New Testament. Witness was borne that this does bring in
supernatural features and factors, and puts life on that level.
The
Effects of the Spirit
(a)
Transformed People
In the first place, the persons
themselves are so different. You may meet them and see them as
ordinary people, amongst people, but you meet also an extra
factor. You find that in them is another Presence. It is not they
only whom you meet. That Other is the Holy Spirit, the Lord
Himself, and He is no neutral. If the Holy Spirit is really
there, a life is not negative and neutral, suspended, tentative.
A certain positiveness is brought into the life itself, into the
individual. Such are not just lost in a crowd. Every one of them
is vital, every one of them is a life point, every one of them
carries something more than himself or herself, and that extra is
the Holy Spirit, it is Christ. It makes a tremendous difference
to us, and the difference is that we are not just and only
ourselves - what we are in ourselves. There is this Other that is
met, that is touched, and that touches. So it was, so it is, so
it should be. Probably Paul saw this group of believers at
Ephesus, and found nothing more in them than what they were in
themselves - a lot of people gathered, perhaps, with a common
interest, but no registration, no 'salt'. He said - 'What is the
matter? Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed? It is
difficult to believe that you did'. Such a receiving makes a
difference to the persons concerned.
(b)
Supernatural Resources Available
Then it brings on to a
supernatural basis as to resources - that we are not left to our
own resources, to draw only upon our own life. No, when we
are at an end, that is not the end; when we are
spent, that is not exhaustion. Oh, let this come to us as
a real challenge! So often we take ourselves as the measure of
things. 'Oh, I am so tired, I feel so bad, I do not feel I can go
to the meeting' - and so we stay away, taking our own condition
as being all that there is to count on. There is another level on
which to live, another basis; and if you like to put it to the
test, if you really have received the Holy Spirit; you can lay
hold of the Holy Spirit in the moment of most utter weakness and
find yourself capable of meeting a tremendous demand, of standing
up to something for which you are totally unable in yourself.
There is no place, and it is altogether wrong, for any Christian
to say, 'Well, I cannot, therefore I do not try; I am made like
this and I have not got this gift and that, and I have not this
qualification and that' - and thus to settle down and become
neutral. I am saying to you that if you have received the Holy
Spirit such an attitude is wrong and unnecessary. When the Holy
Spirit is present, we are put upon a supernatural basis for
resources, and we can prove again and again that when we have
absolutely nothing, and it would be utter madness and folly for
us to essay, we can lay hold of God the Holy Ghost and go through
triumphantly and come out at the other end with more life than we
had at the beginning - contrary to nature, supernatural.
I said I am talking about a
fact, not a theory of 'a second blessing'; and I can speak to you
out of personal experience of the fact. I know what I am talking
about. It is a fact. The Holy Spirit within does mean another
level for resource, which is not just our natural level; we are
not left to ourselves; so do not contemplate any proposition from
the standpoint of what you are or are not in yourself. That
standpoint in itself may be perfectly true; but there can be a
laying hold upon the Lord by faith, saying, "I can do
all things in him that strengtheneth me" (Phil. 4:13).
You are surprised at what you can do if you know this
great reality of the indwelling Spirit; you are capable of things
you never thought you would ever do. It ought to be like that.
That is the romance of a true life in the Spirit.
(c) The Gift
of a New Faculty
Then again, there is a new
faculty given to us by the receiving of the Holy Spirit. It is
here that wonder follows wonder. How can I illustrate that? Will
you suffer a personal testimony? For many years I preached, but I
had to get my material from books and all sorts of directions,
and gather it together and make up something to preach; and
although I preached it with all my might as my conviction, I had
obtained it in that way, and the one thing I longed for through
those years was something direct with and from heaven - an
immediate, direct speaking of the Lord in my heart through His
Word so that I could speak out what the Lord was saying to me.
And there came that great crisis of Romans 6, and that is
what issued. From that time to this, by God's grace I have been
able to see in the Scriptures much more than could be known by
mere intellectual effort. I can take the Word of God and see
through the letter of it to meanings, to principles, into the
thought of God. In saying a thing like that, I do not presume to
suggest that I have ranged it all. We are lost in this boundless
ocean; but it is something to have a faculty for perceiving. It
gives you another world beyond your own. That is what I mean. The
Holy Spirit gives that faculty for seeing the more, seeing the
deeper - not for our becoming fantastic, mystical, occult, and
that sort of thing, but really giving to us an inner eye. It is a
wonderful thing. Do you say that all who have believed have got
that? I am far from sure whether these things are true in the
case of all believers.
The
Spirit Known Only Through the Cross
You notice that there is given
to us in this passage the great truth that this receiving of the
Spirit, with these wonderful results that I have mentioned and,
of course, many more, is the issue of Christ's death and
resurrection into which we are placed by faith - what we have
called identification with Christ in death burial and
resurrection; for that is what Paul here laid down in calling
upon them to be baptized into the name of the Lord Jesus. All
the doctrine of identification with Christ in death and
resurrection is gathered up in baptism. Dear believer, even
though it be at a late hour in your life, you must get off the
old ground of the old natural life. If that is governing, if that
is controlling, if that is your main or sole sphere, you must get
out of it, and you can only get out of it through death and
resurrection.
The death of the Lord Jesus was
His exodus. "Moses and Elijah... spake of his decease
(his exodus) which he was about to accomplish" (Luke 9:31). What
an exodus! Emancipation, release from all the limitations of this
life as to time, space, and everything else! All those
limitations broken down by His Cross! We are released by the
Cross. If we really know the Cross as an experience, as something
into which, by faith, we definitely stand for the end of the
control, government, and limitation (as well as of all the evil)
of the old natural life, and if by faith we lay hold on Christ
risen, as being ourselves risen in Him, we are released. Oh, is
not that the need of so many Christians to be released, to be
loosed, to be set free inside? They are tied up. We have to say
of certain people, 'They are all tied up in themselves'. Now do
not go and get into tangles and fogs about 'a second blessing'.
The heart of the matter is here. The Holy Spirit comes upon the
ground of resurrection-union, and all the rest follows. Let us
challenge our own hearts. Are we in the realm of those still
tentative, still suspended, still tied up, still governed by our
natural life and make-up? Then there is something wrong; and it
may be in your case, as it was in mine, that after a good many
years of believing, of being the Lord's servant, the thing
happened. I am always hesitant to say that I received the Holy
Spirit then, because that would be to state a kind of doctrine to
which everybody else ought to conform; but I know the thing
happened. The day I apprehended in a new way the meaning of
Christ in death, burial and resurrection, the Holy Spirit
followed on that and did something in me. It has been going on
increasingly ever since and still has to go a very long way, but
that was the turning point. While I would be most sorry to create
difficulties for you over this and set you worrying about your
own condition, I do say to you that there is something more for a
believer who is still in this limited, parenthetical position - a
believer still 'in brackets'. The Lord get rid of those iron
brackets and make us know what life by the Spirit really is!
There are two safeguarding
words necessary in this connection as I close. The sense of this
lack has sent many off into an intensive soul-force quest for an
experience, and thereby the door has been opened for the most
serious counterfeit work of Satan, with direful issues. Remember,
it is not our soul-force that is the door, but the Cross, our
death with Christ.
Then, it may very well be that
many - unlike these disciples at Ephesus - have received the
Spirit, but have not walked by the Spirit, and have
consequently failed to be led by Him into all the truth.
First published in "A Witness and A
Testimony" magazine, Jul-Aug 1951, Vol 29-4