#"HONEY IN THE MOUTH!" AT THE CONFERENCE OF THE PASTORS’ COLLEGE EVANGELICAL ASSOCIATION.
"He shall glorify Me: for He shall receive of Mine, and shall show it unto you. All things that the Father has are Mine: therefore said I, that He shall take of Mine and shall show it unto you."
- John 16:14, 15
BELOVED Friends, here you have the Trinity, and there is no salvation apart from the Trinity! It must be the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. "All things that the Father has are Mine," says Christ, and the Father has all things. They were always His; they are still His; they always will be His—and they cannot become ours till they change ownership—till Christ can say, "All things that the Father has are Mine"—for it is by virtue of the representative Character of Christ standing as the Surety of the Covenant, that the "all things" of the Father are passed over to the Son, that they might be passed over to us. "It pleased the Father that in Him should all fullness dwell; and of His fullness have all we received." But yet we are so dull that though the conduit pipe is laid on to the great fountain, we cannot get at it. We are lame. We cannot reach it, but in comes the third Person of the Divine Unity, even the Holy Spirit, and He receives of the things of Christ and then delivers them over to us! So we actually receive, through Jesus Christ, by the Spirit, what is in the Father!
Ralph Erskine, in his preface to a sermon upon the 15th verse, has a notable piece. He speaks of Grace as _honey_— honey for the cheering of the saints, for the sweetening of their mouths and hearts—but he says that in the Father, "the honey is in the flower, which is at such a distance from us that we could never extract it." In the Son, "the honey is in the comb, prepared for us in our Immanuel, God-Man, Redeemer, the Word that was made flesh, saying, ‘All things that the Father has are Mine; and Mine for your use and benefit—it is in the comb. But then, next, we have honey in the mouth—the Spirit taking all things and making application of them, by showing them unto us and making us to eat and drink with Christ, and share of these ‘all things’—yes, not only eat the honey, but the honeycomb with the honey—not only His benefits, but Himself."
It is a very beautiful division of the subject. Honey in the flower in God, as in mystery, really there. There never will be any more honey than there is in the flower. There it is. But how shall you and I get it? We have not wisdom to extract the sweetness. We are not as the bees that are able to find it out. It is bee honey, not man honey. Yet you see in Christ it becomes the honey in the honeycomb and, therefore, He is sweet to our taste as honey dropping from the comb. Sometimes we are so faint that we cannot reach out a hand to grasp that honeycomb and, alas, there was a time when our palates were so depraved that we preferred bitter things and even thought them sweet! But now that the Holy Spirit has come, we have got the honey in the mouth and the taste that enjoys it! Yes, we have now so long enjoyed it that the honey of Grace has entered into our constitution and we have become sweet unto God—His sweetness having been conveyed by this strange method unto us.
Beloved Friends, I scarcely need say to you, keep the existence of the Trinity prominent in your ministry! Remember, you cannot pray without the Trinity. If the full work of salvation requires a Trinity, so does that very breath by which we live. You cannot draw near to the Father except through the Son and by the Holy Spirit. There is undoubtedly a trinity in nature. There certainly constantly turns up the need of a Trinity in the realm of Grace—and when we get to Heaven we shall understand, perhaps, more fully what is meant by the Trinity in Unity. But if that is a thing never to be understood, we shall at least apprehend it more lovingly, and we shall rejoice more completely as the three tones of our music shall rise up in perfect harmony unto Him who is One and indivisible, and yet is Three, forever blessed, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one God!
Now for the point which I am to open up to you this morning, though I cannot do it, but He must do it. We must sit here and have the text acted out upon ourselves. "He shall glorify Me. He shall take of Mine and shall show it unto you." May it be so just now! First, what the Holy Spirit does—"He shall take of Mine and shall show it unto you." Secondly, what the Holy Spirit aims at and really effects—"He shall glorify Me." And then, thirdly, _how, in doing both these things, He is the Comforte_r. It is the Comforter that does this and we shall find our richest, surest comfort in this work of the Holy Spirit, who shall take of the things of Christ and show them unto us.
I. First, WHAT THE HOLY SPIRIT DOES. It is clear, Beloved Friends, that the Holy Spirit deals with the things of Christ. As our brother, Archibald Brown, said, when expounding the chapter just now, He does not aim at any originality. He deals with the things of Christ. All things that Christ had heard from His Father He made known to us. He kept to them. And now the Spirit takes of the things of Christ and of nothing else. Do not let us strain at anything new. The Holy Spirit could deal with anything in Heaven above, or in the earth beneath—the story of the ages past, the story of the ages to come, the inward secrets of the earth, the evolution of all things, if there is an evolution. He could do it all! Like the Master, He could handle any topic He chose, but He confines Himself to the things of Christ and therein finds unutterable liberty and boundless freedom.
Do you think, dear Friend, that you can be wiser than the Holy Spirit? And if His choice must be a wise one, will yours be a wise one if you begin to take of the things of something or somebody else? You will have the Holy Spirit near you when you are receiving of the things of Christ, but, as the Holy Spirit is said never to receive anything else, when you are handling other things on the Sabbath, you will be handling them alone—and the pulpit is a dreary solitude, even in the midst of a crowd—if the Holy Spirit is not with you there. You may, if you please, think through a theology out of your own vast brain, but the Holy Spirit is not with you there. And, mark you, there are some of us that are resolved to tarry with the things of Christ and keep on dealing with them as far as He enables us to do so! And we feel that we are in such blessed company with the Divine Spirit that we do not envy you that wider range of thought, if you prefer it.
The Holy Spirit still exists, works and teaches in the Church. And we have a test by which to know whether what people claim to be Revelation is Revelation or not—"He shall receive of Mine." The Holy Spirit will never go farther than the Cross and the coming of the Lord. He will go no farther than that which concerns Christ. "He shall receive of Mine." When, therefore, anybody whispers in my ear that there has been revealed to him this or that, which I do not find in the teaching of Christ and His Apostles, I tell him that we must be taught by the Holy Spirit. His one vocation is to deal with the things of Christ! If we do not remember this, we may be carried away by quirks, as many have been. Those who will have to do with other things, let them—but as for us, we shall be satisfied to confine our thoughts and our teaching within these limitless limits—"He shall take of Mine, and shall show it unto you."
I like to think of the Holy Spirit handling such things. They seem so worthy of Him. Now has He got among the hills. Now is His mighty mind among the infinities when He has to deal with Christ, for Christ is the Infinite veiled in the finite. Why, He seems something more than Infinite when He gets into the finite, and the Christ of Bethlehem is less to be understood than the Christ of the Father’s bosom! He seems, if it were possible, to have out-infinited the infinite, and the Spirit of God has themes here worthy of His vast Nature!
When you have been the whole Sunday morning whittling away a text to the small end of nothing, what have you done? A king spent a day in trying to make a portrait on a cherrystone—a king who was ruling empires! And here is a minister who professes to have been called of the Holy Spirit to the employ of taking of the things of Christ, who spent a whole morning with precious souls who were dying while he spoke to them on a theme concerning which it did not signify the turn of a hair whether it was so or not! Oh, imitate the Holy Spirit! If you profess to have Him dwelling in you, be moved by Him! Let it be said of you, in your measure, as of the Holy Spirit without measure, "He shall receive of Mine and shall show it unto you."
But, next, what does the Holy Spirit do? Why, He deals with feeble men. Yes, He dwells with us poor creatures! I can understand the Holy Spirit taking the things of Christ and rejoicing therein, but the marvel is that He should glorify Christ by coming and showing these things to us! And yet, Brothers, it is among us that Christ is to get His glory. Our eyes must see Him! An unseen Christ is little glorious. And the things of Christ unknown—the things of Christ untasted and unloved—seem to have lost their brilliance to a high degree. The Holy Spirit, therefore, feeling that to show a sinner the salvation of Christ glorifies Him, spends His time and has been spending these centuries in taking of the things of Christ and showing them to us. Ah, it is a great condescension on His part to show them to us. And it is a miracle, too. If it were reported that suddenly stones had life, hills had eyes and trees had ears, it would be a strange thing. But for us who were dead and blind and deaf in an awful sense—for the spiritual is more emphatic than the natural—for us to be so far gone and for the Holy Spirit to be able to show the things of Christ to us is to His honor! And He does it. He comes from Heaven to dwell with us. Let us honor and bless His name.
I never could make up my mind which to admire most as an act of condescension—the Incarnation of Christ, or the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The Incarnation of Christ is marvelous—that He should dwell in human nature, but, observe, the Holy Spirit dwells in human nature in its _sinfulness—_not in perfect human nature, but in imperfect human nature! And He continues to dwell, not in one body, which was fashioned strangely for Himself and was pure and without taint, but He dwells in our bodies! Know you not that they are the temples of the Holy Spirit, which were defiled by nature and in which a measure of defilement still remains, despite His indwelling? And this He has done these multitudes of years, not in one instance, nor in thousands of instances, but in a number that no man can number! He continues to come into contact with sinful humanity! Not to the angels, nor to the seraphim, nor to the cherubim, nor to the host who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb, does He show the things of Christ—but He shall show them to us!
I suppose that it means this, that _He takes of the words of our Lord—_those which He spoke personally and by His Apostles. Let us never allow anybody to divide between the word of the Apostles and the word of Christ! Our Savior has joined them together. "Neither pray I for these, alone, but for them, also, which shall believe on Me through their word." And if any begin rejecting the Apostolic word, they will be outside the number for whom Christ prays—they shut themselves out by that very fact! I wish that they would solemnly remember that the word of the Apostles is the word of Christ. He tarried not long enough, after He had risen from the dead, to give us a further exposition of His mind and will. And He could not have given it before His death, because it would have been unsuitable. "I have yet many things to say unto you, but you cannot bear them now." After the descent of the Holy Spirit, the disciples were prepared to receive that which Christ spoke by His servants, Paul and Peter, and James and John.
Certain doctrines which we are sometimes taunted about as being not revealed by Christ, but by His Apostles, were all revealed by Christ, every one of them! They can all be found in His teaching, but they are very much in the parabolic form. It is after He has gone up into Glory and has prepared a people, by His Spirit, to understand the Truths of God more fully, that He sends His Apostles and says, "Go forth, and open up to those whom I have chosen out of the world the meaning of all I said." The meaning is all there, just as all the New Testament is in the Old! And sometimes I have thought that, instead of the Old being less inspired than the New, it is more inspired! Things are packed away more tightly in the Old Testament than in the New, if possible. There are worlds of meaning in one pregnant line in the Old Testament—and in Christ’s words it is just so. He is the Old Testament to which the Epistles come in as a kind of New Testament, but they are all one and indivisible—they cannot be separated.
Well, now, the words of the Lord Jesus, and the words of His Apostles, are to be expounded to us by the Holy Spirit. We shall never get at the center of their meaning apart from His teaching. We shall never get at their meaning at all if we begin disputing about the words, saying, "I cannot accept the words." If you will not have the shell, you will never have the chick! It is impossible. "The words are not Inspired," they say. Here is a man in the witness box and he has sworn to speak the truth and he says that he has. And now he is cross-examined and he says, "Now, I have spoken the truth, but I do not stand by my words." The cross-examining lawyer has got hold of a certain statement of his. The witness says, "Oh, I do not swear to the words, you know." The question is asked, "What, then, do you swear to? There is nothing else. We do not know anything about your meaning. All that you have sworn to must be your words." But what the fellow means is this—he is a liar. He is a perjurer. Well, I say no more than commonsense would suggest to you if you were sitting in a court. Now, if a man says, "I have spoken the truth, but still I do not swear to the words," what is left? If we have no Inspiration in the Words of God, we have got an impalpable Inspiration that oozes away between your fingers and leaves nothing behind!
Well, take the words and never dispute over them! Still, into their soul-fullness of meaning you cannot come until the Holy Spirit shall lead you into them. They that wrote them for you did not fully understand what they wrote in many instances. There were some of them who enquired and searched diligently to know what manner of things those were which the Holy Spirit had spoken to them and of which He had made them speak. And you to whom the words come will have to do the same. You must go and say, "Great Master, we thank You for the Book with all our hearts. And we thank You for putting the Book into words. But now, good Master, we will not quibble over the letter, as did the Jews and the rabbis and the scribes of old, and so miss Your meaning. Open wide the door of the words, that we may enter into the secret closet of their meaning. Teach us this, we pray You. You have the key. Lead us in."
Dear Friends, whenever you want to understand a text of Scripture, try to read the original. Consult anybody who has studied what the original means, but remember that the quickest way into a text is praying in the Holy Spirit. Pray the chapter over! I do not hesitate to say that if a chapter is read upon one’s knees, looking up at every word to Him that gave it, the meaning will come to you with infinitely more light than by any other method of studying it. "He shall glorify Me: for He shall receive of Mine and shall show it unto you." He shall re-deliver the Master’s message to you in the fullness of its meaning!
But I do not think that is all that the text means. "He shall receive of Mine." In the next verse the Lord goes on to say, "All things that the Father has are Mine." I think that it means, therefore, that the Holy Spirit will show us the things of Christ. Here is a text for us—"The things of Christ." Christ speaks as if He had not any things, just then, which were specially His own, for He had not yet died. He had not yet risen. He was not pleading, then, as the great Intercessor in Heaven—all that was to come. But still, He says, "Even now all things that the Father has are Mine"—all His attributes, all His Glory, all His rest, all His happiness, all His blessedness. All that is Mine and the Holy Spirit shall show that to you."
But I might almost read my text in another light, for He has died, risen and gone on high, and lo, He comes! His chariots are on the way! Now, there are certain things which the Father has and which Jesus Christ has, which are truly the things of Christ, emphatically the things of Christ. And my prayer is that you and I, preachers of the Gospel, might have this text fulfilled in us—"He shall take of Mine"—My things—"and shall show them unto you."
Suppose, dear Brothers, that we are going to preach the Word, again, and the Holy Spirit shows to us our Master in His Godhead. Oh, how we will preach Him as Divine—how surely He can bless our congregation! How certainly He must be able to subdue all things unto Himself, seeing that He is very God of very God! It is equally sweet to see Him as Man. Oh, to have the Spirit’s view of Christ’s Manhood, distinctly to recognize that He is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh—and that in His infinite tenderness He will be compassionate to me and deal with my poor people and with the troubled consciences that are round me! I have still to go to them and tell them of One who is touched with the feeling of their infirmities, having been tempted in all points like as they still are! Oh, my Brothers, if we once, no, if every time before we preach, we get a view of Christ in His Divine and Human Natures and come down fresh from that vision to speak about Him, what glorious preaching it would be for our people!
It is a glorious thing to get a view of the offices of Christ by the Holy Spirit, but especially of His office as a Savior! I have often said to Him, "You must save my people. It is no business of mine. I never set up in that line, or put over my door that I was a savior—but You have been apprenticed to this trade! You have learned it by experience and You claim it as Your own honor. You are exalted on high to be a Prince and a Savior. Do Your own work, my Lord." I took this text and used it with sinners the other Sunday night, and I know that God blessed it when I said to them, "May the Holy Spirit show you that Christ is a Savior! A physician does not expect you to make any apologies when you call upon him because you are ill, for he is a physician and he needs you in order that he may prove his skill. So Christ is a Savior and you need not apologize for going to Him! He cannot be a Savior if there is not somebody to be saved!" The fact is, Christ cannot get hold of us anywhere except by our sin. The point of contact between the sick one and the physician is the disease. Our sin is the point of contact between us and Christ. Oh, that the Spirit of God would take of Christ’s Divine offices, especially that of a Savior, and show them unto us!
Did the Holy Spirit ever show you these thing of Christ, namely, His Covenant engagements? When He struck hands with the Father, it was that He would bring many sons to Glory—that of those whom the Father gave Him, He would lose none, but that they should be saved, for He is under bonds to His Father to bring His elect Home. When the sheep have to pass, again, under the hands of Him that counts them, they will go under the rod, one by one, each one having the blood-mark—and He will never rest till the number in the heavenly fold shall tally with the number in the Book.
So I believe and it has seemed delightful to me to have this shown to me when I have gone to preach. It is a dull, dreary, wet, foggy morning. There are only a few present. Yes, but they are picked people whom God has ordained to be there—and there will be the right number there! I shall preach and there will be some saved. We do not go at a chance, but, guided by the blessed Spirit of God, we go with a living certainty, knowing that God has a people that Christ is bound to bring Home and bring them Home He will! And while He shall see of the travail of His soul, His Father shall delight in every one of them! If you get a clear view of that, it will give you backbone and make you strong. "He shall take of Mine and shall show you my Covenant engagements, and when you see them, you shall be comforted."
But, Beloved, the Holy Spirit favors you by taking what is peculiarly Christ’s, namely, His love, and showing that to you. We have seen it, seen it sometimes more vividly than at other times. But if the full blaze of the Holy Spirit were to be concentrated upon the love of Christ—and our eyesight enlarged to its utmost capacity—it would be such a vision that Heaven could not excel it! We should sit with our Bible before us in our study and feel, "Well now, here is a man, whether in the body or out of the body, I cannot tell. Such a man is caught up into the third Heaven." Oh, to see the love of Christ in the light of the Holy Spirit! When it is so revealed to us, it is not merely the surface which we see, but the love of Christ itself! You know that you never saw anything yet, strictly speaking. You only see the appearance of the thing— the light reflected by it—that is all you see. But the Holy Spirit shows us the naked Truth of God, the essence of the love of Christ! And what that essence is—that love without beginning, without change, without limit, without end—and that love set upon His people simply from motives within Himself. And from no motive _ab extra—_what that must be, what tongue can tell? Oh, it is a ravishing sight!
I think that if there could be one sight more wonderful than the love of Christ, it would be the blood of Christ—
"Much we talk of Jesus’ blood,
But how little’s understood."
It is the climax of God! I do not know of anything more Divine. It seems to me as if all the eternal purposes worked up to the blood of the Cross and then worked from the blood of the Cross towards the sublime consummation of all things. Oh, to think that He should become Man! God has made spirit, pure spirit, embodied spirit—and then materialism—and somehow, as if He would take all up into one, the Godhead links Himself with the material and He wears dust about Him even as we wear it! And taking it all up, He then goes and, in that fashion, redeems His people from all the evil of their soul, their spirit and their body by the pouring out of a life which, while it was Human, was so in connection with the Divine, that we speak correctly of "the blood of God."
Turn to the 20th chapter of Acts and read how the Apostle Paul puts it—"Feed the Church of God, which He has purchased with His own blood." I believe that Dr. Watts is not wrong when he says—"God that loved and died." It is an incorrect accuracy, a strictly absolute accuracy of incorrectness! So it must be ever when the finite talks of the Infinite. It was a wonderful Sacrifice that could absolutely obliterate, annihilate and extinguish sin and all the traces that could possibly remain of it, for, "He has finished the transgression, made an end of sins, made reconciliation for iniquity and brought in everlasting righteousness." Ah, dear Friends, you have seen this, have you not? But you have yet to see more of it. And when we get to Heaven, we shall then know what that blood means—and with what vigor shall we sing, "Unto Him that loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood"! Will anybody be there to say, "Is not that the religion of the shambles?" as they blasphemously call it. Ah, my Friends, they will find themselves where they will wish they had believed "the religion of the shambles"! And I think that it will burn like coals of juniper into the soul of any man that has ever dared to talk like that, that he did despite unto the blood of God and so, by his own willful deeds, will be cast away forever.
May the Holy Spirit show unto you Gethsemane, Gabbatha and Golgotha! And then, may it please Him to give you a sight of what our Lord is now doing! Oh, how it would cheer you up at any time when you were depressed, only to see Him standing and pleading for you! Do you not think that if your wife were ill, your child were sick and there was hardly any food in the cupboard—if you were to go out the back door and you saw Him with the breastplate on, and all the stones glittering—and your name there and Him pleading for you—don’t you think you would go in and say, "There, Wife, it is all right, He is praying for us"? Oh, it would be a comfort if the Holy Spirit showed you a pleading Christ! And then, to think that He is reigning as well as pleading! He is at the right hand of God, even the Father, who has put all things under His feet. And He waits till the last enemy shall lie there. Now, you are not afraid, are you, of those who have been snubbing you and opposing you? Remember, He has said, "All power is given unto Me in Heaven and in earth. Go you therefore, and teach all nations; and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world."
Next, and best of all, may the Holy Spirit give you a clear view of His coming. This is our most brilliant hope—"Lo, He comes!" The more the adversary waxes bold and the less of faith there is, and when zeal seems almost extinct, these are the tokens of His coming. The Lord always said that He would not come unless there was first a falling away. And so the darker the night grows and the fiercer the storm becomes, the better will we remember that He of the lake of Galilee came to them upon the waves in the night when the storm was wildest. Oh, what will His enemies say when He comes? When they behold the nail-prints of the Glorified and the Man with the Crown of thorns—when they see Him really come, they that have despised His Word and His ever-blessed blood—how will they flee before that face of injured love! And we, on the contrary, through His infinite mercy, will say, "This is what the Holy Spirit showed us and now we behold it literally! We thank Him for the foresights which He gave us of the Beatific Vision."
I am not yet done on the first head, because there is one point which I want you to remember. When the Holy Spirit takes of the things of Christ and shows them to us, He has a purpose in so doing. You will not laugh, I hope, when I remind you of what the little boys sometimes do at school with one another. I have seen a boy take out of his pocket an apple and say to his schoolmate, "Do you see that apple?" "Yes," says the other. "Then, you may see me eat it," he says. But the Holy Spirit is no Tantalus, taking of the things of Christ and holding them up to mock us! No. He says, "Do you see these things? If you can see them, you may have them." Did not Christ, Himself, say, "Look unto Me, and be you saved, all the ends of the earth"? Looking gives you a claim and if you can see Him, He is yours! It is with you, with regard to the Spirit showing you things, as it was with Jacob. You know Jacob lay down and went to sleep. And the Lord said to him, "The land whereon you lie, to you will I give it." Now, wherever you go, throughout the whole of Scripture, if you can find a place where you can lie down, that is yours! If you can sleep on a promise, that promise is yours! "Lift up now your eyes," said God to Abraham, "and look from the place where you, are northward, and southward, and eastward, and westward: for all the land which you see, to you will I give it."
May the Lord increase our holy vision of delighted faith, for there is nothing we see but we may also enjoy—all that is in Christ is there for us!
II. Now, secondly, WHAT THE HOLY SPIRIT AIMS AT AND WHAT HE REALLY ACCOMPLISHES. "He shall glorify Me."
Ah, Brothers, the Holy Spirit never comes to glorify us, or to glorify a denomination, or, I think, even to glorify a systematic arrangement of doctrines! He comes to glorify CHRIST! If we want to be in accord with Him, we must preach in order to glorify Christ. May we never have this thought—"I will put that bit in. It will sound well. The friends will feel that oratory is not quite extinct, that Demosthenes lives again in this village." No, no! I would say, "Brother, though it is a very delightful piece, strike that out because if you have had a thought of that kind about it, you had better not put yourself in the way of temptation by using it." "Yes, that is a magnificent sentence! I do not know where I met with it, or whether it is my own. I am afraid that most of our friends will not understand it, but then it will give them an impression that they have a deep thinker in their pulpit." Well then, it may be very admirable and, further, it might be a very right thing to give them that precious piece; but if you have that thought about it, strike it out! Strike it out ruthlessly! Say, "No, no, no! If it is not distinctly my aim to glorify Christ, I am not in accord with the aim of the Holy Spirit and I cannot expect His help! We shall not be pulling the same way and, therefore, I will have nothing of which I cannot say that I am saying it simply, sincerely and only that I may glorify Christ."
How, then, does the Holy Spirit glorify Christ? It is very beautiful to think that He glorifies Christ by showing Christ’s things. If you wanted to do honor to a man, you would, perhaps, take him a present to decorate his house. But here, if you want to glorify Christ, you must go and take the things out of Christ’s house—"the things of Christ." Whenever we have to praise God, what do we do? We simply say what He is! "You are this and You are that." There is no other praise. We cannot fetch anything from anywhere else and bring it to God—the praises of God are simply the facts about Himself! If you want to praise the Lord Jesus Christ, tell the people about Him. Take of the things of Christ and show them to the people—and you will glorify Christ.
Alas, I know what you will do. You will weave words together and you will form and fashion them in a marvelous manner till you have produced a charming piece of literature. When you have carefully done that, put it in the fire under the oven—and let it burn! Possibly you may help to bake some bread with it. Brethren, it is better for us to tell what Christ is than to invent 10,000 fine words of praise in reference to Him. "He shall glorify Me, for He shall receive of Mine and shall show it unto you."
Again, I think that the blessed Spirit glorifies Christ by showing us the things of Christ as Christ’s. Oh, to be pardoned! Yes, it is a great thing, but to find that pardon in His wounds—that is a greater thing! Oh, to get peace! Yes, but to find that peace in the blood of His Cross! Brothers, have the blood-mark very visibly on all your mercies! They are all marked with the blood of the Cross, but sometimes we think so much of the sweetness of the bread, or of the coolness of the waters, that we forget from where these came and how they came—and then they lack their choicest flavor. That it came from Christ is the best thing about the best thing that ever came from Christ! That He saves me is, somehow, better than my being saved! It is a blessed thing to go to Heaven, but I do not know that it is not a better thing to be in Christ and so, as the result of it, to get into Heaven. It is Himself and that which comes of Himself that becomes best of all because it comes of Himself! So the Holy Spirit shall glorify Christ by making us see that these things of Christ are, indeed, of Christ, and completely of Christ—and still are in connection with Christ—and we only enjoy them because we are in connection with Christ.
Then it is said in the text, "He shall glorify Me: for He shall take of Mine and shall show it unto you." Yes, it does glorify Christ for the Holy Spirit to show Christ to us. How often I have wished that men of great minds might be converted! I have wished that we could have a few Miltons and such men, to sing of the love of Christ. A few mighty men who teach politics and the like, to consecrate their talents to the preaching of the Gospel. Why is it not so? Well, because the Holy Spirit does not seem to think that that would be the way to supremely glorify Christ and He prefers, as a better way, to take us commonplace sort of persons and to take the things of Christ and to show them to us. He does glorify Christ and, blessed be His name that ever my bleary eyes should look upon His infinite loveliness! That ever such a wretch as I, who can understand everything but what I ought to understand, should be made to comprehend the heights and depths and to know, with all saints, the love of Christ that passes knowledge!
You see, in a school, that clever boy. Well, it is not much for the master to have made a scholar of him. But here is one who shines as a scholar and his mother says that he was the greatest dolt in the family! All his schoolfellows say, "Why, he was the butt of all our jokes! He seemed to have no brains, but our master, somehow, got some brains into him and made him know something which he appeared, at one time, incapable of knowing." Somehow, it does seem to be as if our very folly, impotence and spiritual death—if the Holy Spirit shows to us the things of Christ—will go towards the increase of that great glorifying of Christ at which the Holy Spirit aims!
Then, Beloved Brothers, since it is for the honor of Christ for His things to be shown to men, He will show them to us, that we may go and show them to other people. This we cannot do, except as He is with us to make the others to see. But He will be with us while we tell forth what He has taught us and so the Holy Spirit will really be showing to others while He is showing to us! A secondary influence will flow from this service, for we shall be helped to use the right means to make others see the things of Christ.
III. Our time is almost gone, but in the third place I must just point out to you HOW HE IS, IN BOTH OF THESE THINGS, OUR COMFORTER. He is so, first, for this reason—that there is no comfort in the world like a sight of Christ. He shows to us the things of Christ. Oh, Brothers, if you are poor and if the Holy Spirit shows you that Christ had not where to lay His head, what a sight for you! And if you are sick and if the Holy Spirit shows you what sufferings Christ endured, what comfort comes to you! If you are made to see the things of Christ, each thing according to the condition which you are in, how speedily you are delivered out of your sorrow!
And then, if the Holy Spirit glorifies Christ, that is the cure for every kind of sorrow. He is the Comforter. I may have told you before, but I cannot help telling you again, that many years ago, after the terrible tragedy in the Surrey Gardens, [See "Emotional Trial by ‘Fire!’"] I had to go away into the country and keep quite still. The very sight of the Bible made me cry. I could only keep alone in the garden and I was heavy and sad, for people had been killed and there I was, half dead, myself.
And I remember how I got back my comfort and I preached on the Sabbath after I recovered. I had been walking round the garden and I was standing under a tree. If it is there now, I should know it and I remember these words— "Him has God exalted with His right hand to be a Prince and a Savior." "Oh," I thought to myself, "I am only a common soldier. If I die in a ditch, I do not care. The King is honored. He wins the victory." And I was like those French soldiers in the old times who loved the emperor—and you know how, when they were dying, if he rode by, the wounded man would raise himself up on his elbow and cry once more, _"Vive l’ Empereu_r!" for the emperor was engraved on his heart! And so, I am sure, it is with everyone of you, my Brothers, in this holy war! If our Lord and King is exalted, then let other things go which way they like. If He is exalted, never mind what becomes of us. We are a set of pigmies—it is all right if He is exalted! God’s Truth is safe. We are perfectly willing to be forgotten, derided, slandered, or anything else that men please. The cause is safe and the King is on the Throne. Hallelujah! Blessed be His name! Amen.
MR. SPURGEON UPDATE:
Another anxious week has passed, and by the blessing of the Lord upon the means used, MR. SPURGEON’S life is still spared. United and almost universal prayer for his complete recovery has continued to be offered and, at the time that this sermon is sent to the printers, there appears to be a slight improvement in the dear sufferer’s condition which is still very critical. MRS. SPURGEON and the other members of the family, as well as the Church at the Tabernacle, are very grateful for all the sympathy that has found expression in various ways. And they entreat all Believers to continue pleading for MR. SPURGEON’S full restoration, if it is the Lord’s will.