The Yearning of the Holy Spirit
Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth (John 17:17).
As we continue with our study of the work of the Holy Spirit in our sanctification, let me remind you that we have seen clearly that we must never isolate this doctrine and regard it as something separate and distinct. The Holy Spirit has been sent and is among us to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ, and we must never think of sanctification and holiness apart from him. We saw, secondly, how the Holy Spirit guided the ‘holy men of God’ as they wrote the Scriptures, and kept them from error; and then we considered together how he works in us through the word.
Let us proceed, then, from that point, but let me remind you that we are not here considering the whole doctrine of the Holy Spirit. We know something of the work of the Spirit in creation, and in many other respects, but we are now concerned in particular with the work of the Holy Spirit in sanctification, and are confining our attention to that.
So we come once more to the question of how the Holy Spirit carries out this work in us. I need scarcely remind you that it is a subject which has often been misunderstood and has often led to disagreement. It has provoked much discussion and has produced many errors and heresies in the Christian church, and still tends to do so. It is, indeed, as has often been pointed out, a very remarkable thing that this truth, which of all others was meant to demonstrate unity, has perhaps caused more division than any other particular aspect of the truth. It was the Holy Spirit who produced that great and amazing unity on the Day of Pentecost. On that day, men of different nations were all made one by this power, and yet, since then, because of the misunderstanding of the doctrine, it has often led not only to disagreement, but even to schism. We must therefore approach it with caution, and be very careful to allow the Scriptures to speak to us.
I would suggest to you that an important principle stands out very clearly in scriptural teaching with regard to this subject. This is that the Holy Spirit dwells within all Christians. Now this is a most important point. There are people who would have you believe that you can be a Christian without receiving the Holy Spirit. But that is thoroughly unscriptural. I would affirm once more that it is impossible for us to be Christians at all without having the Holy Spirit in us. Let me give you some of the Scriptures which assert this. In 1 Corinthians 12:3 we read, ‘No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.’ No man can really say; it does not just mean that you say it with your lips, because obviously a blasphemer and unbeliever could utter these words – but if when he says it a man really means it, then that man can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ only by the Holy Spirit. But the Apostle is still more explicit in Romans 8:9: ‘If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his.’ Now there we have a categorical statement to the effect that if a man does not have the Holy Spirit of Christ within him, he is not a Christian at all, and does not belong to Christ. So it is surely the height of folly, and a complete error, to suggest that one can be a Christian and then later receive the Holy Spirit – we cannot be Christians at all apart from the Holy Spirit, and his work in us and upon us.
But let me give you some more passages, for this is a vital subject. In 1 Corinthians 12:13 the Apostle teaches, ‘For by one Spirit are we all baptised into one body.’ Christians are members of the body of Christ; ‘Ye,’ he says in 1 Corinthians 12:27, addressing the church, addressing Christians, ‘Ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.’ Thus, to be a Christian means to be a part of the body of Christ, and how does this happen to us? The answer is: ‘By one Spirit are we all baptised into one body.’ In other words, the point we are emphasising is that by definition, we cannot be Christian at all except the Holy Spirit should thus have put us into this one body of Christ.
Then again, in 1 Corinthians 6:19 the Apostle Paul says: ‘What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?’ He is writing there to the members of the church at Corinth, not to some of them, but to all of them, and he is writing about a most unpleasant and unsavoury subject. He is particularly warning them against the sin of fornication, of which some of them had been guilty, and his argument is: This is impossible, you must not do this. Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and for this reason you cannot be joined in that way to a harlot? He reminds these members of the church at Corinth, many of whom were guilty of such extraordinary sins and weaknesses, that even their bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit which God has given them and that, therefore, the Holy Spirit is in them. Our Lord had promised this particularly. He had promised his disciples that if they believed in him, he would give them the Holy Spirit.
But let me give you one more quotation, which again is very striking, and this time it is found in James 4:5. In the Authorised Version it reads like this: ‘The Spirit that dwelleth in us lusteth to envy’, but I think it is generally agreed that that is not the best translation at that point. It ought to be put like this: The Spirit which he made to dwell in us yearneth over us even unto jealous envy.’ The point I am emphasising at this moment is ‘the Spirit that he made to dwell in us’ – again, a statement that the Holy Spirit is resident in all Christian people.
I could give you other quotations, but let those be sufficient. The point I am anxious to establish, and you will appreciate what an important one it is, is that we must lay down the basic position that it is impossible to be a Christian at all unless the Holy Spirit is in us; for to be a Christian means that the Holy Spirit has taken up his abode in us. Or take the way John puts it. He says in chapter 2:17 of his first epistle that all Christians have received the anointing of the Holy Spirit. John’s epistle is to all Christians, and their understanding is dependent upon the fact that they have received the anointing, they have received this gift which the Lord Jesus Christ promised that he himself would give to all who believe in him.
So, then, if that proposition is true, we can proceed to ask our vital question: how does the Holy Spirit do this work of sanctification within us? Now here we find two remarkable, scriptural, statements. I have already quoted one of them, James 4:5, and I want to put this very plainly. The Authorised Version, you remember, says, ‘The Spirit that dwelleth in us lusteth to envy,’ but I have suggested that a better translation is, ‘The Spirit which he made to dwell in us yearneth over us even unto a jealous envy.’ Then I want to take with that verse a statement made in Galatians 5:17 where we read that ‘the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.’
Now there, it seems to me, is the basic position with regard to the work of the Holy Spirit in our sanctification. We are told that the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us by the Lord Jesus Christ, has been given in order that he may produce our sanctification. It is thus that God sanctifies us. In the first place, we are told that the Holy Spirit within us is yearning for our sanctification with a jealous envy. Look at it like this. The Holy Spirit comes into us, but by nature, and as a result of sin and the Fall, we are fleshly, we are all creatures of lust, and not only lust of the flesh but also of the mind. That is the teaching of the apostle Paul in Ephesians 2:3; we were all, he says, subject to these lusts and we all know this very well from experience. We are governed by passions; there are lusts and there are desires within us, and of course the world and the flesh and the devil play an equal part. There are these promptings, these desires, these evil powers within us striving for mastery over us.
Then into all that comes the Holy Spirit of God, and the Holy Spirit is a Person. He is not a mere power, nor just an influence, but a Person. Our Lord, you remember, told the disciples just as he was leaving them, ‘Let not your heart be troubled...’ I am going to leave you but, ‘I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter’ (Jn 14:1, 16), another Person and he will do certain things for you and to you.
So these two statements tell us that as the flesh is there lusting within us and drawing us away from God, and into sin and evil, so the Holy Spirit is yearning for us, desiring the mastery over us, desiring to control us, desiring us for God and for Christ. He yearns over us, he desires us – the word that is really used is ‘lusteth’ – even to a jealous envy. In other words, the Spirit of God, and of Christ, and the Holy Spirit, the three Persons in the blessed Holy Trinity, desire us. The Holy Spirit sees these evil influences in us and he hates them, and is yearning to deliver us from them and to set us on the other side. The Holy Spirit is opposed to everything that represents the world and the flesh and the devil. He is against everything in us that is opposed to God, and his work within us is to deliver us from these evil things and to emancipate us from them in order to make us what God intends us to be, and to accomplish what the Lord Jesus Christ has died for.
There, then, is the great truth, and to me it is one of the most comforting, consoling and wonderful truths that a Christian can ever discover; that as a Christian I no longer just live to myself, I have the Holy Spirit dwelling within me, lusting, striving, yearning, that there is this blessed conflict. Indeed, unless we know something about this conflict we obviously are not Christians at all, for it is there in every Christian. Once we were only the flesh, now we are spirit and flesh and these two are opposed to one another. There is the flesh dragging us, drawing us down, and the Spirit drawing us up. There is a fight going on within, because the Holy Spirit has come into us to reside within us, and God does this work of sanctification within us, through this energy and activity, through this longing of the Spirit within us.
So now, if that is the great general principle of the Holy Spirit’s work in us, how does he do it in particular? We can divide his method up very simply. The first thing he does is to call our attention to the truth, all of the truth which we have been considering, the amazing truth about the being and the character and the nature of God, and, too, the truth about sin. We can never know the truth about God, and about sin, until we find it in this word of God. It is the Spirit who gave the word and it is he who leads us to it, to this great word about the Lord Jesus Christ, his Person and his work – it is the Spirit that leads us to that. By nature I am not interested in those things. By nature I like to read the newspaper, all the detailed reports of the Law Courts, and about what the world is doing with all its gaiety and pleasure. I do not want to read this word, but the Spirit leads me to it. His work is to glorify Christ, to reveal him and all the other great and rich doctrines that we have been studying – it is the Spirit who calls my attention to the word, and who goes on drawing my attention to it for every detail of my life.
It is the Spirit, also, who shows me my position as a Christian: this extraordinary doctrine of my being placed in Christ, of my relationship to Christ as a branch in the vine, I in Christ and Christ in me. No man could think of that or discover it, and no man has ever done so. It is the Spirit who leads on to these things, and it is extraordinary, as we examine our experience, to see how he does that. Has this not often surprised you? Here we are, we have had an open Bible before us all our lives, with all these rich truths and doctrines; and yet must we not all admit, as we look back across our lives to having this kind of experience. One day we read a passage, and suddenly we were led to see some great truth, but then we seemed to stop there, we did not do anything about it. Years passed by, and then one day that truth dawned upon us again and we were called to see it and to act upon it. It is always the work of the Spirit: he presents the truth to us. Sometimes we brush it aside and show that we are not interested in it, but he keeps on bringing it back – not only directly by the word but by a book, maybe, that someone brings to our notice. It is all the work of the Spirit. He puts the truth before us, he presents it and shows us these great possibilities that are there for us.
Furthermore, we must not stay even with that. The Holy Spirit not only puts the truth before us and leads us to it, it is he alone who enables us to understand the truth. Now that is the great theme of 1 Corinthians 2, a vital passage in this connection. The Apostle writes there that ‘The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned’ (1 Cor 2:14). He comes to us: ‘We have received, not the spirit that is of the world, but the spirit which is of God’ – why? – ‘that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God’ (v. 12), and we will never know these things apart from the anointing of the Holy Spirit. You can talk to the natural man at his highest and his best, you can talk to the world’s greatest intellect and greatest philosopher, you can ask him to read the New Testament, and as a natural man he will know nothing about it. He will understand nothing at all about this amazing doctrine of what is possible to the Christian, for he cannot do so until he receives the Holy Spirit.
Then you may go to him and tell him about this wonderful truth – about the Christian being in Christ and Christ in the Christian – but to him it will be idle nonsense, mere rubbish, a fairy tale. He cannot receive it because he has not the gift of the Holy Spirit. We can only know these things that are given to us of God, and by God, as we have the Holy Spirit within us; these things are foolishness to the natural man, because his way of life consists only of amassing knowledge of truth and philosophy and then proceeding to apply it. That may be his idea, but it is not that of Scripture. The scriptural idea is to be baptised into Christ like the branch in the vine, and the love of Christ comes into us and fills us and does these wonderful things in us and through us. To the natural man that is foolishness, but we have the mind of Christ.
So we see that the Holy Spirit works in two ways. He leads me to the word, and then he does something to me which enables me to receive it. Thus it is that he goes on working within us, yearning with this jealous envy that we may be sanctified, and as I am led by him, I begin to understand this truth and to realise it. We see in Ephesians 3 that the apostle Paul was praying for the Ephesians that they might be ‘filled with all the fulness of God’ (v. 19), and as I realise that I am meant to be filled in that way, I begin to desire this and to hunger and thirst after it – but I would never have done so if the Holy Spirit had not been working within me. He leads me to the truth and then I desire it, and begin to long for it. Then I seek for it, and I hunger and thirst after righteousness. That is the method of the Spirit, and that is something of his procedure.
Let me remind you again of those well-known words in Philippians 2:12-13. The apostle Paul says, you remember, ‘Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.’ That is a great statement. Let me give it to you again in a still better translation: God is one who through his Spirit is constantly supplying you with the impulse, giving you both the power to resolve, and the will and the strength to perform, from his good pleasure. He does it all. We must work it out with ‘fear and trembling’; we do not remain passive but we work only because he is working in us the desire to work it out, and he gives us the power to do so.
And, finally, I would like to put it in this way – have you noticed the remarkable prayer of the Apostle in Ephesians 3, beginning at verse 14? Read it once more: ‘For this ... cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.’
What does that mean? Let me put it simply like this. The real need, of course, of every Christian is that Christ may dwell in our hearts by faith; that is the extraordinary thing which he again promises. He has said to the disciples: It is good for you that I go away, but if I go away I will send him unto you.
This is why the Comforter comes. The astounding thing that the Scripture offers me is that the Lord Jesus Christ should come and dwell in me here on earth. How can he do this? Knowing myself as I am, and what I am, as the result of sin and the Fall, I say it is impossible, and it is impossible apart from the work of the Holy Spirit, who strengthens me with his own power in the inner man, in order that Christ may dwell in my heart by faith. What a wonderful picture this is! The work of the Holy Spirit in men is to prepare a home for the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the servant who is sent along to prepare the palace for the King, to put it in order, to make everything fit and meet, to get rid of all that is unworthy. That is his purpose. The supreme height of sanctification and of holiness is that Christ dwells in us, living his life in us and through us. ‘I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me’ (Gal 2:20) – that is the height of Christian achievement.
And this is how it becomes possible. We need to be strengthened by might, by the Holy Spirit, in the inner man, in order that Christ may dwell in our hearts by faith, so that Christ may take up his abode with us as a permanent guest – not come and go, but abide – settle down. Here in Ephesians 3:17 the Apostle is repeating Jesus’ own word, and it is the Holy Spirit that makes that possible.
So we end as we began, by pointing out that all this must be thought of in terms of Persons. We must not think of our sanctification in terms of gifts or experience or anything like that. It is really being made fit and ready to receive the Lord Jesus Christ as the permanent guest in our hearts and in our inner man; and it is the Holy Spirit who does that work. He covets us for Christ, he yearns over us, and longs for us, ‘he yearneth over us even unto jealous envy’ that we may be Christ’s and not the world’s. And what he desires above everything else is that he may so deal with us and so work in us that we shall be ready to receive this heavenly guest himself, and he does that in the ways that I have been describing to you. He leads us to the truth, he enables us to receive it, giving us a longing and a hunger for it. He also gives us the power to do that. He undertakes for us and so he prepares us to receive the Lord Jesus Christ. That, then, is the work of the Holy Spirit, that is what he is yearning for and longing for us. Therefore, surely it comes to this: our greatest concern should be to conform to that and to allow the Spirit to do all his work in us.