THE BELIEVER’S NEED OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.

The fact thus Jesus came is the divine evidence that the world needed Him. The fact that the Holy Spirit came is also the divine evidence that the church needed Him.

I am just as optimistic as it is lawful to be, but I see that the New Testament Christian life and the actual average Christian life do not agree.

The Holy Spirit is needed in the church — more to day than ever — because without the Holy Spirit the vision is too dim; without the Spirit the life is too feeble; without the Spirit the holiness is too defective; without the Spirit the power of the church is inadequate; without the Holy Spirit the love of the church is too selfish and limited, in fact, nothing can be done without Him.

I. The Holy Spirit is needed in revival meetings.

He is needed in the singing so that we will sing for Jesus and not for self — sing to save the people and not to show our voices; He is needed in the praying, so we will pray in the Spirit and not from memory, or habit, or from the prayer book. So we can pray to God and not to the public.

We had an hour for prayer in a meeting in Nebraska and next day one man said there was “no sense in what you asked us to do yesterday/’ “I went to my room shut the door, put my watch on the chair and kneeled down to pray, and after I had prayed for everybody I looked and it was only 2 minutes and 30 seconds. No sense in praying an hour.”

The Holy Spirit is needed in testimony so we can speak unto men for edification and exhortation and consolation.

He is needed in the preaching, so we will know what to preach — and can say with Paul I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much-trembling, and my speech and my preaching was in the demonstration of the Spirit and power.

II. He is needed in the church to convict the world of sin.

The church is largely at sea on how to convict sinners of sin.

1. The laymen think the preachers are to do it and the preachers are told to preach on Hell and the torments of the damned.

2. Preach on the Law for people do not know the demands of the Law of God.

3. Preach on the Judgment Day, when every man will give an account of the deeds done in the body.

4. Preach against popular amusements, card playing, dancing and theater going.

5. Preach on the unpardonable sin, or preach on the Love of God.

6. Let us ask Jesus how we shall convict sinners; He will say, “when He is come, He will convict the world of sin!’ He will use everything to do it, tears, voices, songs, prayers, testimonies, sermons of every kind, sermons on every subject. Edwards preached on sinners in the hands of an angry God and sinners were converted by the hundred. He will use a salutation. A rich man in Cleveland was mowing his lawn when a poor man with his dinner pail went by and he said, Good morning, sir, Good morning. The poor man said to himself: He spoke so friendly, he must be a Christian, and the last thing mother said to me was, she wished I would be a Christian; and all day he was troubled and the next morning he stopped at the rich man's house to see how he could become a Christian. A man in Philadelphia looked at another man, stared at him, thought he knew him, but found he did not. The next week the man met him on the street, and said, I want to tell you that you have saved me, and now I am a Christian. When I met you last week, I had $1,500 in my arms and I was going to Canada, but I saw your eyes and I said, there is an honest man and I will be one too, and I took the money back and am a Christian man to-day.

III. We need the Holy Spirit to transform our hearts after we are converted, and endue us with power to have victory. The church is not bad, it lacks, it lacks courage, it lacks love, it lacks peace, forgiveness, purity and power. To-day there is a deep feeling among Christian people that God’s ideal of a Christian life and the real state of the church do not agree. There are thousands of Christians that are beginning the Christian life and their experiences are very little better than stumbling and rising. Their circumstances are not propitious for growth and development. They are not living in Christian conventions, or conferences, or revival meetings, and they do not have that triumph that they expected to have when they began the life. These thousands of Christians are longing to please God. They want to live in conformity to his will, they want to walk worthy of their vocation, but it has hardly dawned upon their minds that it is really possible for Christians to please God while they dwell in the flesh. It has hardly dawned upon their minds that this victory and this triumph comes through the Pentecostal baptism with the Holy Spirit. The carnal mind is not like dust on the furniture or drift wood on a stream of water — but it is interlocked, interwoven intertwined in our moral and spiritual nature and can only be removed by the Holy Spirit.

It is acknowledged among Christian people that the Holy Spirit is not recognized, is not known in the church to-day as God has intended that He should be known among His people. In the preaching and in the practice there is not that close relation and dependence upon the Holy Spirit that God has declared in His word that there should be, and it is generally acknowledged that Christian people are not living thoroughly consecrated lives.

When God speaks about His children, He says very strange and beautiful things about them. He says that the “righteous are as bold as a lion,,, and that “they are without fear.” He says that they are “watchmen that have no fear in the night,” that they are “soldiers, faint, yet pursuing.” He says that they are “workmen that need not be ashamed,” that they shall “stand before kings and fear none of the things that shall happen to them,” that “one shall chase a thousand and two shall put ten thousand to flight.” He says that “when they are in prison they shall rejoice,” and “count it joy when they fall into divers temptations.”

Now when we seek for living examples of what God has said, there is a lack of harmony, aye, there is discord, and how to account for this discord or this lack of harmony is the question. When we look at Christian people we find them — hesitating to do their duty, we find that they are very timid, they are afraid they will offend people. We find that they are driven from one experience to another, tossed about with divers temptations; they become angry or irritable; sometimes they become revengeful or censorious and faultfinding, they are self-willed and stubborn, they yield to almost any of the temptations that come to them, and while they are dissatisfied with doing these things, still they have a conviction that they have to do them.

We find, that instead of being “brave as lions,” “bearding the lion in his den.” “not hesitating to stand before kings,” that they are like sheep that are lost. They are like the “reed that is shaken by the wind,” they are like lambs that have been torn by wolves. They have hands, but their hands are hanging down a deal of the time; they have faces, but their faces are not like flint; they are timid, easily abashed; they have to be coaxed and petted, or they will go back to the world.

IV. Then again the work we have to do is impossible without a supernatural power. The church is sent to do a great work in the world. This work cannot be done unless the mighty Spirit of God is in us to do it. The church is not a political party to have cards signed and get votes enough to elect the Kingdom of God; when people get into the church by signing cards, they usually play cards after they are in; the church is not a fraternity in which we will be “urbane in deportment, courteous in expression and steadfast in friendship,” and let the outside world go to the devil. It is not an educational movement, a financial reform, a temperance reform or a social reform, but it is a New Creation. “Beloved, if any man is in Christ Jesus, he is a new creature. Old things have passed away, behold all things are become new.” A man cannot make himself anew, or regenerate a brother and make him new. A minister has not the power, a layman has not the power to save a man by his own strength. We might as well talk of a man creating Halley’s comet, as to talk about creating a man anew. The human heart is not to be changed or refined by human influence. There must be a supernatural power accompanying the word of God and dwelling in the believer, if he is to succeed in doing the work that is needed in unsaved men.

This work is called a resurrection from the dead.

“You hath he quickened who were dead in trespasses and sins.” There is not power in man to raise a dead body. So there is no power in man to raise a dead soul; a soul that is dead in trespasses and sin cannot be resurrected by the will of man, or the will of the flesh, but only by the Spirit of God.

The Bible does not say that a sinful man is sick, or sleepy, or stupid, or that he is suffering from a disease, that he is cauterized or calloused, or seared or something of that kind. The Bible says the man is dead — dead in trespasses and sins and the sooner we come to understand this as God sees it, the better it will be for us. Whatever death means to the body in its relation to life, it means to the soul in its relation to God. When a man can go to the grave, open it and call forth the dead, then he might talk about saving a soul. The thing to be done is beyond the ability of all the men on the face of the earth, unless there comes to us a supernatural power.

V. We need the Holy Spirit because of the enemies we have to oppose.

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in heavenly places!”

This is not a battle against flesh and blood. It is not simply one man contending with another. We are not fighting against humanity. We are fighting against principalities, against powers and against wicked spirits. The foes you have to meet every day are not merely foes in human shape. They have no sympathy, no mercy, no compassion. The enemies you have to meet, are not human, they are diabolical powers. So that there is great need for us to have the entire preparation that God can give us. Who is sufficient for these things?

How can we go forward and do this work, how can we meet the enemy, saving men that are dead in trespasses and sins, lifting them up out of their deadness and bringing them to God, with such foes trying to thwart our efforts, unless there comes to us a mighty enduement of the Holy Spirit?

VI. Jesus received this baptism.

Luke 3, 21-22. “Now, when all the people were baptized, it came to pass^that Jesus also, being baptized, and praying, the heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon Him, and a voice came from heaven which said, ‘Thou art my beloved Son in thee I am well pleased.’”

If Jesus needed to be baptized with the Holy Spirit in order to carry out His work, is it possible that any believer can do his work and accomplish his full mission in life without this special baptism? Jesus came on purpose to save man. He was the eternal Son of God. He knew what the work was, before He came. He told his mother in the early part of his life that He “must be about His Father’s business.” He knew the enemies He had to meet. He knew the work that had to be done in the redemption of the world. And yet if this same Son of God, had gone away from this world before the baptism of the Holy Spirit came upon Him, He would not have been known today. With all His power and all His purpose, He still needed to receive the anointing of the Holy Spirit. He defeated the devil in the wilderness, preached the things of the Kingdom, performed the mighty miracles, by the power of the Holy Spirit. How can we expect to enter upon our mission and take our place without this same anointing upon us?

VII. We need the Holy Spirit because it is the command of Jesus.

“And being assembled together with them, commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father which, saith He, ye have heard of me.”

I take it for granted that the command of Jesus presupposes an absolute necessity. It was not a freak of authority when He commanded His disciples to tarry for the enduement of power, but it was because of an absolute necessity the Lord sealed the mouths of His disciples and did not allow them to preach a single sermon about His salvation until they were endued with the Holy Spirit.

They had been with Him for three years. They had seen His miracles. They had been intimate with His life. They had known His teaching. They had known His suffering and His resurrection. Yet they were not allowed to tell about Jesus, about His birth, or His life, about His miracles and His sufferings on the cross, about His death, and His resurrection until they received the Holy Spirit.

Peter could have preached Jesus. He could say many things we cannot say. He could say, “Oh, yes, I know this man Christ. He came into my house once and put His hand upon my wife’s mother who was sick of a fever and the fever left her. I know He has power over diseases. Another time four people brought a sick man into my house. They let him down through the roof, and I saw Jesus heal him and heard Him say, ‘Arise’, and the man took up his bed and went away. I was with Him in the wilderness, when He performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes, feeding five thousand men besides women and children. I was in Jairus’ house when they laughed Him 1 to scorn and He put them all out but her parents and took us into the room and took hold of the child’s hand and brought her back to life again. I was with Jesus when He cried with a loud voice at the grave of Lazarus and the grave was opened and Lazarus came forth and was restored to his sisters and his home. I was with Him in the garden. I was with Him when the sweat ran down from His brow as drops of blood. I was with Him in the cruel trial. I shall never forget the look He gave me when the cock crew. How He looked on me in compassion when I had denied Him. How can I forget when the sun hid its face and the veil of the temple was rent? I ran to the tomb with John early in the morning. He was not there. I will not forget how He met me alone. I will never forget the words that He gave me when we met together after the resurrection. I was present when Thomas said, ‘My Lord and my God.’”

And yet Peter was not prepared, Peter was not ready to preach. Is it possible that any of us may have the idea that we can go on in our work and do what God wants us to do in our business, in our homes, in society, and bear the testimony we ought to bear, without the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

The disciples were converted men. They were born of God. Their names were written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. They had kept the word of God. Jesus said, the Holy Spirit was with them and should be in them.

Yet, if they had gone forth, without the Spirit, not obeying the command to tarry at Jerusalem, the world would not have heard of them, and there would not have been a single convert to Jesus of Nazareth.