Far too many communities of contempor-ary Western evangelicals are in a parlous state: some are captive to right-wing pol-itical ideologies (especially in the United States); others, if the truth be told, are dubious about any real success of the gos-pel in a secular state; while yet others are being consumed by faddishness in their pursuit of being relevant.
All of these various groups, indeed all of us, desperately need to realise our great need of the Holy Spirit, without whom we can do nothing of real spiritual value and without whom we can never hope to flourish. And here the Victorian preacher C.H. Spurgeon can help us enormously.
The necessity of the Spirit
During 1859, when a powerful revival swept through much of Great Britain, Spurgeon preached a series of sermons on what are sometimes referred to as ‘the five points of Calvinism’. He was firmly convinced that the proclamation of these doctrines would help further the revival that was then under way.
One of these sermons, entitled ‘The Necessity of the Spirit’s Work’, begins by sketching the biblical teaching on men and women outside of Christ: they are dead in sin, ‘utterly and entirely averse to everything that is good and right’, totally unwilling to come to Christ. Only the Spirit, Spurgeon avers, can remedy this situation; he alone can change the will, ‘correct the bias of the heart’, set men and women on the right road and ‘give [them] strength to run in it’.
When Spurgeon turns to examine the means by which the Spirit brings men and women to Christ (for instance, the preaching of the word) and the means by which he takes them on to maturity (for example, baptism and the Lord’s Supper), he finds that all of these means are completely inadequate unless the Spirit deigns to use them. Indeed, Spurgeon stresses, until the Spirit calls the unbeliever out of darkness into the light of God’s kingdom, his or her ‘election is a dead letter’.
Likewise, the redemption accomplished by the Lord Jesus is of no avail, until the Spirit applies Christ’s redemptive work to the soul.
Spurgeon says: ‘Christ’s blood and righteousness are like wine stored in the wine-vat; but we cannot get thereat. The Holy Spirit dips our vessel into this precious wine, and then we drink; but without the Spirit we must die and perish just as much, though the Father elect and the Son redeem, as though the Father had never elected, and as though the Son had never bought us with his blood. The Spirit is absolutely necessary. Without him neither the works of the Father, nor of the Son, are of any avail to us.’
Spurgeon concludes this sermon by stressing that the vital necessity of the Spirit’s work in the believer does not come to an end at conversion; for ‘the acceptable acts of the Christian’s life cannot be performed without the Spirit’.
‘Come, Holy Spirit, come’
Four years on, preaching on Acts 2, Spurgeon re-emphasised ‘how absolutely necessary is the presence and power of the Spirit’.
He says: ‘It is not possible for us to promote the glory of God or to bless the souls of men, unless the Holy Ghost shall be in us and with us. Those who were assembled on that memorable day of Pentecost, were all men of prayer and faith; but even these precious gifts are only available when the celestial fire sets them on a blaze. … even these favoured and honoured saints can do nothing without the breath of God the Holy Ghost. … if so it was with them, much more must it be the case with us. Let us beware of trusting to our well-adjusted machineries of committees and schemes; let us be jealous of all reliance upon our own mental faculties or religious vigour; let us be careful that we do not look too much to our leading preachers and evangelists, for if we put any of these in the place of the Divine Spirit, we shall err most fatally’.
This absolute need of the Spirit on the part of the church and of the individual believer is a constant refrain in Spurgeon’s sermons and writings over the next 29 years until his death in 1892.
For instance, in a sermon preached in 1864 on ‘The Superlative Excellence of the Holy Spirit’, he challenges his hearers: ‘Do not say that we want money; we shall have it soon enough when the Spirit touches men’s hearts. Do not say that we want buildings, churches, edifices; all these may be very well in subserviency, but the main want of the church is the Spirit, and men into whom the Spirit may be poured.
Spurgeon was thus constrained to stop preaching in the middle of the sermon and pray out loud: ‘Come, Holy Spirit, come, we can do nothing without thee; but if we have thy wind, we spread our sail, and speed onward towards glory’.
Oh that every evangelical pulpit would pray thus and that God would be pleased to answer!
