The New Birth and It's Aftermath

Regeneration, or the New Birth, is a change wrought within the soul by the power of the Holy Ghost, creating within the soul a new spiritual life, a life of loyalty and love.

By nature men are the children of wrath. They are spiritually dead. The faith faculty exists, but is in a paralysis so far as spiritual objects are concerned. The divine life begins with the seed of God implanted in the soul. This is the new principle of love. "For the love of God is shed abroad in the heart by the Holy Ghost." [Romans 5:5] The phrase "love of God" may signify either God's love to me or my love to God. In this quotation it has the former meaning. The Scriptures teach us that God is love. But this is not enough to give me assurance of his favor so long as I read that he is angry with the wicked every day. Therefore, so long as I have a tormenting sense of guilt, I must be filled with painful forebodings till I have a positive and personal assurance that I am taken out of the class of the condemned, and am reconciled to God, who loves me, even me.

How Could Jesus Be Tempted?

QUESTION: Could Jesus be tempted in all points like as we are tempted without a sinful nature?

ANSWER: Exegetes disagree about the limitation of the phrase "without sin." Some say the temptation left Christ without sin; others say it found him without any inclination to sin and left him sinless. They say this phrase "without sin" is an expressed exception to the words "all points." Jesus was tempted, as we are in all points save one, having inherited no evil inclination. Yet his temptation was real because he was human, possessing those susceptibilities, which pure in themselves, may without the resistance of the free will, be incited to sin.  If this is objected to because it implies the possibility that the Son of God might have sinned, we reply that it was certain that he would not sin, just as certain that God will never sin. There is a great difference between certainty and necessity. God is a free agent. He has a conscience which discerns the distinctions between right and wrong, and he invariably cleaves to the right. This brings us to the ground of moral obligation. He who says God does a thing because it is right stands on the foundation of James Arminius. He who says that a thing is right because God does it, that his will is the ground of right, and that he is a law unto himself, and that he can reverse the ten commandments, if he pleases, takes his stand with John Calvin.

— From Steele's Answers pp. 34, 35.

The Spirit Can Qualify You to Preach

QUESTION: Being filled with the Spirit and entirely sanctified, though without education, except the ability to read, I feel called to preach. Cannot the Holy Ghost qualify me for this work?

ANSWER: Yes, he can bless your attempts at a thorough mastery of the Word of God and the art of speaking. God sometimes takes "the weak things of the world to confound the mighty," as in the cases of Benjamin Abbott and Bud Robinson, whose experiences you should read. God helps those who help themselves. A knowledge of the Holy Scriptures and a heart experience of  Christ's saving power are two cardinal elements of success. In this age of brain-worship and excessive leaning on education God likes to skip the universities and endow an ungrammatical Moody with the power to reach and save the multitudes. Such an act shows the church that her power lies not in the dead languages but in the living Christ. If the whole world is to be speedily evangelized the whole church must become preachers by precept and example. Our streets are becoming full of people whose only Gospel is the Sunday newspaper. The harvest is truly great and the laborers — wholly consecrated — are few. Hence I feel like encouraging every saved person to consecrate his or her gift of speech to the salvation of all for whom Christ died. Don't wait for a license, but begin now from the tail of a plow or cart and from the side of the washtub or sewing machine. Tell everybody of Christ's great salvation, backing up the message with your own experience. This was the way in which Christianity triumphed over all its persecutors and mounted the throne of the Caesars in 300 years.

— From Steele's Answers pp. 33, 34.

Forbidden to Speak

QUESTION: My pastor has forbidden my speaking in the social meetings. What am I to do?

ANSWER: Perhaps you have unconsciously fallen into a censorious, fault-finding style. This is neither agreeable not edifying. If this is your habit, try to change by striking the key-note of praise and thanksgiving to God in your heart experiences. It is more safe to do this than to exhort.

— From Steele's Answers p. 33.

No Confidence in the Preacher?

QUESTION: I have no confidence in the piety of my preacher. What do you advise me to do?

ANSWER: Pray for him. Do not pray at him in public by asking the Lord to convert him. Pray for him in your closet. do not abandon the house of God because the preacher is not as pious as you wish he was. Attentively listen to his sermons and appropriate all the truth he utters. Do not imitate his example if you think his conduct is not right. This is the sum of Christ's advice in Matt. 23:2, 3, "All things whatsoever they bid you, these do and observe; but do not after their works; for they say and do not." John Wesley always attended the Church of England and attentively listened to men who excited mobs against him and his people.

— From Steele's Answers pp. 32, 33.

Conditional Immortality in Scripture?

QUESTION: Do these texts prove the doctrine of conditional immortality: (a) I Tim. 6:16, "Who only hath immortality" and (b) I Cor. 15:53-4, "And this mortal shall have put on immortality."

ANSWER:  (a) "God is said alone to have immortality, because he has it not from another's will, as other immortals have, but from his own essence" (Justin Martyr), "underived, independent immortality" (Wesley's note). (b) This is quoted from a chapter in which the future destiny of the righteous only is described. Paul believed in the resurrection of the unjust (Acts 24:15), as did Daniel in 12:2, and as Christ asserted in John 5:29. But Paul had no occasion to discuss the future of the unjust in this passage. Hence this omission does not disprove their endless existence. Study "eternal punishment" in Matt. 25:46 and Rev. 20:10, where two men "shall be tormented day and night forever and ever."

— From Steele's Answers pp. 31, 32.

God Has Begun to Save Everyone

God has begun to save every human soul.

He has already saved the entire race from the extinction threatened in the instantaneous execution of the death penalty upon Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden in the moment of their first transgression.

The remedial dispensation began with the promise that the Seed of the woman should bruise the serpent's head. The children of the pair banished from Eden, and fallen from their high estate, are born in the likeness of their sinful parents, with tremendous proclivities toward sin in the strength of their passions and the bent of their wills. Yet they come into being under the dispensation of mercy. They have a gracious ability to repent. They are saved from that complete moral inability which paralyses the will of the fallen angels in the direction of obedience to the moral law. This ability to resist the downward tendency of their nature, and to turn from sin, is, through the influences of the Holy Spirit, procured by Jesus Christ for all the race. "He will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgement."

Dr. Steele Discusses His Book "Love Enthroned"

This is the second in my ongoing series of necro-interviews with holiness writers of the past. Today our own Dr. Daniel Steele talks with us about his 1875 book Love Enthroned.

 

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Dr. Steele, in the era in which you lived there were many books written about the deeper Christian life (what followers of John Wesley call Entire Sanctification or Christian Perfection). Why did you feel there was a need for another?

For the same reason that I should preach another Gospel sermon.

Why should you read it? For the same reason that you should hear again "the old, old story of Jesus and His love."

Doesn't it still seem strange that so many books on this subject were written in your era?

Mary's Davidic Descent

QUESTION: Where in Scripture do we find proof that the mother of Jesus was of the seed of David?

ANSWER: In Luke's genealogy of Mary, the name of Joseph is substituted for hers, because it was not customary to write a woman's name in the list. Read Luke 3:23 thus, "Joseph the son-in-law of Heli."

—From Steele's Answers p. 31.

Sin & Law

QUESTION: Harmonize these verses, Rom. 5:13 and 14, "For until the law, sin was in the world; but sin is not imputed, when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression."

ANSWER: Adam sinned against an express, revealed command. There was no other command like this till the giving of the Decalogue after 2,500 years. But men continued to sin, by transgressing their own inward moral sense. This kind of sinning is not against any revealed command, as Adam's was; and for this reason it was not so severely punished by God, as Paul said to the Athenians, "The times of ignorance God overlooked." (Acts 17:30.)

— From Steele's Answers p. 31.

The Standing Miracle of Christianity

Our surprise is ever new when we discover that God so loves our entire race that he gave his well beloved Son to the humiliation of the manger, the mockery of Gabbatha, the agonies of Gethsemane, and the ignominy of Calvary. But this was but the beginning of his beneficence. Since the Son of God has gone up to be glorified and worshipped by all the celestial orders, the loving Father has bestowed an abiding gift, the Holy Spirit, to whisper in the ear of spiritual death the words of life, to pardon penitence, and fully restore the lost image of God. The greatest marvels of the gospel scheme are not in the facts of Christ's earthly life, death, and resurrection, but in the wondrous transformation wrought by the Holy Spirit in the soul of the believer who apprehends the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe. A less surprise is the fact that the eternal Logos should inseparably unite himself with a spotless human body and soul than that the Holy Spirit, co-equal with the Father and the Son, should first completely cleanse a polluted man, and then change his heart from a "cage of unclean birds" into "a holy temple" and make it the habitation of God. This is a mystery of mysteries with all who have experienced the love of God perfectly shed abroad in their hearts. The age of miracles is not past. Jesus changed unresisting water into wine, but the Holy Ghost transfigures the sinful soul bristling with antagonisms, transforming depravity to purity by the mighty alchemy of love. The power to effect such revolutions in character constitutes the standing miracle of Christianity. "Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree" — tenderness instead of cruelty — "instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle-tree" — the gentle graces instead of stinging hatreds — "and it shall be to the Lord for a name," indicating his nature, and "for an everlasting sign, that shall not be cut off." The Holy Ghost, holding up to the gaze of the world specimens of his sanctifying power in the form of purified characters and inspired activities for Christ, is the ceaseless miracle-worker attesting Christian truth in an age of intense materialism, selfishness, and unbelief. 

— From Love Enthroned, Chapter 1: "Love Revealed."

Is Immortality Conditional?

QUESTION: Is it true that immortality is conditioned on saving faith in Christ?

ANSWER: Some good people have fallen into this error. When they read annihilation into death and understand life to signify existence, or bare being, instead of well-being, they have a host of Scriptural proof-texts. Whereas there is no word in the Bible meaning annihilation. The Greek word  ἀπόλλυμι (apollumi), destroy, has not that meaning. If it has, we must translate Luke 15:24 thus, "He was annihilated and is found." "I am not sent but unto the annihilated sheep of the house of Israel" (Matt. 15:24). See also Luke 15:4, 6. The destruction of the organism does not destroy the agent for whom it was made. "Fear not them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul," etc. The doctrine of annihilation is inseparable from materialism. If the moral Governor of the universe is at last going to rid it of sin by annihilating sinners he would long ago have given assurance of it by annihilating the devil to prevent the spread of this dreadful contagion.

Spirits angelic, satanic and human are indestructible. Hence the infinitude of the divine sacrifice for their redemption.

— From Steele's Answers pp. 30, 31.

Be Fillled with the Holy Spirit

It is sometimes said that Christ's new commandment, "Love one another," is the eleventh commandment. In the same way we have the twelfth in Paul's mandatory precept, "Be filled with the Spirit" (Eph. v. 18). There is an error quite widely spread in the Church, that the baptism or fulness of the Spirit is not universally obligatory, but rather that it is an elective experience, a privilege and not an imperative duty.

We note that the passive voice, "be filled," implies that we cannot actively fill ourselves, but that the Spirit is present like the atmosphere and ready instantly to fill every vacuum. It is ours to create a vacuum by an unreserved self-surrender to Christ as both Saviour and Lord. This implies strong faith. In truth, faith is man's only capacity to receive God. He cannot enter us through the senses, for they report only material things; nor can the Spirit enter the soul through the reason, which apprehends only relations, not realities. Therefore faith is the only door by which the Spirit comes into the human spirit. Man, a spirit, is an image of God the Spirit. The creature is made for the occupancy of the Creator, and he finds his highest joy only when as a temple he is "the habitation of God through the Spirit."

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Turning to our Greek Testament we note that the command "Be filled with the Spirit" is in the present tense, denoting not a mechanical fulness once for all, but a vital fulness, a constant appropriation and a perpetual reception, a ceaseless drinking and a ceaseless thirst. Hence the paradox of Charles Wesley:

"Insatiate to this spring I fly;

I drink, and yet am ever dry."

— From The Gospel of the Comforter (1898) Chapter 31.

The Day of Judgement

QUESTION: Is it Scriptural to teach that at death the righteous are rewarded and the wicked punished?

ANSWER: Rewards and punishments are administered at the day of Judgment. But the natural consequences of righteous or wicked conduct, happiness or misery ensue immediately, the righteous having present joy and glorious anticipations, and the wicked are stung with remorse and are foreboding the punishment which awaits them, like the murderer in jail awaiting his trial and sentence. There is a great difference between the natural consequences of a wicked life and its punishment. No one has yet experienced the punishment due to his sins. Nor has any saint yet experienced the fullness of joy which will follow the "Come ye blessed." The righteous dead are happy. "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord." They are in the vestibule of heaven awaiting the resurrection when their felicity will be supreme. The wicked dead are miserable (II Pet. 2:9, Jude 6). For the happiness of the righteous after death see Luke 23:42, II Cor. 5:6, Phil. 1:23.

— From Steele's Answers pp. 29, 30.

The Secret of the Success of the Early Methodists

Since Methodism is really no narrow sect, but what Chalmers styled "Christianity in earnest," we shall not be blamed for divulging the open secret of the early success of that spiritual uprising, which has quickened the pulse of our common Christianity throughout the world. Listen, and I will disclose that secret, for we have not taken out a patent right, and do not intend to. The secret of American Methodism is not in its doctrines. Arminius had lived and fought his great battle with Calvinism, and died ninety-four years before Wesley was born. In theology, Wesley simply adhered to the Arminian section of the Church of England. Nor is that secret to be found in the unique ecclesiasticism which this spiritual movement took on. The spirit existed before it embodied itself in a form. What is the essential characteristic of that spirit?

A young man of thirty-three, a presbyter of the Church of England, a fellow of Lincoln College and a Greek lecturer at Oxford, in 1736 went to the colony, of Georgia as a missionary. Stepping on the shore at Savannah, one of the first men he met was the Moravian elder, August Gottlieb Spangenberg. Wesley asked his advice how to act in his new sphere of labor. Spangenberg replied, " My brother, I must first ask you one or two questions. Have you the witness within yourself? Does the Spirit of God bear witness with your spirit that you are a child of God?" Wesley was surprised at such questions. They were new to him. He was at a loss how to answer. The Moravian continued, "Do you know Jesus Christ?" This was easier, and the Oxford priest replied, "I know he is the Saviour of the world." "True," said Spangenberg, "but do you know he has saved you?" This question is the seed-germ of Methodism. For two years it lay germinating in the heart of Wesley as a mystery. "Do you know that Jesus Christ saves you? " Then in an evening Moravian meeting in Aldersgate Street, London, while a person was reading that faith alone justifies, in the preface to Luther's Epistle to the Romans, Wesley experienced an amazing change. "I felt my heart strangely warmed, and an assurance was given me that Christ had taken away my sins, even mine. And I then testified openly to all there what I now first felt in my heart."

Here is the secret. An assurance of sins forgiven and an open testimony before all. In other words, it is the rising of the day-star in the heart, and the opening of the mouth in confession. It is the immediate contact of the Holy Spirit with the human soul, affording a certainty beyond a doubt of pardon and adoption into the family of God.

This doctrine, written in all the evangelical creeds of Protestant Christendom, but lying dead and inoperative, or taught as the privilege of a select few, Wesley published to the vicious and neglected masses of colliers, sailors, soldiers, operatives and peasants; flying like the angel of the Apocalypse, over England, Scotland and Ireland, preaching Jesus a living, present and conscious Saviour, in forty-four thousand sermons.

This great privilege of the direct witness of the Spirit I gladly proclaim to you. You may each ever have within your own bosom a satisfactory and joyful assurance that Christ Jesus is your personal, present and perfect Saviour. The path to that blessed experience is not made by proud philosophy, but by humble faith. "Said I not unto thee, that if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God?"

— From Jesus Exultant, Chapter 8.

Where Is the Print of the Nails?

Roman Catholic legends often embody some important truth. It is said of St. Martin of Tours that once, while meditating in his cell, there appeared a form radiant with beauty, crowned with a jeweled diadem, with a countenance glorious and persuasive, and a manner so austere that it seemed to require homage and love. This form said, "I am Christ; worship me." After St. Martin had looked long in silence, he gazed upon the hands and said: "Where is the print of the nails?" The vision suddenly vanished, and St. Martin was left alone, assured that he had met the tempter.

A Special Mission

If I have any special mission in the afternoon of my life between this and sunset, it is to show to the Church the grave perils which will inevitably follow the abandonment of an intense spirituality and the neglect of the doctrinal truths which inspire this vigorous spiritual life. If the warning is heeded, doctrinal defections will he checked, and all our members will have an experimental realization that Jesus is Jehovah. Then will the weak ones become as David, and David as the angel of Jehovah in valor and strength. Then there will be at least one denomination that the devil will not laugh at and the world spit upon. It was Whitefield who wisely said that he "had rather have ten members wholly consecrated to God and filled with the Spirit, than five hundred that the devil laughs at in his sleeve." The world has an instinctive fear of the man who intensely believes the whole Bible from cover to cover, who is dead to the world and alive to God in every fibre and atom of his being, with every capacity filled and every power energized by the Holy Ghost. "Give me a hundred men," says Wesley, "who fear nothing but sin, and desire nothing but God, and I will shake the world; and I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen; and such alone will overthrow the kingdom of Satan and build up the kingdom of God on earth." He got his hundred men, and he shook the world with an earthquake mightier than can be produced by a million of easy-going nominal Christians afraid of the Holy Ghost and apologizing for their own distinctive doctrines.

I wish I had power to reach every methodist on the round earth. I would say, cease living on the heroism of your fathers, quit glorying in numbers, sacrificing to statistics and burning incense to the general minutes; down upon your knees and seek and find for yourself the secret of the power of the fathers, a clean heart and the endowment of power from on high, then arise and unfurl the banner of salvation free and full and a common-sense theology, the beauty of which, as Joseph Cook says, is "that it can be preached." Then, in double-quick time, charge upon the hosts of sin and conquer the world for Christ. A Brahmin recently said to a Christian, "I have found you out. You are not as good as your book. If you Christians were as good as your book, you would in five years conquer India for Christ." Come, Holy Spirit, and so cleanse and fill us that we may be as good as our book!

— From The Gospel of the Comforter, Chapter 36.

Dogma Divides, Christian Feeling Unites

The language of Christian feeling can never be successfully counterfeited. The language of the dry intellect, the language of the head, may be misunderstood. Hence wherever religion has consisted in theological dogmas alone, fierce strifes have arisen.

But when the gospel has been addressed to men's hearts, and has been received by faith in its transforming power, the weapons of denominational warfare are cast away, and believers vie with one another in magnifying our common Saviour. Such, thank God, are the happy times upon which we have fallen. We live in a day when the Holy Spirit has come down upon the evangelical churches, and we now understand one another, because our hearts speak. In the eras of the warmest theological controversy this heart unison was not noticed amid the din and discord of clashing swords.

Professor Shedd says that:
"Tried by the test of exact dogmatic statement there is a plain difference between the Arminian creed and that of the Calvinist; but tried by the test of practical piety and devout feeling, there is little difference between the character of John Wesley and John Calvin. The practical religious life is much more a product of the Holy Spirit than is the speculative construction of truth."






The advance of spirituality will be the advance of that unity for which Jesus prayed in his wonderful high-priestly prayer in the seventeenth of St. John.

It is said that an Asiatic Christian convert met a converted Feejee on the deck of a ship. Ignorant of each other's native tongue and burning with new-born love to God and man the one exclaimed, "Hallelujah," and the other immediately responded, "Amen." By these words they recognized each other as brethren in Christ Jesus. But what are these but two Hebrew words transferred, not translated, into all our modern tongues, words which once resounded over the hills of old Canaan? They suggest the ease with which believers communicate when they have learned the language of New Canaan.

— From Jesus Exultant, Chapter 3.

Methodism Opposes Pessimism

The intensely evangelistic career of Wesley and his faith in the gospel of Christ as sufficient for the conquest of the whole world in the Pentecostal dispensation have impressed his followers with an optimistic hopefulness. Hence Methodism opposes pessimism.

The present age has witnessed the uprising of a numerous company of prophets of despair. They go about teaching the dismal doctrine that the world is growing worse and worse, that it is like a ship so badly wrecked that there is no hope of saving her under the management of her present captain and crew, and the best thing to be done is to rescue as many passengers as possible before she goes entirely to pieces. This is Mr. Moody's favorite illustration. In fact it is openly declared that the efforts of our Missionary Boards to save the world are a waste of time and treasure which might be spent more profitably in "preaching the gospel to all nations for a witness" and thus hasten the end of this ineffective dispensation of the Holy Spirit, and the inauguration of the personal reign of Christ on David's throne in Jerusalem. Then Jews and Gentiles will be converted in a wholesale way, and the gospel will speedily dominate the whole world. Nearly all modern millenarians are pessimists.

The Inward Revelation of Christ

[There is] another function of the Spirit which needs special emphasis because it is more apt to be overlooked and forgotten – the inward revelation of Christ in the consciousness of the adult believer, as distinguished from that infantile faith by which a penitent is born into the kingdom of God.

Uncertainty and doubt perplex and weaken immature Christians. Christ is to them an outside and distant person whom they endeavor with painful effort to bring near and to make real. They try to do the orthodox thing, to cherish certain beliefs about Him. But there is no warmth, no inspiration, no enthusiasm, no intense love. Their experience is much of the time dreary, and their Christian service is mechanical and constrained, not free, spontaneous and joyful.

What is lacking? Not the new birth, but a definite experience which follows regeneration. The new birth implants love divine. When this love has been tested and strengthened by obedience it is our privilege by faith to have a spiritual manifestation of Christ in our hearts. "He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me; and he that loveth me shall be loved of my father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself unto him."

The Immortal Soul

QUESTION: We often hear from the pulpit the phrase "immoral soul," and "never dying soul." Please give chapter and verse where we can find these in the Bible.

ANSWER: The fact that they are not found in the Bible does not disprove the doctrine any more that the absence from the Revised New Testament of Trinity, incarnation, atonement, omniscience and omnipresence disproves these fundamental truth which are abundantly taught in other terms. The resurrection of both the just and the unjust, the General Judgement of the whole race resulting in its everlasting awards, as in Matthew 25:46, and other texts, are sufficient proof that man has an immortal soul. This doctrine, like the existence of God, is not proved in the Bible, but always assumed as an intuitive truth universally believed. Such a truth is always weakened by attempts to prove it.

— From Steele's Answers pp. 28, 29.