Perfect Love as a Definate Blessing

It took four thousand years for the sacred Scriptures to fully unfold — "to import God into knowledge," in the phrase of Dr. Bushnell. The patriarchal and Jewish dispensations were devoted to revealing and firmly impressing the Divine unity on one nation surrounded by polytheism. If the triune personality of God had been taught before God's oneness of substance was securely established, it might have asked too much of humanity in its early stage of theological learning. For more than three thousand years, the first words taught to every child in the Jewish nursery were these: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord." Under the dispensations before Christianity, faith in this truth, when it produced obedience, was saving. It is saving now for all who have received no higher revelation. So why do we need a clearer and more definite manifestation of the nature of God? Why should he reveal the unthinkable fact of his threefold personality, and call us to a faith that rises so far above reason? This is a question even angels might approach with bashful tread. It is certain that he has not taken me into his counsels. Here I walk by faith. And faith says that the fuller revelation of God, and the new requirement of faith in the Trinity, come from his gracious purpose to give richer blessings to the believer in a dispensation "rather glorious."

The human soul is so made that faith creates and measures its capacity for spiritual good. (This is probably the way it is for all finite spirits.) God enters only by this gateway. So it follows that when God purposes to fill us with his fullness, he gives a fuller revelation of himself that calls for a higher reach of faith. It is no longer enough to believe in one God, as even trembling demons do. Faith must specifically lay hold of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, in his offices of prophet or teacher, priest, and king, and of the Holy Spirit as our regenerator, spirit of adoption, and sanctifier. For that reason, we should expect little spirituality where these distinctive truths of the Gospel are rarely preached, and much spiritual power and deep religious experience where they are clearly taught, received with the least intermixture of error, and not overshadowed by a disproportionate emphasis on ritualism. 

Church history supports this claim. There is always spiritual decline when Christ and the Holy Spirit are given a secondary place in preaching, and there is always revival when the "whole counsel of God" — the Father, Son, and Spirit — is faithfully set forth from the pulpit. The same is true of many individual believers. Their spiritual life is weak and sickly because they fail to grasp Christ and the Holy Spirit in all their distinct offices. Thousands move faintly, with weary steps, along the path to heaven who might instead run with joy — surmounting every obstacle and overthrowing every foe by their resistless momentum — if they would only persistently endeavor to "know the exceeding greatness of Christ's power to us-ward who believe." 

Thousands of sincere souls are troubled and weakened by constant doubts simply because they do not give due honor to the third person of the Trinity by trusting him to do the work of his office, certifying their son-ship by "the spirit of adoption." They do not stir themselves up to take hold of this blessed assurance and insist that the Divine seal be impressed upon them by the Holy Spirit. They go on living in steady disregard of the second pungent inference from Wesley's sermon on the Witness of the Spirit, "Let none rest in any supposed fruit of the Spirit without the witness." 

The natural result of lacking "the spirit of adoption, crying in their hearts, Abba, Father," is a constant swinging between hope and fear, sorrowfully singing: —

"'Tis a point I long to know;
Oft it causeth anxious thought,
Do I love the Lord, or no; 
Am I his, or am I not?"

Instead, they might be singing with exultation: —

"O love, thou bottomless abyss!
My sins are swallowed up in thee;
Covered is my unrighteousness,
Nor spot of guilt remains on me:
While Jesus' blood, through earth and skies, 
Mercy, free, boundless mercy, cries."

I am convinced that this unsatisfying and un-Methodistic experience, now too common in our Churches, is due in part to our preachers' failure to make this blessing plain and specific, even though it is the common privilege of all believers. Hear Mr. Wesley: 

"Generally, wherever the Gospel is preached in a clear and scriptural manner, more than ninety-nine in a hundred do know the exact time when they are justified."

This is the testimony of a man who, from personal observation, was more qualified than anyone since the apostolic age to give a reliable opinion. He visited all his Societies every year, met them in class, and asked each member searching test questions that reached to the very center of the soul. That was the style of class-leading in his day. 

But no such proportion of conversions, accompanied by the direct witness, now appears at our altars. The failure is not in the Gospel, which remains a changeless stream of power flowing from the living Christ, "the same yesterday, and today, and forever." Where, then, does the failure lie? Let every preacher examine his sermons and see whether he has made "the spirit of adoption" a conspicuous part of his ministry.

Another office of the Spirit is purification. He is the Sanctifier. He begins this work in the new birth by planting love to God, the purifying principle, and he continues it until perfect love casteth out fear. That this consummation may come long before death has never been a disputed question among Methodists.

And that their great founder made it more and more prominent, with increasing emphasis until his dying day, no candid reader of "Tyerman's Life and Times of John Wesley" can deny. That this magnifying of the office of the Sanctifier produced such Christian characters as Bramwell, Hester Ann Rogers, the seraphic John Fletcher, and his saintly wife, along with many others unknown to fame but precious jewels in the crown of Jesus, is as certain as the sequence of any effect after its cause.

These results were not accidental. A distinctive faith laid hold of this prize. That faith came through preaching that honored the Sanctifier by dwelling emphatically on his office, not through the use of "glittering generalities" that glide smoothly over it like a slurred note in music. 

We must remember that the Holy Spirit is the most sensitive person of the Godhead. If blasphemy against him is unpardonable, then slighting any of his offices must not only grieve him, but also deprive the soul of the blessings it is his prerogative to bestow. "Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption."

 

---

This is a revision of Chapter 10 of Love Enthroned: Essays on Evangelical Perfection (1875) by Daniel Steele, completely rewritten with the assistance of Microslop CoPilot. The original chapter can be found here: PERFECT LOVE AS A DEFINITE BLESSING.