How Is the Power of God Obtained?

The success of a preacher is not so much in the strength of his logic, or the splendor of his rhetoric, as in the atmosphere of love in which both his pulpit and pastoral work are ensphered. The brainy man will be admired, but admiration is not ministerial success. It converts no sinners. The man of a warm heart will be loved.

Gospel salvation makes sanctified human love its electric wire to souls distant from God, and melts them into penitence. It is not possible for all preachers to be as irresistible in argument as Chillingworth, as brilliant in diction as MaCaulay, or as his gifted limner, Punshon; but all may have the baptism of love, perfect love to God and man, love the fountain of pathos and of power to sway men, drawing them to God.

Does the Fullness of the Spirit Divide?

It is alleged by some that the fulness of the Holy Spirit received by faith in Christ's Pentecostal promise does not unite, but rather divides local churches. This is not true where the entire membership receive their full heritage. The members of such churches are welded together in the closest possible unity, such as extorted admiration even from persecutors. "Behold how these Christians love one another." Such a church is indeed a spiritual brotherhood.

"One with our brethren here in love,
And one with saints that are at rest,
And one with angel hosts above,
And one with God forever blest."

But where part of a church are only nominal Christians, baptized worldlings, who either never knew the Lord Jesus as their Saviour or have fallen from grace, there arises a division, caused not by the Holy Ghost, but by those professors who resist Him in His work of purification. This is what Christ Himself predicted. The founder of Christianity, in putting down the kingdom of Satan whose works He came to destroy, brought disturbance and division to every family, every synagogue, every city and every social organization, a part of whose members rejected Him while a part received Him as both Savior and Lord. Real living Christianity is always a disturber of worldliness and sin, bringing a sword on the earth.

— from The Gospel of the Comforter Chapter 20.

The Work of the Spirit in the Heart

"Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you." — John 16:7 KJV.

I am quite sure that many of my Christian readers will think that I have too highly colored the pre-eminent superiority of the conscious abiding of the Spirit within [over] the visible presence of Christ instructing, assuring and cheering His disciples. They may assert that they have no such experience, and yet they love Christ. I do not doubt their testimony. The difficulty is easily explained. Their experience of the presence of the Holy Spirit is meager and unsatisfactory, because they so little know and honor Him as a person. A person is sensitive when he is spoken of as it and treated as a thing. There may be a faith in Jesus that attains forgiveness, while a faith that claims the abiding Comforter as the Christian's heritage is lacking. He that believes in Christ for all that He has promised, "out of him shall flow rivers of living water." This promise has not become obsolete. There are many modern witnesses to its fulfillment, though the number is not commensurate with the communion roll of the visible Church. Yet by a candid and patient study of God's Word, the ground of faith, and by a self-surrender and self-effacement which put the soul wholly in the hands of the Great Physician with unwavering trust, the utmost stain of evil may be removed, and the presence of Christ be as real as it was to Mary Magdalene.

Is a "New Birth" Expereince Necessary?

QUESTION: When a little child is baptized and trained up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, and being morally correct is received into the church without realizing any change of heart, is he to be considered as a Bible Christian?

ANSWER: No; but he is on a good vantage ground for becoming such, if he does not rest satisfied with nominal Christianity, and is earnestly seeking the new birth. Unless he does this his church membership is an opiate inducing a fatal spiritual stupor. It is also a shield against the arrow of awakening Gospel appeals. It is perilous to trust in morality, creeds, and sacraments, to live and die destitute of spiritual life, which only he has "who hath the Son."

— Steele's Answers pp. 185, 186.

On Ezekiel 47:11

QUESTION: Explain Ezek. 47:11, "But the miry places thereof and the marshes thereof shall not be healed; they shall be given to salt."

ANSWER:  The stream of water is emblematic of the life-giving power of Christianity which vitalizes all the free agents who accept it represented by fishes, but leaves in a worthless condition those who persist in rejecting it, namely, the Gospel-hardened sinners and the "many" merely nominal Christians who take Christ's name but reject his meek and lowly spirit spoken of as "Ye that work iniquity," in Matt. 7:22, 23. The permanency of their lost estate is indicated by the salt which is an emblem here of perpetual desolation, because nothing can live and grow in salt.

— Steele's Answers p. 174.

Give Us a Spiritual Protestantism!

There are multitudes of nominal Christians who confidently assert that it is the highest presumption and folly to expect, in modern times, that full dispensation of the Spirit concerning which so many excellent things are spoken in the Scriptures. They brand as a fanatic the man who proclaims to a slumbering Church the presence of the Holy Ghost, ready to raise the spiritually dead, and to transfigure the spiritually living.