Chapter ix, Continued
i. The Gift; the Living Water. St John, that is to say, the Holy Spirit by him, explains this to mean the Holy Spirit. It is the personal Paraclete. And it is the Paraclete in a mode of presence and action specially conditioned by the soul’s having come to Christ, having believed on Christ, already. True it is, deeply true, that when we come and believe it is already because of the Spirit, the Spirit of Faith. But this is not the phase of truth before us in these two utterances. The Lord takes the case of the man as having, anyhow, come and believed. Then, in the sense of after-experience, after-life, in manifestation, unfolding, indwelling, empowering, the man shall “receive the Spirit.” In a sense different from that which might have been true before, the Spirit, the Holy Ghost, shall be in him, and he in the Spirit. He shall be a “spiritual” man, not in any vague sense, not merely as having, somehow, a higher range of interests and ideas. He shall be, in a sense as literal as it is divine, actuated by the development of a new Life, the Life Eternal, the Life of the Head of the newborn Race, the Life imparted, maintained, dilated, by nothing less than the personal presence in his very being of the Holy Spirit, the divine Agent alike of the Human Birth of the Head and of the New Birth of each Limb.
The Spirit shall be in that man, in this sense, and therefore “Christ shall dwell in his heart.” I lay stress on this last point, because of its extreme practical importance in the whole subject of the life of faith and peace. Let us remember on the one hand that we possess the Lord’s indwelling by the Holy Spirit only. Let us remember on the other hand that what we possess by the Holy Spirit is above all things the indwelling Lord. We are not to look for two separate experiences, so to speak; a presence of the Spirit and a presence of Christ. The presence of Christ is thanks to the blessing Spirit’s presence. The Spirit’s presence is to be known – how? By the character of our actual relations of thought, love, and will with Christ; by our view of His unsearchable preciousness, by our rest in His dominion, by our peaceful power over self and sin in Him. To receive the living water is to be filled, or, however, to be filling, with Him, revealed and applied by the Spirit.
This then, let us remember, is the promised, the guaranteed, gift of God in Christ to all, to all who come.
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