Thoughts on the Spiritual Life - XXXV - H. C. G. Moule

Durham Cathedral Cloister

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Conclusion of Chapter ix.

iii. Now for a few moments let us pass on to the Temple cloister, to the Lord’s utterance on the great day of the feast. Here is the living water again, and the coming, and the receiving. And here is this development of the promise; there shall be an overflow. I say nothing on the place of the quotation; “as the Scripture hath said.” Enough for us now that Christ, in this Scripture, hath said it.

What does it mean? It means that the man who really drinks of Christ, drinking of the Spirit, shall assuredly be a conveyer, a conductor, for the Spirit, for Christ, to others. It means that the really and livingly spiritual man shall be a spiritual blessing, a spiritual power. The thought requires, of course, a reverent caution. It cannot mean that he shall be an origin of grace; and indeed this is guarded by the special imagery, in which the thought is fixed on the drinking the Spirit from Christ, and no mention is made of the spring within, which might have seemed possibly to countenance the notion of our becoming origins, though it would not have done so really. Nor again is there any assurance here that at our own will or decision we can convey blessing to others. That is the express prerogative of the Lord Himself. But the assurance is that we shall be richly fruitful, somehow, of spiritual results; of results in others in the way of their also tasting of the gift of God. Our work in the matter is to drink, is to believe; to live by faith on the Son of God, who obeyed and died for us and liveth in us. His undertaking is that we shall be, in proportion, aqueducts for His living water.

More is meant here, surely, than that we shall merely know what to say, and say it. This is something indeed; this is a great thing. But it is a thing in which a hypcrite can be a conductor. The truth here is that He will use that man, or the woman, who is really drinking the heavenly Water from the Rock, who is really filled for life’s need with the supplies of life eternal, in another, a more mysterious way, and yet a way all the while profoundly natural. Through that personality the Spirit shall be pleased to work special blessings, for He will have made it fit to be so used. It shall livingly reflect something of the glory of the Lord. It shall be a true channel of persuasion, attraction, conviction. It “shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified, serviceable to the Master.” The believer in question may perhaps know that he is thus privileged and employed, by manifest results of fact; he may conspicuously be “a blessing” to very many souls and lives around him. Or he may never know it thus at all. But that matters, comparatively, little. The concern is with the Master’s knowledge, the Master’s interests, not the servant’s. For the servant, for the bondservant, let it be enough to know that the Master meant what He said, and will be found to have kept His word, to His own glory.