Revival

Andrew Murray

In the Epistle to the Romans, people who gave law a place in the world it never had before, and whose influence still rules in our modern world, to them Paul preached the Gospel in its relation to law. The Gospel was a revelation of the righteousness of God, and revealed the way in which He himself was righteous, and could righteously accept the ungodly as righteous too. The Corinthians were a people with whom wisdom was everything. In the Epistle to the Corinthians, Paul shows that just as absolute as was the need and provision of divine righteousness so was the need and provision of divine wisdom. Since no man knows the things of God save the Spirit of God, we receive the Spirit of God so that we may know the things that are freely given us of God. In Romans we learn what the Gospel is that is to be preached; in Corinthians, how it is to be preached.

The church of the Reformation owes everything to the truth of a divine righteousness. They have, alas, not been equally jealous of the doctrine of a divine wisdom as man’s only hope for knowing the things of God. The preaching of the utter insufficiency of man’s righteousness has not been accompanied, as it should have been, by the preaching of the utter insufficiency of his wisdom. The consequences have been most disastrous. And nothing has suffered more from it than the doctrine of divine righteousness. Too often preached not in the power of the Holy Spirit but of human wisdom, the Gospel has not been the power of God unto salvation, or has not led the believer into the close and full fellowship with God it was meant to. The restoration of the truth of the teaching of the Holy Spirit being as indispensable as the forgiveness through Christ’s blood would indeed bring us a second Reformation, a new Pentecost.
After speaking in the previous chapter about the wisdom of man, it is right that our first subject should be the Holy Spirit as the revealer of the things of God — for more than one reason. At the very outset, it will show us how the great evil we have spoken of can be cured as we see how sure and sufficient God has made the provision. It will also help us to test the preaching and the life around us by the standard of Scripture. It will give point and force to our prayer when we are asked by Christ, as He always does ask, “What wilt thou that I do unto thee?” We shall know what to be aware of and expect in answer to our prayer We shall learn to claim for ourselves the full revival blessing — a life daily and wholly under the teaching of the Spirit. And so, even in the reading of this book, we shall be kept from trusting in impressions, however deep, or convictions, however strong, and at each step ask the Spirit of God to reveal to us the things of God.

That is how our prayer will be at the actual beginning of the coming revival. With a stroke of a pen Paul reveals to us in one simple sentence the necessity of the teaching of the Spirit of God:

“What man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? Even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.” No one can know what goes on in the heart of a man but the man himself How much more, as we think of God as an infinite, holy, spiritual and incomprehensible being, must it be true that “the things of God knoweth but the Spirit of God, and he to whom the Spirit reveals them”? He is the very life of God. He searches the deep things of God because God is a Spirit; it is by the Spirit that God is what He is. He alone can reveal the things of God. In one sense Christ revealed the Father. But that revelation was only an objective one. With all that Christ taught His disciples, their apprehensions of divine things were dark and ineffective. Christ promised them that the Holy Spirit would come to show them all things He had taught, and all that there was in Him. The reason the Spirit could do this was that as He was the inmost life in God, He could enter into their inmost life and communicate there the actual participation of the things of God in their living power and blessedness.

Thoughts and reasoning only give knowledge in the mind about a thing; they do not give the heart the actual experience and blessedness of what they represent. True knowledge, whether of earthly or heavenly things, is always life and experience and possession. Reason can give us abundant knowledge about God; it can give us nothing of God himself or that knowledge of Him, which is life eternal. The Spirit is the very life and power of God; all that He reveals is truth and power. He causes us to know God because He enters into the life and communicates the very thing the word speaks in spirit and in truth. Through Him we know God by what He is and gives and works in us. Thoughts can only give pictures of spiritual things. At times these may be beautiful and delightful pictures that make most pleasing impressions. They may waken strong desires in the heart and stir the will to its utmost effort, but they never can give or reveal the life. This is the sole prerogative of the Spirit of God.

He can do this not only because He is the Spirit of God, but because He can and does enter into the very spirit of man. The spirit of man was breathed into him by God; we are His offspring. As the Spirit of God, the Creator, He has the mysterious power of entering and inhabiting the spirit of man. As the Spirit of God, the Redeemer, He has given us a new spirit, within which He dwells and acts, secretly inspiring it with all the life and graces of the Lord Jesus. This is why Paul says in the words following our text that the things of God are spiritually discerned and that only spiritual Christians can profit by spiritual teaching; as long as there are worldly dispositions and conduct they cannot bear it (see 1 Cor. 2:14; 3:1, 3). The Spirit so communicates the divine life that not only is the natural, unconverted man incapable of receiving this, but even the converted man, as long as he yields to the flesh, with sins like jealousy and strife, cannot apprehend this. It needs a spiritual ear and eye, opened by God’s Spirit, a spiritual nature longing to know more of God, His love, His will. The Holy Spirit has been given to all, but only those I have just described are really taught by Him. Only they can say in experience, “We have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is of God; that we might know the things which are freely given to us of God.”

The teaching office of the Holy Spirit is inseparable from the other two: His sanctifying and strengthening work. They all go together. He teaches to sanctify, He teaches by sanctifying, and so fitting the holy heart to receive His spiritual instruction. His teaching is strengthening; it is always accompanied by a divine enabling to act out what He has revealed. One or other of the three may at times, or for a time, in different members of the body, be more prominent. He is ever the one Spirit in whom they are altogether, and who, whatever part of His work may stand out more distinctly in our consciousness, works in us as the Spirit of truth, the Spirit of holiness, the Spirit of power. He is all this because He is the Spirit of life by whom we truly live a divine life.

This work of the Spirit is now the great mark of the New Testament church, of true Christianity. The seal or heavenly stamp God has set upon every believer and upon His church is the Holy Spirit, who knows the things of God, given into the heart to make them know these things. It is not enough that a child be born of healthy parents; his future depends greatly upon the teacher to whom he is entrusted and the education he receives. With the child of God everything depends upon his knowing, submitting to, waiting on, and carrying out the teaching of the Holy Spirit, the feebleness of the church stems from its not knowing, believing, and acting on this truth. A revival in the church will mean nothing less than this, that ministers and members will together be led to give the Holy Spirit, the divine and only teacher, the place God wants Him to take.

Let us think what the faith and experience of the blessing of this truth would mean in the Christian life. Just consider the influence a full appreciation of it would have on a believer who seeks to give God the whole tithe, his whole heart and life. He begins to know not in thought but in faith and power that the Spirit of God is in him. Not as something alongside and additional to his own life, partly and occasionally influencing it—but as the inmost life of our very selves, not only controlling or helping but far more, as the moving spring and power of our being, inspiring and impelling us in all we are and do.

He begins to see what he needs first of all to have a deeper sense of his own spiritual ignorance, of the utter impotence and the great danger of all the mere mind knowledge with its beautiful images and impressions. Then to bow in great stillness of soul before God, renouncing his own wisdom as utterly as his own righteousness, and to ask that the consciousness of the divine indwelling of the Spirit may be given by the Father himself. He learns that in every act of prayer or communion with God’s Word, in every desire or resolve in connection with divine things, his first duty is to wait in humble dependence upon God, to have the activity of nature restrained and mortified, and the heart trained into the habit of faith that the Spirit will teach and work.

As the believer gradually realizes that the Holy Spirit is indeed within him, he bows with a deeper reverence and fear, but also with a fuller dependence and assurance before the Father who gives the Spirit. And he learns what at first he did not understand, that so far from the Spirit being a power in us that we can use or call up, His presence makes us more absolutely and necessarily dependent on the Father. Just as our Lord, who received the Spirit without measure, did not dare to speak a word or do a work without the Father giving it to Him each moment, so the true faith of the Spirit’s indwelling bends us in the most absolute weakness to the footstool of God’s throne. When God made man, it was that He might live in him, imparting by His personal presence all the goodness He was capable of, and working in his will and affections what man was to do and to be.

Pentecost restored what Paradise lost. The believer yields himself trustfully to what God would have him be, because he now knows that the Spirit, who knows the things of God, reveals and works in him the things that are freely given us of God.

To understand aright what this teaching of the Spirit is, there are three essential elements we must specially remember. First, that it is all from within. It is by influencing, by renewing, by purifying the life that the Spirit gives the experimental knowledge of God’s truth. Out of the light of life, wrought within our feeling and willing and acting, spiritual wisdom and understanding is born.

Second, that this power and energy of the Spirit is given on one condition—that of entire possession. As a teacher cannot teach unless he has the undivided attention of his pupil, the Holy Spirit demands the entire control of the life. A great deal of prayer for the teaching on the filling of the Spirit is vain, because the seeker is not faithful in obedience to that measure of the Spirit which he already has. The Spirit claims our whole being.

Third, that it is only communicated and to be received by faith. The moving of the Spirit cannot be known or felt until we begin to act. It is when, while feeling our weakness, we believe in the hidden presence and power within us and begin to act that His guidance and strength are known. Faith in His indwelling and most certain leading, much faith in the Father who works by the Spirit, unceasing faith in the Lord Jesus, in union with whom we have the Spirit flowing through us—this faith will receive the fullness of the Spirit. This is the revival we must seek for: The restoration of the Holy Spirit to His place as the inward teacher, having complete possession and control of heart and life.

What a change it would make in a church if there were a number of men and women given over to be thus taught and led by the Spirit of God! And what a change in our meetings for worship or for work, in our churches or our assemblies and councils, if men and women regarded it as the most prominent characteristic of their relationships with each other that the Spirit of God had taught and was teaching them, hour by hour, the things of God! And what a still greater change when it was known that a majority of our ministers were Spirit-taught men who could say, “God has revealed it to us by His Spirit, which things we speak not in word which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth, combining spiritual things with spiritual.”

What a joy if the churches were waking up, and that in our colleges and institutions for training ministers the first object was now to help men to become true ministers of the New Covenant, ministers of the Spirit—men and women who lived their own life as taught by the Spirit in the things of God, and were therefore able to lead others into the truly spiritual life. Yes, what a change it would be.

With man it is impossible! But with God all things are possible! Oh, let us pray in faith for a revived church and a revived ministry. If there is one thing sure, it is that the Father gives the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him. You cannot doubt this. If there is one thing for which Christ is elevated on the throne, it is that He may baptize with the Holy Spirit, and give streams of living water from everyone who believes in Him. You dare not doubt this. If there is one thing God meant His church to be filled with it is—oh, listen! — It is the Holy Spirit. And shall we then fear and be unbelieving? God forbid! We will believe that God, in answer to the prayers of His people, will work a mighty change.