Whit- Sunday
June 12, 1859
“For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.”—2 Timothy i. 7.
The passage: God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, of love, and of a sound mind.
Many readers of this passage, I doubt not, put the emphasis on the word us. They take St. Paul to be saying: “An ordinary man in your position would fear and tremble. You oversee a society made of contradictory elements, troubled by strange doctrines, and exposed to a commercial and corrupt city. Such a man would be assailed by cowardly thoughts of what others will say of him, crushed by responsibility, and anxious about future calamities. But it is not so with you or with me. Young as you are, God has put you beyond such temptations by a peculiar gift. You are as free from fightings and terrors as I, your spiritual father, am.”
Those who think the blessing of Whit-Sunday belonged only to the apostolic age will naturally take this interpretation, and they can tolerate no other. But I think it conflicts with the direct language and the whole tone of these pastoral letters, and of all St. Paul’s letters to the Churches. Timothy, to judge by what is said to him, felt keenly the greatness of his task and often shrank from its weight. He was as conscious of inexperience and feebleness as any teacher or ruler in any age. No privilege saved him from fear or from the bondage fear brings. If he had been exempt, he would have been wholly unlike his teacher. Paul was so beaten down by fears within as well as fightings without that he despaired even of life. He said he had the sentence of death in him, and at times it seemed about to execute itself.
What encouragement, then, could Paul give Timothy? Precisely what his own experience had driven him to. His own spirit might be palsied with fear, but a Spirit was near him and with him who was not a Spirit of fear. To that Spirit he could turn as Deliverer from fear, Restorer of energy, Quickener of hope. That Spirit had been given not to Paul but to the Family of which he was a member. If he had it in any special sense, it was only because he served that Family and needed powers not his own to make his ministry effectual. All his comfort lay in the assurance that this was God’s Spirit. The Spirit is not bound by the limits or swayed by the changes of those He governs. He can at the same moment control, renew, and set free myriads of human wills, as the sun acts on myriads of living things at every stage of growth or decay. Paul believed that Pentecost spoke of a real gift, a living Person and not a floating influence. He believed it was the last, highest, most permanent of God’s blessings. It was implied in the creation and constitution of Man, but could not be conferred in its fulness and universality until Christ had glorified the nature of Man at the Father’s right hand. Believing this, Paul could bid Timothy remember in his darkest hours, as he did himself, that they had been baptized with the Spirit not of fear but of Power, of Love, of a Sound Mind.
Assuredly, my brethren, this faith would have failed Paul, and been no refuge in his battles with principalities and powers (which he found more terrible than any battle with flesh and blood), if he had supposed that we of after-days would not have the same right to it as he. He lived to bear witness that when Christ “ascended on high, He received gifts for men, yea, even for the rebellious, that the Lord God might dwell among them.”
That witness was either false for his own time, or it is true for us, for our children, and for all whom the Lord our God shall call. Whitsuntide has declared to generations of every nation and tongue that the message was for them. Let us see what lessons of strength, consolation, and warning each one here may gather from words first written for Timothy.
I. I suppose we have all been tempted to say the reverse of the Apostle. We have read in the records of the past, or seen among our contemporaries, such strange panic and cowardice, with counsel and heart failing just when they were most needed, that we have exclaimed, “Surely this is Divine! Outward pressure cannot explain such a loss of nerve, for terrible circumstances often evoke the greatest courage. Natural want of courage cannot explain it either, for those same men at other crises were capable of manly effort. Their fear is supernatural. God has given them this spirit of Fear.” This way of speaking is common and has strong excuse. Many awful sentences of Scripture might be alleged for it, and I think they find an echo in our own consciences.
But I think our consciences will also tell us that we pervert those passages if we set them against St. Paul’s doctrine here. We need not study the past or other men to learn what the spirit of fear is. Each of us knows its grip in himself. Each has trembled before the opinion of Society, or of the small part of it he deals with, or of some particular man. Each has perhaps known the cowardice that springs from self-distrust, from imagined lions in the path, from doubt which road to take, or from foretaste of coming evils. Some shrink at the thought of certain acts being exposed, and how many that “some” would include! But is there one of us who has not been conscious of tempers, habits, and states of mind that he longs to hide from the eye of the Judge to whom he is sure they are most hateful?
Now every one of these fears has a real justification, not just an apparent one. The verdict we dread will very likely go against us. The sense of feebleness is no delusion. The actual sorrow often surpasses our dream of it. The bad act has been done and will someday be discovered. A man lies to himself if he says, “I have not been as unkind, base, or insincere as my heart witnesses; these things are not as much at war with a pure, loving, true God as I supposed.” And yet this reasonable fear takes away my reason and makes me false and slavish. Why? Because I am not obeying the perfect reason; my will is out of harmony with the free and just will. I am afraid of things that have no right over me, but claim it once I have broken loose from my lawful allegiance. The old Scriptures may well show God giving men over to their fear, leaving them to feel what they are without Him. That is consistent with the Apostle’s fuller statement that the Spirit of Fear is not God’s Spirit, not the Spirit He gives. It is the Spirit we are revolting against when fear gets the mastery. Only by recollecting the continual presence of a Spirit of Power, Love, and a Sound Mind can we shake off its tyranny and recover the dignity of men.
II. The Spirit of God is said to be a Spirit of Power. Consider the kinds of power men bow to and covet most. None is more familiar or wonderful than the Orator’s. It is felt in the most savage tribes and the most civilized; it is hard to say whether the North-American Indian or the Greek in the age of Pericles or Philip shows it best. It is not material force. It acts on the understandings, and still more on the wills, of men. It may be an immoral and detestable power, leading to every mischief and lying habit of mind. Yet you cannot banish it from your commonwealths, or diminish it without diminishing human sympathy and making men more inhuman. Whence does it come? How can it be directed? Consider the story we read today. Galilean fishermen, noted for an uncouth dialect, meet at a Jewish feast where men from all over the Roman and Parthian Empires are gathered. Suddenly they speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gives them utterance. They make themselves understood, and the hearers feel that through these stammering tongues One is speaking who knows what is in them and what they want. We have a stereotyped explanation: the Apostles had to know different languages to preach effectively. The Apostles themselves never speak of this necessity and seem unaware of it. What they did need was to learn that the words they used, in their own tongue or any other, were not their own. Words are an awful trust, for which they must answer to Him from whom they came. Words are the instruments of communion between men, not because men are animals but because they are spirits, and a Divine Spirit is speaking to them. Is this not the secret of the orator’s power? Is there not a Spirit of Power from whom all his capacity to influence his fellows is derived? If he remembers his responsibility, confesses that Spirit as the source of his power, and never dares to trifle with truth and honesty (above all under any religious pretence), what health there will be in his speech, and what health it will impart! His words will clear the air of mists instead of raising them. And each of us, though without the orator’s gifts, will feel the grandeur and fearfulness of the organ of speech committed to us all. With shame and repentance we shall confess St. James’s lesson: the tongue is a little member that no man can tame, needing another ruler to keep it from sending out poison, and from “setting on fire the course of Nature, even as it is set on fire of hell”! That is what malicious, lying words can do, and that is their origin. Without this Spirit of Power to quell and purify them, they will laugh to scorn all the laws, conventions, charms, and restraints our wisdom can invent.
There is another power, often mixed with this but different in direction and nature, which also is limited to no country, circumstance, or stage of cultivation. The physician, the healer, is welcomed in all lands under different titles, always because he can act on the life of men and oppose what threatens it. In some regions he is hardly distinguished from the priest, who also deals with life and death, a life or death that may continue when the ordinary physician’s resources are exhausted. Think how these powers, combined or separate, in alliance or hostility, meet you wherever you travel! Think how they mingle with ancient traditions, philosophical theories, hints and promises of good that you fear to weaken, and with an immorality, lying, and slavery that drag nations to perdition! Think how vain the statesman’s efforts are against them when they are most pernicious. In our time he generally gives up the attempt as hopeless, even as wrong, and thinks his best chance is some tolerable compromise with those who claim supernatural agencies of whatever kind. He cannot stop to ask what kind they are: whether the priests invoke a Destroyer or a Deliverer, or each by turns; whether they count Cursing or Blessing their mightiest weapon; whether they hold Truth or Falsehood the more religious.
But suppose we refer every power physicians or priests exert over the bodies or spirits of men to that Spirit who dwelt in Jesus Christ. Suppose we believe He came to baptize us with that Spirit, and that God has given us that Spirit and no other. Then all love of cursing, all tampering with falsehood under any pretext, and all attempts to gain reputation or influence by practising on men’s ignorance or baseness are nothing less than blasphemy against the most high God, a trafficking with the Spirit of Evil. Such sins are more terrible and penal in those appointed as witnesses of His goodness and ministers of His gifts than in anyone else. The Christian priest ought to know that he is as liable to this abuse of power as any Brahmin, and that in him it is far more criminal. It directly contradicts the doctrine of God’s Spirit which he exists to proclaim, and tries to quench His light in himself and others. This reflection, if anything can, will drive him to that Spirit as his only refuge from his own presumption and wilfulness.
Once more. The simplest, barest exhibition of human power is the royal Will that gains supremacy by claiming it, and compels individuals and nations, they know not how, to own that it is meant to rule them. It is as idle to deny that such a force exists as to deny the force of sea or wind. To pretend that policy or knowledge has found adequate precautions against it, or against men’s yielding to it, is to deny the facts of history, as Canute’s courtiers denied the facts of Nature. But somewhere there is a limit to this force, and we all feel and know it. We are certain that the most settled, organized tyranny is still a rebellion and must end as rebellions end. What is the warrant for this conviction? Whit-Sunday says it is this: the highest power, the all-ruling Will, was manifested in One who took the form of a Servant and came not to be ministered unto but to minister. He who thus descended is the same who ascended far above all Heavens, that He might fill all things. His noblest gift to men is His own Spirit of Power. To that Spirit all spirits must at last bow. Any merely arbitrary will, one that does not seek to deliver and raise those it rules, must be broken in pieces. The only effectual power will be proved at last to be the power that can give up itself.
III. If the world was to be taught that all power of speech, of imparting life and wisdom, of governing societies, is of God and His gift, no teachers could be more suitable than those Galileans. They spoke one rough dialect that their own countrymen counted ridiculous, had no art but mending nets, and had trembled before priests and rulers and even before men-servants and maid-servants. Yet I know not whether there was not something more wonderful in choosing them to show that all Love is of God, and that His Spirit is the author of whatever love men act out or feel. As Jews they had learnt to despise and hate all the uncircumcised. As Galileans they must often have been jealous of the more favoured part of their own race that looked down on them. They were chosen by a Teacher who bore all their narrowness and ignorance, and who trained them by careful and gracious discipline for their work. Their affection had been drawn out towards Him, and had bound them to each other, though each continually desired to be chief in His kingdom. But that affection was tried and broke down. It failed towards the Master; what strength could it have towards their fellows? If love was their own, or had its springs in them, it must have been utterly dried up. Then reflect how it burst forth and poured itself out, first on Jews who scorned them, then on Gentiles whom their religion had taught them to scorn. It had to endure not just sudden violent hostility but continuous, growing bitterness and contempt in new and unsuspected forms. All the while they were proving and confessing that they had the same inclinations to be spiteful and malicious as ever, with the added irritation of disappointed affections and hopes. So they were trained to understand that around them and with them was a Spirit of ever-living, long-suffering love, whose heights and depths they could never measure. They could only say, It is the Spirit of Him who died upon the Cross and in that death manifested the very nature of His eternal Father and His purposes to men. This Spirit has been given to us, that we may be moulded to that nature and be heralds of that purpose. While we are subject to His guidance and actuated by His energy, we can claim men of all kindreds and nations as children of the same Father and brothers of one another. We can bind them into a society of witnesses to Christ’s redemption of, and dominion over, the world. Trusting our own powers and our own love, we should be the feeblest of creatures for good, and, through the greatness of the commission we had set at nought, the most potent for mischief.
Brethren! this Whitsuntide lesson we must get by heart, as these Galileans did. We have talked of our love to men; some have spoken of their love to God. Both professions may be real. There may be genuine sympathy in many hearts for the miseries of fellow-creatures whom they see or only hear of, prompting active exertion as well as kind words. There may be gratitude, sometimes overpowering, to God for mercies and forgiven sins. But, oh, the infinite danger that this philanthropy becomes a hollow fashion, its phrases repeated today because we had a corresponding feeling yesterday! The well-being of hundreds of millions may become less dear to us than the triumph of a party. We may turn grand sentences about those millions into tools for our own beggarly, selfish triumphs. Not only grand philanthropy but private friendship once cordial, and love once passionate and deep, may be chilled and quite frozen by petty jealousies and suspicions. More perilous still are the warm religious emotions that seem to carry the pledge and seal of eternity. How hard to admit frankly that they are not what they were! How many arts a man will be tempted to use to persuade himself they are unchanged! He will try to keep warm by denouncing others. At last he may cast aside all faith, declaring it a delusion, and say he would save others, if he could, from the imposture to which he yielded.
Where was his original mistake? What is the original falsehood of all who speak of their love to God and man? It is this: they take credit to themselves for a love that moves them to noble thoughts and good deeds but has another source than their hearts, a source divine, not earthly; universal, not partial. How may they be saved from casting off all that is true in them when they find they have been false? By frankly confessing that falsehood to the Spirit of Truth who is convincing them of it. They must own the horrible vanity and conceit of supposing that they loved men better than their Father in Heaven loved them. They must own that their love was only the result or reaction of His, and that they can be only His agents and ministers, declaring by words or deeds a little of what He is.
IV. Finally, this Spirit is said to be the Spirit of a sound mind. In the last century even wise and great divines feared to touch subjects like these. They said there was no calculating what self-willed fanaticism, extravagant heresies, and contempt of guidance and authority had followed and could follow from the notion that Christ had given His Spirit not to doctors but to human beings. They were right. It always will be impossible to calculate the vagaries of the human spirit. It is impossible to foresee the fancies and wild conceits that haunt the student in his chamber. The same is true of the union of physical emotions and nervous impressions with deep moral conviction in the devotee. It applies to the practices and doctrines suggested partly by the penitent’s sin-sick conscience and partly by the confessor’s over-cleverness. It applies to the effect on a people kept in ignorance of a sudden rush of light into their darkness. And it applies to the indignation that comes from the discovery, which the Scriptures give if they give nothing else, that God’s highest blessings are meant for the wayfarer, mixed with the confused feeling that the wayfarer must have faculties that reach all heights and sound all depths. You cannot estimate the wildness and madness into which man may be led. Therefore you cannot provide the remedy or any adequate protection against it. Do you think you know of one? Perhaps you will say it lies in the Church. But Whit-Sunday says the Church stands on the gift of a divine Spirit, and that this is the very ground of its stability and universality. Perhaps you say the Scriptures will be the defence. Be it so; open them as wide as you can. Their testimony is that baptism with this Spirit is the end of all God’s dispensations. Must you not then have made a prodigious mistake in trying to keep this knowledge back for fear of the excesses it will lead to?
May not this be, after all, the one security against those excesses? May not the Spirit of God keep better watch over the minds He has taken into His guardianship than you can? May not the great lesson you have to teach the student, the devotee, the penitent, the confessor, the ordinary wayfarer, be this: that a Spirit of a sound mind is near them? He knows how all are tempted and what temptation is strongest for each. He is seeking to unite them in a common fellowship and guide them to the same haven. He will let none who would act rightly lack the necessary aids, and none who would seek truth be lost in falsehood. He will continually assist the desire to do right in those conscious of an inclination to wrong, and will kindle afresh the zeal for truth in those who feel themselves beginning to acquiesce in plausible lies.
To tell men that such a guiding Spirit of Power, of Love, of a Sound Mind has been given them and is with them is not dangerous but safe. Believing this, they need not sink into imbecility and fear. They can cultivate every power they are conscious of, sure that God Himself is cultivating it for the good of His creatures. They can overcome the tendencies to narrowness, baseness, and selfishness that work on them every moment, knowing that the love, power, and wisdom that created earth and heaven are also at work on them. They can avoid the thousand motives to fanaticism, superstition, and exaltation of their own intellects, because the Spirit of all Wisdom has not left them to choose their own follies.
Only we must continually remember that this Spirit, though given to us, can never be boasted of as ours. He is with us as light and air are with us, to raise us out of ourselves and teach us of the Father and the Son, from whom He ever proceeds. Therefore we truly keep Whit-Sunday in confessing our rebellion and vanity, in blessing the Father for the redemption of mankind by His Son, and in eating the flesh and drinking the blood of that Son who gave Himself for the life of the world. In this we begin to learn something of the unspeakable gift of which it bears witness to us and to our race.