The Assembly of God. Miscellaneous Writings of C. H. Mackintosh, vol. IIIMackintosh, Charles Henry
Religion
The Assembly of God. Miscellaneous Writings of C. H. Mackintosh, vol. III
Mackintosh, Charles Henry
Theology
I desire that there may be no misunderstanding on this point. I say the
Holy Ghost cannot approve the schisms in the professing Church, for He
Himself has said of such, "I praise you not." He is grieved by them--He
would counteract them; He baptizes all believers into the unity of the
one body, so that it cannot be thought, by any intelligent mind, that
the Holy Ghost could sustain schisms, which are a grief and a dishonor
to Him.
We must however, distinguish between the Spirit's dwelling in the
Church, and His dwelling in individuals. He dwells in the body of
Christ, which is the Church (see I Cor. iii. 17; Eph. ii. 22); He dwells
also in the body of the believer, as we read, "your body is the temple
of the Holy Ghost, which is in you, which ye have of God" (I Cor. vi.
19). The only body or community, therefore, in which the Spirit can
dwell, is _the whole Church of God_; and the only person in which He can
dwell is the believer. But, as has already been observed, the table of
the Lord, in any given locality, should be the exhibition of the unity
of the whole Church. This leads us to another principle connected with
the nature of the Lord's Supper, viz., this, It is an act whereby we not
only shew the death of the Lord until He come, but whereby we also give
expression to a fundamental truth, which cannot be too strongly or too
frequently pressed upon the minds of Christians, at the present day,
viz., that_ all believers are_ "_one loaf--one body_." It is a very
common error to view this ordinance merely as a channel through which
grace flows to the soul of the individual, and not as an act bearing
upon the whole body, and bearing also upon the glory of the Head of the
Church. That it is a channel through which grace flows to the soul of
the individual communicant there can be no doubt, for there is blessing
in every act of obedience. But that individual blessing is but a very
small part of it, can be seen by the attentive reader of I Cor. xi. It
is the Lord's death and the Lord's coming, that are brought prominently
before our souls in the Lord's Supper; and where any one of these
elements is excluded there must be something wrong. If there be anything
to hinder the complete showing forth of the Lord's death, or the
exhibition of the unity of the body, or the clear perception of the
Lord's coming, then there must be something radically wrong in the
principle on which the table is spread, and we only need a single eye,
and a mind entirely subject to the Word and Spirit of Christ, in order
to detect the wrong.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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