It is to be holy in things like eating and drinking. How often
a Christian comes to the consciousness that he takes or seeks too much
enjoyment in that eating, eating for pleasure, with no self-denial or
self-sacrifice in his feeding the body! How often we tempt one another to
eat, and how often the believer forgets that this body is the very secret
temple of the Holy Ghost and that every mouthful we eat and drink must be
for the glory of God in such a way as to be perfectly well pleasing to Him!
Beloved, I bring you a message: There is access for you into the rest of
God, and the Holy Spirit is given to bring you in, and the Holy Spirit will
fill your heart with the unutterable joy of Christ's presence; and with the
joy of deliverance from sin, of victory over sin; the unutterable joy of
knowing that you are doing God's will and are pleasing in His sight; the
unutterable joy of knowing that He is sanctifying and keeping the temple
for Christ to dwell in. Believers, the joy of the Holy Ghost, the joy of
that holiness of God, is His blessedness, His purity, His perfection, that
nothing can mar or stain or disturb. The Holy Ghost waits to bring and to
manifest it in our lives. He wants to come so into our hearts that we shall
live, as Holy Ghost men, the sanctified life, with the sanctifying power of
Jesus running through our whole beings.
My third thought is: the joy of the Holy Ghost is the joy of the love of
the saints. The Holy Ghost was not given to any man on the day of Pentecost
separate from the others; He came and filled the whole company. We know how
much division and separation and pride there had been among them, but
on that day the Holy Ghost so filled their hearts that we find it was
afterward said: "Behold how these men love one another." There was a love
in the primitive church that the very heathen noticed, and could not
understand. Why was that? The Holy Spirit is the bond of union between the
Father and Son; and that bond is love. The Holy Spirit is just the love of
God come to dwell in the heart. When He dwells with me and my brother we
learn to love each other. Though I be unloving naturally, and though I have
very little grace, if the heart of my brother is full of the Holy Spirit he
loves me through it all. You know love is a wonderful thing. As long as a
man tries to love it is not real love, but when real love comes, the more
opposition it meets the more it triumphs, for the more it can exercise
itself and perfect itself, the more it rejoices. Take a mother with a son
dishonoring her. How her love follows him! When she sees that he has fallen
deeper than ever before, how the dear mother heart only loves him the more
intensely through all the wretchedness! Does not the Scripture say, "If He
gave His life for us, we are bound to give our life for the brethren?" The
Holy Spirit comes as a spirit of love, and if you want to know the joy of
the Holy Ghost, and want Him to lead you into the rest of God and keep you
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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