The sinner who, listening to the Gospel invitation, and convicted of sin, refuses to submit to God in true repentance and faith in Jesus, is resisting the Holy Spirit. We have bold and striking historical illustrations of the danger of resisting the Holy Spirit in the disasters which befell Pharaoh, and the terrible calamities which came upon Jerusalem, and have for twenty centuries followed the Jews. The ten plagues that came upon Pharaoh and his people were ten opportunities and open doors into God's favour and fellowship, which they themselves shut by their stubborn resistance, only to be overtaken by dreadful catastrophe. To the Jews, Stephen said: "Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost" (Acts vii. 51); and the siege and fall of Jerusalem, and the butchery and banishment and enslavement of its inhabitants, and all the woes that came upon the Jews, followed their rejection of Jesus and the hardness of heart and spiritual blindness which swiftly overtook them when they resisted all the loving efforts and entreaties of His disciples baptised with the Holy Spirit. And what on a large scale befalls nations and people, on a small scale also befalls individuals. Those that receive and obey the Lord are enlightened and blessed and saved; those that resist and reject Him are sadly left to themselves and surely swallowed up in destruction. Likewise the professing Christian who hears of heart-holiness and cleansing from all sin as a blessing he may now have by faith, and, convicted of his need of the blessing and of God's desire and willingness to bestow it upon him now, refuses to seek it in whole-hearted affectionate consecration and faith, is resisting the Holy Spirit. And such resistance imperils the soul beyond all possible computation. We see an example of this in the Israelites who were brought out of Egypt with signs and wonders, and led through the Red Sea and the wilderness to the borders of Canaan, but, forgetting, refused to go over into the land. In this they resisted the Holy Spirit in His leadings as surely as did Pharaoh, and with quite as disastrous results to themselves, perishing in their evil way. For their sin was as much greater than his as their light exceeded his. Hundreds of years later, Isaiah, writing of this time, says: "In all their affliction He was afflicted, and the angel of His presence saved them; in His love and in His pity He redeemed them; and He bare them, and carried them all the days of old. But they rebelled, and vexed His Holy Spirit; therefore He was turned to be their enemy, and He fought against them" (Isaiah lxiii. 9, 10). We see from this that Christians must beware and watch and pray and walk softly with the Lord in glad obedience and childlike faith, if they would escape the darkness and dryness that result from grieving and quenching the Spirit, and the dangers that surely come from resisting Him.