.
God’s glory be promoted by it? Only by incessant prayer for the Holy Spirit; by constantly calling down the influence of the Holy Spirit upon us; we want him to rest upon every page that is printed, and upon every word that is uttered. Let us then be doubly earnest in pleading with the Holy Spirit, that he would come and own our labours, that the whole church at large may be revived by it, and not ourselves only, but the whole world share in the benefit.
24. Then to the ungodly, I have this one closing word to say. Always be careful how you speak about the Holy Spirit. I do not know what the unpardonable sin is, and I do not think any man understands it; but it is something like this: “He who speaks a word against the Holy Spirit, it shall never be forgiven him.” I do not know what that means: but tread carefully! There is danger; there is a pit which our ignorance has covered by sand; tread carefully! you may be in it before the next hour. If there is any strife in your heart today, perhaps you will go to the ale house and forget it. Perhaps there is some voice speaking in your soul, and you will put it away. I do not tell you that you will be resisting the Holy Spirit and committing the unpardonable sin; but it is somewhere there. Be very careful. Oh! there is no crime on earth so black as the crime against the Holy Spirit. You may blaspheme the Father, and you shall be damned for it, unless you repent; you may blaspheme the Son, and hell shall be your portion, unless you are forgiven; but blaspheme the Holy Spirit, and thus says the Lord, “There is no forgiveness, neither in this world, nor in the world which is to come.” I cannot tell you what it is, I do not profess to understand it; but there it is. It is the danger signal; stop! man, stop! If you have despised the Holy Spirit, if you have laughed at his revelations, and scorned what Christians call his influence, I beseech you, stop! this morning seriously deliberate. Perhaps some of you have actually committed the unpardonable sin; stop! Let fear stop you; sit down. Do not drive on so rashly as you have done, Jehu! Oh! slacken your reins! You who are such a profligate in sin, you who have uttered such hard words against the Trinity; stop! Ah, it makes us all stop. It makes us all draw up and say, “Have I not perhaps done so?” Let us think of this; and let us not at any time trifle either with the words, or the acts, of God the Holy Spirit.
The Comforter
No. 5-1:33. A Sermon Delivered On Sunday Evening, January 21, 1855, By C. H. Spurgeon, At New Park Street Chapel, Southwark.
But the Comforter, who is the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatever I have said to you. {John 14:26}
1. Good old Simeon called Jesus the consolation of Israel; and so he was. Before his actual appearance, his name was the Daystar; cheering the darkness, and prophetic of the rising sun. To him they looked with the same hope which cheers the nightly watcher, when from the lonely castle top he sees the fairest of the stars, and hails her as the usher of the morn. When he was on earth, he must have been the consolation of all those who were privileged to be his companions. We can imagine how readily the disciples would run to Christ to tell him of their griefs, and how sweetly with that matchless intonation of his voice, he would speak to them and bid their fears be gone. Like children, they would consider him as their Father; and to him every want, every groan, every sorrow, every agony, would at once be carried; and he, like a wise physician, had a balm for every wound; he had mingled a cordial for their every care; and readily he dispensed some mighty remedy to allay all the fever of their troubles. Oh! it must have been sweet to have lived with Christ. Surely sorrows then were only joys in masks, because they gave an opportunity to go to Jesus to have them removed. Oh! would to God, some of us may say, that we could have lain our weary heads upon the bosom of Jesus, and that our birth had been in that happy era, when we might have heard his kind voice, and seen his kind look, when he said “Let the weary ones come to me.”
2. But now he was about to die. Great prophecies were to be fulfilled, and great purposes were to be answered, and therefore Jesus must go. It behoved him to suffer, that he might be made a propitiation for our sins. It behoved him to slumber in the dust awhile, that he might perfume the chamber of the grave to make it —
No more a charnel house to fence
The relics of lost innocence.
It behoved him to have a resurrection, that we who shall one day be the dead in Christ, might rise first, and in glorious bodies stand upon earth. And it behoved him that he should ascend up on high, that he might lead captivity captive; that he might chain the fiends of hell; that he might lash them to his chariot wheels and drag them up high heaven’s hill, to make them feel a second overthrow from his right arm when he would dash them from the pinnacles of heaven down to deeper depths beneath. “It is right I should go away from you,” said Jesus, “for if I do not go away, the Comforter will not come.” Jesus must go. Weep oh disciples. Jesus must be gone. Mourn oh poor ones who are to be left without a Comforter. But hear how kindly Jesus speaks: “I will not leave you comfortless, I will pray to the Father, and he shall send you another Comforter, who shall be with you, and shall dwell in you for ever.” He would not leave those few poor sheep alone in the wilderness; he would not desert his children and leave them fatherless. Albeit that he had a mighty mission which did fill his heart and hand; albeit that he had so much to perform that we might have thought that even his gigantic intellect would be overburdened; albeit he had so much to suffer, that we might suppose his whole soul to be concentrated upon the thought of the sufferings to be endured; yet it was not so; before he left, he gave soothing words of comfort; like the good Samaritan, he poured in oil and wine; and we see what he promised: “I will send you another Comforter — one who shall be just what I have been, yes even more; who shall console you in your sorrows, remove your doubts, comfort you in your afflictions, and stand as my vicar on earth, to do that which I would have done, had I stayed with you.”
3. Before I discourse on the Holy Spirit as the Comforter, I must make one or two remarks on the different translations of the word rendered “Comforter.” The Rhemish translation, which you are aware is adopted by Roman Catholics, has left the word untranslated, and gives it “Paraclete.” “But the Paraclete which is the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things.” This is the original Greek word, and it has some other meanings besides “Comforter.” Sometimes it means the monitor or instructor: “I will send you another monitor, another teacher.” Frequently it means “Advocate”; but the most common meaning of the word is that which we have here: “I will send you another Comforter.” However, we cannot pass over those two other interpretations without saying something about them.
4. “I will send you another teacher.” Jesus Christ had been the official teacher of his saints while on earth. They called no man Rabbi except Christ. They sat at no men’s feet to learn their doctrines; but they had them direct from the lips of him who “spoke as never man spoke.” “And now,” he says, “when I am gone, where shall you find the great infallible teacher? Shall I set you up a Pope at Rome, to whom you shall go, and who shall be your infallible oracle? Shall I give you the councils of the church to be held to decide all knotty points?” Christ said no such thing. “I am the infallible paraclete or teacher, and when I am gone, I will send you another teacher and he shall be the person who is to explain Scripture; he shall be the authoritative oracle of God, who shall make all dark things light, who shall unravel mysteries, who shall untwist all knots of revelation, and shall make you understand what you could not discover, had it not been for his influence.” And beloved, no man ever learns anything correctly, unless he is taught by the Spirit. You may learn election, and you may know it so that you shall be damned by it, if you are not taught by the Holy Spirit; for I have known some who have learned election to their soul’s destruction; they have learned it, so that they said they were among the elect, whereas they had no marks, no evidences and no work of the Holy Spirit in their souls. There is a way of learning truth in Satan’s college, and holding it in licentiousness; but if so, it shall be to your souls as poison to your veins, and prove your everlasting ruin. No man can know Jesus Christ unless he is taught by God. There is no doctrine of the Bible which can be safely, thoroughly, and truly learned, except by the agency of the one authoritative teacher. Ah! tell me not of systems about divinity; tell me not of schemes about theology; tell me not about infallible commentators, or most learned and most arrogant doctors;