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Christ’s Heart Surely and Speedily

Goodwin writes of the Holy Spirit’s continual work of shedding God’s love abroad in our hearts through Christ:

Him [i.e. the Holy Spirit], therefore, I shall send on purpose to be in my room, and to execute my place to you, my bride, spouse, and he shall tell you, if you will listen to him, and not grieve him, nothing but stories of my love…All his speech in your hearts will be to advance me, and to greaten my worth and love unto you, and it will be his delight to do it. And he can come from heaven in an instant when he will, and bring you fresh tidings of my mind, and tell you the thoughts I last had of you, even at the very minute when I am thinking of them, what they are at the very time wherein he tell you them…We are said to ‘have the mind of Christ’…for he [the Spirit] dwelleth in Christ’s heart, and also ours, and lifts up from one hand to the other what Christ’s thoughts are to us, and what our prayers and faith are to Christ. So that you shall have my heart as surely and as speedily as if I were with you; and he will continually be breaking your hearts, either with my love to you, or yours to me, or both…

-Thomas Goodwin, The Heart of Christ, pp. 19-20

The fact that the Spirit can come in an instant and declare Christ’s love gives us hope in the midst of emptiness and spiritual dryness. The imperatives are, Listen to Him and Don’t grieve Him.

The Holy Spirit as Editor

I have left my Spirit to be your secretary and the inditer [i.e. composer] of all your petitions.

-Thomas Goodwin, The Heart of Christ, p. 21

Goodwin expounds Christ’s promise of the Holy Spirit as the Paraclete of his people. This ties into an idea I’ve written about before HERE: The Spirit ‘fixing our prayers on the way up.’ When you have an editor in the Holy Spirit, you should not fear boldness in prayer.

Link: Evangelicals’ Favorite Heresies

I facepalmed.

Lifeway has posted an article detailing a Lifeway/Ligonier Ministries survey dealing with basic theological beliefs among American ‘evangelicals.’ CT gives a nice presentation of some of the data HERE. There’s nothing really shocking in the results, but it drove home the point to me that we need to be very clear in our teaching in relation to the doctrine of the Trinity. The fact that 51% of those surveyed believe the Holy Spirit to be an ‘impersonal force’ is very disturbing. Hence the facepalm.

It so happens that I am teaching on ‘I believe in the Holy Ghost’ this coming week in my Sunday School series on the Apostles’ Creed. I think I know what I will be emphasizing.

Being Busy Is Not Enough

Doing the Lord’s work in the Lord’s way is not a matter of being saved and then simply working hard. After Jesus ascended, the disciples waited quietly in prayer for the coming of his Spirit. Their first motion was not toward activism – Christ has risen, now let us be busy. Though they looked at the world with Christ’s compassion, they obeyed his clear command to wait before they witnessed. If we who are Christians and therefore indwelt by the Spirit are to preach to our generation with tongues of fire, we also must have something more than activism which men can easily duplicate. We must know something of the power of the Holy Spirit.

-Francis Schaeffer, No Little People, p. 63

“God Fixes Our Prayers On the Way Up”

As I have been engaged in studying Romans 8:26-27 over the better part of a month I have often found myself confused by the commentators trying to explain the ‘groanings’ of v. 26.

  • Romans 8:26 ¶ Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.

However complex and beyond me the exact answer to the riddles may be, one truth stands out gloriously. As we pray, the Spirit helps in ways that we cannot comprehend.

In prayer our words, through the intercession of the Spirit, are, as it were, brought to the very ears of the Father. And he doesn’t always hear things the way we speak them. He hears them the way they should have been spoken, for in prayer not only do we speak to the Father by the Spirit, but the Spirit speaks to the Father through us and in our behalf.

A young man, a professing Christian, once came to me and confessed with great grief that he had not prayed in months. He simply didn’t know how to. His sins drove him away from prayer because he was ashamed. His inability to discern who God is, and what his will was for him at that particular time, drove him away. I saw a broken, confused young man who had forsaken the one thing he needed more than anything – communion with God through prayer.

Oh, what peace we often forfeit,
Oh, what needless pain we bear,
All because we do not carry
Everything to God in prayer!

The fact of the matter is that none of us really know how to pray. We have some sense of it, but we are always afraid that we are cut off from God on the one hand, or just getting it wrong on the other. That’s where the Spirit’s help comes in. I wish I could have shared this quote with that young man, but I had never read it. One of my pastors shared it years ago and I’ve always treasured it. In the book Praying: Finding our Way through Duty to Delight, by Carolyn Nystrom and J.I. Packer, Ms. Nystrom basically gives the best summary application of Romans 8:26 I have seen:

Some people get so entangled in the various dos and don’ts of prayer, so transfixed by the problem of sorting out what is our part and what is God’s part, so bogged down fretting over whether they, as mere flawed humans, should ask anything of a holy, almighty God, or conversely whether there is any point in asking since God will do what he wants anyway that they become paralyzed about praying…Don’t fret; just pray. God fixes our prayers on the way up! If he does not answer the prayer we made, he will answer the prayer we should have made. That is all anyone needs to know (pp. 174-175).

Don’t get into that position where you are paralyzed, like that young man, and you can’t pray. If you don’t have confidence in your own prayers, have confidence in the intercession of the Spirit. Have confidence that he will ‘fix your prayers on the way up.’ What greater comfort could he give us?

We have an advocate in heaven, Jesus Christ, our great Mediator; and we have an advocate on earth, yet more than on earth, dwelling within us, the Holy Spirit. We are covered from the bottom up. They are not speech writers always giving us the exact words to say. But they are editors presenting prayer to the Father as cleansed with the Savior’s blood and purified with the Spirit. Through the active obedience of Christ, we are counted as though we never uttered an imperfect prayer.

True prayers are like those carrier pigeons which find their way so well – they cannot fail to go to Heaven, for it is from heaven that they come – they are only going home! (Spurgeon, Hindrances to Prayer).

Have you been to Sinai? (Romans 8:15)

A quote from Geoff Thomas on Roman 8:15 concerning ‘the Spirit of bondage’:

In Scotland, there might be a question asked by an elder when somebody was being interviewed for membership in the church. Not my question of why God should let you into heaven but rather this unusually phrased question: “Have you been to Sinai?” That was the question they asked.  “Have you been to Sinai?”  The elder was not, of course, asking had they been to the peninsula of Sinai in the Middle East on a Holy Land bus tour, but had they been to the place where God made them feel the power of his law, touching their conscience with the searching inward probing of the Ten Commandments, and making them feel they were fearful slaves to sin. Have you understood that by the works and deeds of law-keeping no one can be saved, and you are no exception?  Then, what is left for you to do? You can only flee for salvation to the one who perfectly did all that God’s law required in order to take him as your Saviour.

  • Romans 8:15 For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.