y of a new and
divine life. All Christendom is professing to commemorate that fact
to-day, [Preached on Whitsunday] but a large portion of us forget that
it was but a transient sign of a perpetual reality. The rushing mighty
wind has died down into a calm; the fiery tongues have ceased to flicker
on the disciples' heads, but the miracle, which is permanent, and is
being repeated from day to day, in the experience of every believing
soul, is the inrush of the very breath of God into their lives, and the
plunging of them into a fiery baptism which melts their coldness and
refines away their dross. Now, my text brings before us some very
remarkable thoughts as to the permanent working of the Divine Spirit
upon Christian souls, and upon this it bases a very tender and
persuasive exhortation to conduct. And I desire simply to try to bring
out the fourfold aspect in those words. There is, first, a wondrous
revelation; second, a plain lesson as to what that Divine Spirit chiefly
does; third, a solemn warning as to man's power and freedom to thwart
it; and, lastly, a tender motive for conduct. 'Grieve not the Holy
Spirit, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption.'

Now let us look briefly at these four thoughts: Here we have--

I. A wonderful revelation.

Wonderful to all, startling to some. If you can speak of grief, you must
be speaking of a person. An influence cannot be sorry, whatever may
happen to it. And that word of my text is no more violent metaphor or
exaggeratedly strong way of suggesting a motive, but it keeps rigidly
within the New Testament limits, in reference to that Divine Spirit,
when to Him it attributes this personal emotion of sorrow with its
correlation of possible joy.

Now, I do not need to dwell upon the thought here, but I do desire to
emphasise it, especially in view of the strangely hazy and defective
conceptions which so many Christian people have upon this matter. And I
desire to remind you that the implied assumption of a personal Spirit,
capable of being 'grieved,' which is in this text, is in accordance with
all the rest of the New Testament teaching.

What did Jesus Christ mean when He spoke of one who 'will guide you into
all truth'; of one who 'whatsoever He shall hear, those things shall He
speak'? What does the book of the Acts mean when it says that the Spirit
said to the believers in Antioch, 'Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the
work whereunto I have called them'? What did