-that that Divine power is in the very act of faith
received and implanted in every believing soul. 'Know ye not,' the
Apostle could say to his hearers, 'that ye have the Spirit of God,
except ye be reprobates.' I doubt whether the affirmative response would
spring to the lips of all professing or real Christians to-day as
swiftly as it would have done then. And I cannot help feeling, and
feeling with increasing gravity of pressure as the days go on, that the
thing that our churches, and we as individuals, perhaps need most
to-day, is the replacing of that great truth--I do not call it a
'doctrine,' that is cold, it is experience--in its proper place. They
who believe on Him do receive a new life, a supernatural communication
of the new Spirit, to be the very power that rules in their lives.

It is an inward gift. It is not like the help that men can render us,
given from without and apprehended and incorporated with ourselves
through the medium of the understanding or of the heart. There is an old
story in the history of Israel about a young king that was bid by the
prophet to bend his bow against the enemies of Israel, as a symbol; and
the old prophet put his withered, skinny brown hand on the young man's
fleshy one, and then said to him, 'Shoot.' But this Divine Spirit comes
to strengthen us in a more intimate and blessed fashion than that, for
it glides into our hearts and dwells in our spirits, and our work, as
my text says, is His working. This 'working within' is stated in the
original of my text most emphatically, for it is literally 'the
inworking which inworketh in me mightily.'

So, dear brethren, the first direct aim of all our endeavour ought to be
to receive and to keep and to increase our gift of that Divine Spirit.
The work and the striving of which my text speaks would be sheer slavery
unless we had that help. It would be impossible of accomplishment unless
we had it.

'If any power we have, it is to ill,
And all the power is Thine, to do and eke to will.'

Let us, then, begin our endeavour, not by working, but by receiving. Is
not that the very meaning of the doctrine that we are always talking
about, that men are saved, not by works but by faith? Does not that mean
that the first step is reception, and the first requisite is
receptiveness, and that then, and after that, second and not first, come
working and striving? To keep our hearts open by desire, to keep them
open by pur