We need a few familiar passages.
Firstly, from John’s Gospel, chapter 14, at verse 16:
I will pray the Father,
and He shall give you another Advocate,
that He may be with you for ever,
even the Spirit of truth: whom the world cannot receive;
for it beholdeth Him not, neither knoweth Him:
ye know Him; for He abideth with you, and shall be in you.
I will not leave you desolate: I come unto you.
Verse 25:
These things have I spoken unto you, while yet abiding with you.
But the Advocate, even the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name,
He shall teach you all things,
and bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you.
And the fragment so well known to us, from the first chapter of the letter to the Ephesians, verse 17:
I pray that the Father of glory may give unto you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him.
In our consideration of the Holy Spirit as divine character, or divine testimony, we move round to another angle this afternoon: to view Him as light.
It was truth last night. It was holiness this morning. Now it is light.
God is light. Jesus is the light of men and of the world. The Holy Spirit is called the Spirit of revelation. God dwells in the light. The city, which is the last presentation in the Bible, has the light of God. The Word of God is a light, a lamp. Christians are said to be children of the light.
So everything related to God is light. In Him there is no darkness at all.
It is Satan who is the prince of darkness. His works are the works of darkness. His children are the children of darkness. These are the two contrasted and conflicting kingdoms: the kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness.
The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of light, according to what we have just read from the Lord Jesus: “When He is come, He shall guide you into all the truth. He shall take of Mine, and shall declare it unto you.”
So we look at the Holy Spirit as character, and then as function, in terms of light.
God never begins to build until there is light. In creation, before He proceeded to build, He divided the light from the darkness. He said, “Let there be light.”
That is an abiding law: God does all His work on the basis of light.
Those two great symbolic representations of God, the tabernacle and the temple, were the results of spiritual illumination to Moses and to David. Before they could build, light had to be given. Someone had to be the receptacle of the revelation.
When we come into the New Testament, we find that the first definite intimation of the church—“I will build My church”—was made immediately after illumination had come to Peter as to the person of the Lord Jesus.
Flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father.
I will build My church.
That is the consistency and principle of God. You pass from the first intimation of the church in the New Testament, the first mention of the word, to that full disclosure of its eternal calling, destiny, and purpose in the letter to the Ephesians; and you find that, as in the beginning, so in the full presentation, it is along the line of illumination and revelation by the Holy Spirit.
The Lord Jesus said, “I will pray the Father. He will give you another Advocate. He shall guide you into all the truth.”
I am not sure whether, in the mind of the Lord Jesus, there was the thought of the pillar in the wilderness, guiding to the land. It may well have been. But He said, “I will pray the Father. He will give you One to guide you into all the truth.”
Paul is in prayer in the same way as his Master prayed, and his prayer is on the same line: “I bow my knees unto the Father”—the same Father—“that He will grant unto you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him.”
Here it is not the beginning of revelation. That was with Peter, in Matthew 16. Here it is another word which has not been rightly translated in our version. It is the full knowledge of Him: a spirit of revelation in the full knowledge of Him.
So we have to see, first of all, what light is. If so much depends upon it, so much rests upon it, it is like one of the pillars upon which the whole structure of the church rests. It is very important that we know what it is.
Firstly, as character: light is transparency. Light is clearness. Light is absolute purity. Light is honesty. Light is openness of character.
Light hides nothing. It does not believe in hiding anything. Its whole action and nature is contrary to hiding anything. It has nothing to hide. It shows everything; it shows all.
That is, in other words, it is not deceit. It does not want to cover anything, or make pretence or believe that something is other than it is.
Light is single; it is not double. There is no duplicity about light. Light is just light. There is no doubt at all where there is light.
Now, we have pointed out that the city—which, as we so well know, is one of the titles or designations of Christ corporate, Christ and His members—is characterized by everything that speaks of the nature of light.
It is characterized as a whole by crystal clearness. It is like a jasper stone, clear as crystal. Its street is pure and transparent gold. Its river is water clear as crystal. Everything about it is of the nature of light.
It is so much light in its character that it has no need of the sun. The light is in its own constitution. It takes its character from the Lamb, who is the light thereof.
You can see through this city, and everything in it.
I do not know whether you would like to live in transparent houses. But when you live in this city—to adopt the figure or the symbol—you will not be ashamed for anybody to see what is going on. You will not need to hide anything. Well, you can just see through it.
All the things which produce cloudiness, murkiness, and indefiniteness—all the natural things—will have been finally abolished. There will be no night there. No night there.
All these things, as you recognize, are symbolic things. They show symbolically what the Holy Spirit has come to do in men and women and in the creation. That is what He has come to do: to make for a condition like that in human nature.
He has undertaken a tremendous task. That is what He has come to do. He is the Spirit of light; that is His character.
His presence is, on the one side, to bring everything to an end that is of the nature of darkness—all these various shades and aspects of darkness. He comes to bring all that to an end by applying the cross, in which it was all brought to an end in the person of the Lord Jesus: to work that meaning of the cross out in our lives.
So that everything that belongs to that kingdom of darkness is removed. In the end, with us, there is no darkness at all.
Is that really what we think of when we think of receiving, or being filled with, the Holy Spirit?
Here again, perhaps a little reshaping in our ideas is called for. It is true that He has many other things. He is the Spirit of power. He is the Spirit of wisdom. Yes, yes, many other things. But with them all, He is this.
We must not make more of the demonstration aspects of the Spirit—in power, gifts, capacities, and works—than we do of the character side of the Holy Spirit.
Dear friends, if He is going really to do His work in you and in me, what He will do is to bring us to be people who can be looked into without any fear, without any drawing of the blinds. Just be looked into. We can bear to be looked into.
Our lives can bear to be looked into. Our motives can bear to be looked into.
The Holy Spirit knows that. He knows that. We cannot deceive Him. We cannot hoodwink Him, as we say. He knows us.
His dealings with us are with a knowledge that we have not got about ourselves. We must, therefore, give the Holy Spirit credit for dealing with us according to a knowledge of us that is beyond our own.
He has seen something that is contrary to His own nature. He has looked in and found something that does not answer to this character of absolute transparency. He is dealing with it.
You see, we often think that sincerity on our part is all that is required. “We have only got to be sincere,” we say. “We are sincere.”
I remind you that, in any case, there is a difference between sincerity and reality. Saul of Tarsus was the most sincere man alive in his day, but he was the most mistaken man alive in his day.
Sincerity may be required—may be very important, and it is—but do not let us deceive ourselves with our sincerity, saying that because we are downright sincere, we must be right. That is not the case.
The Spirit may require sincerity to open the door. I believe that anything that is insincere is a closed door to the Holy Spirit. But, after all, sincerity is only opening the door for Him to come in and then begin to show us that, sincere as we were, we were wrong after all.
That is exactly what happened with Paul, is it not?
I verily thought with myself that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth.
Absolutely sincere, absolutely conscientious, and yet most ignominiously mistaken, and wrong—until a light came. Then he saw it.
You see the point? He does not just accept our sincerity as the final thing. He comes, perhaps, through that door; then He begins His work, showing that even our purest motives were probably mixed and our sincere intentions were tainted.
He works according to His knowledge, and we must always give Him credit for doing that.
Dear friends, if you and I are really, really meaning business with God, and the Holy Spirit has taken us through an experience, through a day, which has been very self-revealing and a real shock to us—as to what was there that we would never have believed had we been told—the end of that is that we are on our faces worshipping Him as the faithful and the true.
Not rebellion, not bitterness, but thanking God that He has been so faithful with us and so true—so true. We do not want to be left with anything that is darkness at all.
Well, this is the first thing about the Holy Spirit as light. He is, and works for, complete transparency and honesty and purity without a shadow, bringing us to that end of glory—having the glory of God—because there can be no glory in anything that is of the kingdom of darkness.
Another thing about light is that it is absolutely fearless. Light is fearless.
If this character is really there, we are never afraid of something being discovered. A good conscience, a clear conscience, is a tremendously courageous thing. It is a very strong thing. It puts you in a very strong position.
Where there is light and no darkness—nothing to be hidden, and therefore nothing that we do not want to be discovered or uncovered—there is no fear. There is no fear. There is the great strength of confidence and assurance.
Anything doubtful, anything questionable, about which we are not sure—if we are not sure whether our position is right or wrong, if we have some question—we are always afraid. We are in the weakness of fear, are we not?
Darkness and fear always go together, do they not? Naturally, it is like that. Fear belongs to darkness. There is no confidence and no strength where there is darkness.
This city, this people, at the end is such a strong city, having walls great and high. It is the very embodiment of the idea of strength, but its strength lies in its character. Its strength lies in its purity, its light.
Another thing about light is that these things cannot exist where there is light. Well, we know that physically, do we not? We send people with certain diseases to countries where it is all sunny and light. We have learned to expose wounds to the sun for their healing.
Disease cannot abide the light. The light is healing. Light is purifying.
Now come back to the city. John says that the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Disease cannot abide this light that is in the city. It just cannot abide the light that is there.
The light deals with everything that is working corruption, and destroys it. It repairs the damage.
I am thinking especially now of the more recent discoveries and uses of light in healing. Remember how it began? In the First World War, I had a great deal to do with wounded soldiers—thousands of terribly mangled bodies, torn by shell.
It was then, in that war, when it was so difficult to cope with that terrible situation, that methods of healing, and even of making good the loss of flesh and repairing destroyed tissue, were adopted. The method was to put the wounded out in the sun, just exposing them to the sun.
Men, not understanding, found that it built up the body, made good the destroyed tissues, and healed in a wonderful way. That was the introduction of a new technique which has now, of course, been developed into various types of treatment for healing.
Light does it. It is healing; it is repairing; it destroys disease.
Another thing—we are building up for an application—another thing about light is that it is a joyful thing. It is joyful. It is an uplifting thing. It is an inspiring thing.
Darkness is always depressing, is it not? Always depressing.
You can see it in people in this world. People who live in those extreme northern realms, where they do not see the sun from one year’s beginning to another, are heavy. They are dull. They are very largely joyless people.
When you go to southern climes, what a difference: laughter, merriment, light-heartedness. Light has a very big ministry in that regard. People of the sun are sunny people. People of the shadows are marked by shadows.
Oh, now, an important thing is light, is it not, in character? A very important thing in character.
Before ever the function can begin, you have got to have the character. That is the point.
The church broke out on its great world mission and challenged darkness everywhere when the Holy Spirit Himself had come into it and given His own character to it.
You can see the contrast in those early chapters of the church’s history—a tremendous contrast in the apostles themselves. Oh, what a change has taken place in them! What different men they are!
They were men in the shadows, in the dark, but they are now men in the light—or shall I say, men with the light in themselves? Something has transformed those men. That change: the light is in them. The Spirit has come.
Take those two representatives on the Emmaus road. A veil was over their eyes as to the Scriptures. When the Lord Jesus opened up the Scriptures of the Old Testament—from Moses, the prophets, and the Psalms—it was not their introduction to the Bible. They knew the Scriptures. They knew the Bible.
They were not just being introduced to the Book, but how dark their minds were.
Now listen to them on the day of Pentecost. What light they have got as to the Scriptures! They now see, and are proclaiming, wonderful illumination out of the Scriptures.
Light has come into them. It has changed them, made them different people—different and a different kind of people. You can hardly recognize them as the same people in many respects.
You cannot recognize the old Simon Peter in this man who is now standing up and speaking and challenging everybody. He could not stand up to the challenge of a little maid only a little while before, but now he can challenge the rulers. Something has happened to this man. The light has come in; something has been done.
In other words, the Spirit has come into him, and he is now seeing in new ways.
That is how the testimony begins. That is how the function begins.
You see, the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the work of the testimony—the testimony in the nations. Dear friends, the Holy Spirit is not just out to make us retailers of truth in a second-hand way.
That is one of the weaknesses of the whole order. Certain things are learned or taught in schools, and then people are turned out with what they have learned in schools and have been taught. They go out and give that out in this second-hand, photographic way.
It is not surprising that there is not the impact upon the darkness that there was at the beginning, and that the healing of spiritual and moral diseases does not take place and the whole scene is not transformed. No, it is not that way.
This is why the Lord Jesus, after they had all the information that ever they needed—after they had had all His teaching, seen all His works, seen Him die, seen Him after the resurrection, and heard angels declaring that He would come again in like manner as they had seen Him go up—did not allow them to go and preach it.
Yes, they were not allowed to go out into the nations with all that.
This thing had to become something more than something said to them, something they had been told, something they had heard with their ears. This had to come into them by the Holy Spirit as a mighty power within their own being.
Hence He gave them commandment that they should not depart from Jerusalem until they received the promise of the Father.
No, it is not the truth that we have been taught; it is the truth that has come into our hearts by illumination of the Holy Spirit that is power. Not any other. Most important.
I venture to say, dear friends, that if only a small percentage of all the teaching that this little company represents were to come up in the power of the Holy Spirit, some tremendous thing would happen.
There would be an impact and an impression that would be comparable to what was at the beginning. That is wonderful.
Let us not be content with our truth and our teaching. The Lord made it perfectly clear that that was not all that they required. Not all that He had given, not all that He had shown, much as they had gained by their association with Him—He made it perfectly clear: this is not enough.
“You must not go out into the world just with that. That must not be the basis on which you go. That will come to life; that has its place; that is necessary. But you cannot just go on with that only. Tarry ye until ye be endued with power.”
Then the endowment came. What happened? What He had said to them sprang into life. What He had done came to them as a new revelation as to what it meant.
The Holy Spirit is absolutely indispensable, even when you have a very, very large wealth of instruction, teaching, and information.
This is true as to the individual. But remember, as the Holy Spirit is the light of the sanctuary, Paul prays about the spirit of wisdom and revelation with the church before him.
He is thinking of the church as the dwelling place, the habitation, as he calls it, of God through the Spirit. It is the church which is to be here in this world, universally and locally, as this powerful impact upon the darkness in that locality, wherever it is, by the Holy Spirit.
The darkness cannot go unchallenged. It cannot go unchallenged, and it cannot eventually triumph.
So with the Lord Jesus: He was the light, and the darkness overcame it not. It looked as though it did, but it did not. It did not.
The presence of the church with the Holy Spirit in it ought to be like that. It ought to be like that: registering a tremendous challenge. And whatever men do, or Satan does, that light is not quenched. That light survives. It should be like that.
You and I, individually, when we have passed from this earth, should be remembered as having been vehicles of light, vessels of light—this kind of light. It was a challenge which was effective, not just that we had teaching and that we had truth, but there was that with the Holy Spirit in it that left its mark.
We all ought to be like that.
Do you think it is possible for anybody really, really to have the Holy Spirit in any commensurate way and for it to make no difference where they are? Surely that could not be. That could not be.
It was said of the Lord Jesus that He could not be hid. So it should be with us.
Now, this is the truth about the Holy Spirit as light. I am quite sure you agree with the truth, and that your heart goes out that it might be so in your case.
It may be necessary for us to give the Holy Spirit a better and larger chance than He has.
We can, you know, shut out the light. We can deprive ourselves of this light of the Spirit. We can have bandages over our eyes.
What might they be?
Well, prejudice is a terribly blinding thing, you know. What is prejudice? Well, it means, as the word fairly indicates, that you have prejudged something—a situation—before you really did look into it.
Prejudice, perhaps on the basis of report, or on any one of many pretexts: a prejudging.
In prejudging, without a firsthand, honest, sincere, thorough investigation and inquiry, pursuing the matter until you really know, you are closed down. You are foreclosed on it.
Very well: you have put the bandage of prejudice on your eyes. There is no hope until that is removed. There is no hope until that is removed.
Some of us know that quite well. My brethren know that I do, on that very point.
Many years ago, the whole thing turned in my life from what I call a closed heaven to an open heaven. At least one brother was there one Sunday morning when I was preaching, and I was preaching on prejudice.
Well, some people think that I can be emphatic. I was emphatic that day. Metaphorically, I had my coat off and my sleeves rolled up. I was lunging at prejudice with all the strength that I had, calling it by all the names that my vocabulary would provide, saying it was the cruel thing. It was the thing that gave neither man nor God a chance. And so I went on.
Well, that was the Lord’s Day morning. Tuesday morning, I was in my study. A letter was handed to me in which I was invited to attend a certain conference. If I would attend, all my expenses would be paid—travelling and while I was there.
I looked, and I said, “No, not on your life! You should never find me there. I would not touch that with a forty-foot pole.”
And I took out my diary. I was sure that, in those very busy days, of course, I would have my answer; I would have other engagements. When I looked in my diary, the only dates that were free were those very dates.
I left it on my desk, looking at it. “How am I going to get round this? What am I going to do about this? Very kind of this person to offer me all my expenses. What am I to say?”
While I was trying to find my way out of the back door, my wife came in with my morning cup of something. She saw that I was a bit disturbed, looked a bit worried, and asked me about it.
I told her what it was, and she said, “Well, have you any engagements at that time?”
I said, “No, just at that time I have none.”
“Oh,” she said, “well, it looks to me as though you have one or two alternatives: either tell them you will not go, or go.”
So, you see, that is the value of having a practical wife.
I was left with that, and she went out. As I began to think about this again, it was as though someone stood at the side of me. I did not see anybody and I did not hear any voice, but it was as though someone stood beside me and said, “What about your sermon on prejudice?”
Oh, well, I had to face that whole thing before God.
Now, the issue is this: it was just that which brought a great turning point in my life, opened the way for the Lord for something very much more. I came into an altogether new place with the Lord by dealing with that spirit of prejudice.
You can understand how afraid I am of prejudice—what it can do, how it can close the door, or, to return to my figure, how it can put a bandage over the eyes so that we are deprived of what the Lord wants to give.
Yes, pride—pride, unwillingness to humble ourselves, unwillingness to say that we have been wrong, to take something there. Pride. Perhaps there are few things more blinding than pride.
Policy? Policy? You can just shut the Holy Spirit right out if you are going to be governed by policy.
That is, taking into account how it will affect you and your interests, and what other people will think if you do this or that. You will be a speckled bird; you will be regarded as so-and-so. You see, secondary considerations: how it will affect you and your future, perhaps close doors to you.
Oh, that is a hobgoblin of the devil, to rob you of something. Yes, it will blind. He will not go on if there is any policy about it. Make no mistake about it.
I have often been tremendously impressed—and it has been, I may say, a guiding principle in my own spiritual life, to which I have tried to be faithful—by those words in John 5:44:
How can ye believe, which receive glory one of another,
and the glory that cometh from the only God ye seek not?
How can you believe? You see, that is condemnation. Those Jewish rulers, leaders, and teachers were shut out of all that Christ came to give on this one thing: policy. Thinking more of the glory of men than the glory of God; walking more as before men than before the Lord.
If Abraham has a great inheritance—and there is no doubt that he has, in the covenant promise concerning his seed, which seed is Jesus Christ—what an inheritance!
Remember that the covenant was made with Abraham at the point where God appeared unto him and said:
I am God Almighty; walk before Me, and be thou perfect.
“Walk before Me.” That is the way of the enlarging inheritance: before Me, not before men, not before systems, not before public opinion, and not before your own impressions—“How are they going to be served, and what is going to happen to you?” Walk before Me, and be thou perfect. I am the Lord Almighty, all-sufficient.
How can ye believe, which receive glory from one another, and do not seek the glory which comes from God only?
This is the way of light, the way of power, the way of the Spirit: the way of walking in the light as He is in the light, and walking with the light in ourselves.
Now, you can, of course, see how all that relates to the church’s witness in this world. You can understand a lot in the light of that.
When the church was filled with the light of the Spirit, it had a full, unaffected head-on impact upon the kingdom of darkness everywhere. When the church began to lose that basis of light, it began to lose its influence in the world.
The Lord save us. Shall we pray?