The familiar passage of Scripture is found in Zechariah 4.
The angel that talked with me came again, and waked me, as a man that is wakened out of his sleep.
And he said unto me, What seest thou? And I said, I have seen, and behold, a candlestick all of gold, with its bowl upon the top of it, and its seven lamps thereon; there are seven pipes to each of the lamps, which are upon the top thereof;
and two olive-trees by it, one upon the right side of the bowl, and the other upon the left side thereof.
And I answered and spake to the angel that talked with me, saying, What are these, my lord?
Then the angel that talked with me answered and said unto me, Knowest thou not what these are? And I said, No, my lord.
Then he answered and spake unto me, saying, This is the word of the Lord unto Zerubbabel, saying, Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.
Who art thou, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain; and He shall bring forth the headstone with shoutings of Grace, grace, unto it.
Moreover the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house; His hands shall also finish it; and thou shalt know that the Lord of hosts hath sent me unto you.
For who hath despised the day of small things? For they shall rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel; these seven, which are the eyes of the Lord, they run to and fro through the whole earth.
I hardly fail to link with that the familiar words of Acts 1:8:
Ye shall receive power, when the Holy Spirit is come upon you.
“Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.”
Power by the Holy Spirit—the thing which we all feel the need of, perhaps more than anything else; the thing the church of God needs more than anything else: power.
The declaration is made by the Lord Himself: “Ye shall receive power, when the Holy Spirit is come upon you.”
“Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.”
If, as is so much the case, we are conscious of our powerlessness, of our weakness, and of the weakness of the people of God generally—the church in this world—it is useless to bemoan the weakness and deplore the lack of power.
The need is to discover the cause, the meaning. Evidently, it is not the Lord. It is contrary to His own declared intention for His people.
When Israel met that great setback at Ai after Jericho, Joshua prostrated himself before the Lord and cried unto the Lord.
The Lord, in effect, said to Joshua, “In defeat and failure, it is useless to cry unto Me. The thing to do is to find out why—to investigate the reason.”
“I can do nothing, however much you cry, until you have laid your hand upon the cause and brought it to light. When you have done that, and the thing is exposed and dealt with, then the obstacle is removed. Then we can go on, and the power for further mighty conquest can be renewed and restored.”
And so it does become necessary, in a day of defeat and limitation and weakness—loss and lack of power—to find out why.
Now, we are not going to spend a lot of time uncovering the faults which may be in us or in the church. But there are some things which, in a general way, it would be well to take note of.
As those of us who feel the situation most acutely, and who bear responsibility for the Lord’s interests and for the Lord’s people, think about the situation and about the matter of the people of God, some things do press upon our consciousness for recognition. It may be profitable to mention them here this evening.
I feel that I shall find a considerable amount of agreement when I say that perhaps the greatest, or amongst the greatest, of our needs—the needs of the people of God in our own time, now, and even here—is a new apprehension and appreciation of the great basic realities of our life and position as Christians.
Our second hymn this evening contained some of the most wonderful things of which it is possible for men to conceive. When you went through that hymn, singing it, I have no doubt, with all good meaning and heart, I wondered how much we were alive to the tremendous things that were passing through our lips.
“No spot of guilt on me remains, while Jesus’ blood cries through earth and sky.”
I mean, a fragment in a long hymn. What a mighty thing for any mortal human part of this creation to say: “No spot of guilt on me remains, while Jesus’ blood cries through earth and sky.”
See what I mean? I feel, dear friends, that we take so much for granted, almost as a matter of course. It has become so familiar, so oft-repeated.
And yet it is true—it is true—that true and genuine believers, born-from-above believers, children of God, are God’s mightiest miracle in this universe.
Every one is the embodiment of the greatest things that ever God has done.
We need only run our fingers over the features and factors of our faith, our Christian doctrine, and mention them one by one. In every single instance—every aspect with which we are dealing—we are in the presence of an immensity that will take all eternity, all eternity, the ages of the ages, to comprehend.
Again, we are not going to do that. We could think back into the eternal counsels of God and find ourselves in that foreknowledge, foreordination, predestination—chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world. Can you comprehend that?
I say it will take all eternity to compass that one thing.
The incarnation of the Son of God has defeated and defied all human attempts and efforts to explain, to testify, and to comprehend Him: good, infinite, eternal God, and in human form comprehended in a man. Do you understand that? That is the mystery of God.
So we go on. We have said, “While Jesus’ blood cries through earth and sky.” Have we ever yet, or shall we ever, exhaust and measure the infinite virtue and value of that precious blood?
Again, the new birth from above by the Holy Spirit. Nicodemus was the teacher in Israel and had a vast amount of knowledge in the things of God, but that beat him. That absolutely put him out of court. He stood before that with a mighty question: “How? How?”
I could go on like that. Here, friends, you and I, as children of God, are supposed to be the embodiments of these things. This is our thing—not a creed, not something objective to ourselves, but something that has made us, constituted a part of us.
So I repeat: the great need in the matter of recovery of power may very well be our recovery of the wonder and greatness of the things which have become so commonplace to us that we can hear them, sing them, and never feel the thrill.
Never feel startled by a single clause that has eternity in it, truth in it. It is true.
And among the many, many things of which that is true, I think one of the major things is the Holy Spirit: sent by God from heaven to indwell the children of God, to indwell the church.
The Holy Spirit. Do you not feel that we take the Holy Spirit too much for granted?
When we come to discuss this as a subject, what do we say? Well, there is controversy over it, many interpretations, many designations. We resolve the thing so often by saying, “Well, of course, every born-again child of God has the Holy Spirit.”
And that is so often the beginning and the end. That is what it amounts to: we are really born again, brought into new life; we receive the Holy Spirit; we have the Holy Spirit dwelling within.
Yes, yes, I agree.
The Holy Spirit—God the Holy Spirit—an equal member of the divine Trinity; very God in equality; God of all the ages, the God of heaven and earth, God over all, infinite in power, infinite in wisdom, infinite in greatness, and much more, much more, which we may see in these days—that One is resident within you as you sit there where you are, and in me as I stand here where I am.
Is that Christian truth? Is that the teaching of Scripture? Is that the revelation of the Word of God? Is it?
Do you not agree? We need to recover something with a new apprehension and a new appreciation of the greatness of the fundamental things of our very faith.
“Ye shall receive power, when the Holy Spirit is come upon you.” “Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.”
And not the lord of earthly hosts, because, as you notice, a margin there says, “Not by an army.” Not by an army.
Not by an army. Worldly hosts have done great things in this world and can do great things in this world. But the Lord says, “Not that.” And I see in this an invidious comparison between that and this: not that.
An army? Well, look at some of the armies in the Bible. Look at the great army of Sennacherib spread over the land. Look at the hosts of the Midianites, the Amalekites, and all the children of the east, like locusts, it says, covering the earth.
Well, they play an army over against an army—three hundred up against a host like that. Gideon did it. “Not by an army, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.”
Those hosts which Elisha’s servant saw when his master prayed that his eyes might be opened—chariots and horses of fire round about. The Lord of hosts is greater than all the hosts of men. How? By the Holy Spirit.
It is a remarkable story, the story of the forces—the immense forces—that have lifted themselves against the Lord of hosts: empires and their Caesars, their rulers, straddling the path of the onward movement of the Spirit of God. And where are they? Where are they?
God has stated that His Son is the Heir—the Heir of this world. He made it for Him. Again and again men have lifted themselves up to take world dominion to themselves.
What an exhibition of power they have made! What shouts and screams they have given forth in their confidence that, by their power, they would take the earth, take the nations. Where are they?
Where are the Caesars who did it? Where are Hitler and Mussolini, and the others who made a bid for the inheritance of God’s Son—world dominion? The same fate awaits those who are on the same business, and all who will follow them.
“By My Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.”
Where are they? Where is the Holy Spirit? He is still intact. He is still on the field. He is terrible in pursuing the divine purpose by the Holy Spirit. And we are so weak, so impotent, so powerless.
What is wrong? I ask again.
It may be this: it is not so much that we need God to send the Holy Spirit, which He has done, and He is here. Maybe we just need to recognize more clearly, grasp more livingly, the tremendous thing that God has done in sending the Spirit—how great the Spirit of God is.
There will ever and always remain the mystery and the wonder that defeats our intellectual powers to explain. We shall never be able to comprehend with our human minds. And yet, to have some perception of the fact of it is a sanction to power.
When that was really recognized at any time, people were down on their faces in the presence of God the Holy Spirit, broken.
Yes, that is our first language. Look at them. Look at them, down prostrate in adoring worship and wonder.
Oh, friends, this is what has been coming home to me. This, amongst so many matters, is a matter for us to bring back into view right now.
When the Holy Spirit came in His advent on what is called the Day of Pentecost, they were filled with amazement. “What is this? What is this?”
The old question about something defeating all powers of definition, explanation, and recognition came with this visitation from heaven: “What? What is this?” They were amazed. They were perplexed. All their mental power broke down before this in an effort to give an explanation.
Now, I am not saying that we have got to have another experience of Pentecost like that. All I am saying, dear friends—and yet it is a big enough thing to say—is that we do need to recover something of the wonder of the Holy Spirit having come, and being with us, and being in us.
It is going to make such a large number of changes in us. It is going to have so many effects through us—not all pleasant, perhaps. But it is better for men to be antagonistic to something that is really of God than to be able to ignore the presence of God because there is nothing to take notice of.
And I was saying, amongst the many things needed to be recovered in the Christian life is the wonder of the Holy Spirit.
It is no exaggeration to say that this is a matter that could occupy us without monotony and without repetition for a year of days.
I thought about it. I could see quite easily fifty-two evenings through the year, once a week, filled to the full with this matter alone: the meaning of the Holy Spirit.
With this matter alone, the meaning of the Holy Spirit. And I suppose that is limiting the Holy Ghost, if one is able to put it like that.
Well now, come for a few minutes to this from which we have taken our text, in Zechariah and in Acts 1.
Just in broad outline, without the closer examination that must come, there are these things.
There was a task before the Lord’s people in both instances, on both occasions: a task.
They were conscious of being in a purpose of God.
For them, relationship with God was not a matter of believing certain truths, performing certain rites, going through a certain ritual, attending services, and going away having done their duty.
For the people of God—and this is true, or should be true, of all people of God in all ages, if they are really alive to the meaning of their relationship with God—for them, in the days of Zechariah and in the days of Acts, the thing which controlled their consciousness, mastered and gripped their awareness as the Lord’s people, was that they were on the horizon of a divine purpose.
In the Old Testament it may have been represented in symbolic form, in type; lying behind that was the spiritual reality. They inwardly were aware that this thing represented a divine thought, a divine desire. It contained a divine meaning. They were related to God in purpose.
And so they were a people in the grip of this sense: being a people apprehended by God for a purpose, for a work, for an achievement of God. They were in it.
That was true of this remnant that had come back from the exile. Feeble, nevertheless unable to turn from this business, this divine business, and just settle down in the land, cultivate their fields, their vineyards, and the rest.
Central things that were so near to the heart of God, representing this eternal thought of God, were in the grip of that people.
We know how true that was at the beginning of the book of Acts. As they waited during those ten days after the Lord’s ascension, there is little doubt that they were in the grip of a sense of having been laid hold of for a purpose.
Whatever may have happened when He was crucified, in the devastation of vision and outlook and hope, during the forty days that had been recovered and restored. And during those ten days up to the fiftieth, they were men gripped together, people possessed by something.
There was something in the purpose of God that was ahead: mighty controlling anticipation and expectation. And if they were under command to wait, to tarry, then you may take it for granted that it was a restive waiting.
It was a stretched-out waiting. As it says, they continued steadfastly. The word means “stretch out, extend.” It is a picture word of the head thrust forward: looking, waiting, reaching out. Something had laid hold of them. Something was to be.
That is how the Lord’s people ought ever to be, because God is a forward-looking God. He has not reached His end yet. God is an expectant God, a God with anticipation, a God who is reaching on, wholly moved Himself and governed by what is so often called the eternal purpose. He is the purposeful God.
These people who come under His apprehending hand ought to be like that. In spite of all setbacks, discouragements, frustrations, opposition, difficulties, consciousness of helplessness, and impotence, there ought to be in us this sense: God has given us to understand that there is yet something in the purpose of God intended, and we are part of it.
That is the meaning of vision, I think.
I am making a statement. I have been saying, stating divine truth, sitting there. How do you feel about that? Do you assent with your mind? Yes. Do you agree to the proposition, the suggestion, the idea? Do you like it?
Is that in us, friends? Is it really in us? Called according to His purpose, grasped for God—that is the beginning of the Spirit of God. That is where the Spirit of God begins.
If you have had anything of a real experience of being translated out of the authority of darkness into the kingdom of the Son of God’s love—or put that same experience in any of the many ways—if you really have had an experience of salvation, new birth, putting it as you will, that crisis in life which means transition from an old to a new, is it not true, whether you have been able to put it into words and define it or not, that the first consciousness of your new experience is this: “There is something to live for that I never had before”?
“Now I sense that there is some meaning in life that I never sensed before.” Is that not true? It is the beginning of the work of the Spirit in a life: to constitute us according to God’s purpose.
Yes, then, with these people in the days of the return from captivity; yes, with these people at the beginning of the church era in the book of Acts: very conscious of meaning, of having been apprehended by God.
And yet, in those cases, in those instances, there was the consciousness that it could never be achieved unless God Himself came and visited them.
Look at them after the captivity: this little, weak, despised remnant. You have, of course, to read Zechariah and the book of Ezra. They go together.
What were they up against? Look what we are up against. In our sense, what are we? What can we accomplish? What can we do? Look at the forces we have to contend with, within and without.
And the same Holy Spirit who caused the stories to be written has taken pains, in all this scene, to show that there was plenty to be overcome if this was to be done. Find this in our passage: “Who art thou, O great mountain?”
O great mountain. What was the mountain? We cannot be sure in the case of the remnant. We may make some guesses, perhaps, from passages that might relate, by taking the whole situation as we leave it in Ezra, later in Nehemiah.
There is a mountain, good and high—a great mountain. The Lord calls it a great mountain.
Sometimes what we call great mountains are very little things with the Lord, but the Lord here calls it a great mountain. “I know how great the difficulty. I know how strong the opposition. I know the fury and the subtlety of the enemy. O great mountain.”
The church was confronted with a great mountain. The Lord had taken account of that mountain, and He said, “If you have faith, you shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea.” What is He talking about?
The thing that dogged the steps of the apostle Paul over the whole area of his missionary journeys: Judaism. It followed him down, working by every subtle and often diabolical means to prejudice his ministry and message and destroy his influence.
That Judaism that was up against the Lord Jesus Himself and, at last, speaking from the human side, brought Him to the cross—that is a mountain. That is a mountain.
But, “Who art thou, O great mountain?” Great mountain and a little weak, helpless remnant. “Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.”
And, mark you, by the end of the life of the apostle Paul, that mountain had been laid low. The letter to the Galatians is the letter, is it not, of the Holy Spirit—the Holy Spirit.
And it was that weapon that dealt a mortal blow at Judaism.
Yes. Well, the temple was finished, and the wall was completed, in spite of the great mountain.
But what am I saying? How helpless the people are in themselves. Therefore, how necessary that God comes in if the purpose which has gripped them is to be realized.
The necessity of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus Himself, you see, was meeting this opposition every day of His life. It was resisting Him wherever He went. Oh, how fierce it was! It was up against Him, both human and satanic.
Then there came that evening when He sat down with His disciples at the table—John 13—and began to speak. They rose and left the table, went out, and He began His further discourse and talked through all those chapters which we have: John 14, 15, 16, and 17.
What is He doing? He has taken the measure of the forces that are going to be up against them in this world.
He has met those forces Himself, and He knows that His church is going to meet them wherever it goes with His testimony to Him.
Yes, it is a tremendous thing that confronts them: this world, this world, this world. Listen to Him in that prayer, John 17. What a world! What forces it is in the grip of—the evil power. He knew.
But what is He doing in this long conversation and discourse? What is the thing to which He leads everything else up?
“When He, the Spirit, is come.” All of John 16, and a lot more, is on the coming Holy Spirit. “It is expedient for you that I go away. If I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I go, I will send Him unto you. And when He is come…”
In a word, the great mountain will find its match and its master. And you, little flock, little flock—you, so weak, so small, so helpless in yourselves—will, because you receive power, the Holy Spirit coming upon you, be equal to the situation and more than equal.
The Holy Spirit. You see, He has pointed to the way in which a feeble people, in the face of every mighty force in this world against them, can accomplish the purpose of their calling: the Holy Spirit.
Oh, how great, how wonderful, the Holy Spirit.
There then is the task. There then is the need. There then is the adequacy of the Holy Spirit to meet it.
But there is another point on which I am going to close, where, as I said at the beginning, there needs to be recovery on our part.
We make very much, of course, and rightly so, of the sovereignty of God. It is a very comforting truth. It is a very strengthening doctrine. It is a wonderful reality: the sovereignty of God.
Do you not think, dear friends, that it is just possible to leave too much to the sovereignty? Do not misunderstand me.
What I mean is this: well, God is God, the Creator of the heavens. He is on the throne of the universe. He has in His hand all power. He has purpose, and He can and will accomplish His purpose.
All we have to do is trust the sovereign power and wisdom of God and, in effect, sit down in our own chair and wait for the sovereignty to do what it has got to do.
Now, of course, you would not and I would not put it like that. Yet here is a point of danger. There is a point here we have got to recognize: although all that is true, of course, and much more in the same realm, alongside of that there is prayer.
Well, those one hundred and twenty, after He had gone to the throne, continued steadfastly in prayer. About what? This that He had promised: the coming Spirit and the power by the coming Spirit.
Doubtless, day and night through those ten days—that fixed period—they were stretched out on this matter.
Yes, He said it. And is there not much more? In a real sense, it indicates—