The Holy Ghost

But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth. ACTS 1:8

Catherine Booth preached a whole series of sermons on the Holy Spirit, and then, because letters kept arriving from puzzled hearers, preached another to answer their difficulties. That last one is printed as The Holy Ghost, and it is one of the clearest statements of the conviction that drove her whole ministry. She began with a question that every honest minister of her day was asking in private. There was more preaching than ever before, more Bibles, more meetings, more societies and more money spent on religion. Why was so little happening?

The lack is not truth

She had heard the question from ministers behind the scenes. One good man told her he had not seen a conversion in his church for two years. She did the arithmetic for her hearers. Take a congregation of a thousand, with two or three hundred members. What becomes of the other seven hundred, who come and go Sunday after Sunday like a door on its hinges? They hear the truth. They do not reject it. And they go on unchanged. “They get enough light to light them down to damnation,” she said, “but they do not get enough power to lift them into salvation.”

For our gospel came not unto you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost, and in much assurance. 1 THESSALONIANS 1:5

It was not, she insisted, that the truth was lacking. She loved the Bible as much as anyone in the room, and said so. But the facts ruled out that explanation. There had never been so much truth preached, and there had seldom been so little result. Thousands of sermons would be preached that very Sunday, perfectly orthodox, and would be perfect failures, and no one would know it better than the preachers. The want was something else, and she named it in a single word: power.

A definite gift

Her second point was that this power is a distinct gift of God. It is not the same as the truth, and it is not the same as faith; the disciples had both before Pentecost, and were still told to wait. It is the Holy Spirit Himself, accompanying the word of a Spirit-filled witness and driving it into the conscience.

Tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high. LUKE 24:49

And because it is a gift of God and not a quality of the speaker, it does not depend on education, eloquence or position. This was the point at which she became most vivid. She would rather, she said, have a Hallelujah Lass — one of the Army’s working-class girl preachers — “hardly able to put two sentences of the Queen’s English together,” with the power of the Holy Ghost, than the most learned divine in the kingdom without it. The church, she thought, had multiplied its buildings and its learning while forgetting where its strength lay, and the result was exactly what one would expect.

Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts. ZECHARIAH 4:6

For people like us

Her third point was full of comfort. Could believers today expect the same power as the apostles? She answered that we need it for the same reasons they did. The agents are the same: the apostles were not heroes of intellect but frail, easily frightened men who forsook their Lord and fled. She loved the angel’s message after the resurrection, Go your way, tell his disciples and Peter (Mark 16:7), and the way it singled out the one man most likely to think himself excluded. Whatever you have done, she told her hearers, the Holy Ghost is equal to the emergency.

And the work is the same. The great thing to be done, she said, is to subdue the rebellious human heart, and no human power can do it. You can educate a man, civilise him, reform his habits and make him a respectable citizen without the Spirit of God. You cannot make him a new creature. Every other kind of change, she was sure, would prove at the last to be wood, hay and stubble.

It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life. JOHN 6:63

The conditions

How, then, is the power received? She set out the conditions plainly. Put away everything that hinders; cast aside every doubtful thing; make a whole-hearted surrender to Christ, embracing His will at whatever cost; and then wait for the gift, as the disciples waited in the upper room, until it comes. “Anybody can have it on these terms,” she said. She was not particular about the place or manner of waiting. In another address she told a hearer who was troubled about whether to leave his daily work to wait for the Spirit not to lose the substance in quibbling about the way. Wait in whatever manner suits your circumstances; only wait until you have it.

If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him? LUKE 11:13

Weighing it

There is much here that the whole church needs to hear. Her diagnosis — that orthodoxy without the Spirit’s power produces congregations that are informed and unchanged — has lost none of its force. Her refusal to make education or status the qualification for Christian witness has been vindicated a thousand times over in the growth of the church among the poor of the world.

Two cautions are worth adding. First, her language of a definite baptism of power, received on conditions, belongs to the holiness movement of her day, and Christians differ on how to describe the Spirit’s work after conversion. Many would say that every believer has the Spirit from the moment of new birth, and that what is needed is not a second gift but a fuller surrender to the One already given. Her practical counsel survives either way: put away what hinders, yield entirely, and ask. Second, the conditions can be heard as a ladder of attainment, so that the Spirit becomes a reward for sufficient consecration. That was not her meaning. She said repeatedly that it is not a question of human merit at all, but of submission, obedience and faith.

She closed The Holy Ghost with her own story — of the feeble, trembling woman who had raised her voice for the first time twenty years before, and the hundreds of souls who had been given her since. Who can tell, she asked, what God can do by any man or woman, however timid, if only fully given up to Him?

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Look honestly at your church and your own life. Where is there truth without power? Name it rather than explain it.

2. Is there something you know hinders the Spirit’s work in you — a doubtful habit, a withheld area, a grudge? Put it away this week.

3. Stop measuring your usefulness by your education or ability. Ask God for the Spirit’s power in the one conversation you are most afraid of.

4. Set aside a definite time this week to ask the Father for the Holy Spirit, taking Luke 11:13 as His promise.

5. Think of someone you have written off as too far gone. Remember and Peter, and pray for them by name.

A PRAYER

Holy Spirit, I have had the truth for years, and too little power. I have spoken the right words and seen nothing happen.

I put away what hinders You. I give myself wholly to Christ, to go where He sends and do what He says.

I am not strong, or clever, or brave. Neither were the disciples. Come upon me as You came upon them, and make me a witness.

Do in me and through me what no human power can do: make dead hearts live, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.