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Page 30
Do we know God in the Spirit? His incarnation in Jesus evidences His
"incarnability," and His eagerness to have His fulness dwell in every
son who will receive Him. To know God in the Spirit is so to follow
Jesus that we share His sonship with the Father and have Him abiding in
us, working through us His works, manifesting Himself in our mortal
lives.
Our Father is the great public Spirit of the universe, the most
responsible and responsive Being in existence. The needs of all are
claims on His service, their sins are burdens of guilt on His
conscience, their joys and woes enlist His sympathy. He has His life in
the lives of His children. The Spirit is God's Life in men, God living
in them. To possess His will to serve, His sense of obligation, His
interest and compassion, is to have the Holy Spirit dwelling and regnant
in us. It was so that the Father's Spirit possessed Jesus and made His
abode in Him; and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and of the
Son in the Christian community.
And what a difference it makes whether we feel that the responsibilities
our consciences force us to assume, the sympathies in which our hearts
go out, the interests we are impelled to take, the resolves and longings
and purposes within us, are just our own, or are God's inspirations! If
they are simply ours, who knows what will come of them? If they are His,
we can yield to them assured that it is God who worketh in us to will
and to do of His good pleasure.
Our faith in God as Self-imparting by His Spirit makes possible our
confident expectation that He can and will incarnate Himself socially in
the whole family of His children, as once He was incarnate in Jesus.
Christians who devote themselves to fashioning social relations after
the mind of Christ, and inspiring their brethren with His faith and
purpose, are conscious that through them the Spirit of God is entering
more and more into His world, revealing the Father in the new community
of love, which is being born. Sir Edward Burne-Jones once wrote: "That
was an awful word of Ruskin's, that artists paint God for the world.
There's a lump of greasy pigment at the end of Michael Angelo's
hog-bristle brush, and by the time it has been laid on the stucco, there
is something there, that all men with eyes recognize as Divine. Think
what it means: it is the power of bringing God into the world--making
God manifest!" Men and women who are molding homes and industries, towns
and nations, so that they embody love, and influencing for righteousness
the least and lowest of the children of men, are putting before a whole
world's eyes the Divine, are helping build the habitation of God in the
Spirit. Through them God imparts Himself to mankind.
God over all--the Father to whom we look up with utter trust, and from
whom moment by moment we take our lives in obedient devotion; God
through all--through Jesus supremely, and through every child who opens
his life to Him with the willingness of Jesus; God in all--the
directing, empowering, sanctifying Spirit, producing in us characters
like Christ's, employing and equipping us for the work of His Kingdom,
and revealing Himself in a community more and more controlled by love:
this is our Christian thought of the Divine--"one God and Father of all,
who is over all and through all and in all."
CHAPTER V
THE CROSS
The human life in which succeeding generations have found their picture
of God ended in a bloody tragedy. It was a catastrophe which all but
wrecked the loyalty of Jesus' little group of followers; it was an event
which proved a stumbling block in their endeavor to win their countrymen
to their Lord, and which seemed folly to the great mass of outsiders in
the Roman world. It was a most baffling circumstance for them to explain
either to themselves or to others; but, as they lived on under the
control of their Lord's Spirit, this tragedy came gradually to be for
them the most richly significant occurrence in His entire history; and
ever since the cross has been the distinctive symbol of the Christian
faith. It had a variety of meanings for the men of the New Testament;
and it has had many more for their followers in subsequent centuries. We
are not limited to viewing it through the eyes of others, nor to
interpreting it with their thoughts. We are enriched as we try to share
their experiences of its power and light; but we must go to Calvary for
ourselves, and look at the Crucified with the eyes of our own hearts,
and ask ourselves of what that cross convinces us.
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