Expositions of Holy Scripture | Page 7

so many
sacred memories and associations, and how gladly I reknit the bonds of an affection
which has been unbroken, and deepening on both sides through thirty long years.
Dear friends! let us together thank God to-day if He has knit our hearts together in mutual
affection; and if you and I can look each other, as I believe we can, in the eyes, with the
assurance that I see only the faces of friends, and that you see the face of one who gladly
resumes the old work and associations.
But now, dear brethren, let us draw one lesson. Unless there be this manly, honest,
though oftenest silent, Christian affection, the sooner you and I part the better. Unless it
be in my heart I can do you no good. No man ever touched another with the sweet
constraining forces that lie in Christ's Gospel unless the heart of the speaker went out to
grapple the hearts of the hearers. And no audience ever listen with any profit to a man
when they come in the spirit of carping criticism, or of cold admiration, or of stolid
indifference. There must be for this simple relationship which alone binds a
Nonconformist preacher to his congregation, as a sine qua non of all higher things and of
all spiritual good, a real, though oftenest it be a concealed, mutual affection and regard.
We have to thank God for much of it; let us try to get more. That is all I want to say about
the first point here.
II. Note the lofty consciousness of the purpose of their meeting.
'I long to see you, that I may impart unto you some spiritual gift.' Paul knew that he had
something which he could give to these people, and he calls it by a very comprehensive
term, 'some spiritual gift'--a gift of some sort which, coming from the Divine Spirit, was
to be received into the human spirit.
Now that expression--a spiritual gift--in the New Testament has a variety of applications.
Sometimes it refers to what we call miraculous endowments, sometimes it refers to what
we may call official capacity; but here it is evidently neither the one nor the other of these
more limited and special things, but the general idea of a divine operation upon the
human spirit which fills it with Christian graces--knowledge, faith, love. Or, in simpler
words, what Paul wanted to give them was a firmer grasp and fuller possession of Jesus
Christ, His love and power, which would secure a deepening and strengthening of their

whole Christian life. He was quite sure he had this to give, and that he could impart it, if
they would listen to what he would say to them. But whilst thus he rises into the lofty
conception of the purpose and possible result of his meeting the Roman Christians, he is
just as conscious of the limitations of his power in the matter as he is of the greatness of
his function. These are indicated plainly. The word which he employs here, 'gift' is never
used in the New Testament for a thing that one man can give to another, but is always
employed for the concrete results of the grace of God bestowed upon men. The very
expression, then, shows that Paul thought of himself, not as the original giver, but simply
as a channel through which was communicated what God had given. In the same
direction points the adjective which accompanies the noun--a 'spiritual gift'--which
probably describes the origin of the gift as being the Spirit of God, rather than defines the
seat of it when received as being the spirit of the receiver. Notice, too, as bearing on the
limits of Paul's part in the gift, the propriety and delicacy of the language in his statement
of the ultimate purpose of the gift. He does not say 'that I may strengthen you,' which
might have sounded too egotistical, and would have assumed too much to himself, but he
says 'that ye may be strengthened,' for the true strengthener is not Paul, but the Spirit of
God.
So, on the one hand, the Christian teacher is bound to rise to the height of the
consciousness of his lofty vocation as having in possession a gift that he can bestow; on
the other hand, he is bound ever to remember the limitations within which that is true--viz.
that the gift is not his, but God's, and that the Spirit of the Lord is the true Giver of all the
graces which may blossom when His word, ministered by human agents, is received into
human hearts.
And, now, what are the lessons that I take from this? Two very simple ones. First, no
Christian teacher has any business to open his