Operations of The Holy Spirit in Preaching #1

Introduction: Defining the Subject and Presuppositions

0:03 The following sermon was delivered on Wednesday morning, October 23, 2002, at Trinity Baptist Church in Montville, New Jersey, during the annual Pastors' Conference. The preacher is Pastor Albert N. Martin, and this is the first sermon in a series entitled, The Immediate Agency and Operation of the Holy Spirit Upon the Preacher. It's a sobering thought, brethren, and I try to carry it with me every Lord's Day, and even on days like these when I climb those stairs instead of those,

0:42 that one time will be the last time, and this time may be the last time. Very sobering. Now, the reason that you men got your brochure and the outline of the program without anything written next to these, these sessions except my name, is that when the invitations and when the brochures were sent out, I had not yet settled in my own mind and heart what I should do with these two sessions.

1:22 However, I come to them this morning with a deep sense of peace that God has heard your prayers and the prayers of His people and my prayers, that we might be guided by Him with respect to the subject matter in all of the sessions, as well as the prayer that the Spirit of God would attend the labors of those who minister to us in those sessions. And my subject matter for this morning in the two sessions is this. I want to make an attempt to lecture slash preach to you

2:00 on the subject of the immediate agency and operations of the Holy Spirit upon the Preacher. Upon the Preacher in the act of preaching. The immediate agency and operations of the Holy Spirit upon the Preacher in the act of preaching. Now, by way of easing us into this vital theme, I want to do two things.

2:30 First of all to exegete the language of my title. And then secondly, to identify several crucial presuppositions relative to the person and ministry of the Holy Spirit in general, before we narrow in upon this very specific focus of the person and ministry of the Holy Spirit in conjunction with the act of preaching. Now, what in the world do I mean by this combination of words? The immediate agency and operations of the Holy Spirit upon the preacher in the act of preaching.

3:12 Well, this is what I mean. I am concerned to address the agency and the operations of the Holy Spirit with reference to the act of preaching itself. I am not addressing the necessity and reality of the agency and the operations of the Holy Spirit in our preparations for preaching. We must experience His work in preparation for preaching as the spirit of wisdom and counsel in the selection of our sermonic materials.

3:52 We must know His ministry in the study as the spirit of illumination, enabling us to enter into the mind of God in any given time, text or theme of Scripture, answering our earnest prayer, Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law. We must experience His ministry in our preparation as the spirit of grace and of supplication, sustaining in us a prayerful disposition from the beginning to the end of our preparation. However these necessities,

4:34 necessary ministries of the Spirit may be, and they are necessary, however real they are in our experience, I am not addressing them. I am bypassing those dimensions of the agency and operations of the Holy Spirit, focusing upon the agency and operations of the Spirit upon the preacher, not upon the congregation in the act of preaching, that's another whole field of study. I bypass it, I am not addressing it. Furthermore, we will be concerned to demonstrate that His agency, that is, His active power,

5:19 and His operations, that is, the effects of that power, are immediate in the act of preaching, as opposed to and in contrast with those secondary, operations of the Holy Spirit, both in preparation for preaching and in the act of preaching. This, then, is the very focus of our concern, and I trust that terminology has delimited the field of our concern with some measure of precision. We are to address the immediate agency and operations of the Holy Spirit upon the preacher,

6:04 in the act of preaching. Then, secondly, by way of introduction, I want to briefly highlight several presuppositions with respect to our doctrine of the Holy Spirit in general. These are realities drawn from a scripturally based and historically orthodox doctrine of the Holy Spirit. I will not take time to prove these things, only to highlight them, that they may act as a kind of present quality control as we think our way through and grapple with this oft-neglected but crucially important dimension

6:48 of the work of preaching. As we take up this subject, these are my presuppositions concerning the Holy Spirit. First, that He is a person. When dealing with any act, aspect of the ministry of the Holy Spirit, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the functions of the Holy Spirit, we must always remember that we are dealing with the operations, the gifts, the functions of a person.

7:21 And this is particularly vital when we are dealing with the ministry of the Spirit in conjunction with the act of preaching. When I read statements such as these, how to obtain the power of the Spirit in our ministries, or Holy Spirit power, something in me, the bells within me, go off in an alarm system, because it seems to me it takes us perilously close to the language of Acts chapter 8. Give me this power! My money perish with thee.

7:57 We are dealing with the agency and operations of a person upon this person called the preacher as he is engaged in the act of preaching. Secondly, he is not only person, but I'm presupposing that we believe that he is a divine person. He is God, the Holy Spirit, and all that can be attributed to and predicated of the Father that constitutes the essence, all that can be attributed to and predicated of the Son that constitutes the essence of deity,

8:42 all of this can be and must attributed to the person of the Holy Spirit. Hence, all of the reverence, the awe, the submission, the love that flow out of renewed hearts to the Father and to the Son must constantly flow out of the Holy Spirit. Out to this divine person, God, the Holy Spirit. And then my third presupposition is this, that he is not only a person, not only that he is a divine person, but that he is a sovereign divine person.

9:23 And it's especially necessary when thinking of the agency and operations of the Spirit in conjunction with gifts of utterance to remember that, this aspect of our general doctrine of the Holy Spirit. It is nowhere more highlighted than in that very setting in Paul's treatment of spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians chapter 12 where he says now concerning spiritual gifts, I would not have you ignorant and in his treatment of that subject we are told in verse 11, but all these work the one and the same Spirit, capital S, dividing to each one severally

10:07 even as he will.

10:13 Therefore, we must beware of any attempt to establish ironclad rules within which the Holy Spirit must be expected to operate and to function. He does not work in any perfectly predictable pattern in his agency and operations, in the act of preaching. Now having exegeted my title and identified these three fundamental presuppositions with respect to the person of the Holy Spirit, we now take up our subject, the immediate agency and operations of the Holy Spirit

10:55 upon the preacher in the act of preaching. And let me say at this point, lest some of you think I will be contradicting something I say later, I do not. I do not regard this as a sermon. This is a lecture in which precision of statement is crucial and therefore my nose will be in the direction of my notes far more than I would permit in a sermon and walk away from it with a good conscience and I want you to understand that.

The Indispensable Necessity of the Spirit's Immediate Agency in Preaching

11:27 All right then, as we take up our subject, two major heads in this first hour, time permitting, and a third major head, in the next hour. First of all, I want to address briefly the indispensable necessity for the immediate agency and operations of the Holy Spirit upon the preacher in the act of preaching. We are dealing with that which in my judgment we can see in the Scriptures is an indispensable necessity. And we're going to look at three categories of biblical witness that I will set before you that I trust will persuade you

12:11 if you're not already persuaded that the immediate agency and operations of the Spirit in your preaching is not a luxury, it is not a desirable option, and certainly it is not the prerogative of a fanatical fringe to experience and claim that they experience, but it is an integral indispensable necessity for you if your ministry is to have any claim to being biblical.

12:47 Indispensable necessity.

Necessity Demonstrated: The Ministry of Jesus Christ

12:52 And the three lines of witness I lay before you briefly are these. First, such an immediate agency and operation of the Spirit was indispensable to the preaching ministry of our blessed Lord, Jesus Christ Himself. According to the Scriptures, our Lord was conceived by the immediate agency and operation of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit shall come upon you, the angel says to Mary, and that which is conceived in you shall be of the Spirit, and you shall bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name Jesus.

13:37 The same Holy Spirit, that conceived Him in the womb of the Virgin, is the Spirit who nurtured the holy humanity of our Lord Jesus as He grew in wisdom and stature, in favor with God and with men. And if you have never read Owen Volume 3, his masterful treatise on the work of the Spirit, I urge you to read the section in which Owen demonstrates the ministry of the Spirit in the divine, the development of the perfect humanity of our Lord Jesus. There was a constant and an immediate agency and operation of the Holy Spirit

14:22 in that development described in Luke 2 in verse 52. Yet, yet, when the time came for Him to begin His public ministry, what was the defining work of God with respect to the work of God with respect to His beloved Son? Well, when we look at the Old Testament prophecy concerning Messiah, the answer is very clear. Chapter 61 of Isaiah.

14:53 For the sake of our Brits, Isaiah.

14:57 61 verse 1. The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to preach, conceived by the Spirit, His holy humanity in nature developed and expanded and brought to maturity by the Spirit and in the process such wisdom given to Him that the doctors of the law are amazed at this twelve-year-old boy. But when He comes to mature years to begin to speak those words of wisdom, there is an additional, a distinct operation of the Spirit.

15:42 The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me because He has anointed me to preach, to preach good tidings to the meek, sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to them that are bound to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor and the day of vengeance. We have the record of the historical fulfillment of that prophetic utterance in the Synoptic Gospels. I refer to the account in the Gospel according to Luke chapter 3, verses 21 and 22. Luke chapter 3.

16:25 Now it came to pass when all the people were baptized that Jesus also having been baptized and praying, the heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended in bodily form as a dove upon Him and a voice came out of heaven You are my beloved Son, in you I am well pleased. And then He is driven by the Spirit who has come upon Him into the wilderness there to be tempted forty days and forty nights of the devil. He comes out of that temptation victorious and we read in verse 14 of chapter 4 and Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit unto Galilee

17:10 and the fame went throughout the region and He taught. In their synagogues being glorified of all. Think of it. Incarnate wisdom.

17:24 Pure, unsullied, unpainted humanity.

17:30 Gifts of insight and gifts of expression of such a nature that at age twelve He astounds the doctor. Surely all He needs is a further unfolding of that process of maturation under the agency and operations of the Spirit? No. No.

17:52 He utters no word of public ministry until there is an endowment by the Holy Spirit which among other things equips Him to speak as God's authoritative prophet as well as to be set apart and sustained so that He may by the eternal Spirit offer Himself up without spot, unto God.

Necessity Demonstrated: The Ministry of the Apostles

18:22 So, I lay out that first line of evidence of the indispensable necessity of the immediate agency and operations of the Spirit as we see it in our Lord. Secondly, such an immediate agency and operation of the Spirit was indispensable for the apostles. According to the scriptures, they had been given special endowments of power in conjunction with their appointment as apostles. And sent forth into their Judean ministry, they could cast out demons, they could raise the dead, they could heal the sick. Furthermore, they had

19:00 had their Lord to instruct them in the remainder of His earthly ministry and then subsequent to His death and resurrection for forty days, He is enlarging their understanding of the very heart of His mission. According to Acts 1 in verse 3, the primary focus of those forty days was instructive, it was didactic, and after appearing and demonstrating by many proofs that He was indeed the risen Christ, appearing to them by the space of forty days and speaking the things concerning the kingdom of God. He's now helping them to make sense out of so much of scripture which hitherto

19:44 was obscure or they couldn't fit it together, and now they begin to see as they ought to see with respect to the nature of the kingdom, with respect to the great concerns of His messianic mission, and yet He says to them at the end of Luke chapter 24, in a kind of summary statement of what He was doing during that period, Luke chapter 24 and verse 44, These are my words which I spoke unto you while I was with you, that all things must needs be fulfilled that are written in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms concerning me. Then He opened their mind. Here is illumination

20:29 given by an immediate operation of Christ. He opened their mind. This was not some generic illumination. It was specific. It was

20:43 an immediate operation of Christ upon the mind. He opened their mind that they might understand the scripture. And said to them, Thus it is written that the Christ should suffer, rise again, repentance and remission, preached among the nations. You are witnesses of these things, and behold, I send forth the promise of my Father upon you, but wait in the city until you be clothed with power from on high.

21:14 Now I'm fully aware that there are dimensions of passages such as these that have no one-to-one equivalence, because in redemptive history we are in a period of transition. I'm fully aware of that. But what I want you to notice is this. In contrast to the broader aspects of the ministry of the Spirit laid out so wonderfully in the Upper Room Discourse, and may I say so helpfully by Pastor Fisher in a recent men's conference here, when he spoke on the person and ministry of the Spirit, here the focus is upon the Spirit's ministry in conjunction with power.

21:52 Power directly related to their bearing witness to the central truths of the Gospel. And that is precisely the same emphasis given in Acts chapter 1, where we read in Acts 1, verse 7, It is not for you to know times and seasons which the Father has set within His own authority, but you shall receive power, the Holy Spirit coming upon you, and you shall be my witnesses. It is power for witness-bearing that is highlighted by our Lord in this promise of the Pentecostal blessing. Then

22:36 when Acts records the actual coming of the Spirit, where does the emphasis lie? Acts chapter 2. When the day of Pentecost was now come, they were all together in one place. Suddenly there came from heaven the sound as of a rushing of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. There appeared unto

22:56 them tongues parting asunder like as of fire, and it sat upon each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and had an immediate sense of the wonder of their union with Christ. According to the upper room discourse, that would have been one of the immediate operations of the Spirit. And many of the others, but notice what is highlighted by the Spirit of God. They were all

23:22 filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak as the Spirit gave them utterance. And I suggest that this is the great paradigm for the New Covenant ministry. Filled with the Spirit, spoke as the Spirit gave them utterance. Here was an agency and operation of the Spirit that was immediate.

23:49 Now granted, there was a supernatural dimension to it. They speak in dialect, and languages that they had not acquired in the ordinary way of acquisition. I know that. But the great emphasis as we see in the unfolding of the book of Acts, is that the Spirit is present in His agency and operations in conjunction with utterance that again and again is described as bold utterance.

24:18 There is utterance in which there is a present operation of the Spirit. And, this operation, this agency of the Spirit in the act of preaching, was a conscious experience to the apostolic band. It was not something they, quote, took by faith, and believed it was happening outside the realm of their spiritual consciousness.

24:52 1 Thessalonians chapter 1 Knowing, brethren, beloved of God, your election how that our gospel came unto you not in word only but also in power, and in the Holy Spirit, and in much assurance or conviction. 1 Corinthians 2, and I, brethren, when I came unto you yes, I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling, conscious, personal, internal, dispositional experience. And, my preaching was not in wisdom of words,

25:35 conscious experience in utterance, but in demonstration of the Spirit, and of power, conscious, religious experience. And when Peter describes their preaching in 1 Peter 1, 12, these who preach the gospel unto you with the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven. So I say, the necessity of the immediate agency and operation of the Holy Spirit upon the preacher in the act of preaching is not only seen with reference to our blessed Lord

Necessity Demonstrated: New Covenant Ministry

26:19 and to the apostles, but thirdly such an immediate agency and operation of the Spirit is an indispensable component of any God appointed ministry of the new covenant. And here's the point.

26:36 Here I commend to you a careful evaluation and study of 2 Corinthians 2, 14 to 4, 18. This rich distillation of the apostles' teaching on the nature of the new covenant ministry that has greater glory than the old covenant ministry. And in the heart of that section, chapter 3, verses 1 to 8, there is this dominant emphasis upon the ministry of the Spirit so much so that the term ministry of the Spirit is synonymous. With new covenant ministry. We are not

27:11 sufficient of ourselves to think anything is from ourselves but our sufficiency is from God who has made us able ministers of the new covenant not of the letter but of the Spirit. He has made us ministers of the new covenant ministers of the Spirit. So my brethren I lay before you very briefly the threefold testimony concerning what I've called the indispensable necessity for the immediate agency and operation of the Holy Spirit upon us as preachers in the act of preaching. And just as this immediate agency

27:54 and operation is described and promised in conjunction with prayer in Romans 8 verses 26, verse 26 so in the act of preaching there is available to us in the virtue of Christ own commitment to his servants an immediate agency and operation of the Holy Spirit. We know not how to pray as we ought what's the answer? The Spirit helps us. Immediate personal agency and operation the Spirit helps us in the situation of our helplessness

28:37 in prayer. At this point I give you the first of several quotes from Spurgeon's marvelous article in lectures to my students the one entitled the Holy Spirit in conjunction with our ministries. And listen to what Spurgeon says concerning the indispensability of the Spirit's agency and operations in our preaching ministry. To us as ministers the Holy Spirit is absolutely essential.

29:09 I probably got the words of my heading from Spurgeon. Without him our office is a mere name. We claim no priesthood over and above that which belongs to every child of God. But we are the successors of those who in olden times were moved of God to declare his word to testify against transgression and to lead his cause unless we have the spirit of the prophets resting upon us the mantle which we wear is nothing but a rough garment to deceive. We ought

29:46 to be driven forth with abhorrence from the society of honest men for daring to speak in the name of the Lord if the spirit of God rests not upon us. We believe ourselves to be spokesmen for Jesus Christ appointed to continue his witness upon earth but upon him and his testimony the spirit of God always rested and if he does not rest upon us we are evidently not sent forth into the world as he was. Remember John chapter 21 chapter 20 breathe on them and said receive the spirit as

30:30 the father has sent me the anointed one so send I you. At Pentecost the commencement of the great work of converting the world was with flaming tongues and a rushing mighty wind symbols of the presence of the spirit if therefore we think to succeed without the spirit we are not after the Pentecostal order if we have not the spirit which Jesus promised we cannot fulfill the commission which Jesus gave.

Manifestation 1: Heightened Sense of Spiritual Realities

31:07 Now then having considered this matter of the indispensable nature or the indispensable what term did I use?

31:22 Look at my heading got away from lecturing and started preaching. I considered yes the absolute necessity and gave you the three lines of evidence. Alright now I come to the second division of my subject. The first time I've given this folks so bear with me as I try to work between lecture and preaching. Here's my second

31:48 heading. I want to address some of the specific manifestations of the spirit's immediate agency and operations upon the preacher. In the act of preaching some of the specific manifestations I don't claim to be comprehensive nor exhaustive. If time permits I want to consider with you four of these some of the specific manifestations of the spirit's immediate agency and operations upon the preacher in the act of preaching. First

32:25 the Holy Spirit gives us in the act of preaching a heightened and felt sense of the spiritual realities in which we are trafficking as we preach. First the Holy Spirit gives us in the act of preaching a heightened and felt sense of the spiritual realities in which we are trafficking as we preach. Now let me describe the process. You've been sitting at your desk in a prayerful frame.

33:09 As you believe you have been guided by a number of strands of influence both without and within to settle upon the given text. You may be preaching through a book of scripture. You may be preaching a series on a given vital theme of scripture. And you're now at that point where you're focusing in upon the exegesis, the organization, the homiletics, the illustration, all that goes in.

33:33 To sermon preparation. You're sitting there in a prayerful frame pondering the truth as you seek to come to a more accurate grasp of it and the ability to lay it out before your people. And as you do there is a felt impress of the truth upon your own spirit. It may be a truth that causes your spirit to groan. It may be

33:57 a truth that causes you to back off from your desk and raise your hands and bellow out a hallelujah. It may be a truth that causes you to shed a tear. There is a felt experience of that truth in the process of preparation. Preparation time is done.

34:18 The moment of truth has come. And I know we'd all like to have an eight day week. We always see it by one more Saturday. How much better I preach.

34:26 If you haven't felt that then come and tell me your secret. Now you stand before the people of God in a prayerful frame. And you begin now to share with them the fruit of what went on in the study. And as you begin to preach your mind begins to experience the friction of the truth upon your own spirit. And in living

34:51 interaction with the people of God and the promised special presence of God and that electric current that is established between you and your people the truth that was flooded in the study with a hundred watts of divine influence in light. Not another truth. Certainly not an error. But that very truth is now flooded with a thousand watts of light.

35:17 And though you saw it in the study you see it now in preaching. It stands out in such bold three dimensional relief before your mind in the act of preaching. That truth that exerted its emotional energy upon you with a heaviness, with a joy, with a grief. There was a thousand BTUs of spiritual heat in the soul in the study. Now

35:49 as you live with that truth and preach it, you feel ten thousand watts from that same truth in the preaching. You've been meditating on the glories of Christ in the study. Feeling so incompetent to set forth this glory with a thick tongue and a slow mind. And a wandering heart.

36:14 But the Spirit of God by His immediate agency and operation enables you to get a sight of Christ as you preach of that glory that was hammered out in the study. And as you behold His glory, there's a sense in which you wouldn't care if everyone got up and walked out. Just soliloquizing about your Savior in an internal rapture in the act of preaching. You may have been reflecting upon the horrors of hell.

36:48 And there was heaviness. And you felt, how can I preach this horrific doctrine? And in the act of preaching it's as though you can smell the brimstone. And your soul feels the horrors of the pit that awaits the impenitent. It may

37:06 be that you're opening up some dimension of the provisions of grace, the duties and privileges of the Christian life. Whatever! Here it is! The preacher experiences in the very act of preaching.

37:22 What does he experience? A heightened and felt sense of the spiritual realities in which he is now trafficking as he preaches. The result of that is it will give at times an unforced glow to the very countenance of the preacher. You experience that last night in this building.

37:50 No actor can produce it.

37:53 Nothing in the notes that says glow here can anticipate it. It will evoke an unplanned tear in the eye. Produce the unplanned pathos and pleading power in the vocal cord. My friends, if you don't know anything of what that is, I pity you. And I

38:21 pity your people. This is why Whitefield said I would not for a thousand words felt.

38:35 That's what he was talking about.

Spurgeon on Heightened Sense of Spiritual Realities

38:38 That's what he was talking about. Again, I quote my friend Spurgeon. I'm hiding under Spurgeon's skirt on these matters. He writes, the divine spirit will sometimes work on us so as to bear us completely out of ourselves.

38:55 From the beginning of the sermon to the end, we might at such times say whether in the body or out of it I cannot tell. Everything has been forgotten but the one all engrossing subject in hand. And now only Spurgeon. I wonder how God put the man together so he'd even think these thoughts.

39:16 He's meditating on if God said you can't come to heaven but you can choose whatever state you'd like to be in for eternity what would you choose, my son? Listen to Spurgeon. If I were forbidden to enter heaven but were permitted to select my state for all eternity I should choose to be as I sometimes feel. In preaching the gospel heaven is foreshadowed in such a state, the mind shut out from all disturbing influences adoring the majestic and consciously present God.

39:53 Every faculty aroused and joyously excited to its utmost capacity. The truth that was flooded in the study with a hundred watts of divine influence and light. Not another truth. Certainly not an error but that very truth is now flooded with a thousand watts of light. And though you

40:17 saw it in the study, you see it now in preaching. It stands out in such bold three-dimensional relief before your mind in the act of preaching. That truth that exerted its emotional energy upon you with a heaviness with a joy with a grief. There was a thousand BTUs of spiritual heat in the soul in the study.

40:48 Now as you live with that truth and preach it, you feel ten thousand watts from that same truth in the preaching. You've been meditating on the glories of Christ in the study feeling so incompetent to set forth His glory with a thick tongue and a slow mind and a wandering heart. But the Spirit of God by His immediate agency and operation enables you to get a sight of Christ as you preach of that glory that was hammered out in the study. And as you behold His glory, there's a sense

41:31 in which you wouldn't care if everyone got up and walked out. Just soliloquizing about your Savior in an internal rapture in the act of preaching. You may have been reflecting upon the horrors of hell. There was a lot of heaviness. And you felt

41:49 how can I preach this horrific doctrine? And in the act of preaching it's as though you can smell the brimstone. And your soul feels the horrors of the pit that awaits the impenitent. It may be that you're opening up some dimension of the provisions of grace, the duties and privileges of the Christian life. Whatever it is,

42:14 the preacher experiences in the very, the very act of preaching. What does he experience? A heightened and felt sense of the spiritual realities in which he is now trafficking as he preaches. The result of that is, it will give at times an unforced glow to the very countenance of the preacher.

42:44 You experienced that last night in this building. No actor can produce it. Nothing in the notes that says glow here can anticipate it.

43:01 It will evoke an unplanned tear in the eye. Produce the unplanned pathos and pleading power in the vocal cord.

43:15 My friends, if you don't know anything of what that is, I pity you. And I pity your people. This is why Whitfield said, I would not for a thousand... That's what he

43:34 was talking about. That's what he was talking about. Again, I quote my friend's Spurgeon. I'm hiding under Spurgeon's skirt on these matters.

43:47 He writes, the divine spirit will sometimes work on us so as to bear us completely out of ourselves. From the beginning of the sermon to the end, we might at such times say, whether in the body or out of it, I cannot tell. Everything has been forgotten but the one all engrossing subject in hand. And now only Spurgeon, I wonder how God put the man together so he'd even think these thoughts. He's meditating

44:15 on if God said you can't come to heaven, but you can choose whatever state you'd like to be in for eternity, what would you choose, my son? Listen to Spurgeon. If I were forbidden to enter heaven, but were permitted to select my state for all eternity, I should choose to be as I sometimes feel in preaching the gospel. Heaven is foreshadowed in such a state the mind shut out from all disturbing influences, adoring the majestic and consciously present God.

44:52 Every faculty aroused and joyously excited to its utmost capacity. And all the thoughts and powers of the soul joyously occupied in contemplations of the glory of the Lord and extolling to listening crowds the beloved of our soul. And all the while the purest conceivable love toward one's fellow creatures, urging the heart to plead with them in God's behalf. What state of mind can rival this?

45:23 Alas, we have at times known this ideal, but we cannot always maintain it, for we know also what it is to preach in chains or beat the air. We may not attribute holy and happy changes, may we not attribute these happy and holy changes in our ministry to anything less than the action of the Holy Spirit upon our souls.

Manifestation 2: Unfettered Liberty and Heightened Facility of Utterance

45:54 I'm in good company when I talk about the operations and agency of the Holy Spirit upon the preacher in the act of preaching. But not only is this immediate agency and operation of the Spirit such as to give us a heightened and felt sense of the spiritual realities in which we're trafficking as we preach, but secondly, the Holy Spirit gives us, in the act of preaching, the blessed experience of an unfettered liberty and heightened facility of utterance. He gives

46:37 us, in the act of preaching, the blessed experience of an unfettered liberty and heightened facility of utterance. I said earlier that the paradigm for preaching in the new covenant is Acts 2.4. Filled with the Spirit, speaking as the Spirit gives utterance. And I'm

47:04 so thankful we have chapter 4 where tongues are no longer in the picture, but notice how the paradigm obtains. The servants of God gather to pray. And who it was to whom they went, whether it was the company of the apostles or the larger church is unclear from the text, but they gather, they pray, and as they're praying, you remember the Spirit of God comes upon them afresh, and we read in verse 31 of Acts 4. When they had prayed, the place was shaken wherein they were gathered, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they spoke the Word of God with boldness. Parousia.

47:51 And that word, noun, sometimes adverb, and its verbal form, parousiazomai, is the dominant word to describe the quality of their preaching throughout the book of Acts. Take your concordances and follow it out, trace it out, and again and again, this matter of preaching boldly. Preaching with boldness. Culminating in the apostles' request of the Ephesians that this great experienced apostle would be given boldness of utterance, that it would be given to him. He knew he didn't

48:30 carry it in his pocket.

48:33 And he's asking these Ephesians, Christians, pray for me. I know the mystery. I'm not asking you that God will unfold the mystery to me. I know the mystery.

48:43 But I want to speak it as I ought to speak it. And what I need is a constant, ongoing gift of utterance. In one sense it has nothing to do with native loquaciousness. It has nothing to do with past enablements.

49:05 It has to do with an immediate agency and operation of the Holy Spirit upon the preacher, that he might experience unfettered liberty and a heightened facility of utterance. When the mind of the preacher is seeing with that clearer light of the Spirit's assistance in the act of preaching, and as we'll come to the third manifestation of his work, the heart is expanded with greater measures of what the old writers would call disinterested benevolence. Genuine, selfless love for people. What greater frustration could there be than to see with heightened

49:50 clarity, and to feel with intense yearning, and to have it all dammed up in the vocal cords and the tongue. I know that frustration. When the tongue feels sick thick as dry leather, and the mind convoluted in terms of getting out what God has given in the study, in the labor of the secret place, but now flooded with fresh light, and exerting fresh and immediate heat, as the Spirit do, he delights to come and give us in the act of preaching the blessed experience

50:34 of unfettered liberty and a height and facility of utterance. So that times without number, if we could, we'd say to the congregation, please just hold it for a minute. I want to write down what I just said. Get that way in the study. You did your best in the study.

50:59 It's in your notes. There was a heightened dimension that affects even the ability to draw words out of the storeroom of vocabulary. You may not have used them for donkey's ears. And suddenly they flash into the consciousness, and when you're sank, say, yes, Lord, that's it. That's it.

51:20 That's what I was fishing for in the study. It didn't come. Thank you, Lord. And there are times you want to tell the congregation, pause. You want to get

51:28 out of your face and worship. And say, oh, God,

51:35 thank you. And you're humbled. You don't swell with pride. You know that didn't come from you.

51:43 You'd be as stupid to think you created yourself to think you did that. You know that that is the result of an immediate agency and operation. Of God, the Holy Spirit, His person operating upon your person in conjunction with His glorious truth. Marvelous, wonderful, blessed experience. I remember

52:09 when we had the academy.

52:12 And again, I don't want to romanticize this thing and touch up facts. It's so easy to do that. But something like this happened more than once. One of the young men would go off to preach on the weekend.

52:25 And I would try, if he was a novice at preaching, to get to him sometime shortly thereafter, and say, brother, how'd things go? Then I'd listen. And more than once they would describe, well, pastor, I prepared such and such a sermon. And you know, I was about a third of the way into the sermon, and something strange happened. And they'd begin to

52:46 try to describe. The Spirit of God came in a special, immediate agency and operation in this area of utterance. And I'd play dumb like they were some kind of fanatic. Oh, what are you talking about? Come on, tell me some more.

53:02 And here they are, struggling to describe the indescribable. And when they'd done it enough that it was clear, they knew there was such a reality, and they had known it, then I'd smile and say, my brother, you've tasted it, and you'll never be satisfied again. Some call it unction. Some call it liberty.

53:25 Call it what you will. You've known it at the level of your experience. You can never, ever treat it as something that is in the realm of fanaticism. And you can't be satisfied without it. Again,

Spurgeon on Unfettered Liberty and Utterance

53:40 I hide under the skirt of my patron saint, Mr. Spurgeon. Brethren, we require the Holy Spirit also to incite us, immediate agency and operation, to incite us in our utterance. I doubt not you are all conscious of different states of mind in preaching.

54:03 Some of those states arise from your body being in different conditions. A bad cold will not only spoil the clearness of the voice, but freeze the flow of the thoughts. For my own part, if I cannot speak clearly, I'm unable to think clearly, and the matter becomes hoarse as well as the voice. The stomach also, and all the other organs of the body affect the mind.

54:23 But it's not to these things that I allude. Are you not conscious of changes altogether independent of the body? When you're in robust health, do you not find yourself one day as heavy as Pharaoh's chariots with the wheels taken off? And in another time, as much at liberty as a hind let loose? Today

54:46 your branch glitters with the dew. Yesterday it was parched with drought. Who knows not that the Spirit of God is in all of this?

55:03 I'm going to call him a raving fanatic. When you've got 5,000 people coming an hour early or twice every Lord's Day for 30 years to hear you, then you've earned a right to judge my blessed brother. Until then, perhaps some of you need to get on your face before God and say, O God, is this the cause of my barren ministry? It's a barren preacher trafficking in divine truth without the immediate agency and operation of the Holy Spirit.

Manifestation 3: Enlarged Heart with Selfless Love

55:41 But then thirdly, not only does this immediate agency and operation give us a heightened and felt sense of the realities in which we traffic, a blessed experience of utterance and heightened facility of speech, but thirdly, the Holy Spirit gives us in the act of preaching an enlarged heart presently suffused with increased measures of selfless love that yearns to do our hearers good by means of our preaching. The Holy Spirit gives us

56:26 in the act of preaching an enlarged heart presently suffused with an increased measure of selfless love that yearns to do good to our hearers by means of our preaching. I remind you of 1 Corinthians 13.1 If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love, it profits me nothing. While at our desks, the dominant disposition of the heart is often and rightly so being able to labor in the study of 2 Timothy 2.15

57:08 before us. An imperative of spudazzo. I love that word because it sounds what it is. Do your utmost.

57:18 Marshal all of your faculties to show yourself approved unto God. A workman who has no just cause of shame before his master and what will help him to do that? Cutting a straight course in the word of truth. The eye of your master upon you in the handling of his truth is often and rightly so the dominant pressure upon the soul in the study.

57:43 And when we have so labored as to believe we could present to our master what we are saying in his name, then the disposition that dominates to a greater degree, though you can't put them in categories, is how will this do good to my people? And you bring your congregation into the study and you see their faces and think of their states and conditions and especially in the area of application and illustration you say, Lord, how can I make it more plain to the kids? And how can I make it more stickable to the man behind? To the man behind his workbench?

58:19 And Lord, how can I see arrows fashioned out of this truth to pierce the heart of the careless and the wandering? There are measures of divine love for your people. The love that is willing to enter into the sacrificial labor of thoughtful application and illustration.

58:39 So the measures of love are there in the study. However, when you stand to preach and you look into those faces and they're no longer an image imported by an activity of the mind into the study but sitting in front of you in the place of meeting and you look at their faces and you, as it were, relive those glimpses of them that you had in the study and the Spirit of God whose fruit is love expands the heart, fills it with love. That love at this point yearns to do them good by means of that preaching. And it is, that yearningness of love that enables us to say with Paul,

59:24 O Corinthians, our heart is open, our mouth is open. The conjunction of an open heart and an open mouth is forged by enlarged love.

59:38 And it is that enlarged heart suffused with fresh measures of love, hear me now, brethren, that is the mother of genuine earnestness and unfailingness. Unfeigned passion.

59:55 It is a heart suffused with love that is the mother of unfamed, genuine earnestness and unfamed passion.

60:09 The worst counsel to give to a preacher is you've got to put more earnestness into your preaching hogwash.

60:18 You must feel more deeply the impulses of divine love that in turn will produce earnestness and passion.

Love as the Mother of Earnestness and Passion

60:34 One has defined earnestness as follows. It is the energy of the soul intent upon a given object. I like that. What is earnestness?

60:45 It's the energy of the soul intent on a given object. We've got a young man sitting here who's becoming intent on a given object. It's one of the young ladies in our church.

60:59 And if he wasn't in earnest, he'd have been scared away already. So she's got a protective pappy.

61:09 Hmm? But he's got an intention in his soul. And it's producing some earnestness. He's willing to sit down and go eyeball to eyeball with Papa and not be spooked away.

61:23 Couldn't help but think of him when I wrote this.

61:27 Energy of the soul intent on a given object. Oh brethren, what are we doing in the pulpit? Earning a living? Trafficking in ideas?

61:38 Then dump it on them and go home.

61:41 But if we yearn to do them good, we want to see sinners saved. We want to see saints brought to maturity in Christ. And we have a yearningness. And we believe what we're trafficking in under God's blessing can produce it.

61:57 How can we help but be passionate and earnest?

62:04 Remember the words of Professor Murray, quote, to me, preaching without passion is not preaching. Listen to the words of J.W. Alexander, page 27, of his book.

62:20 The same truths uttered from the pulpit by different men or by the same man in different states of feeling will produce very different effects. And this is no Arminian talking.

62:35 This is no manipulator. This is a solid experimental Calvinist. The same truths uttered from the pulpit by different men or by the same man in different states of feeling will produce very different effects. Some of these are far beyond what the bare conviction of the truth as uttered would ordinarily produce.

62:59 I get sick and tired of these men with this, well, it's God's fruit, and if he's going to bless it, he'll bless it. My friends, the reason God's ordained preaching as his unique method for dismantling the kingdom of darkness and building the kingdom of his Son has something more to do than bare truth.

63:17 It's because in preaching, the effect of that truth, the truth upon a redeemed man is embodied in the man conveying it.

63:29 Alexander recognizes this. The whole mass of truth by a sudden passion of the speaker is made red hot and burns its way.

63:41 Ask yourself your own consciousness. When has God burned his truth into your heart so as to elicit a righteous response?

63:53 Was it by the take it or leave it preacher? It was Bible. It's objective truth. No matter how it comes, it's scripture.

64:02 Or was it when that truth, as it were, gathered to itself the energy of the soul of the preacher and it came throbbing with that energy to your ear, registered here, and by the blessing of the Holy Ghost found its lodgment down here.

64:23 It's the Spirit's work to do this. I personally believe that few men can live long if God were to sustain that energy of that measure of selfless love 24 hours a day. It kills people like Brainerd and McShane at an early age.

Conclusion and Prayer

64:45 But I do believe we ought to expect it, pray for it, and bless God when he grants it in the act of preaching. On my fourth head, I'll give you a little P.S. when we come, God willing.

64:57 I've already gone 10 minutes over.

65:02 If I had an hourglass, I could say I didn't read it too accurately, but I have a watch.

65:09 So I must be done. Let's pray.

65:15 Father, we've talked about things so sacred, so precious, that we fear lest we should any way defile them by our misstatement of them. So we can only ask you to take the chaff and blow it away. Whatever's been the wheat of your truth, may it be stored up in our hearts and worked out in our lives and ministries.

65:45 Hear us and continue with us for Jesus' sake. Amen.