The workings of the Holy Spirit
We often fail to make a distinction in the operations of the Holy Spirit both individually and congregationally.
1. A distinction in spiritual maturity
Each Christian begins as a novice. That is how the Bible describes a beginner believer, as a recent convert (I Timothy 3:6). He is not instantly mature. His understanding of everything is inadequate; his understanding of himself is immature. God veils from him the full power of remaining sin or he would be crushed. I heard a preacher recently speak of his nine year-old son who earnestly witnesses in his South Wales school about Jesus Christ. He has been tormented by a few children for this so that he came home recently to his mother quite disconsolately. She got her Bible and read to him verses from John 15 where the Lord tells his disciples about the fact that as he had been persecuted so they are going to be persecuted - as this little boy had experienced in this relatively mild way. Gareth listened and then said to his mother, ‘You mean it is always going to be like this?’ Yes. That is one of the early lessons a recent convert learns; always needing courage to go on taking your stand for Christ, always doing battle with remaining sin; always growing in knowledge of the Scriptures; always growing in evangelistic earnestness and so on. Everyone starts as a novice. It is not that everyone starts without the Holy Spirit. We progress spiritually as we do physically by inches. We become men of God through the means of grace in a growing communion with God.
2. A distinction in spiritual gifts
There is the great picture of the church as a body in 1 Corinthians. There are different kinds of gifts . . . service . . . working (12:4-6) from the same Lord. God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be (12:18). Some seem weaker, and others are unpresentable, while others are less honourable, but all are designed and given by God. Are all teachers? No. Do all speak in tongues? No (12:29-30). It is simply that in the congregation there is planned diversity. The gifts of the Spirit make us different from one another so that we can minister to one another and receive ministry from one another. The fruit of the Spirit makes us like one another, and the chief of the fruit is love. So Paul never took one of the gifts of the Spirit and made the possession of that gift definitive for the presence of the Spirit. A New Testament congregation where every single person spoke in tongues would have been like one enormous nose rather than a body of various complementary organs. So too extraordinary preaching is not the infallible mark that a man is full of the Spirit and an heir of heaven.
3. A distinction in talents
Some Christians are 'strong' while others are 'weak brethren'. In the parable of the Lord the master goes on a long journey and he gives to one servant five talents and tells him to be occupied in using these talents until his return. Another is given three and another one. They did not choose the number. That choice and bestowal was divine, but all three men had to put them to use. They would be judged if they hid them away and did nothing with them. Some Christians have been called to be preachers and pastors. That is their distinctive gift of the Holy Spirit, but there are five-talent gifts of preaching, and three-talent gifts, and one-talent gifts. In other words, Martin Luther had a great gift of teaching, and so did John Bunyan, and so did Cornelius Van Til: five-talent people. The grandeur of those men was that they were on full stretch in their use of those talents throughout their lives. There was no let-up.
In that way they are our examples and we should seek to copy them, but we should not fret that we will never accomplish what they achieved. Most of us preachers are one-talent men and it will be enough for us to answer to God in the great day how we employed that one. Were we steadfast and immovable and always abounding in the work of the Lord with the talent God gave us? No special empowering of the Spirit will change one talent into five talents. A baptism of the Spirit will not turn a John Bunyan into a John Owen. We need John Bunyan and we need John Owen just as they are. We ourselves will never do a metamorphosis into a Jonathan Edwards, but we need the Holy Spirit to enable us to work with our one talent just as he helped the five-talent William Tyndale to labour. When I get to heaven the Lord will not ask me, ‘Geoff, why weren't you Tyndale?’ But he will ask me, ‘Geoff, why weren't you the Geoff I gifted and blessed?’ The pulpits all over the world are filled with humble men of one or two talents who by the ministry of the Spirit have given their gifts to the Lord and have been greatly used by him. If there is one evident pattern for 21st century church life it is that. There are no hyper-preachers in our day but thousands of faithful servants working by the Spirit's enabling to advance God's kingdom. However, let no Christian feebly excuse his own laziness and cowardice and prayerlessness with the words, ‘But my name is not George Whitefield.’ That is true, but you can go to the same God as Whitefield and ask for the same strengthening of your heart and soul in the Lord's service. Let us dedicate the talent we have to God and seek the strength of the Spirit to employ it until the Saviour comes. Robert Murray M'Cheyne used to write 'Master, help!' on his sermon manuscripts. Whatever our talents we need Holy Spirit aid for them to be used as they should be.