Lord! teach me to tarry with Thee in the school, and give Thee time to train me. May a deep sense of my ignorance, of the wonderful privilege and power of prayer, of the need of the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of prayer, lead me to cast away my thoughts of what I think I know, and make me kneel before Thee in true teachableness and poverty of spirit.

However we study or delight in the letter of the Word, it has no saving or sanctifying power without the Holy Spirit. Human wisdom and human will, however great their efforts, cannot command that power. The Holy Spirit is the power of God. It is only as the Holy Spirit teaches you as you read, only as the Gospel is preached in the power of the Holy Spirit, that you will be given, along with every command, the strength also to obey it.

Perpetual inspiration from the Holy Spirit is as necessary to a life of goodness, holiness, and happiness as the perpetual respiration of air is necessary to animal life.

The two must be united — the Word and the Spirit — because only in these can we know for sure the will of God and learn to pray according to it. In the heart, the Word and the Spirit must meet; it is only by such indwelling that we can experience their teaching.

The teaching of the Spirit — not without or against the Word but as something above and beyond it and in addition to it, without which we cannot see God's will — is the heritage of every believer. It is through the Word and the Word alone that the Spirit teaches, applying the general principles or promises to our special need.

It it universally admitted that the Holy Spirit has not, in the teaching of the Church or the faith of believers, that place of honour and power, which becomes Him as the Revealer of the Father and the Son. Seek a deep conviction [p 141 ] that without the Holy Spirit the clearest teaching on holiness, the most fervent desires, the most blessed experiences even, will only be temporary, will produce no permanent result, will bring no abiding rest.

whopper-stopper

For Scripture is the school of the Holy Spirit, in which, as nothing is omitted that is both necessary and useful to know, so nothing is taught but what is expedient to know. Therefore we must guard against depriving believers of anything disclosed about predestination in Scripture, lest we seem either wickedly to defraud them of the blessing of their God or to accuse and scoff at the Holy Spirit for having published what it is in any way profitable to suppress.

For by a kind of mutual bond the Lord has joined together the certainty of his Word and of his Spirit so that the perfect religion of the Word may abide in our minds when the Spirit, who causes us to contemplate God's face, shines.

it is the peculiar privilege of the Church, to know what the Divine judgments mean, and what is their tendency.

If at any time, then we are troubled at the small number of those who believe, let us, on the other hand, call to mind, that none comprehend the mysteries of God save those to whom it is given.

True knowledge of God and of the secret of his wisdom comes from faith, because the obedience of faith opens to us the gate of the Kingdom of Heaven.