O the depth of the riches, both of
the wisdom and the knowledge of God, how
unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past
tracing out.
To me, who am the least of all
saints, was this grace given, to
preach unto the nations the unsearchable riches
of Christ.
The unsearchable riches of Christ.
Having noted that this word riches is linked
with a number of things in the New
Testament, we have commenced our meditation with the
first of these connections, the riches of his
grace.
We have said a little about the basic
character of grace, something about the works of
grace and the works of law, and we
have gone on to look at God's work
of grace, finishing his work for man
before ever man comes into the picture at
all, and is then called into the work
which God has finished.
This is the grace of God.
Now, let us for a few minutes look
at the free action of the Holy Spirit
as the Spirit of Grace.
We know that the Holy Spirit is called
the Spirit of Grace.
What does it mean that the Holy Spirit
is the Spirit of Grace?
It means that the Holy Spirit is that,
and the Holy Spirit comes to us as
that, and the Holy Spirit is freely given
to us through faith as the Spirit of
Grace.
Here is the grace of God.
We never am or merit the Holy Spirit.
He is freely given to faith, and although
it may sound like repetition and laboring the
point, I do want that we should be
impressed with this, that the Holy Spirit, given
freely as the Spirit of Grace, brings to
us from God all that grace means.
We have the Holy Spirit in possession, in
dwelling.
We have in himself, his very presence, all
that divine grace means.
He is the Spirit of Grace.
Now, with him, we have the free action
of God, the free action of God.
The Bible begins in a very simple way,
so simple that you hardly notice it.
It is something written, set down, you read
it, and you hardly know or notice what
you have read.
Now, the earth was without form and void,
darkness was over the face of the deep,
and on we go, the Spirit of God
brooded upon the face of the deep, and
on you go again.
What was there in that condition to merit
the presence and action of the Holy Spirit?
The initiative was all with the Spirit of
God, over and against a set of conditions,
utterly contrary to himself, and yet this brooding
was a very active thing, a very energetic
thing, a very purposeful thing.
In a word, the Spirit of God brooding,
hovering over that state of things was the
presence of God to change the whole situation,
because God wanted it changed, that's all.
Just that, God wanted it changed.
And he took the matter in hand.
There was not only lack of merit, but
plenty of demerit.
We don't know, there have been some rising,
perhaps guessing, perhaps right guessing that that state
of things was due to some judgment which
had come upon the creation, which we need
not speculate about at all.
There was a state which was altogether contrary
to the mind of God, and the state
could do nothing about it for itself.
Free action, just the free, voluntary, unearned initiative
and action of the Spirit of God.
Now dear friends, you and I are here,
and there are multitudes in our position, as
we believe, saved, born anew, children of God,
who would say we are a new creation
in Christ.
How did it happen?
Did we go up to heaven to call
him down?
Did we go into the deep to bring
him up?
Did we go to the outermost parts of
the earth to find him and persuade him?
We really did nothing about it.
We are where we are and what we
are by an action altogether apart from anything
that we did in the matter.
He did it.
He did it all.
We did nothing toward it.
Indeed, our condition was all against God's thought
and God's mind, and yet he took the
initiative, and he did it by his Spirit.
That is the Spirit of grace, you see,
taking things in hand, taking things in hand,
to have them to make a beginning, to
make a beginning, to have things not as
they were, but as God intended and intends
them to be.
That's all very simple, isn't it?
But there's much more in that for our
heart ravishing than perhaps we are aware of
because perhaps our salvation is taken too cheaply,
taken too much for granted.
It's those people who know best and most
what a ruin they were, what a chaos
they were, what darkness they were in, what
disruption there was in their life.
Those people who know that most and best,
who know that their salvation was nothing of
their doing.
It was the free action of the Spirit
of grace.
We'll get to that in a minute.
Therefore, the Holy Spirit has brought God to
us.
He has brought God to us.
He is God.
As God, he has brought God to us.
But what does that mean?
In other words, what are the riches of
his grace?
Now, we're going to dwell upon that this
evening, in part at any rate.
And we'll begin with other three things with
which we are so familiar.
First of all, as the Spirit of grace
coming as God to us, he comes as
the power of God into our lives to
do all that God wants done.
Now, that's a simple statement.
But he has come to do it.
He has come to do it.
It's no more of ourselves than it was
of the first natural material creation that brought
about the change.
No more of us.
It's the power of God that has taken
this thing up.
Is it too commonplace as to evoke no
response in our hearts?
Are we not more and more and ever
more aware that whatever has been done or
is being done or has got to be
done is by the power of God?
The power of God.
And what power?
What power?
Isn't darkness a power?
Isn't it a power?
Well, perhaps you have some experience to make
it possible for you to say yes.
I know.
When you've got to move into this world
where the Lord is neither known nor recognized
nor acknowledged, apparently not wanted, and you realize
that darkness is an awful power.
Darkness covers the earth and across darkness the
people, they're in darkness.
And what can you do about it?
You can't talk.
You can do all that is in your
power.
You cannot break this thing until the spirit
of power, as the spirit of light breaks
in on that soul, on that life, in
that realm.
It wants the power of God.
Darkness is an awful power.
If that is true in this side of
the world where there has been so much
light given, so much truth given, there is
so much Christian tradition, you go to the
other side of the world.
You go to those dark places of heathendom.
You have only got to move in such
a place, such a country as India, where
the gospel has not touched.
And you can feel the darkness.
It's evil.
It's positively evil.
It's like that.
You may feel it in the traditionally Christian
world.
I'll never forget my first visit to the
city of Rome and wanting to see the
various things.
I went to the Colosseum, to see the
place where the Christians were flung to the
lions.
And I went to this and that, and
then I went into St. Peter's Church.
And you know, I couldn't stay.
After a very short time I had to
go out.
I felt ill, physically ill.
A sense of awful death came on me
physically.
I was glad to get out of the
place.
There was an atmosphere of death, darkness to
the spirit.
But that's true there.
As I say, you go to other parts
of the world and you can't cut the
darkness.
It's so strong.
It's a terrible thing.
When the spirit of God, the spirit of
light, entered into this darkness which was over
the face of the earth, it made an
awful power.
It was dealing with an awful power.
And it called for the exercise of the
infinite power of God to break that reign
of darkness.
It called for the divine fear.
Let there be light.
The word of his power.
Oh, did our hearts cry and crave for
the knowledge of that power in his word
more.
If the smallest percentage of all our speaking
had the real power of God in it,
something would happen.
Something would happen.
It would be a fear, an act of
God to speak.
That is why the Lord Jesus is called
the word.
Because where he comes, the word, something happens.
Something happens.
The devil is exposed as when he was
here and cried out, I know thee whom
thou art, holy one of God.
Hell helped the impact of the word.
Man, sinful man, cried out in his presence.
Like that.
Point is, darkness is a terrible power.
The disruption in our humanity is a terribly
strong thing.
We are every day, almost every moment of
our lives, up against that breakup in the
humanity which is ours.
Or the breakdown of it.
The disorder of it.
Disintegration of it.
The disruption of it.
We know that our humanity is a broken
down thing.
With all those times, trying to pick it
up and build it up and hold it
up.
We know it's a power.
A terrible power.
Disorder.
Chaos in ourselves.
The spirit of God came of his own
accord.
Of his own accord.
As the spirit of power to deal with
what no other power in this universe could
deal with.
To change it.
And that's where we are in the new
creation.
It's what the spirit of God has undertaken
to do with us.
And surely there are few, if any, in
this place tonight who would not echo the
words of the apostle.
Kept by the power of God.
You know you would not be a Christian
today.
You would not be going on with the
Lord.
You would not be standing true.
But for the keeping power of God.
In a world like this.
There is such a power against what is
the Lord.
Well, this is the spirit of grace, you
see, that has come to take it over.
The Holy Spirit, as the spirit of grace,
is the custodian of the divine perfection.
Has taken responsibility for realizing God's end.
Oh, thank God for that.
Knowing ourselves and the awful forces that there
are in our nature.
Knowing the world or something of it and
the awful forces that there are in this
world.
And knowing the devil and something of his
inimical hatred and opposition to what is of
God, anything that's of God.
We say, well, the only possibility is if
God Almighty doesn't cease to it.
And that is the spirit of grace that
has come to take it up.
To do it.
Free action of the Holy Spirit.
See, we read, you know, we read John
16.
You read John 16?
And if I asked you, what's in John
16?
You'd have the answer.
Well, you know, that John 16 is, I'm
going away, I'm going away.
You see me now, you won't see me
anymore.
I return unto my Father.
If I go not away, the comforter will
not come.
If I go away, I will send him
to you.
Then on and on and on, what he
will do, what he will do when he
is come, when he is come, when he
is come.
It's all so natural.
All so effortless, you see.
It's just going to be.
It's just in the order of things.
He's coming.
And he's going to do this and that.
And that's all there is to it.
It's just that he's coming, I'm going to
send him.
We read it, we know the content of
the word.
But do we realize that all this just
means that the Holy Spirit is taking over
all that Christ came to initiate to carry
it right through to its end.
He's going to do it.
That's what he's come for.
He's the spirit of grace.
And grace is just God doing all that
God can do without asking for any merit
or any payment.
The Holy Spirit is the spirit of that
grace.
As the power of God.
But that's one of the riches.
The riches of his power through grace.
We ought, you see, to get down to
our Bibles and have a word study and
a passage study here and there and there.
Perhaps if I only just remind you, it
will start off something.
Have you not noticed that grace is many
-sided in the New Testament?
And one of the sides or aspects of
grace is that it is an energy.
It's an energy.
It's a power, it's a force in our
lives.
There was a messenger of Satan given me
to buffet me.
And although these are not the words that
the apostle used, this is what he meant.
I cried out to the Lord, take this
away because I can't endure it, I shan't
be able to go on with this thing,
I'll not be able to get through.
This is too much, this is too strong,
this is too great a burden.
It's going to limit me.
It's going to spoil my life.
And he said unto me, my grace is
sufficient.
My grace is sufficient.
My strength is made perfect in which this
grace there is introduced as over against the
conscious inability of the apostle to go on
with what had been called for from him,
what had been put on him.
His natural reaction was, I just cannot.
If I've got to have this thing, I'll
just not be able to.
Take it away Lord.
He said, I asked him three times, take
it away Lord, take it away Lord, take
it away.
Life's impossible.
He said, my grace is sufficient for thee.
Everything is possible to grace.
It's a power, you see.
It's a power.
An energy in the life.
We do know this in measure, not as
we ought to.
We've had to say many times, but for
the grace of God, I should have acted
very differently from what I did.
But for the grace of God.
Grace saved me.
Grace kept me.
Grace held me.
The power of God is the spirit of
grace.
But there is where the riches begin.
But what next?
He is called the spirit of wisdom.
Spirit of wisdom.
Later we'll have something more to say about
wisdom, but just for the moment.
What does that mean?
What is wisdom?
To begin with, what is wisdom?
Wisdom is more than knowledge, you know.
You may have a lot of knowledge and
have no wisdom.
And the people who have most knowledge have
got the least wisdom.
They're the most foolish people with all their
knowledge.
What is wisdom?
It is knowing how to do things.
Or how to do it.
Knowing how to do it.
That's a simple formula for wisdom.
As I said, there's more to say in
another connection.
Here it is.
I remember many years ago, I heard or
read a little incident of a firm of
engineers who were given a contract to do
a certain job.
And when it was done, they sent in
their account.
More or less general.
And it was a very big account.
And the people who had to pay the
bill sent it back and said, look here,
this is not good enough.
We want you to explain this.
Tell us how you make up this bill.
The firm sent back materials, so much.
Time of workmen, so much.
One or two other practical things like, so
much.
And when those were added together, it didn't
come up to the whole account.
And they wrote underneath, knowing how to do
it, for balance.
Ah, well.
Knowing how to do it.
It's quite a big part, you see.
It's a whole business, isn't it?
They might have had the materials and they
might have had the workmen and they might
have had all the other things, but not
knowing how to do it, what would have
been the good at all?
They'd never have done it.
Wisdom is knowing how to do it.
And here's the spirit of grace.
In this way, grace knows how to do
it.
We've got to learn a lot about that,
have we not?
But grace knows how to do it.
To take up the problems.
Handle them and solve them.
Negotiate the situation to a successful, triumphant issue.
Handle the people concerned.
How to handle them.
Oh, and a thousand other things which require
knowing how to do it.
Now I do say, and I'm quite sure
that I'm speaking the truth now, that you
and I are many times brought to the
place where we don't know how to do
it or what to do.
We just do not know.
So we haven't got the wisdom for the
situation.
Perhaps you're in it now.
I am.
But the spirit of grace is the spirit
of wisdom.
He knows how to do it.
We have some experience upon which we can
say, I never thought it would be done
and I never imagined it would be done
like that.
The way the Lord has done it.
What the Lord has done.
How he has done it.
That never occurred to me.
He'd do it like that.
And when you think of it, was there
any better way?
Could it have been done better?
No.
The riches of his grace is the riches
of his wisdom.
Grace.
In the wisdom of God.
If you and I do believe in the
grace of God, brought to us by the
spirit of wisdom, and I almost hesitate to
say it because I know I'm involving myself,
whereas you, we ought never to despair of
a situation.
He knows how to handle that.
How to get us through that.
How to resolve that.
We do not know.
And in the presence of this quandary, this
problem, we cry out.
It wants something so deep and so great
that it's altogether beyond us.
And it may be in time, but certainly
in eternity we'll say, oh, the depth of
the wisdom.
The depth of the wisdom.
How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways
past finding out.
The spirit of grace is the spirit of
power.
The spirit of grace is the spirit of
wisdom.
The spirit of grace is the spirit of
life.
He is called the spirit of life.
The law of the spirit of life in
Christ Jesus.
By the spirit we are told Jesus was
raised from the dead.
Raised from the dead.
Through the eternal spirit.
Spirit of life.
We need not go back again for our
analogy to the first creation.
The operation of the brooding spirit and the
resultant life in the creation.
Both in the animate creation and in man.
The other kind of life.
It's all the result of the presence of
the spirit.
In the new creation it's like that.
But here again it's not just a Christian
truth.
A Christian doctrine.
The gift of eternal life is just not
one of those things that we come into
when we become Christian.
This resurrection life is a continuous abiding from
day to day power and experience.
It's put in all the tenses of the
Christian life and salvation.
We were raised together with him that we
should walk in unison life.
That's the past tense.
We are now living in the good of
that that the life whereby Jesus conquered death
should be manifested in our mortal flesh.
That's present tense.
And this goes on to the future.
The future.
Great revelation of life in it's final, full,
perfect expression.
This resurrection life is not something only that
happened when we were saved.
It's a power to work in us continually
now.
Well you know it so well in theory
and teaching.
But this is the spirit of grace.
Oh thank God for the power of this
divine life which is demonstrating itself continually.
And it seems to me, it does seem
to me, I often said this in the
past, but it seems more and more to
be the case that the further you go
on the deeper this life has to go
simply because you are taken so much deeper,
more deeply into death.
The experiences of going down become deeper and
greater than ever they have been before.
The experiences of going down become deeper and
greater than ever they have been before.
So it seems.
And therefore the power of his resurrection becomes
greater all the way along.
This is a very hopeful thing for us.
Perhaps some of you are feeling today that
well you're touching bottom.
And perhaps you're saying well this is the
end.
But do not forget that resurrection is a
reality, it's not a theory.
It is not just a doctrine, it's an
experience and a continuous experience.
And dear friends, the great revelation in the
world of God is that in the end,
in the end, it's going to be up
and not down.
I usually, when I go into a lift
and there's a lift man there and I
have a little joke with him and say
your life is full of ups and downs
isn't it?
He says yes it is.
I say how's he going to finish?
Up or down?
And he looks rather wise and knows that
there's something coming.
We know how it's going to finish.
It's an elevation life that we have.
And we may from time to time descend
but we are going to ascend as many
times as we descend as the Lord's people
and the final movement is an ascension movement.
This life is that way.
It must seek out and find its own
source.
Where it began it will end.
It began in God, it will end in
God.
This is the spirit of grace, the spirit
of life.
And I know dear friends that I have
only said things with which you are familiar
but sometimes our most familiar things because of
their familiarity lose their power.
And it's as well to be reminded of.
Now I've mentioned these three aspects of grace
as three great and primary riches of grace
and how rich they are.
What I have next to say, if the
Lord wills would take considerably longer than we
would have time for this evening because they
really do take us into the depths.
So I'll leave it there but you've enough
to get on with.
You've enough to get on with with what
I have said this evening or what I
trust the Lord has said.
You go away and let your hearts as
well as your minds dwell upon this.
You know we miss a lot, dear friends,
we miss a lot because we hear we
hear, we go away and do nothing.
Be very good.
Always for our good real value if after
tonight you just recall these things and went
to the Lord very quickly said, Our Lord
this is what is said, this is the
truth I look to you to make that
good in me.
Spirit of power Spirit of wisdom Spirit of
life It's said that these are features of
your grace brought in the person of the
Holy Spirit.
This is the teaching of the Word of
God.
It mustn't stay in the book.
It must come into reality into my own
life.
Lord, I count on you to make this
true, make this real and so more than
ever May peace.