Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2213
Delivered by C. H. Spurgeon, on Friday Morning, April 24, 1891
“He shall glorify Me: for He shall receive of Mine, and shall show it unto you. All things that the Father has are Mine: therefore said I, that He shall take of Mine and shall show it unto you.” John 16:14,15.
BELOVED Friends, here you have the Trinity, and there is no salvation apart from the Trinity! It must be the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. “All things that the Father has are Mine,” says Christ, and the Father has all things. They were always His; they are still His; they always will be His—and they cannot become ours till they change ownership—till Christ can say, “All things that the Father has are Mine”—for it is by virtue of the representative Character of Christ standing as the Surety of the Covenant, that the “all things” of the Father are passed over to the Son, that they might be passed over to us. “It pleased the Father that in Him should all fullness dwell; and of His fullness have all we received.” But yet we are so dull that though the conduit pipe is laid on to the great fountain, we cannot get at it. We are lame. We cannot reach it, but in comes the third Person of the Divine Unity, even the Holy Spirit, and He receives of the things of Christ and then delivers them over to us! So we actually receive, through Jesus Christ, by the Spirit, what is in the Father!
Ralph Erskine, in his preface to a sermon upon the 15th verse, has a notable piece. He speaks of Grace as honey— honey for the cheering of the saints, for the sweetening of their mouths and hearts—but he says that in the Father, “the honey is in the flower, which is at such a distance from us that we could never extract it.” In the Son, “the honey is in the comb, prepared for us in our Immanuel, God-Man, Redeemer, the Word that was made flesh, saying, ‘All things that the Father has are Mine; and Mine for your use and benefit—it is in the comb. But then, next, we have honey in the mouth—the Spirit taking all things and making application of them, by showing them unto us and making us to eat and drink with Christ, and share of these ‘all things’—yes, not only eat the honey, but the honeycomb with the honey—not only His benefits, but Himself.”
It is a very beautiful division of the subject. Honey in the flower in God, as in mystery, really there. There never will be any more honey than there is in the flower. There it is. But how shall you and I get it? We have not wisdom to extract the sweetness. We are not as the bees that are able to find it out. It is bee honey, not man honey. Yet you see in Christ it becomes the honey in the honeycomb and, therefore, He is sweet to our taste as honey dropping from the comb. Sometimes we are so faint that we cannot reach out a hand to grasp that honeycomb and, alas, there was a time when our palates were so depraved that we preferred bitter things and even thought them sweet! But now that the Holy Spirit has come, we have got the honey in the mouth and the taste that enjoys it! Yes, we have now so long enjoyed it that the honey of Grace has entered into our constitution and we have become sweet unto God—His sweetness having been conveyed by this strange method unto us.
Beloved Friends, I scarcely need say to you, keep the existence of the Trinity prominent in your ministry! Remember, you cannot pray without the Trinity. If the full work of salvation requires a Trinity, so does that very breath by which we live. You cannot draw near to the Father except through the Son and by the Holy Spirit. There is undoubtedly a trinity in nature. There certainly constantly turns up the need of a Trinity in the realm of Grace—and when we get to Heaven we shall understand, perhaps, more fully what is meant by the Trinity in Unity. But if that is a thing never to be understood, we shall at least apprehend it more lovingly, and we shall rejoice more completely as the three tones of our music
shall rise up in perfect harmony unto Him who is One and indivisible, and yet is Three, forever blessed, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one God!
Now for the point which I am to open up to you this morning, though I cannot do it, but He must do it. We must sit here and have the text acted out upon ourselves. “He shall glorify Me. He shall take of Mine and shall show it unto you.” May it be so just now!
First, what the Holy Spirit does—“He shall take of Mine and shall show it unto you.” Secondly, what the Holy Spirit aims at and really effects—“He shall glorify Me.” And then, thirdly, how, in doing both these things, He is the Comforter. It is the Comforter that does this and we shall find our richest, surest comfort in this work of the Holy Spirit, who shall take of the things of Christ and show them unto us.
I. First, WHAT THE HOLY SPIRIT DOES. It is clear, Beloved Friends, that the Holy Spirit deals with the things of Christ. As our brother, Archibald Brown, said, when expounding the chapter just now, He does not aim at any originality. He deals with the things of Christ. All things that Christ had heard from His Father He made known to us. He kept to them. And now the Spirit takes of the things of Christ and of nothing else. Do not let us strain at anything new. The Holy Spirit could deal with anything in Heaven above, or in the earth beneath—the story of the ages past, the story of the ages to come, the inward secrets of the earth, the evolution of all things, if there is an evolution. He could do it all! Like the Master, He could handle any topic He chose, but He confines Himself to the things of Christ and therein finds unutterable liberty and boundless freedom.