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The sermon presents fallen humanity as spiritually dead and unable to generate repentance, faith, or saving life. The Holy Spirit is therefore essential not merely as an aid but as the one who applies the Father’s saving purpose and Christ’s finished work to the sinner. Genuine Christian experience includes conviction of sin, reliance on Christ rather than self, freedom from idolatrous attachment to earthly goods, and hope of heaven. The sermon combines strong doctrines of human inability and sovereign grace with an urgent call to self-examination, repentance, prayer, and faith in Christ.
Theological center: Salvation is sovereignly applied by the Holy Spirit, who gives spiritual life to those dead in sin and unites them to Christ.
Applications: Examine your spiritual life · Repent and look to Christ · Pray for saving grace · Consider humanity’s spiritual condition
Primary texts: Ezekiel 36:27 · Romans 8:7-9 · John 6:65
“And I will put My Spirit within you.” Ezekiel 36:27. THE miracles of Christ are remarkable for one fact, namely that they are, none of them, unnecessary. The pretended miracles of Mohammed, and of the Church of Rome, even if they were miracles, would have been pieces of folly! Suppose that St. Denis had walked with his head in his hand after it had been cut off—what practical purpose would have been served thereby? He would certainly have been quite as well in his grave, for any practical good he would have conferred on men! The miracles of Christ were never unnecessary; they are not freaks of power. They are displays of power, it is true, but they, all of them, have a practical end. The same thing may be said of the promises of God. We have not one promise in the Scripture which may be regarded as a mere freak of grace. As every miracle was necessary, absolutely necessary, so is every promise that is given in the Word of God! And hence from the text that is before us, I may draw, and I think very conclusively, the argument that if God, in His covenant made with His people, has promised to put His Spirit within them, it must be absolutely necessary that this promise was made and it must be absolutely necessary, also, to our salvation that each of us should receive the Spirit of God! This shall be the subject of this morning’s discourse. I shall not hope to make it very interesting, except to those who are anxiously longing to know the way of salvation. We start, then, by laying down this proposition—that the work of the Holy Spirit is absolutely necessary to us, if we would be saved. I. In endeavoring to prove this, I would first of all make the remark that this is very manifest if we remember what man is by nature. Some say that man may of himself attain unto salvation—that if he hears the Word, it is in his power to receive it, to believe it and to have a saving change worked in him by it. To this we reply—you do not know what man is by nature—otherwise you would never have ventured upon such an assertion! Holy Scripture tells us that man by nature is dead in trespasses and sins. It does not say that he is sick, that he is faint, that he has grown callous and hardened and seared—it says he is absolutely dead! Whatever that term, “death” means in connection with the body, that it also means in connection with man’s soul—viewing it in its relation to spiritual things. When the body is dead, it is powerless; it is unable to do anything for itself. And when the soul of man is dead, in a spiritual sense, it must be, if there is any meaning in the figure,…