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The sermon presents the Holy Spirit as God, together with the Father and the Son, and as the decisive agent in applying salvation. Regeneration is described as God’s instantaneous creative work, while conversion and renewal continue throughout the believer’s life. Human reason and will are redirected and empowered by the Spirit, but neither self-effort nor moral persuasion can produce new spiritual life. The church is therefore urged to depend on God rather than instruments and to pray expectantly for the Spirit’s outpouring and blessing.
Theological center: The Holy Spirit is fully divine and sovereignly brings about regeneration, conversion, sanctification, and perseverance as the necessary agent of spiritual life.
Applications: Depend on the Holy Spirit · Pray for divine blessing · Feel dependence on God · Believe in the triune God
Primary texts: Acts 10:44 · John 3:8
“While Peter yet spake these words, the Holy Ghost fell on all them which heard the word.” Acts 10:44 THE Bible is a book of the revelation of God. The God after whom the heathen blindly searched, and for whom reason gropes in darkness, is here plainly revealed to us in the pages of divine authorship, so that he who is willing to understand as much of Godhead as man can know, may here learn it if he be not willingly ignorant and willfully obstinate. The doctrine of the Trinity is specially taught in Holy Scripture. The word certainly does not occur, but the three divine persons of the One God are frequently and constantly mentioned, and Holy Scripture is exceedingly careful that we should all receive and believe that great truth of the Christian religion, that the Father is God, that the Son is God, that the Spirit is God, and yet there are not three Gods but one God. Though they be each of them very God of very God, yet three in one and one in three is the JEHOVAH whom we worship. You will notice in the works of creation how carefully the Scriptures assure us that all the three divine persons took their share. “In the beginning JEHOVAH created the heavens and the earth,” and in another place we are told that God said, “Let us make man”—not one person, but all three taking counsel with each other with regard to the making of mankind. We know that the Father has laid the foundations and fixed those solid beams of light on which the blue arches of the sky are sustained, but we know with equal certainty that Jesus Christ, the eternal Logos, was with the Father in the beginning, and “without him was not anything made that was made.” Moreover we have equal certainty that the Holy Spirit had a hand in creation, for we are told that “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the earth; and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” And brooding with His dove-like wing, He brought out of the egg of chaos this mighty thing, the fair round world. We have the like proof of the three persons in the Godhead in the matter of salvation. We know that God the Father gave His Son. We have abundant proof that God the Father chose His people from before the foundations of the world, that He did invent the plan of salvation, and has always given His free, willing, and joyous consent to the salvation of His people. With regard to the share that the Son had in salvation, that is apparent enough to all. For us men and for our salvation He came down from heaven. He was incarnate in a mortal body, He was crucified, dead, and buried. He des…