Lesson 80: The Holy Spirit and Prayer, part 2
Jude 1:20-21 - But you, beloved, building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life.
To understand how the coming of the Holy Spirit was indeed to commence a new WAY in the prayer-world, we must remember who He is, what His work is, and what the significance of His not being given until Jesus was glorified. It is in the Spirit that God exists, for He is Spirit. It is in the Spirit that the Son was begotten of the Father: it is in the fellowship of the Spirit that the Father and the Son are one. The eternal never-ending giving to the Son which is the Father’s right and the eternal asking and receiving which is the Son’s right and blessedness—it is through the Spirit that this communion of life and love is maintained. It has been so from all eternity. It is so specially now, when the Son as Mediator ever lives to pray. The great work which Jesus began on earth of reconciling in His own body God and man, He carries on in heaven. To accomplish this, He took up into His own person the conflict between God’s righteousness and our sin. On the cross, He once for all ended the struggle in His own body. And then He ascended to heaven, that from then on, He might in each member of His body carry out the deliverance and manifest the victory He had obtained. It is to do this that He ever lives to pray; in His constant intercession, He places Himself in living fellowship with the constant prayer of His redeemed ones. Or rather, it is His constant intercession which shows itself in their prayers, and gives them a power they never had before.
And He does this through the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the glorified Jesus, was not yet given (John 7:39), and could not be, until He had been glorified. This gift of the Father was something distinctively new, and entirely different from what Old Testament saints had known. The work that the blood effected in heaven when Christ entered within the veil, was something so true and new; the redemption of our human nature into fellowship with His resurrection-power and His exaltation-glory was so intensely real; the taking up of our humanity in Christ into the life of the Three-One God was an event of such inconceivable significance; that the Holy Spirit, who had to come from Christ’s exalted humanity to testify in our hearts of what Christ had accomplished, was indeed no longer only what He had been in the Old Testament. It was literally true “the Holy Spirit was not yet given, for Christ was not yet glorified.” He came now first as the Spirit of the glorified Jesus. Even as the Son, who was from eternity God, had entered upon a new existence as man, and returned to heaven with what He had not before, so the Blessed Spirit, whom the Son, on His ascension, received from the Father (Acts 2:33) into His glorified humanity, came to us with a new life, which was not previously so, to communicate. Under the Old Testament He was named as the Spirit of God: at Pentecost, He descended as the Spirit of the glorified Jesus, bringing down and communicating to us the full fruit and power of the accomplished redemption.
Prayer: O my God, in holy awe I bow before You, the Three in One. Again I have seen how the mystery of prayer is the mystery of the Holy Trinity. I adore the Father who ever hears, and the Son who ever lives to pray, and the Holy Spirit, proceeding from the Father and the Son, to lift us up into the fellowship of that ever-blessed, never-ceasing asking and receiving. I bow, my God, in adoring worship, before the infinite gift that thus, through the Holy Spirit, takes us and our prayers into the Divine Life, and its fellowship of love.