To profit withal'--for his own good who possesses it, and for the good of all the rest of his brethren.
Now, that involves two plain things. There have been people in the Christian Church who have said, We have all the Spirit, and therefore we do not need one another.' There may he isolation, and self-sufficiency, and a host of other evils coming in, if we only grasp the thought,' The manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man,' but they are all corrected if we go on and say, to profit withal.' For every one of us has something, and no one of us has everything; so, on the one hand, we want each other, and, on the other hand, we are responsible for the use of what we have.
You get the life, not in order that you may plume yourself on its possession, nor in order that you may ostentatiously display it, still less in order that you may shut it up and do nothing with it; but you get the life in order that it may spread through you to others.
The least flower with a brimming cup may stand,
We each have the life that God's grace may fructify through us to all. Power is duty; endowment is obligation; capacity prescribes work. The manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal.'
You can regulate the flow. You have the sluice; you can shut it or open it. I have said that the condition, and the only condition, of possessing the fulness of God's Spirit is faith in Jesus Christ. Therefore, the more you trust the more you have, and the less your faith the less the gift. You can get much or little, according to the greatness or the smallness, the fixity or the transiency, of your desires. If you hold the empty cup with a tremulous hand, the precious liquid will not be poured into it--for some of it will be spilt --in the same fulness as it would be if you held it steadily. It is the old story--the miraculous flow of the oil stopped when the widow had no more pots and vessels to bring. The reason why some of us have so little of that Divine Spirit is because we have not held out our vessels to be filled. You can diminish the flow by ignoring it, and that, is what a host of so-called Christian people do nowadays. You can diminish it by neglecting to use the little that you have for the purpose for which it was given you. Does anybody profit by your spiritual life? Do you profit much by it yourselves? Has it ever been of the least good to anybody else in the world? The manifestation of the Spirit is given to you, if you are a Christian man or woman, more or less. And if you shut it up, and do never an atom of good with it, either to yourselves or to anybody else, of course it will slip away; and, sometime or other, to your astonishment, you will find that the vessels are empty, and that the Spirit of the Lord has departed from you. Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption.'
