Now it is the work of the Holy Spirit to effect the passage in life from theory to practice, from profession to action.  He illuminates the mind that we may understand; He stirs the will that we may act.  He aids us to overcome the intellectual and physical sloth which is the arch-enemy of Christian practice.  He intercedes for us, and He pleads with us that we may act as the children of God that we believe ourselves to be.  But all He can do is to entice the will; if we remain unwilling, unmoved, He is ultimately grieved and leaves us.  We may hope that that despair of the Holy Spirit of a soul rarely happens because it is a spiritual disaster awful to contemplate.  In most men and women we can see enough impulse toward God, enough struggle with evil, to encourage us to think that the Holy Spirit has not utterly abandoned them.  And it is never safe for us to judge definitely of another’s spiritual case; but we do see lives that are so given over to malignancy that our hope for them is an optimism which has small basis on which to rest.

In most we may be certain that there is going on a very active pleading of the Holy Spirit.  He is interpreting the meaning of the truth we accept.  He is present in a careful reading of the Bible, in meditation, in devotional study.  He receives of Christ and shows it unto us.  I am sure we ought to think more of this interpretative assistance of the Holy Spirit in the work of understanding the Christian Religion, especially in its application to the daily life.  I am quite certain, and I have no doubt that the experience of some of you, at least, will bear me out, that it makes a vast difference in the results of our reading and study if we undertake it under the direct invocation of the Holy Spirit and with the conscious giving ourselves up to His guidance.  We have to make a meditation, for example, and we begin with prayer to God the Holy Ghost for guidance and enlightenment.  It is often well to let that prayer run on as long as it will.  It may be in the end that instead of making the meditation we had planned we shall have spent the time in a prayer of union with the Holy Spirit and will find ourselves refreshed and enlightened as the result.  There is need of that sort of yielding of self to the promptings of the Spirit.  I think that it not infrequently happens that our rules get in the way of His action by destroying or checking in us a certain flexibility which is necessary if we are to respond quickly to the voice of the Spirit.  As in the case just mentioned where the Spirit is leading us to communion with Him we are apt to think:  “I must get on with my meditation or the time will be up and I shall not have made it,” and we turn from the Spirit and stop the work that He was accomplishing.