It is to be holy in things like eating and drinking.  How often a Christian comes to the consciousness that he takes or seeks too much enjoyment in that eating, eating for pleasure, with no self-denial or self-sacrifice in his feeding the body!  How often we tempt one another to eat, and how often the believer forgets that this body is the very secret temple of the Holy Ghost and that every mouthful we eat and drink must be for the glory of God in such a way as to be perfectly well pleasing to Him!  Beloved, I bring you a message:  There is access for you into the rest of God, and the Holy Spirit is given to bring you in, and the Holy Spirit will fill your heart with the unutterable joy of Christ’s presence; and with the joy of deliverance from sin, of victory over sin; the unutterable joy of knowing that you are doing God’s will and are pleasing in His sight; the unutterable joy of knowing that He is sanctifying and keeping the temple for Christ to dwell in.  Believers, the joy of the Holy Ghost, the joy of that holiness of God, is His blessedness, His purity, His perfection, that nothing can mar or stain or disturb.  The Holy Ghost waits to bring and to manifest it in our lives.  He wants to come so into our hearts that we shall live, as Holy Ghost men, the sanctified life, with the sanctifying power of Jesus running through our whole beings.

My third thought is:  the joy of the Holy Ghost is the joy of the love of the saints.  The Holy Ghost was not given to any man on the day of Pentecost separate from the others; He came and filled the whole company.  We know how much division and separation and pride there had been among them, but on that day the Holy Ghost so filled their hearts that we find it was afterward said:  “Behold how these men love one another.”  There was a love in the primitive church that the very heathen noticed, and could not understand.  Why was that?  The Holy Spirit is the bond of union between the Father and Son; and that bond is love.  The Holy Spirit is just the love of God come to dwell in the heart.  When He dwells with me and my brother we learn to love each other.  Though I be unloving naturally, and though I have very little grace, if the heart of my brother is full of the Holy Spirit he loves me through it all.  You know love is a wonderful thing.  As long as a man tries to love it is not real love, but when real love comes, the more opposition it meets the more it triumphs, for the more it can exercise itself and perfect itself, the more it rejoices.  Take a mother with a son dishonoring her.  How her love follows him!  When she sees that he has fallen deeper than ever before, how the dear mother heart only loves him the more intensely through all the wretchedness!  Does not the Scripture say, “If He gave His life for us, we are bound to give our life for the brethren?” The Holy Spirit comes as a spirit of love, and if you want to know the joy of the Holy Ghost, and want Him to lead you into the rest of God and keep you there, beware above