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.’

[Footnote 1:  Whitsunday.]

WHAT LASTS

’Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. 13.  And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three....’—­1 COR. xiii. 8, 13.

We discern the run of the Apostle’s thought best by thus omitting the intervening verses and connecting these two.  The part omitted is but a buttress of what has been stated in the former of our two verses; and when we thus unite them there is disclosed plainly the Apostle’s intention of contrasting two sets of things, three in each set.  The one set is ‘prophecies, tongues, knowledge’; the other, ’faith, hope, charity.’  There also comes out distinctly that the point mainly intended by the contrast is the transiency of the one and the permanence of the other.  Now, that contrast has been obscured and weakened by two mistakes, about which I must say a word.

With regard to the former statement, ’Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease,’ that has been misunderstood as if it amounted to a declaration that the miraculous gifts in the early Church were intended to be of brief duration.  However true that may be, it is not what Paul means here.  The cessation to which he refers is their cessation in the light of the perfect Future.  With regard to the other statement, the abiding of faith, hope, charity, that, too, has been misapprehended as if it indicated that faith and hope belonged to this state of things only, and that love was the greatest of the three, because it was permanent.  The reason for that misconception has mainly lain in the misunderstanding of the force of ‘Now,’ which has been taken to mean ‘for the present,’ as an implied contrast to an unspoken ‘then’; just as in the previous verse we have, ’Now we see through a glass, then face to face.’  But the ‘now’ in this text is not, as the grammarians say, temporal, but logical.  That is, it does not refer to time, but to the sequence of the Apostle’s thought, and is equivalent to ‘so then.’  ‘So then abideth faith, hope, charity.’