1.
As to soul and spirit, spirit is the upper part, and life
was communicated to the body through it.[i]
1.
When unbelievers, we need to be begotten or born of the
Spirit.[ii]
1.
When men truly repent, are they not believers? It would be a
sorry doctrine that supposes genuine repentance without real faith; yet the
gift of the Holy Ghost was consequent upon all.[iii]
2. Christ
is the Giver of the Spirit to those who already believed. He gives the living
water to the believer, not to the world.[iv]
See
Quicken
1. When we
believe the gospel and rest on the Saviour’s finished work, we are sealed of
the Spirit, and not before.[v]
2.
Quickened as sinners, sealed as saints.[vi]
1.
The grand fact is, there is one Spirit as there is one body;
not only abstractly, buy actually one, forming the body, putting each member in
its place in the body; and He is the source of every proper thought and act in
the church, now the fact is there. No doubt Ephesians 2 is the great example of
two made one, but then that was brought about by death and resurrection putting
all on the new footing, bringing in a new state of things founded on it. It is
of the unity of this new state of things that the Spirit is the power and
characteristic. Now the Holy Ghost brings all these things into harmonious
detail, and gives fellowship in them in that harmony: there then is the unity
of the Spirit, and this may be of course in a thousand details, wherever the
Spirit works.[vii]