I. No man can even profess Christianity without the help of the Holy Spirit. It is something even to profess to be a Christian, to make a clear statement even of doctrinal truths which have entered very deeply into the heart. "No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost." The mere convictions of our intellects are not in our own power. The strongest arguments might not convince a man, unless the Holy Spirit of God was at hand to add force to the argument, and to enable the man, by spiritual help, to say that Jesus is the Lord.
II. If we believe our creeds and the doctrine of Whit Sunday, we shall, all through our lives, recognise the presence and working and power of the Holy Spirit of God; but then, if we are to have any real conviction of this spiritual operation amongst the people of God for the salvation of souls, how must our thoughts be occupied? Not with the things seen and temporal, but with the things unseen, which are eternal. He who would be able to realise the working of the Spirit of God must endeavour not only to think of spiritual gifts, but of the spiritual world. It is a proverb among the Germans that beyond the hills are people living. Men are apt to suppose that in the narrow valley in which they pass their days all life and activity is concentrated; but beyond the hills, where the sun sets, there are other nations full of life and spirit; and his mind is cramped and confined who thinks only of the narrow district in which he lives. Far beyond all material creation, there is a spiritual world, where God the Father dwells, and where the Lord Jesus Christ is on His right hand. And do we not feel and know that all the highest impulses of our souls come direct from the spiritual world, and that the Lord who died for us fulfils in every honest Christian heart the promise which He gave, making all good men to become better, through the working of the Holy Spirit of God?
A. C. Tait, Christian World Pulpit,vol. x., p. 1.
References: 1 Corinthians 12:1. Church of England Pulpit,vol. iv., p. 81; H. P. Liddon, Church Sermons,vol. ii., p. 321. 1 Corinthians 12:1-31. F. W. Robertson, Lectures on Corinthians,p. 168.