C R Vaughan
The promises of the covenant cover all the emergencies in the life of a saint. There are pledges of grace for life and for death, for the time of joy and the time of sorrow, for supplies suited to each day, for guidance, for control, for needed aid, for every contingency. But they are all empty of power; they are changed into mockeries of felt necessity unless the Spirit will shine within them. In the season of hot battle with some great trial of faith and patience, tempted believers are often sorely vexed with the promises; they are apparently so different from what they seemed to be, and seem to prove so powerless when they are most needed; thus the temptation is strongly suggested to throw them away as practically useless.
To do this would be a fearful sin; it would be to charge God with folly and unfaithfulness; it would be to make Him a liar; it would be to charge Him with trifling with the hopes He has raised. The difficulty is in ourselves, not in Him; in our unbelief, not in His unfaithfulness; in our want of insight, not in His truth. What is needed is the inward illumination of the Comforter teaching us to see the truth as it is and as we ought to receive it. In all such trials of faith it is well to meet the temptation at the threshold, to say what is true: the fault is in ourselves. It is well to make up the issue squarely in our mind: these promises are true; they do mean something; they are full of a great and precious significance.
The reason why they seem to be otherwise is in me and in my sin, and I will not yield one inch to the suggestion that God is either false or trifling. I will trust Thy words, O spotless Christ! Help Thou mine unbelief, O Comforter of Thy people! Then in the happy moment when the gracious Spirit of truth assumes His office of Comforter and shines in our hearts and fills the darkened promises with His holy light, we shall be able to see, as well as to know, that the fault was in us, and that the promises were all the time full of a significance which deserved our confidence, and were inexpressibly rich in comfort.
1An edited extract from Vaughan’s work, The Gifts of the Holy Spirit. The author was an American Presbyterian minister who died in 1911.