O ne of our leading magazines re cently carried an article on deep breathing. It pointed out that we use only part of our lungs, and that we are not making the most of our resources. Manifestly, everything de pends upon breathing. To quit means we stop living. No man is ever more than a few breaths from death and eternity. Genesis 2:7 tells us that God made man out of the dust of the earth and breathed into him the breath of life, and he became a liv ing soul. Man is a God-inspired be ing. We are living souls, not mere matter. What makes the difference is the breath of God. The Bible tells us that all Scrip ture is God-breathed (II Tim. 3:16). There is ordinary human inspiration in great literature and music but this Book is more than any of these. It is the divine breath of the Lord. This is God’s Word, not just in spots or wherever it speaks to us, but in its entirety. In John 20:22 we find that the risen Lord breathed on the disciples and said, “Receive ye the Holy Spir it.” This was prophetic since the Spirit came at Pentecost. Today, every C h ris tian is God-breathed. When he is born-again, God breathes into him eternal life; he is indwelt by the Holy Spirit. The church is God-breathed, a heavenly fellowship, endowed with life from above. This does not mean that all churches are empowered by the Holy Spirit for service and for testimony. The greatest need of the church today is breath. Dr. J. B. Phillips declares, “The church is so prosperous it is out of breath, and so organized that it’s muscle-bound.” There are a lot of members puffing and blowing but getting nowhere. Dr.
Wilbur Chapman, as a young min ister, asked Dr. F. B. Meyer: “Why is my spiritual experience so inter mittent?” The old saint responded, “Have you ever tried breathing out three times without breathing in once?” He got the message. We hear much of artificial respira tion these days. There is mouth-to- mouth resusitation when somebody drowns. The church is using a lot of it. Men are trying to blow in in spiration into men by pep talks and promotions. The corpse may seem to move momentarily but it’s not real revival. People are spending time in churches today, trying to pull out what has never been put in. Only what’s down in the well will come up in the bucket. There are two verbs in our Lord’s word to the disciple: “He breathed and said receive ye the Spirit.” There are the giving and the receiving. An other word comes continually these days, which is “open-ended-ness.” We should be open toward God for strength, and open toward man for service. A lake that has no inlet is soon exhausted and a lake with no outlet is soon stagnant. Our Lord said to His disciples, “Go ye.” But He also said, ‘"Tarry ye.” We need both the mirror and the window. In the mirror we see ourselves and our needs. Through the window we look out to the needs of the world. The book of Acts is simply the record of the outflow and the overflow of the inflow of the Holy Spirit. When I was a small boy, my fa ther used to take me to an old mill out in the country. It was operated by a water wheel. As the stream poured on the wheel, it operated the mill. Suppose the miller came down one morning and found that there 3
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