Our Savior reserved the most profound and interior teaching about the spiritual life for the closing hours of His ministry. He selected Saint John to record, from the 13th to the 17th chapters of his Gospel, the deep and marvelous words that He spoke on the night of the Passover. No words in all the Bible go deeper down into the spiritual life, and especially in the believer’s relation to God, than the words in these chapters. Especially does our Lord bring out in the 14th and 15th chapters the most ample doctrine about the Holy Spirit, and crowns it all with that marvelous prayer in John 17.  

For three years Jesus taught His disciples about the Father, and for about three hours after eating the last supper, He expounded the Person and ministry of the Holy Ghost in words of fathomless depth. A great official, in retiring from public office, might bring forward his successor in office, and with eloquent eulogy introduce him to the nation. Just so, as Jesus was closing His earthly ministry and was about to ascend back to the Father, He brought to the special notice of His disciples His Successor, the Comforter, the Person of the Holy Ghost. He would take His place and abide within the believers, and manifest to them both the Lord Jesus and the Father during the Church age, until Christ’s second coming to gather His saints, and the setting up of His Kingdom on earth.  

The most perfect religious experiences always tally with the words of Scripture. The subject of Divine manifestations to the heart of the perfect believer is set forth by our Savior in the 14th chapter of John with a scope, precision, and beautiful order, not surpassed anywhere else in the Bible. What a third heaven of grace is unfolded in the following words, “If ye love me, and keep my commandments, I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter to abide with you for the age. He now dwelleth with you, but (when you have your Pentecost) He shall be in you, and then ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you. I will not leave you orphans; but he that loveth me, shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and we will come, and make our abode with him.” Here we have most explicit promises of the incoming, and the indwelling, and the manifestation of the three Persons in the Godhead to the perfect believer in Jesus, and the perfect lover of Jesus.  

1. Let us notice the order in this Divine manifestation. We notice that the different Divine Persons are spoken of here in the reverse order in which their names almost universally occur in Scripture. In the order of historical statement and doctrine, it is Father, Son and Holy Spirit; but in this chapter, where the Divine Persons are to be manifested in Scriptural experience, Jesus promises to send the Holy Spirit, and then He will come ( Erchomia, in spirit, and not parousia, the visible second coming), and manifest Himself to the heart; and then He mentions that the Father will abide with an especial love in the believer. This reversal of the general order in which the Trinity are mentioned is true to experience.  

As revelation comes to us from the Godhead, it starts from the Father, the fountain of all being, and then the Son speaks to us from the Father, and then the Holy Spirit flows out upon us from the Father and the Son. But when we take our journey back to the bosom of the Father, it is the experimental order of Divine manifestation, that we receive the Holy Spirit, and He will manifest the Son to us, and through the Son we have access to the bosom of the Father. You must understand that I am not now speaking of repentance, or pardon, or heart cleansing, but of the blessed manifestation of the three Divine Persons to the already regenerated and purified believer. In the words above quoted from our Savior, there is no reference to repentance, or to justification, or to cleansing, as all those things are pre-supposed. He is unveiling the inner chambers of the soul’s communion with the triune God, that radiant palace of spiritual joy where God’s elect come in touch and vision with His blessed perfections.  

2. The manifestation of the Comforter to the heart. I was a sincere Gospel minister for many years, before I penetrated the meaning of the Apostolic benediction, “the love of God the Father, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the communion of the Holy Ghost be with you all.” The word “communion” in the Greek is from a word which means to be “domesticated” with, to be a room mate with, implying the most intimate acquaintance and fellowship. When the Divine Persons are manifested to our souls, they each one affect us in a particular way.  

God is a unit in nature, substance, love, and glory, but each Divine Person has a unique and ever blessed individuality, which the other Persons do not have. Neither Jesus nor the Holy Ghost can take the place of the unbegotten and the unproceeding Father, the supreme fountain of all Godhead, and all being; Who loves, and gives, and commands but never obeys, and is never sent on a mission. Neither can the Father or the Holy Spirit take the place of the Person of the only begotten Son, the outspoken Word from the Father’s bosom, Who is eternally generated by God’s understanding of Himself, and must eternally be the second Person in Divinity. Neither can the Father or the Son ever take the place of that pure eternal stream of uncreated loving Fire, Whose personality is formed of the mutual, ineffable loves of the Father and the Son, the ever blessed Holy Ghost.  

We are a unit in ourselves, and each of us is one creature with the body, soul, and spirit—with the heart, intellect, and will. But in our own nature the heart can never perform the special functions of the intellect and will; and the intellect can never perform all the exercise of the heart; and the will can never monopolize the functions of thinking or loving. Hence we see God has made us in His own image, and for His blessed self, and each of the Divine Persons fits into our nature in a special way, and with special results corresponding to the various offices of the Divine Persons.  

The Holy Spirit, while He works every step in grace for the Father, and the Son, yet in His own personality, when manifest to us, affects mainly our will power. As the Father has the office of the heart in the Godhead, loving and giving; and as the Son occupies the office of headship, speaking, revealing, and judging; so the Holy Spirit has the office of Divine power, the right hand of God, the unction, the zeal of the Trinity. Hence when the believer is baptized with the Holy Ghost, the most special way that the Spirit operates is by empowering and energizing the soul, as if the whole man was turned into a gigantic will, a resistless engine of burning zeal.  

Those who know by experience what it is to receive the Holy Ghost in His blessed personality, will readily call to mind how His incoming seemed to turn everything in them into a brave, ardent will power. One result was that of motion. The mental faculties at once began to act with lightning swiftness. The soul had in it something like rushing rivers, or blowing winds, or other forms of energetic motion. The timid soul at once took on a type of heroism that could face a frowning world. Great undertakings that hitherto had seemed utterly impossible were entered upon with a dauntless courage. The affections, the reason, the imagination, the words or testimonies—all took on a strange and unaccustomed energy. You may have a boiler full of cold water, and a furnace full of cold fuel, but when the fuel is set on fire, and the water boils, and steam is generated, something must move. The human soul is like water, and the truth of Scripture is a Divine fuel, and when the Holy Ghost falls and sets the fuel of Divine truth on fire in the soul, there will be produced a form of energy just as truly as steam in the engine.  

Jesus in His ministry and teaching furnished the Church with Divine fuel, and when the Holy Ghost fell at Pentecost, He set the fuel on fire and produced a species of celestial power that drove the Gospel engines to the uttermost parts of the earth. Thus the special way that we can tell the manifestation of the Person of the Holy Spirit is by touches of energy, courage, zeal, unction, fire and other effects of Divine will power upon our souls.  

3. The manifestation of the Lord Jesus. After promising to send the Comforter, Jesus says, “I will come to you.” “I will manifest myself to you.” The word “come” in this promise is not the second coming of our Lord. Frequently good people speak very erroneously for lack of knowledge. The darkness among Christians on the personal and visible return of the Lord at the end of this present age, with its concomitant events, is just as dense as that on the subject of sanctification by faith, if not more so. We sometimes hear Christians refer to the second coming of Jesus by saying, “He has already come to my heart.” When Christ says in the above quotation, “I will come to you,” the Greek word is erchomai, which means coming in any sense of the term, as night is coming, winter is coming, or joy is coming.  

The Greek word that is used to indicate the visible and personal return of our Lord from Heaven back to this earth is parousia, which is always used to indicate a visible person. Hence we must never confound the promise of Christ coming to us in our hearts with His glorious appearing at the end of this age. After the Holy Spirit takes possession of the sanctified heart, it is His work, according to Scripture, to take the things of Christ and show them to us.  

With the manifestation of the second Person in the Divinity to us, the more special efforts of that manifestation are upon our spiritual understanding. There is a marvelous correspondence between the Person of the Son of God and our mind. Christ is the outspoken Word of the Father, and His personality is constituted by God’s knowledge of Himself. Hence He is named the Word, the Mind, the Wisdom, the Knowledge of God, and is appointed by the Father to be the Head over all things—the King, the Judge of all creatures—for Jesus says, the Father judgeth no man but hath committed all judgment to the Son. For this reason the personality of our Lord Jesus fits in with our reason, our intellect, our apprehension and imagination.  

Scripture tells us over and over, that all things were created by the Son of God; and apart from Him nothing was made.  

This will explain the magnificent things that transpire in the human spirit when the Son of God is manifested to us by the Holy Ghost. When the glorified Christ manifests Himself to us, the whole region of our mental nature is flooded with light, knowledge, discernment, quickness, and vastness of Spiritual vision. We behold indescribable scenes of healing, heavenly beauty and of a ravishing loveliness in Christ crucified, and Christ glorified beyond all the dreams of our natural fancy.  

As the Holy Ghost is Divine fire, so the Son of God is Divine light. With His blessed manifestation to us, internal darkness, and spiritual uncertainty, and theological misgivings pass away. The things of revelation stand out distinctly in clear-cut vision. His manifestation touches our intuition, and we acquire whole worlds of heavenly knowledge about God, and Scripture, and doctrine, and about ourselves, and Satan, and the state of the Church, and the work of Jesus, and His precious blood, and the certainties of Heaven and hell. This comes with a swift, lightning process which makes us know more in a few hours or days, than all books could teach us in a thousand years.  

With this manifestation of the Son of God, there comes to our spiritual perception a marvelous beauty of Divine things. Jesus becomes positively lovely in our thoughts, with a serious, impressive, far away, sanctifying attractiveness, that puts a blight on earthly charms, and fills us with a happy dissatisfaction with all things outside of Himself.  

Another peculiar effect of the manifestation of the Person of Christ to us is the clear discrimination it produces in our understanding of the Divinity and humanity belonging to Him. In His personality He is Divine, possessing all the perfections of eternal Godhead, but to this Divine Person there is joined a human body and human soul, in everlasting union, never to be separated. Inasmuch as the blessed humanity of Jesus is lifted, as Paul tells us, far above all principalities, and powers, of things in Heaven and earth, and is the crown, the gem, the glory, the ornament, at the top of all the created universe, it is most certain that the humanity of the Son of God is the most perfect, the most beautiful, the most precious, the most richly endowed, of any creature among angels or men. The Holy Ghost speaks in Scripture of the humanity of Jesus, “being fairer, more attractive, than all the sons of men.”  

4. The manifestation of the Father. “My Father will love you.” What can this mean? The Father loved sinners so exceedingly, He gave His only Son up to a disgraceful death. But this promise is something else. There are different kinds of love. The Father loves sinners with the love of compassion, the love of pity. He loves His obedient children with the love of complacency, the love of fellowship. There is a deep, interior, sacred, elect love that the Father will have for those who love and obey His Son Jesus.  

When we are justified, the Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God, and we instinctively cry, “Abba, Father.” That experience belongs to the first principles of grace, but it is a good deal more than that, which Christ is telling us in this 14th chapter of John. He says we are to love Him, and then keep His commandments, and then receive the Person of the Holy Ghost, and then the Father will open up to us a deeper, sweeter love from Himself than we have ever known before—the Father will come, and make His abode within us.  

It is an axiom in Bible doctrine, that whatever God does external to Himself is done by the perfect concurrence and unity of all the Divine Persons; and so when God enters the heart of the new-born believer, in reality all the Trinity enter there in their essence and presence; but we are now speaking of the manifestation of each of the Divine Persons to the soul.  

While all the Divine Persons enter the purified heart in the unity of Divine essence, yet the unveiling, the manifesting, of those different Persons to intelligent faith almost always takes place in successive order. In one instant a man may become the possessor of a vast fortune, but he cannot in one instant count the fortune, or examine the different kinds of property, or intelligently investigate the merits, or beauties, or values of the various pieces of property that have become his. Some of it may be in stocks, or mines, or farms, or ships, or railroads, or houses, or cash money. The fortune was an instantaneous gift, but the manifestation to his knowledge of the different departments of the estate, requires time, and successive steps, in becoming acquainted with the various pieces of his wealth. It is because we are creatures, and in our present state very feeble creatures, that we acquire knowledge in detail, and successive order; and especially is this true in the earlier stages of any religious experience.  

With the instantaneous baptism with the Holy Spirit, what an untold fortune of Divine wealth is given to the believer! The joyous heart is fairly dazed and bewildered at the sudden accession of so many Divine gifts. It will take time, and exercise, and prayer, and spiritual meditation, and perhaps many trials, and testings, before the believer comes into a solid, intelligent, abiding appreciation and clear recognition of the heavenly fortune he has entered upon. More especially is this principle true when applied to the manifestation of the three Divine Persons.  

Personality is the highest fact in all creation; and to distinctly and intelligently recognize the Divine Trinity, and have sweet communion with the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, is almost an unknown experience in the early stages of grace, and belongs to established and tried faith.  

Now what shall we say of the manifestation of the Person of the eternal Father? It is not a growth, though it comes while the soul is growing in grace. It is not sanctification, but the unveiling of a Divine personality in the sanctified heart. It is not merely the Spirit of adoption, but a deep acquaintance with the Person of the Father after the soul knows Him to be the Father.  

Just as the Person of the Comforter affects mostly our will, and as the Person of the Son affects mostly our understanding, so the manifestation of the Person of the Father affects mostly our love nature, our affections. The teaching that Jesus gave His disciples about knowing the Father, and having communion with the Father, was of such an extraordinary character, that right in connection with this subject, Philip said to Him, “Lord show us the Father, and that will be sufficient for us.” Philip knew that God was his Father, but he craved the manifestation of the Father’s Person. The adorable, original fountain of all Godhead and all being would satisfy every desire of the heart.  

With the manifestation of the Father, there comes a warm melting of all the affections into a tender, boundless ocean of charity, gentleness, overlooking of the fault of others, a compassion for sinners and those who are out of the way. Have you ever noticed that in all the places in Scripture where Christian progress is described, they all wind up with charity? In Col. 3 Paul mentions first putting off our sins, then putting off the old man, then putting on the image of Christ, then putting on seven Christian graces, and then on the top of all these, putting on charity—the seal, the bond of saintly perfection.  

In 2 Peter 1, the Apostle tells us we are to escape earthly corruption, and then be partakers of the Divine nature, and then add to our faith virtue, and knowledge, and temperance, and patience, and godliness, and brotherly kindness, and then charity. There are many other just such delineations of the steps in Divine grace set forth in the infallible Word of God, which is the exact pattern wrought out in the soul in living experience. The word “charity” is really Divine love. True, we get Divine love in the new birth, and pure love in sanctification, but in this stage we are to be possessed with Divine love, filled with it, and covered with it.  

With the manifestation of the Father, the believer enters into a more secret, and quiet, and passionate communion with God. Just as the Father is spoken of in Scripture as the most hidden Person in the Godhead, the one most deeply veiled from human eyes, so when the believer, having been baptized with the Holy Spirit, comes into a more perfect knowledge with the Person of the Father, his spiritual life retires more and more from the things of sense. Young saints are fussy and impetuous, and often have a zeal that runs away with their knowledge. Mature saints have learned to walk softly and quietly with God, in those enchanting, sequestered valleys of Divine wonders, where they are melted and overawed with the silent grandeurs of the Divine perfections.  

Christian biography furnishes us with hundreds of instances in which established saints, like Lopez, De Renty, Guyon, Fenelon, Faber, Fletcher, Bramwell, Rodgers, Maxwell, Summerfield, Rutherford and many others, who gave themselves up to fellowship with God and a life of prayer, have had such manifestations of the Persons in the Godhead, that their souls were so inflamed with love—pure, boundless, melting love—that they felt in their bodies a heavenly burning. The Prophet Jeremiah said that God’s Word burned like a fire in his bones.  

Another feeling with the manifestation of the Father is that of vastness. The fences around the soul and mind are taken down. The Spiritual landscapes stretch away into illimitable fields of verdure and beauty. The heart expands round and round the world, and mantles all nations, and kindreds, with loving prayer and missionary zeal. The spiritual understanding runs over all bounds of tradition, or man-made theology, and stretches away in lucid lines of discernment from worlds’ end to worlds’ end, and charity—wide, tender, considerate charity—becomes the normal state, the abiding habit of the soul, that lies in tranquil love before the face of the Father, our dear Father, our everlasting Father, Who is eternally the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  

It is a common experience in the manifestation of the three Divine Persons, for the soul to be specially occupied alternately with either the Father, or the Son, or the Holy Spirit, in a special way. Bishop Taylor said that there were times, when for days, his prayer and communion would be particularly with the blessed Jesus, and again with the Father, and at other times with the Holy Spirit. It is not that any of their sacred Persons are forgotten, but while they are all held in the vision of faith, the heart seems, for a season, taken up more particularly with one of the blessed Trinity.