Like a lion, I look, that He will
break all my bones. From morning till evening, Thou wilt make an end of
me."
But people are apt to forget this. And therefore they fall into two
mistakes. They think of the Holy Spirit as only a gentle, and what they
call a dove-like being; and they forget what a powerful, awful, literally
formidable being He is. They lose respect for the Holy Spirit. They
trifle with Him; and while they sing hymns about His gentleness and
sweetness, they do things which grieve and shock Him; forgetting the
awful warning which He, at the very outset of the Christian Church, gave
against such taking of liberties with God the Holy Ghost:--how Ananias
and Sapphira thought that the Holy Spirit was One whom they might honour
with their lips, and more, with their outward actions, but who did not
require truth in the inward parts, and did not care for their telling a
slight falsehood that they might appear more generous than they really
were in the eyes of men; and how the answer of the Holy Spirit of God was
that He struck them both dead there and then for a warning to all such
triflers, till the end of time.
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