Sealing of the Spirit: I recently came across an old booklet that I had heavily underlined about forty years ago. As I read through my markings, I realized I was looking at a theological map I once lived inside. The booklet contains a sermon preached in 1842 by John M’Kenzie, who served as joint editor of the Gospel Standard with J. C. Philpot from 1840 until his death in 1849. The sermon was originally titled The Sealing of the Spirit and was later circulated under the title Believing and Sealing. It became one of the writings for which he was particularly remembered.
M’Kenzie’s central concern is easy enough to recognize, and in one sense even to appreciate. He is trying to distinguish living, spiritual religion from mere doctrinal assent – to show that a man may know the language of grace, profess the right doctrines, reform his conduct, and still possess nothing more than what he repeatedly calls “natural faith” or “letter faith.” There is nothing objectionable in saying that knowing the doctrines of grace is not the same thing as knowing Christ, or that an outward profession cannot give life to the soul. The difficulty begins when the distinction between true and false faith is increasingly located in a particular pattern of inward experience. From that point on, the question changes from what has Christ accomplished to what has taken place within me? And the further M’Kenzie develops his argument, the more elaborate that inward test becomes.
In the first section, where he distinguishes what he calls a natural faith in God’s Word from a merely “letter” obedience to it, he is already using language that would have been very familiar to readers shaped by that experimental school of thought. “Letter faith” and “letter obedience” had become something of a catchphrase – almost a shorthand way of describing a religion that possessed the words of Scripture without, in their view, possessing its inward spiritual reality. From there he warns against tract societies, Arminian proselyting, and what he regards as the unscriptural use of general offers and invitations. He then describes these deceived professors of religion in striking terms, as people whom Satan himself has effectively furnished for the journey: “when Satan lights the lamp of profession in the heads of fools, he seems to equip them with every requisite for their supposed heavenly journey.”
Not to get sidetracked here, but that last thought is revealing. Once “letter faith” becomes the category for everything short of the required inward experience, even a serious profession of the truth can be explained away as something Satan has furnished. That leaves the reader with an obvious question: if doctrine, profession, obedience, and even apparent sincerity can all be counterfeit, what is left to distinguish the true believer except the particular inward experiences M’Kenzie is about to describe?
He then begins to define what, in his view, separates natural religion from spiritual religion: “They were not ‘the good ground’ of an honest heart, made so by divine teaching and the gracious operations of the Holy Spirit. They were fellows” – the same character – “to the stony-ground hearer, who ‘received the word with joy;’ yet, when tribulation, persecution, temptation, and affliction arose, ‘he withered away.’ He was lacking in three capital points: (1) His rocky heart had never been broken by the hammer of truth (Jer. 23:29), and ploughed up by the plough-share of law and justice. (2) His religion had no root in it. (3) He had no moisture, none of the heavenly bedewings, waterings, and gracious anointings of the blessed Spirit.”
For the moment, I only want to deal briefly with that third point. Some of this ground has already been covered elsewhere, and it also ties directly into several recent thoughts on sanctification and the work of the Spirit. The point worth noticing is the way M’Kenzie makes these “heavenly bedewings, waterings, and gracious anointings of the blessed Spirit” function as necessary inward evidence of spiritual life, so that without them a man’s religion is treated as merely external and defective.
What are these “bedewings” and “waterings” of the Spirit? Where does Scripture define them? By what authority do they become tests of spiritual life? This is where experimental language can become dangerous. What may begin as an attempt to describe the work of God can gradually become another standard by which we measure ourselves, until our attention is divided between Christ and the question of whether we have experienced an inward work of grace. Instead of asking simply what God has said concerning Christ, we begin asking whether the right thing has happened within us – and whether it happened in the right way.
None of this means that Christian experience is unreal or unimportant. A believer may know deep conviction, strong consolation, sudden joy, seasons of darkness, and very real inward impressions from the truth of God. But those experiences must never become primary. They may accompany faith, encourage faith, or deeply affect us, but once they become part of the foundation upon which we judge the reality of our spiritual life, the believer can be left endlessly examining the quality of his own experience. There is always one more inward mark to authenticate, one more feeling to interpret, one more question about whether what happened within us was really of God.
M’Kenzie gives a good example of how far this kind of inward examination can go as he traces the experience of one he regards as a graciously awakened sinner: “Thus convinced of the spirituality and necessity of true religion, and his having a feeling sense of his great want of it, and his inability to produce it, he sighs and groans under the weight and helplessness, is at times almost pressed out of measure, and is even sometimes suspicious of the genuineness of his sighs and groans, because he feels a degree of insincerity and self-pity mixed with them.”
Well, I can certainly identify with the second part of that narrative. But what does that actually establish? Does the intensity of that inward conflict tell me anything certain about my standing before God, or does it simply tell me something about myself? The fact that I question the genuineness of my own sighs and groans may show that I am introspective, troubled, or painfully aware of mixed motives. But once such things are treated as marks of spiritual reality, the soul is sent even deeper into itself for answers that can never finally be found there.
And the experiential system becomes even clearer later. M’Kenzie describes gracious conviction through a fairly extensive series of marks: sensible awareness of sin, bondage under the law, anxious inquiry, confession, prayer, turning from worldly vanities, changed conduct, and finally deliverance into gospel liberty through an inward application of Christ’s blood and obedience. None of those things, considered individually, needs to be denied. The issue is what happens when they become the map by which I determine the reality of spiritual life.
I had several other examples marked out, but I think this is enough. What struck me most in reading the booklet again was that I was not looking at somebody else’s theology. I was looking at my own. These were the very kinds of distinctions and inward tests that once made perfect sense to me, and I can still appreciate much of what M’Kenzie was trying to protect. He speaks often and beautifully of Christ. But Christ can remain central in our doctrine while experience becomes central in our assurance. That distinction now seems enormously important to me. And forty years later, that is the part of the map I can no longer follow. MPJ