John 1:33

THE UNKNOWN CHRIST

‘There standeth One among you, Whom ye know not.… The same is He that baptizeth with the Holy Ghost.’

John 1:26; John 1:33

Is the charge still true. Is Christ still unknown in His special prerogative as He that baptizeth with the Holy Ghost?

I. Christ is not an absent force.—He is unseen. His bodily presence is removed from us for a time, but He is still in our midst the Captain of our Salvation, the Leader and Commander of His people. But just as among the crowd that gathered on the banks of Jordan the Carpenter of Nazareth was unrecognised, and few realised the new and immense spiritual leverage that was for them in Jesus Christ, so it is still very often in the present day. Historically He is better known, we worship Him as the Christ, the Messiah of God. Theologically we know Him and acknowledge His Godhead, His mediatorial work, His sacrificial death, His glorious Resurrection and Ascension. But practically He stands is the midst unrecognised, unknown, unsought.

II. With the outside world we are not surprised to find it so.—They have left no room for Christ in their counsels. It would interfere with their gambling and money-making. It suits them better to pretend that Christianity is a spent force, that the teaching of Christ is old-fashioned, a beautiful ideal, but quite impossible under present circumstances.

III. But what about the Christian Churches?—Surely they know that the living Christ is among them waiting to baptize with the Holy Ghost and with fire? The Apostles, in the Holy War they waged against sin and heathenism and corrupt Judaism, only knew two remedies for human depravity, the Blood of the Lamb and the Fire of the Holy Ghost. But the Church of the twentieth century is getting ashamed of the blood and fire of the Gospel of Christ; her confidence is being placed in intellectual attainments, and so, though there never was so much Christian enterprise as in the present day, it is too much on the human level; there is so little of the supernatural, so little of the power of the Holy Ghost, in it, and even our Christian workers seem to forget the Christ Who stands among us waiting to baptize with the Holy Ghost.

IV. There is often the same lack in the daily life and experience of God’s children.—Their present life is full of weakness and failure, of sadness and complaint. And yet Christ is among them, able to save to the uttermost, waiting to baptize with the Holy Ghost. But, alas! they see Him not.

—Rev. F. S. Webster.