Your salvation if you were truly saved can never be lost. You had a new nature, new desires, new aims. You were no longer hooked on the cheap tinsel of this world. You had a desire to please God and a hungering and thirsting after righteousness. What a tragedy if you obliterate it and fail to cooperate with the sanctifying Spirit! Don’t grieve him who will bring about your sanctification, your gradual conquest of remaining sin. Think of the proud soul that you once were. You knew it all, you despised God and his salvation, and the patient love of the Spirit woke you up and opened your eyes. He humbled you to the dust, and gave you a spirit of repentance, and brought you to Christ. How he must have loved us!
Many times you must have had to clean something out which was foul, which had needed doing for years ‒ somewhere in the house or garden or some situation. And you held your breath and you buckled down and did this distasteful thing, whatever it was. How the Spirit must have loved us to come into our lives and to begin to clean out all that pride and resistance, and to put within us a new understanding and a longing and love for Christ. And he’s there now working within. How can we ignore him? All that is in the appeal of Paul, ‘and grieve not the Holy Spirit.’
TT Shields of Canada who used to be the Minister at the Jarvis St, Baptist Church in Toronto, wrote down his reminiscence in the 1930s, and gave an example of the withdrawal of the Spirit in his own life. There was a deacon in the church with whom he was never in 100% accord, because they were just such different personalities. TT Shields seems to have been something of an extrovert, but this deacon was quiet and withdrawn and quite difficult to engage in conversation, very thoughtful, and always exceedingly grave. ‘You always felt,’ said TT Shields, ‘that he slightly disapproved of you.’ This deacon had been most supportive and made a great contribution, but then a difference arose between this deacon and the pastor, and TT Shields saw that it could be easily resolved and they needed to talk this out. And the deacon was sick and the pastor felt this great urge to visit him and to take that opportunity to resolve the whole issue. But he recoiled. ‘I don’t get on with that man closely enough, I don’t want to do it. I’m going to go back home and get on with my weekend preparation.’ And he went home soon expecting to be immersed in the word of God and carried along with his thoughts coming freely, as they apparently did. But he could not work, and he had the mental equivalent of writer’s cramp, and nothing took on any interest to him. This went on for a day or more until he realised the Spirit was hiding his face, and so he went to prayer and to repentance and visited the deacon and they ironed out the difference, and they resolve the matter, and then after that his soul was elated and he could go back and he could work freely. This was a moral matter really, and the Spirit had hidden his face.