Spiritual Religion — C.H. Spurgeon

The Spirit Gives Life Beyond the Flesh

The text is John 6, 63. It is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing. To a casual reader, it looks as if the meaning of this passage lay upon the very surface. But he who has studied the chapter carefully has discovered that it is a sentence replete with many difficulties as to the exact interpretation of it.

I shall not, however, waste your time by entering into any critical discussion of it. I shall only try to give you simply what I believe to be the mind of the spirit as uttered by the lips of Jesus in this passage.

And after I have done that, I shall then revert to what I shall call the meaning which any person would give to it who is not a diligent and careful student of Scripture. That meaning being true, although not the special truth taught in this passage, I shall briefly enlarge upon it.

It is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing. I suppose there is not a man in the world who could form any intelligent idea of what a spirit is. It is very easy for persons to define a spirit by something what it is not.

But I query whether there is or ever could be any man who could form any idea of what it is. We sometimes talk about seeing a spirit. Ignorant persons in ages gone by and some living now in benighted villages talk about seeing spirits by night.

They must know that such talk is a contradiction. Matter can be seen, but a spirit, if it clothed itself in any light substance, could not even then be seen. It would only be the substance that would be visible.

The spirit itself is a thing which can neither be tasted, handled, seen, nor discerned in any way whatever by our senses. For if it could be thus perceived, there would then be proof positive that it was not a spirit at all, but that it belonged to the material realm.

We divide all things into matter and spirit. And whatsoever can be recognized by the senses in any way is matter. Depend upon it. Spirit is itself a thing too subtle to be either seen or in any other way perceived by the senses.

So I repeat what I said just now, that I suppose there is no man living and that there never will be any man in this mortal state who will be able accurately to define a spirit so as to say what it is, though he may be able to say what it is not.

Now, there is a region where there are spirits dwelling without any bodies being connected with them. It is certain that in the world to come, in that state which now intervenes between the death of the saints and the day of the resurrection, they are dwelling before the throne of God in a disembodied state.

Pure spirits without any corporeal form whatever. It is quite certain that the saints before the throne have no semblance of bodily shape whatever. They are pure spirits, being whose substance we cannot imagine, purely immaterial as they are also immaculate.

But on earth you can find no such thing as a pure spirit. We are all spirits in bodies and somehow from the fact that wherever we find souls and spirits they are always found in bodies. We are very apt to confound bodies and spirits together.

But let us always understand that bodies and spirits are distinct things. And though it hath pleased God in this world never to make a spirit without making a house for it to dwell in called the body, yet the body is not the spirit.

It is the spirit that quickeneth. The flesh profiteth nothing. You will easily perceive the truth of this passage if you will recollect that in man's body no one can tell where the life is situated. In vain the surgeon lays the body on the table and dissects it.

He will find life neither in the brain nor in the heart. He may cut the body in pieces as he pleases but he will not find anything that he can lay hold upon tangibly and really and say that is life. He can see all the effects and evidences of life.

He can watch the various parts of the body moving. He can behold all the appearances of life which are caused by a supernatural something. But life he cannot see. This is altogether beyond his kin and after all his searching he must lay down his scalpel and say at once there now the task is all over.

There is a spirit that quickeneth this body but in my search after life this flesh profiteth me nothing. I might as well search for a soul within a stone or within one of the pillars that support this house.

A search for a soul within mere flesh and blood. If I look for something which I can see, which I can lay hold of or which by either taste, sight, smelling or any other sense I can distinguish and can designate being a spirit.

So brethren, this illustration just brings me to the truth that is taught in our text. We are here assembled at this moment, spirit, soul. Here we are also body. But these bodies are not ourselves. They are the houses in which we live.

I question whether there is any man who can divine what he is himself. The most that any man can say is I am. I know I have an existence but what kind of thing my spirit is I do not know. I cannot tell.

I have no knowledge of what it is. I feel it. I know it moves my body. I feel its outward manifestations. I am certain of my existence but what I am I know not. God alone can say. I am that I am is comprehensible only to God himself.

But man is a being incomprehensible to himself. Though the Lord may allow him to say by the grace of God I am what I am. He cannot tell what he really is. He cannot fully comprehend his own existence.

True Religion Must Be Spiritual

Understand then that as in our being there is a mystery in our flesh. So religion the true religion of the blessed God in order to be made like unto us and to be a something suitable to us must be a religion of spirit.

But because we also have a body it must have a body in which to clothe itself. I want if I can to make this plain to you. If you do not understand it now I hope you will before I have done. We are spirits in bodies.

Well then in order to meet our cases the great work of God in us must be a spiritual thing. But in order that I may be able to talk about it to you that you may be able to hear it with your ears. That spiritual thing must be encased in a body or else if it were a purely spiritual thing I could not explain it to you.

Any more than I could explain to you about a spirit. If there were no body in which a spirit could be found and no body in which I could be able to live to talk about. I want to show you this truth very clearly because there are some persons who are so busy about that which concerns merely the body of religion that they all together forget that religion has also a spirit.

I believe that what our Lord Jesus meant in this passage was the mere embodiment of religion profiteth nothing. It is the spirit that quickeneth. Just as to use my figure over again in order to perform an act the mere flesh and blood and arms and legs profit nothing.

It is the spirit that quickens all the bones makes the nerves act as they ought to do in the sinews work as they should so religion has its outward form it has its ceremonies it has its external invisible developments its body.

But the mere outward body of religion is of no use whatever except the inward and invisible spirit quickeneth it. Begin then. I will first show you this truth as our Savior I think meant it when he first of all stated it.

There were some people in our Savior's day who admired Christ merely as a man and they thought there was some marvelous efficacy in his flesh and blood. To them he said using almost the very words of our text even my flesh will profit you nothing it is the spirit that quickens.

I must state this truth very cautiously yet very plainly. When our Savior was upon this earth there were some I repeat who admired his person. Remember how our Savior rebuked the woman who said to him blessed is the womb that bare thee and the path which gave thee suck.

He would not have people simply admire his flesh and think so much of his mere humanity so he said to her rather blessed are they that hear the word of God and keep it. There are some other people who wanted to take the Lord Jesus and make him a king but in effect he said to them my flesh even if you exalt it to a throne will profit you nothing.

I did not come here that you might bow down and venerate my mere flesh that you might think the mere admiration of my mortal frame is vital religion. It is the spirit the gospel that I came to preach that will benefit you.

It is not these outward appearances it is my thoughts the words and acts which are to bless you. Hear what the Savior says in the next sentence it is not your admiration of my flesh that is of any use to you for my flesh profits nothing.

It is the spirit that quickens and if you want to know what is the spirit of my incarnation I tell you that the words that I speak unto you they are spirit and they are life. It is not your venerating my flesh and blood it is your reception of my doctrines that will be the heart and soul of the religion that I desire you to possess.

Spiritual Reception Versus Physical Religion

Our Savior was however led to make these remarks from the fact that the ignorant Jews when he talked about eating his flesh and drinking his blood really thought that he meant that they were to turn cannibals and eat him up.

You may well smile at so ridiculous an idea yet you know that the idea is still prevalent in the church of Rome. The Romish priest solemnly assures us that the people who eat the bread and drink the wine or the stuff he calls bread and wine do actually act the part of cannibals and eat the body of Christ and drink his blood.

You say to him you mean my dear sir that they do it in a figure spiritually. No, he says, I do not. I mean to say that after I have pronounced certain words over that bread it becomes Christ's flesh and after I have said a certain prayer over that wine it becomes his actual blood.

Well, we reply to him. It is a very singular and you certainly cannot expect us to believe you whilst God allows our heads to be occupied by brains. But even if we do believe you, my dear sir we refer you to this passage which says it is the spirit that quickeneth the flesh profiteth nothing.

You tell the people that they do actually and really receive the body and blood of Christ. Suppose they do. It is no earthly use to them and even if they could carnally bite the flesh with their teeth and drink the blood down their throats it would be of no more use to them than the eating of the flesh and blood of any other man.

It could be of no service whatever to them for Christ himself denounces the error of transubstantiation and declares that even his flesh profiteth nothing. It is only the spirit the spiritual receiving of that flesh and blood that can be of any avail whatsoever.

While I am referring to this point allow me just to say a few more words upon it for potpourri prevails in this day and the doctrine that the bread and wine are turned into the body and blood of Christ is the bulwark of potpourri.

Dr. Carson of Coleraine son of Dr. Carson the eminent Baptist has settled off Dr. Cahill in a remarkable way. He has challenged Dr. Cahill to prove that he can turn the bread and wine used in the sacrament into Christ's body and blood.

He offers to give Dr. Cahill a hundred pounds if he will let him make a wafer for him and if Dr. Cahill will then put it on his own tongue and swallow it in Mr. Carson's own presence. If the doctor is not dead in an hour says Dr. Carson I'll give him a hundred pounds.

No, says someone that is not fair! Oh, but if he can turn it into the body and blood of Christ it cannot hurt him whatever it may contain. But you would make it poison then. Yes, the deadliest I could find.

Would you give him poison? I should not give it to him. He would swallow it himself. He would do it of his own voluntary choice. Of course, Dr. Cahill would not submit to that test. He knows that he cannot turn the wafer and the wine into the body and blood of Christ.

If he could Dr. Carson says it would not hurt him for the body and blood of Christ would poison no one. But some wise Romanist says that is not a fair test. Dr. Cahill does not pretend to turn poison into the body and blood of Christ.

It is only pure bread and wine that can thus be manipulated. Very well, says Dr. Carson. I'll try him another way. I will let him choose a youth from seven or eight Catholic boys. He shall take a quart of wine and turn this wine in his own peculiar way into the blood of Christ.

The boy shall drink the quart of wine and if he is not drunk in six hours I will pay the hundred pounds. Now says Dr. Carson if that liquid is really the blood of Christ it will not make him drunk. He might drink a hob's head of it and it would not make him intoxicated.

But Dr. Cahill dare not come to such a trial as that for it would very soon be found that the so-called consecrated wine would make the boy intoxicated as quickly as any other wine would. Therefore it could not have been turned even by the great doctor himself into the blood of Christ.

The fact is the lie is so palpable the delusion is so absurd that any child of a reasonable age would as soon think of believing the cock and bull story which we used to read in our childish days about what the bull said and what the cock said to be actual truth as to imagine it to be a literal fact that any priest or any man in the world could ever turn bread and wine into flesh and blood.

But even if they could hear again the words of our text it is the spirit that quickens. The flesh profits nothing. So then after all the Roman Catholic sacrament if it be actually a cannibal's feast upon the body and blood of Christ is of no earthly use.

But that divinely appointed ordinance wherein we do spiritually receive the flesh and blood of Jesus and in a spiritual way hold communion with him is that alone which quickens. This brings me to the truth that I want you dear friends specially to understand.

The Spirit Must Animate Baptism and Communion

As Christ Jesus in his flesh was the embodiment of his own doctrine and yet not his flesh but the spirit of his doctrine quickeneth souls. So the outward forms and ceremonies which Christ has made to be the body to contain the spirit of his truth are of no earthly use at all unless the spirit of God be in them.

Take for instance the ordinance of believer's baptism. There are the pool and the water. That pool and that water are so to speak the flesh and blood of dedication. The right observance of that holy ordinance signifies that we do solemnly devote ourselves to the Lord Jesus.

Suppose however our hearts are in a wrong condition or that we are not converted persons. Suppose there is no influence of the spirit resting upon us during the act of baptism. Then the act of baptism is like the flesh apart from the spirit.

It is a dead thing. It profiteth nothing because it is without soul. We come the next Sabbath to the Lord's table. There is the bread broken by God's servant. There is the wine reverently handed round by the deacons of the church.

And it is sipped by the communicants. But mark you, however devoutly the whole service is performed except the spirit of the living God breathes through the divine ordinance the flesh, that is, the mere embodiment of the communion will profit you nothing.

You might sit at a thousand communion tables and you might be baptized in a myriad pools. But all this would not avail one jot or tittle for your salvation unless you had the spirit of God to quicken you.

Nay, to go further, it is not these two outward ordinances only that need the spirit in them. It is so in everything else. You have sometimes read, dear friends, of some eminent Christians who grew to have much fellowship with Christ by prayer.

Perhaps you imbibed the idea that if you were to go home and spend as many hours in your closet as they did you would get as much profit by it. And not thinking about the Holy Spirit, you simply devote yourself to private prayer as you might to any manual exercise with the hope of profiting by the exercise alone.

I tell you, you might be on your knees till your knees were worn bare and you might be in your closet till the steam of your devotion ran down the walls. But unless the spirit of the Lord was in that closet with you, the mere fleshly exercise of praying would be no more avail and profit you then if you had been chanting songs to the moon or standing in the street to sell your goods.

Bible Reading Requires Understanding and the Spirit

Another hears that a certain person has been very much blessed by reading a text of Scripture. Oh, says he, has that text been blessed to such a one? Then I'll go and read the same passage too. You think that if you do the same as he does you will be equally blessed.

You are marvelously surprised that when you read the passage it does you no good. It made his spirit leap for joy. It filled his soul with the wine of the kingdom. But to you it is like a dry well or an empty bottle.

Why is this? The mere leper in which the promise is revealed profiteth you nothing. It is the spirit of the promise. It is the light of the Holy Spirit running through the veins of the promise that alone can profit you.

You hear that another man meditates on God's law day and night and becomes like a tree planted by the river's water. You say, I will take care that every morning I will read a chapter out of the Scriptures and that every night I will read two chapters.

There are certain people who think that if they read a good passage out of the Bible they have done a great deal. In that kind of spirit they might just as well read a portion out of the Hudabraj for they just read it straight through without thinking of understanding it.

Many of our ministers think that in the public service they must read a certain quantity of Scriptures. And they take perhaps three long chapters out of Ezekiel. And not a soul in the congregation knows the meaning of what they are reading.

If they were to read a Dutch sermon in an English chapel it would do to hear just about as much good for no one understands what they read. Instead of reading as Ezra did and expounding the meaning to the people they must go on over hedge and ditch one continuous steeplechase.

Instead of stopping to crack the shells and give the kernels of truth to the people they read right on without attempting to give any explanation of the passage. To such persons we would simply say your Bible reading is but the flesh.

It is of no use to you. It is the spirit that quickens. The mere flesh, the outward fashion and form of Bible reading will not profit anybody. One sentence of the Bible prayed over and bedewed with the spirit and made alive though it be only a short sentence of six words will profit you more than a hundred chapters without the spirit.

Because they are flesh, dead. But the one verse with the spirit is the thing that quickens. I do not know whether I have as yet brought out the full meaning of the text. But I want to let everyone understand that it is not the mere outward embodiment of our religion that saves the soul.

It is the inner spirit of the thing that does us good. Mark, I would not find fault with any of these forms. Any more than I would find fault with our bodies. Because they are not spirits. Our bodies are good things for our spirits to live in.

And the forms of religion are good things for the spirit of religion to live in. But the form without the spirit though it be the most decorous and apparently the most devout that can be presented to God can be of no use for our soul's eternal profit and ultimate salvation.

It is the spirit that is quick and that the flesh profiteth nothing. Now my dear friend, Mr. So and So, if you will just take out your pencil and cast up your accounts for all the years of your life, the sum of them all will come to very little if what I say be true.

The Futility of Outward Religious Performance

I think you say, I am a tolerably good sort of man. I have a few faults but just look at what I have done. I have been to chapel twice every Sunday almost since I was a boy. I don't know that I missed once except when I was ill.

That has been very good of me. I am no mistake. I always read the Bible every morning. I always have family prayer. That is very good of me. Another item to be reckoned to my account. I say my prayers when I go to bed at night and when I get up in the morning I very frequently go to prayer meetings.

I don't think anyone can reasonably find fault with me. Really, I think I do everything to make me a truly religious man. Ah! And did you put at the end of it, Lord, I thank thee that I am not as other men are, unjust, extortioner and so on or even like that poor fellow, a Sabbath breaker, whom you saw going the opposite way as you were coming to your usual place of worship.

It is a pity you didn't finish it up in that fashion. But if you did not in words, you finish it up so in your heart. But I pray God to show you that all these beautiful things of yours are good for nothing.

There are your chapel goings, all your flesh. There are your Bible readings, all flesh. There are your excellences, all flesh. You have never received the spirit of the living God. You dare not say that you have.

Well then, all these things will profit you nothing whatsoever. It is the spirit that quickeneth. You know, my dear sir, and let me speak very pointedly, you know that you never enter into the spirit of the things of which you have been speaking.

Though you go to your church or chapel regularly, yet you know that you might very often just as well be at home. For when the worshippers sing, you do not sing with all your heart. When the minister preaches, it is seldom there is much that touches you unless it is what you call a good intellectual discourse, which happens to please you and you believe it just because it meets your view.

You know that into the inward soul and marrow and bowels of devotion, you have never yet learned to penetrate. Your devotion is like a certain ox which was slain as a sacrifice in the time of siege in Rome.

It was said to portend evil because when the ogre flew it, he declared that he could not find a heart anywhere. He looked through all the entrails, but no heart could he discover. And hence the Romans declared that their city must be destroyed.

It was an omen of ill fortune, they said, when the sacrifice had no heart in it. It is just the same with you. You have done all these things and there has been as much reality in what you have done as there was devotion in the poor Calmux windmill.

When he tied the prayer to it and put it up in the garden and every time it blew round, he counted that was just one more prayer. There was as much heart in your prayer as there was in his windmill. That is to say none at all.

Go on no longer with this useless round of performances. I implore you. I would not have you give up the performances, but seek the spirit that can make them true and acceptable in God's sight. Stop a while and ask God to give you that inward spirit that quickeneth.

For that is what is needed, the flesh, profiteth nothing. I must speak also to you who are the children of God. And I must ask you, how often do you forget this all-important thing? I know it is not likely that I could leave my chamber any morning without prayer, but, oh brethren, I have often left it without having the spirit of prayer.

I should not like to pass a day without reading the Scriptures, but I am afraid it is very often the mere flesh of formal reading and not the spirit breathing the word. And how often is our conscience satisfied with the mere form without the spirit.

Life and Reality in Christian Worship

Now if we were what we ought to be, we should never be content with the form unless we could also see the spirit in it. Mother, would you be content to have at home a child who was dead? Suppose someone would say to you, why, this child is just as good a child as ever it was.

Look at it. It has not lost a leg or an arm or any part of its body. Ah, but, you would say, it is dead. Oh, says one, there is no great difference. It looks as beautiful now as it ever did. Ah, says the poor mother, there is a vast deal of difference between what it was when it was alive and what it is now it is dead.

Just transfer that idea to your poor dead prayer and your dead Bible readings and your dead sacraments and your poor dead goings to chapel and all that. Ah, how many of our sacrifices are just poor dead things when we bring them to the Lord.

They have died in the night and then we come and offer them before God. How frequently do we satisfy our conscience with having the flesh, the embodiment of the sacrifice, and yet all the while we forget the spirit.

Let us remember that God only looks for the life. He does not trouble about the body. And we ought, in all we do for Him, to take care, first of all, that the spirit is there. And then we may rest quite sure that the flesh and blood of the devotion will take care of themselves.

This, I believe, is the true meaning of the passage. But the common rendering of it, if anyone reads it without noticing the context, would be, why, that means, it is the spirit that quickeneth, that is to say, it is the Holy Spirit that quickeneth the flesh profiteth nothing.

Our friend will excuse me when I say that it cannot mean that. You notice that the S in the word spirit in the text has not a capital letter. If it meant the Holy Spirit, it would be so marked to separate it from the spirit to which I have just referred.

The inward spirit, the life of a thing. This word spirit here does not mean the Holy Spirit. Still, almost every ordinary reader would make that mistake and say, it is the Holy Spirit that quickeneth the flesh profiteth nothing.

Well, it is a mistake that will not do him any hurt because if it does not say so here, it does say so somewhere else. And if it is not true in this one particular text, it is true all over the Bible and it is true in a Christian's experience, so that a man may make a great many worse mistakes than that.

The Holy Spirit's Sovereign Work in Conversion

Well then, let us for once make that mistake and then let us get the truth out of it. It is the Holy Spirit that quickeneth the flesh profiteth nothing. It cannot, beneath a power divine, the stubborn will subdue.

It is thine eternal spirit, thine to form the heart anew. It is thine the passions to recall and upwards bid them rise and make the scales of air fall from reason's darkened eyes to chase the shades of death away and bid the sinner live a beam of heaven, a vital ray.

It is thine alone to give. How often have I thought when I have been preaching, there is a young woman in the gallery and down there in the area is a young man, how interested they look during the sermon.

I have met with them. I have admired their character. They have had an amiable carriage and deportment. There has been much in them that everybody would tell others to imitate and emulate. I have said, ah, I shall soon have them added to the church.

There is so much that is good about them. It will be such an easy transition for them. They are so moral and so excellent. It will be very easy for them, surely, to take a step into the kingdom of heaven.

I don't say that I have said so much of that in words to my heart. That has been about what I thought. Well, there's been a very different sort of fellow. A queer-looking object, certainly, who came running into the chapel one Thursday evening towards the end of the service, not even washed, nor in any way prepared for divine worship.

He only just came to hear something that would make him laugh as he thought. I did not expect to have him converted. The next time I sat to see inquirers, in he came, cleansed, brushed up. But I recognized him for all that, and I said to him, didn't you come into the chapel one Thursday night after you had been hammering and tinkering away somewhere?

I thought you looked a strange customer, certainly. Yes, said he, and the Lord met with me that night. Now, I sat many and many a time to see inquirers, but I did not see the young man or the young woman come.

Why was this? The Lord meant to teach his servants that the flesh profiteth nothing. That man seemed to me far from God, and that young man and that young woman seemed very near. But the Lord said to me, I will just let you learn that all their morality and all their goodness did not put them near the kingdom of heaven or help toward their salvation.

I could save one as well as the other, and if I chose to show my sovereignty, I might even let publicans and harlots enter the kingdom of heaven before those who, becoming proud of their morality, would not stoop before me.

Have you not sometimes met with a person of such a peculiar character that you have said, Is it not a pity someone cannot talk with that man? I often have had notes of this sort. A father writes to me, I wish you could get hold of my son.

He is a very interesting young man. If you were to put the truth before him to suit his turn of mind, he would be sure to lay hold of it. For if you knew how he was mentally constituted, you would say that once there was a peculiar adaptation in his mind for the reception of the gospel.

Well, I have been told that a dozen times, but I have never found it true even once. The flesh profited nothing. No peculiar adaptation of mine is any more susceptible of gospel influences than any other.

Dead sinners are all dead, and all dead alike. Some may be black, and some may be white. Some may be well washed and dressed, and some may have all the mire and filth of sensuality about them, but they are all dead alike.

And when converting grace comes to deal with them, it finds as much to help it in the one heart as in the other. That is to say, it finds nothing to help it at all. It brings all that is helpful within itself.

It kindles its own fire with its own torch. It blows the fire with its own breath, and asks for nothing in the sinner, be he who he may. Then again, we have sometimes said, if such and such a man were converted, dear me, what a shining Christian he would make!

He is a man of brilliant talents, of great intellectual power, and extensive fortune. Oh, if he were but converted, what a jubilee it would be to the church of God! How much he would do for Christ! Well, do you know, I have always found out that these fine people, who when they were converted, were to be something extraordinary, if they have been converted, and we have got them, have not turned out to be quite so great after all.

I knew a minister once, who with great joy and gladness baptized a man. It was on a New Year's Day, and I remember with what self-congratulation he said, The Lord has sent me one of the best New Year's gifts I ever had.

He looked upon that man and said, Ah, this is my brother. He is a great gain to the church. He is a man of such active spirit, of such an excellent turn of mind, and he is everything that could be desired.

Well, I have just happened to live long enough to see that man rend the church in sunder, and drive the minister out of his pulpits. And he is alive still, a thorn in the side of that church, and a huge prickly bramble that they would be glad enough to eradicate.

But they have scarcely power enough to do that. No, the Lord will show us that the flesh profiteth nothing. You may have him, says the Lord. If he is such a fine fellow, take him. You will find he will not be much good to you after all.

I will let you know that the flesh profiteth nothing. It is the spirit alone that quickeneth. On the other hand, we have seen some come whose flesh could not help them. They were the poor, the mean, the illiterate, the despised.

And we have seen the grace of God blaze up in their hearts to an intense degree of fervor. And we have seen them stand confident and strong, notwithstanding the nothingness of the flesh. And then we have said, Verily, O God, it is a marvelous, marvelous power when the flesh is weak, thy grace is strong.

And we have heard an answer from the excellent glory which said, Ah, the flesh profiteth nothing. It is the spirit that quickeneth. Now, I do not believe that there is any form of our flesh, nor any act of our flesh, nor anything that our flesh can do or attempt to do, or think of, or suggest that can in any way assist in the great spiritual work of our salvation.