How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish unto God, cleanse your conscience?
—Hebrews 9:14
The cross is Christ’s highest glory. The glory that He received from the Father was entirely owing to His having humbled Himself to the death of the cross. “Wherefore God also hath highly exalted Him” (Philippians 2:9). The greatest work that the Holy Spirit could ever do in the Son of God was when He enabled Him to yield Himself as a sacrifice and an offering. And the Holy Spirit can now do nothing greater or more glorious for us than to lead us into the fellowship and likeness of that crucified life of our Lord.
Do we not have here the reason that our prayers for the mighty working of the Holy Spirit are not more abundantly answered? We have prayed too little that the Holy Spirit might glorify Christ in us in the fellowship of and the conformity to His sufferings. (See Philippians 3:10.) The Spirit who led Christ to the cross desires and is able to maintain in us the life of abiding in our crucified Lord.
The Spirit and the cross are inseparable. The Spirit led Christ to the cross; the cross brought Christ to the throne to receive the fullness of the Spirit to impart to His people. The Spirit taught Peter to preach Christ crucified; it was through this preaching that the three thousand received the Spirit. (See Acts 2:14–41.) In the preaching of the gospel, in the Christian life, the Spirit and the cross are inseparable; as it was in Christ, so it must be in us. The sad lack of the mind and disposition of the crucified Christ—sacrificing self and the world to win life for the dying—is one great cause of the feebleness of the church. Let us ask God fervently to teach us to say, “We have been crucified with Christ; in Him we have died to sin.” Let us always carry “about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus” (2 Corinthians 4:10). In this way we will be prepared for the fullness of the Spirit that the Father desires to bestow.