The Candle in Oxygen: How Grace Ignites Human Gifts

Maclaren seizes upon the Greek connection between charis (grace) and charismata (gifts)—a verbal kinship nearly lost in English translation. The gifts are not separate from grace; they are its direct offspring, its cognates. He illuminates this with a striking image: "As a candle plunged in a vase of oxygen leaps up into more brilliant flame, so all the faculties of the human soul are made a hundred times themselves when the quickening power of the life of Christ enters into them."

This is no mere ornamental comparison. Maclaren argues that natural human capacities—intellect, strength, eloquence, administrative skill—remain dim, nearly useless, until Christ's Spirit infuses them. The oxygen does not create the candle's flame; it awakens and amplifies what was always there to burn.

Yet Maclaren's most cutting observation concerns the modern church's spiritual lethargy. He observes that many professing Christians plead unfitness for service, claiming they possess no gifts. But this confession, he argues, betrays something far graver than humility—it reveals a person with no genuine hold upon Christ. "If a Christian man is fit for no Christian work, it is time that he gravely ask himself whether he has any Christian life." The absence of activated gifts becomes diagnostic evidence of the absence of living faith.

Paul's assumption was radical: every believer possesses grace-given gifts. None are exempt from this possession, and therefore none are exempt from service. To claim giftlessness is to confess spiritual death.