The Holy Spirit

He speaks through the Word of Christ that resonates in our minds. Ephesians 3. He gives the believer a sense of confidence and assurance. Romans 14 and making decisions. His voice is heard in our hearts as we desire to honor and follow him. Galatians 4 verse 6. Over and over again in Revelation chapters 2 and 3, the letters to the churches conclude with this challenge, this exhortation, this pleading. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit is saying.

Are you listening? I have a question for you. Have you ever thought to yourself, I wish I could have met Jesus face to face while he was on earth?

Maybe you've wished that you could ask him a direct question about a decision or a problem. Did the disciples who knew Jesus personally have an advantage over us because they got to talk and live with him? Well, the biblical answer is no. According to the Bible, we actually have the advantage. We have the Spirit of God actually living in us, which is better than God being beside us. Stephen Davey will explore this truth today here on Wisdom for the Heart.

Let's listen. Would you believe that what you believe about the Holy Spirit is so important? It has a way of impacting everything from how you pray to what you watched this week on television. Did you know that the Holy Spirit is so critically important that without him, you cannot become a member of the family of God? You cannot without him participate in the mission of God?

You cannot without him even become a recipient of the love of God. And that's the point of where Paul brings us in his list of gifts in Romans chapter five as he for the first time introduces the person of the Holy Spirit for the first time in this book. He has been telling us of the Father's perfect gifts, the gift of peace and the gift of grace and even the gift of pain.

But now he tells us of another very unique and special gift. Romans chapter five, verse five, where Paul continues, Hope does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us. And might I begin by saying that just as you did not earn the gift of salvation, you did not earn the gift of the Spirit of God, just as you did not work for your justification. So you do not work to receive the Holy Spirit of God. The Holy Spirit is not given to good people. The Holy Spirit is given to redeem sinful people. The Holy Spirit is not even given to obedient Christians. The Holy Spirit is given to every Christian, every believer. The apostle Paul was writing to a confused church, a church tolerating immorality within its ranks, division among its people. And Paul wrote to them and said words you wouldn't expect him to write to them. But he wrote to them in 1 Corinthians 12, 13, for by one Spirit, we were all baptized into one body. He didn't say, look, when you get your act together, you're going to get the Spirit of God.

So try to get your ducks lined up. And when you do, maybe he'll give you the Spirit of God. No. According to the Word of God, it is impossible to be a believer without the work of the Spirit. And those who do believe are invaded and fused with the person of the Spirit of God. So if anybody ever asked me, have you ever been baptized by the Spirit?

And I'll say absolutely. As a matter of fact, according to the Word of God, we all were who've come to faith in Jesus Christ, for by one Spirit, we were past tense, all baptized, all immersed into the body of Jesus Christ. It is impossible to be a believer and not have been Spirit baptized. The love of God, he writes, has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who was past tense, given to us. One of God's perfect gifts to every believer is the person of the Holy Spirit. But just who is the Spirit?

What does he do? How important is he to the life of the believer? Is he some invisible power? Is he a life force you tap into? Or is he a real person?

Is he not necessarily a real person, but maybe an emanation from God the Father? Well, how you answer those questions, ladies and gentlemen, will determine how you pray. They will determine how you witness to others.

They will determine what kind of gifts you hope to express in the body, what kind of involvement you'll have in the local church. What you believe about him will determine how you feel about your security in Jesus Christ and your salvation, how you sense your value before God, how you determine decisions through the course of your life, how you relate to other believers. Simply put, the Holy Spirit is indispensable to holy living and communion with God and service in the church and every decision and relationship in life.

No wonder J.I. Packer wrote in his book, Knowing God, that I read again recently. He said the problem in the life of the average believer is not that they think too little about the Holy Spirit. The problem is they don't think about the Holy Spirit at all. If you do a quick study through the New Testament and you discover that without the Holy Spirit, there would be no gospel, there would be no faith, no living church, no Christianity, no conviction of sin, no witness for Christ, no illumination of scripture, no unity in the church, no operation of gifts in the body, no ability to effectively pray and on and on regarding those things specifically attributed to the work and person of the Holy Spirit. Remove him and this church is dead.

So here in Romans 5, he tells us that one of the distinctive occupations of the Holy Spirit is to become that connecting agent, connecting the love of God and the believer. On January 21st, 1930, I read that the most far-reaching broadcast, radio broadcast was going to be heard. It was scheduled to deliver the message of King George in England at the opening of the session of the London Arms Conference. For the first time, the Western world would all at the same time hear live the message and hear the sound of the King's voice.

America almost missed the message. I read that just seconds before the King was to speak, a member of the control room staff of CBS accidentally tripped over a wire and broke it, severing the connection. Harold Vivian, the control room operator, quickly grasped one of the live wires in one hand and the other half of it in the other and immediately restored the circuit through himself. 250 volts of electricity shot through his arms and coursed through his body, but he held on long enough for the King's message to be heard. That's the Holy Spirit. He has, in effect, connected the wires so that we get the message from the King. He happens to love us, and through us, by his power, we also can tell the world that God loves it too. But what do we really know about the Holy Spirit?

Is he just a lot of hype? Is he some source of invisible power? As I prepared for my message, just for fun, I thought, I'm going to do something a little different. I typed into my Internet Explorer www.yahoo.com. I figured the best search engine to find something to do with the Holy Spirit would be named Yahoo, so I used that one. Immediately after typing in Holy Spirit and a few other commands, I was given the number at the bottom of the screen. There were more than two million sites related to the Holy Spirit.

So I looked some of them up. Some of them promised a biblical overview of the Holy Spirit and were well worth studying. Most of them treated the Holy Spirit as if he were some source of mysterious power. One site promised this, to remove forever the dark mystery of Spirit baptism. Another promised to give me the seven secrets so that I could tap into the megaton power of the Spirit. Another one told me that I could harness the power of the Spirit and gain the Midas touch if I just send my money to them and get it. Another book promised to harness for me the Holy Spirit's economic secrets and the title of the book rather boldly promised and I quote, you'll never be broke another day of your life. Is the Holy Spirit some genie from God and if you get the right secret and the right incantation, poof, voila, you've got everything you want.

What I want to do is remove some of the mystery and follow up on Paul's introduction of this third person of the triune God because so much of who we are and what we do depends on what we know about him and what we know he does. How many men have been married in here for let's say 20 years? Wow. 30 years. 40 years.

Wow. 50? 50 years. 60? Okay, 50. 55. All right.

Get the award. Well, how well do you know your wife now compared to when you married her? A little better. Wasn't really my point. That's actually a good point. You ever notice that it's the guys who are planning on getting married that know that woman so well? You know, I have them come up to me, how well do you know? Oh, man, do I know her?

It's unbelievable. And I smile and say, yeah, it probably is. It's the guys that have been married about two years that the light bulb starts coming on. How well do you know your wife? Oh my goodness, who did I marry? And you girls would say the same, wouldn't you?

Who's this man I married? Amen? I just want to make sure we're even.

I don't want to get in too much trouble here. What do we know about this third member of the Trinity? Well, to begin with, we know that two members of the Godhead, Father and Spirit, are invisible to us.

Only one member of the Godhead has a visible body. Paul wrote in Colossians chapter 1 that Jesus Christ is the image of the invisible God. In other words, one day when you see God, you will be looking into the face of Jesus Christ. If your child or some child asks you, what does God look like? You say Jesus Christ.

And one day you'll see him. Paul wrote, he, Jesus Christ, is the visible expression of the tri in God. But this invisibility, this otherness of God, the Spirit, lends to the mystery that maybe he's a little less of a person than the second person of the Godhead, God the Son.

Let me give you several truths about who he is. First of all, while the Spirit does not have a physical body, he does have a mind. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 2 11, for who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so, the thoughts of God no one knows except the Spirit of God. He isn't some vaporous mist without a mind or a thought process. He is divinely brilliant. He is equally omniscient.

In fact, if you did a study, and I hope to whet your appetite, you will see that the phrases related to God the Father are interchangeable with God the Spirit, also with God the Son and God the Spirit. He has a mind. Secondly, the Holy Spirit has a will in the distribution of the gifts by the Holy Spirit in the local church. Paul tells us, but one and the same Spirit works all these things, distributing to each one individually, just as he wills.

He decides. So he isn't a mindless puppet for the Father with nothing to do on his hands but wait for the rapture. He is determining even now and arranging into the very fabric of every local church those gifts exercised by those believers.

Can you imagine the decisions he is making, the things he is doing? The Spirit of God has a mind. He has a will.

And thirdly, he has emotion, all the characteristics of personality. Paul instructed the believers in Ephesus, do not grieve the Spirit of God. Do not bring great shame and sorrow to the Spirit of God. When we disobey our sin against our Lord, the Spirit of God is filled with sorrow.

You could actually render the word shame. He is so ashamed. He is not unemotional. He is not stoic.

He is not passive mist. He thinks. He decides. He feels. Fourth, the Holy Spirit has a specific place of residence. While he is omnipresent in the uniqueness that only God could arrange and only God can understand, the Holy Spirit has taken up permanent residence in every believer. Paul writes, do you not know that you are a temple of God? Do you not know that the Spirit of God dwells in you for the Temple of God is holy and that is what you are? 1 Corinthians 3 16. So you never have to ask God to give you the Spirit. You only have to thank him that he did give you the Spirit. He is God's gift to you at the moment of conversion.

1 Corinthians 12 13. You were inundated by the Spirit into the body of Christ and he permanently resides in you and he doesn't pack his bags and leave a week later and then come back and then and then leave again and then come back. He has taken up residency in you. Wherever you go, the Holy Spirit goes. Whatever you saw this week, the Holy Spirit saw as it were through your eyes. You are a walking sanctuary of God. The Spirit of God literally has set up residency.

He has unpacked his bags in your house where he lives. May I remind you that he does not fill you up like water fills up a glass. I'm afraid that many people think of the Spirit of God as if you were gasoline and we're the tank and we get filled up and then we go and we, you know, with our wheels spinning and we are busy and we sort of run low and we pull up to the divine gas station and through the intercession and prayer, we get filled back up and then we go back out and and do our thing and we run low and we come back and God the Father stand in there with the handle ready to fill us up again with the Holy Spirit. That's what I really believe is probably the improper theology of most people. But doesn't the Bible say be filled with the Spirit?

It does. Paul wrote that in Ephesians 5 18. He said, Don't be drunk with wine. We're in his dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit. Baptism is a past tense, one time thing into the body of Christ. But the verb here is present tense.

It is it is ongoing. Be continually filled with the Spirit. Sounds to me like you got to get filled up. Well, you have to understand the analogy. Paul is using parallel ideas to make his point. Don't be drunk with wine. What does that mean? That means to be under the influence of it. It means that it affects the way you talk. It affects the way you think.

It affects your walking and your balance. You have surrendered by being drunk to the ability of that substance alcohol to influence everything about you. Paul says in effect, Don't be under that influence. Be under the influence of the Holy Spirit. Let him affect the way you talk. Let him affect the way you walk. Let him affect the way you think.

In fact, you could render the word filled with the word dominated. Be dominated by the Spirit of God. May I emphasize again in a way when you were saved, you got all of him and now daily you give him all of you.

In Romans five, verse five, Paul uses the past tense. He says he was given to us. That is, he is God's gift. We already have.

So now what do we do about it? Well, let me quickly give you three responses. Number one, listen to him. He speaks through the word of Christ that resonates in our minds. Ephesians three. He gives the believer a sense of confidence and assurance.

Romans 14 and making decisions. His voice is heard in our hearts as we desire to honor and follow him. Galatians four, verse six, over and over again in Revelation chapters two and three, the letters to the churches conclude with this challenge, this exhortation, this pleading. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit is saying.

Seven times. It's as if he's saying, are you listening? Not audible sounds, but written instructions and inner impressions directed by and consistent with the word of God, which ultimately leads the believer proving that it is the voice of the Holy Spirit to do nothing more than honor and glorify God in everything we do.

The Holy Spirit is not a power to be used. He is a person to be listened to and obeyed. Listen to him.

Second of all, learn from him. Jesus in John chapter 16 was speaking to his disciples and he said, I have so much more to say to you, but you can't bear it right now. But when he, the spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth for he will not speak on his own initiative, but whatever he hears, he will speak. In other words, the Father, the Son and the Spirit all collaborate in this wonderful functioning triune God. He will glorify me, Jesus said, and he will take of mine and will disclose it to you. You see, here's here's an interesting point.

You might be listening to me right now, but if you're really learning anything, it isn't from me. It's from the Spirit of God. He does the convicting. He does the encouraging. He does the challenging. He does the refreshing.

He does the changing. My words are merely vehicles upon which his spirit loves to resonate within your heart to bring you to the truth of the verdict of scripture. And the more biblical my words are, the more resonating in your heart, the strumming of the Spirit of God will be. That's why I've had so many people come up to me over the years and say, oh, that was a wonderful message. And this point was so powerful to me. And then they'll go on to tell me the point and I didn't make it. So I stand there. That was a great point. I'm going to put that in the next hour and make it. I had nothing to do with it.

That's why even now some of you might be fading off and you don't have an excuse. Others of you, God's Spirit is taking you through some verse, some thought, something, and he is driving a point home and you'll leave here and you will have learned something and it will be the Spirit of God who teaches you. Learn from him. Ask him to teach you.

One more thing. Listen to him. Learn from him. And third, lean on him.

Lean on him. Jesus, again, in John 16, assured his disciples, but I tell you the truth. It is to your advantage that I go away.

Now, I tried to picture myself as a member of that disciple group and that wouldn't assure me. I wouldn't consider that an advantage. If Jesus were telling you it's to your advantage that I leave, what would you say? Oh, that sounds terrific. That sounds like a real advantage, Lord.

Thank you. See, we tend to think that the disciples had the advantage because he was there. He's telling them, you have a disadvantage that I'm here. I'm going to give you the advantage.

You know what it is? I'm leaving. I'm ascending. And when I ascend, the Spirit will descend so that I will not be with you for three years. The Spirit of God will live in you for the rest of your lives.

And that's an advantage that every believer has. He said, if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send the Helper to you. You know, that's a nice way of saying to the disciples, you need help. You need some help. And so when I ascend, I'm going to send the Helper to you because you're going to need him. Do you need him?

How long can you go in your day before you realize you need him? I can remember that the very first question I was asked when I arrived in this area nearly 17 years ago was that question. Some of you are old timers and you've heard me tell a little bit about the story. My wife and our infant boys were in Atlanta so they could be taken care of by her parents. And I moved here and asked God to give us a place to hold services and a place to live. The first day I arrived, we unloaded everything from the truck into a storage unit in North Raleigh. I drove around a little bit and then decided to make it over to a missionary's home in Goldsboro where I was going to spend the night.

I had never been there, but he worked as a part of my father's mission, missions to military. So I can remember still in that 20-foot truck, although it was empty in that rider truck, I was heading down the road. And by the time it was growing dark, I had become completely lost. I can remember the road I was on, the pavement ended and it became a dirt road. You ever had that happen to you?

You know. You're lost. There was a cornfield on my right and there was a farm on my left. And I pulled that truck and there was a stick shift and it's grinding and not wanting to respond. I pulled into that farmer's lane to back up and turn around and go. And I backed up too far and put the back wheels of that big rider truck right into the ditch. Now the nose is like this and I'm sitting here looking into the starry sky, praising God my Savior for his blessing.

Thank you, Jesus. I remember clambering down out of the truck standing there wondering what to do and this farmer coming from his barn walked down his lane toward me, bib overalls, straw hat. He came up to me and looked at me and looked at the truck, looked at me. And then he asked me the first question anybody in North Carolina asked me.

Do you need some help? Of course it was hail. There were two syllables in that. I had to listen carefully. You need some hail. But it sounded so good to me. I said I do need some of that. And he called a wrecker, pulled me out, told me where I could go to a little hotel and spend the night.

That comes back to my mind. Very first thing God wanted to penetrate my heart with is that I need help. And every day, isn't that a wonderful question to know you can only answer by saying, yes, I need help. So Spirit of God, help me. Help me to understand the word. Help me to exalt Jesus Christ. Help me to walk and hole in us and purity. Help me to glorify God in my occupation and the details of the home. Help me to love and serve the brethren. Help me to pray like I ought to help me to wish for things that I ought to wish for.

Help me to ultimately honor the father and adore the son and surrender to the spirit. And we say yes together. We sang it. We believe it.

We mean it. Yes, I will listen to you, O Spirit of God. I will learn from you. I will lean on you. We together as a body of redeemed ones, men and women who've come to faith in Jesus Christ, we as a body should say together, thank you, O God, for this perfect gift of the Holy Spirit. And yes, we will listen to you eagerly. We will learn from you expectantly.

We will lean entirely. Thanks for joining us today here on Wisdom for the Heart. This is the Bible teaching ministry of Stephen Davey. And you can learn more about us if you visit our website, which is wisdomonline.org. Once you go there, you'll be able to access the complete archive of Stephen's Bible teaching ministry.

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