07-11-10 The Holy Spirit’s Highest Priority

If I succeed in effectively presenting

the passage we have before us for this morning

I believe what we are going to see

will surprise more than a few of you.

We are going to return to our study

of the first 11 verses

of the 5th chapter of Romans.

It is a passage we have spent more than a month on already,

a passage we are moving through phrase-by-phrase

because of the importance the passage has for the people of God.

I have described this passage

as the list of the 7 birthday presents

offered to each Christian

the day we enter the family of God.

I have also said that these 11 verses

are positioned in Paul’s letter to the Romans

in such a way as to provide us

with our first introduction to the Father God who has adopted us into His eternal family.

These are the immovables,

the unchangables,

the sure and certain foundation blocks

upon which everything else in our Christian lives are built.

Or, to turn that around,

every thought we have about God,

every doctrine we accept as true,

everything we believe He has said

or think He has done in our lives

must be tested for validity

on the basis of the clear truth revealed to us in this passage.

If our interpretation of any passage in Scripture is not compatible with what we find in these 11 verses

then we have not correctly understood the passage under consideration.

And the remarkable thing about these 11 verses in Romans

is the simple clarity with which they speak to us.

These are not words that are vulnerable to misinterpretation,

or obscure,

or vague,

or confusing.

They are simple, clear, easy words to understand.

It’s not in understanding them that we have trouble,

it’s in accepting and believing them

because they introduce us to a God we never knew,

a God that is dramatically different

from all of the assumptions

and perceptions

that we developed about Him

prior to our entrance into His family.

Maybe this will help -

this is our God meeting us personally at the door

the day we enter His family.

And before He shows us to our room,

before He talks with us about our responsibilities in the family,

before He talks with us about relating to our brothers and sisters in the house,

or relating to the folks outside,

before He says anything to us

about the family obligations

and special responsibilities He will entrust to us,

before we even get out of the entry way,

He sits down with us on a little bench

right there by the door,

and He tells us about what has changed

between us and Himself.

And we have heard Him tell us about 4 of those changes so far.

The first words we heard Him speak were these:

Rom. 5:1 Therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ...

In that single statement

God opens the conversation by telling us

who we have become through faith in Christ,

and how that has affected our relationship with Him.

With our total burden of sin and unrighteousness removed from us

and placed upon Christ,

we have become His Holy ones,

just as if we had never sinned,

pure and righteous in heart forevermore,

and the result of that change within us

has established a peace with God

that can never be removed from us again.

The next thing we hear Him say to us

about our new life in His family

is that our faith has also resulted in our obtaining...our introduction ... into this grace in which we stand...

Our presence in the family,

and our continued life in the household of God

does not depend upon our behavior,

it depends upon the grace of God

which now becomes the foundation

of our life with the King.

And then, from there,

we heard our God begin to deal

with all of that fear we brought with us into our union with Him.

And He just tells us right out,

that because we now have Him as our Father,

and because we now live in an eternal peace with Him,

we never again have to be afraid

of anything He will ever do in our lives,

nor do we have to be afraid

of anything anyone else will ever do to us

because He both can and will use everything that enters our life for good.

That is what we’ve heard Him say to us so far.

Now let’s move ahead in this personal interview with our God

and see what He says next.

And this fifth gift is one that those of us

who know anything about the promises of Christ,

or about the basic doctrines of Christianity would have expected to find

in this list of birthday presents.

But what we do not expect

is the reason for which this gift is given.

The gift itself

is the gift of the Holy Spirit.

But before we look at this gift

as it is stated for us in Romans 5

I want to just lay a little background

for what we’re going to see.

One of the last things Jesus did for His disciples

immediately preceding His death

was to prepare them and us for the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Repeatedly in Jesus’ final conversation with His disciples

just hours before His crucifixion

He told them about the gift of the Holy Spirit.

He said,

John 14:26 "But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you.

He said,

John 15:26 "When the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, that is the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, He will bear witness of Me,...

And toward the end of that final discourse

He went so far as to say,

John 16:7 "But I tell you the truth, it is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper shall not come to you; but if I go, I will send Him to you.

He said, ‟The truth is,

you are better off if I leave

and send the Holy Spirit to you.”

There was no way they could understand that at the time,

because they had no clear idea what He meant by the ‟Helper” or the Holy Spirit,

and they had no idea what the Spirit would accomplish in their lives.

But then, as we move through the comments made about the Holy Spirit in the Epistles,

we learn the wide variety of roles

the Spirit serves in our lives.

We are told that He is given to every believer

at the time we come to Christ,

‟Eph. 1:13-14 ...having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, ...

He is like the engagement ring

given to us by our Lord

as a promise of the total salvation of body, soul, and spirit

that will one day be ours.

And I’m going to get just a little side-tracked here,

but I need to say something

that I have rarely heard said in the Christian world

about one of the initial roles of the Holy Spirit in the Christian’s life.

I need to be careful here

because what I’m about to say

can be easily misunderstood.

I know that,

but I also know that the answer to that concern

is not to avoid saying anything.

And if what I’m about to say

raises questions in your mind

I would encourage you to let me know

so that we can talk more about it.

I just quoted a statement from the first chapter of Ephesians,

a passage in which Paul tells us

that God has given us the Holy Spirit

as “a pledge of our inheritance”.

That word “pledge”

carries with it the concept

of a down-payment on a piece of property you have decided to buy,

or an engagement ring

given by a man to the woman he wants to marry.

Clearly those are powerful concepts

carrying with them

a certainty, a finality.

More than 30 years ago

when I gave Sandee her engagement ring

she took that ring

and placed it on her finger

as confirmation of my commitment to live with her for the rest of my life.

The next day,

when she woke up in the morning

if she wondered whether or not

I was really serious about marrying her,

all she had to do was to look at her hand.

And that ring has been on her finger

everyday since,

serving exactly the same purpose -

providing a constant external evidence

of the life-time commitment

that exists between the two of us.

And God is telling us

that the Holy Spirit is given to us

to serve exactly the same purpose

in our relationship with Him.

In fact Paul says we were “sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise”.

The presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives

is intended to serve

as a constant confirmation

of our adoption into the family of God.

When John wrote his first open letter to the Body of Christ,

twice in that letter

he told us how we know

that we really have been adopted into God’s family.

In 1 John 3:24 he said,

‟...And we know by this that He abides in us, by the Spirit whom He has given us.”

And then a few verses later

in 1 John 4:13 he comes back to it again and says, ‟By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit.”

And my point is simply this -

God tells us that our awareness of the Holy Spirit within us

is intended by God to serve as an ever-present confirmation

of our adoption into His family.

And right here is where I am probably

going to get myself in trouble,

but I’m going to go ahead anyway.

You see, it is impossible to make a statement like I just made

without the question coming up,

“But how can I know if I have the Holy Spirit?”

And I would answer that question

by asking another,

“How did Sandee know that she had an engagement ring from me?”

Well...well she just knew.

She just had to look at it

and there it was.

The presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives

is intended to be the same way-

we know He is there

because we see Him there -

we see what He is doing.

Before we close this morning

I’m going to bring us back to Romans chapter 5

and show us what Paul tells us

is the greatest work the Spirit will ever accomplish in our lives.

But there are lots of others as well.

I’ll just mention a few -

He gives us a hunger and thirst for righteousness,

a longing to live a life pleasing to our Lord.

He gives the Word of God a life,

and a power,

and a vitality unlike anything we’ve ever known before.

It isn’t just words,

it actually feeds our spirit.

The Holy Spirit comforts and encourages us,

He actively leads and guides us.

He gives us a sensitivity to evil

and to sin in a way we’ve never had before.

And I want to make two more comments about this whole thing

before I return us to Romans 5.

First of all,

I believe one of the major reasons

why God makes statements to us such as, “...And we know by this that He abides in us, by the Spirit whom He has given us.”,

is because it gives us a means by which

we can distinguish between

acceptance of the Christian religion

and true submission to Jesus Christ.

God does not give His Spirit

to those who have whole-heartedly embraced Christianity

as the true or correct religion.

He gives His Spirit

to those who have embraced Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.

But I know from my own experience

that it is sometimes impossible

for the sincere religious mind of man to recognize the difference.

If you would have asked me

if I was a Christian my first year of college

I would have said, “Absolutely.”

But if you would have asked me

what evidences I offered for my sonship,

I would not have pointed to the reality of God’s Spirit within me,

because there was no reality of God’s Spirit within me.

I would have pointed, instead,

to my belief system based on the Bible,

and a prayer I prayed when I was 13,

and my attendance at a Christian college,

and my acceptance of Christian values,

and my intellectual acknowledgment

of Jesus as the Son of God.

The truth is

at that point in my life

I was not a child of God.

I was simply an adherent to the Christian religion.

But if, one year later, you would have asked me how I knew I was a Christian,

if I would have known the verse,

I would have quoted Rom. 8:16,

“The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God”.

At that time I probably didn’t know the verse,

but I think I would still have said something like,

“Well, I know because...because I KNOW,

I know because God’s Spirit tells me that I am.”

And the second comment I want to tack on here

before I bring us back to Romans 5

is just a friendly warning.

Several years after I came to Christ

I got tangled up with a group of well-intended but severely misguided Christians

whose whole message was reduced to a frantic pursuit of the answer to the question,

“How can we know if we have the Holy Spirit?”

And the only acceptable answer within that group

was found in the demonstration

of at least one of a tiny cluster of charismatic gifts.

Looking back on it now

I realize that they had been deceived

into asking the wrong question.

They were just half a bubble off,

but it was just enough

to throw their entire walk with the King out of balance.

The question they were asking was,

“What is the proof of the Holy Spirit?”,

and once they asked the wrong question

they opened themselves up

to no end of potential deceptions.

The question God gives us

is not,

“What is the proof of the Holy Spirit?”,

the question God gives us is,

“What is the proof of our sonship?”

And the first answer He gives us is clear -

it is the presence of the Spirit of God within us.

Charismatic gifts in themselves

never have

and never can prove the presence of the Spirit of God within us.

But the presence of the Spirit of God within us

is the first great proof

of our entrance into the family of God.

1 John 3:24 ...And we know by this that He abides in us, by the Spirit whom He has given us.

And with that I want to bring us back

to this 5th gift given to us by our God

here in Romans 5:5.

The gift, of course, is the gift of the Holy Spirit,

given to every believer

the day we enter the family of God.

But what I want us to see as we end this morning

is that this gift is given to us

in a very special wrapping.

Paul does not just tell us that God has given us the Holy Spirit.

He tells us that God has given us the Spirit

in order to accomplish

a specific purpose in our lives.

You see,

the Spirit of God is not just a force,

it is not some sort of cosmic energy

that is infused into our bodies.

It is certainly not some kind of divine gasoline

that we fill our spiritual tanks with

so that we can then go out and do the works of God.

The Holy Spirit

is not an IT at all.

The Holy Spirit is God Himself

taking up constant residence within our spirit

for one very specific purpose.

And what I want us to see here

is that, even though the Holy Spirit

does many different things in us,

and for us,

and through us,

all of them are done for just one central reason.

And in this first conversation God has with us about the Holy Spirit

as it is revealed to us here in Romans 5

in the context of that conversation

He tells us what the reason is.

You see, in our confused little religious minds,

we could easily believe

that God gives us the Spirit

so that He can change us,

or so that He can witness through us,

or so that He can teach us what we need to know,

or so that He can make us usable.

Now it is true that He does do those things in us and through us,

but He does all of them

in a way that allows Him to move us closer to His one central purpose in our lives.

And let me read Romans 5:5

so that we can see what that purpose is:

Rom. 5:5 and ... the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.

Everything God’s Spirit does within us

He does for the purpose of revealing to us greater depths

of the love of God for us.

Every true work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Christian

will result in our gaining a greater awareness

of the personal love of God for us.

And every time something happens in us

or to us

that causes us to doubt God’s love for us,

or to feel rejected by Him,

or condemned by Him,

or separated from Him,

it is NOT,

and cannot be the work of the Holy Spirit.

Let me state it as clearly and simply as I know how -

there is only one central message

imbedded in everything the Spirit of God will ever do in the Christian’s life,

and that message is this:

“Your Creator/Father God loves you with an everlasting love, and He always will.”

The 5th gift, then, given to us by our God

the day we enter His family is this:

Rom. 5:5 ... the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.