8/19/07 Recognizing The Holy Spirit

Those of you who were here last week

heard me say that I was thinking about taking our time this morning

to look at a topic that I don’t remember ever approaching from exactly this direction.

I want us to spend a little time today

talking about how we can correctly recognize the voice of the Spirit of God within us

and how we can know when it is His leading

and not just our own emotions

or our own reasoning processes.

Actually it was a statement made by our Lord

in one of the passages we were looking at last week

that brought this whole thing to mind.

At one point in His debates with His enemies in Jerusalem

Jesus made the following statement to them.

JOH 10:26-27 "But you do not believe because you are not of My sheep. My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me...”.

And with this statement

Jesus was picking up on something He’d said earlier in this 10^th chapter

in a passage that we won’t look at in detail for a couple of weeks.

But let me share just a little of it now.

It is an extended passage in which He uses a shepherd and his sheep

as an illustration of the relationship between Himself and His people.

And He says of Himself, the Good Shepherd,

JOH 10:4-5, 14 "When he puts forth all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. A stranger they simply will not follow, but will flee from him, because they do not know the voice of strangers. I am the good shepherd, and I know My own and My own know Me...”.

In both of these passages

Jesus makes it clear that the foundation of this whole relationship He establishes between us and Himself

is one that is built upon the assumption

that we can literally recognize His voice and follow it in our lives.

I was talking with a good friend of mine this past week

and he was telling me about several recent experiences in his own life

when he had heard people quoting Scripture

and it just didn’t sound right to him.

One was a person on the radio

and another was a preacher in a large, conservative Christian church.

He said that to him they sounded phoney,

but he wondered if maybe there was something wrong with himself

because it didn’t seem to bother anyone else.

I told him that his ability to hear not just a person’s words but their spirit

was his great protection in life

and urged him to trust what he was sensing inside.

You see, I think he was just beginning to get a glimpse of what the Lord was talking about when He said,

A stranger they simply will not follow, but will flee from him, because they do not know the voice of strangers.

The thing that so often surprises us here, of course,

is that we just naturally assume that if a person calls himself a Christian,

and quotes verses,

then surely they must be speaking the words of God.

But the truth is that Satan’s finest work is done under the Christian banner,

through the use of Scripture.

In fact it was some of the most deeply religious men in history,

using Scripture as a basis for their actions,

who executed the Son of God,

doing it in the name of God.

But my point here is simply that

God’s entire plan for us as His children

rests upon the assumption that we can literally recognize the voice of God in our lives on a daily basis

and then follow that voice.

Without that

there is no hope.

So how do we do that?

Well, before we look at how we recognize the voice of the Spirit within us,

let me take a few minutes to explain the relationship God has established with us through Christ.

And here once again let me begin by emphasizing

that true Christianity is not and never has been

simply a religious system of beliefs

that a person chooses to accept and follow.

True Christianity is, well, it’s what Paul calls “the good news of God”.

It is not God calling us to try to improve our lives,

it is His asking us to recognize that apart from Him we have no hope whatsoever,

and we stand justifiably guilty before our Creator.

And all He asks from us

is our willingness to recognize our helplessness before Him,

and then to reach out to Him for forgiveness and salvation,

choosing to believe that He’s telling us the truth

when He tells us that Christ paid our debt for our sins when He died on the cross.

And when we do that

a whole bunch of things happen,

many of which we are totally unaware of at the time.

They are all things that God does for us and in us

in response to our reaching out to Him and believing Him.

I’ll mention just a few so that you get an idea of what I’m talking about.

We are given absolute, total, eternal peace with God. (Rom. 5:1)

The battle is over forever.

All of our offenses against Him are removed from our account

and literally nailed to the cross of Christ. (Col. 2:14)

More than that,

we now enter into a Father/child relationship with God

in which He relates to us as the most perfect Daddy we could ever imagine. (Gal. 4:6)

We also enter into what Paul describes as “this grace in which we stand”. (Rom 5:2)

He’s talking about a relationship between us and God

in which the foundation of the whole thing

is not our performance for Him,

but ratherf His grace poured out on us every day.

And that’s just a tiny part of what we enter into

when we enter into Christ.

But I bring this up because at the heart of it all

is yet another gift He gives each of us at the time we come to Him.

It’s the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Paul puts it like this in His letter to the Ephesians.

EPH 1:13-14 In Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation -- having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of God's own possession, to the praise of His glory.

Now, you see our part in this whole thing, don’t you?

“...having also believed...”.

That’s it.

That’s all He asks of us - that we choose to believe He’s telling us the truth about who Christ is and what He’s done for us.

But then Paul says that in response to our belief

we are “...sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance...”

Now let me tell you what’s going on here.

The words used here by Paul - “promise” and “pledge”

are words that carry the meaning of some significant payment that is made

as proof of a person’s intent to follow through with an agreement.

It’s like an earnest money paid by a person when they commit to buying a house,

or like an engagement ring given by a young man as his proof of commitment to marry a young lady.

It’s as if God is saying to us,

“I have so much that I plan to give you in the endless eternity that we will share together,

and as proof of My intention to keep My promises to you

I’m giving you my Holy Spirit right here and now.”

Repeatedly during His final extended conversation with His men

Jesus promised He would send the Holy Spirit to them.

In John 14:16-18 He says,

"I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; that is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.”

And then a few minutes later He says again,

JOH 15:26, 16:7, 13 "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 testify about Me, But I tell you the truth, it is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I go, I will send Him to you. But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth;...”

And when John wrote his first open letter to the Church

He said simply that the way we know we are Christians

is through the presence of the Holy Spirit within us.

1JO 4:13 By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit.

And Paul comes at it from the other side in Romans

when he says,

ROM 8:9 ...But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him.

We could easily spend the rest of the morning

looking at passage after passage

in which the presence of the Holy Spirit within the believer is an absolute,

universal aspect of the Christian’s relationship with God.

But I’ve said enough to make the point.

And without getting side-tracked here,

let me just make one additional statement that very much needs to be made.

And let me preface it by saying

that there are few topics in the Christian world

that have the potential of becoming more divisive than this one.

The teaching and beliefs about the Holy Spirit

are diverse to the extreme.

There are some groups who rarely if ever talk about presence or work of the Holy Spirit within the believer

except to warn their people about those groups who do talk about Him,

and there are other groups whose entire life together

is nothing more than a compulsive, driven pursuit of external evidences of the Spirit’s presence in their lives.

In my distant past I have at times been deeply involved in both extremes

as well as a whole bunch of other groups in between.

But let me just offer my statement in this area

so that there is no confusion here before we move on.

If anyone ever tries to suggest to you

that you can be a Christian and yet not have the Holy Spirit within you

walk away from them.

I will wholeheartedly affirm

that we can and often do hide from or run from the Spirit’s work in our lives,

and that we frequently misunderstand what He’s doing or why He’s doing it.

But there simply is no such thing as a Christian without the Holy Spirit.

That would be like saying there is a living child

who has no blood in their veins and no air in their lungs.

The Holy Spirit is not some nifty spirit-world add-on.

He is the Person of the Trinity through whom God accomplishes the new birth within us.

Listen once again to the clarity and simplicity of Paul’s words.

EPH 1:13 In Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation -- having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise...

But having the Spirit within us

and recognizing His voice are two very different things.

And it is this topic most of all

that I want us to spend the rest of our time on this morning.

And I before we move into this

I need to tell you that during the past week

I’ve spend considerable time wrestling with how best to approach this.

I know there are some things I can share with you that will help.

At the same time

I also know that there are some things I would like to do

that simply cannot be done.

You see, mostly I can help you to recognize the lies,

to know with certainty when a voice in your life is not the Spirit of God.

But I cannot give you ears to hear the real thing.

When Jesus said, “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me...”,

He was talking about a kind of communication exchange between Himself and us

that is rooted deep within our spirits.

His voice comes to us in a number of different ways.

There have been many, many times throughout my Christian life

when I have been reading a passage of Scripture

and have suddenly realized that a certain statement,

or a certain verse,

or sometimes just a few words within a verse were being given directly to me by my Lord.

What started out as simply a desire to gain a little more general knowledge about my God

suddenly became a very personal, very intimate communication between Him and me.

There have been times in my life

when I have suddenly known something,

something that I did not know before

and simply should not have known at all,

and looking back realized that the thought,

the idea,

the truth,

the knowledge was given to me by the Spirit of God.

There have been times in my life

when I have been consciously aware that the Holy Spirit

was supernaturally equipping me for some specific task He wanted me to accomplish,

or giving me the desire and the ability to reach out in love

to someone who’s actions at the time should have just repulsed me.

Even though I usually have no conscious awareness of it

I live every day of my life knowing that the Holy Spirit

is actively working both in me and through me for His purposes.

I know that because that is the agreement God has made with each of His children,

and I’ll come back to this shortly.

One time in my life

the Holy Spirit chose to communicate to me in words,

not audible, but clear, specific, exact.

It was something I very much needed to hear,

but I did not accept it or trust it as the Spirit’s voice for a considerable time

until I had tested it, and tested it, and tested it again

because I know the power of the forces that work against us

and I know how easily we are deceived,

and especially at those times when we are hearing something we really want to hear.

I have been immersed in the world of religion for the past 40 years now,

and, I believe, by God’s design

I have at different times been involved in a wide spectrum of forms, and styles, and systems, and approaches.

And in the process I have seen up close

so many of the games Satan plays with us

in his efforts to divert us from what Paul calls “the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.” (2 Cor. 11:3).

And it has made me cautious to the extreme

when it comes to my accepting or believing any voice that overtly claims to be the voice of God.

I’m to the point now where

if I hear someone begin a sentence with the words “The Lord told me...”

my first assumption is that I’m about to hear a lie.

I know why John said what he said in his first letter when he warned the people of God,

1JO 4:1 Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.

This is not a game,

it is a battle,

and the chief weapon used by Satan against us is deception.

And one of his favorite techniques

is to carefully surround the lie he wants to feed us

in a fog of truth.

He will give us 99% truth so that we will believe the lie that comes with it.

In spite of my intention to not get side-tracked,

I’m going to yield to this one

because it is a crucial part of the truth I want to share with you concerning our ability to correctly hear the voice of the Spirit of God within us.

It will mean that this one week topic will become a two week topic,

but you’re use to that by now.

But since I have gotten myself into this business of those relatively rare times

when we feel like we may have “heard” the voice of the Spirit in a specific way,

I want to once again borrow a passage from The Fisherman

because it will say best what I want to say here.

These are Peter’s words

as he describes his response

to that remarkable point in his own life

when he literally heard the voice of God on the Mount of Transfiguration.

Well pick up the account

just as he’s describing what he heard.

Then a voice came from the midst of the cloud. Have you ever heard thunder? I mean really heard it—heard it explode just above your head, causing the ground to shake under your feet, obliterating all other sounds and senses? Now can you imagine what it would be like for that thunder to suddenly form itself into words and speak? If so, then you have some sense of what we heard.

The words and their meaning were unmistakable. “This is my Son, my chosen one; listen to him!”

Then, as quickly as it had come, the cloud departed, leaving us in absolute silence. This time, though, I had no desire to speak. Everything that needed to be said had just been said by God himself. For several minutes we continued to lie there, our faces to the ground. When we finally looked up, we saw only Jesus standing next to us, looking as human and safe and wonderful as we’d ever seen him.

It changed me, of course, that morning on the mountain, but not in the way you might think. When it was all over, I was still just “Simon Peter,” the man. In fact, even more so, if you know what I mean. Having entered into the very presence of God himself, and having heard him speak to me in audible words, with a voice that could create or destroy anything, everything at will, I came away profoundly aware of my own finite humanity. Until that day I had spent my life comparing myself to others, using what I chose to see in them to feed my own pride and arrogance. Look at my strength! Look at my skill! Listen to my bellowing voice! I am great among men!

But those few seconds in the presence of God provided me with a mirror in which I caught a fleeting glimpse of my real self. For the first time I understood Isaiah’s agonized cry when he too entered into the presence of God. “Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.” Isaiah came away overwhelmed with his sinfulness. I came away overwhelmed with my arrogance. It wasn’t that I saw myself as having no value. Indeed, it was exactly the opposite. Everything that happened that day between myself and my Creator confirmed my incredible value to him. But it was a value absolutely unrelated to anything I had ever done or ever could do. I had value to him simply because I had value to him, and nothing I could ever do or not do would alter that reality. I left the mountain that morning knowing I was a tiny speck of God’s infinite creation yet a speck who had incomprehensible value to him.

Those few minutes in the presence of God provided me with another gift as well. Having seen the real thing, I can now so easily recognize the counterfeits. There are so many games used by Satan to cheat and rob the people of God. One of his most effective seems to be inviting God’s people into a kind of spirit-world communication that plays on their egos and bolsters their pride. He feeds them messages and offers them experiences that seem to confirm for them an elevated status in the family of God. They come away feeling as though they have become skilled in the ways of the spirit world, qualified to interact with the presence of God at will.

To those who have been so deceived, let me speak the truth. Entrance into the presence of the real God, the living God, is the most humbling of all human experiences. If you find yourself coming away from spirit-world exploration focused on yourself and what you’ve learned and what you’ve experienced, seeing yourself as a select member of a privileged few within the family of God, then you have simply been deceived into playing ego games with the devil. For, you see, when we enter into the real thing, with the real God, we do not come away focused on ourselves. We come away overwhelmed with him, and with his Son, Jesus Christ. And if we see ourselves at all, we see only our unworthiness and the inexplicable wonder that he loves us as he does.

OK, I’ve taken the time to share that this morning

because I know how the true voice of God affects the human spirit,

and I know that so many of those who are running across the religious landscape proclaiming,

“I heard the voice of God!”, have done no such thing.

And if you keep listening

it won’t be long before you’ll discover that they want your money,

or your loyalty,

or your submission,

or your praise and adoration.

True interaction with the Spirit of God,

and especially true communication with Him at any level

is the most humbling of all human experiences

because we see ourselves as we really are,

with no logical reason whatsoever for why our God should even notice us,

and yet see ourselves being loved by Him

with an intensity we never even dreamed of.

Well, I got into this because I started to say that there are all sorts ways the Spirit of God communicates with us,

and what I think I can help you with

is how to recognize the false voices

so that you can more easily recognize the real thing.

And this is where we’ll pick up this study next week.