8/26/07 Recognizing The Holy Spirit Pt. 2

We started something last week that I want us to continue with today.

We took a break from our study of the Gospel of John

to look at how we can correctly recognize the leadership of the Spirit of God in our lives.

We spent quite a bit of our time last week

looking at what our Lord tells us about the presence of His Spirit in the life of the Christian.

And what He says to us about the Spirit

isn’t in any way confusing or unclear.

In fact it’s extremely straightforward.

I like the way Paul says it in his opening remarks to his friends at Ephesus.

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.

When we choose to believe that God is telling us the truth

when He tells us that Christ’s death paid our debt for our sins in full,

He responds to that simple act of faith

by placing His Spirit within us, sealing us in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise.

To have Christ

is to have His Spirit within us.

In fact it is only through the working of the Spirit within us

that anyone ever honestly reaches out to God.

People can and often do immerse themselves in religion of all sorts

without the working of the Spirit within them,

but it is impossible for us to gain even a tiny glimpse of God’s personal love for us

apart from the working of the Spirit in our lives.

I have a question I sometimes ask a person

when I’m trying to better understand where they are at in their relationship with Jesus Christ.

I’ll ask them if they have ever felt like God has picked them up and hugged them.

I’ve had some people respond to that question

by looking at me as if I’m more than a few bricks short of a load.

But I’ve had others know exactly what I’m saying.

There is a kind of communication that can only be accomplished

by the Spirit of God within us,

a communication between the Holy Spirit and our spirit

in which He tells us the one thing we find it hardest to believe,

and the one thing we need to know the most - that our God loves us.

Paul says it better.

Talking only to the Christian,

in that remarkable passage in the first half of Romans 5,

a passage in which he shares with us the birthday presents we receive from God the day we enter His family through faith in Christ,

he says,

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

And without reteaching all that we looked at last week,

let me just say that to be a Christian is to have the Spirit of God within us.

But having the Spirit within us

and being able to recognize His voice and His leadership

are two very different things.

And what I’d like to offer you this morning

are some principles that can help us more easily recognize His work in our lives.

And let me begin first of all

by stating some of the assumptions that are a part of this whole process.

First of all,

we need to begin with the realization that this is not a test,

it is a growth and learning process.

When our Lord promised, HEB 13:5..."I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you,",

it was not a conditional promise.

He didn’t say, “I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you so long as you correctly hear and follow the leadership of the Spirit in your life.”

He didn’t say, “I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you

as long as you get it right and don’t mess up.”

He didn’t say, “I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you

as long as you hear My voice perfectly and follow immediately.”

What he said was, "I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you.”

If we misunderstand what He’s saying,

if we resist what He’s doing,

if we openly rebel against His voice in our lives,

if we find ourselves terrified with what He’s saying to us and try to hide from Him,

if we get it all wrong and end up, along with Jonah, buying a passage on a ship

that’s headed exactly the opposite direction from where He’s called us to go,

still He says to us, “I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you.”

In fact it’s even better then that.

Through Paul He goes on to say

ROM 8:28 ...that (He) causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.

When we begin our walk with the King

He assumes we know nothing.

I’m not talking about knowing Bible stories and church culture,

I’m talking about Him.

We don’t know Him.

We don’t know His voice,

we don’t know His ways,

we don’t know His heart or His priorities or His goals either for us or for our world.

We are so ignorant of Him

that we will actually see a man with great wealth and believe God has “blessed” him,

and see another man who has very little and assume that God has not blessed him.

We will see a person who has endured great suffering and wonder if God is mad at him,

and see another who has suffered nothing

and think it is evidence of God’s kindness to them.

I came across a comment in the book of Acts recently

that once again made me realize how little we understand about life with our Lord here and now.

This is found in the 5^th chapter of the of Dr. Luke’s account

at a point when those who had been responsible for the crucifixion of Christ

attempted to stop His followers from proclaiming His resurrection from the dead.

They began by jailing the disciples,

and then when the Lord miraculously released them from prison

they brought the group before the Jewish leaders and we read,

ACT 5:40 ... after calling the apostles in, they flogged them and ordered them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and then released them.

And it’s the next statement that caught my attention.

ACT 5:41 So they went on their way from the presence of the Council, rejoicing that they had been considered worthy to suffer shame for His name.

Now really!

What a strange way of looking at life.

What a strange thing to bring joy to these men.

They considered their shame, their humiliation, their beating to be a clear evidence

of the presence of Christ with them

and His approval of them.

But my point is that when we first start out in our walk with the King

we haven’t got a clue as to how to do it His way,

and in fact most of the time we don’t.

We fumble along,

and mess it up,

and misinterpret both Him and His Word,

and occasionally get glimpses of Him and His heart and His ways,

and never, ever does He walk away from us,

or turn His back on us,

or remove His Spirit from us.

I was talking with a friend of mine recently,

and I asked him if he could ever see himself walking away from his Lord

and his one line response to me told me

that he really did understand the heart of everything God is saying to us in Christ.

He said, “Well, I know I could really mess up in a big way, but it wouldn’t change anything.”

Welcome to what Paul calls “...this grace in which we stand.” (Rom. 5:2)

I mention this before I share with you

those things that can help us to recognize the voice of the Spirit within us

because I know the power of religion so well,

and I know how easily we can be convinced

that there is something we can or must do

in order to earn the work of the Spirit in our lives.

We get to thinking that, IF I perform at a certain level for God,

THEN He will allow His Spirit to work in me and through me,

but if I fall below a certain level of performance

then He will remove His Spirit from me until I get my act together.

Paul wrote his letter to the Galatians

to attack this very lie,

telling them that from the very beginning

it has always been about God’s grace poured out on us

simply on the basis of our faith in Christ.

But at one point in his attack of the lies they’d believed

he asked them a series of questions designed to force them back to the truth.

He says,

GAL 3:1-2, 5 You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified? This is the only thing I want to find out from you: did you receive the Spirit by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? So then, does He who provides you with the Spirit and works miracles among you, do it by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith?

Of course he’s not telling them that they shouldn’t keep the moral law of God.

But he is telling them

that the work of God’s Spirit in their lives

is not BECAUSE they keep the law.

We do not and cannot ever earn the work of the Holy Spirit within us by our performance.

There is no way we could ever be that good.

I think maybe I just made that whole thing too complicated.

I could have said it better by saying simply that once we come to God through Christ

from that time on we are His children and He is our perfect Father

and whether we hear Him correctly or not,

whether we follow perfectly or mess it up big time,

He will never leave us,

never forsake us,

never desert us,

and never ever remove His Spirit from us.

It’s not a test, folks,

it’s a living growing eternal love relationship with our Creator.

But having said that,

how do we go about recognizing His voice, His Spirit within us?

How can we recognize the difference between

the Holy Spirit and our emotions?

How can we recognize the difference between the Spirit

and our learned reasoning processes?

How can we tell the difference between the voice of the Spirit

and those demonic forces that war against us?

How can we tell the difference between the leading of the Spirit

and the power of social pressure and peer pressure?

I was in my early 20's when I first discovered the principle I’m about to share with you,

and the discovery of it

became perhaps the most freeing single concept I’ve ever learned.

Since it’s discovery

I have rarely wrestled with knowing the leadership of the Spirit in my life.

I’ve often wrestled with following it,

but almost never with knowing it.

A short time after my discovery of this truth

I was asked to speak at a ski retreat for a group of high school students in Washington state.

I was so excited about what I was learning

that I built the entire retreat around this one concept.

When I finished, several of the adults were so mad at me for what I’d done

that they contacted the regional head of the that denomination

and had him put in place a policy banning me from ever speaking at another one of their youth events.

I found out later that there was a mother at that retreat

whose high school son was getting into some things he shouldn’t have been getting into

and she’d come to the retreat with her son

with the hope that I would lay down the law in a way that would drive her son back into submission and obedience.

I will admit looking back

that given the high school audience I was speaking to

my approach to this concept was probably unwise.

But I also know that what that mother wanted me to do simply could not be done.

You simply can’t get there that way.

There is no law, no list, no form in existence

that can produce true life in the Spirit.

Do you remember that statement the Lord made in His conversation with Nicodemus in John 3:8?

JOH 3:8 "The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit."

Do you recall that description of life in the Spirit

that we saw just recently in John 7:37-39?

Now on the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, 'From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.'" But this He spoke of the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive..

What our Lord gives us when He gives us His Spirit

is an approach to life

that, when we understand it,

will equip us to be absolutely free from the two great sources of slavery in life -

religion

and immorality.

Free from rules,

free from sin,

free to be all that we were created to be,

free to do all that we were designed to do.

So here’s the way it works.

It begins with our choosing to believe

that God really has done what He said He’s done.

In other words, it begins with simple, practical faith.

We simply choose to believe that God has placed His Spirit within us

and that He is in the constant process of living His life out through our unique personalities.

GAL 2:20 "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.

I spent some considerable time in my early Christian years

in church groups where those involved were forever looking for external evidences of the presence of the Spirit in their lives.

And it came as no small revelation to me

when I finally realized that every time we did that

we were calling God a liar,

or at the very least expressing our doubts about His honesty.

We were saying, “If you really placed your Spirit within me, come on, prove it! Prove it!”

And whenever we start asking God for proofs that He’s told us the truth

we open ourselves up to a whole world of deceptions.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t clear evidences of the Spirit’s presence within us

because there certainly are.

But I’m aware of only three that cannot be imitated or duplicated by Satan.

The first is a hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Before we come to Christ we think we should be good,

after we come to Christ we wish we could be good.

Only the Spirit of God can create within us a longing for a life that honors our Lord,

and if such a longing exists within us

it is a clear evidence of the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

The second evidence of the Spirit’s presence that cannot be imitated by Satan

is a growing awareness of God’s personal love for us

and our love response to Him in return.

Satan cannot, will not ever make you aware of God’s love for you.

On the contrary,

he will do everything he can to convince you that God is still displeased with you,

still angry at you,

still wanting more from you before you can know true peace with Him.

But if you have a growing awareness of God’s personal love for you,

it is a clear, powerful evidence of the presence of the Spirit of God in your life.

I was in a conversation with a person recently

who was in the process of wrestling through some extremely painful issues in his own life.

He had invited me into that process with him

and together he showed tremendous courage in facing honestly some really hard things in his life.

Several months later I was in another conversation with him

and I asked him if there was anything he knew about God with absolute certainty.

He answered without hesitation.

“Yes! I know that God is absolutely good and that He loves me.”

Then I said, “But how can you say that given the painful things you’ve seen in your own life recently? How can you put that together with a good God who loves you?”

And his answer to me will forever be

one of the most powerful expressions of the work of the Holy Spirit within a person

that I’ve ever heard.

He said, “I can’t explain this,

but my certainty of God’s goodness and of His love for me came at exactly the same time as my discovery of the bad stuff in my life.”

I understood exactly what he was saying,

but I’d never heard anybody put it in words before.

Only the Spirit of God can accomplish that work within a person.

Only the Spirit of God

can confront us with the reality of evil within ourselves,

and yet do it in a way that at the same time imbeds within our spirits

a deep awareness of God’s absolute goodness and His deep personal love for us.

In fact, listen to this!

The Christians who have the least personal awareness of the love of God for them

are the ones who have the least honesty about the evil within their own lives

because they have refused to allow the Spirit of God

to lead them into genuine admission of the evil and repentance.

Whenever the Spirit tries to move them that direction

they run in terror,

frequently hiding from the truth behind a sticky Christian facade.

But only the Spirit of God within a person

can confront us with the reality of evil within ourselves,

and yet do it in a way that at the same time communicates to us

a deep spirit awareness of God’s goodness and personal love for us.

You see, it is only against the backdrop of our own personal corruption

that we can see the true nature of God’s love for us.

It’s only when we hear our God say to us,

“I know all about this, and it does not, cannot, will not every alter my love for you.”,

it’s only when we see Him loving us in the midst of our corruption

that we finally begin to get it.

ROM 5:8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

A hunger and thirst for righteousness,

a personal awareness of God’s love for us and our response to that love,

and then the third evidence of the Spirit of God within us that cannot be imitated by Satan

is the ability to truly love and act in love toward those around us.

We all have certain people that we can love in the flesh,

people we’re drawn to,

people who give us what we want,

or in some way make us feel good.

But giving us the ability to love those who have wronged us,

or those whose actions repulse us,

or those who hate us,

or those whose attitudes and actions are in every way offensive to us

is a work that only the Spirit of God within us can accomplish.

When the Spirit of God places the love of God within us

it will motivate us to do things that no amount of money could every motivate us to do.

And it cannot be duplicated or imitated by Satan.

All the other spiritual gifts and miracles can be imitated

and in themselves are no certain proof of the presence of the Spirit of God within a person.

But these three,

a hunger and thirst for righteousness,

a growing personal awareness of the love of God and our love response in return,

and our ability to love those who in the flesh we find offensive, unlovable,

these three are clear, powerful evidences of the presence of the Holy Spirit within us.

And obviously I’ve run us out of time for the morning,

so we’ll just stop here for today

and finish this up next week.