Sunday, April 22, 2007
Whatever Happened to the Holy Spirit?
(Disclaimer: This is in no way an exhaustive study on the subject of the work of the Holy Spirit. Hopefully this will lead you to continue your study of this subject or raise some questions.)
The Gifts of the Holy Spirit: Part One—4-22-07
I think when we talk about the Holy Spirit—as we have for the past few weeks—we have a tendency to think emotionally about the Holy Spirit or intellectually about the Holy Spirit, which is wrong. So how do we experience the Holy Spirit?
But Paul is really speaking here about the truths that have been revealed for the first time in the NT. Men could never have arrived at these truths through scientific investigations or philosophical inquiries. The human mind, left to itself, could never discover the wonderful mysteries which were made known at the beginning of the gospel era. Human reason is totally inadequate to find the truth of God.
Only a person’s spirit that lives within him knows his thoughts.
We call this intuition. And women tend to have a better handle on this than men. Why? Because men tend to be more rational than women.
Men are always trying to understand things in rational terms. But this morning you didn't hear praise and worship with your eye, because God did not give you your eye to hear with. He gave you your eye for vision, not hearing. If there was a beautiful sunset, you wouldn't enjoy it with your ear, because God did not give you your ear to hear sunsets.
Take for instance, this one guy I met in the program who I had to counsel. He was a hit man for the circus. That’s what he told me.
Now what do you do with that information if you’re counseling him? He never really thought he’d find God. He had “MOM” crudely tattooed on his knuckles. He had a tear drop tattoo at the side of one eye. I’m not in a gang, but I think that’s the gang sign for redneck.
He knew how to use his eyes to stare you down if he needed to. He did this in group counseling sessions. He was the best I’d ever seen. And we had this little exercise that got dubbed the “black hole,” because it made a man feel as if he’d been tossed into a deep, dank, lonely hole. They all hated it. Because I would go around the circle looking for the one guy God wanted in the hot seat for the night.
And it always seemed as if God never wanted Hank in the “black hole.” But the person who was selected at random by me was gently interrogated until he knew that solitary confinement of the psyche in public was hard to give. For they’d breakdown and tell about their problems, while others started throwing in their two-cents worth about his progress.
These guys were ruthless. But no one, I mean, not even me. We were all afraid of him. We all had visions of this guy breaking into our homes a year later when he was out and we were at home in our beds. We pictured him pulling out a pistol with a silencer, and poof! The bullet would make up for everything we’d done to him.
We could picture him operating the Tilt-a-Whirl. We could see him tearing tickets and checking safety bars, and then grabbing that long lever, knocking the ride in gear. We could see him being slipped a piece of paper by the manager of the fair. We could see his teardrop wrinkle up, as he tried to make out that name of the next guy put on his hit list. And when we looked at Hank in this light, then we stayed away from him.
Then it happened. I was talking to someone about how Jill wanted some carpet put down in this makeshift bedroom that we’d fashioned in her parent’s basement, and I asked a staff person, “Do you know anybody that lays carpet?”
And, suddenly, I heard this deep voice, and I turned to find “Hank, the Hit Man” standing there, and he said, “I can lay carpet.”
In that moment it was a choice between hundreds of dollars to get the carpet laid or it was a free ride on the back of a hit man. So I had two seconds to respond, so I said, “Okay, then we’ll do it the day after tomorrow.”
Problem solved. Then I realized I had a deeper problem. I had to go home and tell Jill that the “Hit Man” was coming to lay carpet.
“You think he’ll leave the program someday and come over here and kill us?” she asked.
And on our way to my house so he could lay some carpet for me, he pointed at an interstate bridge where I-65 splinters off into I-440. He pointed to where the underside of the bridge met the crude earth and said, “That’s where I usually sleep when I pass through Nashville.”
He was being friendly, as friendly as a hit man can be.
And I can’t tell you how relieved I was once we moved from the basement and into the hidden world. I no longer have to worry about his pocked face at the door of the basement. And how stupid can you be to invite a hit man to your house to lay carpet? It is completely void of intuition.
Take Jill for instance, she would have said no. Did say no, but I couldn’t reverse my actions by this point. Telling a hit man that you didn’t trust him enough to take him to your house after inviting him may have pissed him off. It may have been worse than the first missed intuition.
So this thing of the Spirit is about what you feel in your gut. But most of the time, we go after the Spirit with our emotions or after it with our intellect, but capturing the Spirit of God is spiritual.
I say all of that to say, you cannot understand God’s spirit with your mind. He did not give you your intellect to apprehend him. The Spirit of a man is what he gave us to apprehend divine things.
So just as women’s thoughts are higher than men’s thoughts, so are God’s thoughts even higher than women’s thoughts.
It’s clear that the mind doesn’t apprehend the spirit, so I wanted you to know this before we jump into our next study on whether or not miracles, tongues, and healing is for today or did it all pass away with the First Century Church.
And I think this is a problem in Decatur. We have tons of churches, but we are only reaching a fraction of the population, because we are all fixation on some aspect of the Holy Spirit and fighting for our pet-doctrines. And I think you see this more with the Holy Spirit than you do with God, the Father and God, the Son.
As a church on the whole in America, we are fixated on the Holy Spirit more than God, the Father or God, the Son.
Take this week for instance when the director of nursing introduced me to a patient by telling the patient I was a pastor. And the first thing she said was not what do you believe about the cross or what do you believe about creation or what do you believe about the Resurrection or about the End Times, she said, “Do y’all speak in tongues as an evidence of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit?”
Now you are very interested in my answer, aren’t you? Well, I’m going to refrain unto the end of this study, because I want you to make up your own mind about, since it is such a fixation, then let’s go ahead and get straight in our own minds what we believe.
The first thing to understand about the Holy Spirit is that He is a person, and as this person he is part of the Trinity that makes up the Godhead—God, the Father, God, the Son, and God, the Holy Spirit. That’s what we call the Trinity.
So the Trinity that makes up the Godhead is much the same. No matter what you call God, He doesn’t change. He is the same person. He is God, the Father, God the Son, and God, the Holy Spirit. Three persons in one.
Think of water. It’s made up of the same substance, but there are three different forms of water. You have water—ice—and steam. Is it still water when it is ice?
One of the early works of the Holy Spirit was to bring the church age into existence.
I think what we get confused about these days, is what the power of the Holy Spirit is supposed to do in our life. Sometimes we think of the Holy Spirit as magic.
Story about the boy kicking me at DGW.
A lot of churches believe the power of the Holy Spirit is what we are supposed to receive every Sunday at church by the administration of the Spirit’s gifts, which are:
The Revelatory or Word Gifts
This is the list that has always been in question when we think about the First Century Church still being in existence today. You’ll hear people talking all the time about the power of the Holy Spirit and nine times out of ten the heated debate about the work of the Holy Spirit will center around this list.
So why are they in the Bible if they are not for the church today?
That’s what we are going to explore for a couple of weeks, and today we are going to start with what’s called the cessation position. Now how do they explain what happened at Pentecost? They say Pentecost was a part of the salvation-historical structure of the Book of Acts.
The best way to look at this is to see what the Cessationist are saying against charismatic believers.
Cessationist View believes what happened at Pentecost is a package deal.
This is the package deal, meaning the pouring out of the Holy Spirit was for the first century only.
Jesus’ death
Jesus’ Resurrection
Jesus’ ascension to heaven
Jesus’ reception of the Holy Spirit
It’s a non-repeatable, once for all event. It puts the Holy Spirit in a salvation-historical model.
It’s like this, I did a funeral one time where two doves were going to be set free at the gravesite after I finished the prayer. And this intrigued me, so while everyone was gathering around the gravesite, I had a few minutes to talk with the guy who owned the doves. He said they would circle the graveyard two times, and then fly home. He guaranteed it.
And this is what this view does with the Holy Spirit. It makes the Holy Spirit predictable, because all of the miracles and word prophecies were for bringing the church into being. It belongs to the period of the foundation for the church.
For futhering reading:
Are Miraculous Gifts for Today? (4 Views) by Zondervan
The Gifts of the Holy Spirit: Part One—4-22-07
I think when we talk about the Holy Spirit—as we have for the past few weeks—we have a tendency to think emotionally about the Holy Spirit or intellectually about the Holy Spirit, which is wrong. So how do we experience the Holy Spirit?
1 Corinthians 2:9-14 (NCV)
9 But as it is written in the Scriptures:
“No one has ever seen this,
and no one has ever heard about it.
No one has ever imagined
what God has prepared for those
who love him.” Isaiah 64:4
10 But God has shown us these things through the Spirit. The Spirit searches out all things, even the deep secrets of God. 11 Who knows the thoughts that another person has? Only a person’s spirit that lives within him knows his thoughts. It is the same with God. No one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 12 Now we did not receive the spirit of the world, but we received the Spirit that is from God so that we can know all that God has given us. 13 And we speak about these things, not with words taught us by human wisdom but with words taught us by the Spirit. And so we explain spiritual truths to spiritual people. 14 A person who does not have the Spirit does not accept the truths that come from the Spirit of God. That person thinks they are foolish and cannot understand them, because they can only be judged to be true by the Spirit.
But Paul is really speaking here about the truths that have been revealed for the first time in the NT. Men could never have arrived at these truths through scientific investigations or philosophical inquiries. The human mind, left to itself, could never discover the wonderful mysteries which were made known at the beginning of the gospel era. Human reason is totally inadequate to find the truth of God.
Only a person’s spirit that lives within him knows his thoughts.
We call this intuition. And women tend to have a better handle on this than men. Why? Because men tend to be more rational than women.
Men are always trying to understand things in rational terms. But this morning you didn't hear praise and worship with your eye, because God did not give you your eye to hear with. He gave you your eye for vision, not hearing. If there was a beautiful sunset, you wouldn't enjoy it with your ear, because God did not give you your ear to hear sunsets.
Take for instance, this one guy I met in the program who I had to counsel. He was a hit man for the circus. That’s what he told me.
Now what do you do with that information if you’re counseling him? He never really thought he’d find God. He had “MOM” crudely tattooed on his knuckles. He had a tear drop tattoo at the side of one eye. I’m not in a gang, but I think that’s the gang sign for redneck.
He knew how to use his eyes to stare you down if he needed to. He did this in group counseling sessions. He was the best I’d ever seen. And we had this little exercise that got dubbed the “black hole,” because it made a man feel as if he’d been tossed into a deep, dank, lonely hole. They all hated it. Because I would go around the circle looking for the one guy God wanted in the hot seat for the night.
And it always seemed as if God never wanted Hank in the “black hole.” But the person who was selected at random by me was gently interrogated until he knew that solitary confinement of the psyche in public was hard to give. For they’d breakdown and tell about their problems, while others started throwing in their two-cents worth about his progress.
These guys were ruthless. But no one, I mean, not even me. We were all afraid of him. We all had visions of this guy breaking into our homes a year later when he was out and we were at home in our beds. We pictured him pulling out a pistol with a silencer, and poof! The bullet would make up for everything we’d done to him.
We could picture him operating the Tilt-a-Whirl. We could see him tearing tickets and checking safety bars, and then grabbing that long lever, knocking the ride in gear. We could see him being slipped a piece of paper by the manager of the fair. We could see his teardrop wrinkle up, as he tried to make out that name of the next guy put on his hit list. And when we looked at Hank in this light, then we stayed away from him.
Then it happened. I was talking to someone about how Jill wanted some carpet put down in this makeshift bedroom that we’d fashioned in her parent’s basement, and I asked a staff person, “Do you know anybody that lays carpet?”
And, suddenly, I heard this deep voice, and I turned to find “Hank, the Hit Man” standing there, and he said, “I can lay carpet.”
In that moment it was a choice between hundreds of dollars to get the carpet laid or it was a free ride on the back of a hit man. So I had two seconds to respond, so I said, “Okay, then we’ll do it the day after tomorrow.”
Problem solved. Then I realized I had a deeper problem. I had to go home and tell Jill that the “Hit Man” was coming to lay carpet.
“You think he’ll leave the program someday and come over here and kill us?” she asked.
And on our way to my house so he could lay some carpet for me, he pointed at an interstate bridge where I-65 splinters off into I-440. He pointed to where the underside of the bridge met the crude earth and said, “That’s where I usually sleep when I pass through Nashville.”
He was being friendly, as friendly as a hit man can be.
And I can’t tell you how relieved I was once we moved from the basement and into the hidden world. I no longer have to worry about his pocked face at the door of the basement. And how stupid can you be to invite a hit man to your house to lay carpet? It is completely void of intuition.
Take Jill for instance, she would have said no. Did say no, but I couldn’t reverse my actions by this point. Telling a hit man that you didn’t trust him enough to take him to your house after inviting him may have pissed him off. It may have been worse than the first missed intuition.
So this thing of the Spirit is about what you feel in your gut. But most of the time, we go after the Spirit with our emotions or after it with our intellect, but capturing the Spirit of God is spiritual.
I say all of that to say, you cannot understand God’s spirit with your mind. He did not give you your intellect to apprehend him. The Spirit of a man is what he gave us to apprehend divine things.
Isaiah 55:9 (NCV)
9 Just as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.
So just as women’s thoughts are higher than men’s thoughts, so are God’s thoughts even higher than women’s thoughts.
It’s clear that the mind doesn’t apprehend the spirit, so I wanted you to know this before we jump into our next study on whether or not miracles, tongues, and healing is for today or did it all pass away with the First Century Church.
And I think this is a problem in Decatur. We have tons of churches, but we are only reaching a fraction of the population, because we are all fixation on some aspect of the Holy Spirit and fighting for our pet-doctrines. And I think you see this more with the Holy Spirit than you do with God, the Father and God, the Son.
As a church on the whole in America, we are fixated on the Holy Spirit more than God, the Father or God, the Son.
Take this week for instance when the director of nursing introduced me to a patient by telling the patient I was a pastor. And the first thing she said was not what do you believe about the cross or what do you believe about creation or what do you believe about the Resurrection or about the End Times, she said, “Do y’all speak in tongues as an evidence of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit?”
Now you are very interested in my answer, aren’t you? Well, I’m going to refrain unto the end of this study, because I want you to make up your own mind about, since it is such a fixation, then let’s go ahead and get straight in our own minds what we believe.
Remember a few weeks ago I told you would look at the
1. The identity of the Holy Spirit
2. The work of the Holy Spirit
The first thing to understand about the Holy Spirit is that He is a person, and as this person he is part of the Trinity that makes up the Godhead—God, the Father, God, the Son, and God, the Holy Spirit. That’s what we call the Trinity.
So the Trinity that makes up the Godhead is much the same. No matter what you call God, He doesn’t change. He is the same person. He is God, the Father, God the Son, and God, the Holy Spirit. Three persons in one.
Think of water. It’s made up of the same substance, but there are three different forms of water. You have water—ice—and steam. Is it still water when it is ice?
So you see the Trinity is the Godhead.
2.The work of the Holy Spirit
One of the early works of the Holy Spirit was to bring the church age into existence.
Acts 1:6-9 (NKJV)
6 Therefore, when they had come together, they asked Him, saying, “Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” 7 And He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority. 8 But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
I think what we get confused about these days, is what the power of the Holy Spirit is supposed to do in our life. Sometimes we think of the Holy Spirit as magic.
Story about the boy kicking me at DGW.
A lot of churches believe the power of the Holy Spirit is what we are supposed to receive every Sunday at church by the administration of the Spirit’s gifts, which are:
The Revelatory or Word Gifts
1 Corinthians 12:1-12 (NKJV)
12 4 There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. 5 There are differences of ministries, but the same Lord. 6 And there are diversities of activities, but it is the same God who works all in all. 7 But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to each one for the profit of all: 8 for to one is given the word of wisdom through the Spirit, to another the word of knowledge through the same Spirit, 9 to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healings by the same Spirit, 10 to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another discerning of spirits, to another different kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. 11 But one and the same Spirit works all these things, distributing to each one individually as He wills.
1 Corinthians 12:28-13:1 (NKJV)
28 And God has appointed these in the church: first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, after that miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, administrations, varieties of tongues. 29 Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Are all workers of miracles? 30 Do all have gifts of healings? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret? 31 But earnestly desire the best gifts. And yet I show you a more excellent way.
Ephesians 4:11
11 And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, 12 for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, nfor the 5edifying of othe body of Christ
This is the list that has always been in question when we think about the First Century Church still being in existence today. You’ll hear people talking all the time about the power of the Holy Spirit and nine times out of ten the heated debate about the work of the Holy Spirit will center around this list.
So why are they in the Bible if they are not for the church today?
That’s what we are going to explore for a couple of weeks, and today we are going to start with what’s called the cessation position. Now how do they explain what happened at Pentecost? They say Pentecost was a part of the salvation-historical structure of the Book of Acts.
Acts 2:1-5 (NKJV)
2 When the Day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. 2 And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3 Then there appeared to them divided tongues, as of fire, and one sat upon each of them. 4 And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
The best way to look at this is to see what the Cessationist are saying against charismatic believers.
Cessationist View believes what happened at Pentecost is a package deal.
Acts 2:32 (NIV
32 God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of the fact. 33 Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear.
This is the package deal, meaning the pouring out of the Holy Spirit was for the first century only.
Jesus’ death
Jesus’ Resurrection
Jesus’ ascension to heaven
Jesus’ reception of the Holy Spirit
It’s a non-repeatable, once for all event. It puts the Holy Spirit in a salvation-historical model.
It’s like this, I did a funeral one time where two doves were going to be set free at the gravesite after I finished the prayer. And this intrigued me, so while everyone was gathering around the gravesite, I had a few minutes to talk with the guy who owned the doves. He said they would circle the graveyard two times, and then fly home. He guaranteed it.
And this is what this view does with the Holy Spirit. It makes the Holy Spirit predictable, because all of the miracles and word prophecies were for bringing the church into being. It belongs to the period of the foundation for the church.
For futhering reading:
Are Miraculous Gifts for Today? (4 Views) by Zondervan
