Video Transcript: Holy Spirit

Everything the Holy Spirit does, is to draw us to Christ to fill us with Christ to glorify Christ, to make us like Christ. And to help us do Christ's work, the Holy Spirit so wonderful, the Third Person of the Blessed Holy Trinity. And we want to think this a little bit more about the work of the Holy Spirit. 

The Nicene Creed says, I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who when the father and the son together is worshipped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets. So the Holy Spirit is definitely god, he's divine. He's the third person of the Trinity proceeding eternally from the Father and the Son and sent by the Father and the Son, to fill the lives of those who belong to the Lord Jesus Christ. 

He's to be worshipped and glorified, as God, He is the life giver of all that is, you might remember that in the book of Genesis, it says, at the very beginning, the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the deep. And Psalm 104, says that when God sends His Spirit, then things are created, and he renews the face of the earth. So from the very beginning of God's creation. The Holy Spirit has been the Life Giver of those whom God has made. 

Let's think about five areas in which the spirit has a mighty impact, life, union, truth, holiness, power, he's the giver of life. And Jesus says, You can't enter the kingdom of God unless you're born of water and the Spirit. Water refers to your natural birth. But the spirit refers to being born of the Spirit, Jesus said, You must be born again. And there he was echoing the prophet Ezekiel and chapter 36, where God had promised, I will give you a new heart, and put a new spirit within you. And so being reborn means receiving a new heart and receiving the Spirit of God and His life right inside you. 

And the Holy Spirit is the one who gives faith to trust in Jesus in the first place. You and I would all reject Jesus, unless the Holy Spirit were already stirring and winning us over on the inside. He is the Life Giver, in the sense that He gives us the beginnings of spiritual life, but also that he gives us life eternal, life abundant. Jesus said, I've come that they may have life and have it to the fool. And the way he does that is by giving the streams of living water, Jesus great image for the Holy Spirit, the Life Giver, just as there's no life in the desert, unless there's water somewhere. 

So there's no life in us unless there is that living water of the Holy Spirit. And that's life that lasts forever. When you have the Holy Spirit of God living in you, you can't be lost because you have life that never ends in its abundant life. At the same time, the Bible speaks of the Holy Spirit as a downpayment. We don't yet have the absolute total fullness of life that will come in the new creation. But we do have the downpayment, the first installment of God's life by his Holy Spirit, and he's the one who makes us alive forever. And if we already have the downpayment, then we can be sure that even greater blessings and a greater measure of the life of God will be with us and in us in the new creation. 

The Holy Spirit brings union and here I mean that he brings fellowship with the Trinity. He brings fellowship with the Father, fellowship with the Son, and this fellowship is not just fellowship between separate beings, but there's another sense in which the Holy Spirit comes right within us. And God lives right within us and our fellowship is so close, that it's an intermingling of God's life, with our life, not in the sense that we become God or become another person of the Holy Trinity. 

But God is so close to us. That is right inside us. The Bible speaks of Christ in you the hope of glory, I no longer live but Christ lives in me, when we have this union, I'm in Christ, Christ is in me, this is brought about by the Holy Spirit. And when he does that, he gives us the assurance of God's love. 

Romans 5:5, says “that God's love has been poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, who has given us” 

Romans 8 says that when we cry, Abba, Father, it's the Spirit Himself, bearing witness with our spirit, that we're God's children, when I talk to God as my Father in heaven. It's not just me talking, but it's God's Holy Spirit that helps me to trust him and love him as a father and know first of all, that I've been loved by him, that his love has been poured out in my heart. And this union, then also in vile involves our communion with God, our prayer and our worship. Sometimes we don't know how we ought to pray. 

And Romans 8 says that when we don't know how we ought to pray, the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans beyond words. and he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit always intercedes with the saints, in accordance with God's will. 

So we have the Holy Spirit praying within us when we're without words. And we think we don't even have a prayer to offer the very groans, that we as Christians have our prayers of the Holy Spirit, saying what needs to be said, and those prayers are heard by Jesus and the sun was interceding for us.  And by God, our Father who knows what we needed even before we asked, but he loves to be asked. And so his spirit moves us to pray, and then to worship to pour out our hearts, in our union with Christ, we are temples, the Bible says that the church as a whole is God's temple, and that each individual believer is a temple of the Holy Spirit. 

And from within ourselves as a temple, we offer ourselves as living sacrifices to God. And we do that by the Holy Spirit. We're worshipping in the spirit, we're praying in the Holy Spirit, and this union with God, this life that we have, this unites us with other people who are believers in Jesus, we may have differences, some may be men, some may be women, some may be old, some may be very young, some are for one nation, some from another. Some speak this language, some speak that language, some of this color of skin, others have a different shade of skin color, but we're united in the Lord Jesus Christ, because we're all one in Christ Jesus. 

The Bible says, you have one Lord, one faith, one baptism, you've been baptized by one spirit into one body. And Jesus says that people are going to know that we're His disciples, by the love we have for one another. And he prays that God would make us one in a oneness that reflects the oneness of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, so that the world may know that God sent Jesus. 

So this unity that believers have by the Holy Spirit, is a unity that goes beyond all the differences that we may have in this or that respect of who we just are as humans. God takes that wonderful diversity and unites it in a wondrous variety, yet united by the Holy Spirit. 

The Holy Spirit is sometimes called in the Bible, the spirit of truth. And Jesus said, He will lead you into all truth. How does he do that? Well, one major way in fact, the most important way is that the Holy Spirit inspired the Bible. 

The Bible says no prophecy of Scripture came about by someone's own interpretation, but men smoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. All scripture is God breathed. It is the voice of God speaking to us, because the Spirit of God gave humans those words, to speak so that we can hear God's voice in human language. 

And once the Bible was written, that does not mean that now the Holy Spirit has done all of his work in communicating truth because now, having inspired it, He illuminates the Bible, he opens our minds and our hearts to grasp what the Bible says, to love what the Bible says, to savor it, and to see light in the scriptures. 

The Bible itself wonderful as it is inspired as it is, would be of no value to us, unless the Holy Spirit is working within us shining his light in our hearts so that we can understand it. And as he does that, he does something so amazing that the Bible even speaks of having the mind of Christ, or having the mind of the Spirit. 

Remember, your life is so mingled with the life of God, the life of Christ and the Holy Spirit lives in you that more and more your thoughts are actually his thoughts at work in your mind. Your attitudes are actually attitudes that he's forming in you. And so you can truly say, we have the mind of Christ, we have the mind of the Spirit. And so we have that mind. At the same time, we're told, now have the mind of Christ, act like it have, if you have thoughts in your mind that are at odds with Christ, then get into with him if your attitudes are out of whack, if you're not loving others, as Christ does, then let the mind of Christ, the attitude of Christ take over again. 

And the Spirit of Truth also exposes lies, he helps us to see when Satan is trying to fool us, he helps us to discern what the facts of the matter are, he applies the Scriptures to us. And as we're going through our day to day life, he helps us to see pitfalls so that we're not ignorant of Satan's schemes. He also gives personal direction and direction to churches that need him, sometimes he'll do it in quite striking and extraordinary ways where you know that he's just changing your path and what you were about to choose. And it might not be away from a wicked bath, but maybe from a good thing that you were going to do. But he's got something else in mind. 

I know in my own life, I was intending for a while to become a mathematician and computer science person. But God laid it on my heart that he wanted me to preach the gospel, my best grades were in Maths and Computer, my worst grade in college was in speech. But I had such a powerful sense that the Holy Spirit wanted me to go that direction, that I finally thought, well, I just have to do it, and the Holy Spirit will just have to give me the ability to do what he's calling me to do. 

Now, very often, he won't direct our decisions, in that manner of most of the decisions I make in my life, I try to wait by God's wisdom and pray about it. And I don't have a strong intervention where the Spirit steers me in a different direction than the one that I was headed in. And in the in your life to weather getting married, choosing a career, choosing where to take a job, what kind of work could be involved, and what sorts of ministries to pursue. 

If you can count on the Holy Spirit to direct you, sometimes in a very strong sense that you can, that you can almost feel or hear, sometimes just through your own thoughts, but he's the Spirit who guides and leads us in the way that he wants us to go. 

And he has, of course, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of holiness, that brings separation from a wicked world where we're different from the world around us. He gives victory over sins power. The power of sin in us is sometimes in the Bible called the flesh, humanity operating apart from God's influence and power. And we still have that flesh, that old person sometimes struggling to do what's wrong in us, but the Spirit sets us free. 

The Bible says the law the Spirit of Life set me free from the law of sin and death. He gives us freedom to flourish in the Lord. Scripture says, Now the Lord is the Spirit and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all with unveiled faces beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same likeness, for this comes from the Lord, who is the spirit. And ultimately, holiness means becoming like Jesus, the Bible speaks of Christ being formed in you. 

And scripture says in Galatians, 5:22, and 23,” the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control, what a blessing when Christ and his fruit is being formed in you by the Holy Spirit”. And then he's also the spirit of power, because He is the Spirit of God. 

And so sometimes he is power shines through in the way He equips us, the Bible speaks of spiritual gifts that come from the Holy Spirit. Some of them are extraordinary gifts, like the gifts of miracles or a prophecy. Some of them are gifts like mercy, helping a leadership, administrating, giving gifts of teaching of leading others. 

There are a wide variety of gifts, but every Christian has special gifts from the Holy Spirit. So a gift is something that you're good at, and that God unless by His Holy Spirit in a way that goes far beyond what you would be able to do just in your own power, he takes what you're good at and he electrifies it so to speak, and really makes it effective. He energizes you with boldness, 

The Bible speaks of spirit filled people being very bold. When the apostles Peter and John were speaking to some of Jesus's opponents, some of the very a poet's who had killed Jesus. They told them that they needed to repent and trust in Jesus. And the Bible says, when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, they were astonished. And they took note that these men had been with Jesus, that boldness was not just them, having been with Jesus, however, it was Jesus still living in them by the Holy Spirit. 

And this power helps us to defeat the power of the enemy of Satan and his demons. Greater is He that is in us than he that is in the world. If you want to be able to defeat the powers of darkness, then all you need is the might of God's Holy Spirit. And this Holy Spirit produces real results. We sometimes in our own efforts are trying to make converts, we're trying to change lives, we're trying to improve people. 

But we need the Holy Spirit. Our efforts are not going to produce true and lasting fruit, even in our own lives, let alone in the lives of others, unless it is the power of the Holy Spirit. So we need to be praying for that power, and then working in ministry in that power. And sometimes the Holy Spirit does in a huge way, and in a very rapid way. What he often otherwise does in slower and smaller scale things. 

And we call that revival, when lots of lots of people are one to the Lord, and when entire societies are rapidly changed to be more like what God wants them to be. So when we see a great need for change in people's lives, and in our society, we pray that God will give the Holy Spirit and the Bible says that God will give the Holy Spirit to those who asked him and we pray for revival for the great, wide, far reaching changes that the Holy Spirit and only the Holy Spirit can bring about. He's the spirit of life, the spirit of union and indwelling, the Spirit of truth, the spirit of holiness, the spirit of power. The Holy Spirit, gives new birth, he unites us to Christ. He assures us of Christ's love, forms us in his character equips us with His gifts, and empowers us to be His ambassadors.