Can I Trust The Holy Spirit

In this second article about the Holy Spirit and His gifts, I want to briefly address the issue of trusting the Holy Spirit. It may seem like an odd question, “can I trust the Holy Spirit,” but I find that many people are very nervous about the whole topic of the Holy Spirit, spiritual gifts, and supernatural things in general. As I have ministered to people over the years, I have found that until they are ready to trust the Holy Spirit the same way they trusted Jesus, they will not receive Him or His ministry.

You might ask, why would someone that believes in a God that they can’t see, and has entrusted their eternal security to the Son of God whom they have never met in person or seen in the flesh, have an issue with the supernatural? Good question. I think it is because the work of Jesus is sometimes perceived as something that happened a long time ago, rather than something that is ongoing and spiritual. Of course, the Bible actually presents the work of Jesus, not as just what happened on the cross, or what He did historically during His time on earth, but as an “eternal” work. That means that the work of Jesus had no beginning and has no end. What He did on the cross is expressed in terms of an action that occurred, but that has an eternal, ongoing, effect. Actually, to get technical, the Bible teaches that the work of salvation was completed from God’s point of view before man ever sinned. But that is probably more than we need to get into here.

For the last few hundred years, since about the time of the French Revolution, Western Culture has embraced a way of thinking that defines truth as only that which can be measured, reproduced in a lab, and obeys the laws of math and physics. Anything that is unexplainable is deemed to be suspect at best, and probably false. This line of thinking, called “modernism,” has had a dramatic effect on the way people read the Bible. Many people simply discount the bible stories of the supernatural; like the miracles of Jesus and those that occurred continually through His followers as they were filled with the Holy Spirit. They write these recorded supernatural acts off as the perspective of people that didn’t understand science. Because of this trend, many streams of Christianity today simply do not expect God to do the things that we read about in the New Testament. They essentially live in the moral principles of the Bible, but ignore the possibility of the miraculous in a contemporary setting.

There is much we could say about this, but I will assume that if you are still reading, you are at least open to the idea of trusting the Holy Spirit and allowing Him to move in and through your life in a more powerful way than you may have experienced up to this point. Let me say again, with little comment, and a promise of dealing with it in the future, that if you have accepted Jesus as your Savior, you have already experienced some of the power of the Holy Spirit. All I am saying is that there is more for you.

As to trusting the Holy Spirit, here is one thing that helps me; Jesus said, “If you love me, you will obey what I command. And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Counselor to be with you forever (John 14:15, 16).” Jesus also said that even we human beings with all of our faults, give good gifts to our children, and that the Father will give the Holy Spirit as a good gift to those who ask Him (Luke 11:11-13).

The first reference above says a lot more in the original language than comes out in English. Jesus said that the Father was going to give us “another” counselor. That word “counselor” can also be translated as comforter, advocate, coach etc. In other words, He is not just a therapist, but one who walks through life with us daily. The word “another” comes from a Greek word that means another of the EXACT same kind. In Greek, there is an entirely different word that is used to describe something that is similar, but not exactly the same. Like if I gave you an apple, and you asked for another piece of fruit, so I gave you an orange, I would be giving you another piece of fruit, but a different kind.

Jesus did not use that word to describe the Holy Spirit. He used the word that tells us that the Holy Spirit is EXACTLY like Jesus. He has the same personality, and the same intent for your life, but He is another person. This fits with the rest of the Bible that tells us that God exists in three persons that are all one, but still three. I know, it makes my brain hurt too, but that’s what the Bible says.

So If you can trust Jesus with your life, you can trust the one He personally sent to you, right? If the Father only give good gifts to His kids, and He gives us the Holy Spirit, we can trust that He is a good gift from our Father, right?

And finally, Jesus says in John 16:7, that it is actually better for us that He goes away and sends the Holy Spirit. Wow! Imagine how hard that was for His disciples to believe. But, Jesus never lies to us, so it was true for them, and it is true for us. Jesus actually does everything He does in our lives today through the Holy Spirit.

So if you, for whatever reason, have been nervous about the subject of the Holy Spirit and spiritual gifts, please take time to read these passages and think about them deeply. Pray, ask Jesus what He would say to you about this subject. Begin by trusting Jesus, and be open to Him encouraging you to also trust the Holy Spirit.

If you have questions or comments, I would love to hear them. You can post comments below this article, or you can email them to me at pastor@rmcmchurch.org.

Immersed In The Holy Spirit part 1

I have found in recent days, that the Lord has been reigniting in me a deep hunger to see Christians receive the baptism in the Holy Spirit. It’s odd to think that in my seemingly short tenure as a Christian, I have watched the church in America awaken to the baptism in the Holy Spirit, begin to embrace the host of benefits that come with it, only to slowly drift back to sleep in regard to this great gift. Sadly, there are still huge portions of the church today that deny the present day work of the Holy Spirit, and become very nervous at the mention of the gifts. I find that so odd given the amount of time Jesus Himself gave to instruction on the subject, and the fact that the entire New Testament is filled with references to the Holy Spirit’s powerful work in and through His people.

I am fully aware that even as I write this blog, there are those that will feel uncomfortable with the subject for any number of reasons. There are those who have been confused by misinformation, those that have seen some genuinely weird behavior attributed to the Holy Spirit and decided they wanted no part of it, and those who grew up around genuine God-loving people that denied the present day manifestation of the Holy Spirit. There are even some who are just not comfortable with the idea of supernatural things. To all of these I say, please give me a chance to address some of your questions. I don’t intend to cover this in one article, but there are several specific things I believe the Lord has put on my heart to address over time. All I am asking is that you hear me out, take what is written here to Jesus, pray about it, look up the Scriptures, and let Jesus influence your heart. You and I can certainly agree that Jesus will not lead you astray, right? You can trust Him, even if you’re not too sure about me at this point. Fair enough, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

In this article I want to begin to address one foundational issue; what is the baptism in the Holy Spirit, and is it for us today? First of all, Jesus, not some wacky chandelier-swinging preacher, coined the term “baptized in the Holy Spirit.” You can find this in your Bible in Acts 1:5. If you read John’s gospel, chapters 14, 15, and 16, you can’t miss the fact that, at the very end of His earthly ministry, when time was short and only extremely important issues were being discussed, Jesus spent a lot of that precious time preparing His disciples to receive the Holy Spirit. In our passage in Acts, after He had gone to the cross and been raised from the dead, He refers back to those discussions and again talks about the coming of the Holy Spirit.

Now, I want you to think about whom Jesus is addressing in Acts 1. He is talking to His disciples. These are men who have already believed on Him as Lord and Savior. We will go into this in more detail in a future article, but suffice it to say, these are people who are already following the risen Savior. They have received Him as Lord; we would say that they are already born again. These are the very ones that Jesus is about to release to carry the message of salvation to the whole world. They know Him; they have eaten with Him, walked with Him, even ministered along side Him. And, they already have the Holy Spirit residing in them because they are born again (see John 20:21, 22). To these people Jesus says “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” Notice, the Holy Spirit lives in them, but Jesus wants them to be baptized, that means immersed in and saturated with, the Holy Spirit.

Just one more thought today; if this was the only New Testament example of people who are already born again receiving this second aspect of the Holy Spirit’s ministry, called by Jesus being “baptized in the Holy Spirit,” maybe we could write it off as an anomaly. But we will examine multiple references that ALL follow this same pattern throughout the 30 year period recorded in the Book of Acts. The baptism in the Holy Spirit is something that Jesus Himself gave to His own disciples to equip them for the Christian life and ministry. I believe it is for every Christian. Thanks for reading, and I hope you will watch for upcoming articles.

God Measures by Potential

When we moved into our house 15 years ago, there was a little Blue Spruce out in the front yard just off the deck. It was just a few feet high, and we wondered if it would survive the harsh winters and dry summers when some unnamed person neglects the watering.

A couple of winters later, the tree was badly mauled by vicious Rocky Mountain rabbits with big buck teeth. The poor thing was pretty deformed, but finally recovered. Then, one year on June 10th, it snowed a foot and froze hard the next morning. Of course, the silly tree, thinking that June indicated summer, already had its sap up and the tips of all its branches died from the frost. This led to another several years of deformation, and our wondering again if it would survive.

Today, that tree is around 15 feet tall and 8 or 10 feet across at the bottom. It has gotten so large that it crowds one of our parking places in the driveway, and threatens to overtake the deck. It has become very evident that whoever planted that tree did not take into account its potential size when they chose a place in the yard for it.

This begins to get to my point. We tend to measure things by their size. As a culture, we disdain the small things, and admire the big things. The bigger the better. Big means powerful, strong, healthy. We are drawn to crowds. Big concerts, big games, big churches, big companies – we assume that if it is bigger, if more people are there, then it must be better.

There are a couple of problems with this line of thinking. First, as far as big crowds go, it is simply not always true. People are drawn to all kinds of things, some healthy, some not so much. Jesus at times did specific things to challenge the crowds that followed Him. The result was that those who were following His popularity, or following for a show, left and those who were really committed to Him stayed. In this way, Jesus thinned the crowds that followed Him and increased the overall level of devotion in His followers.

Another flaw in our bigger is better mentality is the fact that although people measure things by size, God measures things by potential. Examples? Here are just a few: God looks at the heart of a person, and weighs the invisible motivations of the inward man when He evaluates our actions. Sometimes, in our haste, we only look at the outward part of a person, a life, a community, and misjudge it.

Another example – God designed the earth to work on a seedtime and harvest principle. Seeds by nature are outwardly unimpressive in comparison with the fruit and multiplied harvests they can produce. If we judge a seed by its size, we might never put it in the ground and receive the benefit of its inward life. Within every tiny kernel of corn, there are many fields of abundance–the same is true of human lives.

This principle works in reverse too. Many times we allow seeds, whether thoughts, ideas, attitudes, habits, or influences to enter our hearts because they look so small and innocuous. We will go to movies, read books, have conversations that sow negative seeds into our hearts.

The Bible also tells us specifically that bad company corrupts good character, and yet we will build relationships with “bad company” at times because it doesn’t feel like a big deal.

The point is that God does not measure things by size, but by potential. When He looks at you and I, He does not merely see what we are today; He sees our potential in Jesus Christ. Did you get that? Not just our potential, but our potential IN JESUS CHRIST. That is an entirely different picture than we get when we look in the mirror. This is why He gives us such a big vision, why He encourages us to big things, Why He believes in us so much more than we do. He isn’t just looking for big, but for multiplied harvest from the life that He Himself has sown in us.

So when we look at one another, when we choose places to go and things to do, it is always wise to look for the long-term potential outcome of a choice. What can the small decision I make today do in the long run? Like that Blue Spruce, the little choices that we are making today will probably be with us for a very long time. They will grow and take over more of our lives. What are we allowing to be planted, who are we hanging out with, what priority are we giving to the various aspects of our lives? Potential – it’s a big deal.