The Holy Spirit: How We Sin Against Him

SPEAKER 01 : 0:00

Welcome to the InTouch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Friday, August 22nd. Jesus promised to send the Spirit of God to enable His followers to live a godly life. In today’s episode, we’ll explore a crucial warning. Don’t hinder the flow of the Holy Spirit in your life.

SPEAKER 02 : 0:19

When you trusted the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Savior, God did us a wonderful favor. He didn’t just leave us here to do the best we could with our life, but the Bible says He sent the person of the Holy Spirit, a person of the Trinity, to live within us, to assist us, to be our helper. In every aspect of our life, He’s there to help us, to give us divine guidance, to bring us into truth, to show us the truth of His Word. to gift us in order to do those things that God would have us to accomplish and to achieve. So many ways that God blesses us through His Spirit and yet the Bible says we also sin against the Spirit. 1 Thessalonians chapter 5 in a very, very short verse But a very strong warning to all of us who are believers, Paul said to the Thessalonians, do not quench the Spirit. Do not quench the Spirit. Now, he’s speaking of the Holy Spirit here. Now, what does he mean when he says that you and I are not to quench the Spirit? And if you recall in the book of Acts, in the very beginning at Pentecost, what happens in the third verse, that second chapter, the Bible says, “…and there appeared to them…” tongues as a fire distributing themselves and arrested on each one of them now when you think about the Holy Spirit you think about fire with fire usually comes the idea of cleansing and light, and truth, and sanctification, and warmth. Many aspects and many ideas come to mind. Usually, oftentimes, the very idea of the presence of God. There’s something about fire. And so when we talk about quenching the Holy Spirit, what he’s saying is this. He says, quench not the spirit. The word quench means to stifle or to put it out. And what he’s referring to here is as the spirit is likened unto fire within us. He says, don’t quench the fire. Don’t quench the spirit of God that is within you. And so what he’s saying here is don’t put the fire of the spirit out in your life. Now, when you look at that passage of Scripture and you think about how the Spirit works in our life, how does the Holy Spirit work in our life? But He creates harmony and unity and a sense of warmth in our relationship to the Lord. He’s the one who guides us in building an intimate relationship with Him. And we sing wherever the Spirit of the Lord is, there’s peace and there’s joy and there’s liberty. And in the life of every single believer, the Holy Spirit is there. And if we look upon our heart as an altar, the Spirit of God is there. And as if a fire, a flame of life, of warmth, there is life in the life of every single believer. There is more than just physical life. There is spiritual life. And so when he speaks here of quenching not the Spirit, he’s really giving us a warning. Now let’s think about it for just a moment. The fire in our heart is the life of God. That is, the Holy Spirit is in our life. And He’s there to give us guidance and direction in every aspect of our life. How would we quench the Holy Spirit? In other words, if the Holy Spirit came to indwell us, the Bible says He came to seal us under the day of redemption, how are you going to put Him out? Well, you can’t put the Holy Spirit out of your life because once He seals you, You’re forever a child of God. And the Holy Spirit came, the Bible says, to be in us, with us, and upon us. And you recall that Jesus said he will abide with you forever. That is, he’s not there temporarily until we sin against him. So sinning against the Holy Spirit does not cause the Holy Spirit to leave us because if he left us, we’d no longer be saved. But the Bible says that you and I have been sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise. Now, The Spirit of God guides us and leads us and convicts us of our sin. We are to walk by the Spirit, relying upon Him for all of our needs, giving us guidance and direction. And whenever you and I choose to sin against Him, the Spirit of God cannot operate in our life the way He normally does. So to quench the Spirit is to dampen the Spirit, to stifle the Spirit. It’s to throw cold water, so to speak, on the fire of God in our heart. Now, I don’t think most of us probably ever choose to walk away from God and say, well, I think I’ll just quit going to church and quit reading the Bible and quit giving and quit praying. I’m just going to call it quits. Now, once in a while, some person may finally come to that conclusion. But usually, how does the fire of the Spirit of God, that is, how does the warmth in our heart toward God, how does this excitement and enthusiasm and commitment to Jesus Christ begin to soften and and to grow cool and finally cold. And though a person does not reach a stage where they’re unsaved, all the excitement and interest and hunger and thirst in their heart for spiritual things is all gone. How did it all happen? Here’s how it happened. When we say quench not the Spirit of God, that means don’t say no to God about something that He has said no. yes to you about. That is when God begins to deal with our heart, here’s where our sin against the Holy Spirit oftentimes begins. God says, here’s what I want you to do in yourself. Lord, I’m willing to do this, but not that. Anytime I say no to him about anything, what happens is this omnipotent Holy Spirit, who is willing to release his anointing and his power, and His gifts in our life, and give us guidance and direction in all the things He does, anytime you and I say no to Him, what we do is we quench the Spirit of God by rebellion. That is, we began to throw cold water on the fire on our heart. And if we don’t deal with that, what happens is we begin to drift. Now, a ship… can be moving in a moving stream when the fire has gone out completely in the boiler. It’s just drifting. And what happens many times to believers is we stop reading the Bible. We get busy doing other things. We decide not to go to church maybe this Sunday or the next Sunday before long. We begin to be, as Paul warned, entangled in the things of the world. And our interest is out there no longer in the things of God. We cease to feed our soul. we cease to feed our spirit. Our longing and hungering and thirsting for the Lord Jesus Christ begins to wane. And before long, what’s happened? We’ve grown cold about the things of God. And then when somebody brings up the Lord, all of a sudden what we used to love to talk about is a little bit threatening. My friend, I don’t know of anything worse than the fire going out in the heart of a believer. Amen. And my friend, listen, and I say this to all of my brothers who are preachers of the gospel. When you lose the fire of God in your heart, you’ve lost it. And you and I cannot afford to engage in anything that would cause us to lose the anointing of the Spirit of God in our heart. And that is exactly what happens. What happens is we cease to kindle that fire. Now listen, if you have ever built a fire in your home, and I’m sure many of you have a fireplace, if you’re going to keep the fire going unless you have gas jets, and that doesn’t count in my illustration, if it’s a normal old-timey fireplace where you’ve got to kindle it up with leaves and sticks and paper and so forth and get it going, how do you keep the fire burning? You’ve got to keep fueling the flame. You’ve got to keep putting the wood on it, putting the sticks to it, putting the paper to it. That is, if you’re going to keep the fire going, you’ve got to feed the flame. God has lit a fire in the heart of every single believer. The Spirit of God is there. And He’s the one who gives the power. And He’s the one who gives the anointing. And He’s the one who gives the wisdom and the knowledge. He’s the one who releases that power within you and your witness, whatever you’re doing. Amen. And my friend, to sin against the Holy Spirit is to hinder and to hurt ourselves in a way far more damaging than most of us realize. You see, you just can’t play around with God and have a little sin here and a little sin over there and disobey a little bit over here and disobey a little bit over there and think, well, that’s not going to hurt. Yes, it does. Any act of rebellion toward God stifles the Spirit and a continuous stifling of the Spirit will quench the fire of God in your heart. And when you’ve lost that, you’ve lost everything. And I think that is probably true, more evidently true in the life of a preacher than it is in other people’s lives because… When a man loses the anointing of God, he doesn’t have anything else. He doesn’t have anything to say. And as Paul says, it’s like banging pots and pans and the words may be there, but there’s no life, no spirit, no power, no unction. The same thing can happen in your life. There was a time when you had a strong witness. You could talk to somebody about the Lord Jesus Christ. They got into conviction. They got saved. You felt the power of God. You knew he was speaking through your heart, but now… Somehow you’re not even interested in sharing your faith. Somehow you’ve sort of forgotten what to say. Somehow you’re not really excited about that any longer. And somehow you’re just not comfortable doing that. You know why? Because the flame has gone out. You know what made the fire die? Sin. S-I-N is what quenches the Spirit of God in our life. He says, quench not the Spirit. You and I cannot afford to tolerate any kind of disobedience or rebellion in our heart toward God. Because it puts the fire out. I don’t mean that the Holy Spirit leaves your life. I’m just saying what we do is we quench the Spirit of God. We stifle the Spirit. We throw cold water on the flame. And what happens is the Spirit of God cannot operate in their life the way He intends to. He says, quench not the Spirit of God. Now, there’s a second sin that I want us to deal with here. And I want you to go back to Ephesians chapter 4 for a moment. And in this passage, in the 30th verse, he gives us another sin that we sin against the Spirit. First of all, he says, don’t let the fire go out in your heart with the Holy Spirit. Then he says in verse 30 of Ephesians chapter 4, and do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Now, what does he mean by grieving? When we grieve the Spirit of God, we grieve Him because we sin. When you and I sin against God, something happens. And if we’re honest, when we sin against him and know that we do, we have this sense of estrangement. And when you and I are deliberately, willfully disobeying God about anything, friend, it just doesn’t work. The spirit of God does not release his power in a life of disobedience. And we grieve the spirit of God. Look what he’s done for us. And we turn around and sin against him. Now, how do we do that? Well, this passage, and I want us to look at this passage because he deals with some things that we probably don’t even like to think about. We think, oh, that’s not going to hurt anything. Yes, it does. So let’s begin with verse 25. This verse 30 is right in the middle of a whole group of ways we grieve the Holy Spirit. Beginning in verse 25. Therefore, laying aside falsehood… Speak truth, innuendos, lies, and we call them little white lies, little black lies, doesn’t make sense what color you put on them. A lie is a lie, falsehood is a falsehood. He says, laying aside these things because they don’t fit us. Listen, when you’re indwelt by the Holy Spirit, one of his responsibilities is to conform us to the likeness of Jesus Christ. Anything that interferes with that conformity has to go. He says, now, laying aside falsehood, speak truth, each one of you with his neighbor, for we are members of one another. Then he says, secondly, be angry, yet do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger. There is a form of sin that is a righteous indignation that is not because someone has wronged us, but because someone else has been wronged. And so we’re not talking about that kind of sin here primarily. We’re talking about what happens when we get angry about the way we’ve been treated. We become angry with someone else about something. He says, don’t let the sun go down your anger. That is, deal with it. That’ll grieve the spirit. Do not give the devil an opportunity. Listen, whenever we sin against God, here’s what we do. We open ourselves. Now, it may be on this side, lying over here, bitterness over here, or anger over here. Here’s what you must remember. Whenever we deliberately, willfully sin against God, we open the door of our life to the devil. Because whereas we think we may have sinned over him, we have this under control, Satan takes advantage of every opportunity to trip us up in some other area. You see, a person oftentimes feels like, well, I live a very disciplined life except this. I’m disciplined in… where I go and what I do and my exercise and all these things. But when it comes to eating, man, I’m telling you, forget it because that’s the one little sin over here that I enjoy and so therefore I’m not going to be disciplined in that area. But my life is disciplined otherwise. No, you can’t be sort of disciplined. And you can’t be mostly disciplined. We either are or we are not. That is, either it’s under control or it’s not under control. Either we’re walking in the Spirit or we’re not walking in the Spirit, by the Spirit, because you can’t straddle the fence. And so when we choose to disobey God, we open ourselves up for Satan to trip us up in lots of things. Again, verse 28, “…let him who steals steal no more, no longer. Let him rather labor performing with his own hands what is good, in order that he may have something to share with him who has need.” Then he gets down to where we really grieve the Spirit, probably more often than we realize in ways we’re not even aware of. He says in verse 29, Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for edification, according to the need of the moment, that it may give grace to those who hear. Have you ever thought about those catty, caustic, critical, gossipy remarks that we make? Grieve the Spirit of God? You see, we don’t place that in a category with murder and stealing. But isn’t it interesting that our Lord places it here with lying, being angry, stealing, unwholesome speech. That is those things that we say that are not of God. He says it grieves the Spirit. Let me ask you something. When you hear that somebody has said something about your character that you know is not true and really has just assassinated you character-wise, how do you feel? Wonderful. No. Deep down inside, you agreed that somebody would say something about you that is not true. Deliberately, willfully say something about you that is not true. That hurts you. When we do it, it not only hurts the other person, it hurts us. And it hurts the Spirit. The Spirit’s grieved. The other person’s character is damaged. And what have we done to ourselves? We’ve cut off the flow of the Spirit. The Spirit of God will not flow through a sin-filled life. And so that’s why he says, don’t let the sun go down on your anger. The truth is we shouldn’t let the sun go down on anything. Anger, bitterness, stealing, unwholesome speech, whatever it might be. We should deal with it. If we want the Spirit of God to exercise His power in our life, we have to deal with sin. And the reason I bring this up is because we have to deal with those little things that can accumulate in the corners of our life if we’re not careful. And saying a little something here and a little something over there and doing this and doing that can accumulate. And then we wonder, wonder what’s wrong. What’s wrong is, it’s the accumulation over a period of time of little things we tolerated, which we thought that didn’t really make a lot of difference with God. I don’t mean to say that we live in a straight jacket. But as believers, if we’re walking by the Spirit, and listen, one of the primary works of the Holy Spirit is to convict of sin. And that is one of His responsibilities in the life of the believer. Why is He there to convict us of sin? To keep us clean and to make us sensitive to those things that are not of God. And so the more we fuel the fire of the Spirit of God upon the altar of our life, and the more we’re in the Word and on our knees in prayer, and the more we’re seeking His face and developing our intimate relationship with Him, the less of these things that are going to be there. Then look, if you will, verse 30, don’t grieve the Holy Spirit of God with whom you were sealed in the day of redemption. Then he says, verse 31, another way we grieve him, let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, slander be put away from you along with all malice. And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ has also forgiven you. Now remember what we’ve said over and over and over again. Remember who you are in Christ Jesus. The Bible says that you’re a child of God, that you’re a new creation, that you’re indwelt by the Holy Spirit, that you’re a joint heir with the Lord Jesus Christ of all of his inheritance and all those multitudes of things that we are in him. None of the things we’ve read fit who we are. Who are we? The Bible says that we’re the sons of the living God. We’re indwelt by the Holy Spirit. We’ve been sanctified, and we are being sanctified, and we are the holy sons of God. Our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit, and we’re indwelt by Him. These things don’t fit us. And so when we sin against God, what do we do? We put the fire out. We sin against God, what do we do? We cause hurt. to the Lord Jesus Christ, and we act like somebody we’re not. What is it in your life that’s caused you to grieve him? Is the power gone? The way to make that right is repentance, asking for God and thanking God for his forgiveness and turning away from whatever has put the fire of God’s wonderful grace and love and warmth of intimacy in your heart, dampened and cooled, all of that. If you’re willing, God will change it. If you’ll let him. Father, we love you and praise you and thank you for your kindness. And oh, how patient you are with us. And Father, sometimes we wonder why you put up with the wickedness and the evil in people’s hearts. But we know that’s an expression of your loving kindness and being patient with them just like you’re patient with us. So teach us how to be patient. And teach us to remember. that it’s only because you put up with us and kept on being patient with us that we’ve been saved by your grace. And I pray that if there’s been someone whose heart has begun to be hardened about the things of the Spirit, that you will smite them with loving conviction and remind them something has dampened their enthusiasm and their excitement for you and your word, Father. And for your work, I pray that you’ll speak to their heart. Speak to them to make a definite, deliberate decision to obey the promptings of the Holy Spirit is my prayer in Jesus’ name. Amen.

SPEAKER 01 : 19:29

Thank you for listening to The Holy Spirit, How We Sin Against Him. If you’d like to know more about Charles Stanley or InTouch Ministries, stop by InTouch.org. This podcast is a presentation of InTouch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.